Chapter 3

Having been alerted to my mistake in the last two chapters, the name is Pevensie now, not Pensevie.

Peter walked quietly through the hall, looking for the bulletin board where the cast listing was supposed to be. There was a small crowd there now, a few girls filtering away from the board until just one was left. Peter stalled for a moment, not really wanting to talk to her. She was searching for her name on the cast listing, her index finger moving down the list.

Peter walked up, hands in his pockets, and made a show of looking at the other postings on the board. The girl next to him sighed, talking to herself.

"Lady Agnes, lady-in-waiting. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride." Her shoulders slumped, and her face fell a little, composing itself again in a moment when she saw Peter there. He turned to look at the list.

"Didn't get the part you wanted?" he asked.

"Yeah." The girl said. "I thought maybe this year I'd get a bigger part than Lady in Waiting."

Peter glanced back to the list. "Margaret Ramsden?" he asked, reading the neatly typed list. She nodded, shuffling her pocketbook to her left arm to shake his hand. Looking at her, face to face, she really wasn't that bad looking; a bit homely, perhaps, but quite pretty nonetheless.

"Peter Pevensie." He supplied. Margaret looked back on the list.

"But …you're playing the lead!" she said, her face lit up with surprise. Peter looked at the list in astonishment. Sure enough, there he was, first on the list. Peter Pensevie- King Balan.

"That can't be right. I thought Shakespeare…" Peter trailed off.

"Shakespeare? Oh, you mean Eddy Shakely. Yeah, he normally gets the bigger roles. See, he's playing the villain, Rorick. He must really think you're good if you got the lead." Margaret said, her smile fading away as she turned to leave, her heels clicking on the tile floor of the empty hallway.

Peter stopped for a moment. "Margaret!" He yelled down the hallway. She stopped, and turned around. He ran up, catching his breath for a moment. "Do you think…maybe…we might go have a cup of tea, sometime?" Peter asked, his voice all a rush. Margaret smiled.

"Sure, maybe, King Balan. See you at practice." She said with a smile, opening the door and letting a draft of autumn air into the hallway.

Peter practically skipped up the stairs to his dorm room.

"What's got you in such a good mood all of a sudden?" Nate asked, wrestling with calculus homework.

"I made the play." Peter said, flopping down on his bed. Nate turned around, ready for any distraction at all.

"Oh, really. And what part did you get?"

"The lead!" Peter said triumphantly. "And I just found myself a date."

Nate sat up, outraged. "You cad! Who?"

"One of the girls from the play. She was checking the list, and I asked if she wanted to go for a cup of tea sometime."

Nate smiled. "You sly devil, you! First the play, then a girl. Some blokes have all the luck." He said, turning back to his calculus.

Peter unwound his scarf, ducking through a doorway to the little theater where they would be rehearsing "The Swan Song" for the next several months. Shakespeare, or Eddy now, was handing out scripts. He smiled at peter and clapped him on the back. "I've got good feelings about this, Balan. Good feelings. No pressure, all right?"

Peter smiled thinly and found Margaret, very much alone, flipping through with her pen and marking her script. "Does he not remember my name? He just called me Balan." He asked, scooting into the seat next to her.

"No, he does that to everyone. For the next three months, you're King Balan to him, not Peter Pevensie."

"Quiet down, people. Quiet!" A tweedy man with thick glasses and a sheaf of papers tucked under his arm said, waving his hands for quiet.

"Mr. Allenby- he teaches Rhetorical Studies and Theatre Arts, plus he sponsors the Theatre Guild, who runs these little productions." Margaret whispered to Peter amid the shuffling quiet. Peter remembered him from the audition, scribbling away notes.

"I'm very happy to see some new faces this year, as well as some old returning ones too. Who's ready to begin rehearsals?" A general roar went up from the actors and Mr. Allenby smiled. "Right then. To business! Today we'll just have a read through. Where's my King and Queen?"

Peter raised his hand, looking around for another somewhere in the sparsely seated theater. Mr. Allenby checked his list. "Sophie? Sophie, I know you're here somewhere…"

A blonde head popped up from between the rows of seats. "Sorry Mr. Allenby. I dropped my…pencil." She said with a giggle. Margaret rolled her eyes.

"Dropped her drawers, more like." She said under her breath.

Mr. Allenby seemed oblivious to any mischief making, and waved vaguely for them to begin.

The Swan Song was a rather romantic and contrived piece- the villain, Rorrick, was attempting to woo the queen into killing her husband so that he can become king. When she refuses, he poisons her so that she may only do his bidding. When her lady in waiting, Agnes, tells the king and thwarts Rorrick's plot, he turns the queen into a swan, unable to speak and warn her King that Rorrick is trying to kill him. In the end, the queen turned swan lures the king outside with her singing while Rorrick waits in the garden, ready to kill the king. The queen takes the knife meant for the king, dies, and thus, the story ends sadly.

Peter's part was indeed, rather large, but not so large as Rorrick or the Queen. Peter didn't quite understand how it was that he had gotten such a large part, since he had absolutely no experience whatsoever. No experience acting, Peter thought ruefully. But I've had plenty of experience being a king. Maybe that's how I got the part.

That lack of acting experience didn't, however, stop Sophie from flirting like mad with him. He just managed to slip away from her to ask Margaret, packing her bag, if he might walk her home, since it was getting dark out.

"Is she always like that?" Peter asked, walking down the dark sidewalks with Margaret's bag in hand.

"Sophie? Yes, unfortunately. She's a little promiscuous…but she's a good enough actress."

"You're better, I think." It was true. Sophie's lines, even in read through, seemed over-delivered, dripping with seduction and wile where there shouldn't have been any. Margaret seemed perfect with her voice.

"That's kind of you, Peter, but Sophie's got the looks, and she's not afraid to flaunt them. Just once, though, I'd like to play the lead, the queen or princess or what have you. Just to spite her." She said this with such venom that Peter had to laugh.

"I'm sure you will, someday."

So no one caught my small, Lilliputian reference to Lewis' freind Tolkien the other day, did they?

Professor of medieval literature with a capital P indeed. Well, anyway. Thank you all so much for your kind comments! Continue to provide me with feedback so I can in turn provide better reading material for you, the wonderful people who slog through this stuff.

Merc Gray