Page 79 of Love Me Not
Properly distracted, our visitor left the room. The moment the click of his closed door floated down the hall, Georgie burst out laughing.
“This isn’t funny,” I pointed out. “We’re acting like exactly what he called us. Teeny-boppers.”
“Who says that?” Georgie asked, quelling the laughter.
“Old people.”
She sobered immediately. “Ronald is two years younger than I am.”
Oops. “Focus on the real issue here. Do you think Trey heard what I said? Not that he doesn’t know what’s going on with us, but I wouldn’t want him to be hurt by hearing that. What if he’s skipping rehearsal to avoid me?”
Dropping into her chair, she tapped the desk. “Maybe he didn’t hear anything. Something probably came up this afternoon that he can’t get out of, that’s all. He said he’ll be there on Monday, right?”
Moderately appeased, I nodded. “He did. I really hope we can still be friends.”
“You don’t want to be just friends, though, do you?” she asked.
“What I want and what needs to happen aren’t the same thing.” Georgie opened her mouth—presumably to argue my statement—when the bell rang, cutting her off. “Time for class,” I said, turning to leave.
“Lindsey,” she called, as the sound of chaos filled the hallway. “It’s never too late to write a different ending.”
A nice thought, but this ending wasn’t going to change.
Chapter Nineteen
“The position is good,” I called from the middle of the seats, “but you need to turn toward me more. This is a big scene and we need the audience to see the emotion on your face.”
“I’m supposed to face Aiden, though. Should he move over then?” Emma asked.
“Yes, Aiden, you can move over a bit.” My lead shifted to his right. “Not that far. We don’t want your back to the audience.”
He corrected and I yelled, “That’s perfect.”
The last dress rehearsal before opening night was by far the most stressful night of my life. Once the audience filled the auditorium and the actual performance began, I would settle down. At that point, whatever happened happened. Sometimes the show went off without a hitch. Other times a shoe flew off and landed in a bucket during a serious scene. Either way, the play was alive and you dealt with the outcome.
But right now, we had one last chance to focus on the details so there would be no regrets come show night.
“Leo ripped his pants,” Maddy said, rushing toward me. “They’re completely ruined.”
Nearly all the cast were wearing their own clothes, but Leo was playing a police officer, which required an actual costume.
“Can’t you sew them back up?”
“It’s not on the seam,” she said through ground teeth. “The rip is down the center of his left butt cheek.”
“How did he…” I knew better than to finish that question. “Do we have any other brown pants in the wardrobe closet?”
My budding designer nearly snarled. “Don’t you think I looked already? There’s nothing.”
Time for an intervention. “Take a breath, Maddy. We have twenty four hours to find Leo another pair of pants. I’m sure we can do that. He didn’t rip them on purpose, after all.”
This would have been a good time to have Trey around. He likely knew more about finding men’s polyester pants in a pinch than I did. Though he’d shown up as promised on Monday evening to help with the backdrop, which turned out to be a three day nightmare that luckily he took the lead on, I hadn’t seen him at all today.
The night before we went live in front of an audience and Trey Collins was nowhere to be found. He’d at least had the courtesy to tape a note to my classroom door letting me know he couldn’t make it. When he’d done so was a mystery since I’d been in my room most of the day and hadn’t laid eyes on him once.
He didn’t text over the weekend, and our brief encounters this week had been cool at best, so I had to assume he did overhear my conversation with Georgie on Friday morning. Either that or he’d interpreted our talk in the parking lot as a full stop to anything beyond a working relationship.
Technically, I was getting what I wanted. An end to the stress and anxiety of a pending romance that was bound to fail. Rip the bandage. Nip the situationship in the bud. Bail before the curtain fell.