by Jen Klein
Marin pulls my door open wider. “Inside,” she tells me. “Now.”
•••
When I wake up again, hours and hours later, I’m burrowed into the center of Marin’s bed. Sarah showed up not long after Marin found me. They gave me toaster waffles and made me take a shower, possibly because I couldn’t stop crying, and at some point they didn’t know what to do with me anymore. Marin gave me a pair of hot-pink shorts, a matching midriff top, and a small white pill. “It’s herbal,” she told me. “Melatonin. Over the counter.” I don’t know if it was that pill or the fact that I hadn’t slept well in days, but now as I’m looking at Marin’s clock, it’s almost call time in Olympus. I’ve slept the entire day.
I scramble out of bed and pick my dirty jeans off the floor so I can yank them over Marin’s shorts before going to the living room. There, I find Marin and Sarah curled up next to each other on the couch, thumbing through trashy magazines.
“Finally,” Sarah says when she sees me.
“We were going to wake you up in twenty minutes,” Marin informs me. “How do you feel?”
“Better.” But then my eyes well with tears. “Maybe not that much better.”
My friends hop up. They each grab one of my arms, pulling me to sit between them. “What happened?” Marin asks.
“Do we need to kick someone’s ass?” Sarah says.
“No.” I smile through my tears. “I like a boy, that’s all.”
“Well, duh.” Sarah squeezes my hand.
“Not Tuck.” I pull away from her. “The other boy. He’s sweet and funny and smart and so, so hot and…” I trail off, dropping my head into my hands. “And I ruined everything.”
Sarah and Marin immediately turn into two chickens, clucking and cooing over me. “No,” Marin says. “I’m sure you didn’t ruin everything.”
“He’s a dumbass if he doesn’t like you,” Sarah says. “The stupidest boy on the planet.”
“No, he did like me,” I tell her. “But I screwed everything up and…” I pause, trying to sort through how to explain it, how to give words to the summer. “I think my heart is broken. Is this what it feels like when you follow through on a thing to the end? When you actually let yourself like a person? They can mess you all up and make everything hurt?”
I see Marin and Sarah exchange a look. Marin peers into my eyes. “I mean…sometimes.”
Sarah shakes her head. “I’m telling you, we’re happy to kick someone’s ass.”
“This sucks,” I tell them both.
“Do your parents know you’re home?” Marin asks me.
“God no.” I run my fingers through my tangled hair. “They’re going to be so pissed. Can I just hide out here for a while? They won’t even know. They think I’m still up in Olympus.”
“Until Sunday, yeah.” Marin glances at Sarah. “Then mine will be back from Vegas. We can probably still swing a night or two, but then we’ll have some explaining. Sarah?”
“Mine won’t give a shit.” Sarah shrugs. “What do you need, like a week?”
“Yes,” I tell her. “Then I can just arrive like I’m coming home from Olympus.”
“That’s messed up,” Marin says.
“I know,” I tell her.
Sarah abruptly stands and leaves the room. She comes back with my backpack. “You should check your phone,” she says. “It’s been blowing up all day. We finally put it in the kitchen because the buzzing was getting on our nerves.”
Reluctantly, I take out my phone and look at it. It’s the same two names over and over: Tuck and Ella. Milo hasn’t texted once.
“Maybe you should call one of them back,” Marin says.
“No.” The sigh comes out of me accidentally. “Nothing I have to say is going to change anything.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Sarah grabs the phone out of my hands and scrolls through my messages. “Tuck has literally texted you twenty-six times.”
“Weird,” says Marin.
I don’t say anything.
Sarah keeps looking at my screen. “He says he needs to tell you something important.”
“He is really cute,” Marin says.
Sarah flicks her in the arm. “Cute isn’t everything.”
“I know, but he is.” Marin grabs the phone out of Sarah’s hand. She looks at the messages. “Rainie, seriously.”
“Stop,” I tell her. “I broke up with him, okay?”
But Marin’s still looking at the screen. “I don’t think that’s what this is about. I’m going to answer him.” She starts typing on my phone.
“No!” I make a grab for it, but Sarah catches my hands in midair.
“Two to one,” she tells me. “You’re overruled.”
“You can’t do that!” I try to tug away, but Sarah is strong. “Marin, what are you saying to him?”
Marin holds up my phone so I can see the one word she typed in response:
What?
Immediately, an ellipsis pops up on my phone’s screen. Tuck is writing back. A second later, his words arrive:
At school
On the stage
Marin looks up at me. “What is he talking about?”
“His monologue,” Sarah reminds her. “When he got all weird and stared at Rainie.”
“What about it?” Marin asks.
“Shush,” Sarah says, pointing back to my phone screen. Another ellipsis, then…
I said the words. I didn’t write them.
Marin’s thumbs immediately start moving over my screen:
Who did?
But her question is unnecessary. As I stare at my phone, at the tiny ellipsis, I already know. I know what Tuck is typing before the bubble pops up on my screen. I know what he has to be typing, because it’s the only thing that makes any sense.
Milo.
The only thing more stressful than driving down a mountain in the middle of the night when you’re exhausted is driving up a mountain at the beginning of the next night when you’re in a massive hurry and you’re stressed and heartbroken. Which is why, in this particular scenario, Sarah is the one behind the wheel.
Also, I know better than to text and drive, and right now I am sending text after text after text. As we wind up the mountain, moving in and out of cell-service range, I receive messages back, out of order in scattered bursts.
From Tuck:
You’re welcome.
From Ella:
Did the bananas rub off on you? Okay, forgiven. See you soon.
And then:
But I’m keeping the blue nail polish.
From Milo:
Trying to work. Rainie, stop. Please.
Of course I had anticipated Milo’s reaction, but seeing it on my phone screen made it even more real. And even more painful.
We squeal into Olympus after the end of intermission, which is easy to ascertain, as the Act II opening strains are already piping from the speakers, echoing up to us. There are a few stragglers in the parking lot, still eating hot dogs or finishing cigarettes or coming out of the bathrooms. I point Marin and Sarah in the direction of the box office and race for the trail that runs along the outer edge of the amphitheater. It’s the long way to get there, but since we’re mid-performance, I can hardly trample down through the seats and across the stage.
The wooden deck is mostly empty when I pound onto it, breathing hard from my run. Gretchen and Brilliant Master Thespian Hugh Hadley are in the center, near the corkboard. When they see me, Gretchen waves and hands something small to Hugh. The object glints under the backstage lights. I head in her direction, stopping about halfway at the location of the best place we have to watch the show from back here. I step onto the wooden bench attached to the floor and peer through a hole in the wall. The audience can’t see me because I’m hidden by leaves and fake boulders and the darkness of the upstage area, but I can see what’s happening out there. It’s the big group polka number, which happens as the Greeks and Trojans fight. I see my usual dance par
tner—Jon the lipstick thief—miming that he’s dancing with an invisible person. Ugh, awkward.
I’m scanning the stage for Milo when Gretchen and Mandy arrive from opposite directions. “Where have you been?” Mandy whispers.
“They forgot to give away your line,” Gretchen says. “It was real weird in the ‘who’s the prettiest’ scene.”
“The whole show is a mess,” Mandy tells me. “The first light cue didn’t go on time, and everything’s been screwed up ever since.”
“Tuck tried to ad-lib,” Gretchen says. “Tuck sucks at ad-libbing.” She brightens. “Hey, ‘Tuck’ rhymes with ‘suck’! How did I never notice that before?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. To Mandy, I say, “Sorry I wasn’t here yesterday. Or part of today.”
Gretchen giggles. “I guess I was too focused on another word that rhymes with ‘Tuck.’ ”
This time, Mandy and I both turn to stare at her. “Are you drunk?” Mandy asks.
“Hey.” Gretchen holds up a hand like she’s being sworn in at court. “Hugh was knocking it back, like, more than usual. I took a little for the team.”
“Crap,” Mandy says.
“You should thank me. I am a sacrificial lamb.” Gretchen giggles again.
“Let’s get you some coffee.” Mandy grabs her hand. “You’re about to go back on.”
Mandy pulls Gretchen away toward the kitchen counter, and I turn back to the hole in the knotty wood of the deck. Onstage, they’re still fighting. Swords clash against shields. Trojans and Greeks wheel around each other, ducking and lunging. I finally locate Milo in the midst of it all. He’s wearing his armor—emerald green against the mossy color of the other Trojans, to differentiate him as a principal character—and brandishing his sword at Paul, who in this scene is Grecian. Finally, now that I’ve divested myself of all Tuck-related confusion and guilt and misplaced feelings, I’m free to just appreciate Milo. The way his arms tense when he swings the sword, and how he dodges to the side when he’s swung upon. His hair, damp with sweat, clinging to the edges of his angled face, and his heaving chest as—
Hold on a minute.
I squint, pushing my forehead right to the wood above the peephole. There’s a lot of clinging and heaving out there. Milo looks exhausted….
I jerk back from the peephole and whip around to see Hugh, still standing in the center of the deck, tipping back his flask. Because it’s faster than racing over there, I reach down to pull off a sneaker and throw it at him. It hits him in the lower leg, and Hugh jumps, startled. His flask clangs to the ground, and he shoots me a look of accusation. I point toward the stage. “You’re on,” I whisper as loudly as I dare.
Hugh starts and then heads for the stage entrance as fast as he can wobble. A second later, I hear his raspy, microphoned voice. “Enough!”
A second after that, a cannon booms. I drop my head into my hands. The pyro crew must have decided to try to improv their way to the end of the scene by shooting off some weaponry.
I clamber back onto the bench and look through the hole as the Greeks and Trojans all come to a weary halt and trudge offstage, much later than they should have.
I jump off the bench and charge along the deck, which is quickly filling with tired warriors, to the entrance where I know Milo comes offstage. Sure enough, there he is, swinging through the crowd, sliding his sword into the scabbard at his waist. He’s still breathing heavily, and his skin is glistening with sweat. When he sees me, his eyes flash dark. “I thought you were gone.”
“I came back.” For you.
I don’t say the last words, but I don’t think it would have mattered, because Milo is striding across the deck to cue up for the Trojan horse scene. From onstage, the sound of Helen and Pollux’s duet floats through the night air. Helen’s part—which is mildly slurred—is all about how much she loves Paris. Pollux’s side is the same, but it reframes the emotion as bro-love instead of romance. The crux of the song is about how a relationship can start in deception but end in everlasting happiness. Helen’s final line—“Look how happy everyone is now!”—is undercut by Pollux’s (supposedly) humorous last words:
“Except for all the deaaaaaaaaad people!”
Laughter erupts from the audience, so maybe they can’t tell how insane the show is tonight. Maybe they think slurred words and long battles and inappropriate cannon shots are all part of the program.
As the onstage Greeks—led by Milo-as-Achilles—inform the audience that they’re leaving because they’ve been beaten by Troy, I take off running. I might be late, I might be doing it all wrong, but the very least I can do is show up. I sprint down the deck, weaving in and out of armored Trojans and toga-clad Muses, tearing into the girls’ dressing room. Ella looks up from where she’s adjusting her leather sandals, crisscrossing the straps around her shins. She scans my body—“You’re a hot mess”—and I remember I’m wearing Marin’s pink half shirt, my own dirty jeans, and one shoe.
“He won’t stand still long enough to let me tell him,” I say.
“Milo?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him what?”
“That I’m sorry and I was stupid and I love him.” The words come out before I can edit them, and now that they’ve been said, they’re real. “Crap, I love him.”
Ella stares at me for a long moment, during which I can’t tell what she’s thinking. Then she jumps up and grabs my toga from my hook. “Then you have to make him hear you. After the show, make him hear you.”
I start undressing at the speed of light, grabbing my toga from Ella and jerking it over my head. “What do I do during the show?”
“During the show, just enjoy the way he looks in that armor.” She grins at me. “It’s kind of spectacular.”
Several minutes later, I’m in the wings with Ella and Paul and Jon and all the other actor-techs in our chorus robes as onstage the final scene rages on. The sounds of war are enhanced and amplified through the speakers, making the battle seem worse and louder and scarier than it really is. Tonight it looks like the makeup team went a little overboard, because red goo is everywhere. When Paris kills Achilles—which, as always, makes my heart clench—the blood bag beneath Milo’s armor explodes dramatically and they’re both sprayed with crimson. Milo slides slowly down the length of Tuck’s sword, crumpling to the ground, and it’s all I can do not to rush out there and curl my own body around his.
But there are only a few minutes left in the show. I can wait.
Tuck-as-Paris sheathes his sword while, across the stage, Logan-as-Pollux makes a final kill. They stand amid the glory and the ravages of the battle, everyone else either a corpse or too wounded to rise. Then Pollux also slides his sword away. He starts striding slowly toward Paris, exuding the air of tragic victory he has maintained all summer, as Paris gazes at the horrible aftermath of what he began when he stole Helen. “Paris. Brother.” Pollux indicates the carnage littering the stage. “Look what we have wrought.”
Paris sighs heavily and takes off his helmet. “We have won the war.”
“But at what cost?” Pollux lifts his eyes skyward, as if to entreat the gods. “We should never have come here, Helen and I. The reason was false. It was a trick—”
“That turned into love!” Paris interrupts in a shout.
“That turned into war!” Pollux yells right back.
They stare at each other like they’ve been doing since the first rehearsals, all tragic and furious. From the wings where I stand, Milo’s face is visible. His helmet came off in the battle, and because of the way he’s fallen, his head is turned away from the audience. His eyes are open so he can watch Paris and Pollux’s final fight.
Someone backstage must be prompting drunk Hugh, because this time Zeus makes his entrance right when he’s supposed to. A spotlight appears on him, standing in Olympus above the battlefield. “For Achilles!” he thunders, just as he thunders every night…
Which is when a lightning bolt is supposed to cra
sh and a bright flame should split the stage and kill Paris. Pollux, who’s already heading toward him, will speed up in order to catch him as he falls to the ground. Then Pollux will lower Paris’s dead body before standing again to give the travesties-of-war monologue right before Eros and Eris lead us all out for the mournful dirge. That’s how the order of events is supposed to go: lightning, death, travesties, dirge.
Except that tonight, there’s no lightning bolt. There’s only Zeus yelling…and then a frozen pause. The pyro effect doesn’t go off with his line. It should be fixable, because there are backup bolts in place for just such an emergency…but those don’t go off either. Which is unfortunate because Tuck has already started his slow collapse to the ground in anticipation of his imminent death.
But his death hasn’t happened, because he hasn’t been shot with lightning, which means that Pollux, who has rushed across the stage to catch him, instead catches him in a weird hug, mid-fall. In the wings, I hear my gasp echoed by those around me as Paris and Pollux wobble there in a half-crouch for a few seconds before Pollux pulls Paris back to his feet. Gretchen was right about Tuck not being great at ad-libbing, because he doesn’t say or do a thing to rectify the situation. He just stands there. Frozen. Staring out at the crowd.
“What is he doing?” Ella whispers.
“What can he do?” Paul whispers back. “He’s not dead.”
“Then he should say something,” Ella says. “When you’re not dead, you say things.”
When you’re not dead, you say things.
The assistant stage manager rushes into our midst, loud-whispering to Nikki through his headset. “I don’t know. Do you want me to start the dirge?”
As he waits for an answer, as everyone else watches the train wreck onstage, I suddenly turn to Ella. I grab her by the shoulders and repeat her own words back to her. “When you’re not dead, you say things.”
Ella looks confused. “That’s what I just—”
