The Backstagers and the Theater of the Ancients (Backstagers #2)

by Andy Mientus

  “Backstagers, assemble!” Timothy shouted. They formed an elaborate tableau on the roller coaster car, posing as if they were flying off of the speeding car and holding on for dear life. A kind stranger snapped a photo on Jory’s phone.

  “Do you guys mind if I post this on Instasnap?” Jory asked as they waited for their rides in the parking lot. “My aunt follows me and is always concerned I’m not making friends because I only post pictures of my sketches.”

  That was fine with everyone and Jory posted the adorable photo—proof of a moment made a memory, a family of friends on a perfect spring night.

  Across the globe, where the moon was high in the night sky, the masked figures knelt before a statue of a robed deity. The tragedian pleaded into the stone microphone, petitioning the god as fiercely as she could.

  “Please, please, hear our call. Show us what we seek. The theater—”

  The comedian’s phone chimed in his pocket. The tragedian paused, gritting her teeth, then continued.

  “The theater has lost its way. We have strayed so far from—”

  Another chime.

  “So FAR from what you built for us. Please help us find the legendary—”

  One chime too many. The tragedian exploded in anger as the comedian fumbled in his pocket for the offending device.

  “My GOSH, can you please turn that off when we are out here?! This is exactly the problem we’re trying to—”

  “Whoa . . .” the comedian whispered, transfixed by something on his cell phone screen.

  “What is it?”

  “Everyone in the group text is sharing this Instasnap photo. Dimitri spotted it on the Backstager tag—it’s from some high school Backstager in America.”

  “Why should I care what a kid is posting on Instasnap?” the tragedian grumbled.

  “Because look at what he’s holding . . .” The comedian showed her the image on his screen.

  It was a group of kids pretending to take a wild roller coaster ride. The kid cascading out of the front car was clutching something that filled the two masked marauders with wild excitement.

  “Could it be . . .” the tragedian whispered intensely.

  “Everyone is agreeing, it sure looks like it,” the comedian said. “The Designer’s Notebook . . .”

  The two shared an eager look, then turned to their statue, amazed at a prayer so quickly answered. The statue glistened in the silvery light of the full moon—was it a trick of light and shadow cast by the flickering candles, or did the ancient stone deity actually begin to smile?

  CHAPTER 2

  Walk off the St. Genesius stage into the darkness of the hanging black curtains and you’ve found the wings. Move through the wings to the back wall of the auditorium and you’ll find the stage door. Through that and down a flight of stairs, you’ll see the Club Room—the secret hideout of the Backstagers.

  It’s a special place, filled with graffiti from Backstagers who came before, relics from shows long since closed, and solace from teachers, parents, and, most importantly, actors. The Club Room had a kind of magic to it—but not real, literal, dangerous magic. That kind of magic lay behind the Unsafe door at the back of the Club Room. Head through that, and you’ll find yourself in an endless hallway of doors lit by a canopy of shining stars overhead. Those are the tunnels, which lead to innumerable rooms where you can find any theater tool, lighting instrument, costume, prop, or whatever else a Backstager might need.

  Reo had been through these tunnels dozens of times now as Jory led his training, but he still had to marvel at them. It’s hard to make a real-life witch like Reo throw his hands up and say, “That’s impossible,” but as Reo opened a door he was sure would lead to the Paint Room and was instead met by lines and lines of tap shoes performing an elaborate showstopper all on their own, that’s exactly what he shouted.

  “I was just at this door two days ago! It was definitely the Paint Room!” Reo said as he politely shut the door on the staccato rhythms of the Tap Room.

  “They change, remember?” Jory said.

  “But how?!” Reo asked. “How does any of this work? It’s gotta be some kind of portal, right? To another dimension, or, like, the spirit world. And St. Genesius is the mouth of the portal and . . . and . . .” Reo, normally dry as a bone and cool as a cucumber, was frazzled like Jory had never seen.

  “Don’t try to go down that rabbit hole, friend. Trust me, just go with it. We all do.”

  It was only a few months ago that Jory was the new kid, asking all these same questions, getting equally ambiguous answers from the other Backstagers. Even after all they had been through this year, they still knew so little about how the backstage actually worked. To the best of their collective knowledge, the Unsafe door was some kind of portal. It was the last barrier between their everyday world of school, shows, and adolescence and the world of the backstage. They knew that if you went deep enough into the backstage, you might find the Arch Theater, which is the very source of theater magic—the kind of magic that makes an audience forget they are looking at sets, costumes, and actors, and actually enter the world of the play. It was confusing and dangerous and pretty overwhelming if you thought about it too hard, but if you just let it wash over you, it was pretty wonderful.

  “Okay, so they . . . change,” Reo said, pulling his black sweater a little tighter around himself as he gathered his sanity again. “Do we know how they change?”

  “Not really,” Jory said. “Though it seems to have something to do with the will of the Backstager. You find what you’re looking for if you’re really focused on finding it.”

  Despite his all-black outfit and generally subdued energy, Reo lit up.

  “Jory,” he said, his eyes widening, “why didn’t you tell me that sooner?! We could have saved so much time!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think witches actually do when we do magic? We focus our will. We’re the best in the world at it! What room do you wanna find?”

  “Well, we were looking for the Paint Room.”

  “Nah, we already have that catalogued, Jory. Let’s find something new. What’s on your list?”

  “Um, the Prop Room?”

  “The Prop Room. Okay.”

  Reo closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. Jory raised his eyebrows, unsure of what was actually happening but respectful of the process. After a few moments, Reo began to walk, eyes still shut, down the starry corridor. Jory followed. Reo’s pace quickened with his breath. Jory gave chase, focusing his own will on Reo not getting them totally, hopelessly lost. After a few twists and turns around the tunnels, Reo stopped before one of the dark wooden doors. It looked just like any of the others, but as Reo opened his eyes, he turned to Jory and said confidently, “This is it.”

  Jory nodded and twisted the doorknob. It swung open, revealing a massive warehouse filled with mountains of objects of every conceivable variety. Teddy bears and race cars and tea sets and grandfather clocks and Christmas trees and televisions and literally everything else you could think of, piled in teetering stacks that reached up to the sky. Reo had done it—they were in the Prop Room!

  “Reo!” Jory hollered. “You’re amazing!”

  “Witches, dude. Where there’s a witch, there’s a way to your will.”

  “Do you know what this means?! We could map the entire backstage by the time we graduate! No Backstager will ever get lost again! We’d be legendary.” Jory imagined the look in Hunter’s eyes when he delivered a complete map of the tunnels and all of the rooms they used regularly just in time for him to take over as stage manager. “Now it’s time for my magic,” Jory said.

  He reached into his bag and pulled out the Designer’s Notebook, flipping through its contents until he found a floor plan sketch of a massive space labeled THE GREENROOM.

  What Jory wouldn’t tell Hunter back at the amusement park was that he and Reo had been building a surprise for the team using the newfound power of the Designer’s Not
ebook: a hub for all of the rooms of the backstage. Unlike the tunnels, this hub would be organized and unchanging. They’d already mapped the Paint Room, so now they would never have to go searching for the Paint Room again; they could just go to the hub, where they would find a new door that led directly there. Jory and Reo thought that it was potentially the single greatest achievement in the history of Backstaging, but everyone who ever put up a flop musical thought the same thing, so they decided to keep it secret until it was all finished.

  Jory took out his pencil and began to sketch a hallway from the Greenroom to this new door, the Prop Room. He’d learned after a couple of weeks of mapping the backstage that in order to truly pin down the correct room, you had to sketch its door exactly. In the darkness of the tunnels, the doors all looked exactly the same, but once you were inside a door’s room, you could more clearly see the grooves, scratches, and knots that made it distinct. Jory was in the middle of shading a dark snarl of a knot in the door when all of a sudden and quite out of nowhere, a little voice in his head barked:

  “DON’T MESS UP.”

  It took Jory by such surprise that he pushed down hard against the paper and broke the tip of the pencil halfway through sketching the door. He looked up at Reo, his brown eyes widening.

  “What?” Reo asked. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve never not finished a drawing before. In the middle, I mean . . .”

  “So what?”

  “So, anything I draw in the notebook becomes real in the backstage. If I don’t finish . . .” Jory tried the door handle. It wouldn’t budge. He looked again to Reo and Reo understood. They were trapped. That’s when Jory’s little voice returned, not so little this time.

  “HOW COULD YOU BE SO STUPID? NOW YOU’LL BE TRAPPED IN HERE FOREVER!” Jory staggered away from the door. The voice was so loud and clear, it was as if someone were shouting directly into his ears.

  “Jory?” Reo could see the color drain from Jory’s face. He knew something was wrong. “Jory—it’s okay! We’re in the Prop Room! There has to be another pencil in here somewhere!”

  Jory looked to Reo and nodded, but he could barely hear him over the intense negativity of that voice in his head.

  “YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO BE LEGENDARY?! A LOSER LIKE YOU?! THAT’S HILARIOUS. YOU’RE THE WORST BACKSTAGER OF THE BUNCH AND YOU KNOW IT.”

  Reo searched Jory’s stricken face for some sign that he understood, but he looked absolutely terrified, as if he were about to cry or scream. Reo grabbed his friend’s shoulders.

  “Wait here, Jory. I’ll be right back, okay?”

  Reo dashed off in search of a new pencil as Jory spiraled deeper and deeper into himself, led by the voice.

  “YOU THINK YOU ARE CAPABLE OF TRAINING ANOTHER BACKSTAGER? YOU CAN’T EVEN DRAW A STUPID DOOR WITHOUT MESSING THAT UP AND GETTING THE BOTH OF YOU TRAPPED. HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE THE OTHERS TO FIND YOU? WILL THEY EVER? THEY’LL PROBABLY STOP LOOKING, SINCE YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING RIGHT ANYWAY. IF THEY DO FIND YOU, THEY’D BETTER TAKE THAT NOTEBOOK AWAY. LOOK AT THE TROUBLE YOU CAUSED WITH IT. YOU ARE NOT WORTHY OF CARRYING IT.”

  “Jory! Hey man, I found a pencil, see? No harm done. Finish that drawing and let’s get out of here. Jory. JORY!”

  Reo practically had to shake Jory out of his trance. Jory looked down and saw the pencil in Reo’s hand and finally regained his senses, weakly taking it. After a deep breath, he was sketching again.

  “There,” he said at last, finishing the sketch of the door. Reo turned the knob and miraculously, the door swung open. This time, instead of being met by the dark tunnels from whence they came, the door opened into an expansive field of lush green grass that went on as far as the eye could see, until the horizon met a perfectly blue sky, peppered with fluffy white clouds. There were a few gently rolling hills, a little forest of trees that seemed made for tree houses and climbing, a babbling stream of cool, clear water, and a boulder just big enough for a handful of Backstagers to sun themselves on.

  “You did it, Jory,” Reo said. “We’re in the Greenroom!”

  “Yeah . . .” was all Jory could muster.

  The door they had stepped through, labeled props in prominent letters, was one of many similarly labeled doors. They seemed to stand alone on the grassy hill, leading to nowhere, but were actually each portals to the rooms Jory and Reo had already explored. At the far end of the field was a set of grander, double doors. As Jory and Reo made their way toward them, Reo turned to his friend, concerned.

  “Hey man, so . . . what happened back there?”

  “I’m . . . not sure,” Jory said. “There was this voice in my head.”

  “A voice?”

  “Yeah, it was so clear. Like someone was talking directly to me.”

  “What was it saying?”

  “Um . . .” Jory was embarrassed to repeat the negative things the voice had said, mostly because he secretly believed them to be true.

  “We all get that voice sometimes,” Reo said, clapping his hand warmly on Jory’s shoulder. Physical contact was new to Reo, who tended to fly solo, but he could tell Jory really needed a hug. This was the best he could do. “You panicked, that’s all. We’re good now. We got the Prop Room!”

  “Yeah . . . yeah, sorry about that. Great work on finding the room. If you can do that again, it’s a game changer!” Jory was becoming himself again. He had heard about panic attacks before but had never had one. Maybe that was all the episode with the voice was—a trick of anxiety and adrenaline swirling around in his brain.

  They made their way across the field of the Greenroom to the double doors at the edge of the lawn. Pushing through the heavy doors, they found themselves back in the cosmic expanse of the tunnels, and soon they were back on the normal side of the Unsafe door in the cozy security of the Club Room.

  Jory took out his phone to call his mom and let her know it was time to pick him up when something on the screen made him say, “Whoa.”

  “What is it?” Reo asked, pulling on his signature black cloak.

  “That picture I posted on Instasnap, the one of us on the coaster? It has almost a hundred likes.”

  “That’s cool. It’s a good picture,” Reo said.

  “No but, like, my pictures only ever get a handful of likes from my aunt and kids from my old school and stuff.”

  “Maybe it got picked up by some roller coaster blog?”

  “And my followers. I had thirty-five before. They’ve more than doubled. Ninety-seven. Oh! Ninety-nine.”

  “Congrats, Jory! Maybe you’ll wake up famous!”

  Reo slung his bag over his shoulder and gave Jory one last friendly nudge before ascending the stairs and exiting the stage door. It was time to go, but Jory was frozen to the spot as he watched the numbers on his Instasnap account steadily climb. A smile spread across his face, lit by the warm glow of his phone’s screen and orchestrated by the pings and blips of new followers and new likes flooding in.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Oh my gosh, close but . . .” Adrienne snorted as she tried not to laugh at an eager but confused Aziz.

  “What?” Aziz laughed as he signed. “I asked ‘you . . . excited . . . to start . . . ’” then he placed one fist over the other and twisted them and Adrienne couldn’t help but let a chuckle escape. Aziz looked to her with puppy-dog eyes. Gathering herself, she turned his wrists so his palms were facing downward, crossed one over the other, and tapped them.

  “This means ‘work,’” she said. “This,” she said as she turned his fists outward, twisting them the way he had before, “means ‘make out.’”

  Aziz put his face in his hands and they both howled with laughter.

  “I’m trying!” he signed.

  “I know,” she replied. “It’s cute.”

  “You’re cute,” he signed back.

  They were hanging in the Club Room as the first rehearsal for Tammy was about to get started up onstage. Downtime had been a blast, but a Backstager away from the t
heater is like a chorus girl wearing stage makeup out in the daylight—something is just a bit off.

  All of the Genesius guys were thrilled to be back in their element and in their new roles. Because Timothy and Jamie were away, the Backstagers all assumed the roles that they would take on next year when Hunter became the full-time stage manager. Beckett would be the ASM (assistant stage manager) until he could take the trials to earn full status. Sasha was training to take over Beckett’s spot as master electrician. Of the Backstagers, he was far and away the most full of energy, so putting him on electrics was an easy call. In Sasha’s place on props, Reo’s affinity for old objects and dark spaces made him a perfect choice to haunt the prop closet. Aziz would slot up from carpenter to set designer. Due to their limited numbers, he would still have to construct the sets along with the others, but starting with Tammy, he could also exercise his creativity by designing what those sets would look like and how they would function. Jory’s Designer’s Notebook would save him a great deal of time in his role as costume designer—all he needed to do was dream up the costumes and sketch them in the notebook and they would appear, fully realized, in the backstage. It would be busy for all of them, but they were confident that, together, they could do anything.

  “Anyway, yes, I am super excited to start work,” Adrienne signed. “Downtime is boring. And I’m happy we can hang out more.” Aziz only understood every third sign, but he could tell from Adrienne’s face that she was flirting. Just then, he heard a commotion up on the stage level—voices arguing in increasingly impassioned tones. Adrienne could see from Aziz’s expression that something was wrong.

  “What’s up?” she signed.

  “There’s an awkward—” He corrected his mistake. “A PROBLEM, up onstage. People shouting.”