Just Pru

by Anne Pfeffer

  Storm clutched at her head. Tiny skulls were painted on her fingernails. Her eyeliner rode all the way across her temples to her hairline. “Ellen’s going to tie me to a rock and drown me. She’s going to boil me and have me for dinner.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “The harness just tore. Ellen made me test it with a two hundred pound sack of cement. She wanted to make sure it was strong.”

  A wave of affection for Ellen rolled over me. Naturally, she would think of the safety of her actors.

  Storm rambled on. “I promised Ellen, I swore to her I’d have it ready for today’s rehearsal. This blows.”

  I thought about it. “Lemme talk to her. The truth is, Blake’s not ready either. Maybe you both need another day.” My mind calculated quickly. We were cutting it really close to the opening, but we had no choice.

  Storm fell on her knees before me. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! You’ve saved me. Anything you want, just ask. I will serve you. I will wait on you hand and foot….”

  I cut in. “Do you think you could just get the harness ready by tomorrow? But, please, do whatever it takes to make it foolproof, because this is Blake’s safety we’re talking about.”

  She saluted me. “I promise. Thanks, Pru.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  From Pru’s Journal:

  In home school, Phyllis sometimes included foreign influences, like haiku poems. They were short and super-easy to write. I wrote this one:

  Pepper Hathaway.

  Does and says what she wants to.

  Awesome role model.

  My mom didn’t like it, but I thought it was great.

  ##

  “Guess what?” I said to Blake, trying to act casual. “The harness isn’t done yet, so today we’ll rehearse without it.” Ellen hadn’t taken the news well, but I’d promised her both Blake and the harness would be ready by Monday.

  I had no clear idea of how I could pull this off, but I did know that Pepper could make anything happen. I had seen every episode of her show Model Cop. Working in her dual capacity as a supermodel and police detective, Pepper had been known to persuade an armed bank robber to release his hostages, arrest and book him, and still make a late afternoon photo shoot for designer lingerie. She could work a runway show in the morning, then take down a ring of white slave traders before dinner. And that wasn’t all. She did her police work without weapons, relying on brains and beauty alone.

  I willed myself to be like Pepper.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said to Blake. “All you have to do is learn your lines.”

  “Goody.” An arm thrown over his eyes, he lay on his back in a padded seating area in the corner, where people hung out on breaks.

  Silently, I sat down cross-legged beside him. He didn’t move. When I cleared my throat, he ignored me.

  Pepper would never have let her boyfriend lie around sulking like that.

  I poked his shoulder. “Blake.”

  He slowly sat up and opened his eyes. “So, big plans tomorrow, huh?” He didn’t bother to keep the resentment out of his voice.

  “Not that big.” What did he care how I spent my free time?

  “You’re skipping out on us, right? Ellen said you were taking the day off.”

  “Just tomorrow.” Ellen had made the supreme sacrifice and given me Sunday off.

  His hair was tousled in a sexy, but anguished boy-poet sort of way. “What if I need you?” His green eyes, the lines of his back and shoulders, the set of his jaw—all radiated confusion, anger, and despair.

  This was exactly how he had played Act I, Scene 1, in which Duncan learned he was a suspect in his wife’s murder.

  My voice and heart hardened. “Poor baby.”

  His eyes grew wide. “I need my muse.”

  “You’ve got Ellen. And Becca.”

  “I need you.”

  “I’ll tell you what I need. I need you to get it together and learn these lines. Now.”

  “I can’t.” His voice wavered, and this time I saw something real slip out, the true Blake behind all the posing. “I can’t do this scene, Pru.” He made a gesture of hopelessness.

  I stared him down. Genuine fear looked back at me.

  “Why is this scene so hard for you, Blake?”

  “I’m just not into the idea of people offing themselves, okay?”

  What would Dr. Abbot have said to help Blake? A second later, I knew. I snapped my fingers in front of his face. “Ten minutes!”

  “What?”

  “Take things ten minutes at a time. Just focus on that. Can you memorize lines for ten minutes?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then do it! Now!”

  Given that Blake spent part of this scene hanging from a rope, he had fewer lines than usual. In the first ten-minute session, he had most of them memorized.

  “Now another ten minutes,” I said.

  Blake finished learning the lines and polished up his delivery. As usual, he was a quick study when he applied himself.

  “But I can’t do this in front of an audience,” he said. “Or the harness either.”

  “In the next ten minutes, all you have to do is recite the lines in front of Ellen. Don’t think any further than that.” I pushed him back through the exit door and onto the stage. Even though I knew my folks were back in Clayton, I still found myself nervously looking around, as if they might loom up and pry me into a straitjacket. No sign of them, thank goodness.

  I watched from the wings as he went through the scene without a hitch, then breathed a huge sigh of happiness. Once again, Dr. Abbot had come through for me.

  Blake came down the stairs from the stage, looking relieved. “Ten minutes at a time,” he said, giving me a thumbs up.

  “Blake! Pru!” It was Storm, holding the harness. “I just repaired and tested it. Two hundred pound sack of cement, for a full hour—no problems.” She held it out. “It’s ready to go—right now if you want.”

  Blake went pale.

  Oh, brother. Now what would I do?

  Chapter Eighteen

  From Pru’s Journal:

  Needless to say, Pepper Hathaway has this fantastic boyfriend. His name is Brett, and he’s a Rhodes Scholar turned pro tennis player. Pepper’s been to Wimbledon with him twice. Brett asks Pepper to marry him about once a month, but she just shakes her head and says, “I have yet to make my mark!” I kind of feel the same way, although no one’s asked to marry me. I, too, have yet to make my mark.

  **

  “Repaired?” Suspicion clouded Blake’s brow. “How’d it break to begin with?”

  “The point is,” I said quickly, as some of the crew walked up, “that any harness you use has been fully stress-tested.”

  Blake’s face turned drawn and haggard. “Forget it.” He turned on his heel and stalked away just as Becca and some of the other actors joined the gathering crowd.

  “What’s going on?” It was Ellen.

  “Blake’s got a problem with this scene,” I told her. “Part of it’s the harness.”

  An idea was creeping into my head, a bad idea. A really bad idea, in fact, and my logical mind was rejecting it, saying, Don’t do it, don’t do it. But another part of me was saying, This is exactly what you need to do.

  Like Pepper, I was a professional. Whether it meant singlehandedly disarming a Mafia drug lord or kneeling for hours on a glacier in nothing but a tankini, Pepper would not rest until the job was done.

  Why should I be any different? For Opening Night, I had to get Blake on that stage, performing his best. I had to do whatever it took to make that happen.

  “I wanna hang myself. In the harness. To show Blake it’s not so bad.”

  The words had just popped out, surprising me. My careful, logical self sent up a prayer that Ellen would instantly reject my offer, but instead she appeared to be mulling it over, leaning on her crutches, her magenta glasses sliding down her nose.

  “It has to be me,” I told her. “You�
��ve already broken your leg.”

  Ellen nodded. Of course, she would have gone up there in a heartbeat if she hadn’t had that cast on.

  “I’m about Blake’s size,” I went on. “If the harness can hold me, it can hold him.”

  Ellen listened, looking at me intently. “And he cares what you think of him.” A smile curled at the edges of her mouth. “Of course! If you do it, he’ll do it.” Her smile broadened. “Pru, you’re a genius!”

  She turned to Storm. “Lemme see that thing.” Ellen inspected the harness and grilled the designer about the safety testing.

  “I’ll go find Blake,” someone offered. By now, everyone had gathered to see what was going on.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Let me start climbing first.”

  A minute later, Storm had pulled me behind a changing screen and stripped me to my underwear. If I was going to do this, I figured I should make my experience as much like Blake’s as possible. I would wear the harness under a prison uniform. “I’m so excited to test this thing out—on a person!” Storm said. “I mean, I’ve never designed stunt equipment before!”

  “Please don’t say that to me.” I sent more prayers up to heaven. My whole body trembled. I had volunteered for this. What an idiot.

  Storm put me in the harness, pulling the straps uncomfortably tight. They chafed and scratched. Over them went an orange prison jump suit that had been specially modified to accommodate the harness. Within seconds, the synthetic fabric ratcheted the temperature inside the suit to roasting levels. I felt like a turkey in an oven bag.

  “And for the final touch…” Storm slipped the faux-noose around my neck and adjusted it.

  A strange feeling of déjà vu came over me. “This doesn’t attach to anything, does it?” I asked nervously.

  “No, it just looks like you’re dying. There, now you’re all set!” Storm announced. Then, taking in my expression, she hesitated. “If you’re sure you want to do this.”

  A part of my mind wandered back to That Day five years ago, when I decided to give consciousness the heave-ho. I’d come a long way from that darkness, from that feeling of utter hopelessness. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have prayed for my life. Ironic to think that my current terror was a sign of mental health.

  “How can I tell Blake it’s okay if I’m not willing to do it myself?”

  We went out to meet Ellen, who was waiting for us. “So you just have to climb up the ladder to that beam,” she said, pointing. “Jump off. Hang there. Then we’ll lower you until you’re two feet off the ground, and Wilson will cut you down.”

  I had to tilt my head far, far back to look all the way up the ladder. Narrow and flimsy, it stretched away from me up into the stratosphere. “Beam?” I croaked.

  Ellen pointed to what looked like a chopstick suspended in outer space. “Just go up to that beam and jump off. DeAndre will meet you up there to attach the rope to your harness first.”

  “Meet me?”

  “Don’t worry, he’s on a rope, too.” Ellen shaded her eyes as she looked up toward the ceiling lights. She pointed. “There he is. You better get going.”

  With a sinking stomach, I saw that our sets and props guy, DeAndre, high in the air, was shimmying along the beam in our direction. He waved to me, a rope in his hand.

  While surges of hot and cold ran through me, I caught sight of Blake from the corner of my eye. Someone had gone to get him.

  I forced myself to think how Pepper would have felt in this situation. Puleez. Not only had she once negotiated a high, narrow window ledge to save a boy’s life, but she had done it in slip-on stilettos. “Hah!” She would have scoffed at my little ladder-and-beam problem.

  I started up, my knees quivering. My heart pounded in my throat. My hands had stiffened into claws that could barely fit around the sides of the ladder.

  Blake was watching. I had to make it look easy.

  One rung. Another. Another. At one point, my feet slipped off their rung and pedaled the air while I clung on with all the strength in my hands. Praise heaven, my left foot finally hit something solid. The right foot came to land beside it. I took only a second to catch my breath, then kept moving. I didn’t dare look down.

  At the top of the ladder, DeAndre greeted me. “Hold still, so I can hook you up.” Straddling the beam, he secured the heavy-weight hook on the end of the rope through the big ring attached to the shoulder area of my harness. “There, now you can’t fall too far!”

  I clung to the ladder, almost hysterical. “Isn’t there a better way to do this?”

  “Not on our budget.” DeAndre helped me climb onto the beam, then signaled to someone below, who took away my ladder. “I’ll stay until you jump.”

  “You mean forever?” My teeth chattered with fear. Please, please, don’t make me …

  DeAndre laughed. “Ah, the things we do for Ellen.”

  “You ready, Pru?” Ellen’s voice drifted up to me. “On the count of three!”

  No, no, no, no.... I would never be ready.

  “One,…” The cast and crew below counted in unison. “Two...”

  Helping Blake is the only thing you’re good at.

  No…

  “Three!”

  Who was I? A Pru or a Pepper?

  With that thought in my head and too terrified to jump, I leaned forward and basically fell off the beam, descending with a whoosh, then jerking to a stop, the harness catching me painfully around the armpits, waist, and hips.

  I spun and swung at the end of the rope, starting to feel queasy. But the straps still held.

  I cracked one eye open. I was up here and alive!

  Below the crowd was going nuts, cheering. For me.

  Terror and nausea were now joined by a thread of excitement. I opened both eyes and looked around.

  I had done it. I wanted to do a mid-air dance of triumph, but instead I thought, no, I’ll play Blake’s role. I bet I could act as well as he did. I let my arms and legs go limp, shut my eyes, and lolled my head to the side as realistically as possible. Close by, an ambulance siren began to wail.

  Check it out, Dr. Abbot! He would have loved this story.

  Below me, the spectators burst into applause. “Go, Pru!” someone yelled. The audience whooped as I continued to spin. The siren increased in volume.

  I let myself enjoy the feeling—I had really done it! I was on my way, for sure.

  Now the siren was deafening. In fact, it wasn’t a siren. It was a voice. A piercing, high familiar voice. “Gracious heavens, they’ve executed her!”

  My eyes popped open. To my horror, I caught sight of my mom’s tight yellow curls and my dad’s black hair, complete with a bald spot you rarely saw because he was six-foot-six.

  DeAndre was back on the ground, operating the rope and pulley mechanism that moved me around. I kicked my legs and gestured wildly to him. Obligingly, he began to lower me. No, I mouthed silently. I want to stay up here! I would have hung there until Christmas.

  It was no good. A few seconds later, my feet touched the floor. A mob of cast and crew stampeded in my direction with congratulations, which I would have loved had I not seen the top of my dad’s head slicing through the crowd toward me like a shark fin through water.

  Blake beat them all to it. He sideswiped me in a joyful tackle, clamping his arms around me, so that my left arm was immobilized between my body and his, and pulling me off my feet. “You kicked ass!” He kissed my cheek with a resounding smack.

  My folks stopped dead, staring at me in prison orange, feet dangling, in the arms of a stunningly beautiful man. Around us were Ellen, on crutches, Storm, clapping her hands with their long skull-decorated fingernails, the dreadlocked and tattooed DeAndre, and a horde of other hard-working people my folks would dismiss on sight as riff-raff and drains on society.

  Blake kissed my cheek again. “Mwah!”

  “Put me down!” I whispered.

  He slid me down so my feet touched the floor, releasing me, and raised a ques
tioning eyebrow at me. My fellow cast and crew were still bombarding me with questions and congratulations.

  Lloyd and Phyllis, the latter having stopped her shrieking, formed a small pool of ominous quiet in the midst of the hubbub. My mother wore a flowered A-line skirt and one of her brightly colored cardigan sets with matching espadrilles. My dad, tall and cadaverously thin, stood beside her in a black suit and white shirt. They both wore their SCBAC buttons, representing the town of Clayton wherever they went.

  They exchanged a glance, which I read with an experienced eye. My dad’s head moved imperceptibly toward Blake, meaning Who’s that? My mom answered with an equally imperceptible head shake. No clue, but he looks like a bad influence.

  My heart hammered so hard it had to be visible, beating under my day-glow one-piece. The last time I stood up to Lloyd—I mean really stood up to him by going on a hunger strike when I was thirteen and desperate to attend the local middle school—he had made me sit at the kitchen table with my dinner in front of me until two am, when I finally broke down and ate it. He had stood there while I ate, humiliating me with the gleam of triumph in his eye.

  He won. I lost. It was the natural order of things.

  One thing about my father, though, was that he didn’t show his mean side in front of witnesses. Instinctively trying to protect myself, I grabbed Blake and Ellen each by the arm and pulled them forward. “Come meet my parents!” I made no move to hug my mom and dad or even greet them directly. “I guess they dropped by to see where I worked.” Again, I mentally kicked myself for telling them the name of my play. A quick internet search must have given them its location.

  Linking my arms with Blake’s and Ellen’s, I drew them close to me, while the other cast and crew scattered.

  Phyllis jumped right to the heart of things.“What are you wearing?”

  “It’s a costume. I was helping Blake prepare for a scene.” I nodded in his direction, and she looked over at him. He laid a smile on her that turned her ears pink and set her to fumbling with the strap of her straw handbag.