“No, don’t!”
She laughs at my panic. “I’m just teasing. I’m glad he did it.” She glances up. “What’s that sound?”
“Lunch bell,” Vanessa says. “Let’s go.”
“Let me just change my shoes.” As she slips off her sneakers and puts on some flip-flops, Julia glances at me. “Oh, wait . . . can you eat there?”
“Yeah, I have a meal card.” As we walk down the stairs and out the building, I’m feeling very optimistic about this summer for the first time since Mom committed me to coming here. I already have people to hang out with, and even more important . . .
Alex Braverman is here. And I’m about to see him.
As we cross the courtyard, I pull out my hair elastic and shake my hair so it falls around my face, then rake my fingers through the waves.
Alex Braverman is here. And I’m about to see him. A ponytail isn’t going to cut it.
scene three
I follow Julia and Vanessa into the dining hall, a large open room with a snaking buffet line at one end, a salad bar in the middle, and about a dozen large round tables filling up the rest of the space.
We get in line together. I grab a slice of pizza and a brownie; Vanessa grabs a slice of pizza and a dish of vanilla pudding; Julia doesn’t grab anything until we reach the salad bar, and then she piles lettuce on her plate and douses it with balsamic vinegar.
We get drinks, then look around for a place to sit. “This way,” Julia says, and leads us over to a table.
She drops her tray down in front of an empty chair that’s next to an extremely good-looking guy. She says to him, “You remember Franny? She went to our middle school.”
He smiles up at me. “Hey, Franny! Nice to see you again.”
“Hey, Alex,” I say. Even if I hadn’t recognized him—which I had—I would have figured out pretty quickly that he was Julia’s brother: they have the same straight nose, same unusually light blue eyes, same thick dark hair. They’re beautiful specimens, both of them, a persuasive argument for genetic engineering.
“Can you believe it?” Julia says, plopping down on the seat next to him. “I’m so relieved to actually know someone already. I was freaking out all yesterday about being with strangers,” she tells me and Vanessa.
“She really was,” Alex says. “But she freaks out easily.”
“True. And now I know Vanessa, too. She’s my roommate and she’s from New York and she’s way cooler than we are.”
“Way cooler than you’ll ever be,” Vanessa adds with a laugh. We both sit down at the table. “Who are you?” she asks the thin, brown-eyed guy on Alex’s other side.
“Lawrence.” He squints at me. “You look really familiar.”
“Probably because I knocked into you at the entrance to the dorm half an hour ago,” I say. “Sorry about that.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, that’s it. Totally my fault.”
“Nope, mine.” We grin at each other.
“You were Lady Larken!” Alex says suddenly.
“I was?” Lawrence says with mock surprise.
“No, I was,” I say. “In Once Upon a Mattress.”
“I totally remember you,” Alex says.
“You acted like you already did!”
“I knew you looked familiar. But it just clicked: You were Lady Larken, and you wore a big pouffy dress. And you sang a couple of songs. You have a great voice.”
“Thanks, but I don’t really—I’m just good at faking it.”
“And we had a class together, right?”
“Chemistry.”
“Ms. Adanasio.”
“Except she disappeared three-quarters of the way through the year, remember? And they hired that other guy to take her place?”
“Oh, right,” he says. “The guy who never showered.”
“I wonder if we’ll get to do any singing in the shows here,” Vanessa says. “I mean, I know it’s not specifically musical theater, but there’ll be some singing, right?”
The others start discussing that, which leaves me out of the conversation, so I pick at my slice of pizza without much interest. Hunger fled at the sight of Alex Braverman. Stomachs are like that—there isn’t room for both swooning-on-the-inside and digesting.
A guy and a girl approach our table. They obviously know each other already, since their arms are entwined.
“Can we sit here?” asks the girl.
Everyone at our table nods frantically, not just to be friendly but also because the two newcomers are like comically good-looking. As they sit down and introduce themselves—Isabella Zevallos, Harry Cartwright—the rest of us stare at them unabashedly.
Harry’s got gray-green eyes and thick dark blond hair that he runs his fingers through impatiently whenever it falls forward into his eyes, which it keeps doing, because, as far as I can tell, it’s been cut to do just that. His features aren’t perfect—his nose is a little crooked, like maybe it’s been broken, and his eyes are almost too far apart and his lips are so full they’re verging on feminine—but somehow it all kind of works together. When our eyes accidentally meet at one point, I quickly glance away, embarrassed to be caught studying him so openly, but then I realize that every other girl at the table is doing the same thing, except for Isabella, who’s watching the rest of us with amusement and leaning her head in toward Harry’s to exchange a whisper.
So they’re definitely a couple.
No wonder: they belong together. Isabella is so beautiful that if she’s even a halfway decent actress, she’ll be a star one day. The girl is gorgeous, but not in the way that the prettiest girl at my high school is gorgeous (long blond hair, long blond legs, long blond personality)—no, Isabella looks more like an adult than a teenager. She has elegantly angular cheekbones and slightly tilted dark eyes that swiftly examine all of us from under a thick fringe of eyelash. Even her hairstyle is grown-up: it’s pinned in a narrow coil at the back of her head. It makes her look like an old-fashioned movie star. She’s wearing a silky white tank top over tight blue jeans, and her bare shoulders are elegantly square above her slender arms.
After all the introductions, she and Harry quickly and confidently take charge of the conversation.
“You wouldn’t believe all the ways we’ve traveled today!” Isabella says, leaning back in her chair and arching her flawless neck in a luxurious stretch. “First by plane—”
“No,” Harry corrects her. “Car to the airport first.”
“Oh, right, then the plane, then the tram to the shuttle bus, the bus to the camp van, then on foot from the dorm—”
“The only thing we didn’t take today was a horse-drawn carriage.”
“Or a ride on a camel.”
“You know, I should get a camel—it’d be faster than a car in L.A. traffic. Plus I could name it Lumpy.”
“Lumpy would be a good name for a camel,” she agrees.
“You’re from L.A.?” Julia leans forward. “Both of you?”
Harry grins at her. It’s a charming grin but veers toward overkill, what with the too-cute dimples under his green eyes. “Yep. From the same part of L.A.—Brentwood.”
“So you two already know each other?” Julia’s eyes dart back and forth, assessing the situation. I remember her crush on Steven Segelman, and I can kind of see how Harry is a similar type to S-squared. Pretty boys, both of them. Steven didn’t have a brain in his head. I wonder about Harry.
“Best friends since ninth grade.”
Best friends? Really? That would imply they’re not a couple.. . . Oh, wait: Absurdly gorgeous guy with a close friend who’s a girl? Who loves theater?
So he’s gay. Sorry, Julia. And then I notice that Lawrence is gaping at Harry too.
Clearly, I’d be wise to assume every guy here is gay until proven otherwise.
“Not the beginning of ninth grade,” Isabella says. “It was during The Music Man, and you were dating what’s her name, the girl with the enormous . . .” She curves her fingers into round sh
apes.
“Nose?” he suggests mischievously.
She laughs. “That too. Anyway, she hated me ever since Jackson Trent kissed me in seventh grade, and every time I tried to talk to you she’d get between us, blocking me with her enormous—”
“Nose.”
“That too.. . . She made it clear I wasn’t welcome. It wasn’t until you broke up with her—”
He grimaces. “And what fun that was, what with the tears and the screams and the begging—”
“Yes, you did get emotional, didn’t you? But at least I was finally permitted to talk to you, and that’s when we became friends. And you learned to date less clingy girls.”
Girls. Okay, so he’s not gay. Then why aren’t they a couple?
I give up. Sooner or later we’ll know all about one another. I don’t have to figure it all out in the first hour.
“Were you also in The Music Man?” Julia asks Harry.
“Of course he was,” Isabella says. “He was Harold Hill. Harry always gets the lead.”
“It helps to be a guy,” he says. “There are always more girls than guys trying out for roles. You don’t even have to be talented, just willing to make a fool of yourself.” He jerks his chin at Lawrence and Alex. “Right?”
“I take voice lessons,” Lawrence says seriously. “And acting classes. And dance.”
Harry shrugs cheerfully. “Well, of course it doesn’t hurt to be hardworking and talented. I’m just saying you don’t have to be. I mean, look at how the girls outnumber the guys here.” He waves a hand at the students, and I look around. He’s right. There are probably four girls for each boy. “All we men have to do is show up.”
“Whose phone is that?” Isabella asks, because there’s an unmistakable buzzing sound of a phone set on vibrate. She glances around the table. “Didn’t they say we weren’t allowed to use our phones except in our rooms at night?”
“It’s mine,” I say, and pull it out of my pocket and read: Lunchtime is over. Thanks, Amelia.
“It’s the first day,” says Alex. “I don’t think they’re going to really come down on us yet. But you should still probably hide it, Franny.”
“It’s okay,” I say, texting back a quick BRB—I doubt she’ll know what that means, but let her spend time figuring it out—before sticking my phone back in my pocket. “I’m allowed to use mine.”
“Why’s that?” asks Lawrence. “You special?”
“My mommy always said I was.” I flutter my eyelids. “But, that’s not why—it’s because I’m not actually a student here.”
“What do you mean?” Isabella asks.
“She’s doing an internship with the costume director,” Julia cuts in.
“It’s not exactly an internship.” I get to my feet. “More what you’d call a job—I’m working for the costume mistress. Who’s also my aunt. Not coincidentally.”
“What’s it like?” asks Vanessa.
“You know those nineteenth-century sweatshops where it was always incredibly hot and people had to work long hours under brutal conditions? Basically like that. Only with folk music.”
“Sounds rough,” says Harry. “Especially the folk-music part.”
“Yeah, that stuff’ll kill you. Anyway, I really do have to go back now.”
“You’ll come to dinner here, though, right?” Julia says.
“That’s my plan.”
“We’ll save you a seat if we get here first.”
“Thanks,” I say, oddly touched.
“Oh, and one more thing,” Harry says. “If you’re going to be working on my costume, I feel it’s important you know ahead of time that I dress to the left. And that I need a lot of extra room over there.”
I stare at him blankly. I have no idea what he means, but Isabella is laughing. I look to Julia, who’s equally confused. “What does that even mean?” She turns to her brother. “Alex?”
He shifts uncomfortably. “I only know because Dad’s tailor asked me once, and Dad had to explain it to me. It has to do with the way guys’ pants fit . . .” He trails off.
“How they fit?” Julia repeats.
But Vanessa gets it. “He means which side they put their junk on when they get dressed,” she says calmly.
“Oh,” I say. Then I wrinkle my nose. “Ew. TMI, Harry.”
He smiles like a cat that’s pleased with itself. “Just felt someone should know.”
“Yeah, you should ignore that feeling in the future. Bye, guys.”
As I walk away, I hear Isabella saying in a low voice, “So, wait—she’s really not in the program?” I can’t hear the response.
I leave the dining hall and pause out front, adjusting to the hot muggy air. Everyone else is inside. It’s just me out there.
It’s kind of an icky feeling, like I’ve been exiled from all the fun. I know that’s not how it is. No one’s kicking me out. No one’s treating me like some kind of outsider. They were all actually really nice to me. But it still feels that way.
I start to cross the courtyard to the theater but have to jump back when a car comes zooming up the gravel drive. It’s not a through street or anything—there’s a sign at the entrance that says only college-owned vehicles are allowed to come down this way, but this car is a small silver Porsche convertible.
The car brakes near me in an abrupt spray of gravel, and a guy gets out of the driver’s seat. He’s got flat brown hair and a round head and appears to be somewhat challenged in the chin department. He’s wearing sunglasses, so I can’t see his eyes, but he looks college-aged. “Hey, there,” he says, amiably hailing me. “Where is everyone?”
“The dining hall.” I jerk my thumb in that direction.
He leans down to the car window. “She says they’re all in the dining hall.”
A girl gets out of the passenger seat. She looks a little bit younger than he does—roughly my age—and pretty, with honey-colored hair, large hazel eyes, and a heart-shaped face. She’s wearing very short denim cut-offs and a tight blue T-shirt. Perfect body: small, compact, curvy. “That’s why it’s so quiet. I was wondering if I had the day wrong,” she tells me. “I was here earlier to drop my stuff off, and then we went out to lunch. I figured I should have one last good meal before I have to eat dining-hall food all summer.”
“It’s actually not too bad,” I say. “The pizza’s decent.”
“Really? I’m dubious.” There’s a pause.
“I’m Franny,” I say, since we’re just standing there.
“Oh, hi. I’m Marie.”
She doesn’t bother to introduce the guy, so he says to me, “I’m James,” before turning back to her. “Well, I guess this is good-bye for now.”
“Don’t you think we should get my purse out of the car before you take off?”
“Oh, right.” He scuttles around to the passenger side and gets out a large quilted leather purse.
“Now we can say good-bye,” she says as he hands it to her. She offers her cheek to his lips and he plants a solid one there, making an appreciative smacking sound that seems to cause her pain, since she winces.
But she recovers and says, “I’ll let you know when you can come see me. There are all these rules about visitors and going off campus, but I am not going to be a prisoner here for the next six weeks, so expect to hear from me soon.”
“I’ll break any rules for you,” he says with awkward gallantry.
Her lip curls. “But you wouldn’t be the one breaking them; I would.”
“Right. Text me,” he says, and gets in his Porsche and continues driving down the sloping road—which means he has to drive past us again a few seconds later, because the gravel road only leads to an area that lets you turn a car around. He gives us a little wave as he goes by.
“He’s nice,” I say.
She shrugs. “Uh-huh. Let’s go in. I don’t want to miss the meeting.”
“I’m going this way,” I say, indicating the theater.
“I thought you said we were s
upposed to be in the dining hall.”
“You are. All the acting students are. I’m working on costumes.”
“Oh,” she says, her eyes darting away. “That’s great.” She turns toward the dining room, then stops. “Hey, since you don’t have to make the meeting, would you mind doing me a huge favor and just running my purse up to my room?” She holds it out toward me. “It’s really heavy. I don’t want to have to lug it around all afternoon, but I’m already late. It would be so incredibly nice of you—”
“I can’t get in there,” I say, glad I have an easy excuse. I’m not about to be turned into anyone’s personal bellhop. “No key. Sorry.”
“I could give you mine and you could just run it back to me.” A pause. I don’t jump at the offer. She threads the bag back on her arm. “Guess I’ll have to be even later than I already am.”
“Sorry,” I say again. “Bye.”
“There you are. Finally,” Aunt Amelia says when I walk into her workroom. The Sweatshop.
“I was meeting people.”
“Were they nice?”
“Some of them,” I say, and for some reason it’s Alex’s blue eyes and slow smile that I’m seeing as I say that.
A couple of hours later I think maybe I’m hallucinating—the heat’s gotten to me—because the guy himself is suddenly standing right there in the doorway, trying to get our attention with a cheerfully uncertain “Um . . . hello?”
Before I can process that he’s maybe actually really there, Amelia looks up and says coldly, “How can we help you?”
“Sorry to bother you, but Ted—my director—he said maybe we could borrow a few hats for the rest of the afternoon? Hey, Franny.”
“So you two have met,” Amelia says with an annoying little smile.
“We went to school together.” I stand up. “I can show him where the hats are, if you want.” I hope I don’t sound too eager.
She’s back to working at the machine, material bunched up all around her, so she just nods absently. “Don’t give him anything that looks new or expensive. Not if they’re just using them for goofing around.”
“We’re playing an improv game,” Alex says.