“What else can I do?” said Safta.
Wai Po was trying not to smile.
Safta pointed at Wai Po. “When Mini is here, you’ll have to keep a close eye on Bao Bao so he won’t eat her poop.”
Wai Po opened her mouth and closed it.
“It is the least I can do,” she said.
SAFTA WANTED TO GO TO THE department store to find some real cat toys for Mini. David was on poop watch, so I went with Safta to see if I could find any new clothes that looked 1950s. We stopped in the men’s department to get my dad some new undershirts, and that’s where we saw Rabbi Doug.
“Rabbi,” said Safta. “How are you?”
Please don’t be buying underwear. Please don’t be buying underwear, I thought. But Rabbi Doug was just getting a pair of tube socks.
“Just fine,” said Rabbi Doug. “I should be asking you the same question. I haven’t seen you at services lately. Or Hebrew school.” Before I could make up an excuse, he said, “Your mother told me about the play. Are you keeping up?”
Our Hebrew school class met twice a week, but I’d missed a number of the Wednesday classes when Mrs. Tyndall had called play rehearsal.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said.
He smiled. “In the meantime, there are other ways to feel spiritual,” he said. “Music. A walk.”
“I’ve been listening to Jewish music,” I said, forgetting, for a minute, that Patsy wasn’t Jewish anymore. “And I walk to school most days.”
“I hope you know the Aleinu as well as you know your lines.”
I nodded. I had learned that one in third grade.
“We’ll make sure she practices, Rabbi,” said Safta.
He nodded and held up a pair of tube socks with the colors of the Miami Dolphins. “What do you think?”
“Good,” I said. I wondered where he had gotten them. Mrs. Tyndall had suggested thick white socks, cuffed at the ankle, rolled-up jeans, and a white T-shirt. That’s what Cheryl and Hallelujah were wearing. I guessed that’s what I would be wearing, too.
Right before dress rehearsals, Mrs. Tyndall gave us a big lecture about theater etiquette while lying down on the stage. She had gotten an old megaphone from the school so we could all hear her.
“Do NOT say ‘good luck!’ ” she said. “You can say ‘break a leg.’
“Do NOT ever say ‘M-A-C-B-E-T-H !’ You can say ‘the Scottish play.’ ”
“You mean Macbeth?” said Andy.
“I spelled it for a reason!” shouted Mrs. Tyndall, though I was pretty sure none of us would have thought of saying Macbeth until she said it.
“Do not whistle onstage! Do not clap onstage! This can cause confusion and miscues.
“Keep your costumes neat and tidy. Do not leave them lying around!”
Mrs. Tyndall had a lot of rules, and none of them were for bringing good luck. They were for warding off bad luck.
The school auditorium wasn’t big enough for the entire school, so we only performed for the eighth graders and some seventh graders. Even then, it was pretty crowded; some of the teachers had to stand. This was why I was surprised to see Safta sitting in the back.
“What are you doing here?” No one else’s grandparents were there.
“You can’t take photos during a regular performance, so I asked if I could come for the dress rehearsal,” said Safta. She held up her camera and waved it around. “Did you know that your principal grew up with my cousin’s best friend’s business partner? Small world.”
Poor Mr. Hoban. He never knew what hit him. He probably also did not know that Safta’s photography was best known for its close-ups of her thumbs and her ability to cut off heads at any range.
When Safta put her camera down, I noticed that she did not have her regular purse with her. She had her cat-carrying bag.
I lowered my voice so the people milling around us wouldn’t hear. “You didn’t bring Mini, did you?”
“I had to because of the you-know-what.”
My mind started to run through all the terrible things that could happen. Mini could pee or poo in the carrier and then stink up the whole theater. Safta could sit next to someone who was allergic to cats, and they could start sneezing uncontrollably. I decided to borrow a trick from Tiffany.
“Excuse me,” I said, gesturing to the students sitting around Safta. “I’m taking a poll on allergies. Is anyone here allergic to milk? Grass?” I paused. “Cats?”
It turns out that most people will participate in polls just because they’re bored. In Safta’s immediate area, there was one kid who was allergic to grass and two kids allergic to milk, but that was it.
I let out a sigh of relief. I had at least prevented the worst of it.
The first act was a quasi-disaster. Hector forgot a whole stanza in his song, which kind of threw off the hoopers. And the doorknob came off in Tara’s hand when she went to her father’s store, but she did a great job of playing it off. “Father,” she said, “the shop is in need of some upgrades.” And the audience laughed right along.
Then, in the second act, weird things started happening.
During the show, we kept the ghost light turned off in the wings. But during Tara’s solo, “Circling through Time,” the light came on. Then went off. On. Off. On. Off.
Mrs. Tyndall shielded her eyes and stared menacingly up at the light booth. I could see one of the guys make the universal gesture for “we don’t know what’s happening.”
“It’s the ghost!” whispered Michael.
“There’s probably a more rational reason,” said Duncan. But he didn’t sound completely convinced.
After Tara’s solo ended, the light stopped flickering. But then a few minutes later, there was the distinct sound of movement up in the rafters. Something getting knocked over.
I ran over to Tara when her solo ended. “Did you see the ghost?”
Tara shook her head. “No, but there is definitely a weird vibe out there. Right before I went onstage, it felt like someone had brushed up against me, even though no one was there.”
I shivered. I still hadn’t made up my mind if ghosts were real or not. Every Passover, we waited for the spirit of Elijah to come in and drink the wine from a glass we left on the table, but that wasn’t the same.
Then, during the scene of the meeting of Mothers United for Decency, a strange sound started.
“No son of mine will ever …” said Kelli Ann in her best mom voice.
“Arreeewww!”
Kelli Ann swallowed and finished the line. Sort of. “No son of mine will put a hip in that hoop!”
The sound was unearthly, the sound of torment and fear. The audience began to shift and murmur in their seats. We were supposed to go to intermission, but the mood was weird, uncertain.
Then it happened. From above the stage, something moved, but not in any way that a human could. The lights caught a flash of movement and the sound of running. Someone screamed.
“Ghost!”
It all made sense now. The flashing light. The moaning. And now this. The truth is not always pretty.
I darted forward. “It’s not a ghost,” I said. “It’s a cat with a rhinestone problem.”
And then the lights went out.
“I can’t believe that you let Mini get out of the bag,” I said to Safta.
“I didn’t let her. She’s just so clever that she managed to unzip the bag without me noticing,” said Safta. I wondered if Safta ever bragged about me as much as she bragged about Mini. We were standing in the lobby, with Safta holding the still-empty bag.
The show did not go on.
“You would think,” I said. “After taking Bao Bao into the hospital.” Right before David’s bar mitzvah, we had to take Wai Po to the emergency room. Safta and David snuck in Bao Bao to cheer her up, which was a good idea right up to the point when Bao Bao got loose.
“What?” said Safta. “Everything turned out fine.”
“Well, now we have to figure out where M
ini went,” I said. “I just hope that she stayed in the auditorium.”
“That’s why you made the call, isn’t it?” asked Safta.
At that moment, Wai Po came walking up to the school with Bao Bao on a leash. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”
I figured that if one creature on earth could figure out where Mini was, it would be Bao Bao. He was always sniffing her and following her around. Mini just had a bit of a head start this time.
The lights were still not working, so Tiffany found some flashlights. She gave one to Mrs. Tyndall, who was lying down on the stage in the dark. She gave Bao Bao two formal, awkward pats. “I hope he finds her soon. Good dog.”
We started off in the seats, showing Bao Bao where Mini had last been. We made circles of lights on the seats. He sniffed around the chair and Safta held out the bag.
“Find Mini!” we told him.
I’m sure Bao Bao was doing his best. He certainly enjoyed the attention, and the dark didn’t bother him a bit. Bao Bao made his way down to the stage, and then went back up the stairs to the lobby. Then he decided to go backstage. We went past the racks of clothes and David’s special hoop setup. We looked around the motorcycle for Elvis. We peeked in the shelves that made up Brenda Sue’s father’s toy store.
“The cat could be anywhere,” said David.
I looked at the clock. We had been searching almost an hour. A cold breath of air blew across the back of my neck, and it suddenly occurred to me that just because we knew about Mini didn’t mean there wasn’t a ghost. There could be a ghost and Mini.
Bao Bao sat down and started to bark.
“Where’s the kitty? Find the kitty!” I said, trying to get him to stand back up.
“He must be tired,” said Tara sympathetically.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” said Safta. “I hope you brought that can of cat food that I asked for.”
“Found,” said Wai Po. She pointed her flashlight into the rafters. And there, amid the rigging, two green eyes looked back at us. “Bao Bao is a hero!”
With a lot of coaxing and some cat food, Mini came down. “I’m glad this ended well,” said Mrs. Tyndall from the floor. “But honestly, Lauren, I expected so much more from you.”
“Me?” I said. “I didn’t do anything. Safta brought Mini, not me.”
“But she was here at your behest,” said Mrs. Tyndall.
“You cannot behest her into doing anything,” said Wai Po, nodding at Safta.
“Lauren did not know that Mini and I were here,” said Safta. “Until we came.”
Mrs. Tyndall looked up at my grandmothers. “I’m sure you’re both very proud of Lauren.” They both nodded. “But she has also been quite disruptive at times. She clearly craves the spotlight.”
“She clearly deserves it,” said Safta before I could stop her.
Then, almost as if they had planned it, Safta and Wai Po turned and marched up the aisle of the auditorium, like two lions, side by side.
I went into the bathroom with Tara so we could take off our makeup.
“Those stripes aren’t very 1950s,” Tara said, looking at my hair in the mirror. Even though it had been a few weeks, my hair had not naturally changed back to its normal color. Sometimes I thought I was getting used to it, and then my mother would look at it and sigh.
“I know,” I said. “I keep thinking about using my designer jean money to get it dyed back to normal. I guess I’m out of time.”
“I have another idea,” Tara said. “Markers.”
“No way,” I said.
“Way.”
“They’ll just wash out,” I said.
“Not if we use the permanent kind. There might be some in the art room.”
I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but at least it was doing something with Tara. We walked down to the empty art room and finally found some black permanent markers on the teacher’s desk. We went back to the bathroom.
“I’ll just try a small part so if it looks weird, no one will notice,” Tara said.
“It can’t look any weirder than it already does, I guess.”
Tara took a small clump of my hair and ran the marker back and forth over the orange part. She held it up in the mirror.
“It’s working!” I said. I took another marker and started coloring the front while she worked on the back. The fumes started to give me a headache, but we kept coloring, even the underparts.
The funny thing about talking to someone working on your hair is that you’re so close, but you don’t make direct eye contact. Tara looked at me in the mirror.
“I still can’t believe you messed with your hair,” she said. “I’ve always wanted hair like yours.”
“Mine?” I was pretty sure I had misheard.
“It’s so pretty. No one in school has hair that looks like yours,” said Tara. She picked up another strand of hair to color. “I’m jealous.”
“Ha ha,” I said. “I’m not the student superstar.”
“But you’ve got this amazing voice. And the whole ensemble adores you because you’re smart and funny, and you got them to sound twenty times better. And you started a business, which I would never have had the guts to do. I just tag along and hope you don’t mind.”
“I started the business so I could have designer jeans, like yours,” I said.
Tara made a pffft noise. “Anybody can buy something.”
“I always thought you were the Royal in the Royal We,” I said.
“Nope,” said Tara. “Both of us.”
We were quiet again, but this time it was the good kind of quiet instead of the bad kind. Tara colored another strand of my hair, then pointed into the mirror at a bathroom stall. I turned around to read it forward.
“I guess Ricky was cast right, as Elvis the Heartthrob,” I said. “But which Jennifer?” Every class I was in had at least one Jennifer, and so did our play.
“Red-haired Jennifer,” said Tara. Red-haired Jennifer didn’t seem like the type of person to write on a bathroom door. But I was pretty sure that Chrissy was Chrissy Wright. It was easy to picture her crossing out Amanda’s name.
“What if,” I said. Then I paused.
“What if what?”
“What if we changed the words to one of your songs so that someone else could sing it,” I said. “Someone else, like me.” This was huge, asking Tara to give up one of her songs.
She hesitated. “Which one?”
“ ‘All-American Town.’ We’re already onstage.”
“Mrs. Tyndall would probably kill us.” Tara, the teacher’s favorite.
“But only after we do it,” I said. A bigger idea was beginning to take over. “And we should include some of the others in the ensemble.”
Tara nodded. “Let’s do it.” She capped her marker and fluffed my hair. “What do you think?”
I had never liked straight black hair more.
“You are a True-Blue friend,” I said, “for turning my hair black.”
“You know,” said Tara, “I kept telling myself that as long as we said things were okay that we’d be okay. That we’d stay True-Blue friends. But this is better.” She didn’t mean hair color.
“Maybe that’s what True-Blue is,” I said.
“Making mistakes?”
“Fixing them,” I told her. “Fixing them together.”
CALL TIME FOR FRIDAY’S PERFORMANCE was at five, but Tara wasn’t there.
I practiced all her solos in case she didn’t make it from oratory in time. Mrs. Tyndall kept looking at her watch from a chair in the corner. She sat very straight.
Finally Tara ran in, wearing her pink oratory dress, while we were doing warm-ups.
“Well?” I said.
“Fourth.” She didn’t look as sad as I thought she would.
“Sorry,” I said.
“There’s always next year,” she said. “We have other things to think about.”
I grabbed her arm and pulled her into the circle.
> “Welcome to our play,” Tiffany said, onstage alone before the curtains opened. She was doing a number of Mrs. Tyndall’s jobs because of the back situation. “We’d like to take you back to the 1950s, to a little all-American town called Pleasant Valley.”
The audience broke into applause, the curtains opened, and we stepped into the blinding light. I tried to spot the people I knew were there: my parents and my grandmothers, hopefully without any animal accompaniment. David’s friend Scott had come to see Hector and to not see David, who spent all his time backstage. Mrs. Mather, the T-shirt lady, was out there somewhere, along with Mr. Pickens, our neighbor. But with the lights onstage and the darkness beyond, it was hard to make anyone out. And then the audience kind of disappeared, and the only thing left was the music.
We launched into “Everything Is Still the Same” and hit every cue. Tara was amazing as Brenda Sue. And David and Mr. Shea had been right about embracing mediocrity—as long as they were smiling, Duncan, Max, and Andy looked like they were dropping their hoops on purpose.
“We’re doing it, we’re doing it,” I said when we finished the first act.
The second act passed even faster. Tara nailed her solos. And she pronounced Imogen exactly right.
Finally we got to “All-American Town,” when Brenda Sue was supposed to be center stage while we swayed in the background. But the Royal We had changed the setup, with Tiffany’s help.
For a minute, I was filled with terror. First because Mrs. Tyndall might kill us for changing her words. And second, what if Mrs. Tyndall was right? Maybe I would confuse the audience. Maybe I didn’t belong.
I felt a cool hand squeeze mine.
“Are we ready?” Tara said.
“We are,” I said.
Tara took the red scarf out of her hair and wrapped it around my ponytail.
I put my Vincent Chin button on my sleeve, where I could see it and be brave.
The music started. Mrs. Tyndall wasn’t moving her head very quickly, so it probably took her a minute to realize that Tara wasn’t out front where she normally was; she was in the back with the rest of us.
Not Your All-American Girl Page 15