“Yeah.”
“And who exactly are you?” There was a tone of real aggression in her voice now.
“Um, Sully.” The toy’s name was the first that popped into my mind.
“Well, Sally, I regret to inform you that Dylan is well and truly taken.”
“Taken?”
“Yes, taken. By me. We are, in fact, dating. So back the hell off, bitch!”
Strike three. I drew a line through Dylan’s name on the list.
It was too soon to panic — there were still five months before prom. But there was only one name left on that list of rare specimens.
At the start of that afternoon’s rehearsal, Doug clapped his hands to get our attention and said, “Listen up, I’ve got something important to tell you. I’ve discussed it with Ms. Gooding” — he nodded in the direction of the drama teacher, who, tonight, again sat in the back corner of the auditorium — “and after lots of thinking and agonizing, I’ve decided to recast the play.”
“Yes!” Zack pumped his fist in the air. “Just call me Romero. Hey, Wren, I think we need to get to know each other a whole lot better to amp up our onstage-chemistry. Are you free tonight?”
“Not so fast, Zack. You’re still playing Matteo,” Doug said.
Zack’s face crumpled in disappointment. “But —”
“You’re too good in the part. No one else could do it as well as you.”
“When you put it like that … I mean, I am good.” He glanced around for confirmation.
“You’re awesome, Zack. The very best,” said Liz, deadpan.
“So, what roles have been changed?” Jay asked.
“You’ll be glad to know, I’m sure we’ll all be glad to know, that you’re still Romero, Jay.”
Jay blew out a breath, grinned and said, “Cool. Thanks.”
“It was the girls’ parts I had to shuffle.” Doug cleared his throat nervously and then said very quickly, “So Wren will play the maid, Liz will play the friar-person, and Peyton’s Juliet.”
“Come again?” I could not have heard right. “What was that?”
“Yeah,” said Wren, looking grumpy. “Run that by us again.”
“You’re the maid, Liz is the nondenominational religious-leader-ty —”
“And who’s Juliet?”
“Peyton,” said Doug, with an expression that looked like a wince.
“Me? I’m Juliet? You want me to play a girl part? You want me to play the freaking lead? Opposite Jay?”
I glanced across at Jay and found he was already watching me, nodding slowly and smiling slightly, as if he thought this might not be the most absurd idea ever suggested in the history of theater.
“Yes. You can act well, I know that from past years. I mean, I’ve never actually seen you play a part written for a woman,” he qualified, “but I’m sure you can do it. And, of course, there’s the all-important physical match. You’re the perfect height to play opposite Jay.”
“Huh.” For once in my life — for perhaps the very first time in my life — my height had landed me something good.
Emotions tumbled around inside of me, like the tangled clothes in the dryer this morning. I was proud to be trusted with a great role for once, thrilled at the challenge of such a fantastic part, excited to play an honest-to-God woman for a change. But I was also terrified. Could I pull it off? Judging from the skeptical looks being directed my way, most of the cast had some serious doubts about my ability — even Doug didn’t seem entirely convinced.
“I wanted to play Juliet,” Wren told Doug, blinking tears away and pouting prettily.
“You’re an awesome actor, Wren. But you’re in tenth grade, and you’ve got another two years to play great lead roles. Jay’s a senior, so it’s his last chance. And I’m sorry, but the two of you look plain wrong playing next to each other. But,” Doug said, “I’ve added some extra lines for you, and I have some great ideas about how you can play her in an amazing new way.”
Wren sniffed, but looked mollified. “Okay,” she said. “I guess.”
“Liz, you okay with playing the friar-type person?”
Liz shrugged. “I get to poison the popular boy — what’s not to like?”
“Jay, you okay with the changes?” Doug asked.
“Sure, yeah. Let’s do this, Peyton!”
My stomach flipped over as I realized what playing opposite Jay would mean. Hours spent rehearsing together, murmuring romantic lines to each other, gazing into his eyes and having him stare longingly back. Kissing!
I felt my body stiffen with rising panic. I, the girl infatuated with Jay, was going to play the part of a heroine head over heels in love with Romero, but not let Jay, the boy dating Faye, realize how I felt about him in real life. I’d be acting offstage as much as I was onstage. How the heck was I going to manage it?
My panic must have shown on my face, because Doug said encouragingly, “You can do it, Peyton. You can. And Jay will help you. We’ll do whatever it takes — extra rehearsals with just the two of you, trust-building exercises, private sessions for body work.”
Zack sniggered. I stared at Jay and swallowed hard. He chuckled.
“Right, let’s begin all over again with a first read-through, this time with everyone in their new roles,” said Doug.
Once again, we arranged a circle of chairs on the stage, but this time I sat down next to Jay, instead of on the other side of the circle.
“You okay, Tiger Eyes?” Jay said softly when I perched on the seat beside him. “You look a little freaked out.”
“I’m okay,” I croaked.
Trying to avoid looking at him, I stared instead at his left hand, which lay relaxed on his thigh. It was a big hand, bigger than mine — I was sure of it. His fingers were long and his nails short, and the skin on the back of his hand had a sprinkling of freckles like the ones on his nose.
“Peyton?”
I turned to look into those olive-green eyes. Felt my stomach flip again. How was I going to do this without melting into a puddle every time he looked at me? How was I going to hide my feelings to avoid humiliating myself and embarrassing him?
“You don’t have to worry. I promise I don’t bite.”
He didn’t need to bite. Just his smile was enough to unbalance and befuddle me.
~ 17 ~
I was stuffing my backpack with everything I’d need for the day — a jacket, my dog-eared and annotated Romero and Juliet script, my almost-empty wallet — when my mother knocked at my bedroom door.
“Oh, are you going out?” she asked when I let her in.
“I’m helping Chloe with her Halloween stall at the farmers’ market this morning, and then I’ve got rehearsal this afternoon, and work tonight.”
“Are you okay for lifts?”
“Yes.” What would she do if I said no?
“It’s such a pity you have to work on Halloween.”
“Yup.”
“I suppose you’d rather be at home, working on your sewing projects?” She moved over to my sewing machine and picked up a couple of the pieces from the old patterns to examine more closely. “You’re very clever to be able to make head or tail out of these.”
Making an effort to do it gently, I took the pattern pieces out of her hands and slid them back into their correct envelopes, before they could get lost. I wished my mother would stay away from my stuff, or even better, from my room. These mother-daughter chats were all kinds of awkward and uncomfortable. We had nothing to say to each other. Or, rather, she had a never-ending stream of nothings to say, and I had so much to say that I didn’t dare say anything, in case everything came pouring out.
“But then you always had clever fingers — even as a little girl you loved making clothes.” She paged through my sketchbook, smiling at the places where, instead of fabric, I’d cut patterned candy wrappers, fall leaves and old gift-wrap into the shapes of garments for my sketched models.
“I did?”
“Yes, don’t you remember? You were just
a tiny little thing, and you used to make clothes for your dolls and toys. You’d make dresses for your Teddy and Barbie out of dishcloths. And hats out of paper and tissues and such. Dressing them up was your favorite game, and even back then you had a real flair for it.”
“Did I sew the clothes?” I asked, interested in spite of myself.
“I think it was more scotch-tape and rubber bands than sewing, but I could check, if you like? I’ve got all your old arts and crafts safely stored in the basement.” Her face lit up at the idea of unearthing the old treasures. “And, of course, I still have Teddy.” Her smile faded.
“Have you eaten breakfast?” I asked.
“I had two Snickers bars, does that count?”
“Snickers? For breakfast?”
“I opened the package of Halloween candy I bought for tonight, and I just couldn’t resist.”
“You know chocolate makes your asthma worse. You’ve got to take better care of yourself.”
“Are you nagging me about nutrition?” she asked, smiling wryly. “Just who’s the mother around here?”
Good question.
“Anyway, having sampled it, I can confirm that it’s great candy, not cheap knockoffs. The trick-or-treaters are going to love them. And I got an excellent last-minute deal for a bulk package.”
I knew she was only trying to make conversation, but I had neither the time to hear about how she planned to feed other peoples’ children, nor the patience to hear about her online shopping expeditions.
When I made no response, she asked, “Did you hear what I said about the bargain I got on the candy?”
“What do you want — a medal for spending more money we don’t have?”
“You’re so hard on me, Peyton,” she said, eyes brimming with tears.
I wished she’d get mad at me, instead of sad. I suspected I needled her precisely to provoke her temper, but if so, the effort was futile. She never got mad, never shouted at me, or confiscated my phone, or grounded me. She just let me hurt her and then looked at me with wounded, liquid eyes. Which only annoyed me even more. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattled, shout, “Wake up!” I wanted to shock her or scare her, or infuriate her back into life. But whatever I did only seemed to make things worse.
I had to get away for good before I damaged both of us beyond fixing.
“What did I ever do to make you so angry?” she asked. She made no move to wipe away the tear trickling down her cheek.
“It’s more what you didn’t do.”
“What do you mean?” She seemed truly puzzled. Was she really that clueless, so wrapped up in herself?
“Mom, I don’t even know where to begin.”
Luckily, I didn’t have to, because just then a distinctive three-beat honk sounded from outside. Saved by the horn.
“That’s Chloe, I’ve got to go.”
As I swung over the windowsill, I caught a last glimpse of my mother standing in the center of my perfectly neat room, still clutching the sketchbook. She looked forlorn and something more — lonely, perhaps. I felt a pang of guilt, or perhaps compassion.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you miserable,” I said. “Save some chocolate for me, and we’ll have a midnight feast when I get home from work, okay?”
She gave me a smile so pathetically grateful, I immediately felt even more guilty. And irritated. I was at least as bad a daughter as she was a mother. We made quite the dysfunctional pair, her and me.
The farmers’ market was cute — wooden stalls, straw bales, carved pumpkins, orange bunting, and wandering minstrels playing flutes and tambourines. Small children, their faces painted to resemble skeletons, witches and kittens, raced up and down the aisles, and excited dogs burrowed into the raked piles of fall leaves.
Chloe’s stall was a perfect picture of stomach-turning Halloween treats: witches’ fingers made from green-frosted sponge cake, with slivered almond nails; slippery jello worms; chocolate spiders; brownie graves pierced with white chocolate RIP tombstones, and red-velvet cake pops decorated to resemble bloodied eyeballs.
“Where did you find the time to make all these?” I asked when I saw the full range displayed on the skeleton-print tablecloth. I knew Chloe’s school workload was at least as heavy as my own.
“My mom made most of these.”
Must be nice.
“But I sprinkled the shredded coconut on the spiders’ legs,” Chloe added proudly.
“Good job — they’re almost too revolting too eat.” Almost. I’d already gobbled one that had lost a few legs in transport. “And you can tell your mother they’re delicious.”
A little kid dressed as a bandaged mummy came over to inspect the goods. “How much are they?” he asked, with a nose-clearing snort.
“A dollar each.” Chloe tapped the sign which showed the price.
“A dollar?” he whined.
“But I’ll do a special price, just for you — three for two dollars.”
“Three for two?” Another phlegmy sniff.
“Just for you,” Chloe confirmed, “because you’re special.”
“Well, I don’t know.” The kid leaned over the spiders, and I expected at any moment to see mucus drip onto their hairy legs.
“You strike a hard bargain, sir,” Chloe said. The kid grinned at that and nodded so vigorously that a bandage on his head began unraveling. “Tell you what, if you buy two, I’ll throw in one for free!”
“For free?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll take two spiders and one grave,” the kid said.
“You got it, sir!”
When he walked off, already happily dismembering the spider, I laughed. “You’re a natural-born seller.”
Chloe had said she was selling the Halloween treats to add to her college fund, but it was clear from her smiles and glowing face that she was also doing it for the sheer fun and challenge of the to-and-fro selling game. Through the course of the morning, I saw her make several just-for-you deals and special offers, and wondered how many online sites were suckering my mother with similar lures.
“The trick is to package the pitch just right for each customer. You want them to think they got a real bargain, but you still want to make a healthy profit for yourself,” Chloe said, after getting a harassed-looking father to buy a dozen brownie graves for ten dollars.
“As ways of making money go, this standing around in the sunshine and sampling the wares sure beats waitressing at the diner. Especially since Tori and Steve are still on my case.”
Every time we drew the same shifts, they hassled me about my lack of progress on the dating scene. I was still determined to win the bet. Apart from the minor issue of winning — or losing — eight hundred dollars, there was the fact that, with every long fiber of my tall being, I did not want them to be proved right. Because that would be me being proved right, too. Deep down, I didn’t think guys liked Amazons either.
“Though, to be honest, I’m so busy between school, work and rehearsals that I don’t know when I’d find the time to date anyway. I’ll wait until January before I put the moves on Robert Scott. That’ll give me three months to wangle three dates out of him, and maybe my luck will be better next year.”
“It’s a pity I don’t know of a love potion tea that we could slip into someone’s” — here Chloe gave a loud cough that sounded a lot like the word Jay — “water bottle, so that he’d fall for you.”
“He’s still seeing Faye,” I said, staring glumly down at the eyeballs. They stared back, reminding me of her — how she sat front and center at every rehearsal, watching Jay’s every move and giving me filthy looks.
“Rehearsals must be majorly awkies.”
“You have no idea.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“What I want to do is check out some of the other stalls. You okay on your own for a while?”
“Run free, little one!”
~ 18 ~
I mean
dered through the market, admiring a display of hand-wrought pewter jewelry and another of blown-glass baubles shimmering with iridescent colors in the October sunlight, and tasting the delicious samples set out at the food stalls. It was a treat, for a change, to taste something that hadn’t been cooked in a microwave. A girl could get real tired of TV dinners.
But the stall that held my attention was one called Past Times, which stocked vintage clothing — some old military uniforms, a fifties-style flared skirt in pink taffeta, a double-breasted box-jacket with brass buttons, and even a white, tasseled flapper dress from the 1920’s. All the garments were gorgeous. The colors, textures and lines of the fabric invited my hands to touch.
Though I couldn’t afford even one of the satin gloves, I couldn’t resist trying on a full-length coat of finest scarlet wool, with large black buttons and a snug waist. The saleslady raved, popped a matching red beret on my head, and insisted I admire myself in her full-length mirror.
Full-length, my eye. The mirror reflected only as high as my chin. To see the beret, I had to bend my knees, which ruined the effect of the coat.
“When I am queen of the world,” I informed Chloe back at her stall, “all mirrors will need to be fixed at least a foot higher on walls, and freestanding full-length mirrors will need to be placed a minimum of one and a half feet off the ground. This measure will ensure that tall girls can see their whole reflection in one go.”
“I think that would discriminate against shorties,” said Chloe. “They’d have to stand on stools to see the whole of themselves.”
“It would serve them right,” I muttered, thinking of all the violators of The Law. “But okay, I shall decree instead that all full-length mirrors will need to be at least 6ft in length.”
“And what about big girls?” asked Chloe, holding her arms away from her sides. “They can’t see all of themselves in mirrors either, and I don’t hear them complaining.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Are you trying to annoy me, or is it just coming naturally?”
“This might be a good time for me to go get us some tea,” said Chloe.
The Law of Tall Girls Page 10