Nate Expectations

by Tim Federle

  But right when a truck passes our house, and makes a huge rumble-rumble sound, Mom texts me the gay freaking pride flag (!!!!!!!!!!!!). And doesn’t even follow it up with “whoops autocorrect” or anything.

  It just sits there bold and still like a flag that nobody’s trying to tear down or mess with.

  And when I hear Ben say, “I’m here, let’s roll!” I almost drop my phone in the grass.

  Bossy Nate Is Bossy

  Libby can tell something’s up with me. Unfortunately.

  Here’s the funny thing about having a best friend who knows you basically better than she knows herself: She also knows when you’re hiding something.

  “Okay, guys,” I say to my cast, who are all wearing their ridiculously ill-fitting, half-baked costumes from home. There’s so many white T-shirts with the collars torn out, it looks like a production of The Outsiders, six months into the run after the wardrobe budget ran out. “Let’s take it from the top, and remember to really artic-you-late even when you’re lip-syncing. Because I want the audience experience to be, like: Whoa, are they really singing, or is that Peter, Paul, and Millie?”

  “Mary!” someone yells, and I say, “Excuse me?”

  And Libby has to lean up on her tiptoes and say, “The singer’s name is Mary, not Millie.”

  It’s the first time Libby’s ever had to haunch herself up to say anything to me. In this instant, I realize I’ve grown. I am now half a head taller than Libby. Something about this leaves me shooketh.

  Jim-Jim, who is in charge of music at rehearsals, because he has the best wireless speaker system, casually offers (at the “Places!” call) that he forgot his speakers at home. And I blurt out, “Wait, what?!” and Jim-Jim drops his head and says, “Actually, I loaned them to a senior.”

  “Citizen?”

  “No, like: upperclassmen.”

  Libby smacks her hands against her thighs. “We’re about to have our final run-through, Jim-Jim! This is kind of a pivotal moment!”

  But strangely, two of my girls apparently independently travel with high-end wireless speakers—“You never know when you need to have a party,” one, whose name I haven’t fully committed to memory, offers—and so we’re back on track.

  “What’s up with you?” Libby says when Abigail or maybe Autumn, or Amelie, is syncing the speaker with Jim-Jim’s phone, which has the show’s playlist downloaded.

  “What do you mean, I just want today to go well,” I say, and I wince as I gulp back some Sunny D, because I guess I’ve been chewing on my lip, and cut it open, raw.

  “Yeah, something’s up with you,” she eye-roll mutters, and pulls out a big white notepad from her bookbag.

  “Oooh, fresh office supplies!” The best, right? The only good part of any project or school event is the office supplies. You can quote me.

  Also, I’m trying to distract Libby from uncovering the pride flag on my phone. The minute I show it to her, it’s all she’s going to be able to focus on. She’s like a cat with a laser when it comes to drama. Frankly, she’s like me with a laser—laser pointers are just incredibly fun.

  I nod at the stage manager, a sophomore girl who ran for class president last year and was voted dead last, but relishes power and yelling at boys (obsessed with her for this). She bellows “Places!” so loudly that Libby’s mom sticks her head out from the kitchen window upstairs, to check on us.

  Pip takes his place by the fence, and the cutest thing happens: A few people give him fist bumps to psych him up, and another guy even gives him this full-on hug.

  Mona Lisa is performing some kind of breathing exercise that involves holding her air in until she almost passes out, then hissing at her flat palm until all the air has run out? I’m not sure—it feels like witchcraft—but I admire the commitment.

  And the assistant stage manager, a boy whose whole “gag” is that he’s got an old-fashioned name, and wears penny loafers and a bowtie to school, goes around and collects people’s cell phones. And nobody puts up a fight.

  “I’m waiiiiting,” Libby says, but not to them. She’s in my ear, leaning over and not up now, because we’re sitting on an ancient Ikea sofa that Libby’s mom let us move to the backyard for rehearsals. “Is it Jordan? Did he do something even stupider since last night?”

  And that’s the exact moment when I see Ben doing push-ups behind the tree that Libby and I carved our names into, back when we were ten. But we didn’t etch NATE <3 LIBBY or LIBBY <3 NATE, we carved NATE + LIBBY <3 RAGTIME—a semi-underrated musical about injustice and the Ford motor company, which received a revival that somehow didn’t record a cast album, so did it even happen?

  Ben hops up, sees me watching him, and grins, and I look away at nothing, too fast. Fast enough that I hear my neck give a little crick.

  “Is somebody gonna play the overture, ’cause I’m just standing here being stupid?” Pip says, and I catch Jim-Jim flirting on the sidelines, with Paige. I’m both proud of my frizzy-haired, previously unpopular Paige for this moment of romantic clarity, but also super annoyed. So I clear my voice like an old-timey cartoon: “A-hem.”

  “You better tell me at intermission,” Libby says, and I guess that does it—fine, she wore me down, whatever.

  Because, at the opening guitar strums of “The Sound of Silence”—an old folky duet by a man named Simon and his friend Garth, that we play when Pip comes out and walks through the graveyard at the top of the show—I hold up my phone for Libby to see. I point to the text exchange with my mom, and when the music lets up, the sound is not of silence but of Libby gasping.

  “You told your mom you’re g—?!”

  “No,” I say with a gritted jaw, a haze of Axe lifting off me like summer smog on pavement. “She apparently . . . just . . . figured it out. I don’t know how.”

  And I swear a weird wind sweeps through the yard, and knocks over all our cardboard headstones. Carl runs out onto the grass to set them back up, but Pip, bless him, keeps speaking, even as Libby’s mom’s wind chimes go nuts, bing-bing-bing.

  “My father’s family name being Pirrip,” he says, like a disaster—it’s like, just wait for the breeze to die down, then talk!—“and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.”

  A loud text rings out over the speaker system, and Jim-Jim leaps over a beaming Paige, and grabs his phone out of the head stage manager’s hand, and says, “Sorry! Lemme just put this on mute!”

  But these are just the background details, folks.

  The main show is that Libby is still so shocked that my mom knows I’m gay, that it’s up to me alone to say, “Hey, guys? Let’s go back to the top, and let’s always put our phones on vibrate before we turn them into stage management, and let’s especially always talk twice as loud. You know the rules, don’t make me be Bossy Nate.”

  Apparently they call me Bossy Nate behind my back, which I should hate but I actually 60-percent love. Because, I don’t even like bossing myself around. I don’t even feel comfortable choosing what underwear to wear or cereal to eat. That anyone thinks I’m a boss at anything is . . . novel.

  “So, let’s try this bad boy again.”

  I barely nod at the stage manager and she shout-screams, “Places, again!” and I see her get revved up by screaming at a junior boy from the lacrosse team who she recruited as an assistant stagehand.

  When I plop back down on the sofa, Libby pulls the old thing we used to do, to make each other laugh: At the last moment you hold out your hand and your friend sits on your open palm. Kid stuff. For kids.

  But funnily enough, it still works, and we laugh, and we start “The Sound of Silence” over again.

  Ben is filming the entire final dress rehearsal on his phone.

  Ben’s always filming stuff on his phone.

  It’s his hobby and I think it’s so he can hide behind the camera like how the character Mark does in Rent, a musical in th
e nineties that my Aunt Heidi once told me was “as big as Hamilton, and this was pre-Twitter.”

  Anyway, Ben’s got his phone up, making another little movie. He does this any time he’s not onstage—or the patch of grass we’re using as our stage today. He isn’t much good as Arthur, the rebellious brother. He forgets his lines, he talks over other actors, he is always either too LOUD or too soft. But Ben’s like our mascot. He makes funny videos; he brings in homemade cookies; he shows up looking exhausted, like he was up half the night avoiding one of his mom’s tirades. Probably because he was.

  On Broadway, you can’t take videos from the wings. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I’m verrrrry grateful for people who shoot bootlegs from the balcony, as most of my show knowledge comes from illegal YouTube bootlegs. But you’re supposed to just . . . not. Live theater is supposed to be live, not captured on a rectangle of metal and glass.

  But I don’t stop Ben. This isn’t Broadway. It’s a backyard. I’m finally accepting that this comes with its own niceness.

  “I thought that was notably not-terrible,” Libby whispers to me, after Pip’s first monologue.

  “Agree,” I say, and pretend to write something down on my own spanking new white notepad, which Libby has set in my lap like the power producer she is.

  She scribbles a little pride flag on her own notepad, to tease me, and I say, “Don’t even.”

  I’m not going to go over the next part, because, like it or not, it’s Great Expectations—even a version that includes a fun up-tempo song called “Free Man in Paris,” by Joan Mitchell, which I staged to be sung at a bar. But no matter how many times an adult tells you you’ll like an old-times book by the end, there are certain things that are just always going to be a little boring. And Charles Dickens is one of them.

  Unless it’s Oliver! and I’m starring in it five years ago, before my voice changed.

  “Ten-minute break!” power girl yells, at intermission.

  Libby’s mom brings out orange slices, and everyone is allowed to have their phones back for ten minutes. But the best thing is that people just sit around talking and inside-joking, and somebody teases me for my “director voice,” which I guess I do when I’m talking. (At least it’s not a British accent.)

  “Look,” I say to Libby as she’s picking off tomatoes from her hoagie, and throwing them behind a bush that died three summers ago.

  “What?”

  “Not what. Who. Look at how nobody’s on their phones. They’re acting like a little family. They’d rather be in person than online.”

  “Oh, that’s ’cause our WiFi is down,” she says, “and we have terrible reception in the backyard.” But then she sees my slightly cracked face and goes, “J.K., it’s because everyone loves each other because theater is a family and Bossy Nate is Dad. Duh.”

  I take a bite of hoagie and it’s so good. Sandwiches just get a lot of things right, you know?

  At the tail end of intermission, when Carl collects all the phones and pretends to “grab/steal” a few of the kids’ noses like he’s actually sixty, I finally text my mom back. Because that pride flag is now just sitting there a mistake, an inkblot nobody acknowledged on a nice dressy shirt.

  I go with the bug-eyed, shocked emoji, and chase it with a heart.

  She isn’t usually fast with return texts. Not usually.

  Mom takes a while to find the right emoji. It’s her whole outlet; she loves her phone—it’s like her secret diary or message in a bottle to an outside world that is potentially nicer than the one she chose for herself, all those years back.

  My dad doesn’t text.

  So, normally, when I text my mom anything—“gonna be ten minutes late” or “is so you think you can dance dvr’ing?”—she takes a bit to get back to me. She marinates. Her texts are her novels, her sonnets.

  She’s Jankburg’s own Charles Dickens—a guy who famously released his novels one chapter at a time in a newspaper, and was paid by the word. So he used a lot of words. Extra words. That’s my mom, except not the extra-words part. She was a bad student, and to this day, she’s always self-conscious about using the wrong word for something. She uses emojis because you can’t spell an emoji wrong. She takes a while to find the right emoji and even then she usually uses only one of three.

  But I text her the bug-eyed emoji and the heart today, and right away, like she’s been sitting on a draft, she sends me back “<3 you back forever”

  “Places for Act Two!” the stage manager yells, and a couple of the boys help Libby’s mom clean up the hoagie plates, and for about eleven seconds, I don’t mind being back home.

  Half-Cockney, Half-Southern

  At some point I should share that I’m getting a 3.0-ish GPA right now, which is not good and not bad. But it’s average and I loathe being average.

  Anthony—my older brother, the star athlete, and the type of kid who winks at a piece of paper and a giant A+ appears on it—never had to try that hard for good grades. But for me it’s either: I’m in love with a subject (my cooking class elective) or I loathe it (most of the others).

  Somebody tell me when I’m going to need algebra, when I eventually move back to New York? Like, literally, somebody, tell me.

  They should teach public school children how to navigate various transportation systems across the world. Show me how to get through Paris or Chicago or Gettysburg alive, right? Or, you kids wanna move to New York? Okay, here’s what you need to know about how to safely get to Queens after 11 p.m. on a weekend, when the city subway guys decide to do all their repairs.

  Teach us that, adults!

  I’m drawing a map of the subway system on the back of a worksheet in social studies class, desperately wishing we were studying Eva Perón (Evita the musical), Joseph what’s-his-name (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, about a blonde college student in biblical times who sings high and wears a fabulous patchwork coat), or actual Nazis (Cabaret and The Sound of Music). But we aren’t. We’re learning about how a bill becomes a law—and yes, I’m basically asleep.

  So to stay half-awake, I’m sketching the subway by memory, the loops and turns, recalling how I’d watch rats scuttle around rooting for food. Maybe this is why I have a 3.0-ish.

  But then, something happens.

  Kids in my class are turning around, whispering, texting something to each other. I guess what I’m saying is: My desk is right in the middle of our social studies room, and our teacher is on the phone to the A.V. office because the Smart Board keeps short-circuiting. And some kind of rumor, or mini hurricane, is whipping around the edges of the room, working its way in, toward me. I see it happen as if I’m watching a tsunami of teen giggling occur on the horizon and gain force. It whips up strength, the text chain going off, eventually a chorus of chimes and rings and buzzes uniting in a symphony, until wham—it hits my phone too.

  Ding.

  Not that I haven’t been bracing myself for some kind of news alert. It’s now just a few days before our school-wide performance ($5 to get in, yes, but the cash bar was not allowed by the school board), and I’ve been having stomach cramps over the idea of an actor waking up with a cold, or losing a grandparent to a freak elderly person event. I was thrown on at the first preview of E.T. and I don’t want to do it here. It wouldn’t be fair, for one. I have so much more experience than the cast, and I’m a member of the actors’ union, so for me to step into a role in the middle of a gym in the middle of Pennsylvania, I could be taken to Broadway jail or severely fined. Probably.

  But, yeah, that’s not what’s going on here.

  “Click on it,” somebody says, gesturing to my phone.

  I press the link to a video in the text—a video that has 5,800 hits, and was only uploaded last night—right as our teacher hangs up the phone, walks over to her desk, and yells, “Technology stinks! In the old days, we just had books, which don’t need to be manually rebooted!”

  But mostly I’m tuning her out, because mostly I’m watching my
production—my Great Expectations that has somehow become my baby; my Nate expectations—unfold on my little phone screen.

  The user who uploaded it is @BenOverBackwards_2020. Ben. My Ben. And he’s good—like, a solidly decent videographer. Like, the lighting is even flattering, and it’s just natural light, from Libby’s backyard. From our rehearsals. That I perhaps should have kept off-camera.

  This video is going viral, and it’s not because people are being mean about it. It’s because . . . it’s great.

  “Congrats, dude,” says the kid behind me.

  Which is when I get a funny Did I just have bad seafood? feeling, because I scroll down, and see that Ben has posted the time and place of my show. And that it’s directed by NATE FOSTER.

  In fact, the video description says:

  NATE FOSTER’S

  production of

  CHARLES DICKENS’S

  GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  except . . . it’s a musical!

  ~with songs by your parents’ favorite singers~

  And then the date. And the time.

  And that tickets are five bucks.

  “Mr. Foster, would you like to turn your phone off and join the class?” the teacher says, but nope. No, I would not! Instead, I leap up and say, “I need to pee!” and grab my bookbag and make a run for it.

  * * *

  For reasons that are insane—I plead insanity, your dishonor—I am currently ringing the front desk of our school, tucked away in the bathroom stall upstairs, on the third floor behind the half-finished planetarium.

  For further reasons of insanity, when the receptionist picks up, I slip into a sort of half-Cockney, half-Southern accent: “Hi-lo,” I say, rolling my eyes at myself, “could you please call the student Ben Mendoza to the back driveway? This is his—aunt—and I need to speak with him. In person.”

  It’s complicated to explain why I wouldn’t just text him, but trust that it involves the fact that Ben is pulling a 3.9 (I know, amazing; as if he even needed extra credit in English), and that he feels like good grades are his way out of his own house someday. And so he walks through school all day with his phone buried in the bottom of his bag, so he won’t get distracted. Kid’s got discipline for days. Apparently wearing a helmet was only the tip of his responsibility iceberg. I admire it.