Quiet Backstage: A Series of Lippa Oneshots

Grades Up

Lin: meet in the auditorium, Erickson wanted to talk real fast xx

Pippa smiled down at her cellphone as she shut her locker closed. She couldn’t help but guess what this chat might be about. She could only imagine that it is to praise Lin’s performance in their school play. They were putting on Little Women, and Lin was playing Theodore Laurence. 

Pippa walked down the long hallway to the theater, the bashful, giggly grin still plastered to her face. She threw her backpack over her shoulder and leaned into her right shoulder to push the heavy door open. 

She made sure to shut the door silently, not to disrupt anything that was going on inside. Pippa slowly walked forward towards where her boyfriend was standing with the theater director. 

“Lin,” She heard Mr. Erickson say. “We had an agreement. Your audition was stellar, but we promised each other that if I gave you this role, you would keep your grades up. And your grades in chemistry and Mandarin are slipping rapidly. I want to see you succeed, Lin.”

The auditorium fell to an eerie silence. Pippa held her breath and dipped back behind the wings she was standing in. 

She heard her boyfriend mumble something, but she couldn’t quite make it out. All she could hear was Mr. Erickson tell Lin to, “go home, and get some rest.”

Nobody could know that she heard all of that. Pippa ducked back into the audience and acted like she hadn’t been there the whole time. 

“Ready to go?” Lin asked, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. He ran his hand over his face, the stress being evident on his features. 

“All ready.” Pippa placed a gentle kiss to Lin’s cheek, took his hand, and they headed off to Lin’s car.

Pippa was staying over that Friday night into Saturday morning, since Pippa’s parents were both out of town, and both of the students had midterms to start studying for. Hey, you can never start studying too early. 

~~~~~

“I made you a sandwich. I didn’t realize how late it was getting.” Pippa extended a glass plate towards her boyfriend, who had his nose buried into his chemistry textbook. 

The sound of the plate clinking against the wooden bedside table made Lin look up from his book. “Oh, so you raided my pantry and cabinets in my own house to make me a sandwich?” He snickered, reaching over, picking up the plate and setting it in his lap. 

“Exactly. What would you do without me?” Pippa joked back, returning to her place, sitting next to Lin on the bed. She dug through her backpack for a while before conjuring up her Mandarin textbook. 

“What time is it, by the way?” Lin asked, taking a loud exhale. He leaned his body to the left, ignoring the plate’s existence in his lap. He switched his gaze between the worksheet and the open textbook to answer the question. 

“Almost nine.” Pippa let out an exhale as she twisted her hair into a messy bun using the stretched out hair tie from her wrist. 

Lin rolled his neck, a few satisfying pops emitted from his joints. “I’ve been stuck on this for this long?” 

“What is it?” Pippa shut her textbook and leaned onto Lin’s shoulder. She passed chemistry last semester, she’d be able to pull some of those facts back out from the back of her head. 

He exhaled loudly. “Chem.”

Pippa snickered. “I got that much, you idiot. What are you guys learning?” 

Lin looked over at his girlfriend, his eyes going wide for a moment before relaxing. “I...I couldn’t even tell you.” 

“Well…” Pippa started, mentally noting to take a look at the lesson later. “Why don’t you put chemistry away for a bit, and start something else. Maybe if you take your mind off of it for a while, then what you learned will come back to you. What else do you have? Mandarin?” 

“No, I finished my Mandarin homework.”

“Well, can I check it for you?” Pippa sat up from his shoulder. 

Lin shook his head for a moment, but then whipped the papers from where they laid - partially dog-eared - in his folder. “You can. It’s probably all wrong, though.”

Pippa rolled her eyes. “It’s not that bad, Love.”

~~~~~

More time passed and it was now nearing midnight. The only bites taken out of that sandwich was one that Pippa stole right from the center of the slices of bread, specifically when Lin wasn’t looking. 

“Babe, you need to eat something.” Pippa started. Running her fingers through Lin’s growing out curls. He was laying across her thighs, eyes glued to his script for the play. “You’ve been offbook for almost a month now, you know your lines.”

“It doesn’t hurt to brush up on them, Pip.”

Pippa took in a silent but sharp inhale. She knew what she was going to say next, and she knew that it needed to be said. “It also doesn’t hurt to ask your girlfriend for help in classes that you’re not doing great in. Especially when your leading role is dependent on keeping your grades up.”

Lin’s eyes immediately widened and his script fell out of his hands. The paperback booklet that was falling apart at the binding hit the mattress, sending a gentle sound into the air of the now tense room. Neither one of them heard the sound. 

“How in the...how do you know about that?” Lin scrambled to sit up, messing up the sheets in the process. He frantically stood up on his legs that had happened to fall asleep from laying so sideways for too long. “Pippa, whoever told you that is lying, and that is just gossip, and…” He started shakily pacing and running his sweaty palms against the legs of his sweatpants. 

“Lin, I heard Erickson talking to you about it.” She stated, now standing on the opposite side of the bed from him. 

Lin’s face simply fell. It was written all over his expression. Pippa was right. 

“So, what do you think?” Lin asked in the midst of the tense silence. 

Pippa took a breath, not wanting to look her boyfriend in the eye. “What do I think about what?”

“What, do you think I’m paying my way into roles? And that a four-point GPA is Erickson’s charge? Because you and I both know nobody in that theatre is doing that great, academics wise. Or...or do you think that my parents put this pressure on me to be perfect at everything? Or do you think that I should’ve been fine all along? Like, yeah, I should be able to focus on learning Chinese when my mom died two months ago, and now my father is bringing new women home every other week? That’s probably what you think, don’t you?” Lin shouted, his cheeks flushing as he refused to breathe in between sentences. 

It was written all over Lin’s face that he didn’t expect the last part of that to come out of his mouth. That it just...happened. Both teenagers stood there, staring at each other, their faces frozen in a state of shock. The ungodly amount of distance in between them, put in place by the bedframe and mattress in the center of the room, only seemed to expand. 

“Lin, why would you even ask me that?” Pippa spoke, her voice cracking at any volume above the whisper she was already talking at. “Come here.” She walked around the bed frame, meeting Lin in the middle. “Why do you think I think like that?”

“I…” Lin stammered, his eyes filling with tears as Pippa pulled him into a hug. He rested his chin on her shoulder. He could only seem to focus on the light switch plate on the wall. The white plate that stuck out hideously against the rich blue color of his wall. "I don't know what I'm saying." 

"Is that what you think? About yourself?" Pippa asked, rubbing Lin's back as tears slipped from his eyes. 

"No...alright, maybe…no." Lin stepped out of the hug. "What I do think about myself is…" He wiped away his tears, trying to act like they didn't even fall. "I think that I need to get my grades up."