Five, Six, Seven, Nate!

by Tim Federle

  “And Asella,” Dewey says, finally to the last name on his list. “We’d like you to take Alien Number Eight.”

  (Alien Number Eight has a page-and-a-half-long monologue right underneath my Blurp, by the way.)

  “Terrific,” Asella says, or at least I think she does. I can barely see where the voice is coming from. “You mean I’m understudying E.T. and playing Alien Number Eight, eight shows a week?”

  Wait. Wait, wait. Somebody else is understudying E.T. too?

  “Where’s my agent?” Asella shouts.

  The room scream-laughs, and suddenly a chair scootches away from the table, and Asella (I presume?) hops to stand on it. But even with all that, she’s barely the size of Genna.

  Asella is my first midget.

  Everyone applauds.

  “Thank you, thank you,” Asella says, taking a curtsy. “I’m thrilled to have logged twenty-five years in show business to end up playing Alien Number Eight.” Big group hoots as she hops to the floor, donning a pair of eyeglasses and turning to the guy next to her. “I’m not even Alien Number Seven.”

  Dewey stammers, laughing with everyone but clearly afraid he’s got his first controversy brewing. “Ah, don’t take it too hard, Asella,” he goes, hands shaking. “Alien Seven could be anyone. We needed somebody with depth and experience for Alien Eight.”

  “Depth and experience always means old,” Asella says, by now doing a stand-up routine, seated.

  But Alien Seven is barely hearing any of this. “Alien Seven could be anyone.”

  “Let’s get reading,” Garret says, clearly growing impatient. “I have a number to stage after lunch. And something tells me we’re going to need all the time we can manage.”

  “Did the midget lady just say she was understudying E.T.?” I whisper to Genna.

  “I believe the little person did,” Genna says, consumed with a small mirror. “There’s two understudies for every part—”

  “Act One,” Dewey says, “Scene One.”

  “—and they only put the best one on if the lead is sick,” Genna says, sitting up tall and batting those giant eyelashes.

  “There’s something fishy in these woods,” reads a gnarled man from the end of the table. “And I aim to hook a guppy tonight.”

  The other E.T. understudy has been in show business for twenty-five years. My parents haven’t even known each other for twenty-five years. Not even for twenty. I’m as good as dead.

  “What’s that noise over there!”

  I’m as good as . . . well, Alien Number Seven. Who clears his throat and gets ready to read the heck out of his one word.

  And You Thought P.E. Was Bad

  (Five weeks till first preview)

  The best thing to do when you’ve got a lot on your mind is to unload it on somebody else.

  “Lib, hey. Hope this message goes through.”

  I’m in the bathroom.

  “I’m on our first break.”

  Hiding.

  “Just . . . cooling off from the excitement.”

  God, she’s going to see right through this.

  “The morning’s highlights: We read through the script and I think I nailed my line. Also—”

  Beep. I’m cut off, not even sure if the message goes through. And just as I’m hitting REDIAL, the bathroom door whooshes open.

  “Actors, we’re back!”

  Actors. I ignore it at first, before remembering that I’m one of them now.

  “Coming!” I shout.

  When I return to the studio, all the tables have been cleared away, and the whole cast is standing along the perimeter of the room, their eyes trained on Garret and his assistant, Monica, at the center.

  “What’s going on?” I say to Keith.

  “Nobody can figure it out,” he says, checking his iPhone with a sly glance. “But I’m pretty sure they’re choreographing steps for us. Or something.”

  This is my chance. Libby and I have crammed a million ensemble numbers into our recent YouTube studies. If I do well in this rehearsal, maybe I’ll get put in the front of a production number. That’s what an ensemble star is: somebody the audience is basically forced to look at.

  “Let’s get this done,” I say to myself. (This is my brother Anthony’s personal motto before polishing off an energy shake or dunking my head in the neighbor’s above-ground pool.)

  Monica, the dance assistant, improvises a triple turn. She whips around so fast, it’s like a barber pole in tights.

  “Yes,” Garret mutters. “That step would be perfect for the children.”

  The blonde girl claps very quietly to herself. Dancers.

  “Okay, are we back from break?” Garret says, turning to any available stage manager.

  “Yes, Mr. Charles, they’re all yours.”

  “Delicious,” he says, but then he retreats to a chair and allows Monica to take over. God, does this guy have a good job.

  “Remind me who my tumblers are?” Monica says. Back home a tumbler is what Dad pours his gin into. I haven’t even figured out the question by the time every child’s hand but mine is raised.

  “Round-offs? Back handsprings?” Monica says.

  “Back, front, side,” Keith says. “Whatever.” He switches off his phone and rubs actual sleep from his eyes.

  “Me too,” says another child.

  “Me three,” the blonde girl says, grinning wide like she’s the first person to have ever thought of this joke in the history of ever.

  “Nate?” Monica says, making some kind of fish face. “Nothing, right?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “Right.”

  “What about my adults?” Monica says, strolling on two high-heeled dance shoes and modeling a tank top that’s so sheer, I can practically tell what she had for breakfast. “Anyone have tricks we didn’t explore at the audition?”

  “I show up eight times a week and never call out sick,” Asella shouts.

  “Thank you, ’Sell,” Monica says. “Anyone else? Special skills? Fire-eating? Et cetera?”

  “That depends,” says a short older guy, wearing, I now notice, the exact same tank top as Monica. “Are we on a raked stage or what?”

  “Okay, yes,” Garret says, springing from his seat. “Let’s talk about the set design.”

  For some reason, this gets the room rabid, with everyone slithering into Garret at the center of the dance floor.

  “Traditionally,” he says, glaring over at Dewey—who’s behind a table, talking with Calvin—“the director would have presented the set design at the beginning of the first rehearsal.”

  Monica’s staring at herself in the mirror and begins to quite literally kick a leg past her own head. If she’s practicing a move that I’m expected to perform anytime in the next thirty years, I’m going to pack my bags at Aunt Heidi’s tonight and then quietly write my resignation letter.

  “But in our director’s world,” Garret continues, “we apparently don’t begin with basics.” He thumps his bald head, and reveals yellowed teeth that almost make me miss the cornfields back home. “Nothing traditional about our approach on this musical, is there, Dewey?”

  Dewey leaps to his feet. “What’s that?” he yells. “Are we on lunch?”

  “We’ve got a half hour till lunch,” Calvin says, calm as ever and practically bordering on Canadian.

  “Is there anything you’d like to say about your set design, Dewey?” Garret says.

  “So, yeah.” Dewey shouts from behind the table. “So, whenever we’re in Elliott’s hometown,” he says, licking his lips and pressing his thumbs into the air, like it’s a joystick, “the set design will be all mysterious. It’s gonna be lit like hecka-dark and hecka-flashy, and for all the Halloween stuff it’s going to feel hecka-otherworldly. And when we’re on E.T.’s ship, it’s going to look like a plain 1950s living room. It’s going to be totally backward and shed a light on what we perceive as, like, truly alien.”

  “That’s gorgeous,” says April, the seventeen-foot
-tall dancer lady who’ll be playing the school teacher. She looks as much like a school teacher as my father does a swimsuit model, but that’s Broadway!

  “In summary,” Dewey says, “it’s going to freak people out.”

  He looks like he’s convincing himself, which I recognize as the same expression I’ve probably got right before “shooting” a “hoop” in gym.

  “It’s going to freak people out,” Garret repeats, his beady, nervous eyes thudding from actor to actor like stones being skipped through quicksand. “This is what we’ve got.”

  “Oh!” Dewey says. “One other thing: You’re all going to be hauling around a lot of the smaller set pieces. Like . . . Elliott’s bedroom and the desks at school. They’ll be these light-up cubes that can be pushed across the stage on wheels.” He grins. “Think you can handle that, Jordan?”

  “Jordan won’t be pushing a thing,” Garret says, and Monica places her hand on Jordan’s head. (His hair doesn’t even move, I swear to you.)

  “Thank you, Mr. Garret,” Jordan literally says.

  “Sorry to cut in here,” the stage manager says, genuinely looking pained. “But we’ve only got fifteen minutes till lunch, if you guys want to move along the dance portion of the morning.”

  “Right-o,” Garret says, pulling his drawstringed jumpsuit tight. “Monica is going to lead you all through a few basic tap steps. We’re playing with concepts for the finale, and I want to evaluate how much I’ll need to drink tonight to calm myself down.”

  “He doesn’t mean tea,” I hear Asella say.

  “Thank you, Garret,” Monica says. “Let’s get the kids down front, and anyone who’s a bit shorter. Or slower to pick up tap steps.”

  “Is this for all of us?” says the woman playing Elliott’s mother. “We’re not all tap dancing, right?”

  She was great in the read-through this morning. Very motherly in a show biz way. She could really turn the crying on and off, and Libby says that is what separates a good actress from a singer who just talks in between songs.

  “We’re all tapping,” says Garret. “For many of you, tapping is as alien as it gets—even if it freaks you out. That is our ‘concept,’ isn’t it, Dewey?”

  “Did somebody say my name?” Dewey says.

  “Exactly,” Garret says, folding his arms so hard, it makes his neck bulge.

  “Let’s spread out and start with a beginner step,” Monica says.

  I plant myself firmly in the middle of the pack. Always smarter to blend in at first.

  “Nate, it’d be smarter if you came down front,” Monica says, “because this will be a challenge.”

  Never mind.

  “Let’s imagine that E.T.’s spaceship has just flown away into the sky,” Monica says.

  “The audience won’t even have to imagine it!” Dewey calls out. “There’s gonna be a giant LED video screen of a spaceship, playing upper-stage!”

  “Upstage,” Garret corrects, power-walking to the double doors and exiting the room entirely.

  “The curtain will drop, just after,” Monica continues, slowly, waiting to be interrupted but then barreling on, “and when it rises, you’ll all be standing there, in a straight line.”

  “One other thing!” Dewey says. I see the assistant director Calvin’s face contort, probably wishing Dewey’d just shut up and let Monica talk. “There’s also an idea,” Dewey says, his hair getting messier just by the way he’s pacing, “that everybody will be dressed as Elliott for the bows.”

  The actors squirm. Keith and I catch each other’s eyes and we both crack up a little bit. Nice.

  “Five minutes,” the stage manager says.

  “So,” Dewey, says, “it’s like: ‘Who’s who and what’s what? Are they aliens? Boys? Is there an alien or a boy inside each of us?’ ”

  The room is completely still.

  “The only thing inside of me is doubt,” Asella says into her shirt collar. For such a tiny human, her voice can sure carry.

  “Let’s just concentrate on dance steps for the remaining couple of minutes,” Monica says, hiking her dance pants up and smiling at Dewey like she’s going to murder him. “We can all hop on our left foot, can’t we?”

  The entire room does, some with more precision and excitement than others. The blonde girl, for instance, is still about three feet in the air when the rest of us have already landed.

  “Great,” Monica says, staring at the blonde. “Great, great.”

  Garret comes back into the room wearing woolly pants and a turtleneck, his outfit changed for lunch.

  “How much have we taught?” he says. “Can I see any of the finale?”

  “We’ve hopped on one foot, Garret.”

  “And then what?”

  “That’s it,” Monica says, digging a toe into the ground.

  “At this rate,” Garret says, “we’ll be opening next February.” This is delivered as a joke and lands as a warning.

  “And I’m sorry to say,” says the lead stage manager, a tall guy with an old-fashioned moustache, “that we’re on lunch, folks. So we’re going to have to hop on our right foot at two o’clock.”

  Everyone skitters to their bags, checking phones before they even breathe. And just as I’m skimming a text from Libby (“u ok e.t. understudy of mine? ur msg was garbled”), Keith taps me on the shoulder.

  “A bunch of us are going to check out the marquee.”

  “The what?” I say.

  “The theater. They’re putting up the E.T. signs today. And, like, doing a photo shoot with Jordan outside the front. On lunch.” This is the kind of thing a well-meaning teacher would force a mean-meaning bully to invite me to, back home. But Keith sounds pretty real here.

  “We’re grabbing iced coffees and heading over,” the blonde girl says. She looks like she’s still hovering in the air from the legendary hop.

  “It’s twenty degrees out,” I almost say. “You’re getting iced coffees?” But I’m thrilled to be asked anywhere, so I go, “Sounds awesome.”

  And as we head out for a lunch of iced coffee and Jordan-spying, Monica calls me over.

  “You ready to sweat?” she says.

  Wow. Such attention! “You bet!”

  “No, literally. We gotta get you sweating. So you don’t pass out in the middle of the show. Gotta get your cardio polished up.”

  “Oh, sure. I figured rehearsals would, you know, whip me into, like, spandex shape.” Shut up, Nate.

  “Well, it’ll help. But how about coming in a little early, in the mornings? I’m going to be leading a remedial crash course for some of our . . . beginner dancers. And we’ll incorporate some panting into the warm-up.”

  “Okay.” What am I going to say? Sorry, my mornings are booked, speak to my manager? I don’t even have a manager. Libby’s the closest thing to it, and she commanded me to show up exactly how they hired me. Fat lot of good that did me. Literally. “Cool. Who else will be there?”

  “Asella. And Herbie.”

  Herbie is a sixty-year-old chorus boy with a wooden leg. I’m in the Broadway special ed class.

  “Party time,” I manage to say.

  “That’s the right attitude,” Monica says, patting me. “We’ll see you after lunch—and then every morning at nine thirty.”

  “On the dot,” Garret says, sneaking up behind her like the ghost he’s practically ancient enough to be. “We haven’t got a moment to lose.”

  “Come on, Nate,” Keith yells from the door. “We might grab hot chocolates, instead, on the way over.”

  That’s more my speed.

  “Hot tea,” Garret says, loud enough that Genna overhears and giggles. She’s scooping out lip balm from one of those little jars and spying on the whole interrogation.

  “Hot tea,” I say. “You betcha, Mr. Charles.”

  And though I try to be cool about it, nothing could be hotter than how my cheeks feel right now.

  Nothing Ice Cream Can’t Solve

  (Five weeks till
first preview)

  You know how “What did you do over summer break?” is the worst question ever?

  “How was your first day of rehearsal—yesterday?” Other questions can feel the same way. “I can’t believe you didn’t call me back last night,” Libby says. “I feel like you’ve been gone forever, already.”

  I’m staring into Aunt Heidi’s computer monitor, which glows a soft blue in the corner of her bedroom. Heidi’s cat is circling my feet and cozying up to my knee. Frankly, it’s almost a little too exciting.

  “Yeah,” I say, “I can’t believe we missed each other online.”

  Libby adjusts her laptop monitor. She’s got a Häagen-Dazs Cookies & Cream cracked open, hacking at the thing with a spoon and letting a nearby bowl of celery go completely ignored. “Well,” she says, swallowing an important Oreo chunk, “before you launch into the rehearsal report: I’ve got news too.”

  I’m delighted to get off-topic. E.T. is all I’ve been thinking about. A casual observer would almost call me obsessed. “Go for it.”

  “Well, two things,” Libby says, picking up her computer. My stomach lurches; I’m not good with sudden movement or change, which should make tap dancing in the finale a real joy. “First of all, I strung lights from my ceiling.” She shows off beautiful red lanterns.

  “Gorge,” I say.

  “I wanted a real Flower Drum thing in here.” She’s quoting our favorite unloved Rodgers & Hammerstein score. It was technically a flop, so technically a swearword, but we’re not saints, after all.

  “And the second piece of news?” I say.

  She sits down with her back to a twin-size mattress placed haphazardly against her wall. “The second thing is: now that James Madison has been expelled from General Thomas—”

  “Yes?” Ugh. James Madison, legendary bully.

  “—the school has taken on, like, a totally new tone.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Something clanks from my aunt’s kitchen, and possibly even a glass breaks. Heidi’s putting together soup and grilled cheeses for us, but “anything could happen” (Heidi’s quote) when she’s around a stove.