Page 4 of In What World

“Greetings, my beautiful stars!” Dallas says when we landcenter stage. He’s borrowed a projector screen from the computer lab for this occasion, and we position ourselves on either side of it. “What an exciting time—myfinalproduction. There’s so much I could say, and you know by opening night I’ll have made you listen to it all. But I know you don’t want to hear a word of it right now. You want to know what show we’re going to create together this spring. So I won’t keep you in suspense.”

He looks up to the control booth, where Jim, the head of our tech crew, waits for the cue. The auditorium darkens as Dallas clicks around on the laptop he’s placed atop a rolling cart. When I look to the projector screen, I expect to see our spring musical’s logo. But a Zoom window pops up instead.

And then, Cilla Cove’s face.

“Hi, guys!” Cilla says, waving with both hands.

For more than a minute, our students lose their minds, screaming and cheering and some of them even crying as Cilla sits there smiling so wide her cheeks crinkle into her eyes.

Her hair is very long now, dark red in a way only high-end salons can achieve, the color of Amaretto. It’s curled like she’s used a Dyson, but that could be Alice seeping into my thoughts. The only time I’ve ever willingly taken a curling iron to my own hair was for a play, and I haven’t done one of those in more than eight years.

Cilla has aged well. Or maybe no one ever properly conveyed to us as kids what thirty-four-year-olds would actually look like. She still has that grin that makes most people want to return the favor, with round, rosy cheeks and that damned twinkle in her eye, every light source somehow bending to her will, even on shitty laptop cameras. Long gone are her choppy haircuts and her obsession with sleeping in black eyeliner so she could have a perpetually smudgy look she thought made her seem edgy and cool. Having worked with enough teenagersby now, I can confidently determine she was not achieving either goal.

This Cilla seems to have no makeup on at all. Surely even that is a choice. She wants us to see her as one of us—a humble girl from Iowa who stumbled into the big time without losing her roots. She needs no glamour. No spectacle.

When the roar dies down, she speaks again, using the polished affectation she’s adopted since hitting it big—a weird lilt at the end of certain words that makes every sentence sound rehearsed.

“I’m so excited to be the one to share what Dallas’s last show will be!” she tells the students. “Dallas reached out to me a few weeks ago and said, ‘Darling, if you can spare little old me a moment, I’d love to have you tell our current thespians the big news.’ ” She does a pretty decent impression of Dallas, managing to capture his essence without overdoing it, which is a notable feat as a white woman embodying a larger-than-life gay Black man. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without him and the Wilbur Reed High School drama department, so I couldn’t miss the chance to tell you all that this year, for Dallas’s final musical—”

Kids shift in their seats. Jim flickers the lights. It goes on so long that some of the students begin to plead “Tell us! Tell us!” Even I start to feel it—the burning need toknow—even though I already do. I’m the one who helped Dallas pick.

“You’re doingSpring Awakening!” Cilla announces.

Jim turns up the house lights to full brightness as the students let out a collective, ear-piercing scream of delight. Two girls fall over in their chairs, then spring back up, continuing their jumping hysteria with no interruption. Dallas has his laptop in his hands, and he uses it like a documentarian, turning the screen so Cilla can see the reaction.

He pans the camera to me.

And even though it’s digital, and there’s a lag, and blurriness, and all manner of barriers that prevent us from really seeing each other, Cilla’s smile changes, morphing from something vibrant into something restrained.

“Oh. Hi, Marlowe,” she says. “It’s great to see you.”

I wave with one hand, tucking the other into my trousers to hide the nervous energy that’s bubbled up without my consent. “Thanks for doing this for the kids,” I say.

“Of course,” she says. “I had to.”

One of our most outspoken performers—a very tall, very loud boy named Billy Larsen who got too hurt to continue playing basketball his sophomore year and realized he could flirt with girls all day if he did drama instead, thus cementing him as our de facto straight theater boy—yells out, “Marlowe, you actually know her?”

“Ms. Jenkins,” I correct. The students love to try to call me “Marlowe” because Dallas prefers to be known by his first name, and that’s another tradition the kids want me to carry on when he retires. I want to do it, too. I really do. “Ms. Jenkins” sounds wrong. Bland and unimaginative. Nowhere near as interesting as my first name. There’s nothing about me that’s a Ms., even if I’m still using she/her pronouns. But I continue to correct students whenever they use “Marlowe,” too afraid of potential consequences from the administration.

Cilla uses her laughter to slide right back into her manufactured ease. “Marlowe and I graduated the same year. We did every WRHS show together.”

Billy’s jaw falls open. “Are you serious? Ms. Jenkins, why didn’t you tell us you were friends with a famous person?”

Because we weren’t friends, I want to say, but Cilla chimes infirst. “The last show we did together wasRENT.” She has mastered the art of the redirect. “Marlowe was Mark. I was Roger.”

“The picture of us from that show is right outside,” I remind him, oddly insulted he hasn’t noticed it before.

“No way,” he says to me. “Are you wearing one of your vests?”

This gets the other kids laughing. I wear a rotating collection of sleeveless sweater-vests over T-shirts because it takes the fuss out of deciding my clothing for the day, and yeah, I also find the look to be aesthetically pleasing. Sue me.

Lately, though, my students have started to comment on them in a way that veers toward mean-spirited. I’ve yet to figure out the real reason behind their obsessive interest in the vests. The best defense I have is not only to continue wearing them, but to double down on my commitment to the look.

“Yes,” I deadpan. “I had on a sweater-vest underneath every costume I ever wore.”

“No way?” Billy says again, only this time it’s a question. He’s unsure of how much sarcasm I’m using, which means I win today’s battle of the vests.

Dallas turns the laptop to himself. “You know, Cilla decided to chop off all her hair forRENT, dying it a truly hideous shade of yellow-blond, even though she knew good and well I’d get her a nice wig for the part.”