Holly Black (42 page)

Sooz giggled uncontrollably when she saw the pictures.

“This is serious,” I told her. “Stop it.”

“Sorry.” But she kept giggling. “I’m just thinking of how it’s gonna look when I’m done.”

I had taken as many as I could, as quickly as I could. They were mostly pretty bad—
you
try taking a bunch of pictures through a tiny hole in a compact case while surrounded by girls who could notice you at any minute.

But there were two or three that weren’t totally awful. Sooz took the best one and massaged it in Photoshop until it looked pretty good and then she did some more work. I watched her, impatient.

“That’s it,” I said. “It’s done.”

“Not yet,” she said, focused on the screen.

An hour went by. “Come on, Sooz. It’s perfect.” I was practically dancing from foot to foot.

“It’s nowhere near perfect. Shut up, Katya.”

I spun around her room. I paced. I practiced my brachiosaur walk.

“Come
on
, Sooz!”

She grumbled a little and clicked the mouse a few last times. “Fine. Fine. Here.”

I looked at the screen over her shoulder. “It’s perfect. It’s
beyond
perfect.”

Sooz grinned. “How many should we print out?”

We waited. To have it all come out the next day would be too suspicious.
Someone
would remember me in the locker room.

So I waited. Again. Still lying in ambush. I’ve already pegged the prey—it just doesn’t know it yet.

After two weeks, I pounced.

Brookdale awakened to a new poster on its telephone poles and newspaper boxes and bulletin boards. A new flier tossed in piles by the post office and the grocery stores and scattered all over the entrance to the high school.

It had taken us all night to walk around and do it. All night. Worth every last second of it.

I didn’t even get five minutes of sleep, but I couldn’t possibly miss school that day. Not and miss what everyone was talking about.

The image Sooz had mocked up.

Andi, half-naked from the shower in the locker room, drying her hip and leg, her torso completely revealed. Wet and gorgeous and totally unaware.

Sooz gave it atmosphere and mood. She Photoshopped out the locker room and Photoshopped in a sleazy hotel room we’d found online. And at the top:

DO YOU LIKE SEX? SHE DOES!!!!!

Under the picture: CALL ANDI! with her phone number and her address. And then:

TRUST ME—SHE LOVES IT!!! I KNOW FROM EXPERIENCE—COUNTLESS TIMES!!!!!

The first time I saw Andi that day, she was in tears. She was alone. She was rushing to the bathroom.

She probably tried to lie. She probably tried to say it wasn’t her. But she
knew
it was. You can’t hide that kind of knowledge from your expression, from your eyes. People can tell when you’re lying.

Everyone in Brookdale knows what Andi’s boobs look like now.

It was the talk of the school. I heard all sorts of rumors: She was a secret prostitute. (She and her best friend had had a threesome with a college guy from Pennsylvania.) She was an exhibitionist—she couldn’t help it. It was an ex trying to get back at her. She was a nympho and couldn’t help cheating on Jamie. It wasn’t really her. (Then why did it
look
like her? Why was her phone number on it?)

At lunch, I sat with my usual view of Andi’s table. By then, the
real
story had spread throughout school: They were over. Period. For good. Zik Lorenz and Michelle Jurgens had heard the whole fight near the stairwell between third and fourth period.

What the hell is going on?
Jamie yelled.
Everyone’s saying you’re a slut.

It’s not me!
she protested.

It is you! It is!
Jamie said.

Which clinched it. For everyone. After all, Jamie would definitely know what she looked like naked.

If it’s not real
, Jamie demanded,
how did they get a naked picture of you?

What could she say to that? With the locker room Photoshopped out, how could she know
where
that picture had come from?

According to the grapevine, Andi had just broken down into tears again at that. I wished, oh, I wished I had been there to see it!

I watched at lunch instead.

I watched as Andi sat down at her table.

Jamie didn’t sit with her.

In fact,
no one
sat with Andi.

Sooz flashed me the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. I resisted the urge to high-five her. Too incriminating.

But when I got up from the table, something amazing happened.

The earth shook with my footsteps.

It
shook
.

From now on, the earth would tremble in my wake.

And I knew. I knew what the dinosaurs sounded like.

They sounded like
me
….

Text by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci. Illustrations by Bryan Lee O’Malley.

by
sara zarr

I wrote it.

I know we’re supposed to pick something from a quote-unquote known work such as something by Shakespeare or Chekhov, or one of those photocopied monologues in the drama room, but I looked at them and honestly there’s nothing that shows my range or says anything about who I am that will be memorable in any important way and that’s what I need: to be memorable. Because, and I’m not trying to embarrass you, Mr. P, but you’ve had trouble remembering my name since I first started auditioning freshman year. So obviously I need to take a new approach. Look at the audition form and look at my face: Rachel Banks. Not Rochelle, not Ruthie, not Melissa—I really don’t understand where you got that last one, but you have called me Melissa at least three times in as many years.

So my goal here is to be memorable. And anyway I thought that if Candace Gibson is allowed to reenact a scene from
Napoleon Dynamite
as her audition, then I can perform something that I wrote and is not just a total rip from a movie every single person at this school has seen fifteen times and can recite in his or her sleep.

We might as well get this out of the way now: I am going to go over the time limit. I beg you not to cut me off because I saw with my own eyes how Peter Hantz went overtime with that Sam Shepard thing, which was not even that brilliant. And all this introduction doesn’t count against the time. It says on the form that your introduction doesn’t count against the time.

I’m going to tell you a story here. One you already know, Mr. P, but I’ll be including some facts and details for anyone in this room who may not have been there or in case I want to use this monologue again someday when I am finally auditioning out in the quote-unquote real world, as you are so fond of calling it when trying to alert us to the truth that our high school shenanigans will not be appreciated by professionals.

You can start timing me…now.

Scotty King got electrocuted while running the light board.

It sounds like a joke, I know, but I’m saying that he
got electrocuted.
While
running the light board.
I’m saying that he died, during the second act of
Miracle Worker
when Julie-Ann Leskowitz had gotten so good at playing blind, deaf, and dumb that she didn’t stop her scene, even though the lights flashed and everyone heard the sizzling noise from up in the booth and Annie Sullivan stopped and said, “Oh my God, Scotty,” because she knew about the leak in the auditorium roof and Scotty’s belief that bare feet were good luck and we were having one of those late spring storms and there were puddles and drips everywhere, and she put it all together faster than any of us. And we stopped the show and people filed out, a lot of them not realizing what had happened and asking if they’d get a refund. Seriously, who asks for a refund for a seven-dollar high school play? I’m sorry, I’m still making it sound like a joke. You don’t know this about me, since you’ve never taken the time to know anything about me, but I use humor that way. It relieves the tension. Unless someone is actually dead, like Scotty, in which case it just ends up sounding sick and insensitive.

You know all this already, of course, as it is in our very recent history. And, well, you were there and all. What you may not realize is that it was supposed to be me.

Now it doesn’t sound like a joke. Now it sounds melodramatic, like I’m trying to get attention or turn the focus away from Scotty’s tragedy on to me, who has suffered no tragedy other than spending the last few months walking around like a zombie, like a ghost, like I stole someone else’s life and thinking if it had been me, would anyone have noticed?