Tart. Jody Gehrman
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suede pumps, freshly ironed blouse, her dark hair impeccably smooth and silky; the stain looks so out of place, it has the same childishly comic effect as a mustache drawn on a supermodel. I stifle another giggle.
She studies me for a moment. Surprise, recognition, and then—what? Irritation? Rage? They all register in her eyes in rapid succession. She strides away from me abruptly, as if it’s my face, not my coffee, that’s burned her.
Weird, I think. Well, shit, she can hardly hate me just for bumping into her, whoever she is. Hopefully she’s a traveling book rep and I’ll never see her again. I look at my watch. Aargh—10:50. I’ll be fired.
Please, please, God—I’ll never ask for anything again—just let me get through this day.
Striding into the black-box theater, I force my face into a semblance of confidence. The chattering gives way to a deafening silence, and I feel fifty eyes on me, inducing a powerful sense of vertigo.
“Hello, class. My name’s Claudia Bloom. Any questions?” Delete. Delete. You’re supposed to actually teach something before you ask for—wait. Someone’s got a hand up. Okay, here we go; this is easy. A girl sporting a wild tuft of indigo hair is looking at me with cranky indolence. “Yes?”
“Wasn’t this class supposed to start, like, half an hour ago?”
“Every day but the first day.” Twenty-five bewildered faces look at one another skeptically. “Acting is all about waiting. Timing. Patience tempered by instinct. It’s about grueling hours spent hovering between worlds. You people—you’re the ones who stuck it out. I like to know who my hard-core actors are, right from the get-go. I can really only focus on a select few.”
“Half the class left already,” a boy in overalls offers. “Some of them went to Westby’s office.”
“You see. You think they’re going to make it? Huh? If they can’t stand a measly twenty-something minutes waiting for their instructor, you think they’re going to tough it out when their agent hasn’t called in months? You think they’ll have the stamina for those long hours of nervous fidgeting when they’ve got a couple lines in act one, scene one, and they don’t have their big deathbed soliloquy until act three, scene four? If they have to go running to the dean’s office whenever things don’t go precisely as planned, you think they’ll tolerate the wild, passionate life of the thespian and all of its incumbent bull—”
“Oh, Claudia.” I spin around and Ruth Westby, the department chair, is watching me from the doorway. “You are here.”
“Yes. Of course I am,” I answer innocently.
A bony, middle-aged woman in enormous pink glasses files in with a handful of disgruntled others in tow. “Well, she wasn’t here,” the woman tells Ruth. “She must have just—”
“It’s fine, Ruth,” I say. “It’s an exercise I like to do on the first day. Nothing to worry about.”
She hesitates for a second; her dark eyes linger on my face, and I feel my stomach knotting up painfully. Then she nods and smiles pleasantly. “Happy first day, then.”
She disappears. And suddenly it’s just me. And them. With no lesson plan. The woman in pink glasses is staring me down like a babysitter who just watched her ward tell a bald-faced lie to the clueless mother. “All right, then. Let’s see. Why don’t we start by learning each other’s names?”
“Where’s the syllabus?” Pink Glasses asks.
“Syllabus?”
“Yeah. You know. Piece of paper. Says what we can expect, how to get an A, all that. Frankly, I’m just shopping around.”
“I see.” There’s an awkward moment of silence. I clear my throat. “Well, frankly, I don’t offer a syllabus until after the first week. So, as I was saying—”
“Why not?” Pink Glasses again. She reminds me of a praying mantis, folded at hard angles into the too-small chair. Her real eyebrows have been completely plucked, and she’s painted new ones into high arches above the rims of her glasses, Wicked Witch style; she would be terrifying if she weren’t so annoying.
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