If she hadn’t added that last part, I might have been all right, but what if I lied and I really did die? It might not happen right away, but when it came, maybe years from now, I would know I had brought it on myself.
Each time someone played her last card, hands would fly into the center, but I couldn’t risk touch. A couple of times, a spoon went flying and I grabbed it, but mostly I kept losing.
The questions were easy at first.
“If you could go anywhere on vacation,” Mandy asked, “where would you go?”
“Boring,” said Lena. “Ask something interesting.”
“I don’t want to be mean,” Britt said, when it was her turn to ask.
“It’s not mean,” said Lena. “It’s part of the game.” But Britt asked an easy question too.
Finally, Lena said, “I think Caddie’s losing on purpose. We should ask her something good—for punishment.”
And the next time she won, she asked, “Who do you like?”
I knew she’d make a thing of it, but I named a guy in our class: “Dev Lakhani.”
Lena cackled and said, “I cannot wait for Monday,” but Mandy stuck up for me.
“We can’t play a game with secrets if we can’t trust each other to keep them,” she said.
“Fine,” Lena said, but the mocking threat in her eyes never went away. The next time I lost, she said, “Tell us about your parents.”
“That’s not a question,” Mandy said, her voice sharp.
But Lena said, “I hear they fight all the time.”
Mandy had started picking at the carpet. Lena had never been at my house, and I’d definitely never told her about my parents’ fights.
Lena rephrased. “Do you think your parents will get a divorce?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your best guess,” Lena said. “You have to answer.”
“I told you, I don’t know,” I said, but was that true? Answering either way felt dangerous. If I said yes, that might make it come true. And if I said no, that might be a lie.
I had cut back on the washing by then, but when a game had a consequence that I couldn’t accept, washing gave me an out, a clean slate and a second chance.
“I have to use the bathroom,” I said.
“I’m guessing the answer is yes,” Lena teased as I stepped through the tangle of sleeping bags to get to the door.
In the bathroom with the door locked, I washed all the way to my elbows. I don’t know how long it was before Mandy knocked. “Caddie,” she called, “are you sick or something? Can I come in?”
“Just a second.”
I finished and dried off. Then I opened the door.
I said, “Sorry I’m taking too long.”
Mandy looked concerned, but disappointed, too. “I really like Lena,” she said. “I want her to have a good time.”
Do you like her more than me? I wanted to ask but didn’t dare.
“Why would you talk to her about my parents?” I said.
“It just came up,” she said, and then, “Can you not be weird?”
She knows. She knows, played in a loop in my head. I followed Mandy back into her room and tried to look cheery and ready to play.
“Since you hate my question,” Lena said, “I thought of an alternate: What were you doing in the bathroom for so long?”
My face went hot, but I couldn’t speak. Eons passed. New species developed, flourished, then died. My limbs wouldn’t work, my jaw wouldn’t move, even if I had known what to say.
“You have to answer,” Lena said.
I tried to tell myself it was okay to lie because Lena was mean, but no lie came. Part of me wanted to spill my guts about my games and the panic and ask them to keep it a secret, but tell me I’m normal, please, tell me I’m not as freakish as I think I am.
I didn’t have it in me—to lie or to tell them the truth.
“I just—shouldn’t be here,” I mumbled, before I knew what I was saying. “I need to go home.”
“Are you sick?” Bailey asked.
I nodded, but Lena wouldn’t let up. “We would have heard if she’d gotten sick.”
“It’s just a stupid game,” Mandy said, and she sounded desperate for us not to ruin her party.
“You’re shaking,” Britt said, and I was. My teeth were chattering, my hands . . . I pressed my fingers together but couldn’t hold them still.
“Caddie,” Mandy pleaded, “don’t freak out. We don’t have to play anymore.” There was frustration in her voice, in her eyes, that and something else too—contempt.
“She has to answer,” Lena said. “Those are the rules.”
“No, she doesn’t. You don’t have to,” Bailey said.
“Just answer,” Mandy said. “Lie if you want. No one cares.” She was begging me to behave, to keep being her friend, but our friendship died, right then. I felt it go.
“I’m sorry. I want to go home.”
“My parents are asleep,” Mandy said, but I left the room and walked down the hall to the master bedroom. The door stood open a crack. “Caddie, don’t,” Mandy shout-whispered, but I pushed the door open.
Her parents looked weirdly exposed with bare feet sticking out from under the sheet, her father’s arm across her mother’s hip. Mandy’s mother must have sensed me—she sat up gasping, clutching her husband. Mandy’s father lurched to sitting, a defensive reaction, and then they stared at me with something like horror. That changed to annoyance as soon as they got their bearings, but horror felt like what I deserved.
My parents were called. Mandy’s father put on a robe over his hairy chest and boxers—I hadn’t wanted to see that—and sat up with me in the kitchen, not speaking, waiting for Dad to come.
The next week, Mandy asked if I felt any better, but there was a wall up. She told me Lena had invited her to spend the night that weekend, saying something about it being a shame that I couldn’t come too, but that Lena’s mom only let her have one guest at a time.
We still sat together at lunch. Mandy still told me secrets, but she didn’t ask me to share mine. I never spent the night at her house again.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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13.
Auditions make everyone crazy, but it comes out in different ways.
Mandy shows up reeking of smoke. “I had the windows open on the way here and everything,” she says. “It didn’t matter.”
“You’re not going to have any voice left if you don’t take it easy,” says Drew. He’s in his usual slouch against the wall of lockers, thumbing through a car magazine.
“Aren’t you nervous?” Mandy asks.
“What’s the point?” Drew says, but it’s clear he’s on emotional lockdown. He doesn’t look up from the magazine, and he flips the pages with so much force you’d think they conspired to give him paper cuts.
At lunch, Livia’s extra-impulsive. At one point she lunges for the saltshaker and rains salt down on Oscar’s chicken-fried steak. He eats it. For a laugh. Then he opens his mouth in my face to show how dry the salt made his tongue.
According to Oscar, once you’ve been in a movie with Lance Dalton, nothing about a school audition can make you nervous. He feels bad for the rest of us. Really bad. He tells us so about fifteen times.
Hank wanders around singing Hamlet’s lines to the air.
And Peter. Nervous looks good on Peter.
I see him once in the hall singing Billy Joel. When a girl laughs at him, he goes down on one knee for a serenade.
At lunch, he asks if we want more fries, and before anybody can answer, he’s up and jogging to the front of the line. He comes back ridiculously fast with a huge mound of fries—the lunch ladies, the students he cut in front of, all charmed by him. Nothing and nobody gets in his way.
“How are you in such a good mood?” Mandy says, diving for the fries and biting the ends o
ff of four all at once.
“I’m excited,” says Peter.
“How are you so calm?” she asks, glaring at me. I’m anything but.
“I’m nervous,” I say, stabbing a fry with my fork and nibbling, even though the sight of food makes my stomach wobble.
“Could have fooled me,” she says, and her eyes drop to my hands. “You could take your gloves off to eat.”
“I could,” I say, and I swallow the rest of the fry. It goes down in a lump.
I should show my nerves—nerves make us normal—but one crack might open the floodgates. I’m a wreck, and I hide it too well.
Peter’s eyeing me. I meet his gaze, and for a second I’m caught there, not able to move or to breathe. His eyes drop to my gloves, then away.
We enter the theater together, a tribe. A girl with porcelain skin and white-blond hair guards the base of Nadia’s stage. She looks fragile and cold and untouchable.
She looks like Ophelia.
“Sign your name here and pick up your sides,” she says.
For a second, I think she means, “pick sides,” like we’re going to have to battle one another to make it to the stage, but no, by “sides,” she means copies of the scenes we’ll be reading.
“Hi, April,” Mandy says to the girl, and April smiles—a sharp line that’s more like a grimace.
“I’ll go ahead and hand you these,” April says, giving her the Ophelia sides.
April is a senior—her attitude gives her away—the senior who would be playing Ophelia if she hadn’t gotten caught drinking in Lincoln.
“Cute gloves,” she says, and it’s a real talent she has as an actress for saying nice words while making the subtext so clear: I hate those stupid gloves, you weirdo poser who wants to steal my part.
I sign my name but hover over the sides marked “Ophelia.” It scares me how much I want it.
“Read for Ophelia,” a voice whispers. It seems to come from inside me, except for the warm breath at my ear, too close, making me shiver.
I shrink and twist around to find Peter standing over me.
He leans past me and reaches for the Hamlet sides with no hesitation. April smiles for Peter. She can’t help herself; his smile’s contagious.
As he straightens up, he says, “You want to play Ophelia, right?”
I stare at the sides. “Maybe I want a man part.”
“Yeah?” He picks up another set of the Hamlet sides. “I bet you could give me some competition.”
I shake my head.
“Do you want to play Gertrude?”
“No.”
“Then you read for Ophelia.” He hands me the sides, and it’s done and decided. No stress. No embarrassment.
He turns and finds a seat at the end of a row, where he starts reading over his lines.
I do the same. It’s easier than facing Mandy with the sides in my hand.
The front of the theater fills up quickly—we’ll be watching one another audition. At precisely 3:15, Nadia crosses the stage to stand center. All this space is hers—we won’t forget.
“Welcome,” she says, at normal volume since all talking stopped the second she entered. “I know you have scripts, but try to make physical choices.” She holds out her hands and waves, cuing the audience to speak, and they do, in a chorus I haven’t learned yet: “Don’t be boring.”
Nadia steps down from the stage to April’s table, scans the sign-in sheet, and sits a few rows back. She calls the oldest students first. There are a couple of senior girls who either missed Lincoln last year or didn’t participate in the partying. One handles the language well, the other trips over the words, but neither seems strong enough for one of the leads.
Of our group, Mandy and Drew are called first for the breakup scene. Mandy’s all about physical choices. She circles Drew like a stalking wolf, runs her hands down his chest.
“Too sexy,” Nadia says. “Ophelia represents everything pure and innocent,” Nadia says. “All the things Hamlet’s lost faith in.”
“See, but I don’t think Ophelia’s so innocent,” Mandy says, and Drew rolls his eyes to the rafters. “In the Branagh version, she and Hamlet have sex and he’s all about it, but then he turns into a hypocrite.”
I told Mandy to watch the Branagh version, but I didn’t think she actually would.
“Mandy, cool it,” Drew mutters, but she goes on.
“He thinks she’s this perfect angel, but the second they do it, she’s a whore.”
“Welcome to the history of Western literature,” Nadia says. “I like that you want to make the character complex, but we still need to see Ophelia vulnerable.”
“Okay, can we try it again?”
Drew sighs, but they go back to the beginning. Drew’s stiff, but Mandy looks at him with love and seems hurt when he says, “I loved you not.”
Her “I was the more deceived” breaks hearts. I feel silly for competing with her.
Then Drew starts in on Hamlet’s “Get thee to a nunnery” speech. He delivers it more to the audience than to Mandy, doesn’t even start to make physical choices. It’s like he’s not even trying anymore. At first, Mandy acts affected—she puts her hands to her head, contracts as if she’s been hit, but eventually she gets frustrated.
“I’m supposed to be hurt by this, Drew,” she says. “He says that women make men monsters! You’ve got to be a monster!”
Drew goes red, and Nadia says, “Actors don’t direct other actors, Mandy.”
“But he’s not being physical. He’s hardly talking to me.”
Nadia studies Drew’s face. “There’s some Hamlet anger. Take that speech again, Drew.”
He starts, and he does sound angry, but he’s still just as stiff.
“Mandy,” Nadia says, and it sounds like she’s having a lightbulb moment, “You’re a dancer. Pretend you’re doing choreography, and put Drew in a shape you think works for the scene.”
Mandy’s eyes burn with new power. “I can just move him?”
Nadia nods, and Mandy pulls Drew down so he’s on top of her on the floor. A couple of students snicker. Mandy takes Drew’s script away and moves his arm so it’s pressing down against her collarbone. Drew more or less goes along, but he makes his body floppy and heavy to move.
“I think, like this . . . ,” Mandy says. Drew looks more and more irritated as she wiggles his shoulders, requesting more tension.
“Speak from there now, Drew,” Nadia says. “Where he says, ‘Be thou chaste as ice.’”
“I don’t have it memorized,” Drew says.
“You don’t need to. Just say that much.”
Drew holds his position for a second, puffs out air, then bends down and grabs his script, holding it beside Mandy’s face. He reads the line, but the words don’t come out any differently. For Mandy though, her voice comes out desperate and strained by the shape she’s chosen.
“Better,” Nadia says. “You can leave the stage. I’ve seen enough.”
Drew takes the stairs to the audience two at a time. Mandy tries to make eye contact with him, but he keeps his head down.
“We can’t try one more time?” Mandy says.
“Mandy,” Nadia says, “sometimes when a director says they’ve seen enough, that’s a good thing.”
Mandy nods and keeps her face composed, but on her way offstage she seeks me out and pops her eyes wide—did I hear that? She’s in.
I promise myself I’ll be happy for her when she gets the part.
“Peter, come on up,” Nadia says, and he jogs to the stage. He bounces on his feet while Nadia scans the audition list. I get a feeling right before she calls me, so it’s less a surprise that it’s me and more a surprise that my feeling was right.
All my nerves fire at once, and my legs go wobbly as I stand. Already, my hands are shaking. I take a deep breath before walking the aisle to the stage, looking down, not at Peter. He’s probably worried about reading with me after I messed up at Mandy’s.
It will
be okay. There’s a character to play and words to be said. In a way, the scene’s already happened. We all know how it’s supposed to end.
I stand across from Peter, and he gives me a nod, his lips already pressed in a grim line, eyes guarded but full. He holds my gaze, the papers at his side—he has the scene memorized. So do I, but I’m afraid to let it show.
Nadia says, “I’d like to hear, ‘To be, or not to be,’ from you, Peter.”
My instinct is to search out Drew. He’s just been told, basically, that he isn’t being considered for the part. I resist looking, but it makes me cringe.
“So, Ophelia,” Nadia says, “wait in the wings and listen to the speech. Let that inform how you enter.”
I nod, but she’s humoring me, giving me notes on how to act offstage so that I’ll feel like I’ve done something when she cuts us off halfway through the scene.
Peter goes into the speech, and it’s clear he understands the choice Hamlet has. Is it better to stay alive and suffer, or to let his “sea of troubles” drown him? He’s afraid that what comes after life might be worse, so it’s safest not to act at all.
“—Soft you now! The fair Ophelia!”
Ophelia’s just heard her boyfriend say he would kill himself if he weren’t too afraid. I try to compose my face. Ophelia’s an actress too.
“Good my lord, how does your honor for this many a day?”
I focus on Hamlet, on saying what I came here to say, and that gets me into the scene, but soon I catch myself pushing again.
I take a breath to refocus. I’m breaking up with Hamlet even though I love him. I can imagine loving Peter. And my whole family’s just broken up. It’s not Ophelia’s story, but it’s better than thinking about how the words sound.
I repeat the line about returning Hamlet’s gifts. It’s good I know the lines—my hands are shaking so hard I’ll never find my place again.
Nadia’s voice chimes in, “What do you want to make him do, Caddie?”
My frustration comes out when I answer. “I want him to feel bad,” I say. “I want him to stop acting like everything is normal.”
“All right, then, say the line again.”
I do. This time I watch for Peter’s face to change, for him to break and let me see if he cares. I don’t think I’m doing terribly, but I shouldn’t be thinking about how I’m doing at all. I should be Ophelia.
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