Rehearsal

by Alexandra Kessler

You wrote a play because you wanted attention. What you did not expect is that the drama club would actually put it on, or that Pete Silver would play your leading role. The fact that you got exactly what you wanted worries you. Like it will never happen again. But the play is commencing and you’ve accepted that.

You love Pete Silver like your mother loves Jesus. You want to nail him to the wall over your bed. You want to white-knuckle his limbs like Mary in those stained-glass pictures. You want him to look at your face and see the creamy amber light of a woman, divine.

He’s a senior, and this will be his last high school play. He has starred in every play since his freshman year, and his last play will be your play. You ache for the situation to feel as important for him as it does for you. But why would it?

You are a month into rehearsals. It is February and opening night isn’t until June. You have nothing but time. You like staying for after-school rehearsals. The school building is empty and dark, and they turn all the lights out except for the auditorium. You wish that somebody had died in your high school, so there would be ghosts to discuss, a fear to bind you and the rest of the cast all together.

It is Friday night, and you’re rehearsing a scene that’s just Pete Silver and Abigail—your fellow sophomore—who plays his wife. Mr. Rorke, who is your history teacher but also directs the drama club, is letting you direct this scene by yourself. 

Since he made you his co-director, Mr. Rorke thinks you are his friend. He has told you that his wife had an affair with the dog breeder from whom she adopted a puppy. But it’s over now, and she and Mr. Rorke are trying to rebuild trust. You don’t mind rehearsing scenes alone while he yells at her quietly over the phone in the back row of the auditorium. 

Mr. Rorke drives you home from rehearsals because he lives near you. It is a small town, everyone lives near you. One time Mr. Rorke told you that if he ever has a daughter, he hopes she will be just like you. Another time he told you that if he could get married all over again, he would choose a woman just like you. You resented that he assumed you’d be faithful. You are fifteen, and you try to convince yourself that you still have time to marinate, to grow into someone Mr. Rorke would be too intimidated to talk to.

This is the scene: Pete Silver’s character has just told Abigail’s character that he is going to leave her. In the script, you wrote that she slaps him and runs offstage. But now that Pete Silver is in front of you, a warm and moving animal, you see that more can be done. 

Pete Silver has swoopy hair and a look in his careful eyes that you think means he might understand you. As an adult, you’ll recognize this look as resignation, a kind of giving up. But for now, you’re enchanted. You want him to see you, to be sweet with you. But for that to happen you need to get his attention. So far, he has not yet spoken to you or called you by name. These weeks of him looking past you, like you’re not even there, must be punished.

It’s ridiculous, the way Abigail is slapping him, because she’s not really slapping him. She raises her arm up high and swings it down softly, stopping her palm when it’s inches from his face. Pete Silver whips his head around and falls backward, pantomiming perfectly his response. But, you keep telling them, Abigail’s performance doesn’t earn Pete Silver’s. Her weak slap isn’t even making a sound. You tell Abigail to hit him for real. She says she doesn’t want to. You wait for Pete Silver to say something. If you make him uncomfortable, he can’t forget you.

“I guess we can try that,” he says. For you—victory enough.

“It’ll look so much better,” you say.

So they do it again, and Abigail hits him for real, but she’s holding back. When the slap lands it barely makes a noise, and Abigail stands there, limp-wristed like a lazy infant, looking worried. 

“You have to go for it,” you tell her. “You didn’t hurt him. He’s fine.” 

“It’s ok, Abigail,” he tells her. “I’m fine.”

So she hits him again, and again, and again, until everyone is over the shock of it. The sound builds more brilliantly each time, acoustic joy. Pete Silver is still beautiful, maybe more, with his face swollen and red and sweating. He has to keep his hands shoved in his pockets to resist anticipating the slap. 

“I think we got it,” he says to you, after a while. “I think she can stop now.”

“Just one more time,” you say. “It’s almost perfect.” 

They go back to their places and reset. They yell the angry lines you wrote, and then Abigail runs toward him, raising her arm. But this time, Pete Silver catches her elbow and shoves, sending her stumbling dumbly across the stage. She catches herself, surprised. “Okay,” he clenched-teeth whispers. “That’s enough, okay?”

He presses his palm against his face and breathes hard through his nose. He closes his eyes, then opens them.

“I’m sorry I pushed you, Abigail,” he says. “I’m really sorry.” 

He jumps down off the stage and comes right up to you. You can smell his generic Walmart brand deodorant. You want to lift up his shirt and burrow under it. You want to chew on him like a rat. You don’t know how he wound up with the face he has. You’ve seen his parents around town—his mother is fat and sour and his father is bald and pale and mean. You wonder how that works, scientifically, how DNA sequences can make diamonds from detritus.

“Hey,” he says to you, looking in your eyes. “Can I take a break? For a minute?” He touches your shoulder. You say he can, and it was all worth it, because he looked in your eyes. He touched your shoulder.

Mr. Rorke drives you home. His car is full of dog hair and stinks like cigarettes, though he doesn’t smoke around you. You roll the window down all the way, even though it’s snowing. The road is all white, with dark woods on either side. When it snows here, you can’t tell where anything begins or ends. 

“I’m sorry I was distracted today,” Mr. Rorke says. He says this after every rehearsal. “How did everything go?”

You tell him that everything went fine, that you got some good scene work done with Abigail and Pete Silver. 

“Peter is a nice-looking kid, don’t you think?” Mr. Rorke asks you. You tell him that you never thought about it.

“He’s one of the lucky ones,” Mr. Rorke says. “Like you.”

“Not like me,” you say. You say that before the play, you were invisible. You floated around school and town like a nonentity. Up until now you were so insignificant that you were negative space—your presence could make an empty room even emptier. 

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Mr. Rorke says. “I noticed you.”

You ask him how things with his wife are going. 

“What we’ve got is a failure to communicate,” he says. “And now she’s out for blood because her dog is missing. I left the front door open—for one minute—and it bolted.” 

“I’m sorry about the dog,” you say. 

“Whatever. I hate that dog. I hope it’s dead.” He turns onto your street and you sit in silence while he finds your house. When he stops, you thank him for the ride and open the car door. 

“It’s a black Labrador, medium size, if you happen to see it,” he says.

Your mother is dating the pastor from your church. She says that it’s the best sex she’s had in her life. I recommend men of God, she tells you, it’s like there are tiny little angels living in his cock. The pastor lives in a double-wide in the woods behind the church and your mother spends weekends there. 

Tonight, like every night, you read your play in front of the mirror, cover to cover. You say the terrible dialogue out loud and pinch yourself all over. You remind yourself that the drama club wanted to put on a student play and you are the only person in the whole school who wrote one. It’s not like they had choices and your play was the best play. It is actually a very bad play. You will never write a play again. 

When you were little, your mother told you to do this to manage anxious thoughts: Imagine there’s a string that’s attached to your brain and hangs out your ear. When you pull the string, you can pull your brain, whole, out through your ear canal. Imagine doing this, slowly, over and over. When the thoughts won’t leave and your mother has gone to bed, you drink one of her beers and fall asleep sucking your thumb with all your clothes on in the empty bathtub.

Rehearsals continue to run smoothly enough. Mr. Rorke is increasingly distracted, always angry and short with everyone except for you. Everyone says he might get fired because he’s been acting erratic. There are rumors that he drives back to the school late at night and sleeps in his classroom. But Mr. Rorke being out of it means you get more time with Pete Silver. More time to watch the shadows of his face under stage lights, more time to give him directions he has to follow. You have never felt so excited. You feel like your mind is clear, and your body is useful. 

One Friday, after rehearsal, Pete Silver asks if you want to hang out.

“Now?” you ask.

“Later tonight,” he says. He’ll come pick you up from your house.

You say, that sounds fine, I guess.

Mr. Rorke is driving very slow, torturing you. You need to get home and get ready for tonight.

“Mr. Rorke,” you say, “Can you drive a little faster?” 

He looks at you, and then pulls over to the side of the road. He turns the car off and covers his face with his hands.

“Are you all right?” you ask. “What happened?”

He starts to cry. His eyes are sticky and red like a reptile’s. 

You ask him if something happened with his wife, but he doesn’t answer. 

“Is the dog dead?” you say. “You hated that dog.”

Mr. Rorke grabs you by the back of the neck and steers your face toward his. He presses his cheek against your cheek, like you’re best friends posing for a picture, his eyes wet on your neck. You try to pull yourself away, push as flat as possible against the door, but the car is very small and you are both wearing puffy winter coats.

“I know you’re lonely too,” he says.

You can’t see the dashboard clock over Mr. Rorke’s head. He is still waiting for you to say something. You figure that your only way home is to give him a little of whatever it is you think he wants. You reach your arm around and sort of pet him on the head. You comb his hair with your fingers.

“Please, Mr. Rorke,” you say, “I have to go home. I have plans tonight.” He looks up at you, and says your name. You wonder if he’s ever hit anyone. 

You realize that, right now, Mr. Rorke could lock all the car doors and take you anywhere he wanted to. You look at the road in front of you: all snow and trees and too much space. There are men who keep women prisoners, chained up in sheds. The scene would go like this: You would be wearing a ripped and blood-splattered Laura Ingalls Wilder-style prairie nightgown and your hair would be long and tangled with dirt and you would scream and scream. Mr. Rorke would get up real close to your face and whisper scream all you want, nobody can hear you out here and it would be true. 

But he starts the car and takes you home. You thank him for the ride, and decide that nothing will ruin this night for you.

The pastor is sitting on your living room couch. He says your mother is out. He has two plates, one balancing on each fat knee. One plate has a stack of sliced deli turkey and the other has a stack of American cheese. He presses a slice of turkey and a slice of cheese together and rolls them into a tube—a snack your mother introduced him too. Can you believe, she told you, that I taught him something? 

“You want a turkey tube?” he asks you.

You say you’re not hungry. 

“I brought some ham over,” he says. “I can make you a sandwich.” 

You say no thanks.

You change into a blue dress that your mother hemmed for you. You think it looks good against your legs when they’re bare and pink, so you don’t put on tights. You take off your underwear and brush your teeth twice.

You sit on the couch with the pastor until Pete Silver comes. You try not to sweat. You close your eyes and imagine pulling your brain out through your ear, very slowly. Then Pete Silver’s car is outside your house. It honks one, long honk. 

You ask the pastor if you look pretty, and he tells you that the flesh is meaningless.

Pete Silver’s car is filled with empty soda bottles and plastic bags and greasy napkins. You want to clean it all out and take his car to get detailed. It excites you, the thought of being useful to him. He squeezes your shoulder and says it’s good to see you. He asks if you’re hungry, and you say not really. 

“I have some weed—maybe we can smoke it and then you’ll be hungry?” 

He rolls a skinny joint and licks it closed. You watch him in silence. You would rather say nothing than make a mistake. The two of you smoke right there in the car, stopped on the side of the road. 

“I’m glad you could see me tonight,” he says. “I was thinking we should be friends.”

You ask him what he means.

“You push me,” he says. “You take me seriously.”

“I do,” you say.

“I need smarter friends. I’ve never had a friend who wrote a play.”

“It’s not a good play,” you say. 

“I feel like I can tell you things,” he says.

You push your dress a little higher up your thigh. You cross your legs so your bare knee is unavoidable. You watch him look at it.

“Looks like you’re getting frostbite or something,” he says. You say you feel good. He touches your knee and then pulls his hand away, dramatically. 

“You’re freezing!” he says, “Why didn’t you tell me? I’ll turn the car on.” 

He buys you a kid’s meal at the McDonald’s drive-through. He gets a hamburger that he eats immediately and practically whole. You take tiny bites of rubbery nugget. You want to get out of this parking lot, you want him to take you somewhere private, a place that someday you could both call “our place.” You ask him if he’s excited to graduate.

“Not really,” he says, rubbing grease from his mouth. “I have to start working for my father, driving trucks. I’m taking over some of his routes since he’s getting too decrepit to drive the longer ones. The trips that take weeks.”

“That sounds hard,” you say. 

“He’s been training me for it, you know, ever since I was little. He wouldn’t let me fall asleep for days. He’d drag me out of bed in the middle of the night and throw me in the shower.”

“I like a cold shower in the morning,” you say.

“Sometimes it was really cold, and sometimes it was boiling hot,” he says.

You want to see what his hair looks like wet, you want to be underwater with him.

“So you’re not going to act anymore?” you ask.

“That’s just something to do, for now, for fun. But maybe I’ll write a play, in my head, while I’m driving the trucks. Maybe I’ll be just like you.” He puts his arm around you and quickly half-hugs. Your lungs deflate.

You have to do something to bind him to you, before the moment isn’t yours anymore.

“Do you want to go on a walk?” you ask. “The creek behind the school is frozen. It’s really beautiful.” 

You want him to say: It’s not more beautiful than you.

“Sure,” he says, “Let’s go.” 

You both smoke a little more in the parking lot behind the auditorium, so your skins won’t ache from the wind. He takes a flashlight from his car, because the sun has set. Then you walk across the soccer field and into the woods. 

“Really good snow back here,” Pete Silver says, pointing the flashlight at the ground. “Nobody’s walked on it yet, it still has that crunch.”

You feel proud, like you had a hand in the state of the snow. You pretend to slip a little, and Pete Silver hooks his arm around yours. He tells you to be careful. He says to tell him if you’re getting too cold. 

The creek is black and frozen solid and snakes through the snow like unraveled intestines. There is no noise, and you can barely see where you came from.

“I can’t believe this is right behind school,” Pete Silver says. “It’s like a different earth.” You put your hands flat against Pete Silver’s belly and push him up against a tree. You stand on your toes and put your open mouth on his. You lick his teeth. You wait for him to do something, but the two of you just stand there, breathing into each other. He tries to step away from you, but you grab onto the front of his coat and won’t let go. He tries to pry your fingers off, surprised by your strength. He starts slapping at your hands but you don’t feel a thing. 

“Please, stop,” he says.

“I know you’re lonely too,” you try.

“We should be friends,” he says, and everything breaks. 

The two of you walk back through the woods, to the car. Pete Silver says something, but you can’t hear him. You ask him to say it again, but he says it doesn’t matter. When you get to the parking lot, you tell him you’re going to walk back. 

“Don’t do that,” he says. “Please, let me take you home.”

You say that you like walking at night, and your house is not that far. You tell him you’re sure about it, you’ve already decided. He says goodbye, and that he’ll see you at rehearsal. He makes you take his flashlight. There is nothing but time between now and the end of the play. You don’t think you can make it. You can’t imagine a world where you make it. 

You walk alone in the dark. In your mind, Pete Silver pulls up next to you, headlights desperate. He was wrong, he wants you. But there is only the crack of ice under your boots, the shifting of the snow-heavy trees lining the road. Suddenly, real headlights, a car coming at you. You leap into the woods to avoid being seen. You’re not entirely sure, but you think it’s Mr. Rorke’s car, headed toward the school. 

You decide to walk through the woods the rest of the way home. In the woods, you can pretend to be someone else. In a different town, with different fears. Something darts out in front of you: a black dog, medium-sized, scared, hungry. It growls at you, but then just sits there. You shine the flashlight in its face, but it still doesn’t move. Come here, you say, good boy. Come here. You clap your hands for him but he still doesn’t come. Even this dog knows you want too much, can smell the loneliness on you. So you decide on something new. You kick the dog out of the way, walk past it, and leave it to its darkness. You never look back, but you’re pretty sure you can hear the snow-crunch of unwise paws following you home.

Published January 24th, 2021