Get a sneak peak at Chapter 1!

Chapter 1

The BS started flying before the last audition was over. And if you think snark, lies, and conspiracy theories are unique to politicians and basement bloggers, you should hear theater people. Masters of the bullshit universe.

“We are nothing if not creative…” I murmured, frowning at my phone.

The theater chat feed was thick with speculation and little actual news. The budget for the play was either the biggest or the crappiest ever. Rehearsals wouldn’t leave time for dinner or would be catered, with free booze, but only for the stars. The director had already picked the main cast. No high schooler had a chance. Then why have us try out? I wondered. All of that stuff could not be true at the same time.

And yet, I had to know. This was the second-most crucial thing I had ever wanted: a shot at the lead role in what had to be the sickest reboot of a period piece since Hamilton. It would go a long way toward making up for not getting the first-most crucial thing I had ever wanted. But waiting to find out might kill me.

I sighed. How long could I hold out? Dubiously, I hit Brisa’s number in my contacts. My best friend was always a font of information, which could either be 100 percent trustworthy or completely made up. It was a crap shoot, but if B. didn’t have answers, at least she and I could not-know together.

We never bothered with greetings. “Can you believe Joss wants rehearsals on Friday nights!” The outrage in Brisa’s voice was at 7 on a scale that I had developed over the years based on tone, intensity, and decibel level. The fifth of six kids in the Flores family, Brisa carried a sense of injustice everywhere she went. Someone else always had the stuff or the satisfaction that she wanted.

“She’s your cousin,” I pointed out. “Can’t you get her to change it?”

Brisa’s pout triangulated off the cell towers. “La vaca has the last word. You don’t mess with the director.”

“Look. What good are family ties if you can’t exploit them?”

Brisa chuckled. “I already did. Don’t tell anyone, but Joss already promised me AD.”

I smiled to myself. It was all falling into place. With Brisa as assistant director, the intel would flow our way. “Did she give you any idea who’s getting Kate?” Kate Hardcastle was the play’s young female lead, the one who would have the most memorable lines and the sexiest costumes, opposite whoever was chosen to play the conflicted young stud—probably some college guy, hopefully not too full of himself. There were just as many drama kings as queens out there.

“Hell no. She’s announcing the cast tomorrow. In person. On campus. We all have to be there.”

“So she can see the shame in our eyes when we don’t make the cut,” I supposed. I still felt as though I had nailed my reading, but the chatter online had opened a chasm of doom beneath my tower of optimism.

“No, so she can enlist the losers in doing the grunt work,” Brisa corrected me. “Joss knows once they’re there, it won’t be easy to wriggle out of backstage assignments.”

Smart. Crap. “Mañana, then,” I said, resigned.

“But, hey,” Brisa put in. “This might be our last Friday night as free women. Let’s go bother the guys.”

A worthy pastime. “You got it,” I agreed. “See you at the place.”

***

There were only two main ways in and out of the new home I shared with Mom in the wooded trailer park: a road off the highway, and a network of hiking trails that connected to a local through-way, one of those bike-and-hike paths developed by the county on an old railway bed. The city park that the path intersected closed its gates at dusk, but the miles-long ribbon of pavement couldn’t be shut down. A viaduct supporting a pedestrian overpass formed a natural shelter that Foster High kids had claimed as a hangout spot. This was my saving grace—I could get out of “the community” without having to beg a ride or take the bus.

I grabbed a headlamp, even though the days were getting longer, and hit the loop trail at the end of our street. This spoked off through the trees and ferns to a rougher path that linked to the paved county corridor about a half-mile away. Then it was just a short jog to the place. We had never given it any other name; the spot hosted a rotating guest list of anyone who showed up on any given day or night. Fridays, though, guaranteed the most company.

A smattering of fists raised for bumps as I ducked under the overpass. There were a few people from Spanish class whose accents were better than mine, a guy who always sat in the same seat at lunch with two of his friends, and the usual knot of Pioneers jocks whose voices were the loudest and who acknowledged anyone outside their group by making public comments about them that discouraged any polite conversation. One of them, a tall, basketball or baseball kind of guy, had been at play try-outs. I remembered him because it was odd for one of his crowd to color outside the lines.

“Hey,” came a soft, male voice, along with a proffered fist, which I tapped as I passed by.

“Zup,” I said, noting once more in the fading light that my neighbor’s eyelashes were longer than any I’d ever seen, on a male or female. With his head of fine, black hair, delicate facial structure, and those luxurious eyelashes, Chris Hamada was arguably more beautiful than either of his two sisters. He drew gazes from men and women, and was probably a shoo-in for a major role onstage. He’d nabbed two leads at Foster High before, once, improbably, as the devil in Damn Yankees. He and I had met on the bus to school from Worden’s Woods, along with the small population of community residents who were past their toddler years and under the age of fifty-five.

“Hey, Carls!” Brisa waved me over to our favorite corner of concrete abutment, and Chris fell in beside me.

“If it isn’t Carlotta Hall Monitor,” one of the jocks announced as I passed by.

“It’s Carlita, cochon,” Brisa retorted, sticking up for me, and we high-fived as the pig epithet sailed over the guy’s head. Spanish was the verbal currency in the Flores household, unlike in mine. If I had to bank on my command of the language, I wouldn’t be able to break a five. Hence the need for Spanish 310.

Brisa smiled at Chris. “Hamad, heard you were good today at try-outs.”

He dipped his head in false humility and said, “Where’d you hear that?”

“Oh, here and there.”

I nodded, knowing that Brisa might blab, but she’d never give away her sources. To have the goods and not use them: that was power.

Brisa leaned in and exchanged eyelash flutters with Chris. “Did you know that it’s gonna be an all–high school cast? Well, it’s almost for sure.”

“What?” he squeaked.

I pressed my lips together. “Come on. Why would Joss do that? It’s a community college production.”

Brisa kept a straight face. “Same reason they invite us to try out in the first place. They don’t have enough theater majors. And there are already too many extracurric options for the amateurs. Who wants to work their ass off for a play when they could be doing musical bowling or dessert crawls?”

“Me,” I answered without thinking, then added, “wait. What’s a dessert crawl?”

Chris cut off a reply with both palms. “Who cares? The odds of us getting cast just went up astronomically.” He paused. “Actually, by a factor of … 9.4.”

Now I didn’t know which of the two were more shocking—Chris, with his photographic recall and ability to estimate crowd numbers and demographics—or Brisa, with her talent for complete poker-faced fabrication. “I call BS, Flores. No way did Joss say it’d be a high school–only cast. There were tons of Foothills students auditioning.” I narrowed my eyes at Brisa, trying to elicit a giggle or confession.

But my friend just raised her chin and murmured, “I’m not saying if she did or she didn’t.”

“But you just did!”

Brisa tugged at the hennaed ends of her long, thick, black-brown hair and then tossed them over her shoulder, never admitting to a thing. She had probably spent more time on her eye makeup today than an entire lifetime’s worth of contemplation of her inconsistencies. Blue-green lid shadow abruptly met inky waterproof eyeliner and mascara in a show of force, directly contrasting with personal boundaries that were more … permeable, I mused. Quite the opposite of my own predictable, rational standards, consistently applied to all situations—unless parental consent was needed for something. Well, parents had to be set up to do the right thing.

Brisa reached out and grabbed the Coke can Chris was holding and took a swig. He totally let her, so she gave it back without a fuss. Then he offered it to me.

I hesitated.

“Vaxxed and no symptoms,” he said, reading my mind, so I took it.

Nearby, a wave of laughter rose from the athletic crowd that had grown so large it spilled out onto the paved trail. A track-and-field girl performed an exaggerated shake, letting her butt cheeks lead the rest of her body around in half circles. One voice boomed above the rest of them: “Amanda Perry climbs to the top of the charts with her hit single, ‘I Want Some Maximus in My Gluteus’!”

Chris half-stifled a laugh and said admiringly, “The dancer’s got some chops.”

Brisa put in, “And the DJ’s not so bad himself, with that honey voice and … honey everything else. Dean Dixon. Doesn’t he do that Tuesday-Thursday lunchtime radio show at school?”

It was the jock who had come to try-outs. Tall, handsome, and a seductive broadcaster’s voice. “I hate him,” I said, and my friends popped eyeballs at me. “I mean, the show’s great. But a guy who has it all and everything comes easy to him?” I just shook my head, never mind that, not so long ago, that could have been said about me. Not my type, I thought stubbornly.

Chris was still watching Dean cut up for his audience. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe just the luck of the draw. Maybe it’s not all roses for the guy.”

“Maybe he cuts wicked farts and can’t help it,” Brisa suggested, also keeping her eyes on his athletic build. Tall enough for basketball, lithe enough to pitch a baseball game, Dean Dixon was the picture of potential. His knee-length, red shorts showed tight calves that flexed and popped as he shifted his weight, and the sleeves of his gray knit shirt were pushed up to emphasize his softball-sized biceps. I would only confess to myself that the aesthetics were top-notch, farts or no farts.

Our talk turned to more speculation about the play, then an outdoor concert that was coming up, and whether there would be a senior skip day this year after every senior got Saturday detention last year. Since we all were juniors, the prospect of the whole senior class being jailed for a day was both not applicable to us and delicious.

After a while, people started to pick up their bikes or drift off to parked cars. We three friends lingered, not wanting to leave, until one of the sporting crowd shouldered into Chris, pretending he hadn’t noticed him. “Sorry, ladies,” he said.

“It’s dude, dude,” Chris retorted, his pale face coloring wildly. B. and I glared daggers at the offender, then said our goodbyes to each other.

“Coming with?” I asked Chris, nodding in the direction of home.

“Sure,” he said in a voice a half-octave lower than normal.

It must be tough to be a beautiful man, I thought.

***

Somehow, tomorrow came. I took some care in dressing, knowing I might be meeting my costar for the first time. A dark-olive shirt set off my green eyes, while my favorite jeans, I thought, added some substance to too-narrow hips and too-skinny legs. I added a little cheek color, but that was it for makeup, and I chose the feather earrings that other women always noticed, to break up the solid colors of my top and pants. After my shower, I had added some curl product to my shoulder-length, brown hair, which I now checked in the mirror in my room. The still-wet curls formed stripey highlights against the drying strands. Perfect.

“I hope you can handle all this, Mr. Wonderful,” I addressed my potential castmate. One thing I did know: the conflicted young stud in the script—“Spider” Marlow, who woos Kate—would not be played by my neighbor. Chris had tried out for the larger but less glamorous role of Tony Lumpkin because it had greater comic opportunities. No, this was to be a blind date, assuming I got the role I felt I was destined to play.

The student-written script, Mistakes of a Night, was a take-off on a melodrama written in 1773, moving that British comedy of manners to present-day America but preserving much of the original, to great effect. The director/playwright had thrust colonial-era problems into today’s world to show just how alike they still were. Some things never changed, I thought, and romance and money were at the top of that list. I had been surprised to see how readable and relatable the doctored script was. It was going to be so much fun. And fun was my watchword—ever since the pandemic had crested, and since my family had been dissected in a decidedly un-fun manner.

I looked for Chris at the bus stop, but he didn’t show. Twenty-five minutes later, the bus dumped me at the edge of the Foothills Community College parking lot. I kicked aside clusters of plastic bottles and candy wrappers to join the intermittent stream of students heading inside one of the buildings. Then I made the long trek kitty-corner to the theater and art center. It was segregated like a poor stepchild from the more serious departments and offices, as though they didn’t want all that frivolous thespian energy to seduce the math majors. The joke was on them, I thought, spying my neighbor out in the hall in front of the double doors. Chris was both a math guy and a comedic actor with great timing. Maybe an actor needed more math than I’d imagined.

I saw him now, and he waved limply at me, pointing at the doors to indicate they were still locked. A few other people we didn’t know milled about, waiting for the same thing we were waiting for. Then a trio of honchos strode toward us.

Brisa’s cousin Joss swung a lanyard of keys, and the crowd parted so she could unlock the entrance to the theater. Behind her followed Brisa, with a sheaf of papers, and a college guy I didn’t know, whose fluid gait hinted at years of dance lessons. His strawberry-blond hair, translucent skin, and lanky build were quite the contrast to the two Latinas; Joss and Brisa both rocked the lower end of the color scale and the higher end of any bell curve.

Chris sidled up to me, and we drifted in through the doors with the motley assortment of Foster High kids and community college theater types. Someone snapped on the rest of the house lights. An aura of expectation surrounded the sea of a couple hundred empty seats, as well as the hopes and dreams of all of us would-be cast members, who Joss motioned up to the front rows. She ascended the black stairs and plopped down on the edge of the stage, while the rest of us took seats or milled around beneath the footlights by school groups—FCCers stage left, Pioneers stage right.

My stomach did that inverted, empty thing it did when I forgot to breathe properly for a long time. I shot a sideways look at Chris. He appeared unperturbed and excited, not desperate and … clenchy, like me. I glanced around more widely, pretending to search for someone I knew but really taking inventory of possible challengers and costars. Why was it so easy to tell the difference between my classmates and the college students? There wasn’t that much of an age gap, after all. No, it was more a sense of place. They belong here, I thought. We’re just visiting.

The appeal had gone out to Foster High English and Speech classes to come try out for the play because the college department’s numbers were down, not having rebounded yet after the return to in-person classes and extracurriculars. But maybe the rumor mill was right, and we’d been invited just to fill the need for set painters and ticket takers. I studied Chris’s expectant face once more. He wasn’t going to like that.

Strawberry must have picked up on the pessimism. He cleared his throat and struck a pose at Joss’s feet, then enunciated, “Friends, Romans … lowly high schoolers! The moment we’ve all been waiting for has arrived. Our supreme ruler, writer, and director, Joss Morales, is about to decree who will be the heroes of our little drama … and who will be its beasts of burden.” The snickers came from the stage-left crowd. The rest of us held our breath.

Joss waved an arm at him. “Dave B., everybody. Likes to distill things to their atomic makeup, but that’s not exactly how things work around here. Yes, I am this production’s supreme ruler.” She grinned. “But, no, we are not otherwise hierarchical; we are a team. Without every single player, the show cannot go on. That means onstage and off. You are all here because we need each other, but more important: our future audience needs you. You will be working for them—not for me, or for Dave here, or for yourselves.”

My abdominal muscles relaxed ever so slightly.

Brisa spoke up. “What about for me? They will work for me, right?” she asked with mock arrogance, while really wanting that to be true.

Joss socked her in the shoulder. “Sí, jefe. I forgot. They do have to answer to you.” She addressed the group again. “My cousin Brisa, amigos. She will be my assistant, meaning she will do everything I don’t want to do and everything that keeps you all pulling together, to pull off—” Her voice rose. “—the greatest show this world has ever seen!”

The crowd buzzed, liking the prediction.

She raised her hands for quiet. “Now. To set the tone, here’s what I’m going for. We take a 250-year-old script, give it a makeover to today, and transport the audience to a place they have never imagined in their wildest dreams. We confound their intellect. We make them laugh. We take their emotions to new heights, creating a sense of yearning, and then we satisfy that yearning.”

“In short,” Dave B. broke in, “we turn a British comedy of manners into a Greek tragedy.”

Joss nodded. “Only with a purely American flavor. We come at it from the roots. We sing the blues.”

My mind scrambled to catch up. I was still stuck back on yearning. To think you could use that for something—something noble, something that only art could generate.

“Okay, let’s give this announcement the drama it deserves.” Joss got to her feet and turned toward the stage wing. “Kavi? Some mood sound and lighting, yeah?”

Moments later, the house lights dimmed and a blue spot found the director at her mark. Synthesizer tones came through the hidden speakers, starting with a low hum and building to a crescendo. Brisa came forward and handed her papers to Joss, who waved at the wings. The music dropped to background level.

“And now, the big reveal: a role for each of you who took the time to come out, try out, or volunteer to get this production off the ground. Please join me onstage when you hear your name. From Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer to Josefina Morales’s Mistakes of a Night … I give you our cast and crew!” Joss pushed her short, choppy, dark hair out of her eyes and checked her roster, then began to read. “Servants…”

She rattled off several names, one a classmate of mine from last year’s math class and the rest unfamiliar. I caught Chris’s eye in the dim light as the suspense grew.

“Kavi?” Joss raised both palms and gave him a two-arm wave. The spot changed to three colors of flashing lights, and the music swelled once more, with a recorded drum roll added. When it subsided, the director read off the main cast: “Tony Lumpkin, played by Chris Hamada….”

I gripped Chris’s arm as he jumped out of his seat. “Way to go!” I said through the applause.

“Miss Constance Neville to be played by—” a college girl who squealed and headed for the riser. “Beau Hastings will be Dave Bolnes!”

“Of course.” I watched the red-headed thespian vault from the floor to the stage without even using the stairs. The guy was clearly a natural and had expected the role.

“Spider Marlow will be portrayed by—” a lithe college guy with soft-looking, longish brown hair and a massive grin. He slapped palms with his friends on the way past.

I could get used to that energy, I thought with anticipation. In the play, Spider was Kate’s suitor. That meant that—

“Our next star, playing Miss Kate Hardcastle, is—”

I tensed, waiting to hear my name.

“Malia Kendrake!”

Malia…? Someone other than Carli Hall. The nervous smile froze on my face as another girl jumped up amid cheers to take her place next to the cute, long-haired guy. My stomach knifed inward, until I let out a forceful breath.

Not me. Every muscle was tight and immobile. Brisa got in. Chris got in. But not me.

The lights and sound fuzzed out as I tried to keep it together and not dash for the exit. “A role for each of you,” Joss had said, meaning some anonymous production crew slot awaited me. B. had been right, it was harder to say no to the fallback position, now that I’d taken a bus across town to get here and everyone knew I didn’t make the cut. Nobody wanted to be seen as a sore loser.

A hand jabbed my elbow. I shook my head and tried to hear over the pounding in my ears. “They want you,” a college girl two seats over called, and I looked up to see Brisa wildly waving me forward.

“Carlita Hall? Is she here?” Joss asked impatiently.

I stumbled over the first stair and had to stick out a hand to keep from cracking my jaw on the edge of the stage. “What am I—who…?”

“Mrs. Dorothy Hardcastle, I presume,” Joss said, glowing at me now, as a few kids gave me pats on the back. “Our elder stateswoman, ladies and gentlemen. Her costar, and our final cast member, will be … as Mr. Cadbury Hardcastle, Dean Dixon!” My popular classmate bounded toward the stage amid guttural shouts from the teammates he’d brought along to witness his glory. My costar.

Oh.

The lights and sound amped up along with calls and claps for the cast, and I gave a good rendition of pleased modesty while my stomach proceeded to digest my heart. I heard Brisa’s and Chris’s celebratory words and Joss saying something about the first time that two high schoolers had snared the leading roles….

Wait. What?

Leading roles? The two old farts in the show? Did I look old? Maybe people just thought I acted old? But Dean wasn’t mature in any way, and they’d cast him as the patriarch. The Hardcastles weren’t even the romantic stars—those were Kate and Spider, and Constance and Beau. The cool, young characters. The sexy ones.

I turned to commiserate with Brisa but instead caught Dean Dixon looking at me with an indecipherable expression. His dark-chocolate eyes showed confusion, his parted lips emitted no sound. Then he shook his head in a satisfied manner and pulled away to accept his friends’ congratulations. He must have gotten something he wanted. But that something sure couldn’t be me.