by Mindy Klasky
“You’re not going to divert us with carrots,” Jules said. “Come on. What’s really going on with you and Drew?”
Oh, how I wanted to have an answer to that question.
I wanted to say that we’d had a dozen heartfelt conversations. I wanted to say that we huddled next to each other at every rehearsal, ducking out for a quick cup of coffee at breaks. I wanted to say that we shared private little jokes, secret glosses on the script, on the actors, on the way the show was evolving.
Unfortunately, our relationship—such as it was—hadn’t progressed to that stage yet. He mostly hung out with the guys, talking about the Wild’s losing hockey season. But every single time I talked to him, I got one of those ridiculous rushes, the sort of fits that made me giggle and gasp like I was in high school. When he looked up from discussing goaltenders and defensemen—even if he was just smiling absentmindedly as I called the cast to order—my heart started pounding like a wild creature trapped in a cage.
I was smitten.
I shrugged. “He asked me to run lines with him during lunch break yesterday.”
Maddy rolled her eyes. “Isn’t that romantic.”
“Like you’re one to judge!” I said. “Sometimes romance is more than just jumping into bed!”
I think I was more surprised by my vehemence than my housemates were. They both stared at me, and I put down my fork. I had to say something, so I muttered, “He brought me a muffin yesterday.”
I didn’t bother to say that he’d brought them for everyone who had the early rehearsal call. And Maddy and Jules didn’t need to hear that I’d taken the last one out of the bag. And they definitely didn’t need to know that the flavor had been orange coconut.
I hated coconut.
Teel had eaten my muffin, along with her own lemon poppyseed.
Nope. No need at all to bore my housemates with all the details of my busy theatrical life.
Jules speared a perfect butterflied shrimp and chewed carefully before asking in a breezy tone (Read: Changing the topic of our conversation entirely), “So, who’s this Teel person?”
I almost choked on a bite of broccoli. “Teel?”
Jules nodded. “Stephanie Michaelson mentioned her at the Little Women audition on Saturday, at the Spirit.”
Maddy interrupted. “I didn’t know you were auditioning for Little Women! What made you try for that?”
“Who wouldn’t want to play Jo?” Jules smiled.
Maddy snorted. “You? Jo? Maybe you could have pulled that off five years ago.” She forked another one of the Eight Treasures into her mouth. “Don’t look at me that way, Jules. You know how crazy this business is. Jo is supposed to be what, sixteen in the play?”
“Fifteen.”
“And you’re twenty-six. And you don’t play young.” Another bite of rice, to punctuate her evaluation. “Kira, come on, you have to agree with me! We all promised years ago that we wouldn’t lie to each other. Besides, Jules, Laurel Martin is directing that show! She’ll never cast an attractive woman if there’s a dog she can put into the lead instead.”
I shook my head. It wasn’t that I disagreed with Maddy. Laurel was legendary for finding the ugliest women she could for her productions. She always managed to find the prettiest boys, too—she was partial to long lashes and delicate features, even when she was casting hardened, soul-dry villains. Local reviewers had commented on her decisions in both the StarTribune and the Pioneer Press, but Laurel wasn’t about to change her ways. She craved the power that came with being the director.
Still, it wasn’t kind of Maddy, telling Jules that she was too old for the role. Each of us was getting older, every single day. And the theater was a cruel world for a woman who couldn’t play young.
When I remained uneasily silent, Maddy bulled on ahead. “Well?” she said to Jules. “How did the audition go?”
Jules drained her glass of ice water. She fiddled with her fork. She took a sip of tea. “She asked me to read for another role.”
“Which one?” Any minute now, Maddy was going to produce a glaring white light, demand to know where Jules had been on the night of July the thirty-first.
Jules whispered, “Marmee.” The mother.
“You’re way too young for Marmee!” I said, glaring daggers at Maddy. And then, even though I wanted to avoid the topic of Teel, I felt obligated to rescue Jules. Housemate loyalty made me slant the conversation back in a direction I would have preferred to avoid altogether. “So, Stephanie mentioned Teel?”
Jules flashed me a grateful smile. “Just to say that she’d been hanging out at rehearsals. Helping answer questions. I gather Teel’s a bit, um, outspoken?”
That was one way of putting it.
“Bill has this weird Method thing he’s doing,” I explained. “He wants the men to understand how a woman thinks, how we feel. He wants to get a woman’s view on the script, to share it with the guys, but he doesn’t want the women in the cast to share their thoughts, their experiences. They have to get used to thinking like men.”
Maddy and Jules looked skeptical. Let’s face it. I’d been skeptical, too.
Maddy said, “So what’s the deal? This Teel is like a translator?”
“Every time we start a new scene, Bill has Teel explain what she’d be thinking if she were Juliet. You know, when she first tells her nurse about seeing Romeo, about falling for this guy solely on the basis of looks. Teel takes an experience from her own past—from her real life—and shares it with the guys.”
“Uh-huh,” Maddy said.
Better Teel than me, I wanted to say. Instead, I tried to think of a good example. All I could remember, though, was the scene my genie had dredged up on her first day at rehearsal. Following our agreement, I had summoned her, pressing my fingers together and calling her name before driving down to the Landmark. Teel had chosen her appearance conservatively—she looked pretty much like every young college student on the University of Minnesota campus. Every one that weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. And wore jeans slung low around her hips. And a scarlet thong clearly visible above her studded leather belt. And a short ribbed T-shirt that bared the silver ring in her navel. And four piercings in the cartilage of her right ear. And, of course, the flames tattooed around her wrist.
I’d made her wait in the lobby while I asked Bill whether she could join us. As I’d predicted, he’d been reluctant at first, worried about her taking his ideas, sharing them with journalists or reviewers or other cultural spies before he was ready to disclose our unique production. He’d run a hand over his bald head and squinted up at the ceiling, talking to me about the sanctity of the rehearsal room, the compact that the cast members made with one another.
But then he’d looked out into the lobby and seen the compact little package that Teel presented. I could almost literally see the wheels turn in his all-too-masculine mind.
Teel was no fool. She’d smiled across the lobby, biting her lip with just the right semblance of timidity. She settled her hand on her hip. I’m pretty sure that she nudged the tattoo just a bit, too, made it sparkle across the room.
Bill invited her to join us, as if she were some long-lost friend.
And in almost two weeks, he’d never looked back at his decision. At each and every rehearsal, I’d heard way more than I cared to about the imagined love life of my genie.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t imagined. Maybe every single word of it was real. After all, Teel had lived through the sexual revolution. She had found her G-spot before my peers even knew that they were looking for theirs.
And she had a contemporary vocabulary to describe her experiences.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard the words before. They were some perfectly good nouns. A few decent verbs. A shockingly apt compound adjective.
But there was something more than a little unseemly about the way all the guys hung around her. Something inappropriate about the way they dredged up individual lines, asked about character motivation for each an
d every Elizabethan phrase in the script. There was something just plain icky about the way they worshipped Teel and her recollections, about the way they never seemed to realize that she went way beyond the text in her recollections.
“Give us an example,” Jules urged, spearing another bite of spicy shrimp.
I fumbled for one that didn’t make us all sound like perverts. “Well…We were talking about the scene where Juliet describes Romeo to her nurse, where she first learns his name. Juliet’s line is ‘Prodigious birth of love it is to me, that I must love a loathed enemy.’ Drew asked Teel if she’d ever loved an ‘enemy.’”
I leaned back in my chair, fiddling with my fork as I remembered how the conversation had played out.
“Teel told him about this time in high school, when she developed a crush on a guy who was completely wrong for her. She was a totally emo kid, a freshman on the literary arts magazine, in the photography club. But she fell for the guy who had the locker next to hers, literally the senior who was captain on the football team.”
I closed my eyes for a second, remembering the energy in the rehearsal room as Teel had spun out her story. Once again, I had no idea whether my genie was telling the truth or not. She might have just been creating a script, entertaining herself because she didn’t have anything better to do with her time. Then again, she really might have fallen for the wrong guy at some point in her past. She might have been taken in by a totally cut body, by a jawline too rugged to be true, by chocolate-brown eyes sparked by just a hint of green….
I dragged my mind away from Drew and told Jules and Maddy, “She said, ‘We did it in the locker room. After the team lost in the State quarterfinals. I’d come in to take pictures of what was left behind, the towels and the game programs and stuff. I hadn’t realized that he’d still be there, sitting all alone.’”
Teel had started crying as she spoke. Her words became more graphic as she described the specific things they’d done, the details of how she’d lost her supposed virginity. Woven into her profanity was a true story of love and loss, the true heartbreak of a girl who’d thought she was making a connection but found out that she was only being used. The quarterback had hurt her, had pushed her fragile shoulder blades into the cement floor. But the real pain was the next day, when he’d pretended nothing had happened, that he didn’t even know her. The real pain had lasted for the rest of the school year, when he never said another word to her, no matter how many times he saw her at her locker, first thing, every single morning.
I said, “A couple of the guys in the cast were blinking hard when she was through with her story. Bill whispered, ‘Marvelous,’ and he just kept staring at Teel, shaking his head. It was like she created something there. She made the story come alive. She gave Juliet’s line, Juliet’s enemy, real meaning.”
Maddy and Jules nodded, beginning to understand. For some reason, I didn’t tell them what had happened next. I didn’t tell them about how the touching scene had broken up.
There’d been a sound in the doorway, a cross between a snort and a cough. I’d looked up to see John McRae standing there, rolling a sheaf of drawings between his palms. He’d nodded at me, and his voice was too loud, too rough for the shamed, chagrined men in the cast when he said, “You got a second, Franklin?”
I’d glanced at Bill for permission before following John out into the lobby. He was chortling as he spread out his designs.
“What’s so funny?”
“The horseshit that friend of yours is selling,” he’d said, taking a pencil from behind his ear and starting to point to a specific drawing.
I hadn’t bothered explaining that she was, supposedly, my intern, not my friend. “How can you say that!”
“There isn’t a word she said in there that’s true.” He’d planted his hands on the table, fingers spread wide to anchor the pages.
“How do you know?”
“How many high schools put freshmen’s lockers next to seniors’?”
“I don’t know! A lot of them, I’d guess!”
“And what high school on the face of God’s green earth is going to let a freshman girl hang out in the boy’s locker room after a game? Without a chaperone? A coach? Anyone at all? It didn’t happen, Kira. I’m telling you. It absolutely didn’t happen.” He’d shaken his head, making me feel stupid for having been taken in.
I’d wanted to call him a liar. But I already knew that Teel wasn’t what she seemed. I knew that Teel’s very presence in the theater was an elaborate masquerade. She had told me that she was bored. Wasn’t it possible—likely, even—that she was just spinning out her stories to spark her own interest?
I’d sighed in frustration and taken a look at John’s drawings. “What is this?”
“The new design for Friar Laurence’s cell.”
“What’s new about it?”
“Bill didn’t say anything?” I’d shaken my head. “He decided he doesn’t want to go with the trapdoor. Instead, he wants a culvert to fly in from the top.”
“A culvert?”
John had shrugged, as if he were asked to create sewer systems for every play he worked on. “There isn’t space to fly it in. We’ll have to roll it on from stage left.” He’d flipped back two pages to show me what he’d done. It was a good design, and it definitely added to the oppressiveness of underground Verona.
“What’s the problem, then?”
“It’s getting mighty crowded back there,” John had said, pointing to the offstage space.
“We’ll manage.” I’d sounded a little skeptical, but I was sure that it would all work out.
“It’s going to get expensive. Paying extra hands to move the damned thing.”
“That’s the Landmark’s problem. And Bill’s. We’ll get by.”
“I’m sure we will,” he’d said, rolling up his plans and tapping them against the table. “I just wanted to make sure you knew what was going on.” He’d looked at me steadily, inviting a return to our previous conversation, the one about Teel. I’d chickened out, though, and told him that I had to get back to the rehearsal. I was pretty sure that he’d watched me the entire time that I walked across the lobby, watched until I’d disappeared into the well-lit rehearsal room.
No, I wasn’t going to share John’s supposed insight with Maddy and Jules. No reason to make them think any more about Teel. Especially since my genie was sure to stifle most answers I could give about who she really was, what she was actually doing at our rehearsals.
In any case, I discovered an easy escape from the conversation. “Wait a second! Where are our fortune cookies?”
Maddy sprang up and grabbed them from the kitchen counter. “What?” Jules said. “You didn’t get into them before the food?”
“You didn’t give me a chance,” she pouted. She worked her cookie free from its cellophane wrapper, crushing it into two pieces without further delay. “You are about to go on a journey,’” she intoned. “Wunderbar!”
“Hey,” I said. “How did we finish this entire meal without your telling us about the man of the month?”
Maddy waved away my exclamation, shrugging off her romantic interest as if he were already fading in her memory. “I figured I shouldn’t waste your time. Gunther heads out to New York next week. He’s a fight director. They’re doing Henry V at Shakespeare in the Park next summer.”
Jules laughed at Maddy’s typical dismissal. She opened her own cookie and read, “‘Today is a sunny day.’ That’s not a fortune!” she complained. “It’s a weather forecast. And it’s wrong!”
They both crunched on their cookies while I opened my own. The little slip of paper tore as I tried to take it out, but I could still read the words: “‘A wise man wishes for good.’”
Maddy and Jules laughed at the simple sentiment, but the words sent a chill creeping down my spine. I dropped the cookie onto my unfinished plate of vegetables, taking the time to roll the fortune into a tiny scroll.
I wasn’t a wise man. And I d
idn’t know what was good. But I had a wish to make. A third wish—and it was starting to weigh heavily on me.
Jules was laughing and saying, “Really? But you don’t even speak German! How can you communicate anything to each other?”
“Wait!” I said, consciously shaking off my dark mood. “German! Herr Wunderbar? Go back! What did I miss?”
Maddy regaled us with tales of Gunther the Fight Director for the rest of the evening, as we cleared the table and settled into a ferocious game of Scrabble. I lost by a hundred points, though, unable to concentrate on wooden tiles when I thought about what I might choose for my third wish. Maybe I’d be boring and ask for an entire new wardrobe. After all, if my roommates had noticed the change in my appearance, then I might be just one killer outfit away from finally getting the attention of Drew Myers. If, that was, Drew could ever find my clothing more interesting than hockey. Or the stories that Teel was telling about her supposed deep, dark past.
And if I cast my third wish, then Teel would go away, wouldn’t she? I wouldn’t have to listen to her stories ever again. I wouldn’t have to debate whether she was telling the truth or weaving elaborate lies. I wouldn’t have to face John McRae’s patient skepticism.
I wasn’t ready to make Teel disappear. Yet. But I had to admit that the temptation was getting a little stronger every single day.
CHAPTER 10
THE NEXT MORNING, I STOPPED IN AT CLUB JOE before rehearsal, knowing that extreme caffeine was necessary—even by my inflated definition. We were starting on the balcony scene, the absolute essence of Romeo and Juliet, and I wasn’t sure that I was ready to handle the theatrical revelations, Bill Pomeroy–style, that were certain to appear, by way of Teel.
I got to the shop about an hour before rehearsal was scheduled to start, so I decided to settle in at a table. I thought about buying a slice of pound cake to extend my “rental” of the space, but I figured there were already a dozen other customers snarfing up the computer connection for no more than the cost of a small coffee. I’d bought a large latte, with a shot of hazelnut syrup and four extra shots of espresso; that was more than adequate dues. With eight weeks to go till opening night, I was seriously considering having my paycheck direct-deposited at the coffee shop.