Inevitable and Only

  “Well, you shouldn’t go having private moments in public places if you don’t want to get interrupted,” I muttered, hitching up my backpack and smoothing out my skirt. “Hey, Fish. What’s shakin’?”

  Raven intensified her glare, if that was possible. I smiled back sweetly. Sometimes I like pushing her buttons.

  Our whole class had been calling Max Frisch “Fish” since first grade. It suited him. He had big brown eyes and pouty-looking lips—pouty fish lips, the kind of pout female movie stars do on the covers of magazines—but on him, it just looked like he was always about to laugh, always hiding mischief of some sort. He was still the same old goofball to me, but now that Raven was going out with him, she’d switched to using his proper name and requested that I do the same in her presence.

  “How can you get excited about kissing a guy named Fish?” she’d asked, pragmatically. This was back at the beginning of the summer, and we were treading water in the pool in her backyard, to tone our triceps.

  “I don’t know, but I sure hope you don’t get married. How could anyone take you seriously, a couple named Raven and Fish? You’d have to name your kids Otter and Tadpole.”

  “Who says I’m having kids? Or getting married? I certainly wouldn’t change my name, anyhow. The Woodbury name—”

  “I know, I know. The Woodbury name represents the sacred sisterhood.”

  “Amen.”

  “Hey, ever wonder why it’s not a-women?”

  “Because the world was invented by sexist assholes.” That was Raven’s standard response when she was getting bored with an argument. It was also a perfect launching-off point into whatever political rant she’d been working herself up about lately. And as such, my cue to change the topic. So I’d dunked her, and we’d spent the next half hour or so chasing each other around the pool.

  “So,” Max asked, bringing me back to the present, “what’re you in such a hurry for?”

  “Oh, I just did the most embarrassing thing of my life,” I moaned. “I almost face-planted into Farhan, and then he asked me for money, and then I gave him money and told him I’ll give him the rest tomorrow but he didn’t want more tomorrow, just today, and—”

  “Cadie, you’re not making sense,” Raven cut in, “and Max has soccer practice to get to.”

  “Right,” he said, and leaned in to kiss her one more time. “Bye, babe.” Then he hefted his soccer bag onto his shoulder (not at all the way Farhan would’ve done it) and took off down the hall. “See ya, Cadie!” he called.

  “Bye, babe,” I mimicked, and Raven socked me in the stomach. “Hey!” I protested.

  “Hey what, you’re the one who just barged in on us!”

  “You’re in a public hallway. Anyway, can I come home with you? Everything’s weird at home again. Dad and I both slept in the living room last night.”

  Raven was suddenly all sympathy. “I’m so sorry, I have debate team today. Do you want to hang out and wait for me?”

  “Debate team! No, that’s all right. Elizabeth is on debate, too. So we’ll probably have dinner without her tonight.” The thought was such sweet relief, I felt my shoulders actually sag, as if I’d been clenching them all day. Which I probably had. “Oh, hey, by the way. I asked her if she was going to the Fall Ball.”

  “And?”

  “And, well, I think I kind of invited her to go with us. With the four of us.”

  “Won’t that be awkward? Fifth-wheel-y?” Raven frowned.

  “We can find her a date, right?”

  “Sure, I mean, I’m surprised no one’s asked her yet. New girl in town, plus that hair, plus that body—”

  “Raven!”

  “What?” she said. “Your sister’s hot.”

  “My sister,” I echoed.

  “God. That still … sounds so strange.”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t know what else to say to that. We observed a moment of silence for the demise of my formerly sisterless existence—or, my former existence in which Raven was the closest thing to a sister I’d ever needed.

  Huh. I looked at Raven. Was she jealous of Elizabeth?

  No, Raven would’ve told me if she felt that way. She never minced words. Besides, how could she possibly be jealous of someone who was causing so much stress in my life? It wasn’t like Elizabeth and I were staying up late watching movies and painting our toenails, or having deep conversations, or any of the things Raven and I did together.

  I dismissed the thought. “So I’ll ask her tonight if she has a date yet. If not, maybe we can—oh.”

  Elizabeth was coming down the hall toward us, walking next to a tall blond guy in a soccer jersey. Who was holding her books and asking her something that seemed to be making her uncomfortable. She tossed her hair and forced a smile, nodded, said something. He smiled back, handed her the stack of books, touched her on her shoulder, and spun away, walking like he had springs on the bottoms of his shoes.

  “Guess she does have a date,” Raven said, her eyebrows almost touching her hairline. “That sure didn’t take long. And, wow—Sam Shotwell?”

  “Yeah, well. As you predicted, right? I’ll see ya.”

  And I went down the hall toward the administrative offices to meet Mom, hoping Elizabeth hadn’t seen us standing there watching.

  Stop it, I told myself. You’re going to the Fall Ball with Farhan. Your one true love. What more could you ask? And besides, you have no claims on Sam Shotwell; you only did a couple of stupid acting-class exercises together. So what if he grinned at you once or twice? You should be ashamed of yourself, trying to hog all the guys for yourself. Who do you think you are, anyway?

  Sometimes, no matter how hard I pushed “stop,” that stupid loop just wouldn’t shut off.

  At least I had Friday to look forward to. Friday afternoon, the whole drama class plus the rest of the Much Ado cast and crew piled into a school bus and drove down to the Shakespeare Theatre in DC.

  None of us ever got to ride on real school buses, the cheddar-colored kind. We did have a small Fern Grove bus (white with the school insignia painted in green) that picked up some students who lived farther away, but almost all the younger kids got dropped off and picked up by their parents, and the older kids took city buses—or drove themselves. I sat with Micayla near the back, and we exhausted ourselves singing stupid school bus songs for a while—“The Wheels on the Bus,” “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer” (which we changed to mead, then Red Bull, then Gatorade, and then it wasn’t funny anymore). Finally Robin stood up at the front of the bus, clapped his hands, and said, “People. Don’t make me throw any students out the window. It’s against the code of ethics in my contract.”

  So we stopped singing and watched the Beltway creep by outside the window. There’s no such thing as speeding, or even driving at the speed limit, during rush hour—which, in the Baltimore-DC metro area, is actually four hours.

  “How are the costumes coming along?” I asked.

  Micayla sighed. “I don’t know. Peg wants us to do a cross between Shakespearean and contemporary—like, contemporary outfits with period pieces thrown in here and there. She said it’s a simple comedy, not a political play, so there’s no reason to try to say anything political using the costumes. She hates when people overpoliticize the comedies.”

  “‘Does this say anything?’” I murmured.

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, just a quote. The first play Dad and I ever saw together, years ago—A Man for All Seasons. There’s this Everyman character, and he wears all black, and he comes onstage by himself to talk to the audience and complains about his costume. ‘Is this a costume? Does this say anything? It barely covers one man’s nakedness! A bit of black material to reduce Old Adam to the Common Man.’ Isn’t that fantastic? We’ve been quoting that line ever since.”

  Micayla stared at me. “You remember lines from a play you saw years ago?”

  I shrugged. “Well, like I said, we’ve been quoting it at each other.”

  �
�Girl, no wonder you’re on stage and I’m not. I can barely remember how to get dressed some mornings.”

  I checked out her outfit today—she was dressed up for the field trip, which for Micayla just meant regular clothes with minimal amounts of paint spilled on them. But instead of tying her hair back with a scarf or bandana like she usually did, she’d swept her long braids into a pile on the top of her head, stuck through with a couple of thin paintbrushes.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “Peg wants us to sew as much as we can from scratch, so at least it’ll be good experience for me. And maybe I can use some of the clothes for my portfolio. Not that I want to do textiles or fashion, but it can’t hurt to be well-rounded.”

  “Man. College.” It seemed like Micayla didn’t have time to think about anything else these days.

  “Yeah … let’s talk about something else.”

  “Oh! Guess what—I found out Robin’s birth name. Before he changed it to Robin Goodfellow.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “You won’t believe this: Rubens Pfefferkorn.”

  Micayla’s eyebrows shot up. “Whoa. So he had more than one good reason to change it, huh?”

  “More than one?”

  “Yeah, I’d heard that he changed it after his parents kicked him out—they disowned him or something.”

  “What?”

  “Yep. Small-town, small-minded family couldn’t deal with their fabulous son who loved Broadway and Shakespeare. And other boys.”

  “But—that’s ridiculous! He’s so talented. They should’ve been proud of him.”

  “‘Course they should’ve. Therefore, the name change, I suppose.”

  We lapsed into silence. Wow. Poor Robin. If I thought my family situation was tough …

  A loud cheer went up from the front of the bus. We’d finally pulled up in front of the Shakespeare Theatre.

  “People! Please wait outside the bus in some semblance of order so we can count and tag you like cattle.” Robin sounded a little stressed. He was wearing his usual black turtleneck and tight black jeans, but he’d added a black blazer on top for the occasion. I looked at him and tried to imagine what it must’ve been like for him to make his own way at eighteen. Just a few years older than I was.

  We waited outside the bus for Robin and Peg to take roll, then filed into the theater. It was only 6:00—we’d arrived early enough to hear the preshow lecture. As Micayla and I walked through the lobby, Heron ran over to join us. “Hey, Mic, let’s see if we can check out the costume room before it starts!”

  “Do you think they’d let us?” said Micayla.

  Heron shrugged. “Can’t hurt to ask, right?”

  “Save us seats,” Micayla told me, and they took off.

  I went into the theater and plunked myself down at the end of a row. Then Sam Shotwell came down the other aisle, waved at me, and started to make his way down the row from the other side.

  I jumped up as if I’d been sitting on porcupine quills and looked around, pretending I was trying to find someone I’d been waiting for. I walked back a few rows, a safe distance from Sam, and this time I picked a seat in the middle of the row, right next to the person who was already sitting there. Zephyr.

  “Hey,” I said. “Mind if I sit here?”

  I draped my coat over the empty seats to my left, to save them for Micayla and Heron.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I took that to mean Sure, go ahead.

  Zephyr didn’t say much off stage, when he didn’t have lines written out for him. Maybe that was smart. Sometimes I thought my life would be much smoother if I could hire a scriptwriter to dictate it all for me.

  We hadn’t talked to each other at all, in fact, except for the words we’d spoken as Beatrice and Benedick in the audition and the read-through. I wasn’t sure what to make of him. He was two grades ahead of me, a senior, and he’d only started at Fern Grove three years ago. Which, in Friends terms, made him a newbie. No one seemed to know him very well. He wasn’t involved in any activities besides drama and he didn’t belong to any particular group—jocks, art kids, nerds.

  “So,” I said, “have you been here before?”

  “Couple of times.”

  “Me, too. My dad and I already saw this production, actually. We don’t usually come all the way to DC for anything except Shakespeare. We have season tickets to Center Stage in Baltimore.”

  He nodded.

  I nodded.

  We were like two bobbleheads on a dashboard.

  “They’re doing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? this season,” he offered. “At Center Stage. You seen it yet?”

  “No, never heard of it.”

  “Oh, my god. Edward Albee. Possibly the greatest play written in the last century. Besides Arcadia of course.” He was still speaking quietly, but much faster. “I saw it on Broadway this summer, with my—with some friends. Tracy Letts was playing George, if you can believe it. Saw a few things at the Booth while I was in New York, but we all agreed that was by far the winner.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “Wow. So, what were you doing in New York?”

  “Oh, I just went to a summer program. You know. Drama camp.”

  Drama camp. I pictured a roomful of Zephyr-like guys, with twisted hair and leather jackets, sitting in a circle on stage and meditating. Reading through the best plays of the last century. Going to see shows on Broadway. And girls, too, of course. Girls wearing lipstick and big earrings and tight, low-cut dresses like Rina Crane and Tori Lopez, who were now sitting on either side of Sam Shotwell and giggling like parakeets. Not that parakeets giggle. But the noises they were making sounded that ridiculous.

  Micayla and Heron came in and looked around for me, and I waved and called their names. They made their way to our row and slid in.

  “They let us backstage!” Micayla reported, breathless. “We saw everything—the costume room, the props closet, the scenery.”

  “They have an internship we could apply for,” said Heron, as if she were saying, They have a roomful of gold coins that they don’t want anymore and they gave us garbage bags to fill.

  “Wow, that’s great!” I said. “Zephyr was just telling me about a drama camp in New York. Have you guys ever considered drama camp?”

  “Oh, I went to the summer program here every year in junior high,” said Heron. “That’s how I pulled strings to get us backstage.”

  Micayla nodded. “I did the program at Center Stage two summers ago. I was too busy with my art classes at MICA this past summer, but the Center Stage thing was fun. You should definitely consider it.”

  I had no idea I was so behind. Or so inexperienced. Had everyone else in this class been on stage since they were in diapers?

  Someone came out to the podium then to start the preshow lecture, and I pulled out my notebook to take notes. I needed all the help I could get.

  Robin had warned us not to see this as an opportunity to copy the professional actors, but rather to collect ideas on what we liked and didn’t like about the production. We were supposed to write a one-page review for homework and another page of new ideas about our own character, or for the lights, costumes, and scenery, if you were on crew.

  The curtain finally went up to reveal Leonato, Hero, and Beatrice sitting on the stoop outside an apartment building, with Leonato’s messenger hovering at his elbow. The Shakespeare Theatre’s set designers had definitely tried to “say something” with the costumes and scenery, contrary to Peg’s views—they’d set the play in mid-twentieth-century Chicago, with Leonato, Don John, and Don Pedro all dressed like Italian mafiosos. Oh, and for some reason, there was half a grand piano hanging from the rafters. After seeing the production once already, I still wasn’t sure if the set and costumes made any sense to me. I put it all down on my “Don’t Like” list.

  It was amazing how much more I saw the second time through. Beatrice talks about Benedick from the very first scene—she’s already crazy about him, she just d
oesn’t realize it. Or maybe she won’t admit it to herself. She’s fiercely intelligent and independent and doesn’t have the patience for any man who can’t match her wit. When Beatrice and Benedick finally do start to fall for each other, it’s partly because their friends trick each of them into thinking the other one is secretly in love with them. But it’s also partly through words, through a meeting of minds—they barely mention each other’s physical appearance. It’s the anti-Romeo-and-Juliet play. Beatrice visibly lights up in their scenes of verbal sparring. And Benedick dissects her sarcastic comments and manages to interpret them as cleverly disguised words of love. He’s the stereotypical teenage girl, I thought, and had to stifle a laugh.

  Halfway through the first act, I decided I did like the costumes after all. Hero was wearing a poodle skirt and her hair was styled in a perfect ’50s flip—you could practically see her salivating at the chance to cook and vacuum for Claudio, happily, in high heels, without Prozac, for the rest of her life. Beatrice, on the other hand, was costumed in pants and a no-frills oxford shirt, a sweater tied around her shoulders, her hair pulled back in a loose braid. She looked pretty but comfortable. Dressed for no one but herself, I jotted in my notes.

  Micayla and Heron were scribbling away, too. Zephyr wasn’t. He was slouched in his seat, his eyes half-closed. I thought he was falling asleep until I realized he was mouthing along silently with some of the lines. His eyes were narrowed in concentration, not boredom.

  At intermission, the lights came back up and Heron and Micayla started discussing their notes, talking at breakneck speed. Zephyr pulled his phone out of his pocket and frowned. It was buzzing. He got out of his seat as he answered it and made his way to the aisle. As he went, I heard him say, “Ava, I can’t talk right now, I’m at a play—no, with my class—”

  Hmm.

  “Hey,” I said, interrupting Micayla and Heron, “is there anyone who goes to Fern Grove named Ava?”

  “Nope,” said Heron. “Why?”

  “Nothing. Just wondering. How are you so sure?”

  “I used to work in the cafeteria swiping meal cards. If there’s an Ava, she’d have to be in the primary school. I know all the names in the high school and the junior high. Anyway, what’d you think about the first half?”