Chapter 53

"Are you planning to be a playwright?"

I smiled and shook my head. "Robbie may make me write one more, but after that I'm done. I'm just a dumb jock."

Janet Martin smiled back. "That's like saying Albert Einstein counts good."

"Where is Miss Tate?" Robert Annoly asked.

"She, uh, wasn't feeling good. She went home after the curtain," Tami said.

Before the play, Robbie had apologized to everyone for being a bitch all week, then after the last curtain, had snuck out as fast as she could. Cody's sitting in the third row with Anna Bolan, the captain of the swimming team, hadn't helped.

"That's too bad," Janet said. "We remember her from last year."

The Zoe's Song cast was sitting down backstage with the judges from the Prentiss Foundation.

"We appreciate that you were able to move us to the bottom of the list," Tami said. The foundation had rescheduled our performance so that we were the last play they saw before announcing the regional winner.

"Normally we try to keep the performance schedule completely random, but Mr. Reed explained that your school had some injured students, and their play dropped out, and you were trying to stage yours in a hurry," Robert Annoly, the chairman of the committee said. "Tony, I understand you outdid yourself."

"Sir?"

"Well, last year Mr. Mulino told us how you and your group put together a show in a week. Mr. Reed says you did this one in a night."

Mr. Reed was standing behind us. I looked back at him. "Tami told me," he said with a shrug.

I looked back at the committee. "I don't know if he told you, but we had a real friend named Zoe who was the inspiration for this. She died last year. We originally submitted a different play, a comedy/drama called The Basement, and lost out in the selection process.

"Afterward my sister, that's Traci," I said pointing at the squirt, "suggested that we should have stuck to a musical 'cause that's our strength. Then Mikee," she was sitting next to me, and I reached over and squeezed her knee, "suggested Zoe as the basis for a new story, and I got inspired."

"My sister and I were spending the night with Traci, and he totally ignored us," Kelly added. She was sitting on the other side of her sister, so I couldn't smack her.

"Toby and Sally had the hard part. They wrote the music," I said acknowledging our musical component. "Anyway, we put it all together, planning to do it next year. Then the car accident, and Mr. Reed called and said we could go for it, and the rest..." I waved my arms to encompass the set.

"So, you think you're good enough for Seattle?" Tom Baxter spoke for the first time.

"Tony didn't even think we'd get here," Tami said.

"He thought we'd get beat by Romeo and George," Traci added.

"Romeo and George?"

"It was a play based on a short story on the net," I explained. "Romeo pretended to like Juliet but was really in love with her brother George. I thought it would appeal to the student body's prurient interests."

"So you don't think you're going to win?" Annoly asked.

I shrugged. "In the school I had the advantage of seeing both of the competition plays, and I was still wrong. For the region, I know North Lincoln did Midsummer Night's Dream, but I don't know what the other schools did."

"That's a good point," Janet said. "Next year we should send a list of each school's entries to the other schools." The other two nodded.

The committee stood up. "We enjoyed the performance, and we enjoyed talking to all of you," Annoly said. "It was too bad we missed Miss Tate. The official announcement is next week, so of course we can't say anything."

Janet Martin winked. "But you might not want to make any plans for the second week of January."

Tami and I exchanged looks.

Silly me. I kept thinking that life would get simpler.