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“You’re keeping awfully quiet back there,” notes Ms. Joy from the other end of the long table, sucking on the end of her glasses, which she has pinched between her ring-decorated fingers. “You got something to say about Kingsley’s journey in the play?”
All the faces at the table turn to me, Toby’s included.
I shrug. “It sucks.”
Frankie stifles a laugh by slapping a hand on his mouth, his eyes wide. Kelsey sucks her lips in, shocked. Toby quite suddenly avoids eye contact with me, his face going red.
Ms. Joy, however, seems completely unfazed. “It sucks?” She gestures toward me with her glasses. “Why does it suck?”
“It just does.”
“Alright. ‘It just does.’ Hmm.” She shrugs, then goes back to sucking on the end of her glasses. “For the sake of encouraging a more intelligent discussion on the matter, indulge us. Tell me why you believe the script sucks, Mr. Kingsley. We’ve got all night.”
After a tense spell of silence passes, I realize she’s serious. The curious onlookers still lurking in random seats in the auditorium are even perking their ears, waiting. I give the script a swat of my hand. “Kingsley is an indecisive cock-tease who uses the word ‘fricking’ too much. Literally no one on Earth says ‘fricking’. Danny still sounds like a woman somehow—and one with the intelligence of a lemming, at that. Hell, even in the original script as a woman named Danielle, the character is so flat, uninspired, and predictable that it makes me not want to return after intermission, and I’m in the damned play. It’s like trying to breathe life into a blow-up doll. The women at this table should be offended Danielle ever existed.”
Silence rings out over the table, the auditorium, and maybe even the entire school for all I know. Spruce itself just hushed up at my act of daring to criticize the work of one of Ms. Joy’s most prized students.
She picks up the script in front of her and frowns down at it, appearing to read the title page over and over.
Then: “You’re right. It sucks.”
Everyone at the table turns to Ms. Joy, shocked.
She takes in everyone’s faces, then looks up at me and shrugs. “The script is stale. Trite. Pretentious at times. The tiny changes the playwright made in gender-swapping Danielle to Danny didn’t do their story any justice. No, this script needs a truth bomb. Is that how you kids say it?” she asks, giving Frankie a look for some reason. “A little bit of a—” She spreads her hands, making an odd explosion sound from her mouth. “—truth bomb? Anyway, I want this to be a lesson: a play is more than just the sum of its parts. The lines may be weak. Unintelligent. But they’re just words on a page until you breathe life into them. Don’t let it just be a blow-up doll, Vann. It’s your job to strengthen your character. If Kingsley feels flat, give him dimension. Are you dissatisfied with all of your frickin’ this, frickin’ that?” Ms. Joy eyes me with an amused smirk. “Own the frick, my boy. Make those fricks yours. Vann might not ever say fricking, but Kingsley is saying it, not you, and it is your job as an actor to be Kingsley. Make him yours—at least, during the time in which you’re on this stage. Otherwise, where’s the effort in acting? Have you ever actually read Romeo & Juliet? Romeo has to be one of the most boring characters ever written, and look what actors do with him. I dare you to find someone who doesn’t know Romeo.” She closes her script. “That being said, I will talk to the playwright about … some rewrites regarding Danny. Yikes.” Ms. Joy clicks her tongue and shakes her head. “That lazily gender-swapped Danny is an insult to the gay community. We’ve got to do better.”
With that, we’re then dismissed to go home. Toby catches me halfway to the door. “Hey, uh … Vann?”
I tug on my backpack strap and lift an eyebrow. “Sup?”
“I was just wondering if, if …” He hugs his script to his chest as his eyes search the ground adorably, looking for the rest of his sentence, I guess. “Well, you said you wanted to walk with me to my house from Biggie’s on the weekends … or something. And it got me to thinking if, uh … if that means …”
“Yeah?” I prompt him, urging him to get to the point.
He clenches his eyes shut, then finally pulls them up to mine. “Never mind. Do you want to go over lines, like, after school one of these days? To, like, y’know …” He shrugs and lets out a small, nervous laugh, then does air-quotes as he finishes. “… ‘make these characters ours’ or whatever?”
I frown at him. “Isn’t that what rehearsal is for?”
