you’d hit me in the face with it instead?” I ask, smirking as I breeze into the theatre.
I take a seat in the top row. The place reminds me of a cave. The walls, stairs, ceiling, and stage are painted flat black. For variation, the hard, plastic chairs, set in steep descending rows, are beige.
The guy slides in next to me. “Liam Garrett.” He holds his hand out.
“Danielle–Dani.” I clap my clammy palm in his and face forward as our professor gets up from her seat down below in the front row and turns to address the class.
“Welcome to Acting I,” she says, smiling broadly before bowing at the class. She’s got short, spiky, purple-red hair and is wearing enormous white glasses. They coordinate nicely with her batik-patterned tunic and black leggings. “I’m Professor Barnes. You may call me Maren.” She holds up a stack of white papers. “I’m going to set the syllabi by the door down here and you can grab one at any time during class. Acting I is all about scene work, so we’re going to begin with open scenes this week. After that, I’ll assign you scene partners and we’ll get into the nitty gritty of the Stanislavski method, my lovelies.” She waves us down toward the stage. “Let’s circle up and get to know each other. Then we’ll do some truly embarrassing warm-ups to get our bodies loose.”
I stand and wait for Liam to clear the aisle. I suppose I could’ve gone the other way, but following him down the stairs to the stage gives me a chance to check out his ass. And a fine ass it is. He’s wearing Levi’s and black Chucks and a short-sleeved royal blue Under Armour shirt that hugs his biceps and shoulders. His short brown hair has wave to it, but he’s got it cut conservatively. None of that weirdness that looks like the guy’s had all of his hair sucked forward in a vacuum. Yep, he’s cute.
At the bottom of the stairs, I go around Liam and cut across the stage, opting not to sit next to him so I can check him out better from the front and size up the other people in class. This isn’t Dani’s first rodeo. I was a mega theatre geek in high school and probably should’ve started taking Acting I my very first term at U of O, but my parents had suggested that with an English degree, at least I’d have a chance of getting a teaching job. There are no prospects in being a theatre major. I obeyed and suffered through four terms of English Lit hell before standing up to my parents over the summer and telling them that just because I could write a short story and liked to read, that didn’t mean I was cut out for life as an academic.
I couldn’t give a flying fuck about criticism or sentence structure or underlying theme. But the characters? That’s what I loved about reading and writing…the drama, the character work, the becoming another person, getting inside someone else’s head. I told my parents I was grateful they’d shelled out the cash for me to attend college, but if I wasn’t going to be able to study what I wanted, they were better off saving their money and letting me drop out to get a job as a make-up artist at the MAC counter in the mall.
The class sits in a circle on the floor, everyone discreetly eying each other. Liam is by far the most conventionally attractive guy, but there are a couple other male specimens with potential. I let my gaze skip over the few boys that set my gaydar off. I’d been down that road one too many times in high school. They could probably sense my hagability, anyway.
I am definitely the most conventionally plain girl in the class. Shoulder length brown hair, fair, freckled skin, sharp nose, weak chin, tiny ears. Chubby, but not fat. Nice-sized boobs. Freakishly large feet. I’m not blond or tan or exotic or ethnic, or anything that would make me interesting. I’m a white Midwestern girl who looks like every other white Midwestern girl. Sometimes this seriously bums me out and sometimes I’m glad I’m not THE MOST BEAUTIFUL because it makes me try harder at being funny and charismatic and outgoing. Which is also pretty damn tiring. I’m conflicted, okay?
“Let’s go around and share a couple of things about ourselves,” says Maren. “I’ll start. As I