Marcelle is

Marcelle is a thespian

❝Look, Charlie, let's face it. We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It's run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know.❞

Lucy Van Pelt

Matthew is slowly losing his shit.

First of all: the casting is starting bumpily, because his best friend is absent and he is supposed to be here for moral support. Secondly: there is a cluster of kids sitting in front of him, because the play auditions overlap with certain class schedules and it is the perfect excuse to bunk class. Thirdly: he needs to start a new list, because his current list is battered beyond repair [this is his scatterbrained mother's fault for messing up the grocery list with her list of life].

The bigger problem, moving to number one on the list of problematic problems, is the bunch of kids.

Like the jock-y boy in the back row of the armada of high school students, decorating the vermillion velvet auditorium seats. The boy does not belong here. Matthew does not recognize a single face in front of him and just because he recognizes that boy [the boy from the football team doing all that butch things butch teenage boys do], he knows that the boy doesn't know shit.

There is something Matthew hates more than phonies, people who do not appreciate Game of Thrones and someone who loves raisins and that's football.

Instead of worrying about the particular boy seeming to scratch every inch Matthew cannot reach, completely isolated from the rest of the crowd, he resorts in humming Fall Out Boy. He does not know in what other way he could calm his nerves. Maybe he will calm down if he listened to Fall Out Boy instead of humming falsettos to himself.

"Right," Matthew clears his throat. Voices retire to a feebly utterance in base of his ear, like a buzzing mosquito. Eyes bulge at the hostility in his voice, lips quickly zipping and thoughts returning to their owners.

He is dreading this day already, but if he does not go through with it, he will probably sit in detention for the rest of his senior year [not that a lot of it is left]. "I'm Matthew Griffin. I'm the writer of this year's production."

He pauses and scans over the large quantity of students threateningly. "I don't make decisions fast and loose, so if you're not good, you're not good."

Matthew might have been a little harsher than he intends, but what's the use he smiles and gives away free candy? There's only so many positions to give away; you can't fit a needle and a haystack through a straw. If they're shit, they're shit. He doesn't want to butter them up with false hope, send them packing to Broadway where the only serious role they will ever get, will be sweeping the floors. He doesn't want to listen to bullshit, because he is not producing bullshit.

This is not his first rodeo in producing and directing. Usually he's right there with them in the seats, patiently reciting his lines to himself, so used to the nerves gnawing his that he doesn't even notice the heartburn shoving up his throat anymore. But he received a promotion from the auditorium seats to the director's chair.