It's only Wednesday, just the middle of the week, but for some reason he can't quite fathom, Cameron feels very tired. He ends up getting out of bed at a time that feels way too early, swinging by Zachary's house to pick him up before going to buy breakfast from McDonald's.
Wishing desperately that he'd gone for late arrival instead of early release, Cameron makes his way to the tech theater class he's an office aide in. He walks into the auditorium, one hundred percent ready to flop into a chair in the audience and stay there for the next hour and a half. Cameron quickly realizes this isn't going to be the case, as the tech theater teacher almost immediately spots him and lets out a loud whoop.
"Brilliant show, Cameron!" he shouts. "Absolutely brilliant."
"It was," one of the girls in the class agrees.
"You were amazing," another girl adds breathlessly. She's clutching a program from Shadows to her chest, along with a black Sharpie.
Cameron would be amused by this if it weren't so early in the morning. Instead he has to hold back an exasperated sigh. "Thanks, guys," he says as genuinely as he can manage. "But I was only onstage for a few scenes, and even then it was mostly in the background."
"You were still amazing," someone says.
Cameron sighs for real this time, tuning out the fangirl noises coming from the class as he heads over to the teacher. "Do you need me to do anything right now?" Cameron asks, setting his drink down on the edge of the stage.
"I need photocopies of the ground plans, and this prop list," the teacher says. Cameron takes the papers and turns to leave, but the teacher stops him by clapping a hand on his shoulder. "Say, Cameron, I have a question, well, questions, about the lighting and the sets and the way they filtered Lara's mic for that one line. But first, what type of spotlight does that theater have?"
"I'm sorry, I really don't know," Cameron says. "Give me a few minutes and I may remember that." And then before anyone else says something, Cameron's picked his drink back up and is dashing out of the auditorium. He takes his sweet time in the copy room, chatting comfortably with the copy lady as he works. He's always been a favorite of the theater teachers, and so he's been a regular visitor of the copy room over his four years in high school, making copies of everything from scripts to press releases.
Cameron returns to the auditorium with the warm papers in tow, pretending not to notice as the head of almost every girl in the class (and a few of the boys) swivel in his direction.
"Sets don't paint themselves!" the teacher shouts at his class, approaching Cameron and taking the pages. "Hey, do you know how they-"
"Sorry, I haven't spent that much time backstage," Cameron lies: he has as much of an infatuation with the technical stuff as with acting itself, and could probably answer every question thrown at him if he wanted to. "What else is there for me to do?"
The teacher pulls a pass from his clipboard. "I have a pass for Annabell," he says. "She's in room 208 now. Tell her she needs to come by the drama room during advisory."
Annie's in a math class, and those are on the opposite side of the school from the theater. When Cameron gets there, he's glad to see that someone else from the show looks as tired as he feels. He leaves the pass with Annie's teacher and hangs around the door for a few moments, watching Annie's eyelids flutter close as she rests her head on her hand.
The rest of the day passes by in a similar fashion: Cameron gets to his English class where his teacher congratulates him and a blissfully small amount of girls fangirl in the corner of the room. Cameron shares advisory with Zac, so waits outside the younger boy's classroom on the way there. Zac comes out, closely followed by the girl with the Shadows program. Cameron grabs hold of Zac's bag and steers him down the hall towards advisory.
"What was that all about?" Zac laughs, letting Cameron push him down into his seat.
"That girl who came out of class behind you spent first period stalking me," Cameron says. "Its creeping me out."
Zac guffaws loudly, and Cameron thumps him with his binder. "Dude! It's not funny!"
"What's not funny?" Paige asks, sliding into the seat next to Zac.
"Cameron has a secret admirer!"
"Liar!" Cameron growls. He turns to Paige. "Its this one girl who's been totally stalking me since I played Oliver in elementary school."
"She likes you," Paige teases. "How cute."
"How weird," Cameron corrects.
"Be thankful that you're a senior and she's not," Zac points out. "After this year you're done with her."
Theater production that afternoon is interesting:he and Annie are the only two kids from the show in the class, and the teacher and all the others only seem to want to pile congratulations and praise on the two of them. Cameron's more than happy to bear with it: these are all people he's known and worked with for years.
Annie, on the other hand, is less than grateful for the attention. She's the only sophomore in the class, because she's the head of the school's make-up crew, and as Cameron talks he watches her in the corner of the room, consulting a sketch of an eye as she dabs at the face of some poor girl. Annie has more self-restraint than almost anyone else Cameron knows, but he sees how focused she is on her task and how her smile is quickly getting more strained with every person that approaches her.
Cameron quickly intervenes and asks the student director to start talking about plans for the upcoming school production. After that, he and Annie are more or less left to their own devices.
Despite his early release, Cameron hangs around to have lunch with Annie, Flynn, Lara and Zac. He regrets this decision almost immediately, as his stalker makes a quick appearance, clutching her program tightly before pushing Cameron's lunch aside and replacing it with the program.
"Hi, Cameron!" she loudly says into his ear.
Zac snorts into his food.
"Hey," Cameron replies, trying to discreetly rub his ear as he shoots the others pleading glances. "What's up?"
"Could you sign my program?" asks the girl. "Please? I waited ages at the stagedoor but you didn't come out, and you looked really busy during first period this morning."
"I was," Cameron grumbles, taking the Sharpie. "What's your name?"
"Oh, Cam, don't be silly," laughs the girl. "It's Cassie! You totally know that!"
"...yeah," Cameron responds after a moment, quickly scrawling his name across the front of the program.
On the other side of the table, Zac and Flynn are mouthing the word "Cam" in unison.
As Cameron hands back the program with a forced smile, he notices that none of the others have signed it. Before he has time to comment on this, Cassie's planted a loud kiss on his temple and has started bouncing away.
Cameron returns his attention to the table and glares at his amused friends.
"You have a little something there," Annie says, pointing a finger at her temple.
Scowling, Cameron waits for Lara to finish scraping Cassie's lipstick off his face with her fingernail, then picks up his bag and his cup noodles. "I'm out," he declares, and before anyone can protest, Cameron's out of the cafeteria and on his way to his car, where he rams the cup noodles into a cup holder before making his way to the theater.
The only other people there so early are Addie and Leah, so Cameron says hi to them before retreating to his dressing room, finishing his meal before crashing on the couch.
<++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++>
Cameron's waken up by a heavy pillow to his stomach.
"Wha- Riley!"
Sliding his legs off the couch, Cameron glances up in time to see Riley stick her tongue out at him.
"Hey, sleepy noodle boy," she says. "We've got a meeting on stage. Then you may need to think about getting ready for the show."
Cameron checks his watch then quickly looks Riley up and down: she's already gotten her hair and makeup done.
"Who are you going on for?" Cameron asks, following Riley out of his dressing room and up towards the stage.
"Paige's ensemble part," Riley replies simply. "And Paige is going to spend tonight watching the kids backstage... I may have encouraged them to get a bit too rowdy last night when no one was watching."
Cameron snorts as they join the group of people on the stage.
"Sleeping Beauty's up!" Mr. Harding announces, appearing from the crowd as he jumps onto a chair, clutching a notebook. "We can start now!"
"Ha ha," Cameron calls.
"Now, I have a lot of things for you guys," Mr. Harding says. "But first up, I have notes."
Everyone groans.
"You did not spend the opening show with your face in that notebook, did you?" Addie asks, making a face.
Mr. Harding makes a face in return. "I'll let that comment slide since you're a dear friend, Adrianna," he replies. He drops his notebook to the ground. "But you're right. I did actually watch the show last night. And I do have a few minor notes."
Cameron tunes in, listening to Mr. Harding tell everyone what they did right, and pointing out what they needed to fix. Cameron and Lara both have the common problem of being just off their marks for some of their lighting: Cameron tends to be a bit too far to one side, while Lara is always a step behind where she should be. But it's not something Cameron's particularly bothered by. He knows how important it is to be right on his mark, but he'd done okay with his singing and acting, and really, that was all that mattered to the casual observer. Cameron had had occasions where he'd been way off his mark, back in his day's of children's theater, and no one he'd known had ever seen a problem.
They're dismissed to finish up their preshow preparations: Cameron shows up to mic check and proceeds to amuse everyone in the theater by a horrible rendition of the reprise of I'll Cover You.
They hold a somewhat rushed show circle in the black box: someone had somehow managed to misplace both Hayley's mic and Riley's high-heeled boots while they were getting into costume or on the stage for soundcheck, and had sent out everyone in the theater to find them. They kept to the time reasonably well, with it being the teenagers' turn for the circle and there being only seven of them. After a warning from Mr. Harding, they quickly wrap up and finish their last warmup, rushing for places.
It's a reasonably uneventful show and for the most part goes off without a hitch. Both Hayley and Lara get their dresses caught on the same wooden part of the set making entrances. Cameron watches both of them struggle with getting their dress free quickly without ripping anything, then a few scenes later watches Riley almost do the exact same thing (and she's already had enough trouble with keeping dresses intact). During intermission Cameron finds a roll of tape and covers the snag, and no one else shows any indication of getting caught for the rest of the show.
Mr. Harding's making rounds backstage after the show congratulating people again. Cameron's packed almost all of his stuff up, and is about ready to go when the girls burst into the guys' dressing room.
"Hey!" Zac shouts, though all of them are fully clothed.
"Grab your stuff!" Riley shouts.
"And a Sharpie!" Paige loudly adds. "Bring a pen or something!"
"Hurry!" Annie adds, grabbing Lara and whipping her out of the dressing room with her.
"What's going on?" Flynn asks, quickly slinging on his bag and ramming his ski cap on his head.
"We're stagedooring!" Riley says. "Now, hurry up!"
Flynn and Riley tear out of the room, Paige and Zac quickly following. Cameron grabs his favorite blue Sharpie from the table and quickly follows. Stagedoors are one of Cameron's favorite things ever, with the fans being so enthusiastic and Cameron has never been in a show with a more enthusiasm than this one.
He can't wait.
I'm really tired, guys. This is the last update for a week or two: I've got auditions for a play next Tuesday, and club activities, and I still need to find and memorize a monlogue, and then callbacks are Wednesday, and then if I don't get a callback I need still need to go for the tech crew interviews on Thursday and so no matter how you look at it I'm staying really late after school at least twice next week.
Urgh.
Thanks so much for the reads and comments and votes and I love you all so much like there is no better motivation than support, and I don't get a lot of it IRL, so it really means a lot.
See you soon?
Also, I thought it would be interesting to mention that Cassie was kinda inspired by things that happened with the last show I was part of: after shows cast members kept getting text messages like "Who is cinderella and is she single???" and then similar ones for her Prince, and we were all laughing about it because our Cinderella was fascinated by these people and the theater department went around breaking the hearts of little girls and freshman by telling people that didn't know that our Prince was actually gay.
By closing night the joke was "The Prince has gotten with more girls in the past two hours than I have in the past year and he's gay."
Theater people. Gotta love them :) Happy weekend.