Catlike, Carla kept her eyes on Andy, waiting for him to answer.
Andy had gone from uneasiness to a kind of mild terror. You could practically hear his palms sweating. He glanced at me, and then turned back to Carla.
“She went to the office after her last class,” said Andy. He twitched, trying to decide whether or not he could safely move away now.
He couldn’t.
“But school ended half an hour ago.” Carla tilted her head to one side. “It isn’t like Mrs Baggoli to be late for rehearsals. Especially not the first one.”
Andy stared back at her, looking as if he might implode. “Well … uh…” he grunted.
“She had some Xeroxing she had to do,” I went on, warming to my story. “For us. She has a last-minute change to the script.”
Andy shifted from one foot to the other. “She’s Xeroxing,” he informed Carla. “You know, a last-minute change to the script.”
The delicate, sculpted nostrils twitched.
“What changes? I discussed the revisions with her during lunch period and she didn’t say anything about more changes.”
Andy gulped under the interrogation-strength beam of Carla’s gaze.
“Oh.” He looked at me out of the corners of his eyes. By now everyone else was looking at me, too.
I truly believe that if you have a good, brave heart the forces of the universe will help you if they can. Even though the forces of the universe had been unable to keep me out of a world that included Carla Santini, they were able to do something else. They inspired me.
“She only thought of it last night,” I said. “But she believes it could revitalize the entire play.”
Andy started to relax a little.
“It was sudden,” he said. “But it’s big.”
“Oh, really?” drawled Carla. “And just what is this big idea?”
I dropped my cape from my shoulders and leaned back in my seat.
“She’s writing out Mrs Higgins,” I said with a smile.
Totally forgetting that I no longer existed, Carla turned to me, her face full of scorn. “Oh, hahaha.”
I grinned. I’d known I could make her talk to me.
Not that I actually heard her, of course. Everyone else was laughing too loudly.
What with starting to learn the new script and being distracted because Ella and I were deep in Siberia, I hadn’t yet addressed the problem of convincing my mother to let me go to New York to see Sidartha. I was so cheered by my victory in the skirmish with Carla that afternoon, however, that I decided to launch my campaign that very night.
I know my mother; she can be handled, but it usually takes some time and I couldn’t afford to blow it because I’d waited too long to start on her. Now it was even more important that Ella and I get to the concert than it would have been normally; this had grown beyond a personal desire and become a righteous cause. I couldn’t let Carla humiliate and ridicule us; I had to go to that party and laugh in her face. I owed it to the rest of the school.
It may seem naïve, but I didn’t really think that persuading my mother was going to be this incredibly ginormous problem. After all, she’d already more or less said maybe. Well, what she’d actually said was, “I’ll think about it.” But I am destined to be a great actor. What’s another thing that separates a great actor from an average one? The ability to
I took the job of convincing my mother to let me go to the concert as a professional challenge. I was confident that once Karen Kapok had given her permission, the Gerards, with their new, guilty understanding of all she’d suffered, would let Ella go, too.
“Is there something wrong with the spaghetti?” asked my mother.
She’d finally noticed. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been sitting there for at least fifteen minutes, languidly pushing my food around my plate and (as usual) no one had paid me the tiniest bit of attention. The twins (also as usual) had been talking non-stop since we sat down, and whenever they paused for air or to stuff something in their mouths my mother took up the slack, yapping on about earth-shattering things like the phone bill and the noise in the car, totally ignoring my pale, sad, silent visage on the other side of the table.
I gave my mother a wan smile.
“No,” I said softly. “No, there’s nothing wrong with the spaghetti.” I gave her another wan smile. “I guess I’m just not very hungry.” I pushed my plate away. “I guess I’m just in too much pain.”
“Cramps?” asked my mother.
It seemed to me that I was always gaping at my mother in horror lately.
“Mommmm…” I moaned. Ella’s mother would never discuss cramps at the table in front of everybody, even though the only people usually at the Gerard’s dinner table are she and Ella. Ella learned about sex and stuff like that from a book her parents gave her. It was made up of questions and answers, so she didn’t have to talk about it with her mother at all.
“I’m in pain, too,” said Pam. She opened her mouth as wide as she could and shoved her face in mine. “See?” she demanded. “My tooth’s coming out.”
All I could see was half-chewed spaghetti. It was enough to make you gag.
My mother didn’t notice that one of her children was making a revolting spectacle of herself any more than she’d noticed my haunted air.
She reached for the salad. “Well?” she persisted. “There’s paracetamol in the bathroom if you need it.”
“It’s not that kind of pain,” I said flatly.
“What kind of pain is it?” asked Paula.
I smiled at her kindly. Even though Pam and Paula are identical twins, Paula sometimes shows signs of being an intelligent life form.
“I think you’re too little to understand,” I gently explained. “It’s a pain of the heart.”
Paula sucked a strand of spaghetti into her mouth. “You mean like indigestion?” And at other times, the closest Paula gets to an intelligent life form is sitting next to me.
“No,” I said. “Not like indigestion. Like having your heart ripped from your body and thrown on to a pile of rusting tin cans. Like having a red-hot corkscrew twisted into your soul. Like having everything you ever loved or dreamed of rolled over by tanks driven by soldiers who are laughing and singing songs.”
Paula looked at my mother. “What’s she talking about?”
My mother shrugged. “You’ve got me.” She helped herself to garlic bread.
“Maybe it’s a bad-hair day,” suggested Pam.
The twins thought this was incredibly funny. Half-chewed spaghetti and bread flew across the table.
“Girls,” said my mother, but she was looking at me. “What happened?” she asked. “Are you having some trouble at school?”
“School?” I covered my heart with my hands as though I were trying to keep it from being ripped from my body yet again. “How can you talk about something as trivial as school at a time like this?” Hot, bitter tears sprang to my eyes. “Can’t you see that my whole world has been pitched into darkness? Can’t you see that I’ve lost any reason to live?”
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” asked my mother.
“That’s what I mean about this family,” I wailed. “Something like this can occur, and you don’t even know about it.”
“Well, maybe if you told us,” said Paula.
I pushed back my chair. “Do you all live in a cave or something?” I shrieked. “Am I being raised by wolves?
