In What World

Continued, In What World

MARLOWE

“Dare,” Priscilla says, grinning into her red Solo cup before tossing back the last dregs of her Diet Coke like a shot.

It’s no surprise that she’s the first one to choose dare instead of truth. Priscilla Covington-French would rather streak naked across the Wilbur Reed High School stage than be honest about something.

Jaz Sinclair surveys the small circle we’ve formed around the coffee table, where an empty glass Coke bottle lies on its side, waiting for an upcoming round of Spin the Bottle.

For us seniors, it’s our last high school cast party ever.

In less than three weeks, we’ll be let loose into the real world.

We’ll never again act together on the WRHS stage.

We will never gather in a cast member’s house, our parents upstairs drinking wine as we figure ourselves out down below, safe in the confines of a carpeted basement.

I’ll spend four years getting my bachelor’s degree in acting, then I’ll be off to New York to put it to work, where memories like this will live so far in my rearview I’ll have to strain to recall them.

Jaz lingers on every face in the group. When her eyes meet mine, it’s as if we’re back onstage together, like we’ve somehow rehearsed this moment a hundred times, but we’re still hoping to capture the authenticity and successfully pretend we don’t know exactly what she’s about to do.

“I dare you to kiss Marlowe,” she tells Priscilla.

The basement quiets. Only the thump of the stereo playing my Ultimate Divas of Broadway CD mix cuts through, Patti LuPone wondering when it will be her turn.

Patti, you’re more than welcome to take your turn right now.

My protest forms, but I swallow it back like my own shot, knowing better than to make the moment too big. To push back is to admit that Priscilla affects me.

She does not.

Priscilla laughs, too loudly, of course, as she readjusts the messy braided pigtails she’s worn to every cast party since freshman year, when that particular group of seniors told her it looked cute.

They’d offered it as genuine praise, not the usual backhanded compliment they paid the other underclassmen.

Priscilla’s hair is too short for the style now, jagged from the cut she gave herself for the musical—not to mention brassy from her box-blond dye job—but she won’t give up the braids.

Who else would make themselves look less appealing for a high school musical?

Me. I would. But I’m no Priscilla Covington-French. I do things like read the entire script ahead of rehearsal, or, you know, say my lines as written.

“Come on. Give me something real!” Priscilla says, as if Jaz’s dare is some kind of harmless warm-up prank.

I take my own Solo cup filled with Dr Pepper and press my lips to the rim. “Wow. Okay,” I mutter.

Everyone here knows I’m a lesbian. It’s a delicate piece of me, fragile in the hands of my impulsive, insensitive peers, but it’s one I’ve needed to embrace anyway, wanting a sense of ownership over myself that no one else can compromise.

Everyone also knows that Priscilla has hooked up with girls.

Two girls she’s made out with in the last year are in the circle with us—Dana Weldon and Melissa Tomlinson.

Priscilla hasn’t made kissing girls a part of her identity like I have.

She treats her actions like hormonal-theater-kid fun.

Maybe for her, it is. All I know is that I won’t let her treat me like a joke.

A glimpse of Priscilla’s real hostility presses against her hollow friendliness, her eyes narrowing on me as her mouth goes taut.

Right there, I want to shout, pointing out the change to our castmates, who all believe Priscilla hung the moon. Don’t you see? It’s not all my doing. She hates me, too!

“What was that?” Priscilla asks me. “Sorry. I couldn’t hear you.”

She’s sitting exactly two people away, kitty-corner on the curve of our circle. I keep my volume the same. Don’t even move my lips from against the cup. “Wow. Okay,” I repeat.

“I genuinely thought Jaz was kidding,” she says.

“I can pick something else,” Jaz tells her.

Jaz is Priscilla’s best friend. She’s the only one, other than me, who seems to know when Priscilla is pretending. She won’t humor her by agreeing that she was joking, because she wasn’t.

“Please do,” I say. “I’m not trying to make anyone uncomfortable with my presence.”

Blotches of red grow like weeds up Priscilla’s neck, visible even through the two layers of orangey-tan Ben Nye foundation she applied down to her collarbone and decided against washing off after the show.

“I’m not uncomfortable. I would kiss you,” she tells me.

“I would kiss you, too,” I say back. She doesn’t get to bulldoze me with a statement like that. “It’s just acting.”

“Obviously,” she replies.

Look at us, two bulldozers crashing into each other. Welcome to the monster truck show.

“I’m really sorry, Marlowe. I wasn’t trying to make it weird,” Jaz says. I know she means it. Probably because in private, she’s confided to me that she also likes to kiss girls.

I swear, everyone involved in drama is gay, gay, gay.

“It’s all good,” I tell her. We might have a lot of complex dynamics within our cast, but everyone really does look out for me. Most of the time. “Let’s move on.”

“Okay, let me think.” Jaz begins her search again, her eyes roaming around her basement for a new challenge.

That’s when Priscilla lunges.

Her mouth crashes into mine, searching and insistent.

There is no time to stop my body’s reaction.

I pull her closer as my lips part, making space for the slick heat of her tongue, and I smell the faintest whiff of alcohol she must’ve snuck into this parent-organized cast party.

The pads of her fingers grip my shoulders so hard I feel it in my bones.

My head whirls with how good she tastes, the genuine shock, and, god, the raging pulse between my legs, completely unrelated to the girl who has one knee wedged between my thighs and her mouth suctioned to mine.

When I pull back, finally able to connect my mind to my body, Priscilla doesn’t look away. Doesn’t wipe my spit from the corner of her mouth. Doesn’t let go of my shoulders.

“I never back down from a dare,” she says, breathless.