by Tim Federle
I wait till everyone has found a place on the bleachers, and the role reversal of it all hits me. What I mean is: I’ve never stood in any gym and been the one in charge.
I’ve stood and been chosen last.
I’ve been pummeled with dodgeballs, and humiliated on shirts-and-skins day.
I’ve practiced balance beam on the basketball court outline, back before I knew not to. And pretended the rope climb was a final audition for Tarzan (overrated movie, underrated musical, still playing in Germany!).
But in those moments, those early years—and hours that felt like years—it was always a countdown. If I can just get through the next forty minutes, I’d chant like a mantra, I’ll be okay. Thirty-nine minutes more. Twenty minutes more. Five minutes more and I can get a sip of water and get out of here.
And now I don’t want this moment to be over. Or start, really.
“Is he going to say something?” I hear one of the girls say, and I’m on.
But just when I open my mouth to say, “Listen up, guys, I’ve got some crappy news,” Ben leaps up. He’s in the front row of the bleachers, of course. Ben is a kid who doesn’t mind sitting in the front and looking eager.
He wants a ticket out of this place and he knows that life is first-come, first-served.
“Hold up, Foster,” he says. “Before you say anything.”
He steps over a stray bookbag, is standing ten feet away from me.
This is probably where Ben’s going to thank me for introducing him to theater. And then, I dunno, intro his girlfriend, and in a surprise twist, point to Paige. That’s the way my life usually goes. Building to a moment and then pulling it out from beneath me.
But just as I’m bracing for Ben’s big reveal, that he’s actually hopelessly in love with a girl and grateful I got him out of the house, instead he nods his head at Jim-Jim, who lifts up his phone and begins playing Carly Rae Jepsen’s seminal hit, “Call Me Maybe,” which will be dated faster than milk but goes down pretty easy right now.
Ben starts wiggling around.
Now, he is a terrible dancer, a terrible mover even, frequently getting his pants legs caught in his bike spokes on the way to rehearsal. Tonight, he’s tripping over his feet, trying to re-create a weaving pattern we picked up from the opening number of A Chorus Line that I made him watch on YouTube a couple weeks ago.
He’s terrible. It’s . . . everything.
He’s lip-syncing the lyrics to “Call Me Maybe,” and I have no idea what is going on, except that Libby is filming the entire thing on her phone, and I think maybe I’m going to throw up, except I didn’t have anything for dinner.
When he gets to the lyric about how, before I came into his life, he missed me “so bad” (insane lyric with grammar all over the place), the cast begins standing. One row at a time. From the back to the front. Like cheerful, cheerleading robots.
And at this point I’m not worried I’m going to throw up so much as that they’re all about to do something to humiliate me.
“Nate!” Ben whisper-shouts above the music. “Read the signs.”
And that’s when I realize they are each holding a large piece of poster board, big handmade signs. And that one by one, starting with Jim-Jim, and then on to Mona Lisa, and on and on and on, they start flipping the signs around to spell something out.
For me.
Ben is still dancing. I’m telling you, he’s adorably horrible and totally off the beat.
I squint at the signs. I’ve never been good at word games. Please, don’t let this be hard to solve:
An H, and then an E, and a Y get flipped around.
“Hey,” I say out loud, to myself.
And then an I sign, and a J, and more and more and faster and faster, flipping like a perfect card trick—U, S, T.
“Hey,” “I,” “Just,” I’m memorizing like a locker combo to a new school where you’re actually doing pretty okay.
They’re spelling the lyrics to this ridiculous candy bop of a song.
That’s when I see a bunch of parents gathered at the door of the gym, all of them watching this not-at-all-spontaneous act—this must have taken a week to coordinate.
I sit down cross-legged on the gym floor, ’cause I don’t have anything to hold on to. And Ben laughs.
A Y sign, an O, a senior whose name is either Jackie or Jacklyn, who can remember, holding a particularly sparkly U (extra points to her, you can tell she used up a lot of glue). And then three kids mix up the spelling of A-N-D, their signs in the wrong order, and I yell, “I got it, you’re spelling and,” and Ben shushes me.
That’s when I see my dad, wandering in from the old racetrack, to spy on the commotion. It’s like Where’s Waldo? except he’s not in stripes, and I find him right away.
He’s just standing there in the doorway to the gym with the rest of the parents, and he’s dead-faced, or maybe I mean Dad-faced. Neutral. Which is, to be fair, sometimes my particular dad’s version of an endorsement.
If he tolerates something, that’s as good as go.
“Keep reading!” I hear someone say, and I flip my head back, and try to catch up, but the letters get scrambled. I’m thinking it’s amazing and probably will someday seem like a beautiful irony that Ben has struggled with dyslexia his whole life, and he’s choosing to spell out some big announcement to me.
This isn’t how I was planning on coming out. I was hoping I’d be an international Broadway celebrity, established in my career back in New York by age twenty, maybe twenty-three tops. And I’d have some really cool boyfriend. And I’d intro my parents to him over FaceTime from a party at the top of the Empire State Building, and if it got awkward, I’d say “Reception sucks!” and hang up. And kiss him.
But it appears I don’t get to direct this particular scene.
The signs keep folding out, one after another, and it strikes me that this must have been what it felt like to read Great Expectations, back in the day. You think it’s going one way and then boom, it doesn’t—Dickens surprises you, takes you on a twist, leaves you wanting to read more in next week’s edition of the paper, in spite of how annoying the wait is.
That’s when I see my name spelled out, N-A-T-E, and then
W-I-L-L and Y-O-U and G-O and T-O—
And this—right here—is when Ben asks me to Homecoming in front of the entire cast, all of their parents, and my D-A-D, dad.
The song cuts out at the most awkward time—right when they’re trying to spell W-I-T-H and M-E in time to the final pumping drumbeat.
Somebody throws Ben one last oversize piece of cardboard—a used Best Buy box, something a dad’s TV might come.
I pinball-wizard my eyes to my own dad, who is now as red as Mars—and that makes me think about how I made my Broadway debut in a show about aliens, and how just-right that is. Because I feel like an alien myself sometimes.
Almost all the time, really.
Does that ever happen to you?
“Well?” Ben says, and I look back to see that he’s holding a question mark sign, a big hand-drawn question mark that was colored in with a green marker that lost its ink halfway through. I feel my own color draining, my white-hot white face.
Green is my favorite color, which I didn’t know he knew. But Ben just seems to be able to predict me.
“Say something!” Libby yells, and Jackie or Jacklyn goes, “Wooo.”
And even though my head is full of prepared remarks—and the image of my red dad, and the echoey gym sound that makes me think of all the times I sat in this very auditorium and watched my brother beat some state sports record—I attempt to go off-script. To answer Ben with: “This is extremely flattering, let’s . . . talk about this one-on-one!”
But I don’t. I can’t.
Because, “The show is canceled, guys,” I hear, before I can talk. “Nate’s trying to tell us the show is canceled.” It’s Paige who’s saying it. The coach must have pre-broken the news to her, before tonight’s big meeting.
Somebody laughs, and then somebody shushes them. Because they can probably tell that I’m as red and as real and in some ways as far away as Mars too.
Warning Labels
My older brother, Anthony, once shared something wise and insightful—which is really something, because usually when he’s talking to me, it’s to tell me to shut up.
Anyway, he once said that the only way he and my dad could connect is if “one of their other senses was being occupied at the same time.” Like, playing catch out back, or even just driving somewhere. Anywhere. They could talk only when they weren’t looking at each other.
But I don’t want to test the concept.
So afterward—after the great Homecoming debacle—I tell my dad I’m just going to bike home, and he nods, doesn’t say anything.
We pretend it didn’t even happen.
He has always been so big to me—tall, yeah, but also just big as a concept. And so, to have seen him, the last of the parents, sitting on the benches, the same benches he used to sit on, back when he played basketball for this same high school; and to see him in his bad-fitting dad jeans and a red baseball hat? It’s hard to notice how small he seems to me now. Even though, I guess it makes us something closer to equals.
“Can I ride with you?” Libby says, even though she doesn’t have a bike. And I say, “Of course,” and my dad lets us be.
I walk my bike home and she walks beside me and mostly she checks her texts and we don’t say much.
But at some point, I stop walking my bike, and pull out my phone, and text Ben: “for the record that was crazy sweet of you to organize that homecoming thing, and I was very tongue tied, and didn’t have anything to eat before rehearsal. so I’m sorry if I was completely weird, and in director mode.”
Send. Breathe. Walk.
Twenty minutes later Libby and I are in the old treehouse that my dad built me, back when he thought I’d take after Anthony, and enjoy playing things like robbers and cowboys and tree ninjas. Instead I used the tree fort as a place to practice my one-man Robin Hood musical, to the acclaim of over twelve wild chipmunks.
Somehow it’s easier to talk up here, because I feel like a kid again. And when you’re a kid, you still have so many chances to get your life right.
“I bet this thing is infested with like a thousand termites now,” Libby says, rather unhelpfully, when we’re sitting knee-to-knee, crisscross applesauce, on our old treehouse lookout tower.
“I should have grabbed Capri Suns from the fridge in the garage,” I say. I can tell we’re both thirsty. You can just tell these things about your best friend.
She scrolls her phone mindlessly. “That’s okay, I can’t stay long. Mom and I are supposed to be watching a documentary tonight.”
“You watch documentaries now?” I say. I can hear how tired my voice is. It takes a lot of yelling to quiet down a freaked-out cast—one that wants to put on the show no matter what. You should have seen the way they started drooping their big, glittery, lettered poster board signs, one after another, in shock, and losing all sense of control.
“On Thursdays, yeah. Thursdays are documentary nights now. You know my ma.” I do. She’s the greatest lady. She makes plans for Libby. Most moms are good at either coming up with cool ideas or following through with them, but Libby’s mom is good at both.
I’m just starting to say, finally, at last, “I can’t believe that boy asked me to Homecoming,” when Libby holds up her phone and says, “Wanna watch the video?”
“Duh.”
Generally I hate how I look-slash-sound in any video, but . . . I don’t know. I think I’m growing into my body a little? Like, not to be cocky. Just a fact. I used to be a full-on pear-shaped boy. But now I’m more like an orange or something.
I dart my tongue over my lips. I could use a drink, and some dinner, too. It’s been over four hours since a real meal, and the bark on the tree that rams through the base of this fort is starting to look like artisanal chocolate.
“So, you were in on it the whole time?” I ask.
“On what?”
“The, like, proposal.” Even saying the word proposal makes me go Mars-red.
“I was. So were some of the parents.”
“Some of them,” I repeat back.
Libby mischief-grins and pockets her phone. “But if you want the deets, you should ask him.”
She chin-points toward my house, where Ben himself is lurking behind a bush, mouthing something like he’s practicing a line, and reaching to knock on the window of the darkened bedroom I’m not even in.
“What a creeper,” I say through a smile.
Libby clears her throat extra loud and swings her legs down over the side of the fort, and Ben turns around like we’re a couple of stars of a vampire musical (vampires in musicals never work—there is a graveyard full of flops to prove me right).
I see him nearly drop a big Tupperware container.
“Hey,” I say, and he goes, “Hey,” and Libby says, “And here’s my exit,” and is gone around the side of the house in three seconds flat.
“You’re . . . here!”
“Is that okay?”
I don’t know what to say, truly. “You are so good in the show and I’m sorry it’s canceled.”
“Am I, though?” he says, and kicks some driveway gravel into our sorry excuse for grass. Libby’s backyard is green like the question-mark sign Ben held for me. Our grass is brown as a bad cloud.
“You are good! Yeah, you totally are. You’ve come a long way in the acting department.”
Awkward pause. Awkward pause. We could really use a big lighting-cue change or orchestral underscoring here. Musicals are so much easier than life, and musicals are hard.
He holds out the Tupperware, which makes me realize how close I’m standing to him. “Oh, I brought you something.”
“Me?”
I take it, and it’s hot, and I’m burning my tender, non-calloused fingers, just as he’s saying, “It’s probably still pretty warm,” and I lie and say, “Nah, it’s totes fine,” even though I want to scream. About everything.
I lift the lid and the steam makes my eyes go watery.
“Yeah, sooo. There’s a lot of vinegar in that. Maybe too much.”
He looks worried, so I blurt, “I love vinegar!” as if that’s a thing, but he goes, “Cool,” so I guess it’s cool.
“Is it . . . chicken?”
“Yeah, leftover-but-still-amazing chicken adobo. Traditional Filipino dish. Grandma’s recipe.”
It smells amazing once you stop coughing.
“Did your mom make it or something?”
“Ha!” He grumble-laughs too hard and then goes, “Nah, she doesn’t cook much. I cook for us. We had extra because she’s never hungry.”
“And you thought I’d want some?” I say. And as if I’m attending the musical of my own life story, I watch as the unlikely star (me) grabs a piece of chicken and takes a bite. And it’s unreal. It’s a flavor party and I’m the only guest.
The unlikely star is grinning like an idiot who’s never had a good meal in his life.
“I figured you’re probably bummed out about the show,” Ben says as I navigate around a tricky bay leaf. “I’m always hungry when I’m bummed out.”
“That’s funny, my mom always loses her appetite when she’s upset. I think she hasn’t had anything to eat in thirty years.”
He laughs again.
“But you didn’t answer my question,” he says with no warning. This is a kid who could really use a warning label. “About Homecoming.”
Ding-a-ling. That’s when Jordan’s FaceTime comes in, followed by an urgent text: “HELP! Need your advice to choose between two new headshots!!! <3”
I hit Ignore, and look up, and catch a shadow—my mom moving away from a curtain that’s half-broken in our living room, hanging from a single loop around a rod that we’ve got to get replaced.
And in this moment I don’t want Ben to see the way my
house is never quite clean—but then I remember that he’s got it worse. That he found me. That it was my window he knocked on.
Like a dumbo, I say, “Yeah, about Homecoming: If I don’t have anything going on that night, sure.”
Ben eyeroll-laughs, but this time it’s like a howl. I try to pivot from the weirdness, and from the fact that I oddly feel like I need my parents’ permission to go to Homecoming—but how am I ever going to begin that conversation? Sure, Dad watched the proposal happen—heck, he showed up for it—but if I never mention it again, we can pretend it didn’t happen.
I wanted to come out on the roof of the Empire State Building.
No—I wanted my insides to feel more sure of themselves before I announced my outsides. It’s that. That’s the problem here.
I wanted to feel ready.
And so to keep the scene moving, I say, “I’ll bring you back the Tupperware when I’m done. And, like, I’ll clean it and stuff.”
He waves it off. “Don’t bother.” And gets back on his bike, no helmet this time. “My mom never notices when stuff is missing.”
He pedals away, way faster than normal. And I kick the rocks from our grass back onto the gravel. And then I sit down against the vinyl siding of our house, and finish the entire chicken dish, all the leftovers, stopping just short of licking the Tupperware.
But at the end, I still feel hungry.
Thriller Night
It’s the morning of the show, but there’s no show to put on.
Nothing is sadder than a clown without a balloon or a magician without a dove.
Mr. English keeps me after class. “I’m very upset for you,” he says. “I was looking forward to hearing those songs and I’m sure it’s a big disappointment.”
I’m about to ask him if that means I automatically get an A. That’d be nice.
But he says, “You’re going to have to figure out a way to bring your grade up, though, Nate. So far you’ve gotten a bunch of Cs on my quizzes. I can tell you aren’t doing even the in-class assignments, and that you’ve got your head somewhere else.”
I unzip my bookbag, but I can’t find any gum. “So, I don’t get credit for all the weeks I put into the show?”