“I hate her. Do you understand me? I hate her. And I’ve been sitting here while you talk about how great she is and how wonderful she is and it’s been killing me. Because she’s not great and she’s not wonderful.”
She took a deep breath.
“Do you remember that one story I told you about her?”
“Which one?” There were millions. Sooz was the editor of The Compleat Crimes of Andi Donnelly.
“About the girl. In the bathroom.”
“Yeah. What about…oh.” It hit me. “Oh, God. Sooz. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you were so in love with her, that’s why! Because all you could talk about was how great she was and I didn’t want to…I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I hugged her. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Sooz.”
“Never mind. It’s all over.” She shuddered. “Let’s kick her perfectly rounded ass.”
So, Sooz was on board. Good. I needed her Photoshop expertise.
I would have to spend a little bit of the money I was saving. But if I was willing to do that before, for makeup, shouldn’t I be willing to do it now, for revenge?
Maybe it was insane to take on Andi. She was bigger than me. She was more popular, more important.
But here’s something every good paleontologist knows: Even the biggest die. Even the meanest get killed off by something that they can’t see coming. Like a meteor. Or an insect.
What it comes down to is this: In this world, you’re either predator or you’re prey.
There are many ways that dinosaurs caught and killed their prey. Everyone thinks that T. rex or allosaur or whatever just ran out into the open air and chased the little guys and ate them up. But the truth is that most of the meat-eaters were ambushers. They lay in wait very carefully and then grappled their prey. Chasing after prey was useless—it consumed too much energy and left too great a chance that the predator would injure itself. Besides, a high-speed pursuit of a smaller, more agile creature isn’t to your advantage when you can only move in a straight line.
So the big boys learned how to be patient. And stealthy. And to attack when least expected.
Like me.
Like a paleontologist.
Because you have to be patient to study dinosaurs. There are massive advantages to patience. On a dig, you can’t just go ahead and rip up everything in your path in your quest for fossils. You’d just end up destroying what it is you’re looking for. Fossils are fragile. They’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years and they won’t react kindly to someone tearing them out of the ground.
So you take your time. You dig out the earth in teaspoons. You don’t gouge the ground—you brush it away gently. You don’t pound the rocks to release the knowledge within—you chip at them. Fragment by fragment. It’s the patient work of centimeters.
It takes forever.
And once you’ve got the ground chipped and swept and brushed away, you have yet another long wait ahead of you. Maybe you want nothing more than to pull it up and marvel at it, but you can’t. There are procedures.
Because once you isolate the fossil in the ground, you have to sketch it for the record and for cataloging. You sketch and take notes and then finally pull it up, but you can’t enjoy it. No. Because you have to wrap it in plaster of paris, for protection. And pack it in a special crate. And send it off to a museum, where it will sit in a basement vault somewhere. It’ll sit there for years until someone has the time (and the grant money) to pull it out and break open the plaster of Paris (again, carefully—patiently) and sit down to clean it and examine it and draw more sketches and officially decide what it is and where it belongs and everything else.
Years.
That’s what I had waiting for me in my future. So I was ready. I was ready to be as patient as I had to be.
Someday, I’ll be the world’s greatest paleontologist. Because I am patient like nobody’s business.
After three months, I began to lose faith in the “ambush theory” of predation. There’s no way a meat-eater could or would wait so long for its prey.
I didn’t have a choice, though. I had to wait for soccer season.
I had to wait for Andi to be in practice pretty much every day of the week.
So I waited. And waited.
On one of my gym days, I “accidentally” left my math book in the locker room after changing. I begged Mom to take me back to school for it.
We got there just as practice was ending. A stream of girls headed into the locker room.
Coach Kimball gave me an annoyed look, but Mom said, “She really needs this book. It’ll just take a second.”
Coach made me give her my cell phone first—cell phones aren’t allowed in the locker room because of the cameras.
But no one noticed my new little credit card–size camera. That’s because I hid it in an empty blush compact, with a hole drilled through for the lens. So I could hold it up and look like I was just looking in the mirror, but I was actually snapping pictures.
When I’m stressed—like I was in the locker room that day, surrounded by Andi’s friends, all of whom just ignored me, thank God—I try to remind myself that over ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are already extinct. So it’s not like I matter. Or any of us. But on that day, I didn’t care that my existence was just a blink of the universe’s eye. I wanted Jamie Terravozza. And if I couldn’t have him, well, at least I could make sure that she couldn’t, either.
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:
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….
Barry Lyga was a geek long before it was cool to be a geek, back when being a geek meant getting beat up on a regular basis, as opposed to selling that cool new Web app you wrote to a Silicon Valley start-up and retiring at twenty-five. In his time, he’s been a comic-book geek, a role-playing geek, a computer geek, and a sci-fi geek, though never a Trekkie, Trekker, or a Whovian, because he has his limits.
Barry is the author of The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl (called a “love letter and a suicide note to comic books”), Boy Toy, and Hero-Type. He’s still a geek.
Text by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci. Illustrations by Bryan Lee O’Malley.
THIS IS MY AUDITION MONOLOGUE
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?
One time I was at Adam Gunderson’s house looking through the sophomore yearbook, and next to my picture someone wrote and I quote: Look up ATTENTION WHORE in the dictionary and you’ll see this pic, and added like fifteen exclamation points. But I’m not. One, I’m obviously not memorable. Two, a performer does not an attention whore make. Not that I’m a performer. As you well know I’ve never gotten a part. I audition every single freaking time and this is the mistake I’ve made: I check the YES box.
On the part of the audition form where it says In the event you are not cast in the play, would you be willing to work behind the scenes on this production? I always put a checkmark in the YES box. Every time I see that question I think to myself:
Rachel, don’t check yes. DO NOT CHECK IT!
And this time, I didn’t. Because if I don’t check yes, and I make myself memorable, maybe I’ll get a part. Chances are that part will be Onlooker #8 in the third act or the maid who passes through the set with a feather duster twice, but I don’t care. As I have tried over and over and over to figure out why I don’t get even the crap parts no one wants, the only conclusion I come to is that you see I’m willing to be backstage so you give the parts to someone else, someone smarter who has checked NO.
This is an aside and should not count against my time: Are you really that desperate for backstage help? Can’t you offer the job to some D-average jock who needs extracurriculars or community service or something?
What happens is the part of me that would rather mop up Julie-Ann’s sweat or de-crust the greenroom furniture than not have anything to do with the play panics and I check YES. Yes, use me. Yes, abuse me. Yes, make me post call times in my own blood, I will do it. I will do it. These are not the thoughts of an attention whore. These are the thoughts of a person—me—who would do anything, anything to be in the general vicinity of this auditorium every single day, including weekends.
And no, Adam Gunderson and I are not dating. As everyone knows, he is with Candace. I simply happened to be in his bedroom looking through his yearbook on a stormy day last fall when the raindrops were hitting the window with sharp little thaps and we made popcorn and watched Twelve Angry Men.
Speaking of Twelve Angry Men, now there’s a play we’ll never be doing unless we get the asexual version of it, and Twelve Angry Jurors just doesn’t have the same ring. The problem is there are too many girls at this school who think they want to be actresses. Actors, I guess, is what you’re supposed to say now whether it’s a guy or a girl. If I were a guy, I bet I’d have any part I wanted. I could have been King Lear and crazy Duke of Cornwall because as you will recall exactly two guys auditioned and then one dropped out because of baseball and that is why we ended up stuck with The Glass Menagerie, which, I’m sorry, is more than a little dated.
This is one way to make myself memorable: I can play dudes. I’d cut my hair and flatten myself out on top—not too challenging—and there are already people in this school who think I like girls. You may have read about it on the second floor bathroom wall. People make the assumption that just because I don’t let guys grope me in the halls or dress in clubwear for school or spend fifteen hours straightening my hair and spackling on cosmetics I’m not a real girl. People are wrong about me, and someday soon these wrong people will know how very wrong they are when a certain person makes his feelings for me public. Not Adam Gunderson. He’s with Candace. The point is I would stuff a sock down there if I had to in order to get a part. Hillary Swank did it and got an Oscar, so wrong people can make fun of me all they want but they won’t be laughing when I’m on E! True Hollywood Story and they are day-job-having single mothers.
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