Nate Expectations

by Tim Federle

  “I can give partial credit. Because, of course. I can always grade that iPhone video of the rehearsal. But even if the show had gone on, you’ve treated this project like it’s your entire grade, Mr. Foster. It isn’t. You’re behind on tests, on in-class assignments . . . it’s not good.”

  He gets a text and he answers it, right in front of me.

  “Is there something else you need?” he asks after I stand there just looking at him for a while.

  “I mean, I guess not?”

  Libby’s waiting by the door, and I walk out feeling like I’m a billion pounds of leftovers. Mr. English asks me to close the door behind me on the way out, and Libby walks me to math, a.k.a. the seventh circle of doom.

  When I finally look up to say goodbye to Libby and tell her I’ll see her at lunch, that’s when I see her I’ve got an idea face. And that’s when Libby tells me her idea. “Something for the dorks” is how she puts it, and I’m sold.

  * * *

  You can barely fit all the parents in Libby’s backyard—and this is a family with a big backyard. They’ve got one of those little sheds where dads store hoses and junk, and patio stones that aren’t broken. And furniture. And enough space for two kids to grow up a little wild. It’s nice. And now it’s full of parents.

  The coach arrives, and it’s so odd to see him in non-gym clothes that I literally don’t recognize him at first. He’s got flowers for Paige and it’s just super sweet and pure.

  “I’m going to tell the stage manager to tell the cast it’s twenty minutes till showtime,” Libby says, pulling me away from the gathering crowd in her foyer.

  She’s got the kind of family who’s got a foyer.

  “Just wait till fifteen minutes,” I say, impatient and feeling like a hot tub with the jets set to blast mode. “That’s when stage managers call. Not twenty. It’s half hour, then fifteen, then ten, then five, then places.”

  “Nate?” Libby says, pinching my cheek like she’s some kind of elderly relative. “You aren’t on Broadway anymore, and if we want to tell the cast it’s seventeen minutes till showtime, we can. My house, my rules!”

  She winks, and runs upstairs two steps at a time, past all her framed class photos and one poster we handmade from a production of Godspell we put on—just her and me, in her backyard. A production that we set in the Depression, because Godspell is very flexible that way. Very cool concept. Jesus was a millionaire. It worked.

  You know what’s not working, though? The fact that Ben isn’t here. As in, one of my actors isn’t in the building. And I have his Tupperware all cleaned out and everything.

  I’ve been trying not to worry about his being late, but I can’t not—I’m more upset that he’s not here than that my mom is working overtime at the shop tonight, prepping flowers for a surprise funeral. And my dad is at the hospital, pulling a double maintenance shift to cover for a buddy of his who’s fishing.

  I half thought of bringing Feather along, just to have a friendly face in the audience. But I was afraid she’d pee all over our set.

  Libby texts me: “the girls are all freaking out upstairs that they’ve run out of hairspray because girls are the worst” and then “maybe u should give a speech to the audience before the show?”

  It’s all too much, really—I’m all about outdoor theater, when it wants to be outdoors. But I’d kind of fallen in love with the gym concept. Once the principal forbade us from using it, however—apparently it would be some kind of “school board liability,” now that lawyers were involved—we had no other choice.

  When we call places, Ben still isn’t here, so I text the stage manager “should we stall????” Even though Ben doesn’t make his first entrance for forty minutes. It doesn’t matter. I want to die and faint and disappear, and rewind everything.

  And never let Jordan be my first kiss.

  That’s when I hear, “Oh gosh, you didn’t start, did you?”

  I turn around and of course it’s Ben, and standing next to him—my dad (!) and mom (?).

  If three ghosts had walked in on stilts, I’d probably be less shocked.

  “We should probably get the kid some ice,” my dad says, and that’s when I notice Ben’s torn jeans, his bloody knee, gravel burnt in his palms.

  “Had a little bike mishap,” he says, sweaty bangs plastered to his forehead. “But luckily, your parents drove by, and stopped, and picked me up in their car.”

  “We were going to come surprise you,” Mom says. “We both took the night off.” She puts her hand on Ben’s shoulder. “I’m just sorry the backseat was full of so much junk.”

  “Ben!” the stage manager calls from the top of Libby’s stairs. “You’re here!”

  The stage manager hurries down, way too zippy, and right when she’s at the bottom, I want to yell, “Slow down, because the second-to-the-last step is unevenly spaced and I’ve been falling off it for a decade,” but I don’t have time to. And she wipes out (but recovers nicely).

  “That’s my name,” he says, “Ben,” looking a little disoriented.

  But, like, so adorable too.

  Libby’s mom pulls Ben into the kitchen, and all at once the rest of the audience makes their way out back and finds about twenty odd chairs. But mostly they just stand like they’re guests at a weird party thrown by kids.

  Which makes me the host.

  It’s still light out, no proper time for a musical, but that’s what’s funny about theater. The show must go on.

  Now, this is the moment when Ben’s mom shows up, right? Right?

  We’ve been talking about her, hinting about her, all her troubles and how she is never there for Ben, even when he cooks up traditional chicken dishes and bikes over to the market, point-seven miles away, to grab her sodas after 10 p.m. on a school night.

  It would be a great moment for a Mom Mendoza entrance. But she doesn’t show up. Because even though musicals usually end with a big production number, life isn’t like that.

  And so, this is the moment—as Libby pushes me out onto the patch of grass we’re calling our stage—that Mr. English arrives, right? Right?

  Like, he’s decided to give up one of his nights, maybe. He always says that “from 2:30 p.m. till 7 a.m. the next morning,” his time is “all his,” which is why old Mr. English famously doesn’t give a lot of homework but does give the toughest tests in the school. But maybe not tonight. Maybe tonight Mr. English shows up, for me: a student he secretly adores for his grit and wit, right?

  Nah, you’ve seen too many movies and maybe a few plays, too.

  Mr. English doesn’t show up. And neither does Ben’s mom.

  But when I cough a couple times and tell myself to stand up straight like a tree (good technique for not looking nervous: imitate something stationary), and then welcome the audience to our show, I see my dad put his hand on my mom’s shoulder.

  A first in forever.

  And neither of them looks at their phones, or away from me, I guess. Like, I guess that’s the bigger deal.

  “Enjoy yourselves, if you can!” I say, and then “Please be forgiving, because we don’t have the best sound system out here.”

  Libby’s mom yells “Hey!” ’cause it’s her house and everything and parents are obsessed with looking “faux-offended but in a fun way” in front of one another.

  And that’s it. There’s nothing more to say. We’re not doing this for a grade, we’re doing this for us.

  I exit the patch of grass we’re calling our stage, and run smack-dab right into Ben ~wham~ who is, of course, filming everything. And who says “Ow” in a sweet way.

  And whose breath smells like peppermint and nerves.

  He bites down hard on a mint and squeezes my hand, and he inhales as if to say, “So, Homecoming, yes, no?”

  But I don’t let him get a word out or a question in. I get professional, and pat him on the shoulder, and I say, “Have a great show.”

  And then I can’t help it—I look back out to the audience, and s
ee my dad seeing me. And I wonder if he told my mom about last night, at the gym. About the red-faced proposal. If my parents went to bed together for the first time in ages and if Dad confessed that he saw another boy ask me to a dance.

  A bug lands on my shoulder and I look at it and wonder if the bugs will bite my actors in this weirdly humid autumn night, or if anyone is going to forget their lines, or if my parents even know how much it means that they gave up some extra work shifts to be here for me.

  Jim-Jim must have pressed Play, because the howling cemetery music starts. Then we cut to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (it’s a great moment, and gets a big parent-roar). And then the stage manager runs around, placing graveyards all over the grass. And I actually wish I’d brought Feather now. She’d be so proud of me.

  Maybe next time.

  Boys Are Overrated

  We have a cast party that turns into a crew party that ends up on Libby’s roof watching shooting stars.

  Ben doesn’t stick around—he has to go “check on his mom.” But we get a good solid hug in, in Libby’s foyer, and I give him back his Tupperware, and he swears his knee will be fine and that I’m lucky I have the type of parents who’d stop to help a kid on the side of the road. And he just leaves, like that. No big goodbye.

  He leaves and I stay, because it’s my party and I’ll stay if I want to? I’m doubting myself, though.

  But all is not lost, or not awkward, at least. Several of the parents called my musical “the best show” they’d ever seen, and one of them even has a subscription to the Pittsburgh Public Theater (which puts on legit shows like Shakespeare), so I took it as a huge compliment. I’m taking it as a huge compliment.

  And Paige was outrageous, by the way. Meryl Streep in braces. She nailed it.

  She was hired as a favor—okay, “cast” as a favor, since nobody got paid anything—and it turns out she embodied Miss Havisham like nobody could have imagined. She seemed so old and haggard and past her prime that if it weren’t for the fact that she sweat off most of the grey powder in her hair, I think people really would have thought we’d hired an old lady as a guest artist.

  The gym coach cried.

  And apparently he told Libby’s mom that he’s working on a “top secret, don’t-tell-anyone plan to get an arts program going again at the school,” and that he’s even gonna volunteer his gym as the auditorium.

  How cool is that. Don’t tell anyone, though, because it’s top secret, ha-ha.

  Now, the less said about Pip the better, I suppose. True, he didn’t forget any of his lines. And when he stepped right through a cardboard headstone in the first scene, and a few of the dads chuckled, he bravely pretended like it didn’t happen. Even as he dragged that dang headstone around by a shoelace for the rest of the scene.

  His parents led the standing ovation. And yes, for a full picture: They were already standing, leaning against the fence for the whole show. But some of the parents got to sit, and by the end they were all on their feet, whistling.

  Jim-Jim and Mona Lisa were excellent. Good enough to understudy their roles, if we’d actually done this thing professionally.

  Which, let’s be honest—we never will.

  “Am I fooling myself that it was pretty great?” I say to Libby, about twenty minutes after one of the kids half pukes off the side of her roof, due to an overabundance of pizza and Mountain Dew.

  “Nah, they killed it,” Libby says.

  She checks in on the puking kid and then kicks him off her roof, through the window that leads to the attic that we haven’t played in for forever.

  “I’m sort of glad so many of the parents were videoing it,” I say, leaning back and now sharing a small bowl of candy corn with Libby. She’s always got Halloween candy around, no matter the season. “I wanna send it to Mr. English and be like: See? You should have given up a night for this.”

  “I think he just knows you’re super smart and is giving you a hard time.”

  “That’s like the lamest line that adults say,” I say. “That they’re hardest on the kids they see the most potential in. Bull.”

  Libby whimpers, and swear-shouts: “Tuck Everlasting!” (sixty-seven performances on Broadway, lovely folksy score, based on a book about people who never die, which sounds exhausting), and then turns to me and says, “I think a rogue candy corn just chipped my front tooth.”

  “Show me.”

  She does an over-the-top fang smile.

  “Perfect. You’re golden. Pretty as ever.”

  She snort-laughs, picks a nail, and waves goodbye to a couple of sophomores whose moms are honking in the driveway below.

  “Yeah, well, tell that to the boys. That I’m pretty as ever.”

  “What boys?”

  “All boys.”

  “Boys are overrated,” I say, “and not worth the drama.”

  “Ha, okay.”

  I sit up on an elbow. “What’s that supposed to mean—ha, okay.”

  “It means, ‘a’ of all, you are a boy, and ‘b’ of all, you don’t seem to have trouble in the crush department.”

  I sit back and try to count stars.

  “Jordan is really full of himself, but in a weird way I feel like if he had somehow hologrammed himself here tonight to cheer me on, I would have felt, like, so honored and dizzy. He still makes me so, like, generally confused.”

  “Well, to quote you, boys are overrated and not worth the drama.”

  I squint at a night cloud. This will sound cosmic and dumb, but I swear to you it’s got the exact outline of Ben’s profile.

  “Does that not look like Ben’s soliloquy?” I say, shaking Libby’s shoulder and pointing at the sky.

  “What do you mean, soliloquy?”

  “Like, his, like, sideways profile-thing. There, his nose. There, his funny lip with the little scar. And there, his spiky hair that always looks messy.”

  “Buster, you mean silhouette.”

  Oh. Right. “I really have to start paying more attention in English,” I say, and we bust a gut so hard that it’s like the old days.

  “Do you think we’ll keep in touch in college?” Libby asks.

  “Uh, let’s just get through high school first,” I say.

  I take another handful of candy corn, despite my belly starting to hurt, and throw them down the hatch. And I’m about to say to Libby, “Do you think I should go to Homecoming with Ben?” when her mom texts her.

  She holds up the phone for me to read: “Natey’s parents called and they think he should ride his bike home now before it gets too late ”

  So, that’s it, then. A one-night-only show, and the night’s over.

  “You had your signature about-to-ask-Libby-advice face on, back there,” Libby says after I’ve strapped on my helmet and said my last goodbyes, and am standing out there on the lawn feeling like we should be celebrating till 4 a.m. and not just till 10:30 p.m.

  “It’s nothing,” I say, because I’ve already made up my mind about the dance.

  And what I’ve decided is: If I get home, and Ben is

  • outside my room, or

  • texts me one more time, or

  • any other sign that is clearly a sign,

  I will say yes.

  I start to pedal away, but I turn back around, and: “Hey, Lib.”

  She’s leaning on their mailbox, like it’s a porch. “Yeah, captain.”

  “Of course we’ll keep in touch in college—because I plan on being your roommate.”

  She laughs. “You’re so cray. They don’t let boys and girls room together.”

  I spin the wheels on my bike with my foot, but I don’t go anywhere. “Lib,” I say, pointing toward her backyard. “After that, tonight, we aren’t just a boy and a girl.”

  “What are we, then?”

  “Legends.”

  She taps her hand on the mailbox. “Or something.”

  “Yeah.” Or something.

  The Ben cloud overhead dissipates into a billion wa
ter particles, and it rains on my whole ride home. I can’t decide if it’s a sign, or if it’s just weather.

  Christmas Except Not

  I take the longest post-show shower ever and I even wash behind my ears and stuff, though I’ll spare you the details.

  But after I get out and towel off and gently check the window: no Ben in sight.

  No texts on my phone.

  No follow-up. No sign.

  The cloud wasn’t him and it was just weather.

  “Knock-knock.” Great. It’s my dad.

  “One sec.”

  “No rush.”

  I slip on my old pj pants and an E.T. T-shirt and meet him in the hall, because one of the very coolest things about my dad is that he’ll say knock-knock but never actually come in. Probably because of what he’s afraid he’d find in my room: a stray wig, a karaoke machine, et cetera. This room is not his brand.

  “Come on,” he mumble-says, and leads me down the hall, past Anthony’s room, with the Nerf hoop on the outside that not even once have I tried to “make” or “score on.”

  And then, past our one family bathroom that I got so foggy, he’ll probably yell at me for leaving my towel on the floor.

  But he doesn’t.

  And then, around the corner to just outside the basement door. He makes a shh sign, and I’m doing a tally: The only other time Dad has ever pulled me aside for a guy-talk was when Mom had health problems a couple years ago, and he had to break it to me that she was going into the hospital overnight for her heart to be looked at, but that it would probably all be okay because the health care was top-notch in Pittsburgh.

  “Am I in trouble?” I say, but he doesn’t answer. He just turns Mars-red again, and leads me downstairs, to our perma-damp storage closet, where we keep the Christmas lights. And now I’m really confused, because we haven’t taken out the Christmas lights in ages. They’re a tangle-palooza.

  And it’s not Christmas.

  “Look, if this is about the fact that I borrowed one of Grandma’s old dresses for the musical tonight, I can get it dry-cleaned.”