Leaving school alone at three thirty, I get hit full-on by one of those warm September afternoons that make you curse the inventor of school. All around me, kids busily thumb their phones. The Java Jones across the street is already lined up out the door.
I take off my hoodie as I walk, hoping to absorb some sunshiny happiness. This is the sort of afternoon when Cassidy and the other drama kids and I would raid the chips aisle at the Kwik Mart and head down to Clarey Park by the river. We’d gossip and do fake music videos around the picnic benches and weeping-willow trees.
A jolt of missing Cassidy makes me stop on the spot. I pull out my phone and text her. Hey, homegirl! School out? A streetcar turns the corner, the metal-on-metal squeal of its wheels piercing my head.
Yep.
Knowing she’s there on the other end of the phone makes me smile. I lean against the corner of a bank building, ignoring the people streaming past. Home in 10. Skype time?
Can’t. Sorry. :( 1st meeting for West Side Story 2day! Rehearsals start nxt wk. :D
I let my backpack slump to the ground. West Side Story?!
Didn’t I tell you?
She didn’t. I’d have remembered. It’s my favorite old-school musical. As Cassidy knows. Forgot. Been busy! I lie.
Glam big-city life! Hoping for Maria. Gotta go now.
Maria. The lead. If I were still there, that role would be mine.
My phone vibrates in my hand, a nudge. Wish me luck!!
Luck, I text back.
Bye-bye sunshiny happiness. I pocket my phone and start walking again. I get to the condo building, pull open the smoke-gray glass door and trudge through the lobby. I hit the elevator button and suddenly can’t wait to get upstairs. Not to watch the Rossmere Heights production of Wicked again, but to get an audition time for the Youth Works Theater Company. Maybe I can’t be Maria, but perhaps I can at least get myself back onstage.
The elevator doors open with a chime. The first note of a new song.
* * *
Audition day. After riding the subway past two stops before realizing I was going west, not east, getting onto the train going east and then running the block and a half from my stop to the East End United Church, I’m sweaty and short of breath. I yank open the ancient door, and it’s so dark inside I can barely see.
“Are you here for the Schooled auditions?” a sharp voice asks. My eyes adjust. At the end of a short hallway, a young woman sits behind a table next to a closed door.
“I am.” I hurry over. “My name’s Ellie Fisk.”
Now that I’m closer, I can see she’s probably nineteen or twenty. Her thick black hair is short, with purple streaks through it. Her nose is pierced with a tiny purple gem.
“Fist?” She frowns at her laptop.
“Fisk.”
A sign on the table reads Audition in Progress. Quiet, Please! I can hear a male voice singing from behind the door. “Miracle of Miracles” from Fiddler on the Roof. He sounds fantastic.
As the girl at the table works the touchpad with one hand, her other one snakes out to a plastic bag filled with gummy bears. She pops two into her mouth, does a final click and looks up. I smile. She doesn’t.
“I’m Neeta Patel, the stage manager,” she says, brisk and businesslike despite the gummies. “We’ve had a ridiculous number of people auditioning, so things are running a smidge late. Makes me insane. You’re the last one today, hallelujah. Have a seat. You’re after Marissa Ivan.” She points over to a bench I hadn’t noticed, where a girl my age sits studying a binder on her lap.
“Thanks.”
Neeta nods, pops another gummy and goes back to her screen.
I sit. The girl on the bench flips through the pages in her binder, her straight brown hair half blocking my view of her face.
“Hi, I’m Ellie.” I keep my voice low but friendly.
She glances over, flicks her bangs away from her eyes. “Marissa.”
“I’ve never auditioned for this company before. You?”
“I’ve been with YWTC for three years.” Her eyes give me a quick once-over. “Can we not talk? I like to focus before an audition.” Though she barely opens her mouth, I notice big white teeth. All the better to snap at you with, my dear.
“Oh. Sure.” Three years. I wonder what sort of roles she’s had, how good she is. I pull my sheet music out of my bag and look over it one last time.
A burst of angry monologue—“I told you not to mess with Carlos!”—comes from the audition room, startling me.
“Yikes. Sounds serious,” I joke.
Marissa keeps reading. Neeta keeps chewing.
I sit there, butt on a hard pew, back against a hard plaster wall. Is everyone in YWTC so grim? Where’s the musical-theater happiness? Where’s the feeling that everyone could break into song because life is so gosh-darn swell? If Neeta and Marissa are typical of the theater-loving young people that Renée Felix cooed about on my dad’s show, I’d hate to meet the theater-hating ones.
The door to the audition room opens, and a slim guy with curly, brown hair struts out. “Nailed it.”
Neeta snorts but smiles.
The guy points both hands, pistol-style, at Marissa. “Your turn, Ivan the Terrible.”
Ivan the Terrible? I look sideways at Marissa, half-worried she’ll pull a real gun on the guy, but she laughs as she and her binder head into the audition room. “Camilla! Great to see you again. How was New York?” she says before the door closes.
I guess it’s just me who gets the cold shoulder.
“Omigod, look at you!” Nailed-it guy is staring at me, hand on his chest.
“What?” I stand up to check myself out. Was I sitting in something? Sweating through my shirt?
“You look like Snow White, all black-haired, blue-eyed, lost-in-the-woods goodness,” he says in a tone of wonder.
I laugh, surprised and relieved. “No one has ever told me that before.”
Neeta shushes us. “You’re scaring the poor girl.”
He shields his mouth from her and stage-whispers, “Sorry.”
“Actually,” I whisper back, “you’re the first person here who hasn’t scared me.”
He nods. “Neeta and Marissa can be a tad sharp.” He thrusts out his hand. “Gregor.”
We shake. “Ellie.”
Marissa’s singing cuts through our conversation with the opening bars from “Popular.”
I drop back down on the bench. “Oh no.”
“Oh no is right.” Gregor joins me. “Marissa should know better. That song is so overdone.”
“It is?”
“Totally. Because it makes every person who sings it feel sassy and bossy in a cute way, which is not how anyone feels at an audition, right? So it’s an ego boost. But it must be pretty annoying for directors to listen to, over and over.” He rattles this off like an expert.
I start to sweat again. “It’s the song I was going to sing.”
Gregor smacks his forehead. “As you can tell, I’ve written a book called How to Not Make Friends in Five Minutes.”
I’d laugh, except I have a blooming sense that I should forget this whole audition idea.
Gregor must see my panic. He turns to face me full-on. “But seriously, do yourself a favor and sing something else. What other songs did you bring?”
“This is it.” I hold up my flimsy pages of sheet music. I had been so proud of myself last night, finding it online, buying and printing a copy, going over it a bit. I realize now what must have been in Marissa’s binder: a massive collection of songs she’s practiced to perfection.
“You brought one song?” Gregor’s delivery conveys half disbelief, half pity.
“Stupid, right?”
He waves that aside. “Anything you know by heart?”
I think of the songs I sang at Rossmere Heights. “‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’?”
“Nope. Overdone, too slow, the high notes flatten if you’re nervous.”
“‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’?”
Gregor grips my forearm gently. “Girlfriend, you will be if I can help you out here, but no. You’re not Olivia Newton-John-y enough.”
I can hear Marissa speaking now. She’s on her monologue. My turn’s coming fast. “The only other stuff I’m good at is from Annie. And that’s too young. I did it in sixth grade.”
Gregor hoots. “I love it. I did ‘Tomorrow’ for my first YWTC audition four years ago.”
“You sang Annie?” Now I’m confused as well as panicked.
“Before my voice changed, of course. It was my homage to Sarah Jessica Parker.” He makes jazz hands up beside his face.
“Nothing you say is making sense.” I resist the urge to grab his jazz hands.
He gasps, widening his already large eyes. “S.J.P. played Annie on Broadway when she was a sprout. How can you be into musical theater and not know that?”
I’m starting to feel like there’s a lot I don’t know. Marissa exits the audition room. She beams but keeps her eyes down, like she’s carrying a fantastic secret.
Neeta says, “Ellie, you’re up.”
I’m frozen to the spot.
Gregor pulls me off the bench. “Come on, little Orphan Annie. I’ll be your accompanist.”
“But I don’t have the music for you to play.”
“It’s all in here.” He points at his temple. “And I’m an exceptional pianist. Because yes, I’m that brilliant.”
Marissa darts a narrow look at me as Gregor and I go by. Neeta says, “Hey, Gregor!”
“It’s an emergency,” he says.
And then I’m in the bright, overly warm audition room. Renée Felix and two other people face me from behind a long table littered with papers and coffee cups. A thirtysomething guy with thick-framed glasses and a beard says, “Welcome. I’m Drew Carrier, the director and musical director of Schooled. What are you going to sing for us today?”