Chapter 11 #2
This Dallas lingers on my face for a while before he says, “Our show’s going up in twenty minutes, if you’d like to stick around and watch.”
That’s it. This Dallas Winthrop has closed the curtains on this production. There will be no more information.
“Sure!” Cilla says with her frustratingly false good cheer. “We’ll get out of your way until then. We know how you like to prepare.” She puts her arm around my shoulder and directs us back toward the auditorium.
With every step we take, my breathing constricts, until all I can muster are short, frantic huffs.
I stop, leaning against the wall to collect myself.
“Whoa,” Cilla says. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I tell her, trying to grab a breath that won’t come. “We’re lost in the infinite universe!”
“We sure are,” she confirms.
“I have so many responsibilities back home. Only I know how to get them done. Especially with Dallas gone. The kids are counting on me, and every Dallas we meet wants to be the Mad Hatter about it. How are we ever going to get back if he never tells us what to do? We’re ruining everyone’s lives right now, disappearing the same way he did, and he won’t help us fix it. ”
She places a hand on my back. My body tenses in preparation for whatever counterargument she’s sure to make, telling me it’s not that bad or that I should try to enjoy this more.
“I know,” she says instead.
Her agreement startles me so much I can do nothing but look at her, bewildered. There is no trick to her expression, no gotcha I can uncover beneath her kind gaze.
“I do love that all Dallases still speak in riddles for the sport of it, but it’s so not the vibe right now,” she continues. “It’s like, please be straightforward. Just explain how this works! We’re begging!”
“We’re begging,” I echo.
“Too bad for us that Dallas Winthrop hates a beggar,” she says.
“Loathes one,” I confirm.
“Remember when Jessie Longino went to his office and sobbed to him that she should get to be Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, and he told her that if she wanted the part so much, she should spend her time preparing her audition and not bullying him into casting the show her way?”
“Wait, how do you know about that? I didn’t hear that story until I started teaching with him.”
“I happened to be outside his office when it happened,” she says.
“You happened to be a lot of places in those days, didn’t you?”
“What can I say? I’ve always had exceptional timing.”
It’s only when I go to roll my eyes that I realize my breathing has evened out. My fear isn’t gone, but it’s not crushing me either.
Did she know she was doing that? Did she just…help me on purpose?
“I can’t believe I’ve spent twenty years trying, and I still don’t understand Dallas’s mind,” I say. “Or yours,” I add, compelled for some reason to mention this.
“What is it about my beautiful mind that you don’t understand?”
“Most of the time, you’re smiling and laughing and letting people get away with just about anything,” I explain.
“But then you’ll have these flashes of what seems like honesty that come out of nowhere.
I never know how real they are, because as fast as they show up, they disappear again, and you act like none of it ever happened. You’re like a walking illusion.”
The light in her eyes dims, and I’m acutely aware that I’m the one who’s snuffed it out, when all I meant to do was make sense of her, of us, of anything at all.
“Got it.” She nods with pursed lips the same way she used to do when Dallas gave her tough performance feedback.
Feedback she’d swallow like a pill with no water, taking it in stride no matter how hard it was to choke down.
“You know, we should probably split up. See if we can learn anything on our own that might be useful. We can meet back in the auditorium for the show.”
“Come on, you’re the famous actress here. Surely you know that’s Horror Movie No-No’s 101,” I say, attempting for some reason I can’t explain to appeal to her. To return the light to her eyes.
She doesn’t bother to answer. No comment about how time with her could never be a horror movie. No joke about which of us would be the final girl. Nothing. She just walks down the hall without me.
I’m torn between wanting to point out that this very reaction proves my point and wanting to apologize for saying it so fresh on the heels of her offering me genuine help.
Needing space of my own, I head to my classroom, unable to accept that nothing here is mine. Or willing myself to change this reality, to be back in the place I know so I can hide out for a minute and organize my thoughts back into categories that make sense.
I am a teacher. Cilla and I are adults who do not care about our high school rivalry. Dallas respects me enough to tell me the truth.
Sitting in my classroom, with the lights off and her eyes closed, is Teacher Priscilla.
She shrieks when I enter, sending me skittering back to the light switch, accidentally forcing us to endure the invasive overhead lights.
“Sorry,” I say, embarrassed to have barged in like this. Of course she’d be here. No matter where I go in my life, I cannot manage to escape some version of her. “I was just…I needed a moment.”
Teacher Priscilla’s laugh comes out in a weak trickle. “It’s okay. Sorry I screamed.”
“It’s okay,” I echo.
“I needed a moment, too,” she says. “That’s exactly why I was sitting here in the dark. Until you walked in, I’d almost convinced myself someone had slipped a hallucinogen into my lunch.”
“That’s a good theory. I think I’m going with coma, personally,” I say. “But a good case could be made for fever dream. I’m certainly not acting like myself.”
Her laugh regains some of its force. It’s strange to witness, because she has Cilla’s face. She is Cilla, though I don’t feel our history between us, and that absence gnaws at me.
I recognize this sensation, though I’ve never allowed myself to entertain its meaning before. This is what I experience when I watch Cilla act. And yes, I watch her act. Not that she needs to hear about it. But what am I going to do when Dallas is always talking about how great she is?
When she’s performing on my TV screen, I’m conscious of my freedom to scrutinize her with whatever level of detail I’d like.
But I’m also constantly aware that she doesn’t have the same opportunity.
I’ve never had the ability to recognize that it’s a strange kind of sadness. I want her to be seeing me, too.
“I texted Jaz about this,” Teacher Priscilla admits.
“Jaz Sinclair?” I confirm.
“Who else?”
“I just…I don’t think Cilla really talks to Jaz anymore,” I say, relieved that Cilla isn’t around to hear me share this either, because it’s proof I have indeed kept tabs on her life.
When Jaz posted about Cilla’s Golden Globe nomination, there was something removed about it.
It felt like the perfunctory post of a distant friend, not the excited raving of someone Cilla speaks to all the time.
And when Jaz posted about her engagement to a woman she’d met on a retreat, I didn’t see Cilla giving any congratulations in the comments.
“I can’t imagine not talking to Jaz every day,” Teacher Priscilla replies. “Actually, can we text her a picture? She said she’s scared I’m doing some weird white-people magic and she’s too Black to accept this kind of thing without proof. But then she said she was scared to see the proof.”
“If it helps, you can tell her I’m scared, too, and I don’t want to be here any more than she wants me to be,” I say.
“I’ll tell her,” Teacher Priscilla says. “She’s always respected your opinion. Well, other you. You know what I mean.”
My cheeks warm. It used to bum me out that Jaz and Cilla were best friends, because I felt like I had a good relationship with Jaz, too, but it could never reach the next level with Cilla in the picture.
If this Jaz somehow respects Famous Mars, then my Jaz and I might be on track for booking matching tattoos someday. If I ever get back.
We send Jaz a picture where we’re smiling cheek to cheek, knowing it would be the exact kind of photo neither of us would ever take with the real version of each other.
As we wait for Jaz’s response, I examine Teacher Priscilla’s version of my classroom.
Where I’ve hung enlarged covers of classic books and quotes from my favorite plays, she has posters of book-to-film adaptations and pictures of famous actors.
Gesturing to Julia Roberts, I ask, “Any acting for you in this life?”
“God, no,” Teacher Priscilla says. “You made me quit. Well, other you.”
“She did?”