Forever in Blue

by Ann Brashares

  “Well done, Bee.” He raised a hand to whack her on the shoulder, but put it down again without making contact. “Do your recording and bring it to Maxine. She’ll be happy to have a whole one.”

  “Love’s Labour’s Lost is such a great play,” Carmen declared. “You were awesome reading the speech of Lady What’s-Her-Name.”

  “Rosaline,” Julia said flatly.

  Carmen was trying to cheer Julia up about the fact that she’d gotten called back for the community production, the least desirable in her mind, and not the other two. But Julia wasn’t having it.

  “Rosaline. Right. You have to admit the play’s a whole lot funnier than Richard the Third.”

  Richard III was the production on the Second Stage. Carmen could already perceive a hierarchy developing between the kids who’d gotten called back for Second Stage and the larger number who’d gotten called back for the Community Stage.

  “Yeah. But they don’t even sell tickets. It’s, like, free. It’s outdoors. It’s not even real.”

  “How can you say that? Of course it’s real. Andrew said it’s the best attended of all of them, by far.”

  “That’s because it’s free,” Julia said. “Anyone can go.”

  “That’s a good thing. Anyway, at least you got called back,” Carmen said. She wasn’t even sure why she said this. She had made up her mind not to tell Julia about her ludicrous tryout, but here she was eager to debase herself to make Julia feel better.

  “Everyone got called back,” Julia said.

  “That’s not true.”

  “What are you talking about? Melanie Peer said that everyone who tried out got called back for something.”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “How do you know?” Julia was sitting up straighter now.

  “I didn’t get called back,” Carmen said, with a perverse note of triumph.

  Julia looked at her in outright astonishment. “You tried out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It was kind of a joke, but no. I really tried out.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I have no idea. It was kind of a mistake, actually.”

  “Who did you read?”

  “Perdita.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah.”

  Julia looked like she might laugh, but she made a wince of sympathy. “You didn’t get called back.”

  “No way.”

  “Oh, well. It was brave of you to try.”

  “That and stupid.”

  Julia patted Carmen on the arm and laughed. It looked like this method of cheering her up really was working.

  Lena wasn’t sure how much of it was attributable to Leo, but she knew that every hour she wasn’t in her painting class she wished she were.

  “Hi, Lena,” he said to her on Thursday as she was leaving painting class, girding herself for three long, bleak days of not painting and not getting to see Leo.

  “Hi,” she said, taking almost absurd pride in the fact that he still knew her name.

  “How’s it going?” he said.

  “Pretty good,” she said blandly. She smiled blandly. “How are you?” she asked blandly.

  “Just fine.”

  Please be interesting, she begged of herself.

  She was wearing her hair down and had put on mascara for the fourth day in a row. She was boring as crap, but at least she looked good.

  “I don’t know if I can make it to Monday,” Leo said. He distractedly pushed his hand around in his hair and made it stand up more.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean no painting. I’m right in the middle of this thing I’m trying to figure out. It’ll be gone by Monday. It’s too long to go, you know?”

  She nodded. Oh, how she knew. She wasn’t sure her reasons were quite as pure as his, but she was taken aback to think they felt exactly the same way.

  “I’m thinking of seeing if Nora would work extra hours over the weekend. I’d have to ask Robert, I guess.” He pushed his hair around again despondently. “Would you want to go in on it with me?”

  She was nearly frozen by the thought. She cherished his phrasing. “Uh.”

  She tried to figure. She’d have to come up with around eight or nine dollars an hour. How could she do that? She had no money. She ate Cup O’ Noodles almost every night from the twenty-four pack she’d bought at Costco with her parents’ membership. That was as close as her father got to financial aid. Her mother had slipped her eighty dollars at the beginning of the summer, and she’d made it last for almost three weeks.

  But how could she say no? She couldn’t. She’d pawn her watch. She’d steal her mother’s diamonds. She’d borrow money from Effie, for God’s sake.

  She swallowed. “I’d love to go in with you,” she chirruped.

  “Are you Carmen Lowell?”

  Carmen looked up from the table at the canteen to see a guy she didn’t know staring at her with odd intensity.

  She was so surprised she didn’t answer. A year ago she might have imagined he was staring at her like that because he thought she was cute, but now she was so conditioned to invisibility she found his gaze disturbing. Suddenly she worried she’d set off all the sprinklers in her dorm or something.

  “Yes, she’s Carmen Lowell,” Julia said, looking mildly impatient with both of them.

  “Well, dude. Congratulations. Sophia over there thought it was you, but I said I didn’t think you were trying out.”

  Carmen could not have been more mystified. She would have liked to say something, but she just gaped like a hooked fish.

  “Congratulations for what?” Julia asked.

  “The callback,” he said.

  Julia put her fork down. She cast a protective look at Carmen. “She didn’t get called back.”

  Carmen nodded.

  “I’m pretty sure you did.” Why did this guy proceed to talk as if to Carmen and not to Julia, who was the one conversing with him? This added another unsettling layer. “Didn’t you check the list?”

  “She did check it,” Julia said, almost combatively.

  “Then maybe you should check it again,” the guy said to Carmen.

  “He has no idea what he’s talking about,” Julia muttered once he’d left, resuming her dinner of salad and Diet Coke.

  Carmen stood up. She had an odd idea blossoming in her mind and she needed to choke it off before it really started to get to her.

  “You said you checked, right?” Julia asked.

  “Yeah. I might go check again, though.” Carmen picked up her tray with the remnants of her dinner on it.

  Julia stood too. “I’ll come with you. I’m done.”

  As they walked toward the Main Stage, Julia talked and Carmen fretted.

  “That guy probably looked at one of the tech lists and got confused,” Julia said.

  “Yeah, probably.”

  But the thing Carmen was thinking when she pushed open the doors to the lobby was that she had checked the lists, but only two of them. She hadn’t thought to check the third, because it was somewhere else, she didn’t know where, and it just seemed too preposterous to go around looking for it.

  Wordlessly, both she and Julia walked to the lists and ran their eyes along the columns. Indeed, Carmen’s name was not there.

  “One thing,” Carmen murmured on the way out. She bent her steps to the other side of the entrance, where she now saw a much smaller list posted.

  “That’s the Main Stage list,” Julia said.

  Even so, Carmen walked up to it and looked. There were seven names on the list, and hers was one of them.

  To: Carmabelle@hsp.xx.com

  From: Beezy3@gomail.net

  Subject: dirt + me = love

  * * *

  Carma,

  I have a new love. Don’t tell Hector.

  I have fallen in love with a dirt floor. I am obsessed. I am devoted. I am its humble servant.

  I am going t
o marry it.

  I am going to have dirty, flat children with it. But fear not, Carma. I’ll still love you guys even though you’re rounded and clean. Just, you know, not in that way.

  Love,

  Mrs. Bee Vreeland Dirtfloor

  After the initial shock wore off, Julia wanted to talk about it.

  “It’s unbelievable, Carmen, it really is,” she said.

  She wanted to know every detail of Carmen’s happening into the theater, her discussion with Judy. She wanted Carmen to reenact every word of her muddled tryout.

  And then, all of a sudden, Julia didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She said she was tired and fell asleep in under five seconds.

  So Carmen lay there twisting in her sheets, wondering if Judy was playing some subtle trick on her. What could it mean?

  And now she was supposed to prepare for a real audition for the following evening? How was she supposed to do that? She had no idea how you did that.

  Anyway, what was the point? She was not an actress. She did not like the lights. She would not get the part.

  Her audition had proven to her that she had no business on the stage, even if it had failed to prove so to Judy.

  The next morning she got up early. She walked around until nine o’clock, when she could find out the location of Judy’s office and, subsequently, Judy.

  “I think you might have made a mistake,” she said, hovering nervously in front of Judy’s desk.

  Judy took off her reading glasses. “What mistake?”

  “You put me on the callback list for The Winter’s Tale.”

  Judy looked at her a little strangely. “That wasn’t a mistake.”

  “I think it might have been.”

  “Carmen, are you the casting director or am I?” Judy didn’t look mean, exactly, but her straight-across eyebrows were intimidating.

  “I know. I know. It’s just that I don’t think I’d be right for it.”

  “You don’t even know which part we’re going to cast!”

  “Well, that’s true, but I don’t think I’d be right for any of them.”

  “Can you please leave that to me?” Judy was getting annoyed now.

  “Judy. Seriously. I don’t know how to prepare for an audition. I’m bad at memorizing. I would not do a good job. I think there are so many people who would do a good job. My friend Julia Wyman, for instance, would do a great job. I heard her read Perdita, and she did it so much better. She memorized the whole thing.” Carmen realized how juvenile she probably sounded.

  “Carmen, no offense to your friend Julia, but I see that girl twenty times a day.”

  Carmen was puzzling over how this could be, until she realized Judy was speaking figuratively.

  “She’s polished, she’s poised and ambitious, but that’s not what I’m looking for right now. When she reads Perdita I hear a shepherdess who thinks she’s a princess. I want a shepherdess who thinks she’s a shepherdess.”

  Carmen did not completely follow, but she didn’t want to argue.

  “I’m looking for somebody who is a little more porous, you know? Someone who is fragile, who is less sure of everything.”

  Carmen nodded, imagining for the first time that Judy wasn’t completely out of her mind.

  When she got home, she called her mother.

  “Carmen, congratulations! That’s exciting!”

  “Mama, it’s not exciting. It’s scary. I don’t think I want to do it. I don’t know how.” Her voice never sounded whinier than when she spoke to her mother. “You know I’m not an actress!”

  Her mother was silent while she mulled this over. “Well, nena, you have always been dramatic.”

  “Mama!”

  Why did everyone keep saying that?

  Never had a weekend passed more slowly. Lena remembered the old adage about knowing whether you’d chosen the right career by how you felt on Sunday night. Well, what light did it shed on your personal life when you abhorred Friday night?

  She lived for Monday painting class. She lived twice when Leo came up to her easel at the first break.

  “Robert says we can’t do it,” he said unhappily.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “We can’t use the studio. Some bullshit about insurance and you need a security person in the building. I don’t know. He says we can’t hire Nora off the books either.”

  “Really?”

  He shook his head.

  “That sucks,” she said, though a little too happily. She was elated that he was seeming so much like her friend.

  “Yeah.”

  Well. It was good not to have to steal her mother’s diamonds. But how could she get through another weekend?

  The timer dinged and they both went back to painting. At the end of class she took a long time putting away her stuff and was thrilled when he wandered back over to her easel.

  “It’s not that I have to paint Nora,” he said as they walked together down the hall and out into the sunshine. “I mean, that would be great. But I just want to keep painting. We should be working every day. I feel like I start over every Monday.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said boringly.

  He walked pretty fast, she realized. She practically jogged to keep up with him.

  “I could work on a still life or something,” he said. “But I’m doing the figure this summer. That’s what I want to think about. It’s not the same to stare at a couple of pears.”

  “Yeah.”

  He stopped. “Do you want to get a cup of coffee?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  He led her around the corner. “This place has good iced coffee,” he said.

  “Great,” said she. His freckles were nice.

  He ordered two. “Do you have time to sit down for a minute?”

  How ’bout an hour? she felt like saying. How about seven? She couldn’t help laughing at herself a little.

  “I do” was what she said.

  They sat.

  “I have a lot of minutes,” she added overhonestly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I guess I am kind of underscheduled this summer.” Why was it that when her mouth obeyed her she was chokingly boring, and when it didn’t she was mortifying? Where was the in-between?

  He looked at her. Did he feel sorry for her? It wasn’t exactly sexy to admit you had nothing to do.

  “I mean, I have painting,” she hurried to say. “I have work-study in the library eight hours a week. But none of my friends stuck around this summer, so…”

  “Right.”

  “Yeah.”

  He shook the ice around in his iced coffee. He looked regretful. “I have to be at work soon. But what are you doing tomorrow night?”

  She turned pink. She felt stupid. Charity and romance did not go together. “Well. That’s really nice of you, but—”

  “But what? Come over for dinner. You can’t go acting like you have other plans.”

  She laughed. “I can’t, can I?”

  “Anyway, it will be good. Here.” He fished around in his bag for a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote down his address. “About seven?”

  “Okay,” she said weakly.

  When he left the coffee shop, the air slowly leaked out of her. Leo had asked her to dinner. She had a date with Leo.

  Some part of her was pleased. Other parts knew there was nothing like the artifice of a date to ruin a relationship. Especially a date born out of pity.

  The Traveling Pants came on Monday. Tibby’s period did not. A watched period, she worried, does not come.

  She decided to change her strategy. She would tempt fate. She wore a pair of slight, lacy underpants and pulled the Traveling Pants on over them. She went to register for her summer classes.

  With a small part of her brain, she filled out forms in the lobby of the main film building and consulted the catalog. With the remainder of her brain, she thought about not thinking about her uterus anymore.

  Since the first
time she’d ever worn the Traveling Pants, she’d had this secret worry that she would get her period while wearing the Pants. You couldn’t wash the Pants, of course. It was the first and most infamous rule. Tibby had often imagined the shame of bleeding on the Traveling Pants and then needing to send them on. She imagined secretly washing them and hoping no one would ever find out.

  It was this fear that led her, from the first summer onward, to wear her hardiest underwear whenever she wore the Pants, and also to wear a liner of some kind. She happened to know she was not the only member of the Sisterhood to do so. It was kind of a basic courtesy at this point.

  But not today. Today she took the ultimate risk. Whatever it took she would do, she both thought and did not think as she strode into her dorm room late that afternoon.

  “Tibby?”

  She reared back against the door. Her blood whisked around her veins in a hectic way. In all the times Brian had appeared in her room, he had never truly startled her before.

  “Sorry,” he said, recognizing her distress. Usually he sat on her bed, but today he was standing. When he tried to put his arms around her, she shrugged away.

  “Today isn’t a good day,” she said.

  “You didn’t answer the phone. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you?” He wanted so much to talk to her. She could see that. But she was holding herself too carefully. She couldn’t open up a little or at all.

  “Don’t you work tonight?” she asked.

  “I traded shifts.”

  “What about tomorrow morning?”

  “I’ll be back for that,” he said.

  “You’re going back tonight?”

  He nodded. “I just wanted to see you.”

  This was her first moment of relief. He wasn’t staying.

  “Okay. Well.”

  His hair was lank. When did he last take a shower?

  “I know you’re worried. I’m worried. I just wish I could—”

  “You can’t,” she said quickly. She looked at the ground. “This is where you are happy that you’re the boy and I’m the girl.”

  He wore his hurt openly. “I’m not happy.”