Now You See Her by Jacquelyn Mitchard

responsibility,” but it was the exact oppo- site of what being an actor was supposed to be! Which was not having to do any of this crap for yourself. I told my parents. It turned out they knew I would have to carry sheets up three flights of stairs! My parents thought the wonderful experience of Starwood would make me be okay with the garbage-y stuff I had to do— stuff I thought would’ve been done for us by, like, the kind of lunch ladies they had when I was in middle school. Not the paying students! So they didn’t tell me. But no wonderful stuff had started yet! I was just alone, and everyone else was an idiot. And I was scraping
    plates and had a tiny six-line part in some modern psy- cho play a former student wrote about people getting shot in an airport. I played a girl who couldn’t find a cab. About thirty people showed up for it.
    The first semester started. And then, instead of really being nice to a new kid, everyone knew each other because they’d all gone there since seventh grade, and they all ignored me.
    I wanted to go home—even to Bellamy—but my parents made me promise I would stay the whole first semester because they already paid up front and it was a lot and I would get used to it.
    The first weeks were horrible! The choral director told me to stop shouting—that the object was to com- plement each other’s voices, not drown each other out. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. I think she just hated me because she was so freaking ugly and old. But she said I was probably used to “local” vocal groups where the standards were much lower. I almost died. I was going to just walk out, but people stared at me like only a freak would do that. I went back to my place. I was going to get on a bus and leave that night.
    When I called my mother, she said, “Bernadette. Hope. You listen to me. Your brother had to go to public school to give you this chance. . . .”
    “Uh, this is me, not caring,” I said.
    “I don’t care if you don’t care,” she yelled at me. “Go back there and do what they tell you! This isn’t the first time in your life you’ve ever been corrected. . . .”
    “It is the first time by some ninety-year-old idiot who tells stories about how she was in the original production of Hair !” I said. “In front of a whole bunch of kids who can’t probably do this stuff as good as I do it! I can’t stand it.”
    “You can stand anything. And plus, I’m not paying for you to come back, so lump it,” she said, and she hung up. She sent me a hundred dollars by FedEx. I bought all these scented pens and junk.
    And then it came to me.
    One night, when I was practicing signing my name different ways. It came to me.
    Why kids were ignoring me, and being so obvious about it. Why the teachers in dance class were like, “Didn’t you learn a double pirouette by now? Did you really study ballet?” And the teachers in English were like, “You don’t know what ‘observational’ means?”
    It was this. They had never seen anyone like me. They were jealous. The other kids were there for an education along with acting. I was just there to make it to the next level. Even though a lot of the girls were beautiful and clique-y, they didn’t have what I had! I called my mother and asked her if she thought I was right, and she said, Of
    course, people were always going to be jealous of the best one, and hadn’t she always said that? I started cry- ing and said yes, but that I didn’t know how brave you had to be. She said the good stuff is always hard. Someone came up to the phone booth—kids weren’t allowed cell phones until junior year—and asked if I was all right and I had to tell them to screw off.
    My mother said, “Do something different. Make them want you. And think beyond Starwood. There are agents who come to see those shows all the time. What if they’re looking for a particular type, all over the coun- try? What if a big agent sees you and