Chapter Eight #3
Danny could feel his face getting red. This was worse than getting chewed out by a priest for chewing gum or a nun for humming in the hallways or his dad for walking in front of the TV—by people Danny didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t respect.
This was his friend, someone whose opinion Danny actually cared about. And he’d screwed it up.
“The only thing that matters to me, Daniel Victorio—the only thing that should matter to anybody with the tits or testicles to get up onstage in front of a room full of drunken strangers—is knowing that when those strangers leave, they’ll have been shaken to the core by the sight of someone completely unafraid to be themselves. ”
Christian met Danny’s eyes, his right eyebrow cocked.
“Not giving a fuck what people say is the thing that changed me from what my dear friend Noxeema Jackson deemed ‘a little boy in a dress,’ ” Christian said, “into a queen.”
He paused, his hardened stare softening just a bit.
“Now just imagine, Danny, what not giving a fuck what people say could do for you.”
Christian’s statement lingered for a moment, sharp and undeniable.
“So…come see me at the Limelight,” Christian said, relaxing back into his normal crooked smile. “And you’ll know what I’m talking about. Now, who wants a hot pretzel? Danny’s buying.”
For the rest of the day, the moment with Christian kept replaying in Danny’s head like an annoying commercial jingle for auto insurance.
He couldn’t concentrate on their walk back to school, or as they snuck through the theater, or in the halls on his way to Performance class.
How could Christian really not care what people thought about him?
Danny knew from his father how folks talked about those kinds of things outside the protected walls of LaGuardia—about those kinds of people.
“So what do you think?” Nina asked as they reached the bottom of the stairs.
“What do I…what?” Danny mumbled distractedly.
“Weren’t you listening to anything I said?” she huffed. “Should I belt or mix the final note of ‘Spread a Little Sunshine’?”
“Oh, sorry,” Danny said. “I’m a little out of it.”
“Yeah, no shit,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Is this about Christian doing drag? Because, hey, you’re one to talk.
We do musicals. Like, we put on makeup and dead people’s hair and dance around onstage just like he does.
And frankly, from what little I know about the Catholic Church, you see draggier shit every Sunday than Christian’s ever done in public. ”
“No, I know…,” Danny stammered. “Sorry, I’m just tired, I think.”
As they stepped into the black box theater, the tension in the air hung thick like fog. His classmates all sat, panicked, on their cubes. Tiffany Totter, the girl who had been cast as the lead in the fall musical, was the first to speak.
“Nina!” Tiffany cried, looking even more distraught than when Danny had accidentally walked in on her performing “I Dreamed a Dream” in an empty rehearsal room with a pair of safety scissors clenched over her own ponytail. “Did you hear about Dustin Parker-Taylor?”
“No,” Nina answered cautiously.
“He dropped out of the show!”
“The show?” Nina shuddered. “You mean Pippin?”
“I do,” Tiffany said, with an almost imperceptible note of pride at having been the first to deliver the news. “He booked a Steven Seagal movie, and bam! He’s on the next flight to LA.”
“No!” Nina shrieked, grasping her chest like she’d just been given the news that Carol Channing had been squashed by a falling air conditioner.
“It’s honestly devastating. But the show must go on,” Tiffany said nobly. “I just hope I can carry the burden.”
“Hello, friends,” Ms. Mellon said, barging into the room with an uncharacteristically frazzled voice. “I can see by the looks on your faces that word travels fast, so I’ll cut to the chase. Yes, Dustin Parker-Taylor will indeed be leaving school for a few weeks to pursue another project.”
A chorus of gasps and toldjas echoed through the room.
“We are very proud of him and know that he will make our school proud,” Ms. Mellon said, her tone measured.
“As for Pippin, rehearsals will continue as scheduled while we look for someone to replace him. I’ll be holding auditions next Wednesday during lunch period.
Obviously, we’ll be working under a bit of a time crunch, so I’m asking for only the most dependable, professional young men to come in. Sign-ups will be posted later today.”
Danny sat up with a jolt as whispers began to swirl.
But the second the hopeful thought entered his head, a surge of doubt immediately gobbled it up like a hungry Pac-Man.
Forget it, asshole, the voice in his head sneered.
She’s looking for dependable, professional actors.
Not some goombah who chokes in Performance class and whose biggest onstage credit was playing Wise Man 2 in three consecutive Christmas pageants.
“So are you gonna audition?” Nina asked as they walked down Broadway after school.
“Come on,” Danny snorted, gripping his backpack strap as they weaved through the crowd. “I don’t think Ms. Mellon is my biggest fan these days.”
“You’d be good for the part,” she said, shrugging. “I mean, physically, at least. I’ve only seen you perform that one time, and yeah, it was kind of rough, but you have a nice voice and most importantly, you’d definitely fit into Dustin’s costume.”
“Great,” Danny muttered.
“Ugh! I still can’t believe how unprofessional all of this is,” Nina continued, either not picking up on the sarcasm in Danny’s voice or choosing to ignore it.
“Almost all of my scenes are with him, and we were just starting to develop some good chemistry, but I guess he’d rather have, like, two lines in a movie starring a guy who’s most famous for pretending to be Asian. ”
“Steven Seagal isn’t Asian?” Danny asked, his world momentarily shaken.
“Who cares?!” Nina said, kicking at the sidewalk. “Either way, it’s just so lame.”
They passed a gourmet deli, a meter maid writing a ticket, and a Rollerblader skitching a ride on the bumper of a taxi.
“Hey,” Nina said, halting abruptly. “Don’t you usually get on the subway at Sixty-Sixth?”
“Huh?” Danny stammered, shaking his vision back into place. “Oh, right. Nah, I’ll just get on at Fifty-Ninth.”
Nina and Danny hopped off the curb and jogged across traffic even though it wasn’t their turn.
Three weeks was all it had taken for Danny to learn that an orange “STOP” hand at a crosswalk was merely a suggestion.
As they walked, Nina blabbered on about Pippin, and choreography, and famous co-star betrayals, but Danny had stopped listening.
That moment in the park. That disastrous performance in class.
All the musicals he didn’t know. All the nightclubs he’d never been to.
All the stupid things that kept seeming to fall from his mouth.
And a question taking shape in his mind, causing his feet to falter just as they reached the roundabout of Columbus Circle.
“What?” Nina asked, pausing and turning around. “What is it?”
“Why are you guys even hanging out with me?” Danny asked, his voice cracking slightly, a ballet of cars whirling around them. “Like, there are obviously a lot of other kids at this school who would fit in better with you.”
Nina let out a sigh, running her fingers through her shiny hair and scuffing the pavement with the soles of her hundred-dollar sneakers.
“I don’t know,” she said with a little laugh. “Like, you don’t know anything. It’s cute, I guess.”
Danny turned away, mortified, and began walking toward the flock of pigeons that had gathered nearby to dine on a take-out box of arroz con pollo.
“Wait, I didn’t mean it like that!” Nina called out, chasing after him. “It’s just…it’s refreshing. Like, everyone at LaGuardia is trying to be a star and trying to be so cool and outshine everyone. Everyone’s trying so hard. And you’re just, well…”
Danny looked up from the bird buffet.
“You’re not trying to be anyone. You’re just Danny.”
Just Danny. Her words played in his head—like if he said them enough times to himself, he’d figure out just who this “Danny” was.
Danny saw himself as someone who didn’t fit in anywhere.
Not in his old school, where he wasn’t smart enough to be a teacher’s pet or tough enough to be respected by his classmates.
Not in his family, where his cousins were ranked by the number of trophies on their shelves or the numbers scrawled by girls on the inside covers of notebooks.
Not at LaGuardia, where kids had voices that you could feel in your bones and who were brave enough to dance like a girl in a meadow full of strangers.
Danny looked up at the sky, at the crosshatches of streaky contrails cutting their way to Newark.
He thought about this group of friends who’d invited him along that day.
Who’d taken the time to teach him about Rent and the Club Kids and drag queens and the art of jaywalking and skipping class.
And sure, he could dismiss it all as politeness, but from what he’d seen, that wasn’t a virtue that any of them possessed.
Plus, there was that feeling. That new one growing in his chest, the one he couldn’t identify.
And that voice in his head, the one he’d heard his whole life, the one that told him he didn’t belong.
But there was also the inescapable fact that ever since he’d started taking the subway to school, that voice was no longer the loudest thing he’d hear in a day.
So maybe it was true that he didn’t belong anywhere, but maybe, just maybe, he was getting closer to somewhere.
A car horn wailed, followed by a man in a taxi leaning out his window and cursing something in a language that Danny couldn’t recognize.
“Come on,” Nina said, done explaining herself. “Walk me to Midtown? I forgot my keys and have to get a spare from my dad. You can catch the train at Forty-Second.”