The Journal Read Aloud To His Class

Nate had told us Thursday night that he would not be trying out. Then at breakfast Friday he said, in the flat voice of someone reading a note, that if we wanted to come sit in the back of the gym, he supposed that was all right. He did not say he was auditioning. I did not ask.

Parents were allowed to watch from the last row of folding chairs by the stage door. About eight of us came. A grandmother here, a dad there, a couple of mothers who had left work early. I knew most of them, and I noticed that three were people I had called.

The gym smelled like floor varnish and radiators just starting up for fall. A folding table had been set on the floor in front of the rolling stage, with Mr. Hartman, the music teacher, off to one side at the upright piano with his hands in his lap. Mrs. Lindgren sat behind the table with a clipboard and a stack of scripts, a small, gray-haired woman of fifty-four with reading glasses on a chain. Her eyes went to me. She looked away first.

I want to be fair to her, so I will say that she did not look like a villain. She looked like what she was, a tired teacher at the end of a long week with a headache she had been nursing since Tuesday.

The sheet had nine names on it. Nate’s was the ninth, in pencil, written Monday before any of it. The nine children sat on a long bench against the wall, scripts in their laps, not talking. I saw the orange jacket first, Brody Tollefson’s, at the end by the stage steps. Ryker Neddermeyer was three places down from him, hands in his pockets. Kaylee Haas sat with her feet not touching the floor.

Nate came in through the side door at 3:14 with his blue jacket zipped to the chin, and he went to the end of the bench and sat down.

At 3:15, on the dot, Mrs. Lindgren looked up.

“Nate Weller,” she said. “You’re first.”

I have wondered since whether she meant it for a kindness. Get the worst of it done, before the nerves can build. I have wondered too whether she meant it as a test. Both can be true of a person at once. It didn’t matter, because he stood up.

He walked to the strip of masking tape on the gym floor. It was the mark where each of them would stand. He stood on it, and he did not take a script. He did not need one.

He took a breath I could hear from the back row.

“M-m,” he said.

Nothing else came.

“M-m-m-m.”

Doyle’s hand found mine in the dark of that last row. My nails were in my other palm hard enough to leave a mark. The first word was “Mister,” and M is one of the hard ones for him. He told me once the soft sounds were the worst, because there was nothing to grab.

Five seconds. Six. I counted them on my knee.

Ten.

Mrs. Lindgren glanced at the clock on the gym wall.

It was a small movement, her eyes going up and back. She would have done it for any child. But I had spent three days thinking about that clock, and I felt it go through me like a draft.

From the bench along the wall, a chair scraped.