My Most Excellent Year Page 5
“Pivot turn, Alejandra. Good!” I’m no longer an ambassador’s quarrelsome child, I’m not my brother’s obnoxious little sister, and I’m not ninth grade’s most famous prig. I’m the first girl in the second row in the third scene in the fourth number in fifth position at ten o’clock on the nose. Nothing less. I can’t imagine anything half so intoxicating, especially when Mrs. Salabes shows us a four-part combination—including an arabesque—and I’m the only one who gets it right. The first time!! Did you ever take modern dance at Miss Porter’s? Did you know that your body can say more with eight bars of music than you could possibly write in a fifteen-page essay?? I don’t need Gwen Verdon or Chita Rivera after all. I’d settle for being a chorus gypsy the rest of my life.
(I’m not quite as optimistic about my voice. So far all they’ve done is take me up and down the scales to see how far they can push it, which I really don’t think is a good idea. Whenever we slide above high C, I get a little nervous. There was an E that technically should have broken a window on the other side of the room. I hope they know what they’re doing.)
By the time I met Augie on the sidewalk after class, I’d changed back into the Other Alejandra, but I still had to explain why I was out of breath and sweaty. So I told him we’d spent an hour learning French aerobics. One day he’ll forgive me. He and his brother are too close to keep secrets from each other. Including mine.
ALEJANDRA PEREZ
AND AUGIE HWONG
present
THE FRESHMAN FOLLIES 2003
CONCEIVED AND DIRECTED BY
AUGIE HWONG
PRODUCTION MEETING
Participants: Alé and Augie
Location: The Word Shop Café and Bakery
Conference Room: Rear Booth
ALÉ:
I knew you’d never let me have solo billing above the title!
AUGIE:
You’re in Times Roman bold. I’m not.
ALÉ:
And what’s with the “conceived by”?? Talent shows are older than the ice caps!
AUGIE:
Maybe. But whose concept was it to stage the whole thing like A Chorus Line? I see rotating columns and Mylar mirrors and—
ALÉ:
Augie, our budget is $100. We can just afford posters.
AUGIE:
Can they have a gold top hat with glitter on it?
ALÉ:
They can have a gold top hat with glitter on it.
AUGIE:
Okay. Then we’ll tell Variety that we’re going in a different direction. That way I won’t lose face when they wonder what happened to “conceived by.”
I’ve never met anybody like Augie Hwong in my life. By 11:30 in the morning on my first day of school, I’d been written off by an entire classroom as a nose-in-the-air name-dropper who had no place on the ninth grade A-list. Then Augie grabbed my arm in the cafeteria line and insisted that it would ruin his adolescence if I didn’t have lunch with him. At first I thought he was mocking me (that’s the way it usually starts), but he was quite serious. It turned out that he had an entire roster of celebrity names that he needed to run through in the event I knew any of them personally—and over an inedible dessert of cling peaches, we finally discovered common ground. Who else but Augie would light up to learn that Judi Dench wears pantsuits to opening night parties? Who else would care? Which is probably why I surprised myself by revealing a few things that I’d never told another breathing soul before. Me, of all people.
“Whenever my father went overseas, I always thought it was because I’d done something shameful again.”
“Ouch. Did you really piss off Korea?”
“Yes. I was awful.”
“No. You were Elizabeth Taylor in Giant.”
He’s truly extraordinary.
He’s also twice as pretty as I could ever hope to be. It isn’t just the exquisitely shaped almond eyes or the hazel sunburst that hides behind them until he smiles; it’s the way his entire face absorbs life whenever you say something that delights him. One thing is certain: The boy who gets to kiss him for the first time is never going to be the same again.
But Anthony was right (a sorry yet inevitable conclusion). Augie was only operating at 75 percent this afternoon. He gave in too quickly on the Mylar mirrors, he only had one cup of cocoa instead of his usual two-plus-half-of-mine, he said, “No, thank you,” when Phyllis offered to slip him an advance copy of the Thelma Ritter biography, and he misquoted Bette Davis in All About Eve. Something was definitely on his mind.
“Are you all right?” I asked, interrupting him in the middle of yet another defensive argument.
“I’m fine,” he insisted.
“Hey,” said a third voice. We both looked up at the same time. It was that curly-haired boy Andy Wexler—the one who needs help with his soccer kick.
“Hey,” mumbled Augie, inexplicably staring down at the tabletop. Is he blushing?!
“How goes it?”
“’Kay. You?”
“’Kay. See ya.”
“See ya.” Augie watched intently while Andy moved over to the counter and sat down on one of the stools—glancing back over his shoulder as he did it and nearly landing on the floor.
ALÉ PEREZ NOTES ON PRODUCTION MEETING
Posters will have glittery gold top hats on them.
The overture will consist of two verses of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” provided that Mr. Disharoon has the sheet music. Otherwise there won’t be an overture. And we’re not using cymbals on the opening chord, no matter how good it sounds on the album.
Auditions will be held on Tuesday and Wednesday from 3:30 to 5:00.
Augie is falling in love with Andy Wexler.
Andy Wexler is falling in love with Augie.
Augie doesn’t know that Andy is gay.
Andy doesn’t know that Augie is gay. (Hello?)
I’m glad I’m a girl.
From:AlePerez@earthworks.net
To:TCKeller@earthworks.net
Stop worrying. Augie has a crush on Andy Wexler, so he’s operating on six levels of panic at the same time.
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From:TCKeller@earthworks.net
To:AlePerez@earthworks.net
I should get him to watch Casablanca again. He’ll handle this a lot better as Ingrid Bergman. He always does.
Why did he tell you and not me??
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From:AlePerez@earthworks.net
To:TCKeller@earthworks.net
Relax, big brother. He told me nothing. Romance is a universally unspoken language understood by every living organism on this planet except heterosexual men. So I’m not surprised that you didn’t pick up on it.
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From:TCKeller@earthworks.net
To:AlePerez@earthworks.net
Then how come you like me?
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From:AlePerez@earthworks.net
To:TCKeller@earthworks.net
I don’t.
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From:TCKeller@earthworks.net
To:AlePerez@earthworks.net
You e-mailed me first.
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From:AlePerez@earthworks.net
To:TCKeller@earthworks.net
It won’t happen again.
UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
CLINT LOCKHART
AGENT
Princess, Augie isn’t your only friend, he’s your first friend. The CIA calls guys like him keepers because they have the kind of 20/20 intuition that could read somebody’s character through a concrete retaining wall. Everybody else needs a few markers along the way. Including you. So try these for starters:
1. Don’t talk about the
kiss from Brad Pitt or the bracelet Princess Di gave you or anything else that belongs in People magazine. Bite the bullet and pretend you’re just a kid. (Oh, wait. You are!)
2. Every couple of days, ask someone sitting next to you to explain a quiz question that you didn’t understand. And if you did understand it, shut up and act like you didn’t. You’ll be surprised how fast the word spreads: “She’s human!”
3. At least once a week, try to make a mistake. And on the off-chance you discover that the world hasn’t exploded, make another one.
You rock, girl. But you need to give everybody else a chance to find that out.
xoxo,
Clint
Dear Jacqueline,
Lee Meyerhoff is the most popular girl in the ninth grade. She wears her hair in an early Beatles cut (almost always a fatal mistake, but somehow she makes it work), her face is so Becky Thatcher wholesome that she really ought to draw freckles on her nose to complete the picture, her I.Q. is somewhere around the temperature of water when it begins to boil (in degrees Fahrenheit), and her parents have a swimming pool in their backyard. Naturally, the boys can’t take their eyes off of her and the girls have booked all of her available sleepovers three months in advance.
She also sits next to me for seven hours a day, so she seemed the likeliest prospect for trying out what was destined to become the least credible experiment of my life—and which hatched itself spontaneously as we were passing our English tests to the front of the room.
“Lee?” I mumbled under my breath, leaning in to her through an improvised mask of pure panic. Why is my voice shaking?? To say she was startled is a matter of understatement; she later told me she never suspected for a minute that I even knew her name.
“I didn’t understand question four,” I lied, looking for all the world as if I were about to cry. “Why couldn’t Hermia love Demetrius?” Lee glanced around the room furtively, then propped up her notebook in front of her so that Mrs. Norwood wouldn’t notice that we were having an illegal conversation behind it.
“Because she fell for Lysander first,” she whispered back, “who sounds like he had better legs anyway.” Oh, wrong, wrong, wrong. Hermia couldn’t love Demetrius because he was a vain and shallow schmuck who needed a codependent neurotic like Helena to make him feel like he had balls—though he certainly wasn’t going to be much of a support system when she wound up in AA because of him. But I didn’t tell that to Lee. Instead, I clapped a fraudulent hand over my mouth and blurted, “Boy, did I screw that one up.” As I was soon to discover, one of the most annoyingly natural things about Lee is that she loves being a big sister—so of course she was now in her element.
“Don’t worry about it,” she assured me confidently, wrinkling her freckle-free nose like she was flipping off both Shakespeare and the entire seventeenth century. “It was only worth five points anyway.”
“Lee and Alejandra,” barked Mrs. Norwood from the front of the room as she slid our papers into a manila folder. “If it’s not something you can share with the rest of the class, button it up.” Lee grinned sheepishly and seemed to take it in stride, but now I really was ready to cry. A reprimand?? ME?? My face turned scarlet and I heard not one more word for the rest of the lesson. Eight years of perfect behavior down the drain because of that idiot Demetrius. What were my parents going to say?
“Alejandra forgot that she was a lady.”
“Again?”
However, my shame lasted only another fifteen minutes—or roughly until I discovered between third and fourth periods that being publicly busted with Lee Meyerhoff is apparently the gateway to the Social Register.
“Alé, where do you get your hair cut?” asked Renee Panitz in front of the mirror in the girls’ room.
“Alé, settle an argument,” begged Soupy Pondfield, almost closing her locker door on Beth Birnbaum. “Doesn’t J Lo look like she’s had liposuction?”
“Love that shirt, girl,” observed Quita Tapper as she snapped an approving finger in my general direction.
Jacqueline, you were the most admired woman in the world. Please tell me that it’s not always so complicated.
INSTANT MESSENGER
AlePerez: Lee, I’ve run out of ways to delete my conscience from my hard drive. I didn’t really need help with question four. I’ve had Hermia’s number since I was 11.
LeeMeyerhoff: Duh. And Demetrius had the morals of a cotton rat. But that isn’t what you wanted to hear. Same thing happened to me in third grade. Nobody wanted to talk to the rich kid either. It also didn’t help that I was the only one in class that Mrs. Strawn liked.
AlePerez: Who’s Mrs. Strawn?
LeeMeyerhoff: Former math teacher and Bride of Satan. Since she left right before the sinkhole opened up on Longwood, we think it was her husband’s way of calling her home. It gets lonely ruling Hell by yourself.
Anyway, the cold shoulder thing lasted until I deliberately misspelled “fluctuate” in front of the whole room and then burst into tears. It was a masterful performance. After that, I had sleepovers coming out of my ears.
AlePerez: It’s not my fault that I met Ben Affleck!
LeeMeyerhoff: Nobody said it was. It’s not my fault that I have a pool in the backyard either.
AlePerez: So what does it take to be prom queen around here—all F’s???
LeeMeyerhoff: Look, Jane Austen wrote the playbook on how girls are supposed to behave. But she’s been dead for 186 years, so we need to update her. And if Judy, Beth, Soupy, and the rest aren’t ready to follow us, then we can do it by ourselves, can’t we? I mean, we may not be as fabulous as Augie Hwong, but we’re not far behind.
AlePerez: Right. We also know what works with boys and what doesn’t. No flirting. Let them come to us.
LeeMeyerhoff: Except when the boy in question has an ass like Anthony Keller does.
AlePerez: Lee, I’m SO not ready to go there yet.
Over today’s indigestible cafeteria lunch of corn fritters doled out by an understandably dour Mrs. Dowdy, we continued our examination of boys from every conceivable angle and so lost track of time that we were yelled at by Mrs. Carsiotis for being late to geography class. Big deal.
Fondly,
Alejandra
AUDITIONS
FRESHMAN FOLLIES
Members of Actors’ Equity and those with agents will be seen first. All others, please take a number.
—A. Hwong, Director
HIGH POINT: “Casey at the Bat.” (And who ever would have suspected it?) Gridley Tarbell plays Casey, Andy Wexler and John Siniff act out the other parts, and Anthony narrates. They don’t know it yet, but Lee gave them their first ad quote: “Utterly charming.”
MOST EFFECTIVE MOMENT: “A straggling few got up to go in deep despair”—which Anthony pronounces “despay-ah.” For some reason he reminded me of Gary Cooper in Sergeant York, and I have no earthly idea why. Lee says it’s because I recognize a certain honest nobility in both performances. No, I don’t. Do I?
MOST ENTERTAINING COMEDY ROUTINE: Watching Augie and Andy not watching each other.
MOST OBVIOUS QUESTION: Why do guys insist on wearing those odious jeans with the rear ends hanging down around their ankles? Do they really think it’s hot? Lee is grateful that Anthony, Gridley, and Andrew wear the regular kind. “See what I mean?” she whispered, staring shamelessly across nine rows of seats. “T.C.’s had a cute butt ever since third grade. It’d be a waste to hide it.”
MOST UNEXPECTED SURPRISES: Ricky Offitt on alto sax, Ruthie Andress on piano, Robin Potts in taps, and Bruce Daniels doing stand-up. (You can always count on the quietest kids to be the funniest. Brucie hasn’t said two words all year, yet halfway through his riff on having to go to the bathroom in the middle of a history test, Lee and I dissolved into clinical hysteria. Especially when he crossed his legs so he wouldn’t pee until he could remember what year the Battle of Saratoga was fought.)
LOW POINT: Stu Merliss on electric guitar singing his own composit
ion: “I Feel Like a Dick.” Augie rejected him on the basis of the title. Stu claimed censorship. Lee suggested “I Feel Like a Dork” instead. All agreed. Now we’re stuck with Stu Merliss on electric guitar.
But most important, Augie seemed back to normal again. Or at least as normal as you can be when you’re Augie, when your life has turned upside down practically overnight, and when you’re not confident enough to share the news with anyone else yet—not even the people who love you most.
“We’ll work out the running order as we go along,” he informed his eager young cast as we sat in a circle onstage. “But I’ll start the ball rolling myself with ‘Maybe This Time,’ we’ll use Tick and the kids to close the first act with ‘Casey,’ Brucie can bring up the second act curtain with his monologue, and all we need is a kick-ass finish. So let’s keep our eyes open, people. I want one more number with the kind of razzle-dazzle that’ll send us to Broadway and West Forty-fourth Street.”
Augie’s going to be fine. And it doesn’t take much brainpower to figure out who’s steering him in the right direction.
INSTANT MESSENGER
AugieHwong: If you had to choose between Humphrey Bogart and Paul Henreid, who would you pick?
AlePerez: Bogart, you idiot. Henreid was a pompous narcissist who deserved a wet dishrag like Helena.
Anthony must have gotten him to watch Casablanca again. And he is handling this better as Ingrid Bergman.
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GEORGE DAVIS WEAVER (also called The Ginger Kid) played for the Chicago White Sox for all 9 years of his major league career, and most people thought he was one of the greatest shortstops who ever lived. But nobody even remembers him anymore. Why? Because 3 weeks before the World Series in 1919, a bunch of gamblers talked 7 of the guys into throwing the games. They even asked Weaver if he wanted in on the scam too, but all Weaver said to them was, “Piss off, you cheeseballs” and played his guts out. It wasn’t good enough to beat the fix, though. The White Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds anyway, even though they might have had the best team anybody ever saw. But the Reds didn’t really win either. The crooks did.