Understudy (4 page)

“Shit, Wren are you okay?” someone asks. Sharp pain sears through my forehead and tears fill my eyes, but it’s nothing compared to how freaking mortified I am. I just walked into a door. Who does that?

With my eyes closed, I rub my forehead. My cheeks are warm to the touch and probably scarlet freaking red.

“I think your phone will be okay.” I recognize the soft spoken voice as Maggie from AP English… and every English class I’ve had since fifth grade. “Thanks,” I say, opening my eyes and taking my phone from her outstretched hand. The pink case popped off when it hit the floor but at least the screen didn’t shatter.

Maggie’s face is as red as mine must be and she’s wearing those thick red framed glasses that I’ve only seen in her Facebook photos. She posts tons of photos a day, and they’re all of just her face, usually taken from holding the camera up real high. Margot likes to make fun of her behind her back, saying that only fat girls post photos of just their heads. Margot can be a real bitch sometimes. She demanded that I take down this one photo of my own head that I thought was really cute. She said people would see it and assume I’m fat. Like I even care about someone’s instant judgment of me.

“I’m really sorry,” Maggie says, shifting on her feet. “I hope your case isn’t broken.”

“Not your fault.” I turn my phone over, checking for scratches but my Hello Kitty protective case has done a fine job. “I’m the idiot who wasn’t paying attention.”

She laughs nervously. “Are you trying out for mathletes?”

“What?”

“Guess not. Try outs are today. I mean why else would you still be here after school?”

“It’s the first day of play rehearsal,” I say, still wondering why she’d think I would be dorky enough to try out for a club of math-obsessed geeks. I’m not even that good at math.

“I auditioned for that,” she says. “I wanted to be the main character but Ms. Barlow said I was too fat.” She gives a disdainful scowl toward her gut and shrugs. “Oh well.”

“If it helps, she also said I was too fat.”

She lifts an eyebrow, squishes her lips to the side and appraises me with a smile. “That does help. Cool phone cover, by the way.” She takes out her cell phone and shows me her Hello Kitty case that’s the same as mine. I would have never pegged her for a Hello Kitty girl, since she plays sports and loves math and all.

I leave her to her mathletes try out and head to the auditorium. Members of the cast and stage crew hang out on stage and in the front row seats. I can’t find Margot or my aunt in the crowd so I chill on the edge of the stage waiting for some kind of direction. I also don’t see Derek, but I don’t look for him.

I feel so stupid for being all flirty and smiling like an idiot around Derek the two times I had seen him. He’s a criminal. He spent half the school year in juvenile detention, which is basically prison for teens. He’s just a loser with an anger problem who will probably end up in real prison one day. How could I have been so stupid?

And why does he have to be so hot?

Margot’s voice filters in from backstage, and you don’t have to be her best friend to know she’s angry. A few students jump at her sudden shriek and one girl says, “Is Margot ever
not
bitching about something?” Laughter fills the auditorium. I get up and walk across the stage, pushing my hands through layers of thick velvety curtains to find my way backstage. It smells like old wood and an antique store back here.

Ms. Barlow stands next to a set of ropes and pulleys, clipboard in her hand and classic annoyed look on her face. Margot jumps when she hears my footsteps but then relaxes when she sees it’s just me. “He’s a loser,” she says to my aunt. “You can’t let him be in the play. It has to be against the law or something.”

“He’s served his detention away from school and how he has to get fifty hours of volunteer work at school.” Ms. Barlow shakes her head. “Take it up with the principal. It’s out of my hands.”

“I swear to god, if he touches me I’ll kill him.” Margot shoots me a look that could slice my script in half. “Wren, you better be careful. He’s a stagehand like you.”

I nod, not knowing what to say; still feeling like someone has punched me in gut.

Ms. Barlow instructs everyone (even us lowly stagehands) to sit in the front seats in the auditorium while she talks for an hour about how rehearsals will go, who does what, and what conduct is expected of us. She also slips in a few stories of her old Broadway acting days, and people seem excited about it, but not me because I’ve heard them a million times. Oddly, each time one of her stories are told, the grandeur of it gets a little bigger. I sit in the third row behind everyone else and stare at Derek, who is in the second row a few seats to my right. There is a wide birth of empty seats around him.

His hair looks so cute from the back.

I totally shouldn’t be thinking that.

The light board has a maze of buttons and switches, most of them with the labels rubbed off from years of use. Although it’s electronic, the dull colors and square shapes mean it’s from the eighties and I wonder how it’s survived this long. Several minutes pass and I’m tired of pretending to be interested in this thing, but I’m too terrified of running into Derek, so I keep standing here.

Someone slaps my butt and I spin around. “Don’t tell me the hottest girl in AP English is a stagehand?” It’s Greg.
That
Greg. Ugh.

“Touch me like that again and I’ll castrate you.” I turn back around and push a button like I know what I’m doing. A spotlight flips on, blinding Gwen and Ricky who are reading from their scripts in center stage. Quickly, I push the button again. At least now I know what that one button does.

Greg leans over my shoulder, his breath hitting the back of my neck. Invading personal space is one of his favorite pastimes. “What ya doing?”

I sigh. “I don’t even know.”

“Yeah me neither. I’m supposed to be the sound guy, but Teach said we won’t have any sound clips for a week or two so I’m just supposed to hang out.”

“That woman is so freaking OCD about her plays but she seems to have screwed up a million things already.”

Greg takes my necklace in his hands and shifts the clasp until it’s at the back of my neck. Goosebumps trail down my arms. Not because I like him—because I don’t—but because he’s a guy and he’s touching my neck. Greg is cute, but in a way that makes you want to punch him. He’s insanely book smart but in an effort to hide it, he’s a smartass. He will say the meanest shit at the worst possible time, and it’ll make you feel like you’re a loser and yet that somehow makes you want to try harder to impress him. He loves to make girls cry.

Last month I accidently made out with him at Margot’s beach party.

That’s probably why he’s being so nice.

“I found a place behind that curtain that makes a really great spot to sit,” he says, staring me right in the eyes because he’s also kind of short for a guy. “Want to go
sit
?”

I know he wants to make out, and it’s probably the only thing that will take my mind off Derek and how stupid I feel for wasting an entire weekend daydreaming about him.

I glance around and find Aunt Barlow at the front of the stage, engrossed in her two lead actors. She won’t miss me if I sneak away for a while.

“Yeah,” I say. I know this is stupid and a bad decision. I know it’s the sort of thing that parents tell their little girls about when they have the
boys only want one thing
talk with them. Greg is a skeeze and I’m not even sure why I say the next few words, but I do. “Let’s go sit.”

He grabs my hand and pulls me through backstage clutter, weaving in and out of the short mini curtains on the side of the stage. Margot whistles and wiggles her eyebrows as I scamper past her.

At the very back of the stage there is one final black velvety curtain in front of a concrete wall. It drags along the floor. Greg lifts the edge and motions for me to walk behind it. It’s pitch black behind there, and it can’t possibly have more than a few inches of space.

“Are you crazy?” I whisper, taking a step back. I’m vaguely aware that I just kicked someone’s shoe. “We can’t fit back there.”

“Yeah we can, it’s like two feet deep.”

“Are you sure?”

He winks. “Yeah, babe. Trust me.”

“You go first.” I’m all down for making out behind the stage, but not if our bodies make two obvious lumps under the curtain. Greg steps behind the curtain and disappears. “Move around,” I say. I hear him shuffling his feet like a salsa dancer, and to my delight, the curtain doesn’t move at all.

“Come on back, it’s lonely without you.”

“Shut up,” I whisper. “Someone could hear you.” He laughs. I lift the edge of the heavy curtain, but before I step behind it, I glance back to see who I kicked a minute ago. Hopefully it’s not someone who will snitch on me.

Derek’s sitting against the wall, with his knees pulled up and he’s sketching the outline of the stage on a notepad. My heart goes cold when his eyes dart upward and see me looking at him.

“Sorry I kicked you,” I say.

He turns back to his drawing. “Have fun.”

Day twenty-seven of the 20 Minute Abs DVD. The moves are no longer as nightmarishly hard as they used to be, but I’m still in horrible amounts of pain by the thirteenth minute. I squeeze out the last set of reverse crunches and collapse on the floor before the credits roll. I should sue this guy with his huge muscles and peppy smile for his false claims on getting perfect abs in just thirty days. My sad sack of stomach muscles look exactly the same as they did a month ago.

The only great thing about this DVD is that it wakes me up for school better than a cold shower. In first period theater arts class, I sit at my desk in the back and doodle in the margins of my script. Although auditions were open to every senior at Lawson High, most of the members of the play are in Ms. Barlow’s theater class. So lessons have been dropped in lieu of extra play rehearsal.

The stagehands and me—their fearless leader—hang out in the back of the class and bullshit for ninety minutes. Derek isn’t in this class, thank god. Greg drags his chair over to my desk and rests his chin on my shoulder.

“What’s up, bosslady?”

“Not a thing.” I slide over in my desk to knock Greg’s head off me. Just because we’ve made out twice now does not mean something’s going on between us, and he needs to know that. He probably won’t care though, because he’s on the verge of becoming a man whore, following in the footsteps of his mega hot older brother, Brian. Brian graduated two years ago and Margot still hasn’t given up her goal of sleeping with him.

“So, should we be uh, you know,” he says, pointing to the script on his desk. “Working on this play?”

“I guess.” Truth is, I haven’t quite recovered from the roller coaster ride my emotions went through when I found out I didn’t get Gretchen’s role. At first I was pissed, then stoked because I’d get to work with Derek, and now I’m forced to avoid him at all costs because he’s some kind of angry psycho. More than anything though, I’m embarrassed at how I let myself get carried away with fantasies of him. That is the last time I will ever get excited to see a new guy in school.

With Greg’s insistence, we work on ideas for props and costumes. He writes everything in his notebook, organized by scene and character. As the smartest guy in this class, he should be the manager, not me.

I mention this to Ms. Barlow after class and it doesn’t go over very well. “I’m starting to wonder if you care about me at all,” she says, taking off her glasses and wiping them with her rainbow colored quilted vest. “Not only as an educator, but as a relative. You seem so keen on hurting my feelings lately.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, I just have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“You can start by memorizing your lines as understudy.”

I roll my eyes. “That won’t be necessary. Gwen loves being Gretchen.”

“Memorize them anyway, okay?” The two minute bell rings, warning me that I’d better get to my next class. Aunt Barlow ushers me out the door and into the hallway. “By the way,” she says as if she just remembered something. “Since Derek isn’t in theater, he agreed to meet with you after school to get started on prop construction. You can bring the other stagehands as well.”