what she would say while she showered, while she brushed her teeth, while she had her usual Glen Ellyn breakfast of oatmeal and a banana (the oatmeal would have to be rationed out; her favorite brand was nowhere to be found). She did her hair up into a pineapple pony, and it had cooperated beautifully, the curls in her bangs perfectly springy. And when the nice, air-conditioned city bus that served as a school bus came to pick her up, she put on a smile and tried to make eye contact with the people already seated.
They had earphones in, or were dozing with their heads against the glass. Two black girls sat and spoke with each other, their hair in admirable, intricate braids that gave her an in to comment on. But they did not look up when Celeste approached. Toward the back there was a tall, curly-haired boy in a hoodie reading a book. Celeste smiled at him and he looked away immediately, shy and skittish. She thought, Ah, I know my lines here.
Repeating her practiced lines under her breath one last time, she stood just in front of the boy and waited for him to look back up. Then the bus jolted forward and caused her to stumble into an empty seat behind him. After that it felt too awkward to move back to him. She waited for someone to take a seat next to her, but apparently she was one of the last stops and the seat remained empty.
When she finally tried the local language on someone outside of her homeroom class, they laughed and said, “Dude, we all speak English here.”
At lunch that day she finally found a group of Americans to sit with, but they didn’t speak about the same things she would’ve spoken about with anyone in Glen Ellyn. A summer of partying on boats off the Croatian coast, of family yoga retreats in Bali, of junior internships with leading tech companies in San Francisco; instead of a summer of biking the streets, of boredom and pools and barbecues, of road trips to Wisconsin. Her lines did not fit into this play.
The misfires continued, and with each one, a terrifying realization dawned on Celeste: she was not at home anymore.
* * *
So of course Celeste had looked forward to the lock-in night. When the posters started coming up, she saw an opportunity. She’d signed up for everything that had a sign-up sheet (the ceramics club workshop, the game of tag to raise awareness about housing inequality, the Hot Sauce Club’s Spice Scream Social). But for the first two hours of the lock-in, her aspirations of meeting someone to connect with, of finding even a glimpse of a home at CIS, had not come to fruition. She had sampled three hot sauces before leaving that particular room, finding it hard to interrupt the little groups of threes and fours. She had participated in the Lock-In Night Escape Room—the students who’d organized it were thrilled to hear, once the news broke, what Marisa had done—but since she hadn’t arrived with a group, she had been assigned to a quartet of resentful seniors. They’d barely looked at her the entire time, speaking in a mix of languages Celeste couldn’t even identify.
Now she stood outside the bathroom in the gym wondering where to go next, feeling the enormous weight of unmet expectations pressing down on her diaphragm. Everywhere, people walked and gathered and laughed in groups. Celeste felt as if there were a spotlight on every single one of them, and only she remained in the shadows.
Then she noticed another poster. More of a paper, really, obviously ripped from a notebook not long before and taped up on this spot last-minute, the font unimpressive and sloppy, unlike the majority of lock-in posters.
Wanna laugh? Improv! Funny! FUN. 8 pm, the room behind the theater.
An arrow pointed the way, so Celeste, encouraged by its goofiness, having been raised in a family that constantly poked fun at each other, headed toward Kenji Pierce, looking for the comforts of a laugh.
* * *
Kenji Pierce was at that moment standing outside the room trying to coax various passersby to come in and watch his improv team perform. Not many had heeded his call, save for a group of impressionable freshmen who had heard Ludovico Rigo was on the team and were happy to have the opportunity to watch him do anything for fifteen straight minutes. To watch him and giggle and to be