Drama High by Michael Sokolove

Author:Michael Sokolove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

THE CAST OF GOOD BOYS AND TRUE. FROM LEFT: COURTNEY MEYER, BOBBY RYAN, MARIELA CASTILLO, ZACH PHILIPPI, BRITNEY HARRON, AND WAYNE MILETTO.

I WOULD KILL FOR YOU

In mid-June 2011, the cast members of Good Boys and True receive their high school diplomas at the traditional commencement on the football field. A week later, they board a morning flight at Philadelphia International Airport, change planes in Chicago, and land that afternoon in Nebraska. This is the post-graduation beach week they yearned for—on the Great Plains, about as far from an ocean as you can possibly get in America.

Zach keeps talking about experiencing what could be called the “Truman Drama effect”: the sense of acclaim they feel only when they leave home. “They say we’re known in the nation, which is insane, to think you’re a part of that,” he says. “Because in Bucks County, we’re not known for anything good, just negative things.”

Truman Drama will not perform for another three days. The kids attend workshops and scholarship auditions, watch the performances of other high schools, and go to dances at night. They are living on campus with a couple thousand other high school–aged kids, most of them eager to get to know one another. The festival is what is sometimes indelicately called a meat market.

Luke Robinson, a tenth-grader at Truman, is among the handful of non–cast members along on the trip. A skinny kid with braces, a member of the debate club as well as drama, he has a passion, bordering on obsession, for recycling. He constantly pesters students and teachers to properly dispose of their plastic water bottles. He meets a girl at one of the dances. “Yo, Luke,” Zach teases him the next day, “you’re the only one of us who has gotten any action. What’s up with that?”

Just like he does every year, Volpe worries about the seniors who are about to go off on their own and away from his day-to-day reach—all but Wayne, who invites no worry. Five of the six are headed to college. Courtney, as yet, has no plans. “All that self-confidence you see in them, it’s not as deep as they sometimes want you to think,” Volpe says as we sit one morning at a coffee shop near the University of Nebraska campus. “They’re not doormats, but they know they’re up against kids who have had more resources. I’ve seen it. They feel intimidated sometimes, even by kids from Pennsbury.” (Pennsbury is a neighboring high school whose students are drawn from the upper end of Levittown and also several wealthier communities to the north.)

Confidence is a funny thing in high school. Almost everyone has it in the wrong measure—either too little or too much. Volpe is in a ruminative mood, thinking out loud about some of the kids. He has given them his all and hopes it’s enough. “Courtney at some point in her life is going to have to realize what a beautiful, brilliant, and perceptive young woman she is,” he says. “She has to come to terms and honor those parts of herself.

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