Carolina Isle Read Free

cynicism made her wonder what it was that Ariel
really
wanted. But as hard as Sara tried, she couldn’t come up with anything she had that Ariel might want. The photo of the unwanted David was still in her hand. He really was the best-looking male she’d ever seen. She slipped the picture into her pocket, then headed back toward the dorm, but when she got to the door, she stopped.
    Her state university didn’t have a good football team. Actually, it wasn’t all that good in any sport, but what it did have was a great drama department. In fact, there were several well-known actors who’d started at her university. Sara had toyed with trying her hand at acting—after all, hadn’t she been acting when she’d smiled and told people that things were great at home? But the head of the drama department was known as a real bastard. To get into his department you had to prove to him that you were worthy. He didn’t let you read a part that someone else had written, but made you perform a character of your own creation. You had to do this in front of him and all his students, and Sara was told that his criticism was brutal, meant to humiliate. More than one student had left the university after just five minutes with him.
    Sara had thought about performing a character like her father, but that would have been telling too much about herself, so she didn’t try out. But as she had her hand on the door into the dorm, on impulse, she turned away and started toward the drama department. Sara knew that at the moment she looked her worse, but that wasgood. If she could imitate Ariel while looking as bad as she did, then she knew she could get into that department.
    She kept Ariel in her head as she walked into Dr. Peterson’s classroom. And because she was Princess Ariel, she didn’t knock. Sara gave a wildly exaggerated performance, a caricature actually, of Ariel. The truth was that Sara created a character who looked like Ariel but who acted like the people her father had described. She felt a little bad doing it, but when she saw the eyes of her audience, she knew she had them. At one point, Sara haughtily asked Dr. Peterson if he was gay since everyone knew that only gay men were on the stage. Dr. Peterson was a notorious womanizer, so that got a lot of repressed snickers from the class. Sara kept it up for about ten minutes, then pretended that she was in the wrong classroom and had actually wanted fourth-year calculus. Once outside, she leaned back against the cool concrete-block walls and breathed again. Her heart was pounding. All her life she’d tried to take the attention away from herself; she’d never wanted anyone to know how bad it was at home for fear that she’d be put somewhere worse. Buttoday Sara’d made a true spectacle of herself—and found that she’d enjoyed herself.
    When Dr. Peterson opened the classroom door, Sara stood upright. He looked her up and down and she could tell that he didn’t like what he saw. Now that Sara was herself again, she felt overweight and timid. “You’re in,” he said, but he was shaking his head as though he couldn’t figure out how she’d been able to transform her dirty self into a princess for even ten minutes.
    So it turned out that meeting Ariel changed Sara’s life. That summer she started in the drama department, and since she was a whole year behind the other kids, she had to take more hours. She never got a summer vacation, but Sara loved every minute of it. When she graduated, she went to New York with a nearly empty bank account, but with the conviction that she was going to set Broadway on fire.
    Two years later, she was broke and had to get a job as an undersecretary in a big office. Sara could act, but she couldn’t sing or dance, and in New York she was competing against people who were great at all three. She would have gone to L.A. to try her luck, but she’d been