“Just…” I took a breath. “It just seems like kind of a long time, that’s all. Maybe you could email it when you make the decision and that way we wouldn’t have to wait?”
“The list has to be posted,” Teri said, sounding scandalized. “It’s tradition.”
“Tradition,” Jayson, Emery, and Stevie sang together, throwing their hands up in the choreography from when we were all in Fiddler freshman year.
“Tell you what,” Mr. Campbell said, smiling at me as he shook his head. “If I finalize the casting tonight, I’ll email it to the office and have them print it out and post it sometime over the weekend. But no promises—I’m busy tonight.”
“Are you going to the premiere?” Aminah asked breathlessly. “The new Amy Curry movie?”
Amy Curry was the department’s most famous alumnus. I hadn’t believed it the first time I’d walked through the theater lobby, looking at the framed pictures from past productions, but there she was, at eighteen, with the lead in Hedda Gabler—the person that I’d seen in big blockbusters and small prestige movies and a few memorable episodes of a medical drama that ended in a summer-ruining cliff-hanger. If she wasn’t a star yet, she was getting there, and the fact that she was kind of from Stanwich (she’d transferred from California her senior year) and had gone to Stanwich High, had been a part of the Stanwich drama department like me… it somehow made it all seem more possible. Mr. Campbell had taught her when she’d gone here—his second year teaching in the theater program, and if we begged enough, he would sometimes tell us Amy Curry stories. He’d tell us about what a scandal it was when she got a lead role straightaway, since she hadn’t paid any of the dues that you usually had to—but her talent was just that undeniable.
And while Stevie thought the Amy Curry trivia was cool, I didn’t get the sense she spent a huge amount of time thinking about this fledgling movie star she’d never met. But I’d gone deep down the rabbit hole, reading articles online and features in magazines, practically memorizing some of them, staring at the glossy images—her red hair, her big smile, her off-duty casual wardrobe of vintage T-shirts and high-waisted jeans. I knew all about how she lived in Los Angeles with her landscape architect boyfriend, how they had two rescue dogs, how she took a long road trip once a year. I wasn’t even entirely sure why I sought out all these articles and stories—but every time I read one, it was like the jump from here to there got smaller. That maybe this thing I wanted to do wasn’t that impossible, because Amy Curry had acted on this stage and walked these same halls and was now being interviewed for Vanity Fair. It was like if I looked at the pictures long enough, I could conjure the same kind of path for me.
“It’s a Ghost Robot movie, not an Amy Curry movie,” Erik said to Aminah with a roll of his eyes. “Isn’t she, like, the fifth-billed?”
“And how many movies have you been in, Erik?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” Teri chimed in.
“I didn’t say I had!” Erik yelped. “Jeez.”
“It’s premiering in the city?” Jayson asked.
“Yeah,” I said—I was as up on this information as Aminah was. “The premiere in LA was last week. New York premiere tonight, and then an after-party at the Gansevoort.” I wasn’t sure exactly what the Gansevoort was, but it was a word I very much enjoyed saying.
“Are you going?” Aminah asked again. Mr. Campbell just smiled. Even though Amy had graduated over eight years ago, she’d kept in touch with Mr. Campbell—he would occasionally drop references to notes and emails she’d sent him, and one time she had him give feedback on a self-tape she was submitting to a casting director.
“Let’s just say I have plans tonight,” Mr. Campbell said enigmatically. “Plans you guys do not necessarily need to know about.”
I quickly looked down at my hands. I was pretty sure that out of everyone in the class, I was the only one who did know what Mr. Campbell was doing tonight.
I had found out about it by accident last year, late one night when I’d been procrastinating writing my history essay and I’d gone down a Google rabbit hole about Mr. Campbell. His name, Brett Campbell, was common enough that you had to be willing to wade