Snark and Stage Fright (13 page)

I got out, closed the door behind me, and walked away. I know he was sitting there in the car for a few moments; at least, he was there the whole time I walked up the driveway and into the party, frantically drying my eyes with the back of my hand before I went in to find Shondra. But first I had to find a bathroom because I was pretty sure I was going to throw up.

10 
Getting By

On Monday, I so dreaded seeing Michael in European History II I was actually relieved that a pop quiz took up most of the period. I preferred staring at my lined sheet of paper and thinking about Archduke Ferdinand to looking at Michael and contemplating how ridiculous I had sounded outside Cameron’s party. And I knew that two periods later, lunch wouldn’t provide any relief from my embarrassment with him, unless I moved myself to another table, which would mean (1) abandoning Dave and Gary and Shondra and (2) looking like a chastened puppy hiding in the corner and hoping no one noticed that I had piddled on the rug. So I made myself march in to the caf, opened up my lunch bag, and unveiled my avocado and baked tofu wrap like the uncrowned queen of the lunchroom. I was ready to dig in when Gary burst into a guffaw.

“It’s been a
whole week
, Georgia, and you still haven’t said anything!” he taunted. “I can’t believe it!”

Great. Something else was going on right in front of me, just like the budding romance between Michael and Diana. Only whatever this was, I had failed to notice it. Probably because I was too busy noticing Michael and Diana, who hadn’t arrived yet. Whatever this new shame was, at least Michael wouldn’t be there to witness it, for once.

“What?” I asked.

Dave shook his head, looking at Gary. “It’s like she didn’t even notice,” he said.

Shondra tapped my elbow and gave me a hint. “Look around at everybody’s lunch trays. What do you see?”

I frowned and scanned the room, but I was still really confused. It looked like everyone was still carrying the same slabs of mystery meat and congealed SpaghettiOs and talking and shouting and grouping themselves into little power cliques as usual.

“Oh, right,” I tried. “The zombie apocalypse. I forgot that was this week.”

Gary clucked his tongue in disappointment and announced, “There’s not a vegan item on one of those trays. Because there are none available. Despite your articles in
The Alt
and the promises you got from administration last year.”

“Oh. You’re right.” I glanced up as Michael pulled out his chair and sat down with Diana right behind him. At least they weren’t holding hands in public yet. Still, I felt my face grow hot as I remembered how I had bragged to his grandmother about winning vegan lunch choices and thought of how happy she would be to see her grandson with someone as winsome and candy-coated as Diana DeBourgh. I pushed both thoughts away and admitted to Gary, “I guess I didn’t notice.”

“I told you,” Gary said to Dave, who replied, “I still don’t believe it,” and put a palm to my forehead to see if I was running a dangerously high temperature. “She must be delirious,” he concluded.

I took a sip of my bottle of iced tea and said, without looking even remotely in Michael’s direction, “I guess I’ve been … kinda preoccupied lately.”

“I
guess
!” Gary crowed and leaped up from his seat to put both hands on the back of my shoulders, like a manic and probably irresponsible Little League coach. “So get! Fired! Up! Let’s get the old Georgia Barrett back! Let’s write some incendiary articles for
The
Alt
. Let’s throw a Molotov cocktail at the food services truck when it backs up to the school cafeteria filled with meat and dairy products!”

Shondra raised a fist and encouraged, “
Viva la Revolucion
!”

“What’s going on?” Michael asked, and Gary caught him up on my lack of attention to the cause I had championed last year, much to Michael’s amusement.

“She’s been, uh, ‘preoccupied,’” Gary finished. “Can you believe it? Come on, Georgia,” he coaxed as he ran a hand across his purple spikes. “There are chickens to be saved!”

I shot him a look and he blanched, which was totally unfair, so I dug out the oatmeal peanut butter chocolate chip cookies I had baked and passed him the whole bag.

“I think there should be more options, and healthier ones,” Diana chimed in with a swish of her ponytail. Her old boarding school probably had a salad bar sponsored by the Canyon Ranch Spa, but I guess it was nice to have her support. It should have been nice, at least. I knew that.

“A new recruit,” Dave said to me. “You guys can storm the admin building together.”

Kind of shyly, Diana offered, “I would go and complain with you if you wanted. My mom knows some people on the school board.”

And through it all, Michael sat back and picked at his soggy French fries, smiling, no doubt basking in the glow of Diana’s generosity of spirit.

“There you go! We have a new foot soldier in the fight for freedom,” Gary enthused. “You guys can go to the admin building after school.”

I shook my head without thinking, but since everyone was looking, I explained, “I, um … told Leigh I’d run lines with her after school. She’s trying out for Maria in
The Sound of Music
next week,” grateful to have an excuse. Normally I’d be all for holding some businessman-turned-town-selectman hostage while I ranted about hormone-fed beef and appalling farming conditions and gestation cages, but not today. And not with Diana DeBourgh.

“Your sister has a great voice,” Michael said then and I gawped at him in surprise.

“And she’ll get to play a nun, which should be kind of natural for her,” Shondra teased with a playful bump of her shoulder against mine.

“Are they letting anybody try out?” Diana asked, her eyes even bigger and brighter than usual like someone had turned on a light bulb in her skull. She explained, “I was in all the shows at my old school,” then turned to assure me, “I wouldn’t try out for Maria or anything.”

“I think you should try out for whatever part you want,” I told her and, with a glance at Michael, I offered, “Do you want to meet me after school, at my locker, and we can go find Leigh and she can tell you all about it? LHS’s productions are actually really good, and there are some really talented people here. So you should go for it.”

She beamed like a little kid who is told they can get a lollipop for such good behavior and cried, “I would love that! Thanks!”

“No problem.” And then, because I felt like everyone was staring at me, especially Michael, I told him, “This is how I indoctrinate them. First, musical theater. Then, the Animal Liberation Front. Next thing they know, they’re releasing tigers from a zoo,” and everyone laughed, but Michael kept looking at me for a while until a slow smile spread across his face, lifting the skin over his sharp cheekbones. For some reason it made my face burn again, even as I felt a little triumphant.

As we left the caf, he caught my elbow and said, “That was really nice of you, George. To invite Diana over like that.”

“I’m not exactly Vlad the Impaler, you know. I can use my forked tongue for good as well as evil,” I told him as I tried to ignore the rush I got from the feel of his fingers on my arm.

He sighed, rolled his eyes, and walked away as Shondra laughed and nudged me off to the Spanish classroom.

So when the final bell rang, I hurried to the juniors’ hallway to catch Diana and invite her home with me so she could look over the script and the music that Leigh had borrowed. She actually squealed in surprise and excitement, even though she appeared to be the kind of person who could make a million lifelong friends anywhere from preschool to a penitentiary. I remembered how hard it is to be the new kid at school.

And this tiny gesture of decency made me feel better, too, because she and Leigh and I actually had a good time reading over the lines.
The Sound of Music
is one of my mom’s favorite movies; I find it kind of annoyingly saccharine, but the actual Broadway play is much darker. There are all of these Nazi sympathizers and the whole von Trapp family is basically going to be crushed under the fascist steamroller that levels Austria unless they escape to the mountains. The three of us ate chips and drank diet soda in the living room while Diana read the part of Liesl, the oldest von Trapp girl, the one who sings
You are Sixteen
, which is a pretty nauseating song, but I could already tell that Diana could play the part as someone genuinely sweet and innocent and not a total moron in love with a future stormtrooper like Liesl is in the movie, while Leigh read Maria’s part. I read every other part, but I really liked being the snotty evil baroness, Elsa, the best and put on a ludicrous approximation of a German accent that cracked Diana up as I did so. I was actually starting to like her, and not just because she’s an easy laugh. Disliking her was like disliking that first day you know spring is really here, when the snow has finally melted and birds are chirping and the grass is new and very green.

Afterward, when we were waiting on the porch for her mom to pick her up, Diana thanked me for about the fiftieth time for inviting her over and said, “It’s hard to be in a new school. Everyone else already has their friends … ”

I nodded and felt guilty for even wanting to dislike her.

“That is exactly what I thought when I moved here three years ago,” I said. “And what I thought after the move before that. And the move before that. My dad’s a professor who keeps getting one-year positions at schools, so we moved around a lot.”

“Wow. You’ve been through this a lot,” she said. I was about to point out that getting a boyfriend like Michael Endicott in your first week at a new school had to be a clue that you were going to be just fine—in fact, you were crushing it—but she pushed an acorn cap onto the top step with the toe of her ballet flat and asked, “Can I ask you something?”

“Uh, yeah … ” I answered, bracing myself to have to lie that I did not mind at all that she was seeing my ex-boyfriend.

“You and Michael used to go out, didn’t you? Until recently?”

I bit my lip and nodded. “Yeah, we did. But it’s over, and I know you guys … ”

“I was just wondering because … ” She paused, choosing her words. “Well, he seems so sad to me lately. And I was wondering if that’s why, if he’s so sad because you guys split up.”

I shrugged, trying not to look as wounded as I felt because as much as I liked the idea that he spent his date time with Diana pining for me, I didn’t believe it. Not after our conversation at Cameron’s party.

Her mom pulled up to the curb in a Prius just then and Diana waved to her and said as she walked toward it, “Our new apartment’s not far from here—it’s in that big house on the corner of Summer Street? You can come over anytime.”

I wasn’t sure I was ready to have a sleepover at Michael’s new girlfriend’s house, so I nodded and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

When I went back inside, Leigh was still at the piano practicing
My Favorite Things.

“Diana’s really nice, isn’t she? I’m glad you asked her to come over,” she said. “It was really nice of you to do that.”

“You have no idea.”

Leigh laughed and closed the lid on the keys. She said, “She’ll get the Liesl part for sure. The trick will be getting enough boys to be in it again. Spencer will be Captain von Trapp, of course, but there are still a lot of von Trapp boys to cast. And Nazis.”

Remembering her problem from last year’s production, I raised my eyebrows as I flopped on the couch and asked, “Is Alistair okay with you cavorting onstage with Spencer again?” Her missionary’s-son boyfriend, Alistair, had almost demanded she drop out of the production when he’d learned that the leading man was gay, when he should have been thanking Jesus for that since Spencer is really cute and talented, so any girl would have been happy to sing romantic duets and dance with him. Leigh and Alistair had almost broken up over it, but somehow they had worked it out.

“It’s
onstage
cavorting.” Leigh laughed. “And Ali’s accepted that if I’m okay with Spencer—and anyone else—then he has to be, too.”

“That’s awesome, Leigh. Way to lay down the law.”

She hit me with a throw pillow and walked out of the room laughing. I burrowed into the couch pillows and thought about how Leigh was so different this fall from the last. She’d been the first freshman ever to get a lead role in the spring musical last year, and she would almost certainly get the lead again. Last spring, Leigh and Alistair had worked it out. He accepted who she is and what she believes and didn’t try to make her change (much) or walk away from her when she didn’t.

That’s pretty great.

If you had told me last year that I would be looking at my sister and her Jesus freak boyfriend as role models for relationships, I would have slapped you. And if you had told me a week ago that I would end up genuinely liking Diana DeBourgh, I would have done the same thing.

She’s so the right girl for him: beautiful, sweet, and not at all difficult.

So unlike me.

If I were a bigger person, I would’ve been sad that Michael was sad, at least according to Diana, and I would’ve artfully pushed the two of them together so they could reach their inevitable happy-ever-after without delay.

But I wasn’t there yet.

11 
The Rules of Engagement Post-Breakup

I suppose I could have started nudging Michael toward Diana on Saturday, when I ran into him on Dave’s lawn, of all places. Dave and Gary had set me up with some paint and a pair of old bed sheets to make banners to hang behind them at the next Pigs show. I had already completed the Gothic lettering reading “Cryptic Pigs from Hell” and had managed to convince Gary not to splatter too much paint all over it when Michael’s familiar silver BMW pulled up to the curb. My heart defied me by doing a little thumpity dance at the sight of Michael sliding out of the driver’s seat and loping over to join us, notebook in hand.