My first initiation into the technical theater department at Tovido High School took place the next day, after school ended, and it was in the form of meeting the loud, brash, agitated director, Ms. Morris.
“You will call me ‘Ms. M’ or ‘ma’am,’ and nothing else!” She declared, tipping her glasses down and scrutinizing me like a hawk sizing up its dinner. “Now, what do you want?” Oliver, who was leaning against the wall and looking amused, gave me a small nod. I licked my lips nervously. I was terrible with confrontational people.
“I… uh, I’d like to, well, I’m signing up for the stage crew?” I said, faltering at her raptor gaze.
“Was that supposed to be a question?” She asked, rather pointedly. Oliver cleared his throat behind me to hide a laugh and I could feel a flush start to creep up my cheeks. He was enjoying this! The final condition to me joining the stage crew, and thus being able to spend my lunch periods free of Stephanie’s harassment, was that Oliver ‘didn’t have time to babysit me,’ which meant I was going to have to take care of things myself and learn quickly to make up for, well, a complete lack of knowledge regarding the workings of the theater. My first task was to let this rather intimidating matron know that I would be hanging around from here on out.
I took a deep breath and tried not to be subdued by her icy look. “No, uh, not a question. I’m joining the crew, definitely.”
“Do you have any prior experience, Miss...?” Ms. M tapped her pencil on her desk impatiently.
“Leonard. Harper Leonard.” I answered quickly, rocking back and forward on my feet and fidgeting with the straps of my backpack. “And, no, I don’t.”
“Then, Harper, what makes you think you won’t just be getting in the way around here?” she asked, pursing her lips.
“I, well, uh, I learn quickly, and I follow directions, and I’m new so I don't have anyone to talk to. So I won’t get distracted, I guess.” I added the last bit as an afterthought and immediately hated myself for it. I mean, how pathetic could one person be, really? My mouth was so dry it felt like someone had stuffed it full of napkins.
“Well, I like the sound of all that, especially the last bit,” Ms. M said, breaking her scrutinous gaze and shuffling some papers around on her desk. “Oliver, you’re in charge of her, if she screws up, you screw up. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go put the band director in line, he’s trying to reserve our stage for some dinky recital or something.” With that, she stood sharply and marched out of her office and down the hallway, the heels of her shoes clicking smartly on the linoleum.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Oliver quipped, leading me back through the back of the empty drama classroom and into the shop, where we found C.C. and two other kids lounging around. His cologne, as always, was a bit on the strong side walking this close to him; good thing it smelled pretty good, or I would have been choking on my own breath.
“She’s like the human version of a chimera,” I said in a low voice, glancing briefly over my shoulder just to be sure she wasn’t lurking behind me. Oliver shrugged.
“You guys talking about Ms. M?” C.C. piped up. She was laying on a table with her feet propped up on the wall, reading a book upside-down when we walked in. She nimbly rolled to a sitting position with a grin on her face. “So, I heard you want to become a misfit miracle like the rest of us weirdos, huh?”
“I guess,” I replied, wondering why C.C.’s grin reminded me of the Cheshire Cat.
“Looks like you two will be good friends,” Oliver interjected. “So, C.C., you’re in charge of her from now on. She goes where you go and does what you do; you teach her the ropes.”
“Oh, make me the babysitter, why don’t you?” She rolled her eyes and tossed her teal-streaked hair over her shoulder. “Fine, we need some estrogen around here anyway. Fodo is a junior, and your average dweeb. He runs our lighting equipment.” She pointed to a short, bony kid with a mop of brown curls who was playing on a handheld video game. He glanced up at me and began staring; I tried to return a friendly smile, but looked away after about two seconds because he was still staring. “MacBeth is, well, the name should explain it. She runs all the audio equipment.” The girl C.C. gestured to might have been goth, but it was hard to tell. She wore heavy makeup (including deep purple lipstick) but was wearing a bright red t-shirt. Only when she shifted to give me a death glare did I notice that there were huge black letters spelling Raining Blood on the front. For a girl who didn’t socialize anyway, it appeared as if I might have already gotten in over my head.
“Come on, I’ll take you out to the stage and give you the full tour,” C.C. said, hopping down from her perch and beckoning for me to follow. We spent the next fifteen minutes going over every location in the auditorium, from the design and control booth at the very back to a creepy, slimy storage cellar hidden underneath the stage called “the pit.” She explained to me that she was, in fact, the “stage manager,” and she was in charge of making sure everything happened where it was supposed to happen, when it was supposed to happen. I was actually really impressed: for a ragtag bunch of teenagers, it seemed that the place seemed to run smoothly and efficiently with little or no adult supervision.
“Sounds like you have plenty to take care of around here,” I ventured cautiously, when our tour had brought us back to center stage. “What do you want me to do?”
“I’m glad you asked! It’s not like I was just about to get to that, or anything.” C.C. grinned. Sarcasm was obviously her strong suit. “Exactly ten weeks from today will be the opening night of Twelfth Night, and we have a crap-ton of work to do you get ready for it. Karl, our electrician, got expelled last year for having cocaine in his locker. You’re going to fill his place.”
“Wait, you’re kidding, right? Cocaine?” I asked, eyes growing as wide as saucers.
C.C. shook her head. “Nope. Karl loved blow almost as much as he loved sticking his fingers in live electrical sockets. which was a lot. You’ve got big shoes to fill there, kid.”
“I don’t know anything about electrical… stuff.” I said pathetically.
“What a great opportunity to learn something, then!” C.C. said, rife with mock enthusiasm. “C’mon, I’ll take you up to the catwalk, that’s where we keep most of the stuff you’ll ever be playing with.”
“Catwalk?” I asked. “Where’s that?”
C.C. pointed at a metal ladder set in the side wall over the stage; it led into the rafters, or whatever they were called in a theater. I felt my stomach do a flip-flop. I shook my head violently, backing away a few steps.
“Oh, no,” C.C. looked at me with a huge sigh. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights.”
There are only a few things that truly scare me in this world:
Snakes. More specifically: rattlesnakes. I’ve read too many stories of kids dying from bites.
Centipedes. How could something have than many legs and not be a demon?
Heights. In any way, shape, or form. Nope.
“Deathly,” I squeaked, staring up at the ladder, which seemed to stretch up and up and up endlessly.
“Fan-freaking-tastic.” C.C. grabbed my hand and began bodily dragging me toward the ladder. “Come on, Sunshine. Time for some phobia-therapy.”
I suddenly felt like I was going to puke. Just what I needed.
The next hour and a half was a blur of information broken by two heart-stopping trips up and down the sixty-foot ladder up to the catwalk. The catwalk itself was a mysterious and eerie place, a maze of metal walkways surrounded by ceiling supports, steel cables, ropes, wires, and tons of lighting equipment. C.C. started me off with a screwdriver and a box of little black plugs--stage-pin connections--and showed me how to replace the existing ones with an old, broken light. Not “light,” “fixture.” C.C. was very firm on me calling things by their proper terms. She explained the concepts of “hot,” “neutral,” and “ground,” pointing out the different colors of the wires to me.
There’s pretty much three things you learn really quickly about working with electricity:
Never touch wires together unless you know what you’re doing.
Wear gloves. No one told me this one until after I had been shocked twice.
Don’t lick anything. Apparently, this was the last electrician’s problem. You know, besides the cocaine.
After about an hour of instruction, she left me by myself to take care of some things in the shop behind the stage. She handed me with a pile of plugs and several fixtures, and I plopped down in the main walkway on a strip of old carpet and got to work, cursing the fact that heat rises while feeling a drop of sweat roll down my spin. Funny thing about the work was that I didn't actually mind it, it was kind of calming. I wondered briefly how I was going to explain what I was doing to my mom, who still had no idea I had signed myself up for any extra curricular activities. With her schedule, though, she would always be home late, and I really found no reason to tell her about it. Dad was swamped with work, but I was hoping we would get time to sit down and talk about it. I wanted to tell him about everything; Stephanie, how C.C. and Oliver had defended me, and how I was branching out and, well, making friends, I guess.
It was hard not having anyone to share my first social successes with.
When I had finished my tasks I worked up the courage to meticulously pick my way back down the ladder. Forty-three rungs later (I counted carefully to keep from looking down) I was back on the ground, but no one else was anywhere to be seen. I checked the shop and the drama classroom, but both were empty. I wandered back out on stage and the window of the booth caught my eye. C.C. had pointed out the door and explained that all the electronic equipment for stage effects was stored inside the booth, but she hadn’t taken me inside Thinking that perhaps she or at least one of the others were working on something inside, I made my way up the auditorium steps and pushed open the door at the very back of the box-like structure.
The first thing that hit me was the sheer and absolute disorganization. It seemed as if every single inch of available wall space was covered in an array of papers, and every inch of flat surface in equipment. I fumbled around for a bit but I couldn’t find the light switch. There was just enough light coming in from the wide glass window overlooking the seats and the stage that I gave up and just started looking at some of the stuff inside the room, completely forgetting why I had gone in to begin with. I sniffed, taking in a sort of stale aroma that smelled like something musty and...burnt? I couldn’t imagine what could possibly make an odor like that.
There were several computers and a myriad of other technical-looking devices set up on a tall desk right in front of the window, presumably the lighting equipment the odd, skinny kid--Frodo--used to control the colors and levels and stuff. There was a toolbox heaped full of tools in the corner, and a wide variety of lighting fixtures and cables strewn about the floor. There was a large, plush blue armchair sitting in the corner with some kind of large misshapen lump filling the seat. I moved closer to investigate, and nearly had a heart attack when the lump suddenly began moving.
“Wha-HUH?!” Oliver shot up out of the armchair like a rocket off its launch pad, looking around with an expression of panic and bewilderment. After a moment, he seemed to register where he was, but still looked at me as if I had grow a third eye out of my forehead. I had stumbled backward into a chair and knocked a folder full of little colored plastic sheets all over the floor in my surprise, and now I was just trying to get my heart rate to return back to normal. Oliver and I stared at each other in a tense, uncomfortable silence for a few second before he finally spoke.
“What are you doing in here?” He asked, running a hand through his hair and giving me a hard look. “This area is off-limits, period.”
“Was was--sorry!--looking for C.C., ‘cause I’m, uh, done with my... project… upstairs,” I stammered, bending down to pick up the contents of the folder I had spilled. Oliver waved me off and cleaned up the mess quickly himself, slapping the folder down on the desk with some finality on the desk. We both just looked at each other for a long moment.
“Well? You going to leave, or what?”
“Were you asleep?”
We both said our piece at the same moment. To my surprise, he turned away somewhat subconsciously and gave the chair a guilty look. “I, erm… yeah. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,” he said finally, giving me a halfhearted shrug.
“That’s cool,” I said, holding my hands up and backing away toward the door. “You can get back to your napping, sorry I came in here.”
“Wait.”
I stopped in my tracks. moved a pile of stuff off of a stool in front of the desk and gestured for me to sit down. “This room isn’t actually off-limits, you just startled me, sorry. Ever been in here before?”
“No.” I took a tentative seat. Oliver took a few moments to point out the lighting control equipment, as I had suspected it was, and showed me into the room next door, which was the audio control and recording side of the booth. He explained how Frodo, he, and MacBeth would spend the show in the booth pressing buttons and watching for technical issues while C.C. would remain on stage and direct cues with a headset while letting actors and the actual stage crew (the people who moved set pieces around) know when they were on and what they were doing. Overall, it was kind of fascinating how complex the workings were behind the scenes. I was no stranger to theater; my mom lover to drag Dad and I to the Ordway Theater in St. Paul to watch this show or that show every few months, but I had never realized the sheer volume of work it took to keep a production moving smoothly from beginning to end. As Oliver finished giving me the run-down, C.C. finally appeared in the doorway, looking from him to me, and back again, with a peculiar expression resting on her terrifyingly pretty features for just a moment.
“You two kids gettin’ along famously?” She asked, cracking a wide grin. We both offered he a shrug. “Cool. Well, I hate to break up your little party, but there’s not much more to do, so I sent Frodo and Macbeth home already. Let’s lock up and get the hell out of here.” Oliver nodded in agreement and I tagged along as they set about locking doors and shutting off lights. When we had finished, the two of them led the way out of a pair of double doors set in the back wall of the shop and onto a large, secluded cement pad behind the school they called “the dock.” Instantly, the New Mexico heat settled on me like a woolen blanket and I wished it weren’t so darned oppressive.
“Oh, crap!” I exclaimed, suddenly realizing something. Both Oliver and C.C. looked at me quizzically, so I explained that I had completely forgotten that staying after school meant I would be missing the school bus home.
“Hey, no problem, Sunshine. I can give you a ride home,” C.C. said with a shrug. I hesitated; I had never ridden with another teenage in their car before. However, my aversion to the idea of walking forty-five minutes won out in the end and I thanked her for offering. All at once, a distinct sour aroma made me recoil and I turned around abruptly to discover the reason Oliver wore so much cologne in school: he was leaning back in one of the battered metal chairs with his feet propped up on the table, smoking a cigarette.
I could never, in a million years, have guessed that Oliver smoked. It was a habit my mind had reserved for… I don't know, dirty people.
He looked so at ease with it, like it were so natural for him. He was blowing thin streams of smoke lazily up into the air like he didn't have a care in the world.
We were three feet from a “tobacco free zone” sign, for crying out loud.
“Do you mind?” Oliver was looking at me out of the corner of my eye. I wasn’t sure if he was asking me if I minded that he smoked, or if he was conscious that I had been staring at him. I assumed it was the former, so I quickly shook my head “no;” the last thing I needed was these guys thinking I was some kind of uptight prude.
“C’mon, kid, I’ve got stuff to do after this, so let's get you home now,” C.C. said, exchanging a glance with him and gestured for me to follow here out to the parking lot. I looked back over my shoulder as we rounded the corner of the building and saw that Oliver appeared to be in no hurry to move from his seat.
“Does he really have to do that right next to the school?” I asked her as soon as we were out of earshot. “Isn't that dangerous?”
“Isn't what way?” C.C. asked casually, without looking back at me. “None of the staff sticks around this late, everyone but us and the sports teams vacate the place at the last bell. He's fine.”
Yeah, but, smoking is, like, really bad for you!” I declared. I wasn't sure why I cared so much. C.C. led me to a beat-up red station wagon that looked like it has seen its better days several decades ago. The passenger side door handle was missing, so I had to wait for her to pop open the door from the inside before I could tentatively take my seat.
“Look, you seem like a cool girl,” she said, turning the key and coaxing the vehicle to start up with a cough and a shudder. “Oliver is, well, a complicated guy. He's not exactly friendly all the time, and yet he seems to have taken a liking to you for some reason.” She gave me a pointed look as we turned out of the parking lot. “I'd keep those thought to yourself if I were you. Oliver’s lungs are the least of his problems. Or yours.” I nodded and bit back a million questions as I directed C.C. the way back to my house. Oliver’s lungs are the least of his worries. What was that supposed to mean?
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