Repeating her practiced lines under her breath one last time, she stood just in front of the boy and waited for him to look back up. Then the bus jolted forward and caused her to stumble into an empty seat behind him. After that it felt too awkward to move back to him. She waited for someone to take a seat next to her, but apparently she was one of the last stops and the seat remained empty.
When she finally tried the local language on someone outside of her homeroom class, they laughed and said, “Dude, we all speak English here.”
At lunch that day she finally found a group of Americans to sit with, but they didn’t speak about the same things she would’ve spoken about with anyone in Glen Ellyn. A summer of partying on boats off the Croatian coast, of family yoga retreats in Bali, of junior internships with leading tech companies in San Francisco; instead of a summer of biking the streets, of boredom and pools and barbecues, of road trips to Wisconsin. Her lines did not fit into this play.
The misfires continued, and with each one, a terrifying realization dawned on Celeste: she was not at home anymore.
* * *
So of course Celeste had looked forward to the lock-in night. When the posters started coming up, she saw an opportunity. She’d signed up for everything that had a sign-up sheet (the ceramics club workshop, the game of tag to raise awareness about housing inequality, the Hot Sauce Club’s Spice Scream Social). But for the first two hours of the lock-in, her aspirations of meeting someone to connect with, of finding even a glimpse of a home at CIS, had not come to fruition. She had sampled three hot sauces before leaving that particular room, finding it hard to interrupt the little groups of threes and fours. She had participated in the Lock-In Night Escape Room—the students who’d organized it were thrilled to hear, once the news broke, what Marisa had done—but since she hadn’t arrived with a group, she had been assigned to a quartet of resentful seniors. They’d barely looked at her the entire time, speaking in a mix of languages Celeste couldn’t even identify.
Now she stood outside the bathroom in the gym wondering where to go next, feeling the enormous weight of unmet expectations pressing down on her diaphragm. Everywhere, people walked and gathered and laughed in groups. Celeste felt as if there were a spotlight on every single one of them, and only she remained in the shadows.
Then she noticed another poster. More of a paper, really, obviously ripped from a notebook not long before and taped up on this spot last-minute, the font unimpressive and sloppy, unlike the majority of lock-in posters.
Wanna laugh? Improv! Funny! FUN. 8 pm, the room behind the theater.
An arrow pointed the way, so Celeste, encouraged by its goofiness, having been raised in a family that constantly poked fun at each other, headed toward Kenji Pierce, looking for the comforts of a laugh.
* * *
Kenji Pierce was at that moment standing outside the room trying to coax various passersby to come in and watch his improv team perform. Not many had heeded his call, save for a group of impressionable freshmen who had heard Ludovico Rigo was on the team and were happy to have the opportunity to watch him do anything for fifteen straight minutes. To watch him and giggle and to be expected to do nothing else. A luxury, a dream come true. Lock-in night truly was sublime.
Among all the students at CIS looking forward to the lock-in, everyone who had lain awake at night picturing the fun that was to be had, everyone who drifted off in class daydreaming, the excitement they felt deep down in their bellies as soon as they learned of the night and which had been rising to the surface as the date inched closer, none were happier right at that moment than tall, lanky, bespectacled Kenji Pierce, whose hair was eternally cowlicked, and his smile, it seemed, smeared across his face just as consistently.
Kenji, a freshman who had been at CIS a remarkable three years, and had been looking forward to his first year of high school so he could finally take part in the lock-in, had admittedly not done much in the way of activities so far. He’d half listened to the welcoming ceremony, which had featured a celebrity alum Kenji did not recognize, choosing instead to spend that time cracking jokes with his best friend, Lindsay. As soon as they were dismissed and the fun began, Kenji and Lindsay ran off toward the food trucks parked by the soccer field. He’d ordered a trio of Southeast Asian tacos, to go. Had he known how long it would be before he was allowed outside again, he might still have chosen to do what he did next. Which was to run across the field toward the back staircase and go immediately to sit in the green room.
The green room was the classroom behind the theater, used normally for drama and cinematography classes, as well as the occasional spillover English class. There was no need for Kenji and Lindsay to be there that early. The improv showcase wasn’t set to start for another two hours and all the other members of their team were playing laser tag in the parking garage. But Kenji was ready for improv, and he was happy to wait with Lindsay and ignore all other activities until it came. They sat and joked and played some warm-up games, and when Lindsay said she wanted to go check out the food fight for a minute, Kenji stood in the hallway trying to get people to fill the theater.
It would fill up. Every event at lock-in night seemed to get a far better turnout than even the most hopeful organizers had wished for. There were dozens of events going on at the same time, and a limited number of people with which to fill those activities, but no club was ever disappointed.
Kenji cared little for the crowd size. He just cared that he could play improv in front of others, that he could profess his love for it, that he could do it free of judgment. He spent all his time with improv, made any homework assignment he could about the subject, no matter how tangentially, and the people at school would ask only, “Yes, and...?” His classmates seemed to inherently understand that central tenet of improv: to accept the terms presented to you and build upon them.
His father, on the other hand, would say it was impractical to build something without first tearing down what was there before. Arthur Pierce worked in construction, and he was constantly making comments like that, which didn’t entirely make sense, but rather seemed aimed to prove that Kenji was wrong.
At home, Kenji had heard “no” a lot from his father. No, a Pierce could not “opt out” of a sport. No, a Pierce could not play pranks on the whole family. No, a Pierce could not play pranks on just the British side, nor on just the Japanese side, nor on just the Spanish cousin who had married in last summer. No, a shadow puppet show wasn’t an appropriate postdinner activity at the restaurant. No, they couldn’t listen to a podcast in the car. No, humor wasn’t particularly important, was not to be given the weight of responsibilities, of school courses, of ambition, of concrete. No, humor could not be, in itself, an ambition.
But this place had so few restrictions, so few parameters built around what a person could be. The audience saw a Japanese boy with a British accent and a goofy sense of humor and thought, as if they had each been trained in the art of improv, “Yes, and...?” They saw someone like Omar Ng, a valedictorian and a star athlete all while being shy and awkward and they thought, “Yes, and...?” For his classmates and teachers, a person’s characteristics were not boxes (or rather, buildings) to place them into; they were colors with which to paint a whole, unique picture.