I hardly saw Via at school this year, and when I did it was awkward. It felt like she was judging me. I knew she didn’t like my new look. I knew she didn’t like my group of friends. I didn’t much like hers. We never actually argued: we just drifted away. Ella and I badmouthed her to each other: She’s such a prude, she’s so this, she’s so that. We knew we were being mean, but it was easier to ice her out if we pretended she had done something to us. The truth is she hadn’t changed at all: we had. We’d become these other people, and she was still the person she’d always been. That annoyed me so much and I didn’t know why.
Once in a while I’d look to see where she was sitting in the lunchroom, or check the elective lists to see what she’d signed up for. But except for a few nods in the hallway and an occasional “hello,” we never really spoke to each other.
I noticed Justin about halfway through the school year. I hadn’t noticed him at all before then, other than that he was this skinny cutish dude with thick glasses and longish hair who carried a violin everywhere. Then one day I saw him in front of the school with his arm around Via. “So Via has a boyfriend!” I said to Ella, kind of mocking. I don’t know why it surprised me that she’d have a boyfriend. Out of the three of us, she was totally the prettiest: blue, blue eyes and long wavy dark hair. But she’d just never acted like she was at all interested in boys. She acted like she was too smart for that kind of stuff.
I had a boyfriend, too: a guy named Zack. When I told him I was choosing the theater elective, he shook his head and said: “Careful you don’t turn into a drama geek.” Not the most sympathetic dude in the world, but very cute. Very high up on the totem pole. A varsity jock.
I wasn’t planning on taking theater at first. Then I saw Via’s name on the sign-up sheet and just wrote my name down on the list. I don’t even know why. We managed to avoid one another throughout most
of the semester, like we didn’t even know each other. Then one day I got to theater class a little early, and Davenport asked me to run off additional copies of the play he was planning on having us do for the spring production: The Elephant Man. I’d heard about it but I didn’t really know what it was about, so I started skimming through the pages while I was waiting for the xerox machine. It was about a man who lived more than a hundred years ago named John Merrick who was terribly deformed.
“We can’t do this play, Mr. D,” I told him when I got back to class, and I told him why: my little brother has a birth defect and has a deformed face and this play would hit too close to home. He seemed annoyed and a little unsympathetic, but I kind of said that my parents would have a real issue with the school doing this play. So anyway, he ended up switching to Our Town.
I think I went for the role of Emily Gibbs because I knew Via was going to go for it, too. It never occurred to me that I’d beat her for the role.
