“Yeah.”
“Good.” His voice sounded like he was smiling. “I promise I’ll take care of you. I won’t let you get hurt. You can rely on me.”
Those words, and the sincere way in which he said them, brought a catch to my throat, and a prickle of tears to my eyes. They were words I’d never heard before, not spoken to me.
I nodded an acknowledgment, but on the inside I was slapping my face, because I needed to get a grip. Jay was talking about the exercise, not a freaking lifelong commitment to my health and happiness.
He spun me around on the spot a couple of times, so that I lost of all sense of direction, and then we started moving. Strangely, it was way easier than I’d expected. I realized that I did trust him. It was me I had the problem with. Me I didn’t trust to take care of myself, to protect me from being hurt by the world, to lead me in the right direction, to see and avoid the obstacles which tripped me up and laid me flat.
Beside me, Jay’s deep voice and his strong, steady arm guided me as I wove between curtained wings, climbed up ladders and down stairs, and turned on taps and drank water (without chipping a tooth) in the backstage dressing rooms.
Eventually, we stopped, and he let go my hand.
“Hold on,” he said.
Then his hands were at my waist, and I — all six feet and one-and-three-quarter inch of me — was being lifted into the air and deposited gently on my butt, on the edge of the stage. No one in my life had ever lifted me up without groaning and complaining. Well, maybe when I was a baby, but it was hard to remember myself as anything other than massive. Easier to imagine I’d been born a giant, that maybe I’d put my father’s back out when he lifted me from my cradle, and tested my mother’s biceps when she hauled me out of the bath.
Now I felt light as thistledown, as petite as Wren, as feminine as any girl on the planet, and I only just restrained myself from pathetically thanking him for the novel sensation.
There was a tug of the blindfold, and then I was blinking at the light. Jay hopped up onto the stage to sit beside me, clearly pleased at the success of our first exercise.
“No bangs or bruises?” he asked, grinning.
When he smiled like that, the softness of his mouth flattened out, and he was all male. I stared at his lips, dreaming of sinking into his arms, of having him hug me tighter than anyone ever had while repeating what he’d said about taking care of me. And gently kissing the top of my head as I nestled against his chest. It was a superb fantasy.
“Peyton?” He was asking me something.
“Huh?”
“Are you okay?” He was staring down — down — at me, with a concerned expression.
“Sure.” I pried my gaze away from his and made myself stare instead at my feet, where the blue canvas of my sneakers was separating from the white rubber of the toe. “What’s next?”
“Next, you fall into my arms.”
“What?”
Had I given myself away, somehow? I could feel the shock and horror on my face, and it must have looked ludicrous because he threw back his head and laughed.
“It’s just an exercise. Here.” He stood up, held out a hand and then effortlessly pulled me to my feet. “Like this.” He turned me around so that I stood with my back to him, and then said, “Take a couple of steps away from me. Just a little further. And one more, that’s it — stop there.”
I stood in the center of the stage, staring into the wings, feeling uneasy. “Now what?”
“Now you just fall backward, into my arms.”
“I just do what, now?” I spun around to peer disbelievingly at him.
“You fall backward, as if you were fainting, and I’ll catch you.”
“No. I’ll be too heavy for you.”
Some things were certain, like the effect of gravity on apples, the magnetic attraction online sales exerted on my mother, and the inability of anyone to catch my deadweight if I fell.
“No, you won’t. Not even close,” he said, sounding like I’d insulted him. “Here, fold your arms like this.” He stepped over to me and crossed my arms over my chest.
“I feel like a corpse.”
Which is what I would be when I toppled backward and hit the deck of the stage like a felled tree in a forest. The floor would tremble, the flats stacked against the back wall of the stage would tip over, stage lights would shake loose from their rigging above, and Jay would realize my size, finally catch on that I was more giant redwood than thistledown.
“Peyton,” he said, and his voice was deep and warm beside my ear, “do you still not trust me?”
“No!” Desperate times called for honest measures. “No, I don’t, okay?”
“I promise I’ll catch you. I will not let you fall.”
My eyes were stinging again.
“Promise?” I asked.
He grasped my hand and placed the palm over his chest, covering it with his own. “I promise,” he said. “Hand on heart.”
“Okay,” I whispered, “I’ll try.”
“Can’t ask for more than that.” He took a few steps backward and indicated with his fingers that I should turn around. “Cross your heart,” he said.
“And hope to die,” I whispered, folding my arms across my chest and digging my fingers into the soft flesh between my shoulders and neck.
“Now just fall backward,” he said.
So I did.
It took everything I had to shift my balance those few inches — all my scarce trust, every meager grain of faith in the power of others to support me and keep me safe. But I did it. I fell back. And he caught me, hands under my arms, holding up my back. And — extra credit to the big guy — he didn’t even grunt in exertion, or complain afterwards about pulled muscles or dislocated vertebrae.
“You didn’t let me fall,” I marveled.
“I promised you I wouldn’t. Ready to try again?”
I thought about that. On the one hand, I now trusted him a bit more — a leeeeetle bit more. On the other …
“What if you’ve exhausted your muscles?”
“Peyton,” he said, one side of his mouth quirking up, “please don’t be ridiculous. Do I look exhausted?”
He looked strong and fit, and anything but feeble. I turned around, crossed my arms and fell backward. He caught me. And this time I laughed at the sheer joy of the rare experience.
“There you go,” he said, smiling. “That’s how you do it.”
I toppled into his arms three more times and then insisted that I take my turn catching him. He apparently had no trust issues, or doubts about my ability to catch him. Without a second’s hesitation, he spun around and collapsed back into my arms. I managed to keep his head from banging onto the stage floor when he fell, but frankly, it was an effort. A major effort. If it had been Zack, I wouldn’t have had a problem, but Jay was tall. And heavy.
“Umph,” I grunted the first time.
The second time I toppled backward, and he landed on top of me.
“Are you okay?” I asked, sitting up and bending over his head to inspect him for injuries, aware that I’d failed in keeping him upright, though I had at least cushioned his fall.
“You know,” said Jay, lying on his back with his head in my lap. “This is surprisingly comfortable.”
It was. I could smell his faintly spicy scent, and was close enough to count his freckles. Jay sighed and seemed in no hurry to move. My hand lifted of its own volition and moved to his head. My fingers were already just touching his hair, ready to run my fingers through it, when I caught myself and snatched them back.
“Peyton?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you like acting?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yeah, why.”
“I dunno,” I said, and waited.
This was a tactic I often used when people asked me difficult or awkward questions. Most people couldn’t stand a silence and rushed in to answer their own
questions, letting me off the hook. But Jay wasn’t most people. He held the silence patiently, and the question hung in the air, gathering weight, until I spoke.
“I guess maybe because I sometimes enjoy not being myself,” I finally said. “When I get into a part, I feel what it’s like to be someone else.”
“You don’t like being yourself? You don’t like who you are?” A small frown furrowed the space between Jay’s eyebrows.
“Well, it’s more that the character in a play is clear on who she is. She knows what she has to say and do, and where and how to move. Her lines and moves are written for her. In real life, I often don’t have a clue how I’m supposed to be. And I don’t get rehearsals.”
His head, still lying in my lap, nodded his understanding.
“I guess I also like to disappear for a while.”
“Disappearing while you’re onstage in front of a watching audience?” He was smiling again. I loved that smile.
“Yeah. When I’m in character, I can be both seen and invisible. Crazy, right? But I don’t mind having all those eyes on me while I’m acting, because then I’m another person. They’re watching the character, not me, see? That’s easier than walking down a crowded hallway with everyone staring at me like I’m some kind of mutant.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed people gawking at you. But that kind of comes with the territory, don’t you think, of —”
I was already sighing, getting ready to respond with, Of course, but I don’t have to like it, do I? when he finished his sentence.
“— beauty.”
“Huh?” I said, completely thrown by his last word.
“When you have tiger’s eyes and a rocking body, people are going to stare, Peyton, that’s just how it is.”
I laughed so hard I bounced his head right out my lap.
He sat up, and asked, “What’s so funny?”
“You are! They’re not staring at my eyes, Jay, or at my beauty.” I sketched quotation marks around the word. “They’re gaping at my freakish height!”
He tucked back his chin in surprise and gave me a bemused look. “Do you really think that?”
“I’ve lived in this super-sized skin for a long time, and trust me, I know how people feel about it.”
“I think,” said Jay, tapping a forefinger against his lower lip, “I think it’s more about how you feel about it.”
I could feel the confusion on my face.
“I think you don’t feel comfortable in your own skin. It’s you who’s super-aware of your height, not others. You’re self-conscious, that’s what it is.”
“Look, I might be self-conscious, but —”
“Might be?” he teased.
“Okay, I am self-conscious, but other people do notice my height. They’re always calling me a giant or an Amazon, and asking me for weather reports from the stratosphere.”
“Really?” he said, momentarily distracted. “They don’t do that to me.”
“It’s different for guys,” I retorted, irked. “You may have heard of this thing called the double standard? Guys are supposed to be tall. Height is a masculine trait, so very tall girls are seen as freakish or unfeminine, whereas guys who are tall are just seen as hot.” Dang, that last word just slipped out.
“So … I’m hot?”
“You’re missing the point,” I said quickly. “They’re clocking my height, not my eyes, or whatever.”
“Okay, so they may notice that you’re taller than most girls, but do you really think they care? Or even think about it again? You’re the one that’s constantly aware of it.”
Could there be some truth in that?
“Besides,” he said, getting to his feet, dusting off the pants of his jeans and holding out a hand to help me up. “You know what Dr. Phil says …”
“I’m listening,” I said, not letting go of his hand.
In a perfect Texan accent, he drawled, “You would care a lot less about what people think of you, if you knew how seldom they did.”
~ 23 ~
The Tall Boys List:
Jay Young
Tim Anderson
Mark Rodriguez
Dylan Jones
Robert Scott
Jay Young was back on the Tall Boys List.
Now that he was free of Faye, I could ask him out on a date, but I was reluctant to do so. It felt too soon to move in for the kill, like I was some dating vulture who had been watching and waiting all this time, ready to pounce the moment his relationship with her flatlined.
Chloe disagreed with me on this. “Do it now, before someone else snaps him up,” she’d said, when I told her that he and Faye were officially over.
“I’m scared.”
“Of what — rejection?”
Always. But also, “I’m scared of screwing up this production. If a date with Jay goes badly, having to act opposite him afterward would be awful. And it won’t be fair on the rest of the cast if it messes up the show. Everyone’s put so much time and effort into it already.”
Also, a date with Jay would matter in a way it hadn’t with Tim, Dylan or Mark. If I asked Jay out, and he said no, I’d care about that. If he said yes, I’d get my hopes up — and not for winning the bet. If we dated and it went belly-up, that would upset me. No, I’d just have to hang tight until after the production was over before I made a move.
By the third week of November, with exactly one month until our production, we’d all more or less memorized our lines — Jay and me more (him because he was a pro, and me because I still feared Wren snatching the role back for me if I didn’t deliver), and Zack less. So, we were all feeling a bit more confident.
Until Doug threw us a curveball.
Romero and Juliet, he explained, was not only going modern, it was going multimedia. Giant flat screens mounted on either side of the stage would show close-ups of our faces, or panoramic shots of scene settings like sunset beaches, wild raves, and Juliet’s bedroom. Popular songs would blast out from surround-sound speakers located throughout the auditorium. And there would be a hashtag (#RomeroandJuliet4eva) so audience members could live-tweet and Instagram the performance.
“It’ll be part movie, part theater, all red-hot razzmatazz!” Doug did full-on star-fingers as he said this.
“Great,” said Liz sourly. “My pimples will be displayed on a giant screen for the whole school to see.”
“We’ll be very selective about what we project,” said Doug. “But we seriously need to work on timing, so you don’t wind up trying to say lines over the music.”
Jay didn’t look enthusiastic at the addition of the multimedia. “It’s going to be pretty distracting — to the audience and to us. You don’t reckon it’ll interfere with our performances?”
“You guys are so negative! It’s going to be great,” Doug said firmly. “It’ll be something different, so it’ll get a buzz going and help sell tickets to the kind of audience who normally wouldn’t come to a performance of Romeo and Juliet. You want full houses, don’t you?”
I did, though when I thought about my performance, I still had concerns. Scratch that. I had major doubts and the sort of dark terrors that sent me into cold sweats. But even I could tell that the scenes between Jay and me were going a lot better after our joint exercises. I still wasn’t giving it my all, but at least I knew him better now. And I trusted him enough to loosen up and let more emotion into my acting.
Wren’s Juliet had been sweet, gentle, innocent. My Juliet was more edgy and tense. I hadn’t planned it that way — I guess my natural nervous reserve just bled into the way I moved and said my dialogue — but I thought it worked better for the modernized play. In this millennium, if a girl was nothing but nice, kind and inoffensive, she’d be boring at best and a complete sap at worst.
Jay reacted to my way of playing Juliet as a tough and prickly rich girl by accommodating his own performance, becoming more bold and challenging, and less smoothly tender in his own characterization. He also began letting his s
tubble grow — telling the complaining teachers that he needed it for the role — so he looked rougher and tougher. And hotter.
After our first rehearsal with accompanying audiovisuals, we felt lost and clueless, but Doug surprised us by not only not freaking out (“It’s your first time with the multimedia, I’ve got to expect some hiccups,”) but by taking us out for burgers at Jumping Jim’s to thank us for trying.
I got a lift to the diner with Zack. I wasn’t entirely sure how that happened — I would have preferred to catch a ride with Jay, or with anyone else, really — but Zack somehow got all the girls into his fast and noisy muscle car.
“Listen to that engine, ladies,” he said, revving at the traffic lights. “That’s the sound of power and adrenaline. That’s the mating call of a real man.”
It didn’t seem to be a mating call that appealed to any of the females in the car, who reacted with eye rolls, snorts and giggles. At least the journey was short, and for a change, I got to ride shotgun.
Inside the diner, we joined up a few tables so that the cast and crew could all sit together. Somehow, I wound up sitting next to Jay. I was hyper-aware of his thigh pressing up against mine and the odd brush of his elbow against my arm. As luck would have it — my luck, other people didn’t seem to struggle like this — Tori was on duty and working our table.
When she delivered our meals, she sidled up beside me and whispered furiously, “I see you sitting there next to your tall boy, Big P, but this doesn’t count as a date even if you are making out under that table.”
“Shh!” I hissed.
“It’s a group outing — let’s both be clear on that.”
“Fine!” Now get lost.
“What was that about?” Jay leaned over to ask, his gaze on Tori’s departing form.
“Nothing.”
No way was I going to tell him about the wager — it was just too embarrassing. Sure, he’d been a good sport about the kiss that first night, but I’d be mortified if he discovered that I couldn’t get a guy to go out with me for three paltry dates. And if he felt sorry for me and volunteered to help me out again? It would be a pity date, just like Tori had said.
It was also kind of shameful. What had I been thinking, agreeing to date boys to get money? Once the production was over, I’d come clean about the bet and ask Jay out. But not before.
The Law of Tall Girls Page 13