Take a Lemon

After Mom left, Tina was ready to get back to trying to teach me about being Marsha. “Are you feeling better, Marsh?” she asked me. “Do you want me to start teaching you things?”

“Yeah, lots better, thanks,” I admitted. My head was still spinning, but it felt really good that both Chad and Tina knew about what was happening and were on my side. Or at least, Tina had a strong interest in making me comfortable in my role as Marsha. Telling her some of my old stories had been a strong dose of familiarity, and had calmed me enough to look at the next steps in this charade I was about to undertake.

Simply getting into the character of Marsha wasn’t going to be enough. I had to learn things that girls took for granted, and I only had a week. Clearly, I wasn’t going to become expert at them in that time; I was going to make mistakes. But as Mr. Condrin told us, audiences don’t notice most mistakes. They assume that whatever you do is what you were supposed to do, as long as you don’t make it obvious by reacting – you have to keep right on going. Nobody was going to know that I was really a boy even if they knew about the experiment. The idea that this particular thing had happened wasn’t likely to be the first explanation that would come to mind if I messed up. So what I needed was simply to become basically competent and fake the rest.

But at the same time, I needed to continue my college studies. I couldn’t have Marsha flunk out – that would be way too out of character, not to mention embarrassing. And I couldn’t afford to get too far behind in my own courses, especially those which were prerequisites for the courses I was going to be taking next semester once I became Marshall again. If I was lucky, she and I were taking some of the same courses, and I wouldn’t have too much extra work. Tina had confirmed that Marsha was pre-med like me, so the odds were in my favor.

It was time to find out. “Before doing anything else, Teen,” I said, “I need to check my courses. If Marsha isn’t taking the same ones I do, I’m going to have a lot of catching up to do.”

So we headed back to my bedroom and I looked for the relevant information. I was counting on Marsha having learned the same study skills that I had. Our guidance counselor had taught a summer course for rising seniors and my parents had made me take it. It stressed the importance of proper note-taking, and of reviewing and recopying ones notebooks. If Marsha had taken it, she would have brought her course notebooks home, and I could read them. Sure enough, there was a suitcase that she had obviously brought home for break. It contained a fair bit more laundry than I had taken home, but the important part was that there was a stack of notebooks in it.

“Organic Chemistry and Spanish 202,” I read from the first two. “Two out of two, a perfect match. That’s going to make things easy.” I glanced inside the first one and saw notes somewhat similar to the ones I remember taking, although in a much neater and of course feminine handwriting. At least it wasn’t going to be hard to read these. I reached for the next two. “European Literature? That’s different. And… Biology 201. Yes, clearly a Bio major.”

“Is that good?” Tina asked.

“Yeah, it’s not too bad. We have three out of four courses the same. I don’t see any logic notes, though.” At her blank look, I explained. “It’s a distribution requirement – you have to take courses outside your major, and the Philosophy department teaches a course on Boolean Logic, which is actually more math than philosophy, but counts. The EuroLit course probably means papers, though, and I’ve generally tried to avoid courses like that. I’m probably going to have to spend part of my break catching up on some of the reading.”

Under the notebooks were a couple of paperbacks Marsha must have brought home to read. Both were romances, which didn’t interest me at all. Evidently, my ‘sister’ and I had very different tastes in casual reading. I would have preferred a mystery or fantasy. Then something else caught my eye.

“Oh no,” I gasped, reaching for it. “I’d forgotten about this.”

“What is it, Marsh?”

I held out what I had found, a bitter taste in my mouth. “It’s a script for The Mousetrap. There’s this director at Piques, a senior, Alvin Tomlinson. He’s got a really great reputation, and I auditioned for both of his plays last year. Wasn’t cast in either of them. He’s doing Mousetrap…” I paused. Even if it wasn’t as painful as… well, everything else I’d lost, it still hurt. “He cast me as Paravicini. It’s a comic role. Not all that big, but it would have been fun… and now I’ll never get a chance to do it. We were supposed to have a read through the first day after break.” I threw the script back into the suitcase in frustration. “Damn it! It was my last chance to get him to direct me. He could have taught me so much!”

“But Marsh,” Tina started.

Then I realized what I had said. “I’m sorry, Teen. What should I have said, ‘rats’ or something like that?

“I’m not talking about that.”

“Oh, you mean that he’s probably going to be doing another show in the spring? Yes, but he’s doing Sweeney Todd, and I don’t have the voice to play one of the leads. I can probably get a role in the chorus, but it wouldn’t be the same.”

“Marsh, you’re not listening. Why do you have the script at all?”

“Because he gave it to me when he cast me, Teen. He came right to my dorm room and…” Then I got it. I didn’t have my guitar, and I had all of Marsha’s books and clothes. This couldn’t have been my script. But that meant…

With trembling hands, I retrieved the script and opened it. Sure enough, the name written inside the front cover was “Marsha Steen.” I thumbed through the pages, looking to see if any lines were highlighted. And found them. “‘Mollie’, I breathed, hardly daring to believe it.”

“What?”

“Mollie. Marsha was cast as Mollie!”

“Is that good?”

“You don’t know the play?”

“No, “ she admitted.

“Well, first of all, this is one of Agatha Christie’s best. It’s been running for like forty years in London. And Mollie is the female lead, probably the best role in the show. She’s got these incredible scenes with Giles and Trotter… I could do this, Teen.”

“Do what?”

“I could play the role – I think. They’d never know. I mean, it’s not as if the real Marsha is going to show up, is it? And if Alvin is as good a director as they say, he’d be able to get me through it.”

“But, you are the real –”

“It’d be challenging, of course. I’ve never done a lead before, and I’d be playing a girl onstage. That means that the way I act is going to be under even greater scrutiny than in real life. I’m going to have to act feminine and make it seem natural, and be critiqued for it.” A happy thought struck me. “Maybe it would even help my normal off-stage performance.” The situation was starting to sound better and better.

“I’m going to do it, Teen! I’d never get a chance like this on my own. The world owes me. With everything I’ve just lost, this is the least I could get in return.” I was actually excited. Standing in for Marsha was finally going to have something positive going for it! “I want to read through the play, concentrating on Mollie’s lines. Can you read the others for me? I need to start thinking about interpretation…”

Tina grinned, “Marsh, it’s so good to see you happy about something. I’m sure I can find time to do a read-through with you. But don’t we have other things to work on first?”

She was right, of course. There were all those other ‘girl things’ that I needed to learn, and the sooner I started working on them, the better. The script was going to have to wait. But after this unexpected bit of good news, I really didn’t mind. It was going to be a fun challenge. Not only did I have to act the role of Marsha, I had to play Marsha playing Mollie; it was my own “play within a play.” I wondered if Alvin was going to film the production. It would be such a kick to be able to compare my performance to that of the girl who got it in the original timeline, after I changed back.