Bound South Page 3

  Georgia doesn’t have an acting conservatory, so it’s out of the question for me to go there. Acting is what I live to do—seriously. Instead of all the dead time we spend in normal life, life on stage is all about conflict and movement; every moment is bigger and more meaningful. Frederick, my director, wants me to apply to Juilliard. I tell him I don’t have the grades, but he says that doesn’t matter, all that counts for admission there is how well you do in the audition. Which he says I’ll nail.

  I AM SO far behind in algebra I don’t think it’s possible to catch up. Plus my teacher, Dr. Mack, is always letting us get him off topic. He’s a born-again, but he loves to talk about his wild pre-conversion days. He’s so dorky it’s practically impossible to think of him at a party. He’s got greasy blond hair, which he wears parted to the extreme left and pushed across his forehead, and he’s skinnier than most of the girls in my class. Seriously. He can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. Plus he’s got this supersensitive skin that is always breaking out in a red rash and flaking. It’s pretty disgusting.

  I don’t know how many times he’s told us about the keg he and his roommates kept in their dorm room at college. They attached a hose to where the pump should have been, and every morning when they woke up they’d take a suck.

  I know I shouldn’t try to get him off topic; I should be visiting him during Coventry’s so-called power hour, the time after school when all the teachers are required to stay in their classrooms in case a student wants to come by and ask questions about the homework.

  Yeah right. As soon as the final bell rings I am gone. I am anywhere but Coventry, at least until play practice begins.

  Today in class I ask Dr. Mack what happened to make him convert.

  “I woke up one day tired of being hungover,” he says.

  I don’t really know what that has to do with Jesus.

  I STAY LATE after rehearsal talking with Frederick. He’s only twenty-three, just out of Yale, but he looks older, probably because he’s such a dead ringer for Daniel Day-Lewis, gravitas and all. I find it hard to imagine him ever having been in high school, but he was, only five years ago. He went to Grady, which is where I would have gone had I gone to public school. It’s awesome that he got into Yale from Grady. Everyone at Coventry is so hysterical about where they will get into college, but Frederick just toughed it out at an urban public school, wrote his college essay about the experience, and was Ivy-bound.

  AT SCHOOL TODAY Amanda tells me that there is no way in hell she’s letting me flunk out of Coventry. She’s going to tutor me. She had Dr. Mack for algebra last year (she’s on the honors track, which puts her a year ahead of me in math and science) and she got an A in the course. Amanda gets A’s in all her classes. She’s on academic scholarship at Coventry; otherwise there’s no way her mom would be able to afford the tuition. Our freshman year Amanda got a C on her first math test and I swear she was practically suicidal over it. I kept saying, “But a seventy-six means you knew seventy-six percent of the material. That’s good!”

  After school we go to the condo she lives in with her mom, who hasn’t come home yet to pour herself a gin and tonic and curse the men in her life. We take Cokes from the kitchen along with a glass plate of salmon mousse left over from one of her mom’s catering jobs. I consider taking a beer but decide that’s stupid. It’s only four o’clock and besides, it’s a Tuesday.

  I sit on Amanda’s bed, rubbing my fingers against her yellow and blue flowered comforter. She stoops in front of her books, pulling a thick notebook from the lowest shelf.

  “Here,” she says. “Look over these, and tell me which problems you could do if Mack gave them to you.” She hands me a stack of old tests.

  “Oh my God,” I say.

  Amanda is sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at her foot. “I know,” she says. “Do you think it’s a wart?”

  “Not your foot, the tests. These are the exact same ones he’s using this year. These first three, I’ve taken them all. You’d think he would have at least changed the numbers in the problems.”

  Amanda looks up at me. “Maybe we should just pretend you didn’t see them.”

  I slip the tests into my bag. “Maybe you should just pretend you didn’t see that.”

  DR. MACK SAYS the class average on yesterday’s test improved by four points.

  “You guys must have been paying attention,” he says.

  He passes them back, each folded in half so we can’t see each other’s grades. Mine is a 91. I could have gotten a 100, but I purposely made some mistakes. I mean, you can’t go from a 68—my brilliant score on the last one I took—to a 100 without raising some suspicion. On top of my test Dr. Mack wrote “WAY TO GO!” in red ink.

  DURING REHEARSAL FREDERICK takes us to the stage of the Van Dunn Theatre. The theater is new, built only two years ago. It’s beautiful. The lobby has a glass wall overlooking the cross-country trails, the seating is raised so everyone can see, and the stage floor is laid with glossy wood. Muffin Van Dunn is in my grade, but she likes to pretend she’s not connected to her donor grandparents. She slums it by wearing peasant tops and used Levi’s.

  We line up on the stage, all facing the empty seats where the audience will be. Frederick, whose black hair is slicked back from his face, stands behind the last row, holding a clipboard with the names of everyone in the cast. Frederick always forgets the names of the kids with bit parts.

  “You people are not projecting,” he says, his own voice booming. “We’ve got to make sure Grandma with the hearing aid can understand what’s happening up there.”

  One by one he asks us what our plans are for the weekend. We are to answer loud enough so that he can hear us from back where he is. When he gets to me, I project my voice from deep in my chest.

  “After sleeping with the director of Antigone, I’ll drive home the next morning and stop at Waffle House for breakfast.”

  The line of cast members jerks as people laugh and look over each other’s shoulders to gawk at me.

  “Well,” says Frederick. “Well.”

  I thought it would be a funny thing to say, but I was wrong. I’m burning. I want to rewind, to go back, to tell him I’m going to Bridgetown Grill with Amanda. I’m such a fucking idiot.

  I DON’T TELL my parents about my 91. Mom wouldn’t react anyway. She’s not really that emotive, at least not when it comes to my accomplishments. With Charles it’s a different story. Dad would just shake out his newspaper and smile smugly, assuming that his threats worked. Which, in a way, they did.

  DURING ASSEMBLY THIS morning they announce which juniors from our class will be on the Honor Council next year. Jim is chosen. I know it’s supposed to be this great privilege and everything, but it seems to me that all the kids on it are just selling out their classmates so they can get into better colleges. I had this idea that we should boycott the system. If nobody ran for the councils (Honor and Discipline—Honor to kick out the cheaters, Discipline to kick out the drinkers), the teachers would be the only ones able to bust us. And it’s not like they are going to show up at our parties to see who’s drinking. Well, Frederick might. But not to get us in trouble. To join in.

  TODAY WHEN DR. MACK hands me back my test (I got a 92), he says, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but whatever it is, keep it up!” I worry he is being facetious. All day long I wait to be called in front of the Honor Council. Ever since assembly, I can’t stop thinking about it, thinking about the times I’ve seen people summoned. Skip Peterson, a senior, will arrive at the classroom door, whisper something to the teacher, and call you out. I’ve seen it happen three times since I started Coventry. Skip always looks so friendly waiting at the door. He is a wrestler, short and squat with curly brown hair. He’s also active in Fellowship of Christian Athletes and Monday Morning Fellowship, and he’s head Honor prefect. Once I was walking down Allen Hall just as MMF was being let out, and half the girls were either holding their stomachs or crying. It turned out Skip had
brought in a slide show of aborted fetuses.

  FREDERICK KEEPS DAVE and me in rehearsal until seven o’clock, practicing the slap. I am so happy that Dave is King Creon. Dave is the other really good actor at Coventry. When I’m on stage with him, I feel totally safe, like anything could happen—I could even forget a line—and he’d be there backing me up.

  Frederick says that essentially Antigone is a story about the dignity of breaking unjust laws. Sure, Antigone’s brothers were violent assholes who would rather kill each other than rule together, but there was no reason why one of them—Eteocles—should be given a noble burial while the other—Polynices—was declared a traitor to the state, his corpse unburied and left to rot. Polynices didn’t do anything worse than Eteocles did. And regardless of his actions, Antigone should have been allowed to bury her brother. That was the women’s spiritual duty in Greek times, to bury the dead. But her uncle Creon won’t let her do it, because doing so would honor “the traitor.” So she sneaks out and buries him anyway. She does a crappy job with it, I mean, all she does is sprinkle a little dirt on him, but the important thing is that she refuses to compromise her principles, even though she sacrifices her own life by doing so.

  That’s why the slap is so important, so crucial to understanding the play. Creon slaps me when I force him to realize that he’s going to have to sentence me to death, that I won’t deny the crime I’ve committed. He tells me that we can just cover it up and pretend it never happened, but I promise him that even if he tries to do that, I’ll just go and bury my brother again. When he finally realizes that I won’t back down, he slaps me, and in that moment, I win. In that moment, he is the bad guy; I am the virtuous heroine, and the gods will reward me justly.

  We practice the slap again and again. To make it real, Dave actually has to hit me. Hard. This isn’t some cheesy high school production. I mean, it’s high school, but this is Coventry, and nothing is amateur at Coventry. The only thing that softens the blow is that I know it’s coming so I can turn my head when I feel his hand on my cheek. He must have slapped me twenty-five times before Frederick let us go. My face is still red when I arrive home to an empty kitchen. I find Mom, Dad, and Charles in the den, watching Jeopardy! Charles and Mom are practically snuggling together on the sofa. Dad is in his chair, his eyes closed, the newspaper in his lap.

  Looking at Dad, who is a Coventry alum, I wonder: does Coventry make you sign a pledge upon graduation, promising you’ll dress like a Republican for the rest of your life? Dad looks just like the preppy guys at my high school, only older and more dressed up. You’ve got to hand it to him, he keeps in good shape with his morning run; there’s no gut sticking out of his blue Brooks Brothers shirt, which is still tucked into his black suit pants. His light brown hair is cut just like a football player’s, short on the back and sides. The only difference is that Dad grows a comb-over to cover his bald spot.

  “There’s vegetable soup in the fridge,” Mom says, not even looking up at me.

  Mom’s vegetable soup is a total misnomer. It’s got two pounds of ground beef in it.

  I just stand there, waiting for her to look up at me and say something about my appearance.

  “Who is Stephen King,” says Charles.

  Mom clucks her tongue and tickles Charles’s forearm. “Right again!” she says.

  I want to scream. At Charles for being Mom’s favorite. At her for not noticing that my cheek is red and might even bruise, and at Dad just to make him wake the fuck up.

  WHEN I ARRIVE at the Waffle House, Jim is already there, sitting in a booth and sipping coffee. He’s wearing normal clothes—jeans and an untucked flannel shirt—but he has on a green plaid hunting hat with earflaps.

  “Are we rereading Catcher in the Rye?” I ask.

  He points his finger at me as if it were a gun. “You got it.”

  I order coffee and a pecan waffle and wait for him to tell me why he wanted to meet for breakfast. I wonder if he’s going to confess that he slept with Shyamala Patel and consult with me over whether or not he should tell Amanda. Shyamala and Jim were in the Inquirers’ Society together, and Jim was always saying that she was the only girl he knew who was his intellectual equal. She graduated last year and went to Harvard. Jim said he saw her this summer while he was attending an enrichment program up there.

  A hundred bucks says they fucked.

  Jim asks if I’m still meditating and I tell him that I try.

  “That makes me very happy,” he says. “I think meditation will be extremely helpful for you.”

  The waitress brings our food, the waffle for me and cheese and eggs with cinnamon raisin toast for Jim. He eats deliberately, taking his time with each bite. I slow down my eating so I won’t look like a total pig in front of him.

  “There’s some talk going around about your high scores in Dr. Mack’s class,” he says, after taking a sip of coffee.

  I am chewing a bite of waffle, and it feels as if it’s expanding, stuffing the inside of my mouth like a piece of foam. I wash it down with water.

  “Who’s talking?” I ask.

  Jim shakes his head. “It’s confidential,” he says. “The incoming prefects, we sit in on the meetings.”

  Oh my God. “It came up at a meeting?”

  Jim’s mouth is a straight line; it almost seems as if he’s mad at me. “Look, I’ve told you too much already. Just be careful. Don’t tell anyone about Amanda’s tests. Pretend it never happened. If you do get called in front of the Honor Council, remember: Deny, deny, deny until you die, you die, you die.”

  He takes another sip of coffee. “Besides, they’ve hardly got any evidence.”

  I CONSIDER ASKING Frederick if he’s heard any rumors that I’m cheating; maybe he knows the inside faculty scoop. I am pretty sure he wouldn’t turn me in, even if I told him everything. He doesn’t care about Coventry. He already told me he lied during his interview with the headmaster. In order to be hired here you have to say that you are a Christian.

  “You lied about that?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I’m an actor.”

  And he is. In a few years he’s going to apply to MFA programs in acting. He would have gone right to grad school, but he needed money. That’s why he took the job at Coventry, so he could live at home with his mom and save.

  IN CLASS, I don’t try to distract Dr. Mack with questions about his personal life. I just keep my head down and take notes, trying not to draw attention from anyone. That’s hard because I arrived just before the second bell, and the only seat left was the one by Magda Miller. Magda is one of two lesbians in our class (they’re not officially “out” or anything, but everyone who does theater knows) and she is always trying to be wacky. She carries plastic pieces of fruit in a straw bag—don’t ask me why. Everyday before class begins she lays the fruit out in front of her on the table.

  I keep glancing around the room, trying to see if anyone is looking at me strangely. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I think Becca Sanders, who is only a sophomore, is glaring in my direction. Becca is really good at math, but I outscored her on the last two tests.

  INSTEAD OF GOING to the cafeteria, Amanda and I eat lunch at the Shack, which we are supposed to call the Student Center, but no one does. I buy a pepperoni pita pocket and a Coke, and she buys a Diet Coke and a bagel. I refuse to buy diet soda, even though I have gained ten pounds in the last year, even though Mom says that at some point in every woman’s life you have to start counting calories. Frederick says I have beautiful curves. He says as long as my waist stays small I should not fight my hips and my boobs, that they will help me get acting jobs one day. He says I should always wear V-necks to auditions.

  “Did Jim talk to you about the tests?” I ask, keeping my voice low in case someone is listening.

  Amanda nods, sticking her finger into the little cup of cream cheese that comes with the bagel.

  “I didn’t know you were going to tell anybody that I borrowed them,” I say.

  She sh
rugs. “He’s my boyfriend.” She licks the cream cheese off her finger. “Don’t worry. He says he doubts it will be brought to court.”

  “What are we going to do if it is?” I ask.

  “I don’t think we should talk about this in here,” she says. “Anyway, I don’t mean to be a bitch, but all I did was show you my notes from last year. I had no idea you would use them to cheat.”

  I don’t know what to say. Apparently she doesn’t either. She looks over my shoulder and starts waving to a group of guys walking into the Shack.

  “Eric!” she says. “Over here.”

  AT HOME AFTER dinner I lie on my bed in the dark imagining what it will be like to go in front of the Honor Council. My freshman year two girls got kicked out for stealing old tests from their chemistry teacher’s drawer. I remember seeing one of them, Emily, after she was expelled. Her eyes were swollen from crying and her cheeks were red and splotchy. She told me the council kept them waiting in an emptied-out office for two hours while they deliberated.

  I remind myself that I, like Frederick, am an actor. Everything that happens to me I will use to hone my craft. And being an actor, I can fake my way through the hearing. I will deny ever having seen the tests. Or I will plead ignorance, say I didn’t know I was cheating, that all I was doing was studying from a friend’s old notes. Anywhere else, this would be no big deal. I heard that at Georgia, SAE keeps a file of old tests for all the brothers to use. But Coventry is different. Coventry is concerned with our character.