Hard Times High by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Author:Susan Beth Pfeffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497682887
Publisher: Open Road Media

7

Bill Douglas picked up his pace.

He had shaved off roughly two minutes from his usual time since Dick had called them all in to tell them about the suicide business. Two minutes off five miles. He still wasn’t at Olympic speed, but he was running fast, as though to assure himself that running would help. Which, as he well knew, it wouldn’t.

Bill was panting heavily by the time he reached his house. The only other time he ran with such concentrated speed was when he and T.J. had the chance to run together. They forced each other to go faster, neither one liking to lose, neither one happy as second best. But Bill and T.J. hadn’t had the chance to run together since Dick’s little bombshell. T.J. was having some sort of crisis with Molly, the exact nature of which Bill was eager to remain ignorant of. Bill had crises of his own.

For starters, there was the gleam in his girlfriend Calista’s eyes when Bill told her what was going on.

“You mean you might get fired?” she asked. “You might not be a regular anymore?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Bill said. They were sitting in the schoolyard, neither one of them wanting to go home just yet. Except for when the show was on break, Bill was spending less and less time at his old school, and he liked being there, enough to continue his studies there, and not on the set, the way the other kids did. Sometimes he felt sorry for the others, missing out on a real school experience, but he had the feeling that except for Miranda, none of them felt they were missing a thing. “Dick’s going to fire one of us, and I guess there’s a one in six shot it’ll be me.”

“Would that really be so bad?” Calista asked.

“Of course it would be,” Bill said sharply. “Do you think I’ve been putting in all those hours, working as hard as I have been, just so Dick can kill off Mark?”

“Mark doesn’t exist, Bill,” Calista said. “He’s just a character, someone Dick Goldstein made up. Dick has a perfect right to kill him off if he wants.”

“Mark may not exist to you, but he does to me,” Bill said angrily, and then looked around to see if the other kids had heard him. It was hard sometimes, living a dual life. The sentences that would make perfect sense to the actors on Hard Time High could sound pretty foolish on a high school lawn.

“All right,” Calista said with a sigh. “Mark is as much a part of you as breathing. I’ve heard that speech before, Bill, but it doesn’t make any difference. If Dick kills Mark off, then you’ll just be out of a job. And then you can come back here full-time, and do whatever other acting jobs come along, just the way you used to. You liked it a year ago. Why shouldn’t you like it again?”

Bill looked at Calista. She was a very pretty girl, the prettiest girl at the high school as far as he was concerned.

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