Playing by the Rules by D'Ann Burrow

Author:D'Ann Burrow [Burrow, D’Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-942239-01-7
Publisher: Three Owl Press via Indie Author Project

17

Theater Class

3:10 p.m.

* * *

“Hello! Hello! Hello!” The drama teacher burst into the classroom with the enthusiasm of a late night host trying to warm up his audience. “I’m so happy to see you today.” Mrs. Whitmore clasped her hands together and beamed at the class. “I do hope you took advantage of your three day weekend to get a little rehearsal time in for your partner work.”

All around me, heads bobbed in agreement. Kennedy was the only one who sat frozen in her seat. For someone who honestly wanted to be in this class, she wasn’t doing a good job of faking it.

But maybe no one else was either.

Maybe they really did rehearse on the weekend.

Something was seriously wrong with theater people. The whole scene was, what, two pages long? How hard could it be? And, besides, we weren’t performing for a while. We had plenty of time to fix stuff.

“Good, good.” Mrs. Whitmore’s smile would have looked creepy if she hadn’t seemed so legitimately excited. And then her eyes fell on Kennedy. She wasn’t smiling anymore. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d think she was shaking her head in disappointment. But why? Kennedy had been in town for about a week. The lady needed to cut her some slack. “Now it’s time to see just how well it’s going for everyone. Today, you’ll be performing the first pages of your scenes for me.”

A hand shot up from the front row. “From memory?”

“Of course.” Mrs. Whitmore looked at me. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t even blinking.

Damn. Could my day get any worse? First Stacia ambushed me outside the weight room this morning and now this.

Kennedy squirmed in her seat, whispering under her breath with her eyes closed. I didn’t know her skin could get that pale. The guys on the team wouldn’t look that uneasy if Coach Dillon had just told us we were playing the Dallas Cowboys next week.

“Let’s begin.” Mrs. Whitmore bowed out from the front of the class and perched at the edge of a cushioned barstool sitting off to the side of the whiteboard. Her eyebrows launched toward her non-existent bangs as she seemed to be picking her first set of victims. She pointed at two people who weren’t me and Kennedy – and that’s all that mattered.

The first team wasn’t bad. I might even say they were good. Neither of them missed a single word from their script, or if they did, they covered it well enough no one noticed. By the end, Mrs. Whitmore had the excited-talk-show-host vibe going again.

I understood her game plan. She’d chosen those two to start on purpose. They were supposed to make everyone else nervous. And the tactic was working on Kennedy. She hadn’t stopped mumbling since Mrs. Whitmore announced what we were doing to the day. At this point, I couldn’t tell if she was practicing or praying. Probably a mixture of both.

Another team went.

The third two stumbled. The guy tried to laugh it off, but the girl looked like she was probably going to kill him tonight while he slept.

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