Lisette was undeterred. (She’s always undeterred.)
“Cindy,” she said, “you’re my best student. And the worst part was that you let the goat eat your friend’s clothing.”
I could have explained that my friends wanted their jeans to look distressed. I could have explained that my goat had a learning disability. I could have explained that my goat was on a gluten free diet. Instead I said, “Well, it was hungry.”
Yes, I went for the most obvious, pedestrian answer every time. I was being safe, and I didn’t even know why. And on and on it went, the scene getting worse each minute. I could feel all the life draining out of it slowly, as Lisette gave me a detention, and my character said, “Okay, fine.”
Paul applauded when we were done, but it was polite applause. Mark said nothing.
“That was horrible,” I said. You see, I knew it, I thought.I knew I’d be bad at this. I knew my previous couple of times doing well were a fluke.
“You were trying to be logical,” Paul said. “When are human beings ever logical?”
I smiled. “I get it,” I said.
But I didn’t get it. Because then I went the other way. The next time I was up, I was playing a scene against Mark, and our location was a police station.
“Sit down, detective,” Mark said to me. “Tell me about the case.”
“Well, there were some clowns committing a murder,” I said.
“Literal clowns?”
“French mime clowns.”
Now I was determined not to be boring, so I was going to be wacky. I started acting out what the French mime clowns were doing as they murdered someone…only they murdered them with daggers shaped like bananas…
Hilarious, right?
No. Not hilarious.
Mark’s sheer deadpan managed to carry us through the muddle I was making, and at the end I sat down and looked at Paul for a long moment.
“Sorry. I know.”
He smiled affectionately at me.
“I’m deeply offended that you mocked French mimes,” Lisette said. “That is a part of my culture.”
Lisette was so endlessly encouraging that she barely seemed to notice how horrible I was. Mark knew and was saying nothing. Paul gave me a little smile, like he was charmed by how bad I was, which was annoying in its own way.
You’ve gotten the first great disaster out of your system,” said Paul. “And we’re all proud of you, Abby.”
I stood up and took a bow. “Now I’ll commit ritual suicide in Paul’s kitchen,” I added.
He gave me that little smile again. “Don’t use the good knife. I only really have the one that I like.”
At the end of the night, I was the first out the door. Paul came to see me off.
“You were hard on yourself,” he said.
“Only because I was terrible.”
“Being hard on yourself puts you in your head and then you can’t improve. You know that, right?”
“Thanks Mr. Stewart,” I said, pretending I was one of his students.
He laughed. “You’ll be better next time. Were you distracted about something?”
