“Right,” I said, relieved that I didn’t have to get into it with Stevie about how hanging out with your ex who dumped you was never a good idea. “Ah well. Too bad.”
“The timing is crazy,” Stevie said, shaking her head. “Have you noticed that, how everything always seems to land on the same day?”
“I have!” Teri, who was walking ahead of Stevie, chimed in. “It’s weird, right?”
We hustled into class, dropped our bags along the wall, and then, like usual, took our seats on the floor. The acting classrooms were practically bare—there was a table pushed off to the side, some chairs, and a couch that we were only supposed to use for scene work but that, over the years, we’d all used for naps. Mr. Campbell was sitting in a chair he’d placed in the front of the room, just looking at us, and everyone quieted down in a hurry and sat on the floor in a loose semicircle as we looked up at him and waited.
As soon as I sat down, and the silence fell, I looked closely at Mr. Campbell, trying to read something in his expression. Did Emery know what she was talking about? Or were things decided already, the answer tucked somewhere in his pile of papers? But his expression revealed nothing—he was as impassive and hard to read as usual.
Mr. Campbell was thirty-eight, divorced, no kids. He hadn’t volunteered any of this information, but we knew how to google. He was an actor, too—when he was younger, he’d done lots of commercials, guest spots on long-cancelled TV shows, roles on all the Laws & Order. But at some point, he’d clearly switched his focus to theater—teaching, running the entire department, and directing. He did a reverse commute every day into the suburbs, returning after school was over to New York City, where things were much more exciting.
He always wore button-downs and dark pants, and never a tie except on show nights. He had a beard, dark hair he kept short, and black-framed glasses he was always perching on top of his head and forgetting about. “Don’t you think he looks like Paul Rudd?” I’d asked Stevie freshman year. “Young Paul Rudd or old Paul Rudd?” she had clarified, then had withdrawn the question when she realized it was redundant. We all spent a lot of time speculating about Mr. Campbell—about his acting career, about his personal life, about what his life in the city was like.
“You guys are obsessed with him,” Beckett had told us once at lunch last year, when Stevie and I had spent most of the time debating what, exactly, Mr. Campbell had meant when he’d said something cryptic, leaving rehearsal the night before. Stevie and I had looked at each other, a little guiltily, as Beckett had pushed back from the table to get some fries—but, more likely, a break from us. And he wasn’t wrong. We all spent a lot of time talking about Mr. Campbell. But Mr. Campbell was the theater department.
He cast and directed both plays every year, and taught the advanced theater classes. The musical theater department was run by Ms. Wallace, who cast the spring musical and taught the musical theater classes. But most of the leads in the musicals went to the people who got leads in the plays, even if there were technically better singers for the parts—it was common knowledge she consulted with Mr. Campbell before casting. And anyway, it wasn’t like the choir kids who always auditioned were getting any leads—and they should have known better than to expect them. None of us were suddenly walking into the choir room expecting to get an aria, or whatever it was they did in choir.
Stanwich High was just so big that the competition for everything was intense—but especially in the theater department. I’d always liked to write, and at some point freshman year I’d thought about joining the paper or the literary magazine—but that was before I got cast in my first play and realized that wasn’t how it worked. You couldn’t do anything else if you did theater. Whenever I saw a television show set in a high school where characters were on the football team one week and then in the school play the next, I’d roll my eyes and then invariably find something else to watch.
“So,” Mr. Campbell said softly, crossing one ankle over his knee and settling back in his chair. He almost never raised his voice—we were always quieting down and leaning in closer to hear him. “We need to talk about the Lear casting.”
I twisted my hands together. The room was totally silent, like my fellow thespians had stopped breathing.
“I am sorry to disappoint you,” Mr. Campbell said, his brow furrowed. “But the list isn’t going up today.”
There was a pause, and then everyone started talking at once, but I just sat there, a roaring in my ears. This was not how things were supposed to go. I was supposed to know today. I was supposed to return home after school cloaked in glory, able to tell my parents that I’d gotten the part, able to start to see the rest of my year and how everything would fit together. I’d prepared myself to get only as far as seeing the list—it was like my imagination ran out after that. I had no idea what things looked like now, like my brain couldn’t adjust to this new reality.
“What?”
“But you said—”
“You always—”
“What’s the problem? Is it Erik?”
“Shut up, Jayson!”
“You always post it on Friday—”
“Are you going to switch plays? Do we need to prepare another monologue?”
“Mr. Campbell,” I said, raising a shaking hand, “I just think—”
“Guys!” We all quieted down immediately. “I get that you’re disappointed, and I’m sorry. But it’s just taking me… a little longer than I thought to cast this one. Things aren’t as clear as I thought they’d be.”
I swallowed hard. What did this mean?
“Do you… want to do another day of callbacks?” Eric asked, a tentative note in his voice, and I drew in a sharp breath. We’d never done that before.
“I don’t… think so,” Mr. Campbell said slowly, like he was turning over the words in his head as he said them. “I’m just…” He looked around the room, then leaned forward. “I can’t say that recent events haven’t shaken my faith in this department. I’d thought we were all on the same page, that we valued the same things. Loyalty. Commitment. Dedication. And honestly, even having to wonder these things… it’s just making this decision harder.”
I looked over and caught Stevie’s eye, and then we both looked away, but it had been enough to let me know we were both thinking the same thing—that this was about Dara Chapman.
My stomach was in knots, because what were we supposed to do about this? If he’d just said he was having trouble casting the ensemble, or the guys, it would have been different. But this was all of us.
And then an even more terrible thought occurred to me—what if it wasn’t all of us? What if it was me?
“How long are you thinking?” Jayson asked. “I mean—when do you think we’ll know?”
“I’d say… Monday.”
“Monday?” I hadn’t even realized I was going to speak this out loud before it was already happening. I bit my lip and Mr. Campbell raised an eyebrow at me.
“Kat? You have a problem with that?”
“Just…” I took a breath. “It just seems like kind of a long time, that’s all. Maybe you could email it when you make the decision and that way we wouldn’t have to wait?”