Chapter Six #2
Ms. P sighed and pinched her nose. “Something about yourself would be nice.”
“Sure,” Danny mumbled. “Uh, I’m Danny. Danny Victorio.”
Somehow, he was more nervous about talking to the class than he had been about auditioning.
“I’m a drama major. I’m from Staten Island. And uh…,” Danny said, picking at a hundred-year-old piece of tape stuck to his desk. “And it’s nice to meetcha.”
“That accent! He sounds like the Fonz,” a girl’s voice chirped in the pause that followed. The room tittered with giggles.
Everyone joined in. Even Ms. P. Even Christian. Danny melted into his plastic chair. Sixteen years and twenty-five miles to learn that he talked weird. All this time, Danny had thought he sounded like Danny.
“All right, shush,” Ms. P said. “Now let’s look at the seating chart…”
Whatever small mercy Christian’s presence had granted in homeroom was not extended to Danny in the rest of his morning classes.
There were no more familiar faces and no more introductions, so Danny slipped into his familiar role as ghost student.
He’d been playing it nearly every day at St. Pete’s, ever since the day he’d thrown up in gym his third week of freshman year and had to go home in an oversized T-shirt from the lost and found.
It was most successful when played in combination with sitting alone at lunch, avoiding eye contact with every person he passed in the hallway, and never, ever raising his hand to answer a question.
Danny was relieved to learn that the act still worked outside of Staten Island—no one asked him anything, or made fun of his accent (again), or looked at his face, or spoke his name.
By the time the lunch bell rang, Danny’d almost forgotten he was acting at all.
The cafeteria was the size of an airplane hangar, with white tiled walls and fluorescent tube lighting so bright that you could probably catch a tan.
There were tables in the center and the perimeter was lined with booths that looked like they’d been pillaged from a down-and-out Arby’s.
Tabletops were carved with initials and phone numbers and every imaginable obscenity.
Everyone already seemed to have staked out their place, talking fast and loud like their phone cards were running low on minutes.
“Hey! Tough guy!” a voice called out, which was when Danny realized that his ghost disguise wasn’t as perfect as he’d thought.
He traced the voice to a corner booth, where Christian Geronimo sat with a group of kids Danny didn’t recognize from any of his classes.
Danny raised his hand hesitantly, barely returning a noncommittal wave.
Christian stood up and waved back enthusiastically, like they were long-lost friends and not two people who had met exactly twice in the past six months.
Danny walked over to the booth, silently practicing how not to sound like a newsie.
Even by LaGuardia standards, Christian’s friends looked…strange. There were two girls and one boy. Or was it two boys and one girl? It was hard to tell with their crazy hairstyles and costume-trunk outfits. They looked like guests on The Jenny Jones Show.
“This is Danny,” Christian announced to his friends, flourishing his hands like he was showcasing a brand-new car on Wheel of Fortune. “He’s the boy I was talking about—the one who’s so fierce that he forgot his sheet music and got in anyway.”
Danny’s cheeks flushed an impossible pink.
“Sit down!” Christian waved, clearly annoyed that Danny hadn’t done so without being prompted. “Unless you’ve got lunch plans with someone else.”
Danny slowly slid into the booth, Christian’s friends looking at him with indecipherable expressions.
“This is Nina, Natalia, and Orion,” Christian said, gesturing haphazardly in their directions as he scooted over.
“I told you, Christian, it’s not ‘Natalia’ anymore,” the grungiest one of the bunch scowled. “My name’s Astoria now. Astoria Ditmars.”
Judging by the voice, Danny was pretty sure this one (who was named after a subway station in Queens, it seemed) was a girl, but with the buzzed head, spiked dog-collar necklace, and Doc Martens kicked up on the table, he couldn’t be sure.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Christian said, rolling his eyes in Astoria’s direction. “She changes her name more often than Giuliani hikes the price of MetroCards.”
“I do not!” she growled through her black lipstick muzzle. “I just think it’s bullshit that we have to walk the earth forever bearing the names forced on us by our tyrannical parents like we’re paper-trained Park Avenue poodles. And Astoria Ditmars is a better stage name.”
“Oh,” Danny said, his voice cracking a bit. “A stage name? Are you in Drama, too?”
“As if,” she scoffed, crossing her arms over her flat chest huffily. “I’m a performance artist.”
She paused, allowing the importance of what she’d just said to sink in.
“Which means she’s a fine arts major, but still lives for drama,” Christian deadpanned. “But Nina here is in Drama like you.”
The girl with the long brown hair and a Cabbage Patch doll face smiled and gave a tiny wave.
Of everyone at the table, she was probably the most, well, normal-looking.
Her hair was sliced down the middle with a perfect center part and her face was dotted with an archipelago of freckles.
But in her black-and-white-checked blazer and matching pencil skirt, she still looked like she’d be more comfortable on the set of Designing Women than in a high school cafeteria.
“Nice to meet you, Danny,” she said in a nasally voice, fixing him with a liquid gaze. “It’s dope beyond belief that you transferred in. We could really use you—all of our best leading men graduated last year.”
“Calm down, Roxy.” Christian raised an eyebrow. “He ain’t said nothing about being single.”
“Eat my shorts, bitch!” Nina reached over and slapped Christian’s hand, never breaking her smile or her eye contact with Danny.
“Nina is basically the queen of the drama department,” Christian declared in an approximated British accent.
“I am so not,” Nina said in a way that told Danny she almost definitely was.
“She’s got a featured role in Pippin this fall,” Christian elaborated.
“And it would have been a leading one if that skank Tiffany Totter weren’t a senior,” Astoria snarled.
“We’re doing Pippin this year?” Danny said, perking up in his chair.
He knew the show from his uncle’s tape collection.
Judging by the scratched case and worn-out cardboard edges of the cassette’s insert, Danny gathered that it was one of his uncle’s favorites, but he’d listened to it only once.
He remembered the music sounding kind of groovy, the kind of stuff pot-smoking hippies might listen to, but hadn’t done a deep dive.
Mostly he felt relieved to actually know something.
“Ohh…yeah,” Nina said, biting down on her teeth and spreading her lips with a kind of pitied expression. “Unfortunately, they already cast the show last spring. That’s sorta how it works here.”
Danny’s shoulders slumped.
“It’s too bad, really,” she continued, making a little frown at Danny. “I think it’s gonna be a good one. There’s so much sex in this show, I, like, can’t believe they’re letting us do it. Maybe they can put you on the crew or something.”
Danny squirmed in his chair, not used to this kind of attention, or the mention of S-E-X, as his mother strictly referred to it.
He decided to steer the conversation to the silent, dreadlocked kid sitting across from him, who was staring at Danny like his nose was where his mouth was supposed to go.
“And, uh, what about you?” Danny asked the boy—Ocean? No, Orion? “What’s your major?”
Of all of Christian’s friends, this one was definitely the most out-there, and not just because of what he was wearing: skinny half-moon sunglasses, a silver jacket made out of what looked like duct tape, and a black tricornered hat sitting atop a spaghetti pile of hot-pink dreadlocks.
“Orion’s in fine arts as well,” Astoria said, like she was his lawyer or like he only spoke whatever language they speak on Jupiter. “And he’s a real artist.”
Orion said nothing, just cracked open the soda sitting in front of him and chugged the entire can in one silent gulp.
Alien, Danny confirmed to himself. Definitely an alien.
As Danny gawked across the table at these outrageously dressed kids, a memory shook loose from that first day in the Chinese restaurant with Christian.
“So are you…,” Danny began to ask trepidatiously, praying he remembered the correct phrase, “…Club Kids?”
All four of them gasped in unison. Nina slapped her hand to her chest, and even the corners of Astoria’s mouth seemed to twitch into a smile.
“Oh snap!” Nina exclaimed. “You think we’re Club Kids? Christian, where did you find this one?”
“Please! They wish!” Christian interrupted. “No, Danny, none of the Club Kids go to this school.”
“None of the Club Kids go to school, period,” Astoria said flatly, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Oh.” Danny nodded, adding this to the growing list of things that everyone knew. “Well…I guess I’m gonna go get in the lunch line,” he said, reaching for his backpack.
“NO!!!” all four, possibly even Orion, blurted out, thrusting out their hands like he was about to step on a cobra.
“You don’t want that shit,” Nina said, shaking her head with disgust. “Only foreign exchange students and orch-dorks get hot lunch.”
“Orch-dorks?” Danny muttered.
“Orchestra majors,” Christian said. “The woodwind section, mostly.”
“So what am I supposed to eat?”
“Baby, that’s what vending machines are for,” Christian said, biting his pinkie nail. “I hear the Honey Buns are in season this time of year.”
Suddenly, a bright flash went off from out of nowhere, startling Danny, who banged his knee on the bottom of the table. Danny squinted open his eyes to find Orion aiming a silver Polaroid camera at his face like a ray gun, the camera slowly birthing the picture with a grind.