But I don't care about this now because I'm in high school, and you can pick classes and clubs yourself, sort of. Well, you can as long as Nicole's not barking over your shoulder like some feral dog about being popular and how Students for Social Justice is lame and just for wannabe hippies.

I am almost skipping when I skedaddle up the walk to the back porch. The trees in the yard look like they're getting ready to turn colors, to turn brilliant. Maybe I will be like those leaves. Maybe I'm about to change from ordinary green to something exuberant. One of the granite slabs of the walk isn't level and I stumble a little and almost fall, like some giddy five-year-old. Imagine if I skinned my knee. It serves me right for being happy. I think of my sister's face and my father's blue tights. I think of my mother's man coming.

All the happy fizzles out.

Inside, I put my backpack on the kitchen table and think about calling Nicole. Fire Man was in the Social Justice club and I know his real name: Tyler Reed. He seems pretty nice too. Not Nicole's type. She usually goes for sturdy jocks, football types not the leaner soccer players, guys whose arms fill out the tops of their shirt sleeves and make them seem like they're going to rip.

The phone rings and I jump, my fists up and ready to fight. Then I feel stupid, because I'm ready to haul a little nasty on a telephone. I pick it up. It's probably Nicole.

"Liliana?"

It's my grandmother. My father's mother.

"Hi, Grammy."

Grammy is eighty-seven. She lives with my dad.

"I want you to be nice to your father, Liliana."

"Uh-huh." I look around. I turn to look out the window. There are no bandits out there, skulking behind the trees with their rifles ready. Darn.

"He loves you."

"Uh-huh."

"He's a good man."

"Yep," I say and twirl the phone cord between my fingers, think about getting a knife and cutting the line.

"He loves you."

"I love you, Grammy."

"Oh," she says and this stops her for a minute. "Next time you see your father, have him bring you to the house. I'll make you a pie."

"Okay."

"Remember, he's a good man."

"I know, Grammy."

"Good. He sometimes tries to call you and he gets the numbers mixed up and quits trying."

"Okay." I yank my fingernails out of my mouth because I've been biting them.

"And sometimes, I know, he forgets to feed you."

"Yep." I twirl the phone cord around my index finger and pull it tight so that it makes marks, little grooves to remember it by.

"Men are like that. It means nothing. It means nothing about love."

And she hangs up. I look at the phone in my hand. There's nothing on the other end. She's always like that, just hanging up. She thinks that if she says goodbye that someone will die, whoever she's talking to, she thinks. Because if there is a God, which she doubts but then thinks is possible when she looks at the beauty of nature, God would make sure it was she who wouldn't die, because God knows she wants to, and needs to; she's just an ugly burden to us all.

Actually, Grammy isn't ugly at all. She's old, and her skin is like tissue paper that's been crumpled up after Christmas and then flattened out to use the next year, easily ripped and full of wrinkles, but her eyes are violet and beautiful. She reads two books a day and can quote almost anyone, Milton, Nietzsche, Goethe, political scientists I've never heard of, you name it. My father says it's hard to be the dumb son of a bright woman, but that it's harder for his mother, who has no one to talk to now that she won't leave the house because she thinks she's too ugly and old for the world to see.

Grammy is always calling and saying things like this. Or else she just calls and cries into the phone, telling me she's too old to live, she wants to die. No one should have to live this long. I like it better when she gets on me about my father. She says she's Moravian. We all have depression in our genes. It's the melancholy of the Czech region, of mountains blocking the sun and invaders ready to run down into villages, striking down anyone in their way and changing their country's name.

After I hang up with Grammy, I look for a snack. On the refrigerator, a note waits. I've attached it here, Mr. Wayne, so that you can analyze my mother's handwriting if you want to. Although I'm sure you have better things to do.

Liliana, Please polish all the glasses if you have a chance. I want them to look nice when Mike comes. I love you. I'd tell you to do your homework, but I know you will. Please thaw some meatballs for supper.

Love, Mom Polish glasses? How do you polish glasses?

I have been working on my report.

Hannah Dustin was born Hannah Webster Emerson. She named her first daughter Hannah too. That seems pretty egotistical to me. Imagine if my mother had named me Rita. God, my whole life I'd be condemned by my mother's name. Jessica had it bad enough. No one is named Jessica anymore. Although maybe I shouldn't be blaming the mothers; maybe it wasn't Hannah's choice. Maybe it was her husband's idea.

I could see it being your idea, if you were her husband. You would see the baby, pick her up in just one of your big hands, and smile. The camera would close-frame your face and the baby's. The baby would coo or grab your finger with her tiny digits.

"Beautiful just like her mother," you'd announce. "We'll name her Hannah."

She couldn't argue with that.

But how do they know which Hannah her father called for when he ran out of the house with his children? Did he yell all his children's names as he ran? When he yelled "Hannah!" did the first Hannah, the mother, know that it wasn't for her he was yelling? She was too sick from childbirth to run. She would slow them all down. Sacrifice them all. Did she tell him, "Go. Go quickly without me. Leave me here to be slaughtered. Save yourself. Save our children. Go." And did they kiss a long kiss, even in front of all those children, knowing it was their last? Or did he say, "Come, Hannah" and she stayed in bed because she didn't know which Hannah he meant?

When I was a really little kid, I used to think that I wasn't human somehow. Maybe I was a changeling baby like they talk about in Ireland. You know the whole thing. Fairies sneak into the hospital and switch babies, snatching the human baby beneath their wings and leaving in its place a fairy baby. Or maybe while she was sleeping, my mother was artificially inseminated by a UFO alien and I was the result: half human and half alien.

That's how I feel now, trying out for South Pacific: half alien. Like I don't belong on this planet and everyone is about to discover what I really am: a freak.

I can't believe this is supposed to make me popular. Although I guess it worked for you, Mr. Wayne. Although you were a big football star first. Right? But before that, before all that, you were just Marion, a boy with a paper route who had a dog named Duke.

Nicole is not trying out.

She glared at me in English class. "Are you kidding?"

"Why not?" I asked her. "You'd be good."

She rolled her eyes and leaned over across the aisle, and spoke to me like I was a mentally deficient five-year-old. "If I didn't get a part, I would be an automatic loser. That would completely derail the popularity train."

I stared at her. Stuart Silsby, who sits in front of me, turned around and gave me disgusted eyes and sang really loud, "Love, Love, My Poo."

"Oh, mature ..."

He laughed. "Liliana eat a banana."

"Brilliant. Stuart is capable of rhyming," I said, shaking my head.

He switched to a manly man voice. "I'm capable of a lot of things, baby."

I shuddered, and when he turned around Nicole said, "He so likes you."

I eyed him.

He turned his head so we could make eye contact, and mouthed "eat a banana" again.

"Bananas have too many calories," I told him.

"Like you need to worry about that," he snapped back. He patted his stomach. "Me, on the other hand ..."

Nicole hiked up her skirt to show more thigh. Stuart noticed and rolled his eyes. I tried not to laugh but it was hard. Nicole glared at me, like it's all my fault. I leaned towards her.

"Try out with me," I begged her.

"No way."

Scene over.

No matter how wimpy she is, I wish she were here trying out with me, because then I could laugh at all the nasty things she'd say about everyone. Sasha is not nasty. Sasha is supportive, which just makes me more nervous because that makes it all seem life-or-death important.

We sit in the back of the auditorium, which is sea green and smells like basement, wet and moldy. On the other side of Sasha, Stuart Silsby jitters his leg. He's tiny, maybe only four feet eleven inches tall. He's probably the only boy I know who hasn't grown yet. Back in second grade when we had our class pictures taken, he was the boy mothers always pointed to and asked who he was and commented on. He wore a tie and a button-down shirt for the picture and smiled like a flashbulb. He's still like that, all showy and confident and full of cornball jokes, but no one thinks he's hot stuff anymore because he's so short.

We're in ninth grade now, Mr. Wayne, and I do feel like a baby, all nervous and anxious with my palms sweating despite the kisses Sasha plants on the top of my head. She'll be a good mother I try to think about how you would be here, just confident, ambling into the theater, standing tall. But Sasha keeps kissing the top of my head for good luck, distracting me.

"This is what my mother does," she says in a big drama-important voice.

I nod my head. "Uh-huh."

"No, seriously. She does it for luck. It calms you down. There's this super-important chakra there."

"You don't need luck."

"Of course I do!'

"You get every lead."

"That was in middle school. We're in the big leagues now."

"Then I should be stage manager and not try out."

"Liliana Faltin!"

"What?"

"You are not stage manager material anymore. Plus, you've never tried out." She shakes her head at me. "Do you remember when I taught you how to cheat at poker in the greenroom?"

I nod.

"Distract the boys with your eyes, blink at them, put your hand on their arm," she'd say. "They can't handle that. Then you slip an ace into your lap or you take a couple extra."

Man, she was good. She'd be one of those women in the saloons, drinking with the boys and taking them for all they're worth, you know. They'd write in the movie trailer: And Sasha Sandeman plays Belle Monday, the scarlet woman with a heart of gold. And a purse full of gold, too ...

What would I be?

Woman # 4 in crowd, cringing.

We watch people audition. First we do the monologues, then we all come back one at a time at night and sing. Sasha comments on people while we wait our turn, and her criticisms seem nice almost.

"Oh, no presence. How sad, but nice articulation," she whispers behind her hands.

Or about Alyssa Cutler, of all people: "Good diction. No volume."

I'm antsy and going crazy and feel like I'm all holed up in jail, guarding some prisoner, and I know that at any second the outlaws are going to come, rifles blazing, and try to break their buddy out. There's nothing I can do but wait for the action to happen, and my nerves are shot to hell, like I need a stiff shot of tequila or something.

Then it happens. They call my name, and with me they call Stuart Silsby.

Sasha stands up with me, grabs my hands in hers and whispers, "I had a baby brother who got his head stuck in the crib and died. My mom heard him crying and everything and couldn't get his head out of the bars in time."

I stare at her. Her big brown eyes are almost crying. There's so much pain in there.

She nods real slow and kisses me on my chakra, then pushes me away.

"He died," she says. "Go."

I trot up the steps and my shaking hand takes a script from Mrs. Gallagher, the director. I stand across from Stuart and I feel almost dead inside, just numb and full of ache. I say all my lines and I say them loud enough, but I forget to act. All I can think about is Sasha's baby brother's head stuck between the bars of his crib and his mother trying to save him. I read the lines, but my lips tremble because I'm thinking of Mrs. Sandeman's face when she knows there's no hope. I say the lines and I am Nellie, the nurse in South Pacific, and I'm telling Emile-Stuart-that I can't stay with him. We can't get married. I have to go. I think of babies. I think of my sister's bruised face. It's all too sad. I cry, long streams of tears escape my eyes and slip down my cheeks. Stuart stares at me like I'm the biggest loser in the world. I can't believe Sasha's baby brother died.

When we're done, Mrs. Gallagher goes, "Good. Good."

She claps her hands together like we're dogs and she's trying to get us to come. I put my face in my hands. I cannot believe I cried. Some cowboy. I look up, determined to get the hell off the stage. At the back of the auditorium, Sasha bounces up and down like a cheerleader. This is something she would never be. She says it's too degrading. I agree, I think, but I'd like to be able to do all those splits and back handsprings. Sasha gives me the thumbs-up sign and starts winking like crazy. She looks so happy. Why is she so happy? Her little brother is dead. I run down the aisle back to her.

"You did it!" she whisper-screams into my ear. "You were awesome. I knew it! I knew it!"

She elbows Stuart Silsby in the gut as he gives her this look like she's cream gravy, trying to get him to agree, but he's completely clueless.

"I know I was," he says, tilting his chin up in the air and sticking it out like some sort of nerdy version of Superman. He puts his hands on his hips, just like the Man of Steel and everything.

Sasha pouts and shakes her head before she starts smiling all over again. "Not you, silly. Lily. She was so good. She cried. Did you see her cry?"

I gape at Sasha and say real slow, "You thought I done good?"

The way I say it sounds like you, but Sasha doesn't notice.

"I'm just so happy!" she bubbles and tries to elbow Stuart again, but he's moved away.

Mrs. Gallagher is clapping her hands for quiet, because she's done taking notes on Stuart and me and is ready to call up two more to the stage, so I lower my voice and lean into Sasha asking, "Sasha. How can you be so happy when your baby brother ... when he ... when he's ... you know ... dead?"

"Of course he's not dead, you silly goof." She gives me a huge smile and a giant hug. "It was a trick. My way of helping you get into the scene. Don't you see?"

Before I get to ask her what the hell she's talking about, she hops up to the stage because her name has been called. She gets a happy, comic scene to try out. Mrs. Gallagher alternates happy scenes with sad. Stuart and I watch her and forget to blink, she's so good. We laugh at her. So does everyone else. Sasha Sandeman.