5. Mandy
Since the day Clyde told me he was leaving for college. . .and we needed to break up, I’ve regretted going with him to that homecoming dance. Sure, we had a fun year. Clyde’s like a basset hound set to sniff out excitement, and that makes him the constant center of attention.
When you’re with him, people orbit around you, too.
But sometimes when we were together, I still felt strangely lonely, even while surrounded by a crowd. Everyone’s attention was on him, not me, and I felt almost like a decoration. I didn’t like that feeling.
When he left me, I figured Jed would finally forgive me. He’d take pity on how I’d been cast aside, and he’d come back around. He never did, of course. In fact, if anything, after Clyde left, Jed acted like he was angrier. He wouldn’t even look at me in class. He sat all the way on the opposite end of the cafeteria at lunch. He would pretend he couldn’t even see me.
That made me look at him more, and comparing him to his brother was something I couldn’t help doing. He wasn’t quite as tall, but he was still the tallest boy at Manila High School. His features weren’t quite as sharp or as bright as Clyde’s, and he didn’t command the attention of everyone in the room. But he did play basketball nearly as well, and he had a sort of quiet dignity his brother never had.
Clyde scored better than Jed on tests and homework assignments, but I’m not quite sure why. He always knew the answers to every question he was asked, and he was at least as bright. Maybe it was that Jed never cared about his grades, because he had no intention of leaving for college. Either way, once Clyde was gone, I realized exactly what I had lost for my year of fame.
My best friend.
Someone I could trust.
The only person who really saw me.
But none of my efforts—not bribery, cajoling, group project manipulation, or even trying activities he liked in the hopes of seeing more of him—made any difference. Where my best friend used to be, there was a very handsome, very angry brick wall.
Tommy’s play actually got the brick wall talking, briefly, but no matter how hard I doubled down, I kept smashing my nose. Until I finally stopped trying to force it. After I tried to steal his backpack and he still wouldn’t talk to me, I gave up.
Miraculously, once I stop pressing, he finally seems to relax. In fact, on the one day a week that Jed comes to practice, I can almost pretend that we’re like before.
Uncomplicated.
Best friends again.
Healed from my bad decisions.
While we’re in rehearsal, he smiles at me when King Mongkut would, and it’s the exact same smile I’ve always known. It’s as familiar as my own kitchen counter. As familiar as the bench seat of my dad’s car. Something in my heart eases as his anger seems to fade, and I wonder whether we might be making some real progress, finally.
Jed’s always been the brother I felt safe with. He was the brother who cared about me, no matter what. It feels like I’m getting a little bit of that back.
And that confuses me.
At the beginning of the year, I thought I liked Jed. I thought that’s why he was angry with me—he liked me too, and I chose wrong. But can I like more than one person? No, right? So what do I feel about Tommy? Liking Clyde is what ticked Jed off last time. As the play approaches, I start to wonder: if I had to pick between them, which one would I choose?
And as it turns out, I do have to choose.
Tommy comes and asks me just before the dress rehearsal to pick one of them. “Do you still want me to ‘get sick’?” He makes air quotes with his fingers. “Or no?”
I’m just choosing which one should play King Mongkut, but still, it feels meaningful in some way.
Tommy’s a better actor, but he’s done several plays. His parents won’t care much whether he does the performance or sits out. To Jed, this could change how everyone sees him—his mom, the other students, and maybe even himself. I also agreed to do this whole thing to try and mend the unhappiness between me and Jed.
I ignore the part of me that wants to perform with Tommy. “Yes, get sick so he can do it.”
Tommy stares at me calmly. “You’re sure that’s what you want, right?” His gaze is steady, his eyes intent.
“Right,” I say. “That’s always been the plan.”
“Do you think after the play, he’ll quit being so stupid? Do you think doing the whole thing will convince him to forgive you?”
“I think that the one time we really worked on the Shall we Dance scene, Jed looked at me—actually looked at me.” I sigh. “I think if he’ll just let go of his anger, he’ll finally forgive me, yes. I don’t know whether the play will be enough, but I’d like to try. If nothing else, we’d be working together on something again.”
Tommy stands still, frozen for a moment, staring.
“I know you’re a better actor,” I say.
Tommy frowns.
“But Jed and I were friends for so long.” I sit down on the ground, my head leaning against the wall. “We played Monopoly every single day for like three summers. We helped each other with our chores. We studied together. He came to my rodeos, and I went to his basketball and football games and cheered.”
“We do those things now,” Tommy says. “Well, except for the Monopoly thing.”
I realize he’s right. He does come help with my chores. And he eats most meals with me—lately, anyway. He studies with me. He rides in rodeos too, but he usually does calf roping, while I do racing. “If he ever gets over himself, you’ll like him,” I say. “He’s funny and smart.”
His broad shoulders droop a little, but he says, “I’ll go tell him.”
I can’t help tiptoeing along behind him and peering around the corner when Tommy goes to tell Jed that he’s too sick to perform. Jed’s brow furrows when Tommy reaches him.
“Hey, man,” Tommy says. “We should talk.” He grabs his stomach.
Jed presses his lips together, his whole face pale. He looks like he’s upset, but what could have made him mad?
“Why?” Jed asks.
“I know I said I only needed you to be the understudy, but you know why we have understudies, right?”
Jed frowns.
“The thing is, this morning when I woke up, my throat?—”
Jed doubles over then and pukes all over Tommy’s shoes. When he straightens, he’s wiping his mouth.
“Are you. . .” Tommy backs up a little. “You’re sick?”
The groan Jed makes can’t be faked.
“Go home, right now.” Mrs. Rasmussen comes tearing around the corner, her eyes wide. She barely stops in time to avoid slipping on the puddle of bright orange puke. “Oh.” She throws her hand up over her mouth. “Get Nelson in here. Throw some shavings on it for now, and I’ll come sanitize it later. We’ve got to start if we’re going to have time for a full run through.”
Nelson, when he arrives, looks like he wants to cry.
I don’t really blame him.
“Well.” Tommy turns around. “I guess best-laid plans of mice and men and all that.”
Which is how, when the curtain goes up—or rather, with our little theater, when it slides to the side—I’m preparing to meet Tommy as King Mongkut, not Jed.
The dress rehearsal goes pretty smoothly, other than two small wardrobe malfunctions for some of the ensemble, but there’s always something different about the real performance. You know your lines cold, you’re surrounded by people who haven’t heard each scene a million times, and all the things you kind of planned to do but don’t really practice over and over, you’re finally doing.
The full skirt I’m wearing swishes as I grab my son Louis’s hand—really a bratty third grader who manages to annoy me constantly by popping his gum, stepping on my feet, and spitting out the wrong lines like a poorly behaved goat.
Luckily he’s a tiny kid, so when he bumbles a line in the opening scene, everyone laughs.
When Tommy walks on stage for his first appearance, it’s the first time he’s been bare chested, his vest gaping wide open, his chest shining with some kind of oil, and I can’t help staring.
Tommy plays football, too.
He ropes calves.
He’s even on the basketball team, though he’s not very good.
I should have assumed he would be in good shape, but I had no idea he was. . . He looks better than Clyde did with his shirt off. I almost fumble a line myself. I catch myself just in time, and the only person who notices is the bratty little kid playing my son.
“You’re embarrassing,” he mutters.
I squeeze his hand until he squirms. “Think about your own lines,” I whisper.
Luckily, even with the bright lights and the stress of the audience, even the children who make up a large part of the cast do quite well. Little Dolores elicits dozens of awws from the audience when she leaps up into Tommy’s arms, her father’s favorite child. It’s an easy transfer for her to be the audience’s favorite actress, but it’s also well-earned. She nails all the blocking and the lines.
And then it’s time.
The King and I isn’t strictly a romance, of course, as King Mongkut has more wives and concubines than anyone could ever hope to manage, and Anna Leonowens is a widow from England. But the story definitely shows that the two star-crossed lovers did care a great deal for one another, and that by the end, they respected one another. Indeed, the king changes important behaviors and allows her to teach his children revolutionary things.
I love that it’s based on a true story.
So when I sing, “and shall you be my new romance?” I happen to glance over at Tommy, and he’s staring at me intently. It makes something inside my stomach flip over.
My voice wavers.
And my voice never wavers. That’s the one good thing about me. I never flub a song. Not in practice, not in performances, never. My voice is as steady as the sun in the summer.
Except in that moment.
Tommy steps toward me, his eyes wide.
But I forge ahead. I sing my last line or two and dance in circles around him, and then I stop. Tommy tells me to keep going, and I tell him I never dance that way, not at home.
That’s when he says, “But you will dance with strange men, holding hands, etcetera.”
He sounds so confused, so forlorn, that my half-laugh is genuine. “Well, yes, but not always a stranger. Usually a very dear friend or a loved one.”
“Good,” Tommy says, walking closer. “Then you’ll show me. Teach, teach, teach.”
“But I?—”
“Teacher teach,” Tommy says, his hands out.
“Well,” I say. “It’s quite simple, the polka. You just count one-two-three.” And I take his hands.
I’ve done this scene a dozen times, but never with his shining chest exposed. Never with a million people watching. Never while he was looking at me like he wants to eat me. When his hands touch mine, it’s like something I’ve never felt before runs through me. Whatever it is makes the hair on my arms stand on end. I inhale sharply, and his eyes fall down toward my mouth.
He noticed.
He’s noticed that I’m reacting to him strangely.
But I have to keep going—the piano’s keeping us on track. When I sing, “On a bright cloud of music, shall we fly?” my voice cracks. It’s so embarrassing that I want to die.
Tommy squeezes my hand, and then he takes over for me, singing his part, the one-two-three and the shall we dance stanzas. Until I manage to join him with “Or perchance.”
Then we can spin around, doing our own parts and movement until I ask again, “Shall you be my new romance?” And I turn to look at him, and his knowing half smile makes that thing in my stomach flip over again. Even harder this time.
Blessedly, I pull myself together well enough to sing the next part, and execute the little misalignments that make everyone laugh. Until then Tommy says, “That’s not right. We’re not supposed to be dancing holding two hands like this.”
My voice is breathy and stupid when I say, “No, as a matter of fact. . .”
And then Tommy’s hand reaches for my waist, his eyes intent on mine, and he says, “My hand should be here, like this.” His half-smile, with those intense eyes. . .
I lose my breath. I can’t even think. I simply stare at him.
“No?” he asks in a deep voice. “Like this?”
I can’t even say yes. I just nod.
And he pulls me closer. And closer. Until our faces are right beside one another. I feel the minty cloud of his breath and the heat radiating off his body. I drop my eyes to his mouth, which is just a little open.
“I can’t,” he whispers. “I want to, but I can’t.”
“Can’t what?” I whisper back.
And then the music surges and he sweeps me in a circle, and then more of them, swirling me around the dance floor smoothly, with the same grace I see when he ropes a calf, when he swings up on his bike carrying two backpacks, and when he forces horses to back up, move out, and spin effortlessly.
I’m barely able to breathe when we finally stop. He stares at me in a way I’ve never seen—it makes me feel things I’ve never felt. I can’t help being grateful that Jed was sick.
I might have been confused before, but not now. All I can think about is Tommy. I definitely like him. I like him a lot.
He lifts one hand and brushes it against my cheek. “Shall we dance again?”
I’m laughing with joy when the curtain closes, and Tommy’s hand is still on my cheek.
“That’s enough, now.” Mrs. Rasmussen grabs my wrist and drags me away. “Scene change.”
But after the play, I’m determined that I will say something to him. I have to at least find out whether it’s all just the magic of the play, or whether he might like me, too. I can just ask what he meant when he said he wants to but he can’t. That’s a normal question, right? It’s not a line from the play.
But when the play ends, the audience swarms us. It’s normal, for a small town like this, where everyone knows everyone. My parents brought me wildflowers, and even Tommy’s mother brought blooms for him.
Jed’s mother brought me daisies, and I can’t help wondering where she found them. It’s not like Manila has a florist. “Thank you so much,” I say. “I’m so sorry Jed’s sick.”
“Oh, dear.” Mrs. Brooks wrings her hands. “He told me I had to come anyway, and that the play is really something,” she says. “He was so right. He really enjoyed working on it, to be honest. I bet you can get him to try out again for the next one.”
By the time I finish talking to her, a half dozen other people are waiting to talk to me, and by the time I’ve finally thanked everyone for their kind wishes, I can’t find Tommy at all.
“You’re looking for Tommy, aren’t you?” Mrs. Rasmussen asks.
I nod.
“I thought something looked. . .electric between you two.” She’s smirking, and I hate it.
“No, nothing like that,” I say. “I just wanted to tell him that he did a great job.”
“I think he left—Jed’s mother had already left when we realized his lunch pail was still here. I didn’t want him to worry about having lost it, so I asked Tommy to drop it off and tell him how the show went, too.”
If I hurry home, maybe I can catch him on the way. Jed’s house is just before mine, anyway. My mom waves, but I point at my bike. “I’ll meet you at home,” I say.
There’s no way I could have explained that I need to be let out by Jed’s house. They’d either realize that I liked Tommy, or they’d worry that I liked Jed. Either way, it would have created too many questions I don’t want to answer. So when my mom tries to tell me she and Dad can put my bike in the car, I’m stuck being forceful.
“Mom, I need to take a little ride to clear my head.”
“But you’ll be all alone,” Dad says.
“Yes, the cows out here will pose quite the risk.” I roll my eyes.
Finally, they relent, and I hop on my bike for the six-mile ride. I pedal like I’ve never pedaled before, turning a thirty-minute ride into more like twenty, I think. The whole way, I keep thinking about how Tommy looked at me.
It can’t just be me who felt that, right?
He has to like me, too.
But when I reach the Brooks house, I still haven’t caught up to him. I must have taken so long to leave that he got there and left before I ever even saw him. I just don’t understand how I didn’t pass him on the way back. The muscles in my legs are burning, and my lungs are heaving when I force myself to start pedaling again, this time, up the final hill to my house.
But just as I’m straightening out, I hear it.
Voices coming from around the back of Jed’s house.
I drop my bike on the side of the road and jog across their dark, damp yard. A shiver runs up my spine at the thought that I can wait until Tommy has dropped off the pail, and then say I heard him, and I’m sure he’ll insist on biking the rest of the way to my house alongside me.
He always does.
I’m stepping around the corner into the back yard when I realize the voices I’m hearing aren’t happy ones.
“I already told you—I know you’re sick, but are you also deaf? I don’t like Mandy,” Tommy says. “Most of the time I actually can’t stand her, because the two of you are the most aggravating pair I know. More than anything else, I’m just so disgusted by all your back and forth that I could scream.”
I want to drop down onto my bottom in the wet grass and cry.
Jed’s standing like a statue on the back porch of his house, a dark figure silhouetted by a soft golden light. “You’re lying. I saw how you looked at her. You just don’t want to make me mad.”
“If you think I’m afraid of making you mad, you’re even dumber than I thought. I just don’t like her—not the way you do,” Tommy says. “She sings like an angel, and that’s all I care about.”
When he turns and walks away, I crouch behind a bush, hoping that the light from Jed’s house will keep him from noticing me in the darkness.
For the first time since I set out on my bike, my luck holds. He walks right past me, and he doesn’t even notice my bike on his way back down the road.
I trudge back to the road, climb on my bike, and pedal the rest of the way home slowly, ponderously, letting out all my tears and all my angst before I reach my house, where I have to pretend for my parents’ sake that all is right with the world.
Even though everything feels so very, very wrong.