By now someone from the North Shore Herald office should have congratulated him, since the school paper listed casting announcements in its “All Over the Arts” section. At lunch, Calvin was sitting at their usual table with his back to the door and so didn’t notice when Declan walked in, then stepped right back out and hightailed it to the Annex.

  The classrooms were empty. The door to Densmore’s office was shut. The theater door was open; the smell of Sammy Doulos’s weed—which seemed to have a half-life equivalent to that of uranium—lingered as always, but there was nothing to see inside save for the empty seats and lighting booth and the sawdust on the stage. Maybe Densmore hadn’t posted the list yet.

  But no, there it was, tacked to the corkboard in the hallway: a sheet of white paper with THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK typed at the top; beneath the title, a list of roles and actors playing them.

  Declan stopped dead.

  He stared at the sheet, trying to keep it in focus. He closed his eyes and reopened them to make sure he hadn’t hallucinated. But no matter how many times he reread the list, it did not change. Carrie was Anne Frank; he’d been right about that. But just below her, next to the place where the name Peter Van Daan had been typed, there was a name Declan was fairly certain he had neither seen nor heard before: FRANKLIN LIGHT. Declan had to look all the way to the end of the list to find his own name: DECLAN SPENGLER—MR. DUSSEL.

  Mr. Dussel?

  No, not the role Declan had chosen and Tyrus had promised. No, not even one of the parent roles that would have given him more lines. No, Mr. Fucking Dussel—the dickish dentist who shared a room with Anne and plotted to oust Peter’s cat from the Franks’ and Van Daans’ hideout.

  Declan knocked on Densmore’s office door and, when no one answered, tried to open it. Locked. Mr. Dussel? What the hell was that supposed to be? Some power game? Payback for some slight? Was Ty pissed at him? Should Declan have laughed when Tyrus made his juvenile “cumming” joke? Had he made a mistake by declaring he would play Peter? Should he have said he wanted to play Dussel so Densmore would have cast him in the role he wanted instead?

  Declan stood in the Annex hall engaging in two simultaneous mental conversations. In one, he silently accepted the role of Dussel, pretending that nothing was wrong; in the other, he punched Densmore in the solar plexus and told him to take his Mr. Dussel role and shove it up his ass, all the while trying to blink away horrifying visions of Carrie kissing “Franklin Light”—who, in his imagination, looked like Richard Beymer, who had been too old, too white, and too gay for the role of Tony when he played it in the movie of West Side Story.

  Declan was halfway down the stairs when he heard footsteps and someone whistling. He peered over the railing. Densmore, in a camel hair overcoat, maroon scarf, and black fedora, was mounting the steps carrying a bag of take-out lunch. Declan made as if to run back up and find a place to hide. He stopped himself. Play it cool, boy, he thought. Real cool.

  “How’re you doin’, Ty?” he asked when he passed Densmore on the landing.

  “Very well, Herr Dussel.” Densmore smiled provocatively, and clicked his heels together. But Declan would not succumb. You had to seem unaffected, like when you were acting opposite someone who fucked up their lines or made up their own. Even if you felt like grabbing them by the shoulders, shaking them, and screaming, “Can’t you just read what’s on the page, Rob, you lazy, arrogant piece of shit?” you had to act as if nothing had happened. Or like when your mom’s boyfriend was sleeping over and he pissed in the toilet without flushing and left his stubble in the bathroom sink. Even if you wanted to scream at the cuckolding bastard to get out of your house, you smiled, flushed the toilet, cleaned the sink, and moved on. So when Declan kept smiling and uttered an offhanded “See you at four today, Ty,” moving on was exactly what he was trying to do.

  Densmore furrowed his brow. “Why?” he asked. “What’re you doing at four?”

  “That’s the first cast meeting,” said Declan.

  “Riiight.” Densmore drew the word out. “But that meeting’s only for actors playing the Franks and Van Daans; I won’t need minor characters and supporting players ’til next week.”

  It was as if Densmore had found a switch inside of Declan and flipped it. “Minor characters?” he muttered to himself. “Supporting players?” His eyes burned. And instead of all the clever ripostes he would later scold himself for not having thought of, the best he could muster was a weak, whimpering “What did I ever do to you? What do you have against me?”

  Densmore cocked his head. “What do you mean, ‘what do I have against you’? I actually love you, Declan. But part of loving somebody is doing what’s right for them, not what they want you to do for them.”

  “You specifically said any role I chose.”

  Densmore began shaking his head before Declan even finished his sentence. “No, no, no, no,” he said. “I asked what role you wanted to play, but that didn’t mean I would cast you in it. Don’t be a child. What if you said you wanted to play Anne? Would I have let you play her with falsies and panties in drag? Yes, I wanted to cast you in some role—a parting gift for such a talented actor—but no more than that.”

  “Well,” Declan said, “If I’m so talented, why won’t you let me play the role I want?”

  Anger flared up in Densmore’s eyes. “It’s for the good of the show.” He grabbed a fistful of Declan’s shirt and pulled him close. Declan could smell the coffee on his breath. “I don’t know what you think I do here, Declan, but every decision I make is for the good of the show. Get your head out of your ass and think about it: the whole tragedy of Anne’s relationship with Peter is about fucking.” Densmore loved to use the word fucking, stared down students and actors whenever he said it, accented it in classroom discussions—how George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? hadn’t fucked in years, and that’s why she thought all men were “flops”; how Lady Macbeth’s line about “screwing your courage to the sticking place” was all about fucking; how the rain that Starbuck brought at the end of The Rainmaker was not rain at all but the ability to fuck Lizzie and “make her cum.”

  “Think,” Densmore said. “In the show, Peter and Anne are in love and want nothing more than to fuck each other’s brains out. But they never will because they’ll never get to be alone. If I cast those roles with two actors who are already fucking each other, poof! There goes your entire tragedy.”

  Every time Densmore said “fuck,” it was as if he were thrusting a blade in Declan’s gut, mocking his virginity. “Do you know what?” Declan said, “I don’t need this. I have half a mind to quit, and if I do, I won’t be the only one.”

  Declan followed Densmore to the corkboard. “Are you saying you want your name off my list?” Densmore asked.

  “Yeah, take it off,” said Declan.

  Densmore took a pen and struck a line through Declan’s name.

  “And while you’re at it,” Declan said, “you can cross Carrie’s name off too.”

  “That would be a shame,” Densmore said.

  “It will be for you,” said Declan. “And I don’t give a damn about going with you on your sacred ‘New York trip’ either, so don’t even ask. Find some other peon. When I’m on Broadway, you can buy a ticket and see me there.”

  Declan hustled down the stairs. He burst onto the first floor just as the tone sounded for sixth period, then stormed through the halls with a determination he hadn’t felt since he’d fallen to his knees playing Tony in West Side Story, shouting, “Chino! Chino! Come get me too, Chino!”

  Declan slalomed through hordes of students dashing for the stairs, shoving each other in front of the boys’ bathroom, pleading their cases with teachers and hall monitors: “I didn’t push the kid; I just jostled the motherfucker.” He scanned the hallways, looking for Carrie’s lemon-yellow sweater, her blue jeans, her red bandana. He stood by her locker, vainly waiting for her to appear.

  Come get me too, he thought. Carrie, come get me too.

  When Declan finally caught up to Carrie, last period was over, and she was walking toward the stairs, backpack over both shoulders. He surprised her with a whispered “Boo!” and a kiss intended for her cheek that got her earlobe instead. She smiled at him and he took both her hands.

  “Where’re you going?” he asked.

  “The Annex,” she said.

  Declan adopted an air of befuddlement. “Why would you do that?”

  “The cast meeting.”

  “Yes,” Declan said, “I know the cast meeting is now, but why are you going?” He led her through a set of double doors and into a less populated hallway, where he explained the whole Peter Van Daan–Mr. Dussel bait and switch. But Carrie, who had plans to become a pediatrician and no patience for drama department drama, seemed unimpressed. “Why can’t you just play Mr. Dussel so we can be in the show together?” she asked.

  “But I told him you’d be quitting too,” Declan said.

  “Why’d you tell him that?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Solidarity.”

  Carrie regarded Declan with a pitying expression, one he associated with the way she looked at her family’s old dog, Marlene Dietrich, when she had to be carried into the backyard. Carrie said she couldn’t drop out; her parents had promised that, if she got cast, they would take her to Amsterdam for spring break so she could see where Anne Frank had lived. She said she knew Declan was angry now, but they would have a great time together. “Besides,” she said, “even if I’m supposed to kiss whatever guy’s playing Peter, I’ll keep my lips closed the whole time.”

  Declan smiled. Something about Carrie—maybe her innate goodness, maybe her love for him, maybe the fact that she never seemed to obsess about slights—always calmed him. Okay, he thought, okay, he would play Mr. Dussel after all. “But if I do it,” he said with a sly smile, “I’ll make sure you eat herring and onions before every rehearsal with a kissing scene.”

  He draped an arm over Carrie’s shoulder. He liked the feeling of having her under his weight, liked walking through these halls as part of a couple. How many times had he watched other couples—making out in the smoking area, holding hands in the cafeteria, pawing each other at YMCA dances—and wondered if he would ever be part of one? He had picked Carrie out of the West Side Story chorus and asked if she wanted to join him and some of the rest of the cast at Yesterday’s for burgers and cheddar-broccoli soup. The only comparable feeling to hearing her say yes was taking a bow and listening to the audience cheer as they rose to their feet. And later that night when he kissed her before they said goodbye in front of the Tinkertoy factory, he felt as if people were crying “Encore! Encore!” How he loved being in love, and the only thing he regretted was that so few people could understand how he felt. His parents knew nothing of love—his slut of a mother, his drunk loser of a father. He couldn’t talk to his friends about love; they just made fun of him or asked about sex or pretended to be happy but were secretly jealous because they had never experienced a love like his. No one understood his love other than musicians, playwrights, poets. Shakespeare understood; so did Leonard Bernstein, and even Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett when they wrote the attic scene with Anne and Peter that Carrie would perform after she had consumed the herring and onions he’d have her eat beforehand.

  Upstairs in the Annex, Declan wasn’t sure where to have the conversation with Tyrus to say he would consent to play Mr. Dussel. But Densmore was already ceremoniously tacking a new cast list to the corkboard. The list was exactly the same as the previous one with a single exception. Now the actor listed as Mr. Dussel was not Declan; it was Tyrus Densmore.

  Declan stood there dazed, unable to speak or keep anything in focus—not Densmore smiling at him, not Carrie calling him, telling him to wait, not Trey asking, “Hey, what’s going on, Dec? You all right?”

  Declan silently made his way down the stairs. Tyrus Densmore was playing Mr. Dussel and Declan would be playing nobody. Never forget, he thought. Yes, here was something else he would never forget.

  Mr. Dussel

  “All right—good work, ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow we schedule costume fittings and start work on your character diaries. Remember, the more detailed and the more personal, the better grade you’ll get. Dazzle me, shock me, titillate me; please do anything but bore me—depending, of course, on how you’re using the term bore.”

  The first full-cast read-through was over, and as the cast members of Anne Frank exited the classroom, Tyrus Densmore kept his head down, pretending to focus on the sketch of the set he was drawing while he listened to his actors. Amanda Wehner asked if anyone had an extra lighter; no one did. Calvin Dawes asked if anyone wanted to grab some chow at Yesterday’s; no one did. Trey Newson, still claiming to have a girlfriend at New Trier named Kathy Ho, said he would head home to “put his ding-dong in his Ho-Ho!” then made twanging “daou-duh-nuh-daou-daou” porn movie soundtrack sound effects; Eileen Muldoon said that was so sick; Carrie Hollinger said sorry, Cal, but she had to study for Biology; Rob Rubicoff said that Declan was the one who needed to “bone up on his biology”; Trey sang “Daou-duh-nuh-daou-daou”; Eileen said that was so perverted; Rob said he would be taking Amanda to the Parkway to catch a double bill of Wattstax and Monterey Pop, and hopefully the sound wouldn’t be as shitty as it had been the last time; Judith Nagorsky said she would finish her homework at the library, cook dinner for her mother, then sit in the back row of the Skokie Theater and “finger herself” while watching Mariel Hemingway in Personal Best; Calvin said he would do the exact same thing but with a fist, not a finger; Trey sang “Daou-duh-nuh-daou-daou”; Eileen said that was so gross; all the while Fiona Grenfall pushed PLAY on her Walkman and bopped to the music she was playing, ignoring the lot of them.

  Tyrus listened until the voices disappeared behind the doors of the Annex stairwell. Already, alliances were being formed; soon love affairs would blossom and wilt, lifelong friendships would begin or be dashed, all because of Tyrus Densmore.

  If you had told Tyrus that casting Franklin Light instead of Declan in the role of Peter Van Daan would wind up changing the lives of every actor in the show, including himself, he would have been amused but hardly surprised. He understood the power he wielded in the Annex, for it was inversely proportional to the power he had over his own life. In the Annex he felt omnipotent, could create or destroy an actor’s reputation and self-esteem based on whom he did or didn’t cast in a show, on whom he did or didn’t take on his annual trip to New York.

  It wasn’t even necessarily something he did on purpose. He hadn’t planned to cast Franklin instead of Declan as Peter, and he certainly hadn’t intended to play Mr. Dussel himself. He had only made those decisions in a fit of pique. But now, looking back, his choices made sense. In Anne Frank, dire circumstances made even the most good-hearted people suspicious of each other—made them fight over resources, despise the ones they loved. So, for this play to work, he had to create an atmosphere rife with tension and distrust.

  However, the moment Tyrus began to descend from the climes of his domain, he could feel power and authority seeping out of him—as if he had just exited the stage, and it was time for him to stop playing a role. He loved the way actors scrambled for his attention and approval like suitors vying for his hand, and he hated how ephemeral their adoration was. After they graduated, they cast him aside like some spurned lover. What did they leave him with after he had changed their lives? Memories, some framed photographs in the Annex hallway, the occasional letter or Christmas card, and a gnawing feeling of perpetual heartbreak and betrayal. Did a single one of them ever realize all that he had done for them?

  Entering the high school’s faculty lot, then getting behind the furry steering wheel of his cream-colored Cadillac DeVille (vanity plates: DRCTR 1), he could feel himself once again becoming the man he was outside the Annex: the surly, peevish husband of a society maven, the father of a barely communicative patient at the Chicago-Read Mental Health Center, a supporting player in a bathetic drama that he would have walked out of at intermission, a sad, bitter character—washed up at forty-three.

  Driving to the clinic always depressed Tyrus. And the fact that Tom Densmore was sullen, hostile, or utterly blank on the days his dad showed up made Tyrus feel even worse. Whenever he went to visit, he would seek out any sort of distraction on his way, hoping that by the time he arrived the receptionist would tell him, “Sorry, Mr. Densmore, visiting hours are over.”

  Tyrus was driving along California Avenue through the north side of Chicago. He had just passed Devon Avenue and was sitting behind a slow-moving CTA bus, wondering whether he could find a traffic jam that would delay his arrival at Chicago-Read even further, when he noticed the bus disgorging a familiar-looking passenger lugging a battered yellow bicycle. The kid wore a denim jacket, grimy sneakers, and jeans, and carried a frayed, overstuffed navy-blue backpack that made him hunch over a bit as he loped past Tel Aviv Kosher Pizza and then the Ner Tamid synagogue. Tyrus drove slowly, letting other cars pass as he kept the kid in sight just ahead of him. Then, when he got to Granville Avenue, he sped up, parked his car in the A&P supermarket lot, got out, and walked back the other way until he came face-to-face with the kid.

  “Well, hello there, Mr. Light,” said Tyrus.

  Franklin looked up. “Mr. Densmore,” he said.

  “You’re a bit far afield, aren’t you?”

  Franklin gave him a look as if to say he didn’t understand.

  “Don’t you live near the high school?” Tyrus asked. “That’s what you wrote on your form.”