“You were spared the company of my parents by about five minutes. No one wants to see a black woman and a tiny Chinese man arguing.”
“Oh, you’re half-Chinese?”
The phone keeps vibrating against my chest. I continue to politely suffocate it.
“He’s my stepdad, but I call him Dad since they married when I was two. My bio dad took off.” The phone stops buzzing. She notices and offers me a wistful smile. “Looks like you’re safe for now. See you in thirty, Des.”
She disappears into her room. A green voicemail notification pops up on the screen of my phone. I swipe it out of existence and, inspired suddenly, I text Randy, my one and only friend that I kept in touch with from that creatively stifling elitist academy. He’s a deliriously gay playwright my age, who I desperately wish I could’ve brought to Texas with me. He might be the only regret I have about leaving that cruel, snobby school. I text him, asking how he’s doing and why I haven’t heard from him. Then, I stare at the screen and excitedly wait for him to answer.
I’m still waiting half an hour later when Victoria knocks on my door to go.
The walk is far less scary than she made it out to be. From the dorms, the School of Theatre is just a stroll past a large courtyard and fountain, through a tunnel over which the Art building squats, beside the University Center itself, and around the tall, glass-windowed School of Music where I imagine the corpse of my mystery roommate to be buried.
The School of Theatre is a giant red block of a building with a three-story tower jutting out from its rear like the tail of a threatened scorpion. The front is a row of glass teeth, punctuated at either end by double doors that read: Theatre, Dancing, Excellence.
As we approach the doors, for some reason I can hear the bottles of my parents’ champagne popping off at some ritzy cast party in my mind, mocking me. I hear mother’s cold words to me all over again, the ones she said when I first came home after quitting Rigby & Claudio’s: “You’re simply not ready for the stage, doll. You’ll find your spotlight someday.” I hear my father’s: “A good actor listens before she speaks. A better actor only listens.” Whatever the hell that means.
When Victoria doesn’t lead us through the front glass doors, I make an observation. “The lights are all out. Do we have to wait for a member of faculty?”
“Oh. No, honey. This isn’t a faculty-organized thing. The seniors do it at the start of every year. There will be booze. I’m fairly sure that some faculty know about it, but they pretend not to. Only certain underclassmen are allowed to attend.”
“Which underclassmen?”
She gives me a knowing smirk. “The ones that matter.”
The side door is propped open, a pool of light touching it from the parking lot. There’s a guy leaning against the wall amidst a cloud of smoke generated from that cancer stick in his fingers. Shaggy haired, skeletal, and looking like he lives under a sheet of cardboard on Bleecker street, he regards me with heavy-lidded eyes and a nod. I’m about to greet him when Victoria steers me into the side door and whispers, “That’s Arnie. He’s a prop rat, hates life, and I’m pretty sure he’s stoned out of his mind twenty-five hours a day.”
The side door empties into a small lounging area, which is entirely unoccupied. We continue to follow the light down a hallway and into what I take to be a rehearsal space, which looks like half a basketball court minus the baskets. Across the room, a pair of double doors empty into the wings of the stage.
“Wow, this is new,” she murmurs, our footsteps slapping against the hard floor as we go. “Party must be in the main auditorium.”
“Are we going to get in trouble for this?”
She answers my question with a shrug, then bursts with energy at the sight of a girlfriend, cutting across the stage to greet her and leaving me entirely on my own. The darkened wings of the stage, framed by long red curtains that hang down from the heavens, are littered with racks of unhung lights, coiled cable, and a big machine on wheels that looks like some sound system from the 90’s. Onstage, there are clusters of students chatting and laughing, only a spray of bleak white light coloring them. In the audience seating, there’s a row or two with a handful of other people kicking back and chatting. Somewhere in the aisle—though it’s hard to see with the bright light in my face—there appears to be a shirtless guy dancing, egged on by whooping friends nearby. Victoria claimed this little theatrical shindig started at eight, but from the looks of it, it started much sooner.
“You’re a new one.”