Tom Lake(6)

“Really?” she asked me.

I nodded, handing her the camera. She stood to take the clip out of my hair.

“You have to go last,” she said. “No jumping line. If Jimmy’s still around he can read with you.”

Jimmy looked me dead in the eye and reached out his hand. We shook on it. “No place I’d rather be,” he said.

I went back down the hall and took my seat. I didn’t want anyone to think I was getting preferential treatment, which, of course, I was. I didn’t have to run to the bathroom with Veronica to know what she was doing. Mr. Martin needed to find an Emily in a field with no contenders. All his hopes would be pinned on whatever girl came last. I had audited over four hours of AP acting classes, which didn’t mean I knew how to act, but I sure as hell knew how not to. All I had to do was say the words and not get in the way.

When the last pair had gone and it was just me and Veronica and Jimmy--George in the hall, I asked Veronica to braid my hair.

Jimmy--George shook his head and Veronica agreed with him. “It’s prettier down,” she said.

I was wearing jeans and duck boots and my brother Hardy’s old U. New Hampshire sweatshirt. Go Wildcats.

“You would have told me, right?” Veronica said. “If this was always the master plan?”

“You know I never have a plan.” Why did it feel like I was leaving her?

She cocked her head like you do when you hear the sound of a door opening somewhere in the house, then she put her arms around me and squeezed. “Kill it,” she whispered.

The gym was the gym again, site of all humiliations: the running, the kickball, the dancing, the play. I wanted to teach English, join the Peace Corps, save a dog’s life, sew a dress. Acting had not been on the list. When I handed my form to one of the men who stood to take it, I very nearly cried out from the fear. Was this how the Stage Managers felt? Was this the reason they lit their pipes and fiddled with their hats? The Georges leapt, the Emilys twirled their fingers through their hair like they were practicing the baton, all because they knew they were going to die up there. My grandmother was watching, and I knew she must be so afraid for me. I closed my eyes for one second, telling myself it would all go so fast. Jimmy was George and I was Emily and we knew our parts by heart.

“Emily, why are you mad at me?” George said.

“I’m not mad at you,” I said.

It was a simple conversation between two childhood friends who were about to fall in love. I said the lines the way I’d heard them in my head all morning, and when we were finished, Mr. Martin and my grandmother and the three men who were with them stood and clapped their hands.



I look at my watch. It’s easy to forget how late it is because the sun stays up forever in the summer. “We’re switching to montage now,” I tell the girls. “I won’t put you through any more of high school.”

“But what about the play?” Emily asks, her impossible legs over the back of the couch. Emily has never been able to sit on furniture like a normal person. I lost that fight when she was still a child. Whoever installed her interior compass put the magnet in upside down.

“You know all about the play, and anyway, it comes up a lot. We have to pace ourselves.”

“What happened to Veronica and Jimmy--George?” Maisie asks. “I’ve never heard a word about either of them.”

“We lost touch.”

Maisie snorts. “There is no such thing as losing touch.” She pulls her phone from the pocket of her shorts and wags it at me like some wonderful new invention. “What are their last names?”

I look at her and smile.

“You can at least tell us which one of you ended up with him,” Nell says.

“We all ended up with ourselves.”

The girls groan in harmony. It’s their best trick.

Emily reaches over and tugs on my shirt. “Give us something.”

We will be back in the orchard hours from now. If they don’t go to bed soon they’ll be worthless tomorrow, though I don’t tell them that. I labor to tell them as little as possible. “The play was a big success. We were scheduled for six performances and we got extended to ten. A reporter came from Concord and wrote us up in the Monitor.”

My picture was on the front page of the weekend section. My grandmother bought five copies. I found them stacked in the bottom of her blanket chest after she died.

Nell asks who played the Stage Manager. Nell is an actress. She has to see the whole thing in her head.

The Stage Manager. There had been so many Stage Managers. I have to think about it. The bad ones are all so clear in my mind, but who got the part? He was good, I know that. I try to picture him walking me to the cemetery. “Marcia’s father!” I cry, because even if I don’t remember his name, I see his face as clear as day. The brain is a remarkable thing, what’s lost snaps right into focus and you’ve done nothing at all. “He was trying out for Doc Gibbs but he was better than the other men so Mr. Martin made him the Stage Manager.” He lacked the hubris to believe that he should have the lead, that’s what made him good. Marcia was humiliated by the thought of me spending time with her father. She avoided me through all the rehearsals and then the play, wouldn’t sit with me at lunch, wouldn’t look at me, but when we came back in the fall for our senior year we were fine again.