This is the fourth part of a series, so if you haven’t done so already, you might want to read Part I, Part II, and Part III.
“Hey, you’re back already?”
Eliza tried to slide into her seat behind Angela as inconspicuously as possible as she answered. “Yeah, apparently a bunch of people who had signed up never showed, so we got through our auditions faster than they had expected.”
“How do you not show up for your audition to Juilliard?”
“Beats me. I got there half an hour early, and that was after my train got delayed.”
“So? How’d it go?”
“Ugh! Don’t ask.”
“Come on. It can’t have been that bad.”
“It really was.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re just beating yourself up over nothing.”
“I spilled Kevine Kline’s water all over him.”
Angela squinted her eyes and hunched her shoulders in sympathy as she said, “Oooooo!”
“Yeah.”
“How did you manage to do that?”
“I got to the part where she was raging against her mother for putting her up for adoption as a baby and I kind of lost myself in the moment. I was waving my arms around and the next thing I knew one of them had knocked down his water glass and there was water all over the table, his papers, his pants…” Eliza hid her face in her hands.
“Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe he was impressed by your commitment.”
Eliza raised her head from her hands just long enough to roll her eyes at her friend.
“What? I’m just saying it pays to be memorable and he’s not likely to forget the girl who wet his pants, now, is he?”
Despite her decidedly humorless mood, Eliza couldn’t help laughing out loud at the way her friend phrased her recent misfortune.
“Miss Schroeder, is there something funny about the present perfect tense?”
Eliza sobered up in an instant.
“No, ma’am.”
“Good. Then can you tell me the present perfect tense of travailler?”
“Ummmm.” Eliza stared at the whiteboard with its lists of conjugated verbs. Travailler wasn’t up there yet so, rather than take a stab at it, Eliza just squinted at the board, her eyes running over the same words again and again, trying to look like she was making an honest attempt at finding the answer, when really she was just waiting for Madame Mezal to rescue her.
Sure enough, after a minute or two of silence, Madame Mezal scolded Eliza for her failure, warned her to pay better attention from now on, and asked for another student to correctly conjugate the verb.
Eliza breathed a sigh of relief as the teacher’s attention moved off of her and she was safely out of the spotlight.
Angela raised her hand, correctly answered Madame Mezal’s question, then surreptitiously passed her notes behind her to her friend.
“Merci,” Eliza whispered.
“Anything for the girl who wet Kevin Kline’s pants.”
Eliza bit back her laugh just in time. She swatted her friend’s back with the papers Angela had just handed her, which caused enough noise to once again attract Madame Mezal’s attention. She looked over at the girls and they promptly bent their heads over their desks in their most studious postures.
To be continued …
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