Chapter 13
Marlowe
Wearing a blond bob wig and an annoyed scowl, Famous Mars plops down beside Teacher Priscilla and me in the back row of the auditorium.
“It’s hot in here,” she says.
“You’re the one wearing a winter coat in May,” I remind her. She’s got on the same perfume as Cilla, but it’s wrong with our skin chemistry. We are not meant to smell like a sexy bonfire.
“Your Priscilla ditched me,” Famous Mars says. “Just up and left in the middle of a conversation.” She leans over to look at Teacher Priscilla on my other side. “You two really are the same.”
“We’re the same person,” Teacher Priscilla reminds her. It’s a glimmer of the Cilla I know, the quick-to-react impulsive talker who always has a charming comeback, or a subtle jab, or a frustrating way to laugh and be above it all.
The comment makes Famous Mars size me up. “I don’t know,” she says to Teacher Priscilla. “I don’t think this Marlowe and I are the same at all.”
We are, though. Because Famous Mars is every part of myself I don’t like, all the pieces I whittle down to shape into something better.
The last thing I want is to claim any parallels to this version of myself, so I say, “I’m inclined to agree,” and leave it at that, pivoting to ask, “You really don’t know where Cilla went? ”
“No clue,” she says with a shrug.
Bile rises in my throat, my fears compounding on one another no matter how hard I try to stop them from growing.
I’m the one who pushed things, and she asked to split up.
She ran away. What would stop her from going back into the Memory Machine without me?
I’d never know where she went or how to find her.
I can’t even find Dallas or my way back home.
I might be lost forever. And worse, I might be alone.
The auditorium darkens, filling me to the brim with fear.
“Excuse me,” I say, rising to leave and fumbling over Teacher Priscilla to escape.
The stage curtains part. Instead of a girl dressed in a plain nightgown set to perform “Mama Who Bore Me,” the show’s opening number, it’s Cilla Cove in her leopard coat and little black dress, holding a mic pack and wearing her signature smile.
“Students!” she says. “Come on out and fill the seats!” She drags the prop chair until it’s at the downstage lip, then plops herself onto it, crossing one leg atop the other as she pins the mic pack onto her coat.
I freeze, practically straddling Teacher Priscilla’s lap. Relief mixes with new anxieties. Cilla’s still here. She hasn’t left me alone. It’s so good to see her face, I don’t even mind that the phony affectation has returned in full force.
But who did she bribe to give her their mic pack? How did she get them to agree? And what in god’s name is she about to do?
I move my leg so Teacher Priscilla is no longer faced with a view of my ass, and I sit down again. The cast is filing out from both sides of the stage in uniform fashion, barely even muttering words of complaint.
It dawns on me that they’re following Cilla’s orders because they think she is Teacher Priscilla. The very Priscilla who sits beside me with her mouth agape.
“If she starts singing, I’m walking out,” Famous Mars says. “I had enough of that in high school.”
Dallas is the last to leave the wings. He has his arms crossed with one hand floating up in the air, his index finger curved into something like a question mark.
I can hear his thoughts as if we share one brain.
If he were sitting beside me, he’d lean over and whisper, What can I say?
I love theater, no matter how it comes. And this, my dear, is sure to be a performance.
Cilla takes a deep breath that gets picked up on her hot mic, and the low chatter of the crowd quiets to nothing.
This is her power. One single inhale, and she has all of us hanging on her next breath. It’s exactly what Dallas means when he says that some people just have it.
“Have you ever wondered who tells your story?” she asks, making sustained eye contact with a few kids in the first row.
“Is it you, or is it everyone else who creates the image of you, and you either have to accept that image or spend your life pushing against it, hoping someone cares enough to take your version of events as the truth?”
“Is this from a play?” Famous Mars whispers.
“What if we all grabbed the mic and said the truth?” Cilla continues.
“Did you know you can do that?” She directs this to the students.
“You can speak up, even if it’s awkward, or hard, or embarrassing.
And maybe people won’t listen, but you don’t have to feel like they’ve made a decision about who you are without your input.
I used to think I was really good at doing that, but I recently realized I haven’t been doing it for a very long time. So today, I’m changing that.”
Billy Larsen stands up. “Speak your truth, Priscilla!”
This gets some chuckles from the students.
“Thank you, Billy,” Cilla replies. “Glad to see your foot is okay. Just be careful if anyone wants to play kickball with you. Maybe wait until this show closes.”
The laughing students quiet again, and Billy sits back down, scratching his head.
“I want to set the record straight on something with all of you as witness,” Cilla says. “I need to talk about my high school experience with Marlowe Jenkins.”
It’s Teacher Priscilla who rises this time. “That’s it,” she says. “I’m stopping her.”
“Hold on.” I put a hand on her arm. I can’t let her end this. Not when Cilla’s given such an interesting prompt.
“Marlowe Jenkins thinks she knows everything,” Cilla declares.
This causes an audience chorus of low, scandalized oohs.
There are few things more ominous than when a group of high schoolers makes this sound.
Teacher Priscilla looks at me, knowing this just as well as I do.
Any goodwill we fostered together in her classroom has vanished.
In fact, her haughtiness is so much like my own Cilla’s that it really is a blow from all sides.
“Marlowe Jenkins was the first to read every play,” Cilla continues.
“She was usually off book before we’d even held a single rehearsal.
And during those rehearsals, she was the one to raise her hand and ask all the right questions about the material.
But for someone so studied, she never could make sense of me. ”
God, I never should have believed that Cilla would want to fix things between us. When have her actions ever been about peace? Even here, two worlds away from the one we know, she’s lighting things on fire for the fun of it.
“At first, I thought it was kind of amusing, how everything I said to her, she interpreted as an insult, no matter my actual intention,” Cilla continues.
“But then it became an annoyance. And then it became a genuine rivalry. She was determined to not like me, no matter what I said, or did, or didn’t do.
Nothing worked. I decided the best way forward was to lean into it.
Give in to the performance. I could go into how she misunderstood what I felt about acting, but what she’s misunderstood the most is what I felt about her. ”
“Oh god,” Teacher Priscilla mutters.
“What?” I ask urgently in the same voice I’d use if someone said a bug landed on me but didn’t tell me where or what kind. It feels the same, too, like something is crawling all over me but I can’t swat it away fast enough to be free of the sensation.
Even with Cilla more than fifty feet away, a whole red ocean of seats between us, her eyes still find mine. She stands up from her chair and says, “Marlowe Jenkins never understood that I spent all four years of high school completely and totally in love with her.”
The shock hits my center hot and fast as a poker.
I don’t care that we’re in another world.
It doesn’t matter if all these students don’t know me as me.
I still know them. I know their minds, their hearts, and their dreams for their life beyond high school.
And I know this auditorium, too. It has always been my safe place, the one sacred room where things go right for me instead of wrong. Except when Cilla Cove is around.
Cilla might be the one who started this, but I’m going to finish it. If she thinks this has always been some kind of performance between us, then here I am, showing up to play my part as the villain.
“How fucking dare you,” I seethe as I charge the stage.
Her ankle gives out as she steps backward. She can barely recover before I’ve invaded her space, pressing us together until we’re chest to chest.
“Tell them how in the middle of our last show together as seniors, right over there in the wings, you thought it would be hilarious to mess with me one last time.” I stare into her contracting pupils. “Tell them how you kissed me. Again. For the second time in twenty-four hours.”
“Marlowe, I—”
“You what?” I ask. “You didn’t think I’d ever mention that part? You thought I’d let that slide in favor of your narrative, where you were silently pining for me? Fuck that. You said yourself that second kiss was a prank. You told me that to my face.”
“This is kinda messed up,” Billy Larsen offers from the audience.
“Hush,” Dallas says.
“Tell them how you thought it was kind of weird how seriously actors take their job and that you’d never do that, and yet you’re the one who made it a career, all because you knew it was the one thing I wanted most in life,” I continue.
“You had to prove to me once and for all that you were the better one, didn’t you?
You had to get in my head one last time. ”
My voice drops into a dangerous warble that’s half anger, half grief.
The audience is pin-drop quiet, and the awkward silence shows me how much I’ve lost the plot.
They have no idea what point I’m trying to make, because none of the history I’m bringing up belongs in this world.
I don’t know what point I’m trying to make anymore either.
I came up here to get revenge on Cilla, and all I’m doing is sharing my own vulnerabilities.
I grab Cilla’s forearms and shove us stage right, pushing until we’re both inside the Memory Machine, rocking it back so hard it almost tips over. Wherever we’re going, at least it won’t be here, where they’ve all watched me make a mockery of myself.
When I close the door and press the button, nothing happens. The machine does not glow red. There’s no countdown, no strange lift.
“What the hell?” I ask, pressing the button until my index finger starts to ache from the impact.
It’s hard to breathe inside this dark box. Or maybe it’s my chest constricting, nostrils full of Cilla’s perfume, head hazy from the memories we’ve dredged up and the pain I’ve paraded out for an audience of confused teenagers.
We can’t be stuck.
There has to be another reality.
“No,” I say, pressing the button again and again. “Come on.”
“We’ll have to open the door eventually,” Cilla says.
Even here, she still has her composure. “No,” I tell her as beads of sweat fall from the tip of my nose.
“I don’t mean to make a bad thing worse, but wouldn’t it stand to reason that they’ll believe we’re having sex?” she asks me. “What else could we possibly be doing in here in their eyes?”
That feeling returns again. The one that reared up the second she appeared in Dallas’s office—pure, unfiltered hatred.
“I wish I never fucking met you,” I say, pressing the button again.
This time, the machine works.