by Tim Federle
“His aunt?” the receptionist says, and I just mutter, “Mhmm,” and she sighs and I think I’m a goner, will never pull this off.
But the power of my actions crackles overhead when, over our school’s century-old speaker, I hear: “Could a freshman named Ben Mendoza please meet your aunt in the back driveway?”
I’ve already got notes for my own performance—like, I should have just told the receptionist that he’s my cousin, and I have his asthma medicine; be specific so it feels less general, et cetera.
But this is how we grow as artists.
“let me guess, ur my aunt,” I get as a text, one moment later, and it’s from Ben, already onto me.
By the time he and I meet up, not in the back driveway but in an emergency fire-exit stairwell that Libby told me isn’t actually alarmed, he’s dewy and nervous and holding up his phone like it’s a murder weapon in which showbiz is the victim.
“Am I in trouble?” he says.
“I mean, that’s not the word I’d use. It’s got almost six thousand views!”
He refreshes his phone and holds it back up. “Nate, it’s up to sixteen.”
“Sixteen thousand?!”
“Nate.” He sits on the steps. “Sixty thousand.”
I sit down next to him and dare myself to put my head on his shoulder, but I chicken out, and just study the weird used gum patterns in the tile. My head’s got such a mixture of feels, there needs to be a new word for it.
“Do you want me to take the video down?”
At the very moment Ben asks me that, Jordan texts me: “you didn’t tell me you were using famous music and charging people for tix!” accompanied by that blank-faced emoji that can mean so many things, good or bad.
I lay my head down on my knee and for one moment pretend I’m asleep, right before the prince appears in the dream.
Genetically Wiggly Eyebrows
Adults can be helpful if you’ll let them, but you have to keep a tight leash.
I’m texting Aunt Heidi, Chief Cool Adult of my life, because I feel like I’ve done something wrong somehow, in my show getting so much attention. Without my meaning for it to, that is. And even though Heidi doesn’t always have the answer, she always has an opinion. Which is something.
“again it’s v hard to explain,” I’m typing to her for the twentieth time.
Finally, she just video-calls me, tired and confused by all the texting back and forth.
“First off, why aren’t you in school?”
“I am.” I whip my phone around. “See, I’m in the bathroom.”
“Nate. Stop shaking the screen. I’m going to puke.”
I lean against the handicap grab-bar and steady my phone.
“Also,” Heidi says, “I’ve only got two minutes because I’m at a callback for an all-female production of Hamlet in Dallas. How can I help? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“I don’t . . . know. Technically. No? Maybe.”
I feel like there’s got to be some kind of manual that high school students get, that tells them how to not completely screw up their lives. And, like, I missed the manual, because I wasn’t there on the first day of school.
Heidi’s doing a thing where she checks for split ends like she’s fifteen, which I love about her. “Just tell me what you did, Nate.”
“Nothing! I mean nothing bad. I’m putting on a performance at school, and I’m using famous pop songs, and a video of the show is going . . . viral.”
“Send me the link.”
So I do, but it takes forever to get to her. As it’s loading, Libby is texting me, “omg omg omg it’s up to 75000 views this vid is liiiit.”
I tell Aunt Heidi what’s up and she does a very overt “gulp” sound. “That is a lot of views, Natey.”
“Duh, I know.”
“Is this a bad thing, though? My agent would kill for something I do to go viral.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just have that exact funny feeling I had that one time you took me to the Indian restaurant in Queens and I ate too much none.”
“Naan.”
“Exactly.”
The bell goes off.
“I have to go.”
“Important class?”
“Lunch.”
“Ah, so your favorite subject, I assume.”
“First of all, how dare you; secondly: yes.”
Except lunch isn’t in the cards today. There will be no Mexican pizza for Bossy Nate.
Because, at that very moment, over the ancient speaker system, comes that same receptionist’s voice—the one who didn’t buy I was Ben’s aunt, but didn’t care enough to question me. “Nathan Foster,” the voice says, and Heidi and I cock the same genetically wiggly eyebrow at each other over FaceTime, “to the principal’s office, please.”
“Nate, am I going to have to be a responsible adult right now and tell your mother that something’s up?” Heidi hates when I make her be responsible.
“Don’t,” I say. “I think I’m about to be in official trouble somehow. I don’t need you to be the warm-up act.”
We hang up after saying I love you and junk, but you don’t need to know all those details.
And look, I know none of this makes sense—a viral video should be cause for celebration. But this is what real life is, when you’re me, or maybe you. The minute you get good news, you wonder where the bad news is hiding.
I’m getting water, stopping at a different bathroom for a sort of unenthusiastic pee, humming and doing gentle hopscotch games all to avoid a direct route to the principal—when Libby texts me: “go look at your locker LITERALLY RIGHT NOW.”
So I do.
And when I arrive, it’s like . . . how do I say this. It’s the way a Broadway backstage on opening night looks sort of like a funeral home—something my mom’s flower shop would have furnished—except somehow even better. Because, even though at E.T. we got over-the-top gifts (literally massage gift certificates), everyone’s dressing space looked the same. We all got the same crap. Pricey crap, but crap. I’m fourteen, I don’t need a massage, I need mac and cheese and an HBO GO password.
But here! Mine is the only locker that’s decorated. Balloons, glittery paper, NATE ROCKS signs. The works. It’s my own mini backstage. My own funeral home, too.
“It was the stage manager’s idea to decorate your locker. There’s a card,” Libby says. She’s behind me, I guess, and has been for a minute or so. I open it. And as I tear across the top of the yellow envelope, I realize in this second that I hope it’s from Ben. That I hope he’s professing a crush, or asking me to go bike riding when it isn’t just to rehearsal.
But it’s not.
“The whole company signed it.”
It’s a card from the whole Great Expectations cast, with little inside jokes—“I’ll smile more!” from Mona Lisa; “You have reinvented lip-syncing” from our stage manager. I catch myself about to cry, emotion running up through me like a rat through a maze. Through a subway system, actually, along the tracks and running from an incoming train.
This isn’t how coming home was supposed to feel. I was all prepped to be hated. My armor was up for that. I know how to struggle through the feeling of being the underdog.
I don’t have enough practice at being liked.
In the corner of the card, the longest message in the best handwriting: a paragraph, from Paige, that ends with: “Not to be sappy but I’ve sort of met my all-time best friends doing this show and I can’t believe you thought I could be a lead but I appreciate it and will forever!!! Paigey.”
And right as my spit is doing its complicated transformation process into tears (I think that’s how it works, but science hasn’t gotten to the bottom of this, I don’t think), the voice comes on again: “Nathan Foster. Stop dawdling. You’re expected in the principal’s office now.”
You Could Have, but You Didn’t!
I breeze past the receptionist’s desk, but before I step inside the principal’s offi
ce, the receptionist goes, “Your voice sure sounds a lot like Ben’s aunt’s,” and winks at me (!).
My mouth must drop open, because the receptionist tosses me one of those ancient hard candies that old ladies keep at their desks and/or purses and/or assorted pockets, and I love her for this. “Good luck in there.” I see a lipstick stain on her teeth and I weirdly want to help her. “For the record, I love the theater.”
“The famous Nathan Foster!” I hear, and turn, and it’s the principal, the gym coach, and Mr. English, like the set-up to a joke where there’s no way I’m not the punch line.
The principal is fiddling with her computer. “How do I . . . get this thing to . . .” She’s clearly watching the viral video, specifically the sequence of Great Expectations in which Paige opens the door to her falling-down mansion. It’s very Grey Gardens, a musical based on a true story about old women with strange accents, who sing kind of minor-key songs that work in spite of themselves.
“Nate,” one of them, or all of them, say. “How does she get this to play through the speakers?”
I run around the side of the desk, and gentle-shove the principal out of the way, and say, “You’ve got like twenty windows open on this thing—you probably stalled it.”
Mr. English pops his gum. He’s a tight chewer, the type where they barely open their mouths.
“Make it stop,” the principal says with a baby voice, and so I reach down and push the power button and reboot the whole system.
“Well, I could have done that,” she goes.
And I can’t help myself, I can’t. I say, “But you didn’t.”
One thing my dad told me—the only really useful thing he ever said—was, “Your whole life people will tell you, well, I could have done that, once you accomplish something. And you get to look at them and say, But you didn’t.”
He said this the first time we drove to West Virginia, and Dad caught an impressive trout (“Let it live!” I shrieked), and my uncle responded to my dad: “Well, I could’ve caught that.” But he didn’t. And the lesson applies. Whether it’s a big fish or a big show, your success is going to be other people’s annoyance. Dad was right about that.
“For the record, these are my favorite songs, so this is on me,” Mr. English says. He’s the only adult not sitting, standing instead at the window like he’s the lookout for runaway convicts.
“Am I in trouble?” I say.
The coach thwaps his meat-hands against the arms of a chair he’s too big for. “Someone wanna be responsible for telling my Paige that she can’t take part in the only activity that’s brought her joy since they reissued the Mulan DVD?”
He’s growing on me like a fungus I actually enjoy.
And yet: “Wait, the show is off?” I blurt out.
The principal, by the way, isn’t even brokering the conversation. She’s typing like she’s trying to kill her keyboard, and then, finally, craning her neck around and shouting the receptionist’s name, capping it off with: “What’s my password?!”
I’m an expert at password recovery, since I was born less than twenty years ago.
“It’s probably a pet, and then a series of numbers, like the last four of your social.” Though it all comes out a little garbled, because the candy the receptionist gave me is so sour I’m starting to drool. Fun!
The principal sniffs twice, types quietly, and says, “Well, look at that. I’m in.”
The receptionist ducks her head in and reads, off a Post-it note, “Binky-eight-five-eight-two.”
“Yeah, I’m in,” the principal says.
On the corner of her desk I see a photo of her with a very big dog, the type who rescues stranded hikers, and, engraved on the frame in a standard Microsoft cursive, BINKY FOR ALWAYS.
“Where were we?” the principal says.
I’m feeling lightheaded, and go to spit out the candy in the principal’s wastebasket, but miss it entirely, and watch it skitter across the floor.
“I think someone was telling me my show is canceled even though everyone loves the music and the coach’s niece is brilliant” (mild lie) “in it.”
That’s when the candy ba-dangs against a potted plant, rolls a couple times, and makes an improbable hop up onto the loafer of a man I hadn’t seen until this second.
A fancy guy, in a suit, with a briefcase on his lap, seated next to a fancy woman and an even fancier smaller guy, and all of them seated in the corner of the principal’s office beneath the principal’s Penn State grad school certificate. Also, a pennant from our high school, that was signed by my brother after he broke the 500-meter swim record and the “free throw” gym class hoops contest, all in one week. I’ll never forget it because I’ve done my best to block it out.
“I believe where we were,” the first man in the loafers says after picking my candy off his shoe and wrapping it in a tissue, “was discussing our terms by which the show could go on.”
While I don’t know who he is, I see who he is. Who they all are.
Well-dressed; slick-haired; perfect dewy skin suggesting years of lavish skin ointments. Too charming, too quiet, and too unwilling to look directly at me. My father, in the only other act I now remember, warned me about people like this.
“Lawyers,” I whisper.
Here’s What $25,000 Will Get You in This Day and Age
So, the show is off. Like, not happening.
Let me just, uh, get that out of the way.
The lawyers all represent the musicians and “estates” (fancy word for ghosts with money), and their job is to figure out “where in the world people are using our songs without permission,” and then “go shut them down. Or get them to pay up.”
What a cool job, I’ll add sarcastically.
“But it was just going to be in a gym!” I say, and the coach says, “A great gym, one of the best gyms in the state,” but the female lawyer isn’t having it, and neither is the small guy or the tall guy.
We all share a nice, big, throat-opening laugh over the amount of money they each want—“Twenty-five thousand dollars to use any of our clients’ songs in a performance for which you’re charging money.”
Which, I learn in front of these adults, is more than “the entire budget for the school’s anti-drug program plus the after-school activities program plus the parking lot repavement efforts—for an entire year!” This, from the principal, who knocks over her beloved Binky photo, flailing her arms around.
But “Twenty-five grand is the figure,” the lawyers keep saying, and nobody’s budging.
We watch them exit to the only nice cars in the parking lot—two BMWs and an actual Porsche in a sea of Kias. They’re all midnight black and shiny and look like no bug has ever died in its path. Only shows. Only shows and dreams die in the path of a lawyer.
“I hate lawyers,” the principal says, and we all scatter away without saying much, heads hung low, the coach looking more disappointed than even I feel. But maybe I’m just numb.
“What if we just didn’t charge the audience?” Libby says later, when we climb out onto the roof of the “bonus” classrooms out on the north side of the lawn, where a bunch of mobile home classrooms went up last spring after the school board discovered asbestos in the main building. I’m picking up little pieces of slate from the roof, and flicking them off, and listening for them to land, but they don’t make a sound.
“Yeah, I tried that idea, but the first lawyer said now that the show had been announced—thanks to Ben’s video—we either pay their fee, or they yank the rights to all the songs.”
Libby is taking it worse than I am, in a way. I’ve gone numb, like when I found out Feather had a gall bladder infection, or that my dad and mom were going through a rocky time. I never cry at the normal stuff. I cry if So You Think You Can Dance doesn’t record on the DVR, or if a boy I shared my first kiss with has gone weird on me. But even then, I don’t cry instantly. It wells up, pools under my skin, creates a clot. And then I’ll, like, spill potato chips all ov
er the kitchen floor, and the clot will break open and I’ll cry over Ruffles, but not real life.
“I knew we should have told Ben to yank the video,” Libby says, and I cluck and go, “Girl, you were so excited to have those hits, you were feeling yourself,” and she pushes me and says, “Shut up,” but doesn’t mean it. Because I’m right.
“So, what do we do?” I say, brushing my hands together and seeing them glow like I’m the tin man, shiny with silver slate powder from the roof.
“You tell me, director,” she says, and takes a pen to autograph her shoe across the toe. It looks great. She’s trying out a new thing where none of the letters are capitalized, a lowercase l leading into an i. I wish we could get graded on the journey our autographs have taken over the years. I’d pull a 4.0 no matter what.
Signs
The coach—distraught is not too strong a word—graciously allows me to use the gym for our final run-through tonight.
Mom’s stuck at the shop and Dad’s off early from work, so he drives me wordlessly over to rehearsal, says he might stick around and wait for me, maybe run some laps on the old track behind the old auditorium. See if he’s “still got it,” as if I’m going to find sports-talk fun, or bonding.
I say, “Cool,” and head into the gym early. Couldn’t eat dinner beforehand. That kind of night.
The cast appears in one big clump of kids, all at once. I hear them before I see them, parading down the halls after dark, the only fun time to be at school.
At first, weeks ago, people came to my rehearsals as individuals, heads down, phones out. But they’re a family now. They arrive together, limbs intertwined, inside jokes ringing out like songbirds in the morning.
But it isn’t the morning. It’s the Thursday night before we’re supposed to put on the show, right here in the gym, and I have to crush them all with the news.