Almost Final Curtain

by Hallaway, Tate

  They both looked so happy; I felt miserable.

  Taylor hopped up and down on her toes with excitement. “You didn’t text us!” she admonished. “How did it go with Nik last night?”

  “Oh, great,” I said as casually as possible as I dialed the combination to the lock. “We broke up.”

  Though I quickly buried my head in my locker, I could almost see their horrified double takes in the pregnant silence.

  “You’re not serious,” Bea said. “This is a bad attempt at a joke, right?”

  “I thought he got this gig with the musical just to hang out with you,” Taylor added. “Why would he break things off?”

  I shoved the books I needed for the next couple of periods into my backpack, and then pronounced, “Boys are stupid.”

  “Yes, but they’re so cute.” Bea smiled, the wheels clearly turning over her plan on how to make her move now that Nikolai was free. Bea had always had a crush on Nik.

  “I thought older guys were supposed to be more mature,” Taylor said, sounding honestly confused. “He always seemed so into you. What changed?”

  Bea and I exchanged a glance. She knew about the vampire/ hunter/witch problem, but Taylor was our nonmagical friend. All the mystical stuff was supposed to be secret.

  So I shrugged and offered up something I hoped she’d understand. “His dad is Russian, you know. I guess they’re kind of traditional. There’s a lot of pressure for Nik to follow in his dad’s footsteps.”

  Bea gave me an appreciative nod, like she was impressed at how accurate I could be without saying anything about vampires.

  Taylor chewed on her lip for a moment, tugged thoughtfully on her hijab, and then came to the conclusion: “Man, I hate that family shit.”

  I laughed a little. “Yeah, me too.”

  “The musical is going to be way awkward,” Bea noted solemnly, as we made our way to first period.

  Except, even updated to some kind of rock opera, My Fair Lady was so not my kind of production. What kind of part was there for a gangly, pasty girl with different-colored eyes? “I’m not even sure I’m going to try out,” I said, though my gut clenched at the mere thought. I’d never missed a show.

  “What?” Bea couldn’t have sounded more offended. “Ana Parker, you are going to the ball! No boy is going to keep you from the audition!”

  “Yes,” Taylor agreed, taking up the cause with enthusiasm. “The show must go on!”

  “Besides,” Bea said, quite seriously, when we’d come to my classroom, “you know you’re the best singer of any of us”—which meant a lot coming from Queen Bea, who always considered herself a diva and the best of everything theatrical.

  “Wow, Bea. You mean it?”

  She flipped a wave of her dyed black and pink hair over her shoulder and said, “Of course. Besides, you can’t let down Stassen High just because some stupid boy hasn’t the sense to hold on to a good thing. Us theater freaks have to band together, you know.”

  I smiled at her. “Great pep talk, BB. Can you give it to me again the day before auditions?”

  “Silly goose, auditions are tonight!”

  That news threw a wrench into the rest of my day.

  I hadn’t planned on concentrating terribly hard during classes, since I’d expected to wallow over the breakup for at least a few days, but now my mind raced. What should I sing? Should I really go? Had Mom washed my lucky audition shirt?

  The good news was I didn’t think about Nik at all; the bad news was that I was so distracted that I missed Mr. Feirria’s explanation of a really critical function in precalculus, and I completely botched a pop quiz in biology.

  But by lunch I’d figured out that I was going to sing the “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” song, since I mostly knew the words already. I hated musical tryouts, actually. I thought of myself more as an actor than a singer. I tended to get stage fright when asked to sing, especially solo.

  I was chewing on my sandwich, and my thoughts, when Bea pulled up the chair. “Hey,” she said with a sympathetic pat on my shoulder.

  Suddenly, looking up into her big, brown, pity-filled eyes, all my Nik emotions came rushing back. Bread and cheese stuck in my throat. “Hey,” I managed to choke in return.

  “He said it was your idea,” she said without preamble.

  My milk came out with a spat. “You texted Nik already? Damn, Bea! Let the body cool before you pounce!”

  Bea laughed like I wasn’t seriously pissed. “I thought you’d want to know he’s depressed about it.”

  That was something at least; misery loves company. Still, I shot Bea a warning stare.

  She neatly unfolded her bento box. “So—was it? Your idea, that is?”

  “I guess I sort of suggested it, but, for the record, I expected him to protest and not agree right away.” I leaned closer and dropped my voice. “I meant what I said to Taylor. His dad is pressuring him to, you know . . .”

  “Ah,” she said, but I could tell she wasn’t as horrified by the prospect as I. I suspected that Bea and Nik shared a similar attitude about vampires. Bea, at least, had contact with only one—well, half a one: me. And we’d agreed not to really discuss that stuff. “I suppose it’s star-crossed-lover stuff, you and him.”

  Her reference to Romeo and Juliet only further served to depress me. I munched dejectedly on my cheddar cheese sandwich. Finally, I asked what I’d wanted to all along, “Did he say anything else?”

  “Not really,” she said in a way that made me think perhaps he had. I glanced up at her, trying to read her expression. She seemed unaccountably fascinated by the contents of her box, and wouldn’t look up at me. Then, I saw it: the hint of a blush! That cheat!

  “You have a date or something, don’t you?”

  She blushed harder, and looked around nervously at everything but me. “It’s not a date. He’s not ready for that.”

  “But you’re going out.”

  “Just to talk,” she said. Finally, her eyes met mine, with an expression that begged forgiveness. “He said the breakup was your idea, Ana. I thought it would be okay with you.”

  “Bullshit!” I snapped. “And it’s a break, not a breakup.”

  “What? He said things were over with you.”

  I couldn’t believe this. Shoving the remains of my sandwich into my bag with trembling hands, I got up. “Look, I don’t even care,” I lied. What I meant was I couldn’t deal right now. My head hurt. My own best friend! Less than twenty-four hours later! “Okay, well, when you see him, say hi for me, will you?” I all but yelled, and stormed off.

  “It’s not like that, Ana. I swear,” I heard her say, but I didn’t even turn around.

  Could this day get worse?

  During study hall, I slunk off to the back of the library again. This time, I sat on the floor in the dusty poetry section, my legs splayed out in front of me. Randomly pulling books off the shelf, I flipped through pages until I found one that spoke to what I was feeling. The poem was several thousand years old, from someone named Sappho, but it pretty much summed up everything:

  “To Eros,” it was called, the god of love. The only line was, “You burn me.”

  The words inspired me to pull out my phone. Though the signal was weak, I was able to get enough bars to send an angry text to Nikolai. It wasn’t nearly as succinct or cutting as Sappho, but I thought it held a certain poetry of its own: “Going out with B already? You suck!”

  What else was there to say? I sent it, stabbed the Off button, and slammed the phone closed.

  It wasn’t difficult to avoid Bea most of the day. We didn’t have any classes in common until drama, last period.

  Seeing her standing with Taylor at her locker made my lips purse into a thin line of pure hate. To think that at the beginning of the day she was cheerleading me, trying to talk up tryouts, and by noon, she’d utterly betrayed me! I was so angry. I stomped right past the two of them without even a backward glance.

  Mr. Martinez’s eyebrows quirked upward
to see me come into the room without my usual entourage, but I ignored him too. I went to my seat, opened my book, and put my nose into it, like I lived to study My Fair Lady.

  I looked up only when I heard Taylor say, “No, I don’t think so. Even if he is a rock star, friends should come first.”

  Catching my gaze, Taylor gave me an “I’m with you” smile.

  Ugh. I didn’t want it to come to the whole friends-choosingsides-in-the-divorce thing. It made me depressed and pissed off all at the same time. Damn Nik’s vampire-hunting family, and double-damn Bea for being such a flirt that she couldn’t leave well enough alone.

  I refused to look at either of them. Instead, I concentrated on being a good student. I filled my notebook with salient bits about the Industrial Age in England, and doodled broken hearts and cartoonish pictures of Bea with Xs for eyes and a halo of daggers around her head. Jinny tapped my shoulder. I thought about acting like I hadn’t felt it, but it wasn’t Jinny’s fight, so it didn’t seem right to snub her. Just as I twisted in my seat to retrieve the missive, Mr. Martinez swooped in between us and snatched it up.

  “Perhaps I should read this out loud if it’s important enough to disrupt class time for, eh?”

  Across the room, Bea made a gasping sound. Then, I felt magic tickling the air, like the cloying scent of lilies.

  Mr. Martinez unfolded the note. I half expected it to burst into flames in his hands, but instead he adjusted the round glasses on his nose and frowned. “Code? You people are getting very clever. Ms. Parker,” he said to me. “You can retrieve your highly classified secret missive after class, understood?”

  “Muh,” I said, because embarrassment had choked out any articulate response.

  Bea let out a breath of relief that released the tingle of magic in the air. My nose stopped itching. We shared a glance and a conspiratorial smile flicked across her lips, like we were still friends. I sharpened my expression to remind her we weren’t.

  The bonus was that when the bell finally rang, I had an excuse to hang around while Bea and everyone else filed out. Mr. Martinez had placed the note on the corner of his desk. He was putting files into his briefcase when I stopped to pick it up. “You are coming to tryouts tonight, aren’t you, Ana?”

  Taylor loitered near the door, clearly waiting for a chance to talk. I nodded for her to wait up just a second. “Yeah, I guess,” I said.

  Mr. Martinez feigned horror. He placed a long-boned hand on his slender chest. “You guess? Surely you can muster more excitement. Thanks to Ingress, this should be the social event of the season.”

  “Yippee.”

  He frowned at my sarcasm, and seemed ready to ask me more.

  “I have to go. Don’t want to miss my bus,” I said.

  “See you tonight?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. That was, if Mom had washed my lucky shirt and I had decided I could face seeing Nik for the entire run of the show.

  “I can’t believe Bea,” Taylor said as soon as we’d rounded the corner from Bea’s locker. She shot a glance over her shoulder, as if she worried that Bea could somehow hear anything over all the clamor of students at the end of the day. “You only broke up with Nik last night.”

  “It was supposed to be a break, not a breakup,” I kept insisting, though clearly I was the only one who thought so.

  “Oh, breaks never work,” Taylor told me, unhelpfully. “Unless you really talk about what it means, you know, lay some ground rules. Did you do that? Did you decide if it was going to be monogamous or how long it should last?”

  “No,” I said miserably.

  “Trust me, boys need clear rules.”

  Taylor exclusively dated the nerd-gamer set, which was particularly fond of rules, especially if they involved hit-point charts, but I could see her point.

  “I don’t really understand how Bea can horn in; I thought you said that this was about Nikolai’s family. They wanted him to date inside the gene pool, right? Bea’s last name is ‘Braithwaite.’ She’s not Russian or Romany, is she?” Taylor continued. We stopped at her locker. It was weird not to have Bea there. The end-of-the-day debriefing had been such a long-standing tradition.

  “She’s a witch,” I said, even though I probably shouldn’t. Taylor knew that much, though she thought we were the gardenvariety Wiccan types. “They’re in the same coven.”

  Where most girls had pinups of the latest teen heartthrobs, Taylor had character sheets from favorite role-playing campaigns and screen shots from the online game she obsessed over.

  “Oh,” Taylor said, giving me a confused look. “I thought you were a witch too.”

  “I failed my graduation test,” I admitted. “I’m kind of on the auxiliary team now.”

  Taylor had been around, though on the outside, when all that had gone down earlier this school year. Her thin eyebrows knit together. “That distinction matters?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, especially since I failed the Initiation because I was half vampire, and oh, an entire troop of vampires showed up and crashed the show and declared me their princess. “A lot.”

  “No offense,” she said, “but religions can be really stupid, especially when it comes to stuff like this.”

  “I hear ya, sister,” I said with a soft smile.

  I pressed my cheek against the window of the bus and watched the trees roll by. The rain had made the leaves pop, and everything was covered in a haze of green. The sidewalks and road had been stained a darker gray, but light reflected off every wet surface.

  My phone trilled with a received text. I hadn’t remembered switching the phone on, and the bus driver shot me a dark scowl. Dragging my backpack into my lap, I dug through everything until I found my phone.

  When I saw it was from Nik, I almost didn’t open it. I mean, did I really want to read a hostile reply to my angry note? Oh! That reminded me—I still had the note from Bea.

  Gee, which horror to open first?

  I could guess what Bea’s note contained. She probably wanted forgiveness and to make excuses. I so wasn’t in the mood for that, so I flipped open the cell. To my surprise, Nik’s text read: “Forget B. I need 2 see u 2 nite.”

  “What’s changed?” I wrote back.

  Two seconds later, he replied, “Everything.”

  “After auditions?” I asked, not quite believing I was agreeing to this, considering how mad and hurt I was.

  “OK.”

  Suddenly, I had a date with Nikolai again. WTF?

  Chapter Four

  I was changing into my lucky audition clothes when I came across Bea’s note wadded up in the pocket of my jeans. My first impulse was to toss it in the garbage, but I was going to see her in less than an hour. Sitting down on the bed, I carefully unfolded the scrap of lined notebook paper. My fingers buzzed with the residual magic that had transformed it into unreadable code for Mr. Martinez. In Bea’s loopy, expansive cursive I read: “I know you think I’m a slut.” No wonder she didn’t want this read out loud! I continued reading. “But I have no chance with Nikolai. No one does. He’s so into you, it’s sad. He’d do anything for you.”

  Which would have been awesome if she’d left it there, but that wouldn’t be Bea—she had to add, “P.S. Doesn’t mean I can’t be a shoulder for him to cry on. You can’t blame a girl for trying.”

  Actually, I could.

  Plus, the little smiley face she drew after the last line ticked me off. Somehow it managed to look smug. I ripped the note into shreds.

  I mean, I supposed I could take the higher ground. Nik was taking me out tonight to talk about how everything had changed, so I’d kind of won the bigger argument. Still. It didn’t change the fact that Bea was unapologetically trying to steal him from me.

  Maybe Taylor was right. There should be detailed rules for situations like this. Boys were available for pouncing, but only after an appropriate time of mourning. Two weeks, maybe. Previous girlfriend gets dibs on changes of heart within twenty-four hours.

  I s
norted a laugh at the thought. Mom called for me to get going if I wanted a ride back to school.

  Mom had some horrible New Age album playing in the MINI. A chorus of women was chanting about a boundless, protective goddess that I doubted ever existed. I reached for the Stop button. “How can you listen to this crap, Mom?”

  “It’s empowering. You wouldn’t know—you’ve grown up with all the advantages my generation of feminists fought for.”

  Switching to a Lady Gaga song, I rolled my eyes. “School’s out, Ma. No lectures, please.”

  Mom adjusted her glasses before taking her eyes away from the road for a moment to frown at me. “Maybe you wouldn’t be so—” She flattened her lips rather than choosing an adjective, and then continued. “If you could experience a bit of magic now and again. You should join one of my women’s groups.”

  “Magic? You’re calling your little separatist meetings magic now?”

  “Ana,” she scolded. “You of all people should know that there’s more than one kind of magic. So theirs isn’t the capitalletter kind. It still has a place.”

  I couldn’t imagine it would be satisfying to sit around a circle of mundane women wishing really hard when I knew that Bea could just point her finger and “zap” reality to any shape she wanted. “I don’t think it’s my thing, Mom.”

  “You shouldn’t judge before you try it.”

  Oh no, she used the tone. Mom had already made up her mind. I was going, like it or not. “Uh,” I said. “I might have rehearsals, remember?”

  “Do you really think there’s a part for you in My Fair Lady?”

  That was it, then—even my own mother thought I was too weird to play Eliza Doolittle.

  As if noticing my crushed expression, Mom quickly added, “Honestly, I don’t know what that Mr. Martinez is thinking. Surely, there are plays with better roles for women. And the theme of that thing—that a woman will transform herself into some rich, white man’s ideal for love—it’s offensive.”