Surviving the Applewhites

by Stephanie S. Tolan

  Partly to get away from the music and partly because it had become an obsession, E.D. had spent a good part of the week in the meadow, by the pond, in the pine grove, anywhere and everywhere on their sixteen acres—looking for a great spangled fritillary. When she came back each day, the unused camera on its strap around her neck, her net empty, Jake’s smirk seemed to get bigger and broader. E.D. didn’t give up easily, but she was beginning to lose hope. September was the last month they were supposed to be out there, and they were listed as rare during the second half of the month. There were only six more days in September.

  It was beginning to look likely that the Butterfly Project would end with a gaping hole in the chart. It drove her nuts. The great spangled fritillary was a common butterfly. The book said so. She should have found one weeks ago. It was just some nasty twist of fate that she hadn’t found one. It was like a curse. If Jake Semple hadn’t come into her life, she was absolutely certain she would have found one by now. But he had come, and then he’d challenged her. She’d told him that she would find one, and now if she didn’t, Jake Semple would win!

  Everything else about the project was finished. The papier-mâché caterpillar and chrysalis were sitting on a shelf in the schoolroom, painted according to the pictures in her book, and she’d scheduled the Teaching Opportunity about metamorphosis for the first of next week. She was going to explain to Destiny how the caterpillar turned itself into the chrysalis and then she would cut the chrysalis open and explain how the monarch butterfly that she had a photograph of on the chart had climbed out of it and flown away. The Teaching Opportunity and a paper describing the project and its results were what she called the Culminating Events. Her paper was almost done—it was just waiting for a paragraph on the great spangled fritillary or else the statement that she had had to give up on finding one. A statement of defeat she couldn’t bear to think about.

  There were no official grades at the Creative Academy, but E.D. always graded herself on her projects. It gave her a sense of where she was, what she had done, and most of the time a comforting feeling of accomplishment. But without the great spangled fritillary, she was going to have to give herself a B in science for the first half of this term. She was not used to getting Bs. She worked and worked until she felt sure she had earned an A. This fritillary thing wasn’t something she could do by hard work. It was totally out of her control.

  Worse, she’d been so determined to find one that she had fallen behind in every other subject. Including math. Her math tutor had sent her an e-mail asking if she was sick. She was doing her best to catch up now. But the more she tried to concentrate, the more she was aware of the voice singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” It filled the house, urging her to climb mountains, ford streams, follow rainbows.

  Suddenly a new voice joined the one pouring out of the living room speakers. Jake burst into the schoolroom singing at the top of his lungs that she should keep climbing and fording and following. Mercifully, when the final chord had died away, the CD ended and the house was suddenly silent. Hal’s hammering stopped with the music. Jake stood there smirking, his hands behind his back. Winston had come in after him and now flopped at his feet. “The song’s right!” Jake said.

  “About what?”

  “About finding your dream if you look hard enough. Well, I wouldn’t call it a dream exactly—not mine anyway—and there weren’t any mountains involved. But I found it!” With that he brought out from behind his back a clear plastic box like the kind nuts and bolts come in. Lying in the box, its wings battered, its body shriveled, was a great spangled fritillary.

  “You killed it!” she said.

  “It was dead when I found it. Guess where!” When she didn’t guess, he told her anyway. “Stuck to the front of Archie’s truck. Inside the grille. It must have been there for days. Maybe even weeks.”

  E.D. stared at the battered insect. There was no mistaking what it was.

  She wanted to cry. This was almost as bad as ending with a hole on the chart. The Butterfly Project would get an A now. But it wouldn’t really be her A. It would belong to both of them.

  Chapter Fourteen

  What’s the matter with the girl? Jake thought. He’d saved her stupid project for her, hadn’t he? So why was she pissed off? She should have been grateful. All the way back from Traybridge he’d imagined her reaction to his finding the lousy butterfly she wanted, and he might just as well have brought her a slug. A toad. A road-killed possum. That’s what he got for trying to be nice. Well, he wouldn’t let it happen again!

  Jake slammed the plastic box down on E.D.’s desk as Randolph Applewhite burst into the schoolroom and stumbled over Winston, who was lying across the doorway. Winston yelped and scrambled out of the way, but Randolph barely seemed to notice. “Who was that singing? Who was that singing?” He looked wildly around the schoolroom. “Jake? That can’t have been you. Was it? Was that you?”

  Jake shrugged. “Just now? I—I guess so. I was just singing along with—”

  “Where did you learn to sing? And where did you get that magnificent voice?”

  “I don’t know—I just—”

  “Never mind. Can you act?”

  Jake shrugged again. He had played a pumpkin in a first-grade Thanksgiving play, but it hadn’t required any acting. His teacher had given him the part because it didn’t have any lines. She had been afraid of what he might say if he was allowed to speak onstage.

  “We’ll find out tonight. You’ll come to auditions, and I’ll have you read with Jeannie Ng. She’s the only person I’ve seen or heard yet who could possibly play Liesl.” Randolph took hold of Jake’s shoulders and looked at him intently, his head cocked to one side. “Possible. Just possible. Luckily, Jeannie’s really small. Do you know Rolf’s song?”

  “Rolf’s—?” E.D. said, “Rolf? Jake can’t play Rolf! Rolf’s seventeen years old.”

  “I know, I know—going on eighteen. You’re—how old, Jake?”

  “Thirteen. Last May.”

  “Well, thank heavens your voice has changed already. And you’re tall for your age. Rolf could be small. It doesn’t say anywhere Rolf can’t be small. All the more reason he would want to join the SS—to make up for being a runt. The psychology of it’s perfect.” Randolph let go of him then. “It’s an excellent part. A wonderful song, a little dancing, a romantic interest. And you’d get to be the source of all the onstage tension at the end.”

  “But I’ve never—”

  “Doesn’t matter. You can sing! You have a strong, powerful voice and you stay on key. Right now I wouldn’t care if you couldn’t act your way out of a paper bag. You’re smart enough. If you can’t act, I’ll teach you. I’ll get you a script right away. In all these interminable auditions I haven’t found a single person who could come close to playing Rolf. Not one. And here you were all the time, right under my nose!”

  With that Randolph Applewhite left the schoolroom, humming Rolf’s song to himself, slightly off-key. A good thing he doesn’t have to teach singing, Jake thought.

  “Are you going to do it?” E.D. asked.

  “What’s it to you?” Jake said. It was a question Jake should have been asking himself. But for some reason he wasn’t. Randolph Applewhite wanted him to be in The Sound of Music. From the very moment he’d understood that, Jake had known the answer. Of course he was going to do it.

  “Because if you do, and if you dare—dare—to sing Rolf’s song, or any other one for that matter, even once in this room while I’m trying to work, I’ll—I’ll—”

  Jake wasn’t listening, he was thinking. His heart, he noticed suddenly, was actually pounding with excitement. He’d never auditioned for anything. What if he froze up? And what would it be like to sing on a stage in front of a lot of people? He’d never done it before. Then there was the acting. He didn’t know for certain that he could act, at least not with a script and lines somebody else made up. But something told him he could. Now that he thought about it, actin
g was what he’d been doing all his life.

  He didn’t know the show, really, but he knew the music. By now there wasn’t anybody at Wit’s End who didn’t know every word to every single song. Randolph had asked where Jake had learned to sing. The weird thing was that until this very moment, he hadn’t even known he could. Not really. Magnificent, Randolph Applewhite had called his voice. Magnificent.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Her father hadn’t been gone two minutes before Jake started humming Rolf’s song. E.D. shut down the computer and stormed out of the schoolroom, her stomach churning. She had just started up the stairs to her room when the CD began again and the house filled with the opening notes of The Sound of Music’s overture. Almost immediately the hammering started up in Hal’s room.

  E.D. turned and went out through the kitchen, slamming the screen door behind her. Under the big beech tree near the barn, Lucille was reading to Destiny. Paulie, from the porch of her grandfather’s cottage, was shrieking with maniacal laughter, and the strains of Ophelia’s death ballet drifted up from the dance studio. These sounds, along with the high, vibrant thrum of cicadas, seemed almost to collide inside her skull with the music from the house.

  Now that she was out here, she didn’t know what she wanted to do. There was no need to get the butterfly net and head out to the meadow. There were no more butterflies to find. And she couldn’t do any other work unless she went back to the schoolroom first to get her materials. Right now she didn’t care whether she ever went back to the schoolroom again. She didn’t know why she was feeling the way she was feeling. For that matter, she didn’t know what she was feeling. But she didn’t care. Whatever it was, it was awful, and she wanted to make it go away.

  She kept walking till she found herself at the goat pen. Wolfie had to be in the shed. Only Hazel was outside. She was in the corner of the pen, her head under the bottom rail, her neck stretched as far as it would go, trying to reach a clump of weeds on the other side. Not so much as a blade of grass was growing inside the pen. The goats had stripped it clean. Their food trough was empty. E.D. pulled up the clump of weeds by the roots and tossed it over the fence. Hazel pulled her head free, picked up the weeds, and began munching. E.D. decided to get a scoop of feed for her and had just put one hand on the gate when Wolfie came thundering out of the shed, eyes blazing, head down. He tore past Hazel and crashed into the gate so hard the impact jolted E.D.’s arm clear to her shoulder.

  “Fine!” she said to the goat, who had now snatched the weeds from Hazel and was shaking them from side to side as if killing them. “You can just starve for all I care. Both of you!”

  The lathe started up in the wood shop. E.D. followed the sound like a trail of bread crumbs. Maybe hanging out with Zedediah for a while would make her feel better. Zedediah could always make her feel better.

  “Whoa, Nellie,” her grandfather said over the sound of the lathe as she slipped in through the door, “who skunked your dog?”

  “What?”

  He turned off the machine. “I haven’t seen anything as threatening as the expression on your face since I saw a tornado heading for the highway while I was driving back from the coast in a hurricane.”

  There were three newly finished rocking chairs in the shop. E.D. threw herself into one of them. “Where’s Archie?”

  “Is he the one you’re mad at?”

  “No. I mean I’m not mad at anybody.”

  Zedediah shook his head. “Could’ve fooled me. Archie took that reporter kid down to the old highway bridge to do a little fishing.”

  “Fishing?” E.D. couldn’t remember any member of her family ever going fishing.

  “He bought a pole while he was in town, and they went out so he can practice. Seems when the television people come they’ll want to get some tape of us doing regular old country things. To show that when we aren’t making art, we’re just plain folk. It’s supposed to be good for ratings.”

  “Oh.” E.D. set the rocking chair moving.

  “Easy. Easy! You rock that hard, you’re going to rock the chair right over on you. What’s eating at you?”

  E.D. shrugged. “Nothing.”

  Zedediah brushed sawdust off his work apron and settled himself in another of the rocking chairs. “Right. I can see that.”

  “Dad’s going to give Jake a part in The Sound of Music. A real part. With a song and everything.”

  “Aaahhh.” E.D. frowned at her grandfather. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Just aaahhh. Anything else?” E.D. wanted to tell him about the great spangled fritillary, but she couldn’t. Just thinking about how it would sound stopped her. How could she be angry about getting some help? “And then there’s Jeremy Bernstein!” she said. Why had she said that? “How come he’s still here?”

  “Because he doesn’t have a pair of quarters to rub together. He didn’t have collision insurance on that old wreck of his. He can’t afford to leave!”

  “Somebody could buy him a bus ticket or something.”

  “Are you kidding? He practically worships the ground we walk on. Who among us can resist that? The kid’s obsessed with art and artists. Besides, he’s got a head full of projects he wants to do about us. First the TV show. That’s supposed to spin off into a feature-length documentary. Then he’s planning to write separate articles about each of us and sell them to different magazines. Probably an article about the Creative Academy, too. And then there’s his book. It’s a good deal all the way around. He gets room and board and a place to work, and we get our own personal press agent.”

  Zedediah rocked for a while in unison with E.D. She realized she could hear, ever so faintly, the music up at the house. She felt her hands clench into fists.

  “So Randolph thinks Jake can sing, eh?” Zedediah said.

  She nodded.

  “I have something to tell you, and I want you to listen. Are you listening?”

  E.D. nodded again.

  “I said, are you listening?”

  “Yes, I’m listening!”

  “All right, then. You, Edith Wharton Applewhite, have talent. Very real, very important talent. Just because somebody like Jeremy Bernstein is obsessed with artists doesn’t mean that artists are the most valuable people in the world. Or that art’s better than everything else human beings do.”

  E.D. thought of her curriculum notebook. Her project charts. Her goals and Teaching Opportunities and time lines. “I know that!” She did. She knew that. He didn’t have to tell her.

  But right this minute it didn’t make her feel one whit better.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sitting in the passenger seat of the newly repaired Miata as Randolph Applewhite drove back to Wit’s End from Traybridge, Jake thought back over the evening. He had gone in to the audition with Randolph. When the Miata had pulled up in front of the theater, Jake had been surprised. He’d expected it to be like a movie house, stuck in among the storefronts on one of Traybridge’s main streets. But it was a whole separate brick building, surrounded by a manicured lawn. It looked something like a library, Jake had thought, except for the tall square part at the back of the building that Randolph said was the “stage house.”

  Columns flanked the double front door, and there was a big red-and-yellow banner over the door that said TRAYBRIDGE LITTLE THEATRE, FIFTY-SIXTH SEASON above a pair of masks, one with its mouth turned up, the other with its mouth turned down. They had walked under the banner into a big lobby with a box office on the left side and three sets of doors ahead, leading into the auditorium, which Randolph called “the house.” There were a few people milling around in the lobby when they arrived, and a great many more in the house, scattered in the rows and rows of dark blue plush seats that faced the stage. A kind of tense hush came over them when Randolph walked in.

  A woman in a pale blue silk suit with upswept blond hair hurried up to talk to him. “I do hope you’re going to be finishing up tonight,” she said. “Our people are getting a
little restive, I’m afraid.”

  Jake didn’t know what restive meant, but from the way people treated one another and him in particular, he figured it must mean “hostile.” From eavesdropping on their conversations, Jake discovered that everybody who had ever been in a Little Theatre show, and lots of people who hadn’t, wanted to get cast, or have their children cast, in a show directed by a real, professional, New York director. But auditions had been going on too long, with no sign of when Randolph would announce the cast. There was considerable tension in the air. He heard any number of whispered references to his hair and his eyebrow ring. He wasn’t the only target. Thinly veiled insults were whispered about a whole lot of other people, too, as they sang or read scenes.

  When it had been Jake’s turn to get up onstage, he had sung “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” with Jeannie Ng, learned a few dance steps from the odd little man who was doing the choreography, danced with Jeannie Ng, and then read Rolf’s big scene—with Jeannie Ng. Jeannie was small and slim, with long black hair, and dark, almond-shaped eyes in a serenely beautiful face. Her singing voice was sensational. Nervous as he’d been, she had such a calm presence that just being onstage with her somehow made him think he could do it. And he could! He had. Even Jake knew he’d been good.

  Another boy, a red-haired and freckled boy who really was seventeen-going-on-eighteen, had also sung and danced and read the part of Rolf, not with Jeannie, but with a blond girl who, when she wasn’t auditioning, kept finding ways to mention various other parts she had played in Traybridge Little Theatre productions—the first of which, she said four or five times, had been when she was only five years old. Jake knew absolutely nothing about theater, but he knew that the blond girl, however many parts she had played, and however early she had started playing them, couldn’t hold a candle to Jeannie Ng. And the red-haired boy, who seemed to be a pretty good actor, couldn’t sing at all.