Jessie’s been cutting corners all along, and we know this won’t fly in Hell Week. We’re in this musical, something about the 50s. Whenever we dance, she half-heartedly finds her spot. She flips her wrists and implies wind-milling her arms over her head instead of flying those arms and flexing those hands like the rest of us do so Mashed Potato will notice. We call our director Mashed Potato because he has a doughy face. His body too. And he’s always trying to insinuate himself with us because he’s just out of school–doesn’t even have a teaching license, just some sort of agreement. Mashed Potato praises everyone’s deranged smiles and strong hands and calls, “Jessie, you’re marking it.” One day, he pulls us aside to say, “Y’all are close with her, maybe you can break through.” We are his stars and committed to the sanctity of rehearsal, dancing each number as if it’s opening night. So we get in Emmy’s car after rehearsal and ask, “Jessie, why do you keep marking it?” and all she can do is shrug–she marks her answer too. When Emmy drops Jessie off, we look at each other, displaying our concern. We suspect Mashed Potato only cast her out of sympathy after the accident.

Jessie has this one line, when she’s a waitress and not just a chorus member. She does that fine but when she returns her waitress pad to the props table, Props Queen always whispers to the director that she did it wrong, to put the props in the right fucking place. She also always finds Jessie in the hall to yell at her. Props Queen is on a power trip, or she’s still sore about the banana incident. The banana incident is this: Jessie stole a fake banana off the props table and brought it into the costume closet with Jimmy O’Connor–who’s really hot but we think is gay because he’s such a hardo and takes this musical so seriously (and one time on a hot ten, we slipped outside to hit a joint and found Jimmy O’Connor curled next to Justin Cho against the brick wall)–and Jessie used the banana to imply a sexual innuendo and she and Jimmy made out under the poodle skirts and pleather jackets and then in walked Props Queen. We talked Props Queen down. Jessie ran away crying so we told Props Queen about what really happened and how Jessie’s sensitive, you’d never know under her stone face and deadpan, her slack arms and how she’s always late to her spot. Jessie really cares. And then we found Jimmy, basically doing “Smell my fingers” to the “sensitive” theater boys and we had to call him gross too. Maybe Jessie puts the waitress pad in the wrong place to retaliate for the banana incident. Maybe the waitress pad lives on the other side of the table now, beside the candy-colored rotary phones and the carafe that Props Queen fills with water from the bubbler. We drink from the carafe in one of our scenes, when we wake up from a sleepover and THE MOTHER serves us breakfast. Props Queen used to fill it in the bathroom but we asked her to use the bubbler instead. She rolled her eyes and said no. Then we noticed her standing there, tilting its neck into the stream of water and handing the carafe to THE MOTHER for the scene. 

Mashed Potato loves that scene, when we kick back in our chairs and rest our feet on the table. We are high school girls in this play, up to no good. Mashed Potato has nice things to say when he runs through notes at the end of rehearsal and then he gets to the big dance number. He reads each note and then holds up his pad for us to see. We know this should be dramatic, but he uses shitty blue pens and all we see are squiggles and the shadows of letters.

“Jessie, this is what I did to my paper every time you marked it,” Mashed Potato says. And we all look at her–Jimmy O’Connor and Justin Cho, Props Queen and THE MOTHER and Mashed Potato and us too. So Jessie just nods and swallows and shouts, “Thanks for the note.”

We know all the notes she got after the incident. Kitty Killer. Wino. We know she thought the kids were asleep. We know her boyfriend lifted Midori from his mom’s stash, and she panicked when they ran down the stairs bleeding so she put them in the car and drove, a solid thump when she banked onto the road. The kids were fine, the parents relieved, nobody died but the neighbor’s cat. But once the cat made local news, the story was set–babysitter, boyfriend, Midori. The principal called her to his office Monday morning, the newspaper folded on his desk. When she cried on our three-way call that night, we told her to buck up. We’re popular! Nobody will care. Move on. She didn’t get suspended and came to school the next day with goopy mascara.

And Mashed Potato calls again, “Jessie, you need to hit your mark. Otherwise there’s no place for you on this stage.”

Everyone else looks to the wings, the space of the ceiling where the lights are, where in two weeks we’ll watch Mashed Potato ascend to set the lights and wonder if it can handle his weight, will this be the tragedy our community is bracing for? Sitting by her side, we sneak a hand to her back, her knee. We watch a swallow travel down her throat, spreading wings in her stomach.

“I’ll hit my mark,” she calls. Her voice crackles. Jimmy O’Connor starts to clap, but Justin Cho grabs his hands.

“Let’s see then,” he calls. When we run the number one more time, even though rehearsal is over, even though we all want to go home to cram for history and AP Bio, Jessie puts on her face and windmills her arms and she sings with candied joy. When the piano stops, Mashed Potato rises to his feet, clapping, hooting, and shouts, “Hell yes, Jessie! Now that’s what I’m talking about.” 

Everyone smiles her way. We have collectively improved. But we look elsewhere. We can’t look at her face in the car, can’t stand to know what she’s thinking. We can’t help thinking we put  the bulb in her throat.

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Michael Colbert is a queer writer based in Maine, where he’s at work on a novel. He holds an MFA from UNC Wilmington, and his writing appears in Esquire, The Florida Review, and The New York Times, among others.