The Fall Musical

by Peter Lerangis

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prepare Ye - September 4

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Day by Day - October 1

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Save the People - November 6

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  The Chance of a Lifetime

  Charles stepped forward with what looked like a scroll. He unraveled it to the ground, a ridiculous number of loose-leaf pages stapled end to end. “Whereas,” he announced, “we the Drama Club have put our feet in mouth one too many times without watching where we’ve stepped—”

  “Charles, that’s nauseating,” Reese said.

  “Nobody edited this!” Brianna called out.

  “And whereas,” Charles continued, “we have managed, without meaning to, to chase away one of the nicest, most talented and clear-thinking human beings in our school . . . and whereas, she has, in world-record time, proven said talent beyond a doubt and better than anyone ever seen by the gathered members hereto—”

  “Herewith,” Harrison corrected him.

  “Herewhatever,” Charles said. “We do hereby offer outright, without competition and by acclamation, to Casey Chang the position of Stage Manager of the Drama Club of Ridgeport High.”

  They fell silent and looked up at her with wide, tentative eyes.

  One by one they dropped to their knees. “Please?” Harrison asked.

  “It’s the most important job in the club,” Charles said. “It’s the person who runs everything.”

  Begging. They were begging her to take this job with no experience. At Ridgeport.

  Read all the Drama Club books:

  The Fall Musical

  The Big Production

  SPEAK

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

  Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2007

  Copyright © Peter Lerangis, 2007

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS C TALO,GING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Lerangis, Peter.

  Drama club : book 1 : the fall musical / by Peter Lerangis.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68436-4

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To the stars that dazzle:

  Tina, Nick, and Joe

  Prologue

  THEY SAY IF YOU STARE AT THE PHOTOS LONG enough, you’ll see yourself. You can’t miss them. They cover an entire wall of the school lobby, every year since 1907. The ones way up top are hard to see, but they’re all boys in togas, animal skins, and drag. Often a mysterious blurry bear lurks in the background, supposedly the ghost of a murdered kid but probably some forgotten joke. It was a boys’ school then, and when girls showed up a couple of decades later, the Masque & Wig Society became the Drama Club.

  Every few years a newspaper will do a feature on this. They’ll say most high schools have walls for sports teams, debate teams, math squads, etc. But, they’ll conclude, Ridgeport High is “not most high schools.” And they’re right. Okay, if you look real hard, you’ll find a small dusty cabinet near the boys’ room that contains a few trophies and a list of track records intact since Lamar Williams high-jumped 6’ 1¼” in 1985. I guess Kyle Taggart’s football records will be added someday, but no one seems to be rushing (ha ha). But the lobby wall, the school’s prime show-off spot, is reserved for something else, something much more important.

  Ridgeport is the kind of place where Stephen Sondheim is sung in the hallways, The Light in the Piazza is on everyone’s playlists, and you can spark a heated argument by mentioning the name Martin Pakledinaz. (He’s a costume designer. I didn’t know that either.) Kids give impromptu concerts in the halls, and teachers sing backup. Even Mr. Ippolito, the custodian, does a mean doo-wop second tenor and can recite Shakespeare. He keeps the photos spotless. Especially the Shrine, a glassed-in photo display of the five RHS alums who went on to win Tony Awards.

  Brianna Glaser swears she was, in a previous life, the girl playing in Annie Get Your Gun in a 1966 photo; the girl doesn’t resemble her at all, but it’s hard to disagree with Brianna. Harrison Michaels is the guy playing Zeus in some 1931 play. Reese Van Cleve is, of course, the babe in 1989’s Pajama Game with the 300-watt smile, long legs, and big boobs—a girl who, depending on who you talk to, went on to become a backup singer for Madonna or an Internet porn star.

  Me? I didn’t pay much attention to the photos at first. For one thing, there were no Asian faces for, oh, seventy years. Brianna insisted that didn’t matter and that I was being close-minded, but I think I’m a realist. People see what they want to see. I mean, we all dream of a perfect place, where everyone gets you. Where you can be exactly who you want to be and not worry about making an ass of yourself or pleasing someone else. Some people find it in teams and social cliques. Some have to travel to an imaginary wizard school or through a hidden wardrobe or on a Kansas tornado. In Ridgeport, people find it in the Drama Club.

  As for me, I had to work a little harder. A few weeks after I turned sixteen, in another life in Connecticut, everything changed. Nothing I knew or believed made any sense. On that day I stopped being Kara Chang. I was no longer the good girl, the Organized One, the class president and yearbook editor who could do Whatever She Put Her Mind To. After the school year ended, Mom and I moved away. We had to. Dad probably would have wanted us to stay, but he’d walked out on us three years earlier, so his opinion didn’t count. So, of all the places to move, why did Mom choose Ridgeport, Long Island? I don’t know, probably something like water quality or school SAT scores or the availability of good nursing jobs. I don’t think it was because of the magic that’s here. That was for me to find out. And I did. I realized that in a town where the stage was reality, I could become a new person.

  Of course, I couldn’t go too far with this. Mom would have had a heart attack if I’d called myself Ethel or Bernadette or Idina, so I stretched to the limits of my available options. I introduced myself to people as K.C., which isn’t exactly a lie, but just as I hoped, they spelled it the way it sounds.

  And that’s how I b
ecame who I am today, Casey.

  I became one of those people who need to escape themselves to find themselves. Only I didn’t do it via a trip to Oz or Hogwarts or Narnia. I didn’t even expect to do it through the Drama Club.

  Then I ran into the hurricane known as Brianna Glaser.

  Prepare Ye

  September 4

  1

  24 . . . 15 . . . 4.

  Casey spun the lock for the third time and pulled on the locker handle. For the third time, nothing happened. She smiled, tried not to look like an idiot, and checked the locker number against the assignment sheet. Yup—217.

  The warning bell clanged loud enough to wake a corpse, but no one seemed to notice. Three minutes to homeroom. Later for the locker. She gave the handle one last sharp, futile yank.

  Thwack.

  The door lurched open, throwing her off balance. It smacked loudly against the locker next to it, causing at least four hundred heads to turn. Casey’s backpack slid down her left arm, and as she twisted around in an effort to save it, her belly popped out over her pants, and for some reason she was reminded of yeasty bread rising in a pan. It had not been a great summer for weight, and as she now had a rapt and unwanted audience, she pulled down her shirt, and the pack flung itself onto the floor, sliding across the tiles.

  “Fumble!”

  A blond boy the size of a Dumpster thumped after the pack, scooping it up. He cradled it briefly, lurching from side to side, faking out no one in particular, then tossed the backpack to another Supersizer, who scrunched it into a roughly oblong shape and lifted it as if to pass.

  From behind, a third hulk grabbed the pack roughly and turned toward Casey. Oh, great. Now what? Lessons in Humiliation 101, and her career at Ridgeport wasn’t even three minutes old. She thought about the open locker. With a little sucking in, she could squeeze inside, pull the door shut, and stay there the rest of the semester.

  Until Hulk Number Three came closer, and she got a good look at him.

  “Is this yours?”

  He was looming over her now, about nine feet tall. Or maybe six feet three. His shoulders strained the seams of a button-down striped Abercrombie shirt that hung loose over a navy T. Possibly jeans, too, but Casey didn’t pick up that detail because she was stuck at the upper half, specifically the eyes, which were blue—well, in the sense that freedom and joy and dancing in a field of wildflowers could be called blue. He cocked his head to the left, causing a shock of sandy-blond hair to fall across his face, which seemed less a motion than a change in the weather, a sudden spring breeze.

  He held out the backpack toward her. “Sorry about my friends,” he said. “They’re animals.”

  Casey moved her lips, attempting to respond, but no words came out. By the time she could try again he was gone. She watched him bound down the hallway, his head floating above the sea of shorter people.

  “Thanks,” she squeaked belatedly, to no one.

  “Okay, now, breathe.”

  The voice startled Casey. It belonged to a girl from a locker to her left. She was the type Casey’s dad used to call “a tall drink of water.”

  “Huh?” Casey said.

  “He has that effect on everyone,” the girl continued. “Girls, guys, teachers. He can’t help it. Brianna.”

  It took Casey a second to realize the girl was naming herself and not the guy.

  “Kar—Casey,” she replied, pulling back her old name and cringing at the fact that she had to.

  “Make up your mind.” Brianna laughed, her eyes crinkling into triangles and her mouth showing a little too much gum line, the only flaws in a face that was otherwise all cheekbone framed by blond ringlets. “His name, in case you were wondering, and I know you were, is Kyle. Kyle Taggart. Where are you from?”

  “Westfield,” Casey said, adding as an explanation, “that’s in Connecticut.”

  “Thank you, Carmen Sandiego. Who do you have for homeroom?”

  Casey pulled a folded sheet out of her pocket. “Liebowitz.”

  “Lifer,” Brianna said with a nod. “Sometimes forgets things, like his socks or toupee. Two naps short of Alzheimer’s. I’m going the same direction.”

  Casey opened her locker and stashed her jacket and book bag, arranging them so that the jacket hung perfectly, and the bag was available with a quick arm swipe.

  “That looks like an ad for a catalog,” Brianna observed. “Are you always that neat?”

  “Only when I’m nervous,” Casey admitted. “It’s just first-day jitters.”

  Brianna grinned and pulled open her own her locker. The inner door was already decorated with family snapshots and magazine photos. A couple of the usual movie stars—Casey was not into them—but also some other shots that she did not expect to see.

  “The loves of my life,” Brianna said, noticing Casey’s curious glance. “The child holding the disgustingly obese hamster is Colter Glaser, my adorably obese brother—”

  “Putnam County Spelling Bee . . . ” Casey said, glancing at a photo of a white-shirted Latino guy dressed as a kid standing in front of other young men and women, also dressed as kids. She’d seen the show three times, as well as all the other shows represented on Brianna’s door.

  Avenue Q. Phantom. Les Miz. Wicked . . .

  “Jose Llana is so hot, but you could never tell by this picture,” Brianna said.

  “I know,” Casey replied. “I saw him in Rent.”

  Brianna’s face brightened. “Me, too. Didn’t you just want to jump his bones?”

  “Well, I was little, but—”

  “Jose, don’t take this the wrong way, but we love you!” Brianna gave the photo a kiss, shut the locker door, then slid over to Casey’s and closed hers. “The trick is, after you do the combination, lift the handle first and then pull. If you try to do both together, it sticks. I think Mr. Liebowitz installed these, just after the Depression. Try it and let’s go.”

  Casey did, it worked, and she ran to catch up to Brianna, who was already gliding down the hallway with long, graceful steps.

  “Do you sing?” Brianna asked.

  “Not really,” Casey said. “I’m more an instrument type. Piano, clarinet. I mean, I like to sing, but I’ve done only regular plays, not musicals. So I kind of suck.”

  “Sucking is not a relative act. One either sucks or doesn’t. No ‘kind of’ about it. But I’ll be the judge of that. In terms of singing, I mean. In any other sense of the word, that’s your business.” Brianna tossed her a smile and a wink. A wink! Casey had never met anyone who actually winked in normal conversation. “Now, speaking of sucky singing . . . ” Brianna nodded toward a thin girl in fashionably baggy clothes and a fedora, whose red hair flowed nearly to her waist. “That’s Darci. You know what we say about Darci. Dances like a butterfly, sings like a bee. Hey, Darse—this is Casey—you coming to the audition?”

  “Heeeey!” Darci ran to Brianna and gave her a huge hug, waving to Casey at the same time. “When is it?”

  “A week from today, September 11. And if you can sing in tune, which is a big if, callbacks are Thursday.”

  “LAAAAH!” Darci hooted in a mock operatic voice that sounded, well, pretty sucky.

  “Work on it,” Brianna said. “A lot.” Walking on, she leaned into Casey. “Hope you don’t mind. I’m recruiting. Usually, I’m the star, but for this show I’m student director. It’s something I’ve wanted to try, but you can’t do that and act. Unfortunately.”

  Casey trailed her around the corner, where a group of guys (and one Goth girl) was playing Magic cards in the hallway. “The two handsome guys,” Brianna said, “are Ethan Smith and Corbin Smythe, who sing in the a cappella group, the Vanderdonks, which comes from when this place was the Adriaen Van der Donck School for Boys, I kid you not. Anyway, they have a stand-up act called—three guesses—Smith and Smythe. They are actually funny. The guy in blue is Jason. He can sing, but he acts with his shoulders. Ask him to be happy, he shrugs. Sad, he shrugs. The girl is Lilith. Sh
e likes Jason’s shoulders very much. Often you will see her crying on them. Hey, guys!”

  “Yo!” some of the boys shouted, including Jason, who shrugged.

  “Now, Lori Terrell over there, the one with the huge crucifix hanging from her neck, will be singing at the Met someday—that’s the Metropolitan Opera, not the museum,” Brianna said, waving to a modestly dressed, raven-haired girl who looked like she knew her way around the plus-size rack at Talbot’s. “She’s a senior. Standing stalwartly beside her is Royce Reardon, also a senior. We call him Royce of No Voice, but he’s tried out for every show and he’s sweet. And there’s Reese, our star dancer-slut, who at the moment is involved in her favorite activity, baring flesh before the clamoring multitudes.”

  “Hey, Bri,” called Reese, a girl with pulled-back red hair who, right there in the hallway, was doing a split that revealed the longest, most perfectly bronzed legs Casey had ever seen—although they were a little hard to see through the thicket of boys surrounding her.

  “Drool alert, Mr. Ippolito—all over the floor next to Reese!” Brianna said to a custodian who was approaching with a mop. “Mr. Ippolito, by the way, played Hector, the third Iowan from the right, in this school’s 1972 production of Music Man.”

  “How do you know that?” Casey asked.

  “I have a photographic memory.”

  Mr. Ippolito, a gangly man with sandy hair turning silver, began dancing with his mop. “Dancinnnng in the daaaark,” he sang. “Do I get a callback?”

  “We love you, but keep your day job,” Brianna replied.

  Casey stared at Brianna in wonder. “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?” Brianna said.

  “When you say those things about them—do they mind it?”

  “They love it,” Brianna replied. “That’s because it’s said with love and honesty. Well, honesty at least. When you don’t say things, when you pretend or keep secrets—that’s when people freak. No secrets, no twisted knickers. That’s the motto of the DC. Well, it’s not, but it should be.”