My parents got an offer on the house. It came out of the blue because they hadn’t officially been trying to sell it yet, but the lady from Knockton Farms told some rich friends how we were having trouble, and it turned out they’d been looking for a piece of property to buy for their son, who was a chef. He wanted a place near town with a big old house and a lot of land where he could cater weddings and such. There was all kinds of complicated information that I knew mostly from hearing my parents fight about it. Nobody told me anything directly, but what I gathered was that the offer was for way less than we owed on the house, so the bank had to approve it. It seemed to me that if the bank was willing to take less money than we owed, why not just reduce the amount we owed and let us keep it? But as I found out on a more and more regular basis, life just didn’t work that way. Meanwhile Mom had brought our barn cats over to Knockton, but we still had ten horses and possibly a whole lot less time than we thought to figure out where we were going to flee to when all this finally ended.
Mom and Dad fought pretty much round the clock. Mom’s face had turned this constant shade of red, and anytime I woke up during the night I could hear her rattling around the house—she’d pretty much stopped sleeping altogether. She’d also lost a whole lot of weight, while my dad—who had a tendency to eat under stress—put on about fifteen pounds. It was like the weight moved off her body and onto his.
To drown out the sound of their fighting, and because Finian’s Rainbow was mere days away, I sang my “Necessity” song all the time. I couldn’t wait to perform it onstage. In the play, Annie Leonard started out singing, “What is the curse that makes the universe so all bewilderin’?” Then I came in and sang, “What is the hoax that just provokes the folks they call God’s children?” After that Elizabeth Claire Zimmerman sang, “What is the jinx that gives a body and his brother and everyone around the runaround?” And then we all sang “Necessity.” I had one verse that I sang all on my own, my solo, and it went like this:
My feet want to dance in the sun
My head wants to rest in the shade
The Lord says go out and have fun
But the landlord says, “Your rent ain’t paid!”
So you can see how in addition to being something I had to practice, the song felt relevant to our home life, to the point where one morning at breakfast Mom came right out and asked me to stop singing it. “At least all the time,” she said, kind of apologetic, when she saw the hurt feelings on my face.
I felt like saying I’d stop singing when she and Dad stopped hollering at each other, but she looked so fragile that I bit my tongue. Mom was spending hours and hours on the telephone, trying to find other rescue groups to take her horses. But they all had the same problem: When people needed to start economizing, the first place they started was charitable donations. Especially charitable donations to animals. That morning Mom picked up the phone to start making her calls before I even left for school, and I’m sorry to say that she forgot to say good-bye to me.
Daisy walked me down to the end of the driveway and waited with me until the bus came. She was the only member of our family who didn’t know what was going on, and I envied her.
* * *
We were going to have four performances of the play: Thursday night, Friday night, a Saturday matinee, and Saturday night. Each performance would be packed, because as I have said, people from all over the area came to Williamsport High productions.
As the week began I made a decision that nothing—not Allie scowling at me in American history, not my parents fighting, not even the fate of all our horses—would let me feel anything except excited about this being the week I performed in my first Williamsport High School play. Do you know how many other sophomores were singing solos? None, that’s how many. And do you think my parents stopped for a single second to feel proud about this? No, they did not.
On Monday, after school but before rehearsal, I hung out for a bit on the stone wall by the football field with Tim, Caroline Jones, Tyler, Devon, Rachel, and Jay. Us girls and Tim sat on the wall, while Jay and Devon stood there wearing their football gear for practice. Rachel chatted away with Devon, looking like she couldn’t believe her good fortune. I almost had a flash of sympathy for him when I thought how Allie had always saved her adoring glances for Tim. It was hard to blame him for dropping her for someone who actually liked him. Anyway, in the midst of our various conversations, Caroline happened to mention the cast party, which was going to be at her house.
“Are your parents going to be there?” Devon asked.
“Well, of course they are,” Caroline said. “They’re not going out of town the weekend I’m starring in the school play.” Really Liza Jane Rawls, who played Sharon, was the star of the play, but I did not point this out to Caroline.
Devon frowned. “But they’ll make themselves scarce, right?”
“What do you care?” Caroline said. “The cast party is for the cast, Devon, not the football team.” A couple of those geese flew overhead, squawking away.
“Caroline Jones,” Devon said, in a mock Southern accent. “You have been sitting there talking about a party in front of us for nearly five minutes. Are you telling me we aren’t invited?”
Caroline turned a little pink. “Well, of course you can come,” she said, pointedly looking at Jay and Rachel, too. “But my parents are going to be there, and if you’re thinking of drinking, that’s your own business. I don’t drink anymore.” She looked over at me when she said this last part, and I found myself putting my hand over my palm. I hadn’t even attempted to go to another party since the bonfire. But surely my parents wouldn’t expect me to miss the cast party of my very first play? There wouldn’t likely be a bonfire at Caroline’s house, anyway. And I never did get around to telling them she was the one who pitched me into the fire.
* * *
On Thursday morning my aunt Holly called my cell phone while I was waiting for the bus.
“Hi, Wren,” she said. “I’m just calling to say I can’t come this weekend. I’m really sorry. You know I’ve been looking forward to seeing your play.”
The bus pulled up at the end of our driveway. I got on with the cell phone still to my ear, not answering Holly and barely nodding my head at Jim, the bus driver. Being rude to everyone, in other words. I walked all the way to the back of the bus to where Tim sat eating a packet of little powdered doughnuts. He moved his bag to make space for me.
“Wren?” Holly said. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” I told her.
“Your dad said he’d videotape it for me,” she said. “Not the whole thing, obviously, but your song.”
“The school makes DVDs of the performances,” I said. “You can buy one for ten dollars.”
“Oh, great!” Holly said, like this solved everything.
“Great!” I imitated her singsong, cheerful voice. “Well, since that solves everything, I’ll see you when I see you.”
“Wren, wait,” Holly said. She could tell I was about to hang up. “I know that doesn’t solve everything. But things are so tense I really don’t think it’s a good idea for me to come. I love your mom so much, you know I do, and once this whole Hillsdale thing is settled—”
“Hillsdale thing?”
Now it was Holly’s turn to go quiet. I sat there, listening, and even though she didn’t so much as breathe, it was the loudest silence I had ever heard.
“What’s Hillsdale?” I said, getting a little loud myself.
“Um . . . I think you should ask your parents, Wren. I didn’t realize they hadn’t said anything to you.”
I racked my brain trying to think if the word “Hillsdale” had floated up from any of Mom and Dad’s umpteen fights. Nothing. Clearly the name was loaded enough that even in the heat of fury they’d remembered to whisper it.
Then I thought of something. “Wait. I know what it is,” I said, recalling the plan they’d come up with at the Indian restaurant. “It’s a boarding school where Mom can teach riding. Right? We’re moving there?”
This time I heard Holly take in a breath. “You might be,” she said, leveling with me. Clearly now there’d be no convincing her to come to the play. My parents were going to kill her.
“And where is it?” I said. “Where is this boarding school?”
“New Hampshire,” Holly said.
New Hampshire! It might as well have been Timbuktu. I turned off my phone and dropped it in my book bag. I wasn’t trying to be rude. I just felt stunned. New Hampshire. I pictured mounds and mounds of snow. Classrooms filled with rich northerners just like Devon.
Tim handed me one of his tiny doughnuts. He had white powder across his chin, and I could see from his face that he understood, without asking, exactly what had happened. It was too bad Holly wouldn’t come to Finian’s Rainbow, because it looked like it could very well be my one and only play on the Williamsport High School stage. I closed my hand around that doughnut, put my head on Tim’s knee, and just stared down the aisle of the bus, hardly moving the whole ride, and not saying a single word.
* * *
There was no time the rest of the day to feel sad, even over the complete and total ruination of my life. I had to go to classes, and the whole cast had lunch together in the auditorium, because Ms. Winters wanted to make sure we had light but protein-packed meals just like she’d told us. Of course I had packed my own. I didn’t even know if my parents remembered that tonight was the first performance. I sure hadn’t bothered reminding them.
As soon as the last bell rang, we all met for last-minute blocking and hair and makeup. I wore an old-fashioned dress with an apron over it and a kerchief in my hair, plus shoes with thick heels, since Annie and Elizabeth Claire were both about six inches taller than me. This didn’t worry me. My voice was plenty big even if I wasn’t.
* * *
If only I could take that first performance and bottle it up—keep it somewhere so that anytime I wanted I could just step right inside. Because for the first time in what seemed a million years—long enough to find an alligator and ship him off down further south, long enough for me to lose my old best friend and gain a new one, long enough to lose our horse farm to a catering business—none of those thoughts entered my head. All I saw was that pulsing, happy audience. Not their faces, which just looked like a million dots, but their applause and their attention. When I wasn’t onstage I hid out in the wings, watching Tim sing his lines and dance with Caroline Jones. I felt so proud of both of them, Caroline dancing so prettily, and Tim so funny and charming, his voice sounding so strong and good. And we must have done a decent job with our “Necessity” song, because the whole audience got to their feet and gave us a standing ovation.
Reality didn’t enter again till after the performance. Mom and Dad were waiting for me at the front of the auditorium, holding a huge bouquet of sunflowers, my favorite. They both had smiles on their faces, the first I’d seen in ages.
“Wren!” Mom said. Her face looked bright and lit up and happy. “You were so wonderful! You were perfect! Didn’t I tell you that song was a showstopper?”
Dad had his hands shoved in his pockets. Despite being all pale and bloated, he looked almost like himself when he said, “Wren, you were just great. You sang that song so loud and pretty.”
I took the flowers and let them hug me. “Did you see Ry was in the audience?” Mom said. “I thought he was going to stick around and say hi; I don’t know where he went.”
I shrugged. What in the world mattered less than Ry these days? I had a real life to worry about.
“Allie was here too,” Dad said.
The exhilaration of the performance faded right before my eyes, and the real world came crashing down. The word “Hillsdale” came into my head, but even I wasn’t mean enough to throw it out at my parents just then. They still had the glow of the performance, even if mine had disappeared.
“Let’s go home,” I said. “I’m fried.”
I barely got to see Tim in the shuffle. He was off with his parents and his sister, who’d come home from college to see the play. We waved to each other as we filtered through the crowd with our families.
On the drive home I told my parents about the cast party. I decided not to phrase it like a question. “Tim’s going to have his mom’s car, so you don’t have to worry about driving me.”
They both sat quiet, and I could tell they were agreeing without saying anything or even looking at each other, which reminded me of the way they used to be. Then Mom said, “You can go to the party with Tim, but we’ll pick you up. At midnight.”
“Midnight! The party won’t even start till eleven!”
They were quiet again, that little telepathic back and forth.
“We’ll pick you up at one, then,” Mom said.
“But, Mom—”
“One thirty,” Dad growled. “And that’s my final offer.”
I knew two things from his voice: He was willing to compromise because I’d done so well in the play, and he wasn’t willing to compromise a bit more than one thirty.
“Okay,” I said.
“And in case you’re wondering,” Dad said, “I’ve still got that Breathalyzer.”