Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen by Dyan Sheldon Read Free Book Online

nothing has happened. You can bet if the President died they’d have the flag at half-mast. And probably a special assembly where everybody has to bend their heads in silence for a minute.”
    Ella nodded. “Oh, I get what you mean. National mourning.”
    I steered her into the girls’ room so I could put my lipstick and eye shadow back on.
    I flung my make-up bag on the sink. “After all, the death of a President isn’t half as devastating as the death of a band like Sidartha. If the President dies, the Vice President takes over for a while, and then they elect a new President. Big deal.” I stared at myself in the mirror. The black eye shadow made me look like a tragic Greek queen who’d just discovered that she’d married her son or eaten her own baby or something like that. “But there’ll never be another Sidartha!” I cried. “It’s like the death of the last whale!”
    “It’s too bad we’re not putting on Moby Dick this year, isn’t it?” said a honeyed voice right behind us. “That would have been perfect for you.”
    Ella and I looked in the mirror to see one of the stall doors open and Carla Santini waft out. As always, she looked as though at least a dozen photographers were waiting to take her picture, cameras poised. She was wearing DK leggings, a silk Armani top, and spit-polished black boots. Elegant and expensive, but understated. Everything about her said, This is the person you should want to be.
    I smiled my most understated smile. “Only if you played the whale.”
    Normally I enjoy school. My mother says it’s because I like an audience, and what better audience is there than two dozen students and a teacher who can’t leave the room for fifty-five minutes?
    But that black morning when no birds sang, I couldn’t concentrate on anything except the fact that I now lived in a Sidarthaless world.
    In history I stared blindly at Mr Stiple while he droned on about some war, but all I heard was Stu Wolff singing, I don’t want to hear you say ‘never again’, tell me tomorrow, tell me a lie, but please never tell me ‘never again’.
    In maths I gazed raptly at Ms Pollard while she put equations on the board, but all I saw was Stu Wolff sliding across the stage with his guitar on his knee, smiling that endearing lopsided grin of his.
    It was the same in all my other classes. I was so self-absorbed in gym that I got whacked with a hockey stick and had to sit out most of the period. Ms Purdue, my gym teacher, said I should try to concentrate on hitting the puck, not being it.
    It wasn’t until lunch that I began to revive.
    Carla Santini and her disciples usually sat anywhere that Ella and I weren’t, but that day they sat right behind us.
    Because Carla Santini thinks she’s Dellwood’s answer to Julia Roberts, and because she thinks everybody in the universe is interested in every little thing she does, there is no way you can help overhearing her conversation. Carla will never be a great actor – artistic suffering is as alien to her as wearing perfume is to a swamp rat – but she sure can project.
    Ella and I sat in communal silence, thinking about Sidartha and ignoring Carla, but then something she said caught my attention.
    “I had a long talk with Mrs Baggoli after school yesterday,” said Carla. “You know, about Pygmalion ?”
    Pygmalion! I’d been so depressed about Sidartha that I’d actually let the auditions slip to the back of my mind until then.
    There was a gentle murmur of interest from the entourage. Once it had died down, Carla continued. There was nothing in her tone to suggest that modesty was one of her strongest virtues.
    “I told her how I thought it was very rigid to stick to the original accents,” said Carla. “I mean, we’re not English and it’s not the nineteenth century any more…”
    And Carla Santini couldn’t do a cockney accent to save her life – or even her wardrobe.
    “We need to adapt classics to reflect our own times, to make