UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Over the next couple of days, every time I make eye contact with Mandy, she shoots a meaningful look toward Peter. Sooner or later, he’s sure to catch on.
Meanwhile, Peter barely looks at me except when we’re reading lines together at rehearsal. Maybe my reaction to Project A-hole wasn’t as big as he’d hoped . . . or maybe he saw something in my eyes, too eager, too swoony, and he doesn’t want those feelings from me.
“Best safety lies in fear.” That’s Oscar reading his line.
Nadia says, “What do we think he means, Caddie?” Of course she calls on me when my mind’s wandering.
“I think he means Ophelia has to keep safe.”
“Okay . . . in what way?”
I know what the line means. I wrote about it in my journal, but my understanding of it’s all tied up with Peter, and I’m afraid if I open my mouth I might talk about that. I shake my head.
“Try to stay with us, Caddie.”
On Friday, Nadia tells us to practice in pairs while she holds character conferences. I move toward Peter, but Nadia calls him, and Mandy pulls me toward Drew.
“Let’s work on your first scene,” Mandy says.
“Nadia said pairs,” Drew says. “Just actors.”
“As long as I’m here, I might as well help,” Mandy says, and she looks back and forth between us, smiling. “My boyfriend and my best friend, making magic together.”
Drew lowers his voice to speak to Mandy, but I hear him fine: “You said you’d stop trying to help. It gets us irritated with each other, and I don’t want that.”
“That’s when we’re not at rehearsal,” she says, “but it’s my job to help here. What if Caddie needs my help?”
Ophelia has only six lines in this scene, and they’re not that difficult language-wise. Polonius, on the other hand, never stops talking. But Drew turns to me, resigned.
“Daddy’s little girl,” he says to me, his voice and eyes flat as he opens his arms. I don’t step into them.
“We can work on the father-daughter vibe later,” Mandy says.
“I don’t know—it feels pretty right-on to me,” I say, and Drew exhales something between a sigh and a laugh. For a moment, I’m free from his negative beam. Without meaning to, I’ve taken his side.
“We’re just doing language right now anyway,” Mandy says, eyes cast down on her script.
Nadia’s told us that commas mean speed up, keep building, and on one line, Drew has so many that he runs out of breath and gasps.
“This is impossible,” he says. “‘Springes to catch woodcocks,’ what does that even mean?”
“He means that Hamlet’s setting a trap for Ophelia, making her think he loves her so she’ll sleep with him. ‘Springes’ means traps. It’s in the footnotes, see?” Mandy reaches to point at his script, but Drew shuts it.
“Nobody talks like this.”
Mandy laughs. “You hear a lot of people walking around going ‘‘tis’ and ‘hath’ and ‘prithee’? It’s Shakespeare, baby.”
“Don’t call me baby.”
“You call me that all the time.”
“But you like it.”
Mandy purses her lips and says, “Not if you don’t like it when I say it back to you.”
“Guys,” I say, and they both turn their mad eyes on me. Mandy’s drop back to neutral quickly, but Drew’s stay mad. “Sorry, I just . . . shouldn’t we practice?”
“Yes,” Mandy says, and she turns back to Drew. “Let’s take it again from the top.”
“You take it again,” Drew says, and he stomps off.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Mandy calls after him. “Baby!” Turning back to me, she says, “That went well.”
“Maybe he needs some time to get used to you being Assistant Director.”
“Yeah, I don’t think Drew expected me to actually do anything as AD besides take notes and make coffee. If that were the job, I wouldn’t have taken it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why should you be sorry?”
She dives back into the script. I would be so anxious to run and fix things with Drew, but she seems determined not to let him get to her.
Nadia calls me then, and Mandy pops her eyes wide.
“Thank you,” I say.
“What for?”
“For working with me, being excited for me. You’re a pretty amazing friend.”
Mandy beams and puts her hand to her heart. I always want to shake off nice words—they embarrass me—but Mandy drinks them in.
Nadia’s made a meeting space in a room off the backstage area. Peter’s coming out as I’m going in. I almost want to reach out and squeeze his hand, but he steps aside, giving me plenty of room.
“I’m so nervous,” I say. An offering.
“Nervous works for you,” he says. “She already loves you. You’ll be great.” I try to take in his words like Mandy would, let them swim through me like a drink of something warm. There’s an unfinished edge between us, something wanting to be said, but now isn’t the time. He waves and heads back to the stage.
“Ophelia,” Nadia says with a twist to her mouth like there’s something funny about it.
“Hi.”
She motions for me to sit down and turns to a fresh page in the little notebook she carries. “How are you feeling about the part?”
“Excited. Nervous. Thank you for casting me. I didn’t think . . . being new . . .”
“I didn’t either,” Nadia says. “It usually takes new students a while to feel open enough to give me the performance I’m looking for.”
Open. I don’t think of myself with that adjective.
“I hope,” I say, “that it wasn’t a fluke. I didn’t expect that I would . . . I don’t know . . . feel so much at the audition.”
Nadia shrugs. “You were listening,” she says, “letting things affect you. If you did it once, you can do it again.”
And again. And again.
“Of course, we’ll want a little more control.”
I nod.
“So tell me about Ophelia,” Nadia says. “How do you see her?”
I breathe in, try to keep it smooth, then say, “I’ve been thinking about how she’s someone who has rules to follow—her father’s rules, and her brother’s rules, and Hamlet’s, too, I guess, since he’s a prince.”
“Yes, good.”
“And there’s that part where she talks about Hamlet coming to her room and how he touches her face and shakes her by the arm . . .”
Nadia waves a hand as if to pull more words from me.
“Well, I think that freaks Ophelia out so much not just because Hamlet’s acting crazy, but because it breaks all the rules.”
“Hm. Mm-hm.” Nadia tilts her head, writes something down.
“So, I’m wondering, wouldn’t it be cool if Ophelia never touches Hamlet onstage, like it’s this barrier they can’t cross?”
“I like how you’re thinking,” Nadia says, “but do we want our Ophelia to be the traditional girl who goes along with everything? Because Mandy made a good point at the auditions. Ophelia might not be so innocent.”
“Well, but at least, on the surface, where people can see.”
Nadia nods, but I’m not sure she’s sold.
“What I like about this,” she says, “is that it points to a tension—between what Ophelia wants and what she’s allowed.”
I nod, too eagerly I’m sure, and she goes on, “I like the idea that she’s holding herself together tightly. So when she breaks—which I think she does in that scene you read at auditions—it can be a striking change. What if Ophelia’s proper in those early scenes with no physical contact, and then later, she might be very hands-on.”
I stare at a stack of colored gels. They’re only stiff, beat-up cellophane with numbers scribbled in wax pencil, but put them in front of a light, and they’ll change the mood of the play, turn the scene melancholy blue or fiery red. There’s a disc of metal—a “gobo” because it “goes between” the light and its beam—patterned with skeletal trees, which can turn the stage into a forest, maybe for the scene when Hamlet confronts his father’s ghost.
I used to feel safe on stage, but that was silly. The stage transforms us, makes us more of whatever we are.
As long as I focus on the equipment, Nadia might believe that I’m turning her words in my mind, thinking how best to deliver the performance she wants.
“I’m not sure,” I say, “if I got that far in my thinking.”
When I exit Nadia’s office, she calls Hank, leaving Livia partnerless. She’s studying one of the flats backstage. The plywood wall on a shoddy frame has probably been painted a hundred times for a hundred different sets. I join her and see that the unpainted back is covered with drawings and scribbles. She gives me a sly smile.
“What’s this?”
“Wall of Infamy,” Livia says. “People write on it during productions.”
Most of it is dirty. There’s a running theme: Blank did it with blank in blankety-blank way. “They just leave this up?”
Livia shrugs. “Tradition.”
I follow her eyes to where the wall reads, “On this spot during sophomore showcase, Livia did it with Hank while wearing an Elvis mask.”
Below that, in different handwriting it says, “Then he took her mask off and saw that she wasn’t a dude.”
“No way!” I say. “You mean, that’s not true?!” and she snickers.
We’re silent for a while, reading the scandalous stuff on the wall, and then, because I feel like she won’t make a big deal about it, I ask, “So what does it mean when a guy does something nice for you, and you say thank you, and it seems good, and then afterward, he acts like it never happened?”
“That he’s gay?” she deadpans, and then twists her lips into a smile. “That’s what it would mean if you were talking about Hank and me, but that’s not what I think that means coming from Peter.”
Am I so transparent?
If Livia catches my frustration at her calling me out so bluntly, she has the grace not to acknowledge it.
“I’ll tell you what I think that means,” she says, and I nod, please. “I think that means it’s your turn.”
I let the others go ahead of me at the end of rehearsal while I scribble down last-minute notes. I want Nadia to see me working hard, but I can’t concentrate. Livia’s right. It’s my turn to encourage Peter, let him know that I want to be friends, or . . . something. It’s safer with him avoiding me, but I miss him.
When I finally get to the junior hall, the sight of Peter sitting cross-legged in front of his locker, almost like he’s waiting for me, makes me stop in my tracks. He looks up and smiles—I must look funny frozen here.
I swallow my fear, walk up, and sit across from him, so close our knees almost touch.
“Peter, what are you doing this weekend?”
He shrugs. “Watering the neighbors’ plants, mowing lawns. What about you?”
“Nothing. Well, working on Ophelia.”
“Nice.” He’s enthusiastic, friendly, but he’s not going to help me.
“Do you . . . would you want to get together sometime to talk about our characters?”
It’s the most obvious thing, the least frightening.
And Peter says, “No.”
His bluntness throws me.
“Oh.”
“I’d rather do something else. But if that’s my best chance of getting to hang out with you, then sure.”
He’s teasing me, truth or dare.
One of his hands touches the strap of his backpack, the other his knee. Mine touch the insides of my gloves. So why do I feel like he’s holding me tight, like I can’t look away?
“Well, we could make it fun. Send ourselves on a mission?” I say with no idea what that might mean.
“Only if the safety of several foreign countries and the fate of a small child is at stake.” His answer’s so perfect so fast, I’m not sure I can keep up.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Roger back,” he says with a smirk, and he’s up and gone.
When I’m home, I text Peter. The few lines take me nearly an hour because I want to strike a balance between super spy and silly, but it can’t feel like I worked too hard, and I still have no idea what the mission is, and I don’t want it to sound like I’m asking him out on a date, but I kind of want it to be a maybe date. . . .
I finally come up with this:
Agent P, you have, in poor judgment, agreed to take part in a mission. The fate of Denmark and a small section of the southern US are at stake. The only child I know is my brother, and if you decline, I will be sad, which will probably make him happy, so let’s scrap this part.
Please transmit your availability Saturday through Monday.
Further instructions forthcoming.
Agent C
I hit send and panic rushes through me. Even those few lines ask too much. He’ll say no, and I’ll hurt, hurt, hurt. Or he’ll say yes and then no, and I’ll hurt worse. Or he’ll say yes, yes, yes, but I’ll have to say no because I’m untouchable.
It’s too late to take anything back. The damage is done.
Peter doesn’t make me wait or wonder. He writes back within a few minutes:
Agent C,
Nothing will deter me from my mission.
I’m free tomorrow.
Agent P