Melinda grabbed my arm as I was throwing my stuff in my locker after gym. “Kelly! The cast list will be up on the bulletin board outside the choir room after school! I’ll meet you there. Good luck!”

The auditions had been going on every afternoon for a week for the annual musical. This year we were doing “Carousel” and I had tried out for the role of Julie Jordan along with what seemed like every girl in our Senior Class. I knew I had a pretty got shot at getting the part since I could sing, dance a bit, and had been in every musical since Junior High but I knew these things weren’t a given.

When the bell rang at 3:00 I gathered up my stuff and made a mad rush to the other end of the building. There was a pretty huge crowd gathered around the bulletin board, but I saw Melinda waving me up to the front. The crowd kind of split apart when I walked up and I had an inkling, but when I saw my name next to “Julie Jordan” I whooped. Melinda was hugging me and she whispered in my ear, “I got Carrie!”

We were pushed to the side as more kids tried to check the cast list. Some walked away dejectedly and others beamed and high fived their friends.

“Did you see who got Billy Bigelow?” I was assuming it would be Harry McCully since he was ALWAYS cast as the main male role. I was excited to actually be his love interest because I had a major crush on him like every girl in the school. He was a major hottie.

Melinda was quiet, which wasn’t like her at all. “Dickie Cunningham.”

Surely I must have misheard her. “Dickie Cunningham? No way! Can’t be true. Uh-uh.”

“True. Paul heard his audition and said he blew their socks off with his rendition of Billy’s solo from the musical. Apparently he has a really great voice. Who knew?”

“I can’t do this. Not with Dickie. I detest him. You know that. Why, he has practically stalked me since sixth grade and he drives me crazy. He’s like an annoying fly that is always buzzing around trying to get my attention with some stupid trick. How in the world am I supposed to work with him?”

Melinda just looked at me. “It’s called acting.”

So that’s the deal I made with the devil. I would take this as a kind of life lesson to figure out how to actually act like I cared about someone when in reality I abhorred them. And over the course of the weeks of rehearsal I acted my socks off. I was so good that the rumor was going around school that Dickie and I were an “item”.

Hah! Now that was the final test of how good I really was!