SEVEN
Berry waited for a full week of the white shirt to ask me about it.
To be fair, it was probably starting to look weird. Because it was the same shirt and pants every day for eight consecutive school days. Or maybe that’s just weird to me.
Behind the scenes, BTW, I had to wash the shirt every night because I got a stain on it every day, everything from strawberry ice cream to Monty’s paw prints to the orange glow that was constantly creeping around the collar from my hair. Millie took advantage by making sure I did all of the laundry every night when I washed my shirt.
“I mean,” she noted, plonking the basket of to-be-washed on my floor, “you are wearing my T-shirt. Again.”
I did get a sense that Millie got that me wearing the T-shirt and apologizing to Tanner—which somehow everyone knew about, including Millie—was connected. Lucy may have gotten it, too, but it was hard to say because she was buried under the load of her VP duties.
For every school night that I wore the shirt, Millie also, magically, let me pick what we had for dinner. Which, you’re welcome, everyone: tacos, lasagna, and spaghetti, and repeat.
This didn’t help with stains on my shirt, but whatever.
By the way, on the first weekend of my white-shirt spree I wore only sequins. Like as a cleanse. Danny also suggested I wear only orange to combat the white.
I agreed.
So yes, on day seven of the White Shirt Experiment, Berry found me on the way into class and, first pinning her lips together, inquired.
“So. Like. Not to intrude, but I’m just guessing this, like, whole look you’re doing. . .I mean it’s cool! Right? It’s just, like I’m assuming, from the other stuff you wore before, this is not your standard clothing choice? I mean, I haven’t really known you that long but it’s pretty clear you’re an overdresser at heart.”
“Overdresser.” I nodded, tugging up my jeans. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it.”
As we plonked down in our seats, I turned to Berry. “I mean, you wear the same thing every day.”
“Yeah.” Berry looked down at her coveralls, which today were splattered with blue paint. “I mean, I like these coveralls and I don’t like anything else. I have like eight of them.”
“They’re cool.”
Berry reached up and tweaked her ponytail. She did a little side-to-side dance in her chair. Something I noticed she did when she was thinking. “Do you like your outfit, this outfit?”
I pulled out my books for class, noting the students piling in. “No,” I admitted quietly. “I’m trying something. I’m blending in,” I added. “Temporarily.”
“Huh.” Berry nodded. “Blend ing.”
“I just need to fly under the radar for a bit,” I said as Mrs. Sherman strode in through the door with a giant mug of coffee.
Berry looked at the front of the class. “I hope it works.”
She didn’t sound super hopeful.
And to be honest, I wasn’t super clear if the shirt was working. The fourth day I wore boring clothes (the same boring clothes), I got a brisk nod from Principal Lynde when I passed her in the hallway and nothing else.
I was even covering my hair with a hat that day. And nothing.
Tanner’s soccer training or whatever you called it seemed to be picking up for “the big game” (was there one of those every week?), which I knew because he talked about it loudly every day, so possibly I wasn’t his main concern.
So maybe, I was kind of riding the fitting-in train. . .ish.
And then. . .
Like right after Berry asked me about the shirt, I walked to English. And spotted. . .it. A piece of green construction paper with a printed sheet with lines on it. And at the top it said AUDITIONS.
My heart softly exploded.
“Auditions,” I croaked, like the word jumped out of my throat.
Berry smiled. “School play.”
“Right.” I could hardly breathe.
“Yeah, I was actually gonna ask you about that the other day,” Berry said as we took our seats. “It seemed like something that would be up your alley. I mean, among the many things that are.”
Up my alley? How about my whole street system? Which is not to say that people who are into music overall are into theater. Being an artist doesn’t mean you have to be into all forms of art. And in fact, the one thing I didn’t spend a lot of time on was, like, paintings and stuff. I’m into theater because when I was little, it was the first piece of magic I ever got to see. Millie and Lucy took me to see a production of Cinderella at this little playhouse. I guess it was in Anchorage, where we were living at the time.
And, of course, to be clear, my moms spent like let’s say a solid thirty minutes before and after Cinderella talking to me about why this model of heteronormativity, this idea of a princess needing to be saved by a prince who somehow loves her even if he’s never met her or only met her once at one dance, is problematic.
“Not that we don’t want you to enjoy the play! Or pursue your own concepts of love as they make sense to you,” Lucy had added as she took my hand and gave our tickets to the older woman at the front of the theater.
“But if you realize that the whole Cinderella story is a story and kind of a bullshit story, I don’t think that hurts,” Millie had concluded.
Turns out, I loved all of it. I loved the velvety seats, the feeling of sitting with all the people kind of squished but not, the moment when the lights came down and then the stage lit up with a whole other world.
Also my parents had nothing to worry about, since all I was really into was the singing turtle this particular production of Cinderella had added for a bit of levity. I didn’t like the Cinderella songs and I thought the prince was rude and not a good dancer.
But still. I loved the theater. I begged to go back the next day I loved it so much.
I memorized the turtle song and sang it during breakfast for a month.
Theater is magic and bright lights and people being big and bold and entertaining.
Truly what’s not to love?
“What kind of plays does Greenville High usually do?” I asked with entirely faux chill.
“Mostly we do Our Town,” Berry said, flipping through her textbook.
“Our Town’s not so bad.”
“It’s like ancient history and everyone in the town has seen it like a million times.” Berry sighed. “But yeah, it’s okay.”
“It has a lot of parts,” I said.
“I guess. Mr. Davidson took over like two years ago, and I know he’s kind of dying to mix it up. But you know, Greenville. There was a rumor he was going to do Grease a few years ago and the soccer moms lost their minds. And then Lynde stepped in and they did Sound of Music instead.”
“Davidson wants to do Grea se?!”
I was freaking out.
“All right.” Mr. Davidson pivoted and gave his vest of the day, which was a navy-blue corduroy number, a sharp tug. “Let’s get this poetry started.”
Only I laughed.
On my way out of class, I very very casually paused to take a closer look at the audition list. There were four names on the list already, at the very top, Gilly Henderson and Sarah Pye, with Tanner’s and John’s names written in the same pen and handwriting underneath.
Beside me, Berry peeked at the list, unsurprised. “Yeah. It used to be Mark Spencer, who’s Tanner’s cousin, and his girlfriend, Katie, were the leads every year, but they graduated last year. They were the town actors. And they were both Forevers.”
I turned and started speed-walking away from the tempting list. Berry followed.
“So it’s a question of who’s gonna take up the torch?” I asked.
“I’m guessing Sarah’s thinking she’s getting Katie’s spot. Like, all her social media profile photos are headshots she got at the mall.”
“Huh.”
“Unless.” Berry stopped and grabbed my arm, suddenly glowing. “Would you sign up?”
A few feet behind us, Gilly and Sarah stood in the doorway to English class. Noticing me. Looking at me.
But possibly, I thought, because of the power of the white shirt, they turned and walked away.
School. Play.
The rest of the day, all I could think of was that sign-up sheet. What play would Davidson pick? Most high school teachers were still solidly in the Shakespearean column but a person with his taste in jumpers and a thing for Grease could possibly be down with Mamma Mia!
A girl could dream.
Mamma Mia! did require a pretty big cast of singers. What about Guys and Dolls? Mmmm. Also a big cast. Also you need some solid voices. Guys and Dolls is a classic high school musical, which, while sexist, also contains winner numbers like “Fugue for Tinhorns” and “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.”
“Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” was vibing pretty hard with me, for obvious reasons. Was I going to rock the boat I had literally just committed to not rocking with a week of normalcy? Although, clearly, if I was taking my plan of normalcy forward, I was going to need more than one white shirt.
Signing up for the auditions was not “weird,” but given my short but potent history with Greenville High and its higher-ups, it was clear it could be. . .a problem. If I was going to get up on the stage, it was going to get attention. It was going to be a thing.
Because that’s theater. The nature of theater is that it is a t hing.
But already in my head I was putting together a medley of musical numbers, maybe something from Waiting for Guffman and then a theatrical monologue? Tony Kusher’s untouchable masterpiece, Angels in America? I had plenty of time to ruminate on this because the next period we had Gym and we all had to play soccer.
Berry was in the goalie net because Berry can really play soccer.
When she walks out of the locker room, she’s a warrior. Like usually she seemed reserved and thoughtful. Like graceful but not like aerobic? But once she was in her gym uniform, she got this stance, this like vaguely aggressive posture. It’s like there’s, like, killer robot beams coming out of her eyes. Beams that kill soccer balls.
Not because she didn’t look like someone who could, but because it hadn’t come up, at first I was surprised to find out she was kind of a jock at heart. “Wait. You like soccer?”
“Sure,” Berry noted, adjusting her green sweatband, on the field, “I destroy in soccer.”
“Then. . .Wait. Then why don’t you play on the team?” I asked.
Berry rolled her eyes. Coach Harras tweeted in our direction, mostly I think because that was her only mode of communicating.
TWE EEET!
“Does that tweet mean we start playing?” I asked. “Or is it just an angry whistle?”
“We start playing,” Berry said, jogging in place. “And you should be in the play.”
“If I should be in the play, then maybe you should be on the soccer team,” I said, walking to my spot on the field.
“Forevers only,” Berry told me as she backward-jogged.
“So the play isn’t Forevers only?” I called back. It seemed like only Forevers had signed up. So far.
TWE EEET!
“It’s different.” Berry took her place in goal.
I stepped out to what felt like a peaceful and easily avoided corner of the soccer field.
If I was going to audition for the school play—not saying I would—I could also audition with a number from a new piece I’d been working on set to Olivia Newton-John’s disco hit “Xanadu” (featuring ELO).
Olivia Newton-John. Australian actor and singer. Mostly popular in the seventies and eighties. A polarizing figure? For some nerds, yes. I mean, she played a teenager in the hit movie Grease (1978), Davidson’s fave, when she was twenty-nine years old. And yet somehow audience viewers completely accepted her as teen Sandy (the character she played). Maybe because she was appearing alongside actor Stockard Channing, who played the troubled teen, Rizzo, and Stockard was thirty-three years old at the time (and she won a People’s Choice for that role).
Technically movie trivia is not my thing, but it was my friend Danny’s thing, and this was one of his favorite movie facts.
Maybe, I thought, if you play your part with heart and panache, that’s what matters.
Did Olivia Newton-John worry what people would think about her playing a teenager, or did she just do her best to act like a teenager? Although, let’s say it, she didn’t look like a teenager, but she could sin g!
I can also sing, by the way, something that would come up in my audition, if I auditioned. Oh, I thought, I could do a medley of “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” and the Grease finale, “You’re the One That I Want.” Both great songs.
But “You’re the One That I Want” is a duet between Travolta and Newton-John.
Who would I duet with?
After the game, which was a shutout for our team because, as Berry said, nothing got past her in the goal, I was walking back to the locker room when suddenly Gilly jogged up beside me. She ran in long strides that went with her legs that seemed to be as long as my entire body. Given that most of what I had seen of Gilly up until that point was a person who was leaning or keeping her head down next to her horrible friends, it was strange to see her. . .alone.
Up close, Gilly was tall and thin with a big head, like a balloon on a string. She had large blue eyes and long blond hair that whipped around in the wind like it was its own creature. Her arms were all tanned except for a set of white stripes on her wrists. She looked like someone who spent a lot of time in the sun.
She scooped her hair up into one hand. “Hey. . .Uh. Anne!”
Admittedly I was kind of shocked she knew my name. Also Gilly has kind of a nice voice. I couldn’t think who it reminded me of.
“Yeah?”
“So.” Gilly looked around. “Were you going to sign up for auditions? For the play? Earlier?”
“Oh.” I felt my face flush. “I mean, I don’t know. Probably not.”
“I was thinking”—Gilly’s gaze wandered down the field—“it’s probably something you know about? You’ve lived in bigger cities and you would have something to bring to a Greenville production, right? I mean, Mr. Davidson is great, but it could be interesting to have your. . .perspective.”
I turned to see if Sarah or Tanner was anywhere near, feeling suddenly exposed. Like I was standing on top of a hill.
“My perspective?”
Because, like, what else did I want to hear from someone like right at that moment? (Who doesn’t want someone to care about their perspective?)
“Yeah.” A small smile crept over Gilly’s face, revealing what looked like a chipped front tooth. She covered her mouth with her hand.
Okay, like, hello, obviously this was exactly what I wanted to hear. And maybe it was nice to hear it from Gilly, who had a nice smile, but like, maybe they knew I would think it was nice? Or maybe Gilly was just being nice? I mean this was my first time talking to her. Maybe she was like the mediator, and this was her, like, reaching out. Like, “Hey, Anne just wore this really ugly plain shirt for us for a week, let’s give her a break.”
Right? That was possible? Right?
Or was it so possible that it was clearly not possible?
“Okay, well, I’ll think about it.”
“Great.” She hopped forward. “I mean, I think you should sign up. If that means anything.”
Her hair seemed to leap into the air as she ran off into the school.
I found Berry in the locker room looking sweaty and triumphant. “Hey!”
“HEY,” I cheered, offering a high five, which she accepted. “You had a shutdown!”
“Shutout,” Berry clarified. “Yes I did.”
“Maybe you should try out for soccer,” I added, speed-undressing and -dressing. “I mean, aren’t you as good as the Forevers or the locals or whatever?”
Berry nodded, looking suddenly more like her chill self. “When I was little, I played on the team. For like a minute.”
“And?”
“And it wasn’t very fun.” Berry shook her hair out (an act that practically came with a sound effect, she had so much hair). “It’s, like, they want you to be good, but they don’t want you to be as good as their kids, or if you are, they want you to play like exactly how they want, but no matter what, you’re not them.”
Suddenly I could just see little Berry in her adorable soccer uniform, like, sitting alone with her soccer balls and her giant water bottle.
“If you lose, they freak out so bad. Like, someone yelled at my mom once in a grocery store when we lost a game and I was like ten?”
“So, then. If all THAT sucked, why do you think I should do the play? Don’t people care about theater here?”
“Yes and no. The play is different. It’s not their lifeblood. Like, they care if it’s pornography or, like, too gay, but they don’t live and die by it.” Berry pulled on her boot. “Which is why you could still do it and be, you know, blending. Maybe? A little. Plus, mostly, I think you’d be really good.”
“Hmm.” I pulled on my white shirt which was, let’s say, kind of a mess. How did I get red pen on a shirt when I didn’t even own a red pen?
Berry looked up from tying her laces. “What did Gilly want?”
“Gilly,” I said, throwing on my not white but very plain sweatshirt, “also thinks I should sign up.”
I peeked my face out of my sweatshirt in time to catch Berry picking her jaw up off the floor.
“Really?”
I pulled my head out of my shirt. “What?”
“Oh, I just—” Berry’s eyes searched for something to look at that wasn’t me.
“What? Say it.”
“I mean she’s pretty tight with Sarah and Tanner and John. You know, she’s a Forever.”
I sank down to the bench. “Right.”
Berry did a little wiggle. She was thinking again.
“Look,” she said. “Okay. I don’t trust Gilly. Okay. But. I mean, if YOU really want to do the play, you know, you should. And Mr. Davidson is cool. And. . .yeah. Do it, like, because you want to.”
My brain felt like a ball pit at a playground. “Why don’t you trust Gilly?”
Berry shrugged. “It’s a long story. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try out for the play.”
Millie says sometimes when things feel like too much you should try and find the one thing you’re sure of.
That one thing was this, if I audition, I would be amazing.
Like, in two weeks at Greenville, that was what I knew; that I could kick ass in an audition, even if I didn’t get it.
“Can we go now?” I asked, standing. “And sign up?”
“Totally.” Berry sprang up. She glanced at her watch. “If we run, we can make it to the sign-up sheet before Math.”
So we ran, sprinting past classrooms, slowing briefly past Lynde’s office and my mom’s office, then picking up speed. Berry’s boots clomped on the tile as we rounded the corner to what I was pretty sure was my destiny.
I slid a little, rounding the corner to the hall by homeroom, and spotted the sheet, which was still there, taped up on the wall by Mr. Davidson’s classroom. Berry, who is fast like the wind, picked up speed and got to the list before I did. She looked triumphant for a half second, before her eye caught the names on the list, and then her face fell. In what felt like slow motion, she stepped toward me, hands out, eyes big, pools of worry.
She caught my shoulder with her hand. “Uh, change of plan.”
“Hey!” I laughed. “What’s wrong?”
A nervous laugh escaped her lips. “Um. I forgot. I heard this weird rumor Davidson was thinking of doing some modernized musical based on Jerry Maguire, so maybe this is a good year to skip theater?”
“What’s Jerry Magu ire?”
Berry dropped her hands, “You know how many albums Donna Summer recorded, but you don’t know the movie Jerry Magu ir e?”
“They’re totally different things.”
Berry was shifting her weight from foot to foot, bobbing her head back and forth, so I couldn’t see the list.
“Berry. What are you doing? We’re going to miss Math!” I moved my head to see past her. “What is going on?”
“Fine.” Berry’s face crumpled, and she stepped out from in front of the list.
So I could see.
It was full.
Sarah, Gilly, and Tanner’s names were still there. And a few other kids. And then the rest of the twenty spots were. . .
. . . other names.
“ ‘Debbie McDyke,’ ” I read aloud, “ ‘Harry Homo. Lucy Slut.’ ”
“Fuck them.” Berry put her hand on my arm.
“ ‘Ferris Faggot. Mabel Mustache.’ ”
At the very bottom of the list, in bright red letters, someone had just written BYE BYE, ANNE! GO HOME! My heart hammered in my chest.
“Did you know they would do this?” I tried to keep my voice from cracking.
“When you said the Gilly thing I was worried that something was going on, but also I hate Gilly so that’s bias, so I wasn’t sure?” Berry looked panicked. “I mean, I thought, maybe they would give you shit somehow but—”
“Need a pen?”
Tanner, Gilly, Sarah, and John all stood in the hallway. Sarah waggled a pink marker in between her thumb and forefinger. She must have busted out of Gym class. She was still in her uniform.
Had they filled out the sheet before Gym? Did they get Gilly to talk to me to stall?
“Dang. Looks like maybe that sign-up sheet is full.” Tanner craned his head to see, an exaggerated frown twisting the bottom of his face.
“Can we just go?” Gilly whispered.
Sarah ignored her. “Too bad. I mean, I heard Mr. Davidson was thinking of doing Miss Saigon. Which like. So perfect, right? I mean, since we have an actual Saigon now.”
“You know it, Anne?” Tanner asked, nonchalant. “Missss Sai gon?”
“I’m Japanese,” I growled. “Saigon is Vietnamese.”
“Same same?” Tanner chimed.
The next thing I knew I was clawing the list off the wall, storming over to them, shouting. “FUCK YOU AND YOUR FUCKING SCHOOL!” I tossed the crumpled paper and it hit Gilly in the face.
She batted the paper away, clearly stunned. “Screw you, Carrots,” she snapped.
“Carrots?” I sneered, stepping up close. “That’s what you got? Carrots?”
Gilly looked stunned. Maybe even upset? But I didn’t care. I sprinted away, with Berry on my heels.
“KUNG FU PANDA!” Sarah yelled after me. “JACKIE CHAN!”
“That’s Chinese,” I yelled back as I fled down the hall, the lockers blurring into a streak of forest green.
I heard a door open behind me and a bellow, “WHAT’S GOING ON?”
By then I was bounding down the stairs two at a time. I spent Math in the bathroom with Berry, who crept in after me and perched on the floor a few feet away from where I sat, sprawled under the sink. What better musical accompaniment for feeling like crap than the leaky sound of a school bathroom sink dripping?
Berry spent the first several minutes of our silence looking at me, then looking away. I spent the first several minutes of our silence thinking about how ignorant racism is. Miss Saigon? Like what high school kid even knows Miss Saigon? That’s, like, nineties racism. But that’s the thing with racism. It’s so retro, yet so now. So entirely uninformed and uneducated and yet it feels like its scientifically designed to turn you into nothing.
Finally Berry got up onto her knees. “Disco?”
“Now? Like dancing?” I grumbled. “Not really in the mood.”
“I just thought if we played something.” Berry drummed her fingers on her knees. She had pink paint on her fingertips. “You know it makes you feel better. Music.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. Pressed the power button. Held it up for Berry to see. “Out of juice.”
Berry pulled her phone out of her pocket. Frowned. “Yeah, me too.”
“So,” I said, then went back to feeling both nothing and so overwhelmingly sad I might melt.
“Okay.”
I looked over. Berry had closed her eyes. As I stared, she opened her lips and, after a deep breath, let out the tiniest but heart-fullest tune.. . .
ABBA.
ABBA in the high school bathroom.
“Super Trouper.”
Berry opened one eye, trained it on me as she started in on the chorus. She even sang the piano parts.
I sniffed.
We got up off the floor and danced around the bathroom while we sang. I did a little jig and a few spins. Berry did this very classic step-to-the-left, step-to-the-right dance that was just adorable. For just a few minutes the world was sherbet stained and hopeful, and it was just me and Berry and the feeling music gives you when it fills your lungs.
Joy.
“I think you were right,” Berry said, when, exhausted and out of breath, I plopped back down on the floor.
“About what specifically?”
“About why you should audition,” Berry said, giving a very small wiggle.
“So they have another reason to come for me?”
“Maybe they don’t need another reason, maybe there’s nothing you can do about them coming for you and it has nothing to do with anything you’re actually doing.” Berry sighed. “I mean, in my experience, I can keep it down but they’ll always have something to say. But maybe you have something to say, too.”
“I mean, I definitely always have something to say. Like so much. To say.”
Berry grabbed her stuff. “Plus I think we should go to the next class so they don’t tell your mom you’re skipping school to sing ABBA songs.”
“Good call.”
After school, I watched Jerry Maguire, even though Berry told me later that it really is a terrible movie and she picked it because it was the first horrible basis for a musical that she could think of. Because every movie with Tom Cruise would make a terrible musical.
I actually think you could make Mission: Impossible into a musical if you wanted to.
Speaking of Mission: Impossible, was it worse that I believed Gilly when she pulled a high-school-prank-101 on me on the soccer field, or that Gilly thought I was a person who both deserved that and would fall for it?
Plus she called me Car rots?
Maybe it wasn’t even Gilly’s idea. She was kind of an. . .enigma. I ate three bowls of popcorn trying to decide which was worse, them underestimating me, or not caring about me. And decided both options sucked equally.
That night Lucy came home for dinner looking like I felt: like a dishrag that needs to be washed, but people keep using it because it’s there.
“How was today?” she asked. “Little better?”
“Sure,” I said, because it was weirdly true.
Millie carried the pot roast over to the table and took a moment to look over my shirt. “You were not built to wear white, kid,” she said, handing me a napkin.
“Don’t worry, it won’t happen again,” I said. “Me and this T-shirt are breaking up.”
“Wash it before you give it back.”
That night I just carried Monty on her walk, depositing her by the bushes she seemed inclined to do her business on. Halfway home it started to rain. Like someone in Greenville saw how far away Monty and I were from home and they decided to just turn on the tap.
And it seemed a fitting end to the day.
I mean, yes, I knew I could sing my butt off and kick ass at the audition, and maybe Greenville suspected this and that was why they were all being jerks. But it sucked to have to go to school with people who were being jerks in order to take the stage and to have to prove to them that they were all wrong jerks.
“It’s a rock and a hard place, Monty,” I moaned.
Monty howled in agreement and I carried her wet dog body home.