by Mia Archer
“See, it helps if you look at a spot off in the distance,” I said.
Chloe looked off in the distance, but then her eyes drifted back to me. I wanted to growl in frustration, but honestly it was so cute the way she kept looking at me in the middle of our lessons.
It was cute but it was also distracting. She was supposed to be learning, after all, and I was supposed to be helping out.
Maybe I helped her out more than I helped some of the others, but Mr. Thompson didn’t seem to mind that I was spending more time with Chloe than the others.
Sure he gave me the occasional knowing glance, or a wink when he didn’t think Chloe was looking. Something to make me blush almost as deeply as Chloe did whenever we were working on something, but whatever.
“No, concentrate up there,” I said. “On the distance. You don’t want to look at the audience. The audience isn’t there. You want to look beyond them.”
“But there isn’t any audience up there,” she said.
I sighed. I had to remind myself that this girl was new to all of this. I’d been involved in the drama club long enough that I had all of this down. I’d picked it up along the way because that’s what you had to do if you’d never taken a class and you wanted to get a part.
I’d gotten really good at it picking things up along the way too. So much that I figured this class would be an easy A.
At least I figured it would be easy until I found out Mr. Thompson intended to take advantage of having a seasoned veteran in his class.
Turns out my “easy A” was going to be earned teaching other people what I already knew. No going through the motions for me, damn it.
The sneaky bastard.
“You have to pretend the audience is out there,” I said. “That’s what this is all about. It’s playing pretend.”
“But…”
I racked my brain and tried to think of a way to explain this. It would be just my luck that Thompson would stick me with Chloe of all people. Maybe it was because we sat together on the first day. Maybe it had something to do with those winks he gave me when he thought no one else was looking.
If so it was all my fault. I’d been drawn in by her and now here I was stuck with her while we worked on exercises. Stupid.
“Look, did you ever play with dolls or anything when you were young?”
The girl blushed and looked away. I cocked my head to the side. Not the reaction I was expecting at all. Sure she seemed like she blushed at the drop of a hat, but why would she blush when I asked her about playing with dolls?
Maybe she thought I was making fun of her because she was a freshman or something?
“I didn’t have dolls growing up,” she whispered.
I blinked. Then I blinked again for good measure. I was having trouble believing that. Sure I’d had more fun cutting my dolls’ hair out and forcing them to go on missions with my brother’s action figures, missions they never returned from without a little damage, but I’d still had the damned things.
“What are you talking about?” I finally asked once my mouth finally caught up to the gears turning in my head.
“My parents didn’t let me play with dolls growing up,” she said. “Dad always said they taught little girls to be too loose or something.”
Okay. The depths of the religious brainwashing this girl had been subjected to were really starting to show. I couldn’t imagine someone living like that.
Mostly because my parents were an aberration around these here parts. Educated lefties in the middle of the cornfields with their own ideas about how the world should work, and luckily for me one of those ideas had been that their daughter could love whoever she damn well pleased.
Coming out to them had actually been a little anticlimactic. Everyone expects the drama and the blowup. There are times when I thought they might’ve been more disappointed in me if I turned out to be straight and boring and not a cause they could fight for.
None of that was helping me help this girl though. I could tell this was going to be a lot more difficult than I’d imagined when we started.
I was going to earn that A.
“Sounds like a really nice guy,” I muttered.
“Not really,” she whispered. “He was a jerk and then he left us.”
Hokay then. Now we were getting into really awkward territory. Time to focus on teaching and distract her.
“Okay, so here’s how it is,” I said.
I moved in closer. I thought I heard her breathe in sharply, but then the moment, if there ever was one, was over. She turned and looked at me and there was a hint of panic there, but she kept that panic under control.
Good. The last thing I needed was her freaking out because the class lesbian was moving in up close and personal. Even if I was enjoying this just a little bit beyond the instructive value of being this close to her.
I reached up and tilted her chin so it was facing the back of the room.
“See that back there?” I asked.
“It’s just the wall,” she said, frustration dripping from her voice.
Frustration and was that maybe something else there? No, that had to be wishful thinking. I’d seen those glances that first day of school, but even if there was something there a goodie two-shoes like her wasn’t going to give into those feelings.
Not when she had such a severe case of the Jesus putting a zap on her brain.
“Exactly,” I said, my voice soft.
It occurred to me just how intimate this moment was. The lights were down in the room because Mr. Thompson thought that was better for setting an acting mood. If we were performing on stage the lights would be down, after all.
So it was just the two of us in our own little pool of darkness. Sure there were other people around us working on lines for a monologue they had to deliver for their first big grade, but they faded into background noise and it was just the two of us standing so close together.
Close enough that I started to think things. The sort of things a good girl like Chloe wouldn’t be interested in. Even if I thought her breathing was picking up. Just a little.
“The audience is always going to be right there in front of you,” I said. “And the thing you have to learn if you’re going to be any good at this is you have to look beyond the audience. You have to be able to be the character. Be the performance.”
Maybe that was all so much bullshit. I didn’t have any formal training in this stuff, after all. That was something I’d been looking forward to before Thompson made it clear I was being pressed into unpaid slave labor teaching the fresh meat.
No, everything I’d learned had been learned on the job, so to speak. I was full of acting wisdom passed down from all the people who’d come before me.
She turned. She was so close. Close enough that I’d just have to lean forward a couple of inches and my lips would press against hers. It was like I was hypnotized.
Her mouth fell open. She seemed to realize, to really realize for the first time, just how close we were. She leaned forward.
A clap in the back of the room brought me back to reality. I blushed and my attention snapped to Mr. Thompson standing with a huge grin plastered across his face.
And he was looking right at me. Right at us. Yeah, I was pretty sure he knew exactly what he was doing when he interrupted that moment.
I wanted to growl in frustration. That really had felt like a moment. I was pretty sure I wasn’t imagining things. And the moment had been ruined. On purpose.
“I think that’s enough work on our monologues for today,” he said. “The bell is going to ring in a couple of minutes so you all get some free time to decompress. I know how hard this can be!”
I looked at Chloe and now she was the one blushing. Oh yeah. There’d been something happening there, and it wasn’t my imagination.
The poor girl. I could only imagine what she was going through. It’d been hard enough for me to deal with these feelings when they hit me a couple of years ago gro
wing up the way I grew up.
I couldn’t imagine what it must be like for her. A girl who lived in a house where she wasn’t allowed to have dolls because her dad thought it would turn her into a whore or something. Jesus.
Like literally Jesus.
It sounded like the guy wasn’t in the picture anymore, but could her mom be much better if she was still like this?
I reluctantly pulled away and made my way up into the risers. Sat and gathered up my things as Thompson turned up the lights. I blinked a couple of times to chase tears away. It’s not like the fluorescent lights were all that bright, but they felt bright compared to what we’d been in.
To my surprise Chloe came up and stood next to me.
“Can I sit here?” she asked.
“Nobody’s stopping you,” I said.
Meanwhile my mind was reeling. She was sitting here after what just happened? Seriously? Did this girl know what she was doing to me? Could it be that I was doing the same to her and she was drawn to me despite probably thinking it was wrong with every fiber of her being?
“So how did you learn all this stuff anyways?” she asked.
“Lots of experience,” I said.
I might feel a little weird sitting here talking with her after that almost whatever the hell it was down there in the dark, but drama club was something I could run my mouth about for ages without stopping.
“I joined drama when I was a freshman like you,” I said. “Tried out for the first play because I fell in love with the whole thing watching a play a family friend brought me to when I was a kid.”
“Really?” she asked. “I’ve never seen a play here. There are things they put on at the church, but they’re usually pretty boring.”
I pursed my lips together. A bunch of older people who probably couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag if their lives depended on it acting out Bible stories. Talk about boring.
“Yeah. I can imagine they are.”
“I always thought it would be fun to do something like that though,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons why…”
She trailed off. Looked down and away. I’d been chatting with her long enough now that I recognized when she was getting close to territory that she thought was bad for whatever reason.
Where “whatever reason” usually meant she thought something was bad because that was the zap her youth pastor had put on her head.
“Well it’s the reason why I took this class instead of speech. Even if I knew Pastor Dave might not approve…”
I rolled my eyes but managed to resist making any sort of rude noises. She’d talked about Pastor Dave constantly since she opened up to me, and the guy sounded like a real piece of work.
I could tell she liked him for some reason I couldn’t begin to explain, though, so I figured I’d keep my big mouth shut. It was nice to be nice, and saying I thought the guy sounded like a creepy cult leader wouldn’t do any good.
I was more than willing to admit that my own life experiences might have something to do with my reservations. Even the name was a little too close to a bad experience in my past for comfort.
“There are a lot of things a lot of people in this world don’t approve of,” I finally said, feeling like I was stepping through a minefield. “I figure it’s a lot easier to go through life not worrying about what other people think about you. Not giving a fuck is really liberating.”
She looked at me and her eyes went wide. I figured it might be because I was talking about not caring what other people thought, then I realized I’d dropped an f-bomb.
She was also surprisingly uptight about swearing. Which meant teaching her had been pretty interesting since my learning had included a lot of swearing and so I passed that on now that I was the master and she the apprentice.
“So did you get into a play your freshman year?” she asked.
I barked out a laugh. Now it was her turn to blink in surprise.
“Not a chance,” I said. “There aren’t a lot of freshmen who get cast in a play unless you’re talking about a bit role. That would’ve been nice, but not getting picked is what made me realize I needed to step up my game.”
“Oh,” she said. “I guess I’d need to step up my game if I wanted to be in a play then, let alone figure out this stupid monologue.”
I didn’t think there was a chance she’d ever try out for a play. If her parents were the kind of people who didn’t think she should be allowed to play with dolls, the type of people to commit borderline child abuse by taking their daughter to a church where she fell into the clutches of a guy like this Pastor Dave, then they also didn’t seem like the type who would care for her being in a play.
Or her mom wouldn’t care for it. Dad wasn’t in the picture after all. I wondered what that was like.
“All you have to do is work at it,” I said. “That’s what I did, and it paid off. I’ve been in several plays since and one musical, and it’s a blast.”
She seemed to perk up at that. “Really?”
“Really. Getting to play like you’re someone else up on stage with a bunch of people watching you? It’s the kind of rush you don’t easily forget.”
“Huh.”
That was all she got out before the bell, actually more of a tone that beeped, let us know class was over and it was time to go on to the last class for the day.
“It was fun today,” I said. “Now be ready to come back and work hard tomorrow. We’re going to get that monologue down if it kills us!”
I smiled to let her know I wasn’t being completely serious. She had a bad habit of thinking I was serious when I was really being my usual sarcastic self. I’d had to tone it down around her. A lot.
She grinned. “Right. I’m going to work my butt off!”
I couldn’t help but grin back. It was nice to see her enthusiasm. It reminded me of me a couple years back when I was fresh-faced and ready to take on the drama club.
Then she looked me up and down and I was reminded of me a couple years ago in other ways. It couldn’t be possible, but the signs were all there.
Nah. That had to be wishful thinking, and I had another class to get to.
7
Chloe
"I didn't know I could feel that way about a man until I met Mr. Farnsworth," I said. "The way he looks at me. It sends a shiver running through me every time, and I know it's so wrong. I can’t control myself. I know I shouldn't feel that way…"
I stopped. I let out an involuntary shiver of my own. Sure I was reading from the monologue I was supposed to have memorized by the end of the week, but so much of what I was saying about the fictional Mr. Farnsworth could have applied to the very real Sarah who was helping me learn all the pieces of this monologue.
It just wasn't fair. I wasn't supposed to feel like this. I never asked for these feelings. I never asked to look at a girl the way I looked at Sarah!
It was wrong. It went against God's plan. Everything I'd ever learned at church from Pastor Dave, told me that much.
And that's why I was so confused. Why would God make something that was so wrong feel so good? Was this temptation?
They didn't really talk about the devil all that much in my church, but the threat was there. If you sinned you were going to hell. The threat was implied, even if they never actually brought it up all that often like in some other churches.
I shook my head. Forced myself to look down at the photocopied papers. It was from a play, some comedy, that I’d never heard of before.
Not that I was surprised I'd never heard of it. It's not like I'd been all that into drama or musical theater aside from knowing it was a class I was interested in taking someday.
Mr. Farnsworth Takes A Bride. I was reading a monologue from the woman who eventually became that titular bride. A shy debutante who found herself falling for a wealthy and notorious socialite.
Of course it was all way more complicated than that, and I had to admit the play was pretty funny. Especially for s
omething that had been written decades before I was born. I never realized something so old could be so funny.
It almost made me want to see it performed up on the stage. It was a pity I wouldn’t get a chance. My mom would never let me go to something like that.
I sighed. I looked up at my door. Made sure I couldn't hear her coming up the stairs. It was just the two of us, but she could be sneaky and I didn’t want her to hear me going over a monologue.
I’d sort of added drama to my schedule after I got done talking my schedule over with my mom last year. I’d figured she wouldn't be happy about me joining a class like that. Especially when it was so close to the drama club, and that really seemed like the sort of thing she wouldn't approve of.
I certainly hadn't breathed a word of my interest to Pastor Dave. I'd seen the way he talked to people when he thought they were straying from the Godly path, and I didn't want to have one of those long awkward conversations.
Which only made me feel more guilty. I was lying to my mom by not telling her about this. I was lying to Pastor Dave. Did that mean I was lying to God, too?
And that didn't even scratch the surface of all of the thoughts I had when Sarah came to mind. I shook my head and forced myself to look down at the page in hand.
I could worry about all of that later. Right now I had this stupid monologue to memorize.
It was just so difficult to memorize anything when I was in class. Having Sarah right there next to me was such a distraction.
How was I supposed to learn anything when I was constantly distracted by the girl who was supposed to be teaching me?
"I suppose I should have always known a man like Mr. Farnsworth was wrong for me," I said, reciting the lines mostly from memory.
I looked down at the page. Let out a hiss as I realized I'd gotten the line wrong. Again.
It was thinking about Sarah that did that to me. Every time I thought about her I got flustered. Flustered in a way I never had with Craig despite all his trying.
What was wrong with me? Why did I keep having these thoughts? Why couldn't I just make them go away by wishing they would go away?