Snark and Stage Fright (Snark and Circumstance Book 5)

by Wardrop, Stephanie

  He frowned, brows knit together in confusion. I wondered if he could tell that I had been talking about something besides our project—our relationship, past and present. We sat in silence for a long couple of seconds before I collapsed back into the hard back of the theater seat, utterly defeated. But at least I had done the right thing in letting him off the hook with our project.

  Michael leaned back, too, his head tipped very close to mine.

  “Is that what you think, George? That we are irretrievably far apart?” he asked, and I could barely hear him above the band tuning up and the nuns shouting about their ugly, itchy habits.

  “Yeah. Don’t you? We can’t even study together in the same kitchen.”

  I felt his eyes on me, and when I looked over, he seemed to be searching for something on my face, his eyes so intense I forgot how to breathe.

  He leaned in even closer now, still frowning like he was thinking very, very hard, and asked, “You’re not still upset about my letter in The Alt, right?”

  “No! I was, yeah, but you were right to do what you did by organizing the other teams in protest.” I laughed quietly, bitterly. “You were the better revolutionary, Kerensky. I’m not going to change the world. I am not going to dismantle male privilege. Or the meat industrial complex on my own. I should just stop trying.”

  He was so close now I could practically feel the curls on his forehead brush against the striped headband I’d put on rather than get up early enough to wash my hair. I regretted that choice so much at the moment. When he reached a finger and brushed a strand of hair off of my chin, I stopped breathing altogether and waited for the rest of my autonomic nervous system to collapse with it.

  “No,” he said quietly. “You should never stop trying.”

  I sat there, dazed and trying to swallow the ping-pong ball that had formed in my throat, looking at him as he sat there looking at me—until Ms. Duvall called my name so abruptly I leaped out of my seat into the aisle.

  “I’ll … be right there!” I managed to choke out. I felt very hot in the face and very light in the head when Michael grabbed his bag and slid out to the aisle.

  “I have to go, too, but I’ll talk to you later, okay?” he said. I nodded and he walked away, waving to Diana, who returned the wave like she was flagging down a taxi in the rain, but he stopped at the auditorium’s main doors to look back at me. He nodded, once, then disappeared into the hallway.

  I remained stuck in the aisle until I could trust my legs to carry me to the stage below, hoping that the whole talk about our project had not been about our project at all.

  17 Unintentional Experiments in Torture

  Later, I left Gary in charge of the other von Trapp kids as they finished the ersatz Alps so I could add some white paint to the gazebo we had fashioned to go over a stage in the “town square” for one of the final scenes of the show. The kids had grown to love Gary as much as they loved Diana, but I kept watch with one eye because Gary spent more time giving piggyback rides and letting Leila and Maddie touch his spikes than he did on monitoring their painting.

  Diana interrupted my task, saying, “Hey, Georgia,” and putting a warm slim hand on my arm for a second. “Are you okay?”

  “Uh, yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

  She wrinkled her nose a little in her bunny-cute way and said, “Well, Michael is always telling me how feisty you are, how you take on the school administrators and bullies and the football team—and I’ve seen you do that, too. But lately … Well, where’s old fightin’ George!” She put up her fists and feigned a couple of punches like Mattel’s new Ultimate Fighting Champion Barbie. “You just seem to have lost your spark lately. Is … something wrong?”

  A day earlier I’d have wanted to say, Yeah. It’s a five-foot-two-inch woodland nymph with strawberry blond hair and a smile like the sunrise. But my conversation in the Peanut Gallery had given me a dose of hope.

  “It’s that obvious, huh?” I said instead, and I saw something flicker in Diana’s eyes and I remembered. She’d been through a lot. In the last year she had seen her father embroiled in an ugly public legal battle that would probably send him to prison, a scandal I would know more about if I spent more time paying attention to the world around me and less time paying attention to myself. She’d lost her home and her school and probably spent most evenings with her mother huddled over bowls of Kraft mac and cheese and wondering what the hell happened to her. She didn’t deserve any of that. She deserved much better than what life had given her lately, but she wasn’t wallowing in her sadness, unlike me. And here she was now, trying to make me feel better. “You’re right,” I admitted. “I need to get over myself. Like, fifty feet over myself—not that that makes any sense.”

  She laughed and began, “Listen, I was talking to Michael the other day and I said —” But she was cut off by a wail from behind us and the sudden appearance of Leila, who was swatting my knees with her fists and hopping up and down yelling, “Georgiaaaaaa! Andy spilled blue paint. All. Over. The. Stage.”

  I turned to see Gary helplessly mopping a large pool of paint with some newspapers we’d used to protect the stage. I raced over to help and we got most of it, except for a stubborn patch of blue that wouldn’t be mopped up. Unless the drama club planned to feature a lake in all of their subsequent productions, we were in trouble.

  “Aw, shit, I mean ‘crap,’ Georgia, I’m sorry,” Gary said.

  I could see that Andy was trying really hard not to cry so I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s okay. It was an accident. We’ll figure out a solution.”

  Diana reappeared with a roll of paper towels and then Spencer showed up, carrying a bottle of soda. That’s when inspiration hit.

  “Can I have that?” I asked, pointing at his Coke, and he shrugged a shoulder and handed it to me. I poured some onto the stain and within seconds it started eating through the paint—right through the varnish and into the wood, so I began frantically sopping it all up with the paper towels.

  “Wicked!” Andy yelled at my impromptu chemistry experiment and the other kids squealed with joy.

  “Georgia to the rescue!” Gary laughed. “How did you think of that?”

  I shrugged, but I was relieved that I not only solved the problem but had proven to myself that I had a functioning brain in my body, thanks to Diana’s unknowing reminder that the sun hardly rose and set on my problems alone.

  “Well, I figured if soda eats the enamel off your teeth … ”

  Spencer made a horrified face and began wiping off his teeth with one finger and all the kids laughed.

  “You really are a master thespian,” I said in appreciation of his pantomime.

  “And you’re a genius, even if you have ruined Coke Zero for me forever,” he said as he jumped off the lip of the stage to meet Ms. Duval, who had come into the auditorium and begun clapping her hands to get our attention.

  When I found myself smiling for the first time in a while, Diana asked, “Does this mean Fightin’ George is back?” giving me a little one-arm hug.

  “Maybe Problem-Solving George has been born. And it’s about time,” I said, rolling my eyes, but I was smiling, too.

  “That’s way better than Morose George,” Gary agreed and I had to wonder exactly how pathetic a creature I had been and for how long.

  “What does morose mean?” Topher asked, and I let Gary explain it as he trooped the kids down to the front of the stage for Ms. Duval’s directions. I wanted to close up my own paint can before another accident happened. Then I returned to my kid-sitting duties, still smiling a little and resolved to be less self-involved after that, and not just because I didn’t want to see Andy or anyone else I was responsible for leave a swath of destruction in his wake.

  ***

  The next day—the day before Thanksgiving vacation—we had history class first period, which was good, because I couldn’t wait to see if Michael and I really had been speaking obliquely about our relationship. Mrs. Parker treated
us to a short quiz and then told us to spend the rest of the class time meeting with our project partner to finalize the material to turn in after break.

  “So, Sofya,” Michael said, smiling and trying on a pretty terrible Russian accent, “here is what I zink. I zink you and I can be comrades in dees project after all.”

  I blushed and rolled the tip of my pen along my notebook and tried to match his tone and accent when I said, “Really, Alexander?”

  “What I was trying to say the other day, when we got interrupted in the auditorium … ” he began and then paused again as I shivered inside when I remembered being so close to him in the Peanut Gallery days before, his forehead nearly against mine, so close that I could have counted his long eyelashes if I’d had my eyes open. “ … Is that I don’t think we are so far apart, really. We are like Kerensky and Perovskaya, sort of, and that’s what’s going to be brilliant about this project: we’re going to look at social change from two different angles. We’ll present examples of people who want to work within the system, like Kerensky in keeping the Duma appointed by the Tsar, and people like Perovskaya, who want to wipe out the system entirely … What do you think?”

  My heart squashed flat as a pancake as I realized that he really was talking solely about the school project, and probably had been yesterday, too. But I could be okay with that. After all, nothing had changed, right? I raised my eyebrows and thought for a while. “Yeah,” I said. “I think that can work.”

  “Great! So we can work out a framework to put your work and mine together and decide the focus of our presentation over break?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He told me the details of what he was putting in his part of the essay until the bell rang and he stood up but kept talking.

  “If our team places well at Regionals today,” he said, “I’ll have the state meet on Saturday, but you and I can work on Sunday, if that’s okay with you.”

  I nodded, said, “See you at lunch,” and he waved and disappeared into the crowd surging through the hallway. I was pleased that the new George was dealing with this disappointment so well—until I got to the caf to find Diana sitting in Michael’s lap.

  My arrival, along with Dave and Gary’s, forced Diana back into her seat, giggling all the way, and I found that my appetite had shrunk like a raisin. We were all talking about Gary’s new hair color, radioactive green, but I barely said anything. I kept noticing how Diana would nudge Michael every now and then, and he would smile and roll his eyes, and then she’d giggle. They were freakin’ adorable. After a couple of minutes of it, I told everyone I had to check on a project in the art room so I could finish it before break, packed up my things, and fled. I practically cheered at the sound of the last bell and the opportunity to live by proxy in the make-believe world of musical theater, where any problem can be solved by a shuffle-ball-change step and a rousing tune. I could finally see why Leigh loved being part of it.

  Rehearsal went pretty smoothly for principals and understudies, and I was proud of how well my little charges knew their lines. After the younger kids were sent home, Ms. Duvall called the rest of us over for a huddle before break.

  “As you can see, we have enough nuns to fill the stage,” she said, “but our party scenes and crowd scenes are lacking some Y chromosomes.” She looked around at us over her rhinestone half-glasses and reminded us, “And there is no way we can have an all-female squadron of Nazis in those final scenes—I need you to recruit some male bodies for us.”

  “At last, a job I can throw myself into!” Spencer enthused, fanning his heart with his hand, and everyone laughed with him except Curt the Concussive, who was so well suited to his junior Nazi uniform.

  I wanted to help, but with Dave and Gary already in the musical with the orchestra, that ruled out any male I could recruit, but Diana had other ideas. At Ms. Duval’s words, she squealed, grabbed my shoulder, and began hopping up and down.

  “You have to ask Michael!” she cheered. “And he can get Cameron and the other cross-country guys to join him! Even if they make State they’ll be done with the season by the last week of rehearsals.”

  I took a deep breath, reminded myself that she was not being cruel by intention—more like a puppy who bites hard in play—and said, “You’ll have better luck asking him.”

  “No, you have to,” she insisted. “Trust me.”

  She was so resolute about my suitability for the task, it worried me, but I said, “Okay. I’ll see him this weekend to work on our project. I’ll ask him then. But I doubt it will do any good. Michael is more likely to volunteer to walk in front of a firing squad than to volunteer to walk across a stage in a musical theater production.”

  “I bet he’s out front now,” Diana yelped with a grin and absurdly wide eyes when we reached the main doors of the building. She pointed to the bus in the circular drive that was disgorging the cross-country team and all of their gear, a sweaty and defeated-looking group. “Come on!”

  Even if Michael and the team had returned in triumph, I would not have wanted to ask Michael for anything, and, judging from the slumped shoulders and silence, they hadn’t broken any records today. I was about to back out when I thought of Leigh and how much the show meant to her. And Diana was practically pushing me in his direction so I walked over to his car and waited, dreading my task.

  When he showed up, disheveled and holding his keys for a quick getaway, I asked the dumbest possible question I could have asked: “So how did it go?” I wanted to flee. But Diana sensed I was going to bail and scurried over.

  “Not well,” Michael sighed. “So we can meet for the project on Saturday instead of Sunday if you want.”

  “I’m sorry. Really.” I wanted to brush a damp curl that was stuck to his right eyebrow, but as this was no longer my right or privilege, I glanced over at Diana and said, “Um, Diana has a favor to ask you—I don’t know why she won’t ask herself, but—”

  Michael sighed again, but smiled. “For her, anything,” he said, hitting the bull’s-eye of my heart. “What is it?”

  We explained the need for able-bodied men onstage for the production. Michael frowned, clearly uncomfortable with the idea, brow furrowed in consideration. But he looked back and forth from Diana to me a few times until he said, “Okay. I’ll do it. And I’ll get the other guys on the team to come with me. It’s not like we have anything else going on after school right now.”

  Diana squealed and hugged him. He looked over her shoulder at me and rolled his eyes a little, as if embarrassed, despite the fact that he had eaten lunch in the caf with her in his lap a few hours before.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You guys are saving the whole show. And I can imagine that you want to do this about as much as I’d like an up-close tour of a slaughterhouse.”

  He smiled at that analogy and asked Diana, “I don’t have to sing, right?”

  “No. You just have to look handsome in a tux and menacing in a Nazi uniform!”

  He rolled his eyes again and opened his car door, asking if either of us needed a ride. I had my mom’s car and had to bring Leigh home, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be in an enclosed space with the two of them anyway, even for five minutes.

  “I’ll call you about Sunday. Or Saturday,” Michael said to me out the window. “Happy Thanksgiving, George!”

  I waved and trudged over to my car, wondering why Diana had wanted me to ask Michael when clearly she could get him to do anything.

  ***

  At least when Leigh and I got home that day Tori was there, and she immediately wanted a report on what was going on with me and Michael or me and Dave. As she unpacked in our room, I told her there was nothing to tell, which was true, and over dinner, fortunately, no one wanted to hear about anything besides Tori’s college experience, which was going much better since her roommate was now indulging in practices far more secular than turning the lights on, on Saturdays.

  “She got her hair cut really short and it’s electric blue,” To
ri marveled. “She looks like a really cute manga character, and she has a boyfriend who is a sculptor now so she stays with him when Trey comes to visit.”

  My dad made a grumble-y noise at that, but everyone was so happy to have Tori home that he decided to keep his discomfort to himself. At least he would never have to worry about my spilling details of my sex life at the dinner table.

  For dinner on Thanksgiving, we drove to my mom’s parents’ house in Cheshire. When we got back, Trey was just pulling up to the house to see Tori and catch up with all of us. After giving me a bruising bear hug, he offered to “talk some sense” into Michael for me, but I assured him that Michael was happy with his sweet new girlfriend and that I wasn’t even being sarcastic for once when I said that. Trey looked confused but didn’t press it, instead inviting me to join him and Tori at the movies, which I declined.

  On Saturday, Michael texted that he’d be happy to work at his house again. I agreed, rather than having him come here and having to deal with my entire family scrutinizing us or Tori or Trey ambushing him like some romance-driven Mafia and demanding that he love me back or they’d break his kneecaps. So I biked over again and, after saying hi to his parents and assuring them I had had a lovely Thanksgiving Day, I met Michael in his kitchen.

  We sat reading each other’s papers to decide how we could edit them together to make a single document that didn’t seem like it had been written by someone with a split personality. Michael made me a cup of tea and offered, “There’s plenty of leftovers, too, if you’re hungry. I think the sweet potatoes are safe. No marshmallows.”

  I felt a sad smile tugging at my mouth as I remembered how last spring, on the night we had first kissed, he had gone all the way to Ashworth to find vegan marshmallows for me to make s’mores. It was possibly the most loving thing anyone has ever done for me. But I choked the memory down with a sip of tea and said, “Marshmallows are for wusses. Sweet potatoes are just fine on their own.”