Chapter 5 #3
A firecracker goes off in my gut, adrenaline-fueled frustration I haven’t felt in so long I almost tip backward in the desk chair.
“Yes, the security at the front saw me enter,” she continues.
“Yes, they know it’s me. I had to give them my ID.
And no, I don’t carry some weird fake. Yes, they wanted to escort me around with an attendant, but I said that would be embarrassing, and I ran off without their permission.
Yes, I knew you’d be in here.” She pauses to evaluate my reaction. “Anything I missed?”
“Why are you wearing a winter coat in May?” I ask. Of all the questions, this one surfaces first.
“Why not?” she says, tossing her fake-red hair over her shoulder.
“Okay, when was the last time you came back to Garden Meadows?” I try next.
“I left here the day after graduation, so…June of 2010? I always suspected Dallas would be the one to figure out how to drag me back. I just thought it would be because he’d named the theater after me.”
God. I hate her.
I really, truly do.
It feels revelatory to remember that. I’ve spent years embarrassed by my feelings, ashamed that they still burn as brightly as they do, but it’s kind of amazing right now to be in the fullness of her presence and loathe the ease with which she’s returned.
The phony affectation in her voice. The hollow compliments she showered me with on arrival.
The pride with which she shares that she hasn’t been back.
So above us here in Garden Meadows, her little plebeians who’ve amounted to nothing while she’s gone on to make a name for herself in Hollywood.
I detest every single particle of her being, and that’s the first thing in two days to make me feel better.
“I don’t need your help.” I grab the stack of papers from her hands and shove them into my work tote to look at later. “We’re doing great without you.”
“Oh yeah? You and the police are going to find him in the floorboards together? How’s that going so far?” Her almond-shaped nails press onto the wooden desk as she leans in closer. “He told me he’d figured out how to walk through universes.”
“Yes, I heard you the first time you shared that gem of information.” I reach behind me to pick up the rainstick Dallas keeps on top of a filing cabinet. “He also likes to say that this gives him the ability to control people’s minds.” The two of us watch the glitter inside it slosh back and forth.
“I believe it,” she says.
“Wonder why it didn’t make us hate each other any less in high school?”
“Did we hate each other, Marlowe Jenkins?”
Every use of my name is more pointed than the last. Her impish smirk generates strength from the tension she keeps thrusting upon me.
“We did, Cilla Cove,” I reply.
She plucks a rose out of one of the several bouquets she bombarded this office with earlier. “I see you got my flowers.”
“Just what we needed in this trying time, a dozen bouquets to decorate our local landfill with.”
“Is it really only a dozen?” She counts them. “I told my assistant we should do two dozen. I thought you could give them out to the kids.”
I want to quip about her having an assistant, but I restrain myself. “I need to get ready for our last dress,” I say instead.
“Who’s playing Dallas’s part? Surely not you.” She does her laugh then. That fizzy little giggle that sounds far crueler than any regular laugh could, because it seems both spontaneous and primal.
“Why not you?” I ask. “We could get some national attention on this case if the famous Ms. Cove returned to her high school stage to raise awareness for her missing drama director.”
She has her back turned to me and her head tilted up, scanning the shelf paraphernalia. “Aha. Look at that. He still has it.” She picks up a black analog phone with a crescent-shaped crack in the side.
She broke it during our last dress rehearsal of RENT, slamming it down on the table as she yelled at me about getting in her way during our duet.
It wasn’t the first prop that had ever been broken between us, but it was the loudest and the most public.
Everyone in the cast and crew witnessed the outburst.
Up until that incident, she had the upper hand in our rivalry.
She, the natural talent, plucked from her English class and thrust into WRHS stardom, versus me, the perpetual student of the craft who named her childhood dog Sontag after reading The Lady from the Sea and Alice in Bed back-to-back for fun in eighth grade.
It was easy for everyone to believe that I hated Cilla because she didn’t have to work for anything, when I fell over myself to work for everything, and to most of our classmates, that was just about the least cool thing I could ever do.
They all saw me as the tryhard who couldn’t relax around the girl for whom acting came as easily as breathing.
But they all witnessed the phone break. They knew it was her fault, not mine. It was just too late for the narrative to change. We’d been cast in our roles for so long that no one wanted to rewrite our parts a few weeks before graduation.
After she broke the phone, Dallas pulled the two of us into this very office, clutching the cracked receiver in his hand as he gave us the last of many speeches about how we needed to get our act together.
“You two have the potential to be some of the best actors we’ve ever had at WRHS, and you can’t get out of each other’s way long enough to see that,” he said.
“I know we’re at the end, and I am about to send you two into the real world, where you cannot, under any circumstances, pull half of the shit you’ve pulled in your time with me.
I’ve asked you over and over to make your peace, and I understand that neither of you wants to do that.
So I’m gonna ask you something different this time.
I’m gonna ask you to hate each other enough to leave each other alone.
Okay? When I really hate someone, the last thing I want to do is find every way possible to bother them.
I want to get the hell out of their way.
So that’s what you two need to do. Stay. Away. From. Each. Other.”
Only Dallas ever seemed to understand the two-way street that was my rivalry with Cilla. She fed the flames just as much as I did. More, in my opinion.
Her grabbing the phone right now feels like another one of his messages. Dallas Winthrop, forever finding a way to direct me.
“Do you remember what Dallas told us that night?” I ask Cilla now, pointing to the phone.
“To stay away,” she replies. It’s surprising how quickly she recalls it. The memory must be as close to the surface for her as it is for me.
“Why don’t you do just that?” I open the office door. “Goodbye, Cilla Cove. We don’t need your help here in Garden Meadows.”