Page 42 of In What World

I might be lost forever. And worse, I might be alone.

The auditorium darkens, filling me to the brim with fear.

“Excuse me,” I say, rising to leave and fumbling over Teacher Priscilla to escape.

The stage curtains part. Instead of a girl dressed in a plain nightgown set to perform “Mama Who Bore Me,” the show’s opening number, it’s Cilla Cove in her leopard coat and little black dress, holding a mic pack and wearing her signature smile.

“Students!” she says. “Come on out and fill the seats!” She drags the prop chair until it’s at the downstage lip, then plops herself onto it, crossing one leg atop the other as she pins the mic pack onto her coat.

I freeze, practically straddling Teacher Priscilla’s lap. Relief mixes with new anxieties. Cilla’s still here. She hasn’t left me alone. It’s so good to see her face, I don’t even mind that the phony affectation has returned in full force.

But who did she bribe to give her their mic pack? How did she get them to agree? And what in god’s name is she about to do?

I move my leg so Teacher Priscilla is no longer faced with a view of my ass, and I sit down again. The cast is filing out from both sides of the stage in uniform fashion, barely even muttering words of complaint.

It dawns on me that they’re following Cilla’s orders because they think sheisTeacher Priscilla. The very Priscilla who sits beside me with her mouth agape.

“If she starts singing, I’m walking out,” Famous Mars says. “I had enough of that in high school.”

Dallas is the last to leave the wings. He has his arms crossed with one hand floating up in the air, his index finger curved into something like a question mark. I can hear his thoughts as if we share one brain. If he were sitting beside me, he’d lean over and whisper,What can I say? I love theater, no matter how it comes. And this, my dear, is sure to be a performance.

Cilla takes a deep breath that gets picked up on her hot mic, and the low chatter of the crowd quiets to nothing.

Thisis her power. One single inhale, and she has all of us hanging on her next breath. It’s exactly what Dallas means when he says that some people just have it.

“Have you ever wondered who tells your story?” she asks, making sustained eye contact with a few kids in the first row. “Is it you, or is it everyone else who creates the image of you, and you either have to accept that image or spend your life pushing against it, hoping someone cares enough to take your version of events as the truth?”

“Is this from a play?” Famous Mars whispers.

“What if we all grabbed the mic and said the truth?” Cilla continues. “Did you know you can do that?” She directs this to the students. “You can speak up, even if it’s awkward, or hard, or embarrassing. And maybe people won’t listen, but you don’t have to feel like they’ve made a decision about who you arewithout your input. I used to think I was really good at doing that, but I recently realized I haven’t been doing it for a very long time. So today, I’m changing that.”

Billy Larsen stands up. “Speak your truth, Priscilla!”

This gets some chuckles from the students.

“Thank you, Billy,” Cilla replies. “Glad to see your foot is okay. Just be careful if anyone wants to play kickball with you. Maybe wait until this show closes.”

The laughing students quiet again, and Billy sits back down, scratching his head.

“I want to set the record straight on something with all of you as witness,” Cilla says. “I need to talk about my high school experience with Marlowe Jenkins.”

It’s Teacher Priscilla who rises this time. “That’s it,” she says. “I’m stopping her.”

“Hold on.” I put a hand on her arm. I can’t let her end this. Not when Cilla’s given such an interesting prompt.

“Marlowe Jenkins thinks she knows everything,” Cilla declares.

This causes an audience chorus of low, scandalizedoohs. There are few things more ominous than when a group of high schoolers makes this sound. Teacher Priscilla looks at me, knowing this just as well as I do. Any goodwill we fostered together in her classroom has vanished. In fact, her haughtiness is so much like my own Cilla’s that it really is a blow from all sides.

“Marlowe Jenkins was the first to read every play,” Cilla continues. “She was usually off book before we’d even held a single rehearsal. And during those rehearsals, she was the one to raise her hand and ask all the right questions about the material. But for someone so studied, she never could make sense ofme.”

God, I never should have believed that Cilla would want to fix things between us. When have her actions ever been about peace? Even here, two worlds away from the one we know, she’s lighting things on fire for the fun of it.

“At first, I thought it was kind of amusing, how everything I said to her, she interpreted as an insult, no matter my actual intention,” Cilla continues. “But then it became an annoyance. And then it became a genuine rivalry. She was determined to not like me, no matter what I said, or did, or didn’t do. Nothing worked. I decided the best way forward was to lean into it. Give in to theperformance. I could go into how she misunderstood what I felt about acting, but what she’s misunderstood the most is what I felt abouther.”

“Oh god,” Teacher Priscilla mutters.

“What?” I ask urgently in the same voice I’d use if someone said a bug landed on me but didn’t tell me where or what kind. It feels the same, too, like something is crawling all over me but I can’t swat it away fast enough to be free of the sensation.