Chapter Twelve
Chapter
Twelve
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” Nina said through the earpiece. “But, it’s your voice.”
“My what?” Danny gulped, pressing the smooth plastic to the side of his face.
“Well…your accent,” she said, sounding reluctant. “It’s kind of taking me out of it.”
Danny sat up on his mattress, untangling his body from the coiled telephone cord, which he’d stretched taut from the kitchen, under his door, and into his bedroom.
“Oh,” Danny said.
“Seriously, no offense,” she said rapidly. “I actually think it’s so cute in real life. It’s just that…”
“Yeah?”
“Well…,” she said, seeming to search the silence for the right words. “This show is supposed to take place during the early Middle Ages, and in, like, Rome, so…”
“Right,” Danny said resignedly, curling the telephone cord around his finger.
Earlier that afternoon as the final school bell rang, Nina had accompanied Danny on his walk to the 1 train.
“You have to let me coach you!” Nina said, as ecstatic as he’d ever seen her. “This is actually so perfect! How many other boys get a chance to practice with their actual scene partner?”
In the ensuing hours, Danny had submerged himself into the world of Pippin, reading through the libretto and playing his uncle’s cast album on repeat.
He’d learned that Pippin was a musical from the 1970s about a performance troupe, telling the story of a young prince and his search for the meaning of life.
The role Danny would be auditioning for was Pippin’s thickheaded half brother, Lewis, whose sultry mother, Fastrada, was being played by Nina.
As he flipped through the cassette’s liner notes, Danny tried to imagine his Uncle Richie doing the same.
Perhaps he had done it nervously, crammed in the back row of an S44 bus, en route to an important appointment in the City, or while unwinding on a beach blanket, staring out at the Lower Bay.
But most likely, Danny thought, his uncle had been in that same spot where Danny sat now, in a room with no windows, dreaming of a place that had never seen lime-green carpet.
But what exactly about the musical had drawn his uncle in?
What had caused him to pore over these notes to the point where the cardboard folds had nearly split?
Maybe it was the music and the cool way the cast seemed to sing in a swoopy style, like they were members of the Beach Boys.
Or was it the lyrics? His uncle had underlined a few of them—“Don’t you see I want my life to be something more than long,” and “I believe if I refuse to grow old, I can stay young ’til I die.
” Regardless, Danny knew he couldn’t take Nina’s offer to coach him for granted, even as he sat on his mattress, the apartment’s only phone pressed to his sweaty ear, cursing the day his parents had raised him on Staten Island and not the Upper East Side, where boys learned to speak with clipped consonants and flat vowels like characters on a soap opera.
“Hey, know what might be helpful?” Nina’s voice rose an octave. “What if I said the lines the way Dustin used to say them and then you try to copy it. That way you’re giving Ms. Mellon what she’s already used to. I think that’s the safest bet.”
Danny had agreed to the private coaching session in hopes that they could explore their backstory and figure out the comedic beats of the scene, but he realized now that Nina had envisioned more of a My Fair Lady approach: Henry Higgins scrubbing the street urchin out of Eliza Doolittle.
Still, he wanted the role, didn’t he?
“Yeah, sure. That’d be great.”
Just then, the phone beeped in his ear.
“Hey, hold on a sec,” Danny said, sliding his socks across the linoleum to the receiver in the kitchen.
He tapped the ringer lightly, switching to the other line.
“Hello?” Danny said.
“Heeeeey, tough guy,” Christian’s voice sang through the earpiece.
“So, look. I know you said there was absolutely no way your mom would let you come to the Limelight on Friday, but seeing as you’re, like, secretly kinda religious, maybe you can pray for a miracle?
And if it works, you’re in luck, because I got all our names on Wintergreen’s list.”
“Christian,” Danny groaned into the mouthpiece, pressing himself into the wall for cover. “It’s not gonna happen. Even if the freakin’ Archangel Gabriel came down and told her it was completely chill, there’s still no way my mom would ever, ever let me go to a New York City nightclub.”
“I got it!” Christian shrieked so loudly that Danny pulled the phone from his ear. “Cats!”
“Cats?”
“Not like, cats,” Christian said. “I mean…Cats. Tell your mom Nina got us tickets to Cats. Moms love Cats. Plus, I’m first to perform. We’ll have you on the ferry and tucked into bed before midnight.”
“I’ll work on it,” Danny mumbled. “Okay, I gotta go. Nina’s on the other line and she’s helping me with my audition.”
“Don’t let her bully you too much,” Christian said. “Mwah!”
Danny tapped the ringer again.
“Nina?”
“Still here. Let’s take it from the top?”
Danny woke up early the next morning, picked out the tightest white polo he owned, the one that Nina said made his muscles look the best, then slicked back his hair with a glob of LA Looks hair gel, carefully shaved the few hairs on his upper lip, and dashed out the door.
With the audition hanging over the day like a thick fog, Danny gave up even trying to look like he was concentrating during his morning classes.
In Spanish, he pressed his audition sides between the pages of his textbook, Senora Lopez’s lecture about direct object pronouns drowned out by Nina’s line readings echoing relentlessly in his head.
“It’s going to be a glorrrious campaaaaign,” he whispered to himself, spreading his lips and biting his “r’s” in an effort to disguise his Staten Island honk.
In English, while his classmates took turns reading passages from The Great Gatsby, Danny quietly recited the lyrics to his song, his ears perking up only briefly to catch the part of the book where Tom tells Gatsby that he’ll never belong in upper-crust society.
Yet unlike when Danny would study for a test, the longer he seemed to practice, the less the material seemed to make sense. Was it pronounced Frisians or Freesians? What was the line where Dustin had crossed his arms?
By the time the lunch bell rang, his head was swirling in so much doubt that he was surprised that his feet had somehow found their way to the black box in the basement.
A row of chairs had been arranged neatly outside the room, five of them already occupied by guys in ironed dress shirts (blue, blue, white, white, yellow) and slacks (khaki, all of ’em), like a quintet of tax attorneys.
All five of them looked calm and collected as they silently mouthed their lines, oblivious to the new kid whose hair gel had already begun to flake.
“You guys here for the audition?” Danny asked, tucking his backpack under the lone open chair.
The boys-slash-accountants nodded in unison before diving back into their invisible scene-work routine. Danny pulled out his sides, flapping his elbows to air out the sweat already soaking through his armpits.
The door to the room opened and Ms. Mellon’s smile peered around the corner.
“Afternoon, gentlemen,” she said brightly. “Thanks for doing this. I want to give you some time to eat, so I’ll try to be as quick as possible. Let’s just go in the order you’re sitting in right now—Patrick, Ricky, Jacob, Marcus, Brandon, and last up, we’ll have Danny.”
The other guys nodded back with quiet, smug smiles.
“Patrick, are you ready?”
“Always!”
Just say it slow, Danny said to himself. And try not to sound so much like…you.
At first, Danny thought he’d lucked out going last, but he hadn’t counted on being able to hear every audition through the crack under the door.
Patrick’s voice, even muffled, sounded powerful and controlled, sailing through the high notes with ease.
And while Danny couldn’t exactly hear Ricky’s performance of the scene, he could hear the laughs.
The laughs were even bigger when Jacob took his turn, and after Marcus finished his song, there was honest-to-God applause.
Danny’s head roared like a runaway express train.
What if I just got up and left? He could say that he’d had a family emergency, or he’d suddenly fallen ill—anything other than admit that he was completely, utterly out of his league.
But before he had a chance to make a break for it, the door swung open and out trotted Brandon, a satisfied grin plastered across his face.
“Break legs in there,” Brandon said casually, like he knew something that Danny didn’t.
Ms. Mellon’s voice called from the doorway.
“And last up, Danny,” she said. “Are you ready?”
“Uh-huh,” he panted softly, his Silly Putty legs wobbling across the threshold.
The room was the same room he’d sat in every Monday and Friday, but something was different.
Had Ms. Mellon changed the lighting? Was the clock ticking faster?
Had the thermostat dropped twenty degrees?
Danny walked to the masking tape X and looked out at the familiar foldout table, behind which sat the firing squad: Ms. Mellon, Demetrius (the kid playing the role of Pippin), and Nina, grinning like a cat who’d just learned how to use a can opener.
“Why don’t you sing first?” Ms. Mellon suggested. “And then we can take a look at the scene.”
“Sure thing.”
Danny gave a tentative nod to Jerry, steadfast at his piano, who began banging out the intro.
Considering it was the first time Danny had sung the song with a piano accompaniment instead of his uncle’s cast recording, he felt surprisingly at ease.
The groovy beat thumped in his chest the way it had in his bedroom, guiding his voice to all the correct notes and rests.
Danny punctuated the ending with a confident nod, feeling the tingly sensation of accomplishment coursing through his fingertips.