to tell Beckett the truth when I needed to, and I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. “I want to go talk to my dad,” I said slowly, feeling how true it was as I spoke the words.
“Oh,” Beckett said, macaroni serving spoon halfway to his plate. He set it down and looked at me. “I meant, like, food-wise.”
I laughed. “I know. But—I think I need to talk to him. I think I should have talked to him a long time ago.” Beckett nodded, and I knew that whatever I wanted to do—leave him behind with enough food for four, or sit here and hash out the pros and cons—he’d be fine with. And the thought of leaving right then, heading straight to the Upper West Side, was appealing. But so was the smell of the mac and cheese. I’d waited so long to come here, and all we’d done was get beverages and accidentally cause the restaurant to commit a misdemeanor. “Although maybe,” I said, pulling the slider plate toward me, “I’ll just have a little bit of this first.” Beckett smiled and held out the macaroni spoon to me, and I took it happily.
But when I’d eaten this—free, apparently!—meal, there was only one place I wanted to go.
I was going to talk to my dad. And we were finally going to tell the truth.
CHAPTER 22
Kat
It wasn’t until the middle of the second scene that I realized I was in trouble.
Navel Gazing was a play about five college friends who reunite in a Florida beach town after one of their group dies in mysterious circumstances. When an actress came onstage who looked familiar, I flipped through my program, squinting in the darkness to read her bio, trying to figure out what I knew her from.
But I never got to the cast bios, because there, printed on the title page, were the words that sent my heart thudding: Navel Gazing will be performed without an intermission.
I stared down at the program, trying not to panic. My whole plan had been built around there being an intermission. How was I supposed to leave and get downtown if there was no intermission? How was this going to work?
I tried to concentrate on the play—I didn’t want to miss anything big in case Mr. Campbell wanted to discuss it back home—just hoping that it would be short. Most of the plays I’d seen without intermission were ninety minutes, max. But not all of them. I suddenly remembered watching Fun Home with a sippy cup of soda, not realizing until the lights went down that it was over two hours, with no intermission and no reentry. Stupid theater in the round.
But! This was not in the round, and it also wasn’t a musical, so surely it wouldn’t be longer than ninety minutes. I sat back to watch, all but certain that it would be over soon enough that I could still make it to Josephine’s—and possibly even with enough time to tell Mr. Campbell how good the show was before leaving.
But the more I watched, the more I realized I wouldn’t actually be able to tell Mr. Campbell that without lying. Because the play was not good. At all.
I spent the first few scenes rationalizing that this was all deliberate, these were choices that were being made, that there would be a payoff for the actors being out of synch with each other, the tone being just a little off. As I sat in my seat, I told myself that surely, it would get better.
It didn’t.
Everyone always seemed to be screaming or stating exactly what their feelings were. The jokes didn’t land, even though the actors seemed to expect them to, holding a beat too long for laughter that really wasn’t coming. And though I was trying not to, I couldn’t help but think about what Mr. Campbell would have told us if we’d been putting on a performance like that. Everything was too big, directed toward the audience, nothing internal… and maybe, I figured, desperately trying to rationalize, that this had been intended for a larger space. That maybe everything wouldn’t have been so overdone if the space had been bigger and they wouldn’t have had to indicate so much?
But it just… wasn’t working, which I didn’t understand. This was Mr. Campbell. His taste was sacrosanct. He knew everything about theater. And if he’d just been acting in someone else’s production, or directing a play someone else wrote, I could have