by Tim Federle
She looks exhausted, more tired than I’ve ever seen her. She looks older and it makes me worry.
“Are you . . . a stress-ball about going back to school tomorrow?” she asks.
“Nah, not really,” I lie.
“Okay,” she says. She’s in the same terry-cloth robe she owned from before I went to New York, and it makes me wish I’d bought her, like, a new one, at somewhere nice, like Saks or Forever 21. “Because—I mean, God knows I was never on Broadway myself, but I know what it’s like to worry yourself up before a big day. At a new school and all.”
I dig my big toe into the old rug that’s so worn-out, it’s only got the sopping-up power of a name-brand paper towel my mom would never splurge on. “Nah, I mean, I’ve faced the New York Times, Mom. I’m not worried about a bunch of freshmen.”
She grins, and the mere act of grinning makes her wince.
“What is it?”
“My dumb old neck,” she says, and I say, “Your neck isn’t dumb, or old,” and it’s the nicest moment we’ve had in so long that I sit on the bathtub because I feel light-headed.
“Well, I’ll put a hot water bottle on your bed, just in case,” she says, and I groan and say, “I don’t really use those anymore, Mom,” but she ignores me and turns around to leave, and I remember how bad we are at goodbyes in Jankburg. In New York you really draw out a goodbye, play it for tears. Here, the scenes have no definite endings.
But you know what? When I’m back in my room ten minutes later, after not puking—even though I think I’m on the verge because of my back-to-school nerves—the hot water bottle greets me like a warm puppy. And I cuddle it all night till it’s cold, or I am.
Oh, and Feather remembered me, by the way. Of course she did. Dogs are the smartest, most thoughtful people I know.
Here Comes the Lava
When you are fourteen and have a job that doesn’t start until 8 p.m. at night, that means you have two dinners—one at 6-ish, so your chicken fingers (most likely) can settle, and another around 11:30 p.m., sitting on your aunt’s futon, shoveling down one of God’s many beautiful versions of a potato.
“What do you mean, you don’t want O.J. with breakfast?”
That’s probably why Mom is so surprised when I’m just sitting here at the kitchen table, “awake” (not awake) three hours earlier than I was just a few days ago. Back when I was a Broadway legend. Just kidding.
“Aunt Heidi taught me not to drink my calories,” I say, and I’m scrolling through my phone to catch up with my New York friends. But nobody is up, and everything they sent me came in after 2 a.m., when I was still a wide-eyed worried ball.
Mom hides her tongue in her cheek, and places Saran wrap and a rubber band over my unused O.J. cup, and says, “You didn’t have any problem drinking your calories when we got a Frosty at Wendy’s last night.”
And I say, “Doesn’t count, it was my welcome-home Frosty!” which somehow makes her smile.
And then Libby’s mom honk-honks from out front. And for some reason I check my jeans zipper—an old instinct, like: people won’t make fun of me if my zipper’s up, as if it’s some kind of protective Goddess of Dignity—and then give Mom a quick quarter-kiss on the cheek.
“Try to have fun, or have something, today,” Mom says, giving up halfway through. She knows moms are supposed to prattle on about good grades, but she was a C+ student herself, at best, and constantly says that if math were so important, why does she never use geometry to run my grandma’s failing floral business?
She stands at the door holding her worn-down robe tight and waving at Libby’s mom, who rolls down the window and says, “Nice to see you again, Sherrie,” and Mom does one of those “What, looking like this?!” mom-things that are so predictable and reaching for a compliment.
I haven’t seen Libby since the first preview of E.T.—she came to New York to surprise me, and I fainted, and it was a whole thing—so she catapults her butt out of the car. They are blasting an early-career Kristin Chenoweth album in there, and Ms. Chenoweth is cracking a joke to a live audience (Kristin Chenoweth is the funniest soprano), right as Libby and I half hug and fully laugh, and bounce up and down.
“I hate school so much!” I say as a surprise greeting, and she goes, “Great to see you too, sailor!”
We sit side by side in the backseat, and Libby’s mom comments how she feels like our chauffeur. “Perfect,” I go. “Can you take us right to the airport for a trip to New York, then? Don’t you, as our chauffeur, technically have to go wherever we ask?”
And I guess I say it all too quickly and sharply because Libby goes, “Pump the brakes, Mr. Manhattan, we don’t work for you.”
Her mom cranks down the Chenoweth album a bit, when Kristin gets to some kind of aria (it’s almost always either too early or too late to enjoy an aria; there’s like twenty minutes per day when opera is appropriate), and Libby and I compare the school schedule that I posted on Instagram last night. And speaking of operas, it is nearly tragic that we only have one class together.
“What the heck is physical chemistry anyway?” I say.
Libby’s mom almost steers her Ford Windstar into a tree, because she swerves so bad.
Libby types s-e-x and then e-d into the Notes app of her phone, and holds it up for me. And I whisper, “Why are you saying sexed,” and she shakes her head at me.
Libby’s mom, who is as cool as an adult as you can be and live in Pennsylvania, says, “Sex ed, Nate, you two are in sex ed together—though Libby thinks the teacher was actually born before sex was even a concept.”
And here’s an interesting science fact: A year and a half ago I would have gone completely red-hot and also nervous-chilly at the mention of the word s-e-x, like I’m in one of those nature documentaries about lava flowing right into the sea. But today I just bust out laughing. And Libby goes, “Just wait till our ancient teacher comes up with all sorts of different words for what things actually are,” and I’m reminded how refreshing it is to hang out with a family where everyone is in on the joke. “Last week she called a boob a ‘fleshy chest’ and three of the boys laughed so hard, one of them fell off his seat and had to go to the nurse.”
Whoops, here comes the lava. I’m fire-hot, and I already miss Savanah and New York, where you don’t really need sex ed because everyone walks around half-naked backstage. So it’s kind of a constant, free anatomy lesson.
“This is worse than airport traffic before a holiday,” Libby’s mom says as we pull up to the front circle at the high school where Libby has been going for two months without me.
Once, she FaceTimed from the girls’ bathroom stalls to show me a hilarious piece of graffiti that spelled out exactly where the principal should stick her old-fashioned values, but otherwise, I haven’t been back to this school since my big bro, Anthony, won his last track meet, a couple years back, before going off to Penn State.
“You’re gonna do fine,” Libby says after she sees me holding my seat belt across my chest like it’s a bow, and I may need to protect myself in a recess battle. “People care so much less about petty stuff in high school. Mostly.”
“Especially their grades,” Libby’s mom says, and tilts the mirror down to give Libby a rare mom-warning glance.
“I have a 3.2!” Libby says, undoing her buckle and applying some kind of glitter balm to her cheeks, that I’m pretty sure is meant for your lips—but that’s Libby, a visionary. “A 3.2 gets me well on my way toward an arts administration B.A. at Pitt!”
“Oh, are we an arts administrator now?” I go. “Last week you were a fashion designer.”
“Did you miss the ‘senator of Pennsylvania’ stage of Libby’s career planning?” Libby’s mom says, pulling behind a stalled pickup truck with the wrong kind of bumper stickers staring at me like a taunt.
“Ha and ha and ha—we can all stop ganging up on my aspirations,” Libby says, and has a point. She pulls her socks up a little and then re-adjusts them to the exact same wiggled-d
own position. “I won’t be pigeonholed. If I wanna be a senator who designs pencil skirts, back up and step off.”
She opens the door and her mom does the mom-routine of yelling, “Wait till I’m parked!” but Libby ignores her and hops out to the curb, and I scoot out after her. And that’s the first time, looking at my schedule on my phone, I realize something’s missing.
“Libster,” I go, and she goes, “Yes, Nibster?” A new nickname that I like quite a lot. “Why,” I ask, “is my fourth-period arts elective in the cafeteria?”
Her face goes the color of snow ten minutes before it’s officially sooty. “Oh man, Natey. You haven’t heard, have you?”
Libby’s mom rolls down her window, reaches out, grabs my wrist.
“They tore down the auditorium, Nate,” Libby’s mom says, simultaneously turning off the Kristin Chenoweth album altogether. “All the arts courses are being slowly replaced with ‘practical electives.’ ”
To a theater person, an auditorium is a church. You look for them wherever you go. They mean safety.
To a theater person, placing “the arts” in the cafeteria automatically makes it dinner theater. And dinner theater is not Broadway.
I jiggle my hand away harder than I mean to, and it flings Libby’s mom’s wrist into the side of the window, and I can tell it hurts a little, but she preemptively moms me by going, “It’s fine.”
“They’re basically chopping out the arts,” Libby says, undoing a side braid that she side-braided in the car, three stops back in traffic. Rethinking her whole look. “But I’ve become the pied piper of closet theater kids, since I’m the girl who went to New York to see you in E.T.—so just stick with me. We’ve got a whole underground society of dorks here. You’ll be the king of dork mountain.”
That’s when, a hundred yards behind Libby, I see the bulldozer parked outside the Gene Kelly Auditorium, where half the roof missing, and a dozen pigeons are hanging out on a jagged, exposed wooden frame.
“They’re replacing the theater with a lacrosse field,” she says, putting her hand on my shoulder. “As in: This joint is gonna have a football field and a lacrosse field, plus the gym. But no theater. So. Yeah.”
I don’t say anything. My knuckles sting from flinging them into the window.
“Nate,” Libby goes, “say something.” The cars behind Libby’s mom start toot-tooting, and I still don’t say anything. I just tear into my bookbag, and pull out some emergency beef jerky to start my day right.
That’s another thing my aunt taught me: Don’t drink your calories, but do build your energy around lean protein. She’s like if you stacked six advice guides and three diet books on top of one another, and added a wig.
“This is where you’re supposed to cry,” Libby says, walking me through the front doors at my new old school, where I come face-to-face with a series of trophies that my brother, Anthony, won. Back when he was only a year or two older and a foot or two taller than I am now.
“Nah,” I say, gesturing to a photo of him. “I never cry in front of my brother.”
They’ve Been Talking About Me for Weeks
My chair in homeroom has a weak back leg and every time I breathe in, it squeaks like a fart. (Yay.)
I swear to God it isn’t me, but try telling that to the other kids, whose faces and eyes and everythings I can’t bring myself to look at, because what if they’re making artisanal, handcrafted spitballs to shoot at me? Like the bad ol’ days.
I’ve faced thousands of audience members at a time, but surround me with thirty kids my age and it’s like New York didn’t even happen to me.
The first bell of the day rings. Allegedly we’re supposed to put away our phones and face front for attendance, but almost nobody does. Instead what happens is our homeroom teacher, who is pretty young, comes in and walks directly to my desk, with her arms outstretched toward me like she’s a zombie in off-season pastels.
At the very last moment, I think, what the heck, and turn around, but it’s me she’s zombying toward. “We’ve been talking about you for weeks, Mr. Foster.”
Good morning! “Uh, me?”
“Yes, you!” she says, and gestures to the class. I realize that I don’t recognize half the faces, that now that I’m in high school, a big portion of the school has been farmed in from other districts and neighborhoods. I thought this was my chance to blend in and save my theatrical tendencies for after school every day. To keep a low profile. But no. Apparently I’ve been talked about.
“It isn’t every day a Broadway star joins homeroom.”
“Ha, well,” I say, shifting in my seat, making its leg fart (not me!), looking down and expecting snickers from the class. But none come. I look back up. “I mean, I only starred in the show two performances per week, when Jordy—uh, when Jordan—would be off for vocal rest. The other shows I was just in the, like . . . like, the chorus.”
The homeroom teacher scrunches up her nose like I’ve insulted her favorite singer or called her dog ugly to its face. “I’m sorry, could I have a show of hands as to how many people here have appeared in a Broadway show?” And nobody raises their hand, of course.
I’m sure this sounds as if everything is going enviably well, but something about this on-the-spot show is actually awful, like when somebody tries to describe a funny Tweet hours after reading it. It’s never funny when you talk about it. Let me be anonymous here. Anonymous means safe.
“Put another way,” the teacher says, cracking her knuckles, “do raise your hand if you’ve ‘just’ been in the chorus on Broadway.”
She does air quotes and everything.
I feel something on my elbow, like a small lizard, but it isn’t that, it’s a boy—a kind of square-looking boy with acne like a zealous pizza, and he says, “Raise your hand, dude,” and so I do, half-heartedly.
“You forgot to take attendance and the bell is about to ring again in like forty seconds,” says a girl in the back of the room, a kind of kiss-up type who the teacher ignores entirely.
“Okay,” she says instead, “who has a question for Mr. Foster? I’ll start—what’s it like backstage?”
“Did you get paid, like, a lot of money?” a boy asks, and the teacher shoots him a disappointed-cool-older-sister look.
“Do you get nervous before shows?”
“Fag,” somebody whisper-coughs. Ah, there’s the word I was expecting! I am home!
“Seriously, though, was it, like, a lot of money, or—?”
“Did you have a curfew—like, could you stay up all night because your parents weren’t there?”
This one stops me. It’s all been like a row-row-row-your-boat of overlapping questions, as if someone’s playing a trick on me and the trick is that this school, back home, doesn’t think I’m a freak. At least the majority of them don’t. They think I’m . . . whatever a not-freak is. I’ve never had the word for that before.
Not for me, anyway.
But the curfew question, that stops me. “How did you know my parents weren’t in New York?” I say, turning around to meet the gaze of a girl with unfortunate neon braces and frizzy hair that could use about three years of hot oil treatments.
“Because you’re Nate Foster,” she says. “The entire school thinks you’re famous. You had your own trending hashtag for a while.”
The bell rings twice as hard now, but nobody zips up their bookbags or moves. They just keep looking at me.
Ben Mendoza vs. Mr. English
It’s later, in English class, when the whopper of my first day fully absorbs, like when you leave a clay acne-clearing mask on for too long and it’s nearly impossible to wash off.
I’d expected everyone to stare at me like I was and am an alien—they always have—but now it’s a different kind of stare. It’s like I’m an alien who has come from a more evolved planet. And now I’m here to deliver some kind of message. No pressure?
I suppose that’s why I feel uncharacteristically ambitious when our English teacher, Mr. En
glish (can you believe that?), announces we have to come up with a “unique” version of a report on Great Expectations, a book by a man named Charlie Dickens.
Unique is sort of what I do, according to rumor.
Several boys fight Mr. English on the assignment.
“Can my unique version of the book report be that I don’t read the book?” asks a boy named Ben Mendoza, who has had to be told to take off his baseball hat twice in ten minutes.
“That would be a no, Mr. Mendoza,” Mr. English says. You know those teachers who call kids “Mr.” or “Miss?” That’s Mr. English.
“Bummer,” says Ben.
“Funny, Mr. Mendoza—you’re usually among my quieter, more behaved students. Are you showing off for the new boy?”
Big group giggles, here—and Ben Mendoza pulls his ball cap down over his eyes, and I half stab my hand with a pen just to isolate the torture of this moment, this school.
The same girl from homeroom who had a heart attack over our teacher not taking attendance calls out another request here: “Could you give us examples of—” and Mr. English raises his hand as if to say, “Be quiet, child.”
I accidentally smile, because for a half moment Mr. English reminds me of New York, where the adults are only condescending because they want to help you. Here it’s mostly because they wish they didn’t have to be around you. Fact.
Libby’s uncle used to work at this school and once told us that teachers get into teaching for the right reasons, but at a certain point realize that the majority of children wish they’d disappear under mysterious circumstances, and along with them, the homework would too.
“Listen up, everyone,” old, tired Mr. English says. “The rule here is that you have to let me finish and then you can ask questions. Because I’ve been teaching longer than most of your parents have been alive and/or married and/or divorced, and thus can almost always anticipate what your small underdeveloped heads are worrying about.” He picks up a coffee mug, doesn’t drink, and eyes Ben Mendoza.