Nate Expectations

by Tim Federle

“I gotta run and sing a high C in a sec,” Jordan says before glancing away from me and at the sky, “and also, I think I feel sprinkles, so you should come in too.”

  “What if rain is just God crying over how unfair theater is?” I say, in a kind of conspiratorial dream-voice.

  Jordan snort-laughs and says, “Nate, even for a drama kid, you are truly dramatic.”

  We push through the double doors and duck under the sign that says NO ENTRY EVER, STRICTLY ENFORCED, when I’ve had it up to here (picture me pointing at my shoulder right now) with how casual Jordan is being, and I blurt out: “Why are you in such a good mood? I need somebody to be sad with, and the Lord knows my parents don’t get what I’m going through!”

  “That’s your second God reference in five minutes,” Jordan says. “Is this a new thing for you?”

  Now, this is the part of the show when the female ensemble runs by us in the upstairs stairwell, as they race downstairs to momentarily sing offstage oohs and aahs as E.T.’s ship glows. It’s their tradition to ruffle my hair, like I’m a little kid and not a full teenager who likes to find dark corners to kiss in.

  “I mean I was sort of using ‘the Lord’ figuratively, so.”

  “Anyway,” Jordan says, when the female ensemble has passed and all that’s left is the scent of exertion and hairspray. “I’m trying to focus on the positive about all the good stuff happening for me—that’s why I’m in such an okay mood.”

  Obscure. What’s he getting at? “Good stuff as in what?”

  “I had a callback today for a TV show!” He holds out his arms like I’m supposed to hug him, but instead I attempt a high five that ends with me slapping the wall.

  “For what?”

  “Don’t seem too excited, Nate. Jeez.”

  “No, I just mean—you usually tell me what you’re auditioning for.”

  Constantly. And this kid books a lot of jobs.

  Last month, during one of our ten-minute fire-escape breaks, I ran lines with him for a toothpaste commercial that he was up for.

  The role was “Cute Boy.” So, ideal for him.

  I coached him to focus not on the product but on the impact of the product. “Really savor the fact that, with teeth this white, the concept of shame will be a thing of the past,” I believe I said. And he booked it! Obviously, he booked it. (You should see his smile.) Jordan shot the commercial in Vancouver and had to take half a week off from the show. I did three performances in a row as Elliott, and though all the song keys are basically too high for me, I always get double the laughs as Jordan. Fact. Not bragging.

  Anyway, you won’t see these slightly mismatched teeth selling any toothpaste, or gum, or mouth-vicinity products. Not anytime soon. My smile looks like a bookshelf after the kind of earthquake that’s bad enough to wake up a baby but doesn’t actually kill anyone.

  “It’s for a really big part.”

  “What is?”

  “The TV show. That I auditioned for. Today.” Jordan gives me the exact Why aren’t you listening? face I always give to adults when I have a really good idea and they’re busy looking at their phones. “Like,” Jordan says, “I wouldn’t say it’s the lead, but it’s definitely a lead-like character.”

  Sooo, a supporting character, I believe, is the phrase we use for that. Whatever. Perhaps—but not definitely—I’m just envious I don’t have an agent or a manager myself. I’m Nate, the boy who got to Broadway with absolutely no adult support except the general cheer of his actress aunt, who googles herself during The Bachelor commercials.

  “Jordan!” one of the child wranglers whisper-screams up the stairwell. “Enough with the chitchat. You’re on in a minute.”

  He bounces away. That’s the only way to describe it. He takes the stairs two at a time. And because I have the overall sensibility and worry level of a fifty-year-old woman, I say, “Don’t twist your ankle.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot!” he says, both ignoring me and also stopping midway on the stairs. He reaches into his costume jean jacket and pulls out the green rabbit foot. My green rabbit foot, from my dressing room, for good luck. “I borrowed this for the TV audition. Guess it worked!”

  He tosses it in an impossibly high arc and I catch it in an impossible display of athleticism. Move over, sports. I’m coming for you.

  “You . . . know where I keep my rabbit foot?” I say, feeling both known and weirdly violated, and holding the rabbit foot tighter than I mean to. Feeling reunited with one thing that feels like New York to me, the way I associate Jankburg with fried food, and New Jersey with fear.

  “Of course I know where you keep your rabbit foot,” Jordan says, the wrangler now pulling him away by the wrist. “You’re Nate. I know all things Nate.”

  Another moment where, if we were alone, we’d probably spontaneously kiss, by the way. Not that I keep track of these things.

  Jordan takes off, and I hear him hit that high C, and it’s perfect, as bright and as piercing and as pinpointed as the light on your phone when you’re supposed to be sleeping but can’t help checking to see if a cute boy texted you back.

  I turn the rabbit foot over in my hand. Something feels off. When I examine it more closely, I see that the cheap gold chain that makes it a keychain has fallen off, somewhere. I don’t even use it as a keychain. But something about it broke under Jordan’s watch.

  “It doesn’t even matter,” I say out loud, to myself—but then one of the adult female understudies ruffles my head from behind, and says, “What doesn’t matter?”

  And when I turn around, her eyes are watering, and I say, out of nowhere, “Can you believe we got zero nominations?” and she says, “I know! Why is everyone not freaking out about this?!”

  Because it’s her first Broadway show too, even though she’s in her twenties. We are Broadway babies together. Bawling Broadway babies. (I’m not actually bawling, but I’m obsessed with alliteration, e.g., English is my best subject.)

  We boo-hoo a little, and I say “Finally” into her sweatshirt, because finally I’m allowed to be my emotional self with someone today, without them not kissing me or not stealing my keychain or not smiling when they say my name out loud. “Finally.”

  “Totally,” she says. Score one for me. (I keep a tally of every time an adult agrees with me. Happens more and more these days.)

  This is an adult chorus girl I’ve barely spoken to the whole run. Here we are, holding on to each other like two old people at a fiftieth anniversary of a tragedy of which they’re the sole survivors. I heard that when a cruise ship is sinking following an accident, strangers bond very quickly, and if they survive, they stay bonded for life. Maybe that’s this moment. Maybe my career is an iceberg and this lady and I are drinking Diet Cokes on the lido deck.

  (I’ve seen Titanic seven hundred times. Can we talk about Leonardo DiCaprio’s hair?)

  I pull away from her sweatshirt and comfort myself with the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio and I have the exact same number of Tony Award nominations.

  “You’re a sweet kid, Nick,” this lady says. Like, she calls me Nick, that’s for real. “A real sweetie from day one.”

  And I don’t even correct her. I just go, “Aww,” and ask her if she has any gum (she doesn’t), and then I go back to my dressing room, ’cause I guess we’ve got to do Act Two of this thing.

  Hey, Adults: Not Everything Is a Lesson!

  The next part happens so fast that it’s like when you’re trying to be good and not have sweets for a couple days, after the costume department informs you that your costumes are getting “a little snug” (literally, they said this). But then, you sneak in a cookie or three and ~bam~ the diet is over in like twelve seconds.

  That’s how fast the next part is.

  “Heidi! Hey! I thought I was meeting you back at home tonight?”

  My aunt is at the stage door after tonight’s show, looking like a mom in a TV commercial where one of her kids is home from a war and so they celebrate by making instant coffee.
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br />   “Oh, Natey,” she says, all weird.

  And I go, “What, what?!” like maybe my dog, Feather, died back home, and Heidi has to deliver the news. But it’s not that.

  It’s somehow worse.

  Aunt Heidi adjusts a strange “summer scarf” that a lot of ladies seem to be wearing these days. New York is so hot in August that it sometimes feels as if you are one of those molten chocolate desserts with a hard outside and an oozing core.

  I’ll be honest, I’d kill for chocolate of any temperature right now.

  “Stage management called and told me they were going to gather your company, right after the show,” Heidi says, confused and overheated, her makeup running the slowest race of all time.

  “Wait, should I be inside the theater right now?” I say.

  When I turn around to check the rest of the stage-door autographing line, I realize I’m the only actor outside, the only one of us tonight who took some selfies with some superfans. (One guy here has seen E.T. so many times, he literally calls me out if I screw up a dance step in the scene in the forest.)

  “C’mon,” Heidi says, and leads me back around the metal barricades that separate the stage door from the pedestrians.

  It’s been three whole months of E.T. and I still feel like I’m lining up for a rollercoaster every time I walk through the stage door and no adult stops me. I still can’t believe this is my life, and that I’m this talented to ride this ride.

  “Nate!” one of the child wranglers says, once we get backstage. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you. Didn’t you hear the announcement about the meeting in the theater?”

  Nope! Because I never hear announcements, as they’re always being made when Jordan and I are hiding from the world. The speakers don’t work out on the balcony. And even if they did, when Jordan and I are sneaking in a kiss, none of my other senses function properly. Like literally I can’t smell anything, I can’t hear anything, I can’t even taste anything. It’s like my insides are a clock that just clicks so, so loud, and way too fast. Jordan never has to worry about missing an announcement, however; his dresser basically acts as a personal assistant, prepping him for interview requests and filling him in on breaking news. What a life.

  “Here we go,” Heidi says when we enter the Shubert Theater auditorium to join the rest of my castmates. It’s the only theater on Broadway that’s got green seats. Put another way: Picture a fancy theater. You see red velvet seats, right? Wrong. Buzzer sound! Incorrect. The glorious Shubert Theater is the color of your grandma’s weird sherbet recipe that actually tastes amazing.

  Anyway, earlier I said this part goes fast, and I guess I’m stalling.

  And: “. . . that has forced us to make an extraordinarily difficult decision” is the only part I remember clearly, anyway. It’s coming from a producer, standing in front of us, delivering terrible news in her signature expensive clothes.

  The whole scene playing out in front of me turns into that one feature on your phone where you can make the camera go really fast and then super slow. Everything’s both underwater and on fire. Our director, Dewey, is sitting on the foot of the stage, cradling his head, just like he did when we were in tech rehearsals, when E.T.’s ship kept getting stuck on a corner of the proscenium. I look up at it now, where it still bears evidence of a metal gash that never got fixed before opening night.

  Heidi takes my hand and I pull it away like I’m fourteen years old and she doesn’t know where that hand has been. Which, let’s be honest.

  “I’m so sorry your show is closing,” she says.

  Yeah, in case it isn’t clear yet: On Broadway, if your show doesn’t get nominated for Best Musical, it becomes one of those noble woodland animals that senses it’s going to die and goes and hides behind a log so their family doesn’t have to watch.

  “I’m just so sorry, buddy.”

  There’s something about the way Heidi says it: not condescendingly, or like she’s got any easy way to make it better—like she can’t hide the fact that showbiz is tough and being a kid is even tougher—that makes my stomach, which prefers to play the role of a clock, instead play the role of a rollercoaster.

  Maybe I’m not this talented to ride this ride.

  A bunch of other kids are crying, and one of the oldest ladies in the show is shaking her head like she’s at her own funeral and offended it wasn’t better attended.

  Our production stage manager, Roscoe, is thwapping his hand against a set of keys on his waistband. But two of the female altos are smirking and rolling their eyes in unison, acting a kind of way I hope I never act: like I’m so used to a Broadway show closing, the only way I can process it is to smirk alongside a battle-scarred friend. I’m not smirking. I’m seeing slivers and flashes and feeling sort of faint.

  “Nate,” Heidi says. “Earth to Natey. Are you feeling okay?”

  That’s the precise moment when Jordan catches my eye, and freezes me in his patented freeze-vision. He looks so calm, like this terrible news won’t affect his perfect-and-full-of-opportunities life, that I do the thing my dad always does when he’s mad the Pirates win. I lash out.

  “Don’t call me Natey,” I say to Aunt Heidi, loud, loud enough that when my castmate Genna whips her head around to see why I’m shouting, her hair band comes loose, catapults itself toward my eye, and hits it square in the pupil.

  And this is the thing that breaks me.

  Not the news that my Broadway debut is coming to a crashing end before I could even get the entire original cast to sign my poster.

  It’s Genna’s dumb hair band, whapping my eye with perfect aim.

  I am somehow, now, half-blinded in a cab, pretending not to cry, and working on a Popsicle that Heidi instinctively knew we should stop for (Popsicles > Advil, FYI). Mostly, though, I’m silently checking my phone with my one good eye, every two seconds. Maybe my phone’s broken, though. Jordan hasn’t responded to any of my frowny-face texts or “person dying” GIFs that I’ve sent in the last ten minutes. Since the news.

  “Someday this will be a really interesting chapter in your life,” Heidi says, moments before we hit a pothole so hard that my Popsicle gags me.

  “Heidi?” I say after recovering, and she goes, “Yes, Nate?”—almost “Natey” but not, because even adults can learn if you believe in them.

  “Not everything is a lesson and not everything is interesting in retrospect,” I say.

  I chomp down on my last bite of orange Popsicle, and an ice cream headache rings in my head like a terrible summer song, but I still manage to force out: “Some chapters just suck.”

  Mourning a Hoagie

  Okay, I’m in kind of a mean place tonight, maybe, and hiding in Aunt Heidi’s bedroom for some alone time. “I’m like fifty percent sure that Jordan is a . . . psychopath now?”

  “See, this has always been my theory.”

  “I know,” I say. “I know.”

  “Just sayin’, diva.”

  Oh, that’s Libby—best friend back home, and currently eating a hoagie on a swing set that’s around the corner from her house. We’ve spent a billion hours there staging various outdoor productions for an appreciative audience of squirrels and/or litter.

  “Are you eating a hoagie,” I say, turning my phone sideways to see better, “on a swing set?”

  “Duh.”

  We’re FaceTiming, but the crickets of Jankburg are no match for the sirens of New York. Everything is an emergency here.

  “So, did you literally sob?” she says between bites. “When they announced that you’re closing?”

  Heidi and I just finished Indian food (I literally don’t know if we even have Indian restaurants in Jankburg!) and I’m completely stuffed, but the sight of Libby’s hoagie makes my mouth water, because I’m a monster.

  “I didn’t cry at the normal part,” I say, pausing for another siren to pass, and hearing Heidi turn off the shower and hum a new pop song I’m surprised that she, as a semi-elderly person, even knows. “L
ike, I didn’t cry when the producer said We’re closing the show in a week. I cried when this girl’s hair band hit my eye.”

  Libby hops off the swing, picks up a handful of sand, and throws it into the wind. It immediately backfires, blows back into her face, and makes her wince-scream.

  We laugh.

  “I thought that was going to make, like, a beautiful moment of wind art!” she shrieks. “Like, I thought the sand was going to shimmer in the moonlight! I suck at art!”

  “That’s the problem with wind,” I say obscurely, with nowhere to go with it.

  “So, you cried because of a cornea injury,” Libby says, holding up her sandy sandwich, “the way I’m about to cry because my hoagie is ruined.”

  “Correct.”

  Heidi ducks her head into her bedroom, where I’m sitting on the floor practicing my splits. “Is that Libby?” she says, so I turn my phone around for the girls to wave at each other. “Nate!” Heidi says. “I’m in a towel!”

  “Puh-lease,” Libby says, tossing her hoagie into a trash can. “I’m mourning a hoagie and thus can’t even see straight right now. Plus, you have the body of a model.”

  Heidi rolls her eyes at us (but is, as a Virgo, obsessed with compliments) and calls for her kitty to follow her out.

  “So, sorry to state the obvious,” Libby says when it’s just us again. “But: Please tell me this means you and I will be texting each other during science class in approximately one and a half weeks. Like, please tell me you’re basically coming directly back home by dawn.” Now Libby starts to climb up a metal slide, which proves oddly difficult for her. She abandons it, hops off, and begins walking her scooter home.

  “I mean, I dunno.” God, I hope not. I love Libby but I love New York, too. Don’t make me pick a favorite child. “We’ll see what my parents say. I don’t really know how I’d afford to stay in New York without the show running . . .”

  Libby almost gets hit by a motorcycle and yells “Merrily!” at him, short for Merrily We Roll Along—our thing where we yell out famous flop musicals instead of swearing. Even though we’re old enough to swear now. Like, way old enough.