CHAPTER 48 – You Are My Life

Tuesday.

On the second day of the cleanup, LAPA put itself back together like a disassembled jigsaw puzzle.

Once more, every student and staff member was drafted. Dancers carried boxes. Musicians swept. The Cinematics students stowed equipment in places only they knew. The Media Department burned the midnight oil, trying to release photos, footage and videos for social media. Everyone else wiped down or vacuumed everything else, working hand in hand with the regular janitorial staff.

Eppie’s class was assigned to the Whitman backstage. With everything now removed, it was time to clean the floors, the walls, empty the bins, and put props back where they presumably belonged. Everything was logged, which was why the final clean-up took so god-damned long.

Somewhere along the cleanup, she saw someone up in the projection room, watching her from up on high.

It was William. She recognised the boys’ unique silouette.

By noon, the backstage was done. By 1 PM, the auditorium was reset. By the afternoon, even Eppie was exhausted, but at the very least, LAPA was once more the performing arts high school she knew a week ago.

Wednesday.

For her final English of the Semester, Eppie encountered a glitch in the Matrix. Dr Kirby came in carrying printouts of their Winter holiday reading; only the Title and the Author section made Eppie perform a double-take.

The Crucible. Atticus Mills. 1952.

With exams done, portfolios submitted and showcases performed, the students were in no mood to learn. To motivate the students to read the play, Kirby crafted a summary, which James Jules read aloud in a theatrically trained voice.

Salem, 1692. Abigail Williams, orphaned and powerless, conducts an affair with John Proctor, a respected farmer. When Proctor ends it, Abigail, fearing persecution, leads a group of girls in accusing Salem’s women of witchcraft. Proctor knows Abigail is lying. To expose her, he must confess the affair and destroy his own name. Abigail bites back. Proctor is condemned. He accuses the High Court of “raising up a whore and pulling down the church”. He hangs for truth. The flawed hero dies with his name intact. The villainess survives with nothing but a box of stolen coins.

Dr Kirby stood at the front of the room with immense patience, marker in hand, clicker in the other, and worked through the drudgery with the stoicism of a seasoned teaching veteran.

“Thank you, Mr Jules. You may sit down.” Kirby looked over the sleepy class. “Allow me to append Mr Jules by stating that this is our third and final tragedy. Thematically, they are not just connected by death, catastrophe and civil disintegration—they are connected by women. Women’s bodies. Women’s voices. Women’s complicity.”

Kirby writes, in her exquisite handwriting, the three titles.

Antigone / Titus Andronicus / The Crucible.
Antigone / Lavinia / Abigail Williams

“Antigone speaks,” her voice reverberated around the class. “She names what Creon has done. She invokes laws older than the state and accepts the consequences of her invocation. She is then silenced by the state, her body entombed.”

Kirby marks her point across the whiteboard.

“A woman speaks.”
“Her voice is silenced.”
“Her body is confined.”

She moved along the X-Axis, one row down. “Titus Andronicus, we’ve all done it.”

“Lavinia protests against her role as a political tool.”
“Lavinia is silenced. Her tongue cut out.”
“Lavinia’s body is mutilated.”

She moved along the X-Axis again, one row down. “In the Crucible. Mills asks a subversive and terrifying question. It is a question that arises because his female characters are no less complex or capable of human horror than his men. What if the voice of the woman in question isn’t the truth? He asks. What if she becomes too powerful to be silenced? This isn’t misogyny, as some might protest. A woman has just as much capacity to lie, cheat, and orchestrate catastrophe as any man. This is not irony either. This is humanity without bias. This is veritas. So—”

Her writing continues across the board.

“Abigail Williams,” Kirby’s chalk moved across the board. She stopped.

Ah shit. Here we go… Eppie groaned. She was glad, at least, that the only things that had discernibly changed were Miller’s name, some of the lines, and the order of presentation. History had a way of repeating itself. The Hollywood Ten was now Hollywood Eleven. McCarthy still happened. There was still an Edward Murrow by a different name, and the Red Scare still remained a traumatic stain on US history.

“Eppie.”

The class laughed. They were used to it by now. Dr Kirby was obviously tired, and she was in no mood to slowly work her way through students who couldn’t carry the Socratic Circle.

“Abigail Williams is NOT silenced,” Eppie replied. “Miller’s tragedy operates on the profundity of the seventeen-year-old’s… voice… becoming amplified…”

Eppie paused. She could feel, if such a thing could be felt, her [Script Analysis] doing the rounds. There were layers here. In one layer, a Samaritan who desired nothing but truth burns down the town and the institution. In a second layer, a seventeen-year-old makes a selfish decision that changes the trajectory of her life forever.

“Yes, not silenced,” Dr Kirby’s gaze was raising the hair on Eppie’s neck. “She leverages the fear, the hysteria, the public paranoia, and she raises her voice until it could be heard across Salem and beyond, in Andover, even. And her body, Eppie?”

“Er… Not confined,” Eppie tried to fight off the parallels. Was the [System] arranging the goddamn school curriculum via some providential karmic assortment?

“NOT literally confined, though assuredly, as a girl, her virginity is the business of others.” Dr Kirby’s eyes finally left her face. “She talks. She walks. She watches fourteen people get hanged. Against our plays, one from Antiquity, one from the Renaissance, Mills delivers a different tragedy. A common man, and a common woman’s tragedy.”

“Abigail speaks.”
“Abigail is amplified.”
“Abigail escapes. No prison. No punishment.”

Dr Kirby completed the 3-by-3 grid. “Write this down.”

The class did their best. Some of the students didn’t even bring their books.

“Antigone is a tragedy of a woman entombed,” Kirby said. “Titus is a tragedy of a woman mutilated. The Crucible is a tragedy of a woman believed—each led to catastrophic outcomes.”

“And your book reports,” Kirby wrote the date on the whiteboard with a flourish. “Is for when I see you again, January 7th. Merry Christmas, everyone, and have a Happy New Year.”

Evening.

Eppie showered. Dried off, then sat in the silence of an apartment that had been emptied out. Her two roommates were already gone for the holidays. They had disappeared as soon as the Gala was over, and Eppie had not even noticed because she was out with Zara. It was only on Tuesday morning, when Mama Josefina came to tell her that she would be leaving for two weeks, that Eppie realised she was basically home alone.

Her roommates had left her boutique chocolates, and Josefina had left her six portions worth of homemade taco ingredients. Eppie had given her companions nothing, though they had expressed great gratitude for the opportunity to see Lucia Lancet up close and to hold and take pictures of the flowers.

Then she checked her email.
Eppie was very glad she had decided to check her email.

She was a shit boss. She did not deserve Ms Filmore.

Eppie collapsed in her seat.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GIVE THIS WOMAN A RAISE.

She wrote a letter of profound gratitude to Maddy Filmore. Then wrote another to Daddy, asking for a raise for her Media Manager.

Then she checked her [Stamina], left a few blocks empty, and went to bed, dreaming a little dream about Abigail.

Thursday 21st.
Arts block.

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Final theatre lessons.

The Antigone crew performed a theatre exercise without a name, invented somewhere between Costello’s Tony tour and his pivot into teaching. It involved the students lying on the Marley floor, arms loose, feet bare, eyes on the grid, releasing everything they had learned so that they could start January in neutral.

The exercise began with silence. The heating system clicked on the walls.

Plink. Plink. Plink.

Somewhere, music students were still practising, and they could feel the vibration through the floor of the black box room.

“Since August, I’ve trained your body,” Costello walked among them, his feet landing without sound. “Your body has learned to be Antigone, Ismene, the Chorus. Now, I need you to unlearn everything, lest you bring these characters into our next project unnecessarily.”

Next project. The students perked up.

“Stay in neutral,” Costello informed them. “Now, I hope everyone has a good holiday, but know that there’s a limit to your bodies, and what they can take. Enjoy life, but not to excess. I am your playwright, and you are my players. We are a theatre company. You are the instruments of the stage. I do not need half-tuned instruments. In your spare time, do your stretches, perform your Laban Exercises, and practice your voices. In the professional world, there is nothing more dangerous to an actor than idle time.”

Eppie watched the others watching each other.

The most eye-catching figure, as always, was Madison Evans, the girl who had lost Antigone to her and had worked instead in technical theatre, for the chance of Eppie falling ill had been zero. Eppie had felt guilty about robbing Madison of her chance—but she also had a plan to make it up to the leggy blonde.

Costello’s “Next Project” must have struck a nerve, for all Eppie could see was Madison stiffly swinging her arms and legs like a mannikin, her hips limply thrusting now and then to comical effect.

Dr Costello shook his head and moved on.
Her mind wandered.

She had Friday to do the thing she had been putting off this whole time—her reckoning with Simone. Ever since the lesson with Kirby, the gazelle girl had been on her mind like a tack, and she no longer had the patience to play the Delayer.

Eppie noted she was in a good position now. She was known. She was illuminated. She had money, even if it wasn’t hers to spend, and she had influence. She wanted to catch the truth before it got away.

Then, she had to take a flight to NYC and meet her benefactor.

“Up.”

She raised her body, resurrecting the dead through flexibility, weight and counterweight. Costello stopped to look, then nodded with silent satisfaction.

Their final exercise was a balancing act involving pairs. It was a kind of no-contract see-saw, and it was a test of both balance and endurance.

Madison was paired with Min-Jun. He spent the entire time staring at her exposed midriff.
Lucy was paired with James Jules. She spent the entire time staring into James’ exposed abs.

She was paired with Chloe Vickers, AKA Ismene, her sister. Chloe’s skill was a natural gift, unlike Eppie’s [System] upgrades. Twisting their bodies, they formed themselves around each other, not losing balance for the whole five minutes.

At the end, Costello gave them his highest praise.

Her teacher’s eyes lingered on her a little longer than necessary. The thespian was studying her. He was trying to feel her out. He looked like he could smell the scripts in her head.

“GOOD WORK,” Costello’s voice boomed as the students separated to find their towels. “I have one more announcement, after which I shall see you in January, around the 7th.”

The man took a deep breath.

“Thirty minutes ago, Dr Cooper posted the LAPAGANZA sign-up sheet. It’s on the Quest Board now. Sophomore Production for the Playhouse. Main Production for the Whitman’s Theatre. There are enough places for everyone who wishes to audition, but as always, only the best will take to the stage.”