I waited for the George and Emily on the stage to finish before going out to the lobby, the application in my hand, the Polaroid camera around my neck. Somehow I’d forgotten there would still be so many people waiting to try out for the other parts: the Gibbses and the Webbs. Men and women and children were pacing, silently mouthing the words on the pages they held. I was one of them now. I was about to tell George I was disappointed in him because all he ever thought about was baseball and was no longer the boy I considered to be my friend.
A scant handful of Georges and Emilys sat in the hallway that went back to the stage. Everyone had a chair except for Veronica and the first George, the good one. They were sitting together on the stairs and he was making her laugh, which, I can tell you, was not the hardest thing in the world to do. Her black hair swung down across one flushed cheek, and I realized that we should have swapped our posts two hours ago. I had forgotten because I’d been studying at the school of theatrical auditions, and she had forgotten because she’d been talking to George. You really couldn’t hear the stage from the hallway, which was why she stayed close to the door, propping it open just a little bit with her fat Stephen King novel. Whatever else was going on, Veronica never stopped paying attention to the stage.
When she looked up and saw me there with the camera she raised one magnificent eyebrow. Veronica’s eyebrows were thick and black and she tweezed them into delicate submission. She could get more information across with an eyebrow than other people could with a microphone. She knew I was going to read for Emily, and that I would get the part. I used to say Veronica could never play poker because her thoughts passed across her forehead like a tickertape. She realized that she could have read for Emily, and then she could have been the one to come to rehearsals with this guy. They could have practiced their lines in his car, and raised their clasped hands above their heads at the end of every performance, bowing one more time before the curtain came down. But Veronica almost never got to go out at night because her mother was a nurse who worked the second shift and her stepfather was long gone and she had to look after her brothers. We both had two brothers, yet another bond between us, though mine were much older and hers, technically half brothers, were little kids. If it hadn’t been for those brothers, Veronica would have made a truly great Emily.
“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.