“Drew didn’t hang a dog!” Amy contested hotly.
“We don’t know that! We don’t know anything about him!”
“Why don’t we just take some deep, calming ocean breaths,” Heidi interrupted, “and go play some National Parks Pictionary?”
“Is that even a thing?” I asked.
“It is indeed a thing.” Heidi nodded, standing up. “And it’s just the thing we need!”
Heidi ushered Amy and me out of the room like an efficient Girl Scout troop leader. Still glowering slightly, Amy and I followed her to the Actor Lounge, settling in on opposite ends of the dilapidated floral couch, eyeing each other somewhat warily. Rhys was the only other person in there, but he hastily closed the Edith Wharton novel he was reading when Heidi announced Pictionary.
“Parlor games!” he cheered with delight as Heidi pulled National Parks Pictionary out of the cabinet under the TV.
“Is this really all there is to play?” I eyed the game skeptically. “Because it kind of sounds like the worst game ever.”
“I think you mean the best game ever!” Heidi chirped.
“It’s the only game here,” Rhys said in a low tone. “No Scrabble, no Boggle, no Taboo, no nothing. I checked. I ran a wicked game night back at Andover. If I’d known things were going to be this bleak, I would have brought my own stash.”
“Look at this!” Heidi pulled off the box top and started going through the cards. “We get to draw all sorts of fun words like deciduous … and, and … conifers … and, and … the Tuskegee Airmen!”
“I don’t know what any of those are,” Amy whispered, and I nodded in grim agreement.
“Learning,” said Heidi, “is part of the fun.”
Well, Heidi may have been wrong about National Parks Pictionary being the most fun game ever, but she was right that it made Amy and me forget that we had been quasi-fighting. As Rhys and I took on Amy and Heidi, trying with little success to draw the Organic Act of 1916 or Gneiss, everyone collapsed into laughter. No one guessed a single picture the entire game.
After a couple rounds, Noah returned from his run and the five of us trooped into the tiny kitchen to make a communal dinner of mac and cheese. I caught Amy glancing hopefully toward the door the entire time, but Drew never showed up. Thank God.
We brought the mac and cheese out onto the lawn and all ate straight out of the same pot, fighting each other with forks for the cheesiest morsels, talking and laughing nonstop until long after the fireflies came out. It is a truth universally acknowledged that theater people never run out of things to talk about.
Many hours later, after Noah had produced a guitar and we sang until our voices were hoarse—I had been so right about his guitar-playing hands—we drifted into the house and off to our bedrooms. I pulled on an old faded NJ Devils T-shirt and some plaid pajama shorts and climbed up to my bunk. I tried to get comfortable on the extremely thin mattress, tossing and turning, listening to Heidi’s gentle snores and the low drone of the mosquitoes outside the screen window. Ugh, Drew. That smug, pompous, arrogant, obnoxious asshole! Why did he think he was too good to scoop poop like the rest of us? Was he too good to eat mac and cheese with us, too? I fumed, flopping back and forth, my legs tangling in the sheets. What could Amy possibly see in him? He was a good actor who knew a lot about Shakespeare, but that alone did not ideal boyfriend material make. If only I’d been able to convince her to direct her attentions elsewhere, but that had failed spectacularly. There was no way she could ever be happy with him. No one could ever be happy with him. Unless, of course, he was a totally different person. A much better person. With a way better personality.
I sat up straight in bed, nearly whacking my head against the ceiling in the process. An idea had hit me with all the subtlety of a thunderclap. It was either pure genius or pure madness. Either way, it meant I would get to spend the summer torturing Drew—and nothing could be better than that. This was going to be the most hilarious summer of all time. I hastily scrambled down the ladder to the floor by Heidi’s bed.
“Heidi!” I shook her, pulling on the sleeve of her organic cotton-hemp-blend fair trade pajamas.
She muttered, “Lalita sahasranama.”
“Are you dreaming in Sanskrit?” I asked, stunned.
“Hmm?” Heidi woke up. “Lalita sahasranama,” she repeated.
“That is Sanskrit,” I confirmed.
“How do you know Sanskrit?” Amy asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.
“My mom. She’s a yoga teacher. That’s where I get my rudimentary knowledge of Sanskrit. And deep sense of calm and inner peace,” I added sarcastically.
“Cool.” Amy smiled.
“Namaste.” Heidi folded her hands into a prayer position.
“No, no, not Namaste time, war time!” I pulled her hands apart.
“Oh, no. War, no.” Heidi pulled her hands away and stuck them back together.
“No! Uh, not war!” Damn. I’d forgotten my audience. “Uh … woman empowerment!” I grabbed her wrists and shook them around in celebration.
“Sisters unite!” she cheered.
“Right, right, unite!” I echoed, then whirled around to the other side of the room. “Amy,” I announced, walking toward her like a lawyer on Law & Order. “You are sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it is Drew you are ‘in love with’?” I air-quoted.
“Beyond a shadow of a doubt!” She clasped her hands in front of the TOUGH COOKIE printed on her pink tank top and pulled her matching pajama pants–clad knees into her chest. “I love him, Cass, I know it. I do! And I know you’ll come to see how amazing he is—”
“I think, Amy,” I interrupted her, “that you’ll come to see how amazing he could be.” I smiled. “Let’s review the situation, shall we? Tell, me, what is it that you so like about your special beloved?”
“Um … okay.” Amy stared at me, clearly unsure why I’d awoken her in the middle of the night to interrogate her about her crush. “Well, for one, he’s sooooo talented. How could you look at him onstage and not love him? That was when it started. From the very first line of his monologue, boom—it was like something exploded in my chest. I couldn’t look away.”
“I concede that he possesses a modicum of talent.” I nodded. That was indisputable. He was good. Very good.
“And he’s sooooo cute.”
“He’s not hideous.” I shrugged. Honestly, it was hard to tell anything under that beard. He might have been a god. Or he might have been the elephant man. Who could say?
“And he’s soooo smart,” she added happily. “He knows so much stuff. Connor thought school was so stupid; he never tried or anything. But Drew is, like, absolutely and completely totally brilliant.”
“I guess … but wasn’t it a little obnoxious, the way he was pushing all that obscure Shakespeare terminology in everyone’s faces on the first day?” I asked.
“The way he explained it was so condescending.” Heidi’s voice was rich with disappointment. “Learning new things should be celebrated, not treated as shameful.”
Oh, Heidi. Sweet, innocent Heidi was unintentionally proving to be a brilliant accomplice. Walk into my web, said the spider to the fly … or however that thing goes.
“We-elll,” Amy hemmed and hawed. “I guess that was a little much.”
“Oof.” I grimaced, struck by another way to add some fuel to the fire. “Remember the way he corrected everyone in warmups?”
“Oh, the jaw shaking!” Heidi cried. “If you have a tip, share it as something to explore. Don’t tell everyone they’re wrong. And the push-ups, too! I heard him admonishing you, Cass. Honestly, you were doing your best. It’s effort that should be rewarded, not the end result.”
“I was just trying to do my very best push-up.” I shook my head sadly.
“I know you were.” Heidi patted my arm. “It’s hard to build upper body strength.”
“And wasn’t it ridiculous that he didn’t help out with the bear situation?” I widened
my eyes in exaggerated disbelief.
“Well …” Amy looked even more unsure.
“That was truly ridiculous.” Heidi was looking as close to pissed as I could imagine her being. “No one should fault a bear. It’s an innocent creature, doing only what it knows how to do. Excreting waste is part of the very definition of a living organism! And the bear didn’t know it was littering. Everyone should have pitched in to clean up that trash. It was the only decent thing to do.”
“The only decent thing to do,” I repeated with as much gravitas as I could muster. “And why didn’t he hang out with us tonight? Where was he, huh? Isn’t this supposed to be an ensemble?”
“That’s what theater is all about!” Heidi pounded her fist on the bunk bed. “Creating and celebrating the ensemble!”
“Well …” Amy whispered.
“And doesn’t he always have something snarky to say?” I added. “Like when we were struggling into our corsets, wasting his precious time?”
“Okay, fine.” Amy held up her hands in defeat. “I admit he’s not perfect.”
“Ah, but what if we could make him perfect?” I crowed in triumph. I snatched something out from under our bunk bed. “Now, what do you see here?”
“My script?” Heidi answered.
“This isn’t just a script.” I grinned. “It’s a manual. A manual on how to end the war of the sexes and to create the perfect mate.”
Amy looked confused. So did Heidi. I had to think fast. I didn’t want to lose my unwitting ally.
“I thought you said the whole ‘taming’ thing was sexist. You know, like in your monologue,” Amy said hesitantly.
“Well, yeah, sure, it’s sexist if you tame a woman, but not if you tame a man,” I said smugly.
“That’s a double standard. The whole point of equality of the sexes is equality.” Heidi looked dubious.
“Fine! Sexist, schmexist, whatever! It works!” I jumped on the bed next to Amy. “Would we still be performing this play five hundred years later if there wasn’t a nugget of truth in here? A big-old golden nugget?”
“She has a point,” Amy said in Heidi’s general direction.
“Listen, we just gotta do what the script says, and we can make you the perfect boyfriend!” I said.
“The pursuit of perfection leads to nothing but grief,” Heidi warned.
“Okay, fortune cookie, could you cool it a minute?” I implored Heidi. “The perfect boyfriend,” I whispered to Amy. I could see her eyes glowing. “You can keep everything you like about Drew and change all the bad parts! By taming him. All guys need a little bit of work, right? This is just a shortcut. We follow this script, and voila! The perfect man!”
“I don’t get it,” Heidi interrupted, crossing her arms over her chest.
“What’s to get? You just agreed with me that he’s been acting like a complete and total jackass all week. This will work. Pranks, tame, better, boyfriend, boom!”
“I’m lost,” Amy interjected.
“I mean it doesn’t make any sense,” Heidi continued. “What purpose is this serving? Why is playing a bunch of Shakespearean pranks on Drew going to make him fall in love with Amy?”
“Well, it’s not—I mean yes, but no,” I amended, noticing Amy’s panicky face. “Amy doesn’t need our help making Drew fall in love with her. That’s obvious. Have you ever had a problem getting a guy before?”
“Well, um, no.”
“Knew it, homecoming queen.” I smirked. “That’s not the point of this. They’ll get together on their own; I’m not worried about that.” I waved my hand dismissively. “We just need to tame all the obnoxiousness out of Drew before they do. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with yet another epic douchebag of a boyfriend. No one here wants Connor two-point-oh.” Amy shook her head vigorously. “Just look at the play. It wasn’t all the tricks that made Petruchio and Kate fall in love. The spark was always there, even when they thought they hated each other. All the sleep deprivation and the starvation just made her a lot nicer. Taming works. Get it now? It doesn’t just make sense, it makes perfect sense!”
“But you love him, don’t you?” Heidi prompted Amy. Well, that settled it—I’d lost Heidi. But I could tell Amy was intrigued. “Why would you want to change him?”
“It’s not that I want to change him, it’s just that—let’s be real here. I may be a romantic, but I’m also a realist. Every guy needs a little bit of work. You should have seen Connor before I got to him.” Amy rolled her eyes. “He ate everything with his hands. And I mean everything. It was disgusting. He was obsessed with pudding cups.” She shuddered. “Ick. I could never enjoy a pudding cup again. So why not put the work in before we start dating? That way I can just enjoy the finished product!”
“Hmm …” Heidi narrowed her eyes at me. “What’s in it for you?”
“Who? Me?” I tried to approximate some Precious Moments figurine-esque portrait of innocence. If Heidi figured out how excited I was by the prospect of tormenting Drew all summer, this whole operation was sunk. But honestly, who wouldn’t be excited by the prospect of playing a bunch of Shakespearean pranks? I’d never successfully pranked anyone. I’d been the victim of four years of expert prankage courtesy of the Weehawken High tech crew, but I’d only ever been the prankee, not the pranker. If we could pull this off, it was going to be so epic. “I am shocked! Of all people, Heidi, I thought you would recognize this as the truly selfless gesture it is.”
“Uh-huh.” She crossed her arms.
“I am serving humanity by making the world a better place. How? By helping Drew along on his path to self-discovery. Showing him how to grow and develop, to evolve into the best version of himself he could be. Just like the Buddha! Yes, a bearded, thespian Buddha, on that sweet, sweet road to enlightenment.” Man, I didn’t even know where this was coming from anymore. I was on fire! “And, of course, I’m helping a friend.” I slung an arm around Amy’s shoulder. “Doesn’t Amy deserve the best possible boyfriend? And as her friends, shouldn’t we help her find him? Or, uh, make him?”
“He’s not a robot.” Amy wrinkled her nose. “Or a science project.”
“Of course not.” I patted her genially on the back. “He’s a guy. And he’s about to become the perfect guy.”
“The perfect guy,” she repeated.
“We just tame this Drew, and he’s all yours.”
“Allllll mine.” Amy grinned. “Let’s do it.”
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” Heidi wailed.
“That’s not Shakespeare,” I said, and smiled in triumph.
CHAPTER 9
I had been unprecedentedly quiet at rehearsal today. During every scene I wasn’t in, I crouched backstage, poring over my script, highlighting every trick Petruchio played on Kate and making notes in the margins. That thing was a gold mine, chock-full of interesting tips and tidbits. Sleep deprivation, food deprivation, destruction of personal property—Petruchio was like some kind of crazy sixteenth-century rogue CIA agent! Realistically, I probably couldn’t keep Drew up every night with a trumpet. Or hack up all his clothes with a bread knife. Then he’d know it was me, and secrecy was of the utmost import if I wanted to maintain any kind of decent onstage relationship with him while at Dunmore. Because as much as Drew annoyed me, I wasn’t about to sacrifice my performance to make his life miserable. So I’d have to be way craftier than Petruchio had been. Luckily, there is more than one way to tame a shrew. And more than one way to keep said shrew from sleeping.
Which was why Amy and I were sitting on our bedroom floor, bribe at the ready, waiting for our accomplice as Heidi paced nervously back and forth.
“I still think it’s a bad idea. We should just stop it now before we even start.” Heidi traced even, concentric circles around us. “Well, maybe he’s not coming anyway,” she added hopefully. “Is he late?”
Amy checked her cell phone. “Barely five minutes. That’s still on time. Kind of.”
&nbs
p; We jumped as three quick, sharp knocks at the door interrupted us. I hastily sprang to my feet and opened the door. Rhys tried to sidle inside but was met with some difficulty as he had a pillow shoved up his shirt.
“Somebody knock you up?” I asked.
“My papa always warned me to keep outta the backs of pickup trucks!” Rhys wailed in a Southern accent once he’d made it into the room.
“That’s not very stealthy! You said you’d be subtle. What if someone had seen you?” Heidi worried.
“Well, someone did. I ran into Noah, NBD,” Rhys replied breezily.
“You ran into Noah?” Amy squeaked. “What did he say? What did you say?”
“He was looking at me, and I was like, ‘What?’ and he was like, ‘What’s goin’ on there?’ and I said, ‘Sodium bloat. Too many hot dogs. Water retention. Tragic.’” Rhys smiled. “And I actually did eat a bunch of hot dogs today, so, not even a lie. Completely genius, right?”
“Genius would have been not being seen.” I rolled my eyes. “But good enough. I doubt Noah will say anything.” I held out my hand, waiting as Rhys pulled the pillow out of his shirt.
“Noah might,” Heidi said. “He seems very honest. And forthright. And if he suspects that we stole Drew’s pillow, he might say something because it’s not right—”
“But he won’t suspect,” I said, “because no one will ever notice it was gone. How much time do we have, Rhys?”
“He just got in the shower. So you’ve got time, but not much.”
I quickly peeled off the navy pillowcase and tossed the pillow to Amy.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” she said as she handed me her pillow and started pulling a pink polka dot pillowcase over Drew’s old pillow. “My pillow’s full of feathers and his is all hypoallergenic, but they look exactly the same.”
“Thank God you both shop at Target,” I agreed, stuffing Amy’s feather pillow into Drew’s navy pillowcase. And thank God Drew had let slip that tiny detail about his feather allergy. Let’s see him get a good night’s sleep in his luxurious single room now.
“You got the goods?” Rhys asked.
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