Stage Fright

by Meg Cabot

  These were the things I knew I still had to figure out about her, in order to really get to know my character, as Uncle Jay would say…

  But I figured I had plenty of time before the big performance.

  It was as we were going out for recess toward the end of the week that an interesting thing happened. And that’s that I found out why Cheyenne always sounded so boring when she was saying her lines as the fairy queen. She’d been doing it on purpose!

  “I mean,” I overheard Cheyenne saying to Elizabeth Pukowski, who played a public transportation elf, “Mrs. Hunter can force me to play the fairy queen, but she can’t force me to play her well.”

  I elbowed Sophie. Sophie grabbed her side and made a face as if I’d really hurt her (I hadn’t). I nodded my head meaningfully toward the girls in front of us and indicated that Sophie should listen to what they were saying.

  “What do you mean?” Elizabeth looked at Shamira, who also played a public transportation elf.

  “Well, I’ll play the fairy queen,” Cheyenne said with her nose in the air. “But I’m not going to put any emotional investment into it. I mean, why should I? It’s just a silly children’s play. I’m going to save my most powerful acting for my next audition, whatever it is. Why waste my energy on this stupid play, which only our parents are going to see?”

  Elizabeth and Shamira looked at each other.

  “I don’t want to do a bad job in front of my mom and dad,” Shamira said.

  “But that’s just it,” Cheyenne said. “My parents know the kind of acting I’m capable of. I played Helen Keller, after all. Talent like mine is wasted on a part like this. So why put myself out there, is all I’m saying? M and D agree.”

  Marianne and Dominique, who’d been trailing along behind Cheyenne, but in front of Sophie and me, both nodded.

  “So,” Sophie interrupted, unable to control herself a second longer, she was so mad. “You’re not even going to try to be good in the play?”

  “No,” Cheyenne said with a shrug. She didn’t look ashamed of herself or anything.

  “But…” Sophie looked stunned. “You have to.”

  “No,” Cheyenne said. “I don’t.”

  Sophie’s eyes seemed to glaze over, and for a second, I thought her head might spin off her body.

  “Yes, you do, Cheyenne,” she practically screamed. “You have to try! Because it’s a play, and I’m the star of it, and I said so! Everyone has to do their best in it!”

  Whoa. Sophie had maybe let her starring role go to her head a bit.

  I laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and patted it a little, trying to get her to calm down. To Cheyenne, who was smirking at Sophie’s outburst, I said, “That’s a really bad attitude, Cheyenne. Just because you don’t like the part you got. There are no small parts, you know. Only small actors.”

  Cheyenne stopped smirking at Sophie and looked at me all bug-eyed. “What does that even mean?” she wanted to know.

  “Figure it out,” I advised her. And then I took a seething Sophie’s arm and steered her away from them.

  “Oh,” Sophie fretted when we joined Caroline and Erica at our special area where we play queens. “I just can’t believe her! She’s so horrible! I thought things were going to get better the more we rehearsed, but now I know they’re not. The play is going to be awful!”

  “No,” Caroline said calmly after I’d explained what Sophie was talking about. “Cheyenne and those guys will be awful. We will still be good.”

  “You know what I mean,” Sophie said. She slumped down onto the grass. “What are we going to do?”

  “Maybe we should tell Mrs. Hunter,” Erica said, looking concerned.

  “Yeah!” Sophie brightened. “Let’s tell Mrs. Hunter! That’s a great idea!”

  I eyed Sophie a little worriedly. Yeah, the Princess Penelope thing had definitely gone to her head.

  “That will only get them more mad,” Caroline said. “Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything we can do. You can’t make someone with a bad attitude about something change her mind and have a good one. You just can’t.”

  That sounded like a rule to me.

  A rule that was made to be broken.

  The only problem was, I had no idea how to go about breaking it.

  Cheyenne and her compact fluorescent bulb fairy court not even trying to act when it came time to say their lines wasn’t my only problem, though. Sophie maybe letting playing a princess go to her head wasn’t, either. The fact was, I still didn’t feel as if I had pinned down my character’s motivation. What had happened to Queen Melissa the Maleficent in her life that had made her choose to be the way she was—evil?

  Because everyone knew the way to get friends was to treat people the way you would want to be treated. That’s the number one rule of all!

  And okay, in my experience not very many people actually follow that rule. But you’re supposed to.

  So what kind of person would pick being mean all the time over being nice?

  I knew there was only one person I could turn to with all my theater-related problems. And fortunately, he was coming over that night, because Mom’s second segment on Good News! was going to be on, and Uncle Jay and Harmony were bringing over pizza from Pizza Express, and also Dairy Queen for dessert for us, in honor of the special occasion (and we had all promised not to spill, even though Mark always managed to dribble a huge portion of his vanilla twist cherry dip down his front).

  “Tonight on Good News!,” Lynn Martinez said on the television we were all sitting in front of, “our weekly movie commentator Elizabeth Finkle takes us to the movies and tells us what she thinks about this week’s latest indie release, Interlude with Rasputin.”

  Then Mom’s head filled the screen.

  Only…she looked really different than she had last week. At first I couldn’t figure out how. Then I did.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. “What did you do to your eyes?”

  “Why?” Mom asked. “Do you like them?”

  “Yes,” I said. “They look really good. I mean, they always look good. But—”

  “They look gigantic,” Mark said.

  “Like there are spiders crawling out of them,” Kevin said.

  “In a good way,” Uncle Jay said, really fast.

  Mom looked up at Dad, who was smiling.

  “You do look great, Liz,” Dad said.

  “I bought false eyelashes,” Mom said. “The lights from the studio wash out my own eyelashes, because they’re so fair, so I just put on fake ones. They really work, don’t they?”

  “Do they ever,” Harmony said. “Did Lynn Martinez give you that tip?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Mom said, “she did.”

  Mom gave Interlude with Rasputin a big thumbs-down. She said it wasn’t quite the moving triumph of the human spirit the movie poster promised it would be. She said it was more like a moving triumph of bad moviemaking. She told everyone to save their money for the new Taylor Swift movie that was coming out next weekend.

  I knew with a recommendation like that, I was sure to be even more popular with the fifth-grade girls! Maybe they’d crown me queen of the fourth-graders or something.

  It was after Mom had shown Harmony and me how her false eyelashes worked (easy: you just peel them from their case and stick them on over your real eyelashes. They’re self-adhesive) that I went back out into the kitchen to fill the dishwasher (because it was my turn) and Uncle Jay asked me how rehearsals for Princess Penelope in the Realm of Recycling were going.

  “Not so good,” I said with a sigh. Then I told him about how I was having trouble coming up with a reason for my character to be so mean to everyone, and also about how Cheyenne and M and D refused to act, and Sophie was acting like such a princess about it.

  “And I guess I can’t really blame her,” I said to him. “It’s like they don’t even care whether or not the play is any good.”

  “Well,” Uncle Jay said, “you didn’t used to care, either
, remember? Back when you were so disappointed about not getting the part of Princess Penelope. What changed your mind?”

  Uncle Jay was right! I hadn’t cared about the play back then.

  And I was still sad about not getting to wear my gold flower-girl dress and be the star and not getting to come to school in a limo (although that could still happen. There was still a chance Mom could become a star, and myself the child of a star).

  But I wasn’t as upset about not getting the part as I had been before.

  And a lot of that, I had to admit, was because of how good Sophie had made me feel when she’d come back to rescue me when Missy had been holding me captive.

  But another part of it was how much everybody had been laughing when I’d been saying my lines as Queen Melissa the Maleficent. It felt really good to make people laugh—and to know that people liked me.

  “Maybe,” I said slowly, “we just need to tell them how good they are as compact fluorescent bulb fairies?”

  “Maybe you do,” Uncle Jay said. “Maybe it’s as simple as paying them some attention. Sometimes a little positive reinforcement is all people need. Like with Mewsie. You don’t punish him when he’s being bad.”

  “No!” I said, shocked. “I reward him when he’s being good!”

  “Exactly,” Uncle Jay said. “Why don’t you try that with the fairy girls? They must do good things sometimes.”

  I tried to think if Cheyenne and her friends had ever done anything remotely nice. But I really couldn’t think of anything.

  “Well,” I said, after I’d given up, “I guess we could just lie, and give them positive reinforcement for nothing.”

  “That’ll work, too,” Uncle Jay said. “And as for your character’s motivation, I don’t think I can help you. Developing one’s character is a deeply personal experience, and it would be wrong for me to get involved. You keep working on it. I’m sure inspiration will strike soon.”

  I wasn’t as sure about that as Uncle Jay was, but I had no choice but to go along with it. Just like, when I got to the stop sign the next morning, I had to tell Caroline, Sophie, and Erica that, from now on, we were going to tell Cheyenne, Dominique, and Marianne what a good job they were doing as fairies.

  Sophie looked at me like I was crazy. “But they’re horrible fairies. They’re acting horrible on purpose. Remember? They admitted it to our faces.”

  “I know,” I said. “But if we tell them how good we think they are, maybe they’ll start acting better. It’s called positive reinforcement. And the thing is, they can’t start acting any worse.”

  “Well,” Caroline said, looking thoughtful, “that’s true.”

  “You mean you want us to lie?” Erica looked scared. Erica doesn’t like lying, even when it’s to make someone else feel better. I’ve tried to explain to Erica that this kind of lying is okay, but it still makes her uncomfortable. I’ve even been tempted to show Erica my book of rules, where It’s okay to lie if the lie makes someone else feel better is totally on the list.

  But things didn’t turn out so well last time I showed someone my book of rules, so it’s probably best if I just keep it to myself.

  “It’s just a little lie,” I told her. “For the good of the play.”

  “Then I think we should do it,” Sophie said. “For the good of the play.” Since she had the lead in the play, it made sense that she would think this, of course.

  “It can’t hurt,” Caroline said. “And the real danger we want to avoid is, now that the other girls, like Elizabeth and Shamira, know what Cheyenne and those guys are doing, acting horrible on purpose, they might start acting horrible, too.”

  Sophie gasped. “No! You don’t think they’d—”

  “Yeah,” Caroline said grimly. “I do. And that would be awful. Soon everyone in the whole play, except for us, might start acting horrible on purpose. So Allie’s right. This is our only plan. We have to do something.”

  “I think you guys should do it,” Kevin said. He was always part of our early morning conversations, whether I wanted him there or not, since I had to walk him to school every day.

  “Kevin’s right,” Sophie said with a sigh. “Let’s pretend we think they’re good, and tell them so. For the good of the play. Deal?” Sophie held up her hand for a fist bump.

  “Deal,” I said, and held up my own fist.

  “Deal,” Caroline said, and held up hers.

  “Deal,” Kevin said, and put up his fist, as well.

  We all looked inquiringly at Erica. Finally, she said, “Oh, all right. But it’s going to feel so wrong to lie, you guys!” and bumped her fist against each of ours.

  In the afternoons, we didn’t have rehearsal. We had set building. We were constructing cardboard trees (to be part of the forest Princess Penelope wanders into when she gets to the Realm of Recycling) and the walls of the Castle of Plastic Doom (Queen Melissa the Maleficent lived in the castle, where she watched everything that was happening to Princess Penelope through her crystal computer monitor) as well as things like a papier-mâché cave for Lenny the recycled paper dragon to live in and stuff.

  Different people were in charge of different parts of the set construction—mainly based on what they liked doing. Caroline, Joey Fields, and Elizabeth Pukowski got to do all the papier-mâché, because they liked dipping strips of paper into glue and getting their hands all messy. Stuart, Sophie, Shamira, Lenny, and I did all the painting, because we were all a little artistic and liked drawing and coloring. Patrick Day, Rosemary, and Mrs. Hunter were in charge of the hot glue guns for making the cardboard trees and castle walls, because Patrick and Rosemary liked guns, and Mrs. Hunter liked supervising them.

  Cheyenne and her fairy court (Marianne and Dominique) appointed themselves in charge of putting sparkles on everything. For some reason they thought the Realm of Recycling should be sparkly. So Mrs. Hunter brought them tons of glitter from the craft store, and Cheyenne and M and D went around throwing handfuls of it everywhere. Even on places it didn’t really go, like Lenny’s dragon cave and the evil queen’s computer monitor.

  I have to admit, I found their fairy dust sprinkling kind of annoying, especially when I got home and pulled off my cowboy boots and a bunch of glitter came pouring out of them onto my bedroom carpet.

  But since we’d agreed to start complimenting the fairy queen and her court in an effort to get them more into the spirit of the play, I started going, “That looks really good,” to them every time they threw glitter on something.

  At first they would just give me funny looks. But then Dominique went, “Uh…thanks.”

  Marianne was the one who seemed to be getting over not having won the part of Princess Penelope the fastest. When I complimented her glitter-throwing technique, she said, “Thanks! It does look good, doesn’t it?” all brightly.

  It was working! Our complimenting them was starting to put them in a better mood about the play!

  Well, some of them.

  Because when I said, “That’s looking really pretty,” to Cheyenne about the cardboard toadstool she was glitterfying, she looked up at me sourly from where she was kneeling, and went, “Shut up.”

  I didn’t think I’d heard her right. I said, “Excuse me?”

  “I said shut up.” Cheyenne went back to sprinkling glitter.

  I felt my face turning red. I couldn’t believe it! Cheyenne had told me to shut up, exactly the way she’d told her mom to shut up back at the mall that day I’d been spying on them both in the earring section!

  And just like Cheyenne’s mom, all I’d done was try to be nice to her!

  Then I remembered something: Evil Queen Melissa the Maleficent tried through the whole play to have Princess Penelope killed…

  …and all Princess Penelope had ever done to her was be nice to her!

  And suddenly, just like Uncle Jay had said it would, inspiration struck.

  I had my motivation for the character of the evil queen.

  Cheyenne O’Malley, the mo
st evil girl I had ever met!

  RULE #11

  Make the Best of It

  Rehearsals were going really well. At least in my opinion. I had all my lines memorized by the second week. The secret to memorizing lines, it turns out, is practice. I just practiced my lines all the time. Like at night, right before I’d fall asleep. And in my head in the morning, while I was brushing my teeth. It was easy to memorize my lines by thinking about them at night, in the morning, and then saying them out loud at rehearsal.

  Some people, though, weren’t having as easy a time of it. Like Patrick Day. He only had one line—“Yes, Your Majesty. The pollution ray is ready!”—but he couldn’t seem to remember it. The names and makes of the kinds of cars he wanted to drive when he was old enough for a license? No problem. But that one line? Forget about it. His fellow soldier Rosemary was always having to whisper them to him.

  Some people, I guess, aren’t made for a life on the stage.

  That wasn’t the only ongoing problem with Room 209’s production for the open house. There were lots more, not including the fact that I had been totally right about Cheyenne: She really was evil. Even though Dominique and Marianne had finally started acting, Cheyenne still refused and said her lines like a robot. We were all complimenting her performances like crazy, but she just turned up her nose at us. And I wasn’t the only one who noticed that, whenever Sophie said a line, Cheyenne mouthed it along with her.

  “She’s memorized all of the princess’s lines!” Rosemary whispered one morning during rehearsal, when we were watching Sophie perform a scene we weren’t in. Cheyenne wasn’t in it, either, and was sitting on the side of the stage with us. That’s how we saw her lips moving every time Sophie said one of her lines.