by Annabel Lyon
“Nah.” He sits down next to me and starts peeling apart a square of his own with his orange and brown fingernails. It’s not a big bathroom and our knees bang together when I lean over to grab some more paper off the roll. I say sorry and he says, “No worries.”
“What are you supposed to be, Australian now?” I say. “No worries?”
“Where should I put these?” He means the pieces of separated ply. I point to my stack on the edge of the tub and he puts his there too. “Tell me some more about King Lear.”
“Because I’m so amazing?”
“No,” he says thoughtfully. “Daniel’s pretty smooth, isn’t he? Me, I’m just curious. And stop trying to pick on me, I don’t like it.”
So I tell him. I tell him about the different ways I tried to include Merry in the production, the way Mom and Dad asked me to: helping with scenery (she spilled paint everywhere); helping with costumes (she stuck a pin by accident in King Lear’s bum, making him scream); helping with lights (she couldn’t make the changes fast enough); helping with the music (she couldn’t understand how to cue the CD player and kept playing the wrong song). I tell him about the actors who won’t adapt their own lines the way we asked them to, the singers who hate the music the jazz band is working on, the scenes that still don’t make sense because we’ve had to cut so much, Mr. Harris who is sardonic all the time and seems to want the production to fail, and the way people whisper when I walk down the hall as if I’m wearing my underwear outside my pants.
I even tell him about Sam, who’s always too busy with band practice to come over after school, and Dex being icy-polite with me ever since she didn’t get the part she auditioned for (months ago!), and Regan—here I have to backtrack a little—Regan, the one person who seemed to be on my side, who gave me good advice when I needed it and didn’t seem to care what anyone else thought of her, or me, or her being seen with me, who all of a sudden last week told me she couldn’t help with the production anymore and wouldn’t tell me why and Sam and I were on our own but she was sure we would be just fine.
“That’s odd,” Robert says. “Do you still see her around school?”
“Not so much. I hadn’t thought about it too much, to be honest.”
“I wonder if she’s okay,” Robert says.
I’m ashamed then, because I’d been thinking more about myself being definitely not okay, when maybe she had bigger things than musicals to think about. “I don’t know if I should call her and ask, though,” I say. “She can be pretty weird on the phone. Like she doesn’t quite remember who I am.”
“Some people are shy about talking on the phone,” Robert says, and then he blushes as if he’s said something mortifying.
I pretend not to notice. “You’re right. I should call her.”
“I like some of those old songs,” he says. “My mom has this jazz CD she likes to play when she gets home from work. It’s pretty cool.”
By this time, we have a pretty big stack of plies. “I guess we should get back to supper,” I say. “My mom made apple crumble for dessert. She didn’t want to try anything too fancy in case she messed up in front of your mom.”
“They were talking recipes when I left,” Robert says. “I get pretty sick of listening to my mom talk about recipes, to be honest. Hey, could you do me a favour?”
I shrug.
“Show me how to take this stuff off.” He means the nail polish. “Seriously. I have enough problems at school without showing up like this on Monday.”
“What problems?” I get up to rummage in the medicine cabinet for cotton balls and acetone.
“I wear my underwear outside my pants, too,” he says. “Or that’s what it feels like, some days.”
“Nothing being seen with my sister wouldn’t cure.” I show him how to splay his fingers and I pour some acetone onto the cotton. “Being in the musical couldn’t have made her any more popular than she already is. I don’t know why she’s still so upset about it. Not like that—you have to scrub.” I grab his hand and scrub until the cotton is stained orange and his nail is pink again.
“Stinks,” Robert says.
I do all his fingers for him. He takes a breath a couple of times as if he’s going to say something, but it never comes.
“Hang on to that T-shirt,” he says finally. “You can give it back to me some other time.”
“Thanks. I forgot I was wearing it.”
We go back to the kitchen. Mom and Robert’s mom and Daniel are poring over a recipe site on the laptop. Dad and Aunt Ellie are doing the dishes. Merry is putting dirty cutlery in the dishwasher, piece by piece, as if everything is made of eggshells. Dex has her coat on. “We’re out of ice cream,” she says. “I was just going to the corner store.”
“I’ll come,” Robert says. I’m glad he’s being nice to her.
“Don’t be too long, kids,” Dad says. “Dessert is waiting.”
“I’m just going to make a quick phone call,” I say.
I take the cordless up to my room. The scrap of paper with Regan’s number is pinned to my corkboard. This time someone grabs it on the first ring. “Regan?” a man’s voice says.
“Uh, yeah. I mean, I’m calling for Regan, yeah.”
“She’s not here,” the man says. “Who is this, please?”
I tell him I’m a friend from school.
“Do you know where she is?” the man says.
Do I know where she is? “No, sorry, no. Is she okay?”
“You need to hang up now,” the man says. “We’re trying to keep this line free.”
“Okay. Well, bye.”
The man hangs up. I go downstairs. The kitchen smells of cinnamon now and the table is laid for dessert. Robert’s mom is looking at Mom’s knives. “I could sharpen these for you,” she says. “I’ll bring my stone next time.”
“Edie?” Daniel says, reading my face.
Smooth and quick. “Nothing,” I say. “What are we waiting for?”
“Ice cream.” Dad rolls his eyes. “We could churn our own before those two get back.”
“I should have brought that stuff I got at the planetarium. I left it at Robert’s.”
Just then, the door opens. Dex and Robert are both pink-cheeked from the cold. Robert holds up the bag with the ice cream.
“They came back from the moon!” Merry says. She might as well have said “meat thermometer,” everyone laughs so hard. Even though it doesn’t really make sense, I laugh too, because I want to be in a warm, cinnamon-smelling kitchen with all my family around instead of out somewhere in the cold dark universe, wherever Regan is.
My Funny Valentine
“Guys,” I say. “Guys!”
“Everyone,” Regan says.
“People!” Mr. Harris barks. Everyone turns around and looks.
“Can we get started?” I say.
Mr. Harris gives me a look. “We’re starting,” he says. “Places!”
Mr. Harris has been coaching me in assertiveness. I’m not doing very well.
“Where’s Cordelia?” Regan says. “Nathalie! Anyone seen Nathalie?”
It’s February, and Regan is back. That night back in January when I tried to phone her, her dad had kicked her out of the house “for, like, half an hour,” she said. She spent it sitting at a bus stop, and then she went home and it was over. “Such drama,” she said, sighing, as if everyone was hysterical but her. I think there’s more going on, but that’s all she’ll say.
“Nathalie wasn’t in class today,” Mean Megan says. “I think she’s sick.”
“Again?” Regan says. Everyone shrugs. Nathalie, our Cordelia, is small and frail and pale, with dark pixie hair and dark eyes like a doe in headlights. She’s sweet and shy, almost whispering when she talks, but with a powerhouse singing voice you would never expect. I’ve never seen her do anything alone; people always crowd around her like human bubble wrap. If you ask her how she is, she always says, “Okay,” or, “A bit tired,” with this brave little watery smile, like some ninete
enth-century heroine with a wasting disease. She gets sick a lot, and misses a lot of school.
Mean Megan told me she gets migraines, which are really, really bad headaches. She has to lie in a dark room, basically, while everyone tiptoes around her, and if she tries to move, she throws up. The neat part is that she can tell when she’s got a headache coming. She gets something called an aura, which isn’t pain but is a feeling that tells her the pain is coming, and she has to call her mom right away to come pick her up and take her home. Everyone loves the word aura, of course, and kids are always bugging her to describe what it feels like. I’ve heard other girls ask her if she can see auras around other people. They all want to know what colour their auras are. Nathalie says it’s not like that, but nobody listens. They want her to be magical.
I just want her to come to rehearsal.
“Mei!” Regan calls. Mei is Nathalie’s understudy, the person who learns the entire role of Cordelia just so she can fill in when Nathalie’s sick. My guess? Nathalie will miss most of the rehearsals and none of the performances and Mei will have done a lot of work for nothing. I asked her once if she minded, but she said, “Nah, it’ll look good on my university applications. Anybody can get straight As. These days, you have to make yourself look rounded.”
“Eat more chocolate,” I said.
She blinked. If she knew I was joking, she didn’t show it. She told me she volunteered at the hospital on weekends, too, helping visitors find the right elevator and things like that. She’s going to be a surgeon. She’s only a year older than me, but she said it’s never too early to start thinking about your applications. “What are you going to do at university, Edie?” she asked me.
“Um.” I looked at my feet, as if they might know.
“Good luck with that,” she said.
Mei is clear and confident onstage, not inspired but always prepared, and she never misses a rehearsal. She’s not a belter like Nathalie. She has what Sam calls a church voice, with spitty t’s, quavery, a bit opera. She seems less like someone who would be shattered by her father’s rage than someone who would ask him if he needed her to run to the pharmacy to pick up his blood pressure medication before she started writing up her chem lab. Today, she’s our Cordelia.
“Music!” I call. “Track one!”
Nothing happens.
“Merry, music!” I call.
Nothing.
“Merry!” I call.
Nothing. I’m opening my mouth to shout again, but Regan says, “No sweat. I’ll help her.”
“Sorry,” I mumble.
Regan jumps up onstage and goes into the wings, where Merry sits by the CD player. I kept my word to Dad and found something she can do, sort of. I’ve shown her a million times how to work the machine, we’ve practised over and over at my house, but when we get to rehearsal, she gets all excited and flustered and something always goes wrong.
A second later the music starts and Regan is back beside me. “She was doing everything right,” she whispers. “The guys just turned the volume all the way down for a prank.”
“She should have noticed,” I whisper.
“She’s doing a great job, Edie,” Regan says. “You should cut her some slack.”
“For your information—” I say, but Mr. Harris shushes us.
Mei sings along to the tune of “My Funny Valentine.” Goneril and Regan have just given their lying speeches saying how much they love their father, King Lear, so he’ll give them all his land and money. Now it’s Cordelia’s turn. She really does love her father, but she doesn’t want to play her sisters’ greedy game and refuses to make a speech. In Shakespeare’s version she says:
Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit:
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.
Nathalie and I changed it to:
Silly old dad of mine,
Why waste your time and mine?
You make me sad in my heart.
I love you tons, you know,
But I can’t lie for show.
You shouldn’t try to make me start.
Quinn, as Lear, sits glowering on his throne, which at the moment is a white plastic deck chair. After the song is done, they squabble for a bit and then he banishes her. In the original play, he banishes her to France. In our version, he banishes her to Surrey. This always gets a laugh.
“What’s Surrey?” Merry asks me on the walk home.
“Another part of Vancouver,” I say. “Across the bridge. People who don’t come from Surrey make fun of people who do.”
“Why?”
“That’s a good question,” Sam says. “Why do we do that?”
“No idea,” I say. “But we do, and it’s funny, so who cares?”
“I don’t want to go to Surrey,” Merry says. She looks worried. I roll my eyes at Sam, but she looks away. Now what have I done?
At home, Dexter isn’t around. “How was rehearsal, sweet pea?” Mom says.
“Where’s Dex?”
“Out,” Mom says. “Hot chocolate?”
“Out where?”
“I’d love a hot chocolate, Mrs. Snow,” Sam says. “Then we have to prep for next rehearsal, right, Edie? The first big scene with Lear and the Fool. It’s going to be tricky.”
“Why’s that?” Mom helps Merry off with her coat, unwinds Sam’s scarf for her, points to the mat for our boots. Merry has pink rubber boots, I have black rubber boots, and Sam has purple rubber boots with green aliens on them. I’ve seen them at a store in the mall. Girls like Mean Megan wear them. They’re very fashionable.
“When did you buy those?” I say suddenly.
Sam’s eyes go wary. “Last week.”
“Cool,” I say. And then, because Sam always seems to know the right thing to wear, and nobody ever laughs at her, and she never snaps at Merry, and one day she’s going to open her eyes and see what a loser she has for a friend: “Cool.” My voice is mean as dirt.
“Actually, I have to go.” Sam takes her scarf back from Mom. “Thanks for the offer of hot chocolate, Mrs. Snow. Next time.”
“Any time, Sam,” Mom says.
“What?” I say.
“I’m not your enemy,” Sam says. “I’m your friend.”
“What’d I do?” I say.
“You made fun of my boots.”
When she’s gone, I look at Mom. “Well, you did,” Mom says.
“Where’s Dex?”
“Hot chocolate,” Mom says, taking Merry by the hand and leading us back to the kitchen. “How did the music go?”
Merry explains about the volume on the CD player.
“Nice boys or mean boys?” Mom asks.
“Raj,” Merry says. “I like Raj.”
“He’s nice,” I say when Mom looks at me. Her mouth relaxes.
We drink hot chocolate, the three of us together at the kitchen table. “Where is Dexter, anyway?” I ask.
“She was meeting a friend at the library.” Mom pushes my hair off my forehead. “Dad’s going to pick her up on his way home from work. What do you need her for? Is it something I can help with?”
“No. I just wanted to—” Talk, I was going to say, but I don’t want Mom thinking I don’t want to talk to her. I’m so stupid, anyway. I need to tell someone about school and clothes and Merry and Sam and what a mess I’m making of everything, but Dex would never want to listen to me.
Tricky, Sam said—an understatement. Quinn, our Lear, is a good actor but a lousy singer; Rob the hockey player is a good singer but a lousy actor. My solution? Quinn lipsynchs while Rob sings. Genius, right?
&n
bsp; “No!” I shout. “Again! That was terrible!”
“Stop yelling at people, Edie,” Regan says.
“I told you guys to practise together!” I yell at Quinn and Rob. “Did you practise? Did you? Because that looked fake. Fake!”
“Edie,” Regan says.
“It has to be believable! It has to look like it’s all Quinn!”
“Why, though?” Regan says. “It’s not like it’s a secret. Rob’s going to be listed in the program and everything. Don’t you think you’re being a little—”
“Again!” I shout.
Rob goes back behind the screen we’ve put upstage while Quinn takes his place in front of it.
“Merry, music,” I call.
Silence.
“Merry!”
Silence.
“Raj! Stop messing with the CD player! I can’t believe you even think that’s funny!”
“I don’t,” Raj says, behind me. I turn around. He and Mei are sitting half a dozen rows behind Regan and me. They’re both frowning. “I didn’t touch the CD player. Get a grip, Edie.”
“That was pretty rude,” Mei says to me. “You should apologize to Raj.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry I yelled.”
Raj shrugs. “I should probably go home anyway. I have an algebra test to study for.”
“You’re in this scene, though,” I say. “I just want them to get this song and then we’re going to—”
“They’re never going to get this song the way you want it,” Raj says. “You don’t want it to be all Quinn, you want it to be all Edie. You’re a control freak.”
Mei is nodding.
“You really, really are,” Regan says.
I look at the stage. Quinn is nodding. Rob steps out from behind the screen. He shrugs. “Can I study with you?” he asks Raj. He hops offstage and starts walking up the aisle. Behind me, Raj gets up to go.
“What do I do?” I ask Regan.
The music starts suddenly.
“Please, guys,” I say. “Please, let’s just try it one more time.”
“You know what?” Raj says. “I don’t think I want to be in this show anymore. I’m tired of trying to make everybody laugh. I’m a pretty serious person, actually.”