by Robin Talley
And—what the hell is Rachel talking about? I haven’t gone out with that many people.
I try to catch Dom’s eye. He’s still looking straight ahead, like he’s totally absorbed in the play, but there’s a slight red tinge creeping in around the base of his neck.
“I . . .” I swallow. My hands are trembling as hard as my voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do. What’s embarrassing is, I told them they were wrong. Everyone was saying, you know, ‘Oh, be careful with Mel, she’s got somebody new every week,’ but I told them things were different with you and me. Only now it’s—”
“No one would’ve said that!” I’m not following along with the script at all anymore. “I haven’t gone out with anyone all year except for you! And last year it was just, like, three people—or maybe, I don’t know, unless you count prom, but—”
Now Dom’s looking my way. He shakes his head slightly.
“’Tis almost morning; I would have thee gone,” Christina calls from the stage. There’s another lightning-fast cue coming up. Another single-line delivery from Liam.
I get ready to press the button. I can’t let Rachel take over my head.
But I can’t just let this go, either.
“There’s nothing between me and Hannah.” I speak quietly, even though it’s pointless. Our mics are designed to be sensitive. The crew can hear me, whether I’m whispering or shouting. “I’ve never cheated on anyone. I would never.”
“It isn’t about that. I told you what I wanted, and you didn’t even bother to tell me you disagreed. You just overruled me, like you always do. Everything has to be your call, regardless of how anybody else feels. God, Mel, I didn’t even know she was coming until she showed up and I stood there stammering like a complete fool.”
“Look, I didn’t mean to—”
“Did you know I had a crush on you all last spring during Joseph?” She’s stumbling over her words now. “When you used to come sew after rehearsals, I kept trying to work up the nerve to tell you.”
No. I hadn’t known.
I’d been putting in time in the costume closet last spring because I needed to learn more about wardrobe if I wanted to get promoted to SM. I was strong on set design and construction, but my costume skills were sorely lacking, and a stage manager needs to be proficient in every department.
But that was when I started liking Rachel, too. She was hilarious, and incredibly talented, and so much fun to hang out with. When we wound up at the same drama camp over the summer, it was easy to slip from flirting over sewing machines into sneaking kisses behind bolts of brocade.
“Mel?” Rachel twists to face me. I fight to keep my eyes on the stage. “Are you even listening?”
Christina finishes her line, and I press the cue for the light to shine on Liam. He just has to deliver a few words, and then I’ll wait a fraction of a second so the audience can feel the full weight of them—it’s another one of those cues where the timing has to be precisely right, or else the meaning of the moment won’t come through—and then . . .
“Well, you don’t seem to care what I’m saying, so whatever.” Rachel’s talking fast now. She almost sounds like she’s choking. “I guess this is it.”
My finger falters. Did Liam finish his line?
I hit the button, too hard, and it clicks twice. The lights flash onto the chorus side of the stage, then back to Liam and Christina again before anyone’s had time to say anything.
More laughs from the audience.
“Damn it!” I say, not even caring who hears as I slam the button down again.
Too late, I realize I shouldn’t have done that. The light board is programmed. Every cue in the show is in the system, in order. It’s supposed to be easy—all I have to do is hit the button when the cue is supposed to go up and the lights will come on, like clockwork.
But now the board is two cues ahead of where it’s supposed to be. Or is it three?
Oh, God.
Onstage, the actors are trying to keep the scene going, but I’ve completely lost track of what’s happening. The worst possible thing that can happen to a stage manager.
The lights are all wrong. The audience won’t have a clue what they’re supposed to be looking at.
Ms. Marcus will demote me for sure. I won’t get to SM the spring musical. I’ll be lucky if she even lets me on the run crew.
“So I guess we’re broken up now.” Rachel’s voice is thick and heavy as she rises from the seat beside me. “That’s what you wanted anyway, right? You’ve probably already got your next hookup planned. Have fun hanging all over whoever it is at the cast party. I just hope they know they’re disposable.”
No, this isn’t what I wanted! And—disposable?
Oh my God.
I’ve had bad breakups before. Isabelle dumped me in the middle of the dance floor at homecoming freshman year. Jess and I shouted at each other over video chat so loudly the night before the Steel Magnolias opening that my dads came running into the room thinking I was being murdered. Tyler and I got in a huge fight when we were painting scenery for the winter showcase and spent the next week getting side-eyed by the rest of the set crew every time we got within thirty feet of each other.
But nothing like this has ever happened. No one’s ever made me feel so . . . small.
“You know what? Screw you, Rachel.” The sound of Gabby’s voice shocks me out of my stupor. She sounds shaky, too—but even more than that, she sounds pissed.
Rachel’s already halfway toward the booth door, but she freezes. Even with her headset down around her neck, she can hear Gabby too.
“Sorry, Mel,” Gabby’s saying in a rush. “I know we aren’t supposed to talk during standby, but it doesn’t matter what happened between you and her—she can’t pull this crap in the middle of a show. Shut up and go away, Rachel, you’re messing things up for everybody. Mel, the actors kept going, so just hit G-O and let’s see where we are.”
My reflexes kick in and I hit the button automatically—and somehow, it works. The lights go up exactly where they’re supposed to, and in exactly the right moment.
I turn around. Rachel’s gone.
“Breathe, Mel.” Dom leans in and looks at the monitor. “You’re on LQ sixty-two, and sixty-three is on the next line. We’re all good. Breathe.”
I nod and exhale, slow and steady.
The rest of the show flows normally. I get the next cue right, and the one after that, too. Will comes back into the booth, whatever crisis was happening in the lobby having apparently been resolved. As far as I can tell he doesn’t know about what happened earlier, but he’ll find out soon enough. There’s no such thing as keeping secrets from the technical director.
The actors run through their lines, and they flub a few words here and there, but I’m the only one who notices. Liam’s doublet stays intact, Malik and Julio get stabbed to death, Liam and Christina make out and kill themselves, and finally it’s curtain call. We get a standing ovation, and everyone on the stage and on the headsets is crying because they’re happy, and I’m just crying because I’m crying.
I screwed up. I screwed up everything. The show, Rachel . . .
And all my friends witnessed my complete failure.
I put the house lights up, and Dom shuts his laptop. He keeps giving me sympathetic looks, silently gesturing for me to come with him to meet the others backstage, but I can’t deal with sympathy. I don’t deserve it. I wave him on without me.
Alone in the booth, I pull off my headset, yank my hair loose from its messy ponytail, and shut my eyes.
Our theater’s cursed. That’s the rumor, anyway. Strange things have been happening here for years. Unexplainable things.
I’ve never been sure I really believed it. I enforce the rules that are supposed to keep us safe, of course—but that’s my job. I’m the stage manager, and this is my theater. Here, I’m the one in control.
After tonight, though, I can’t
help wondering if I’ve got that right. Maybe there’s more going on here than I realized.
Maybe I’m not the only one in control.
Beaconville Theater History
Stored on BHS performing arts department shared drive
Created by: Billy Yang, stage manager, class of 2007
Viewable to: All cast, crew, and directors
Editable by: Current SM ONLY
Inferno Horror
Hundreds Injured in Beaconville Theater Fire
Beaconville, Apr. 13, 1906—The Beaconville Theater was the scene of a terrible fire Friday evening. Police confirmed that over two hundred were injured. Fire escapes were not in position at the building, according to police, and most victims were trapped inside when the staircases became jammed.
The fire began during a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The leading lady had just begun to perform a scene at stage left when audience members noticed her staring into a corner of the curtain above the stage. Moments later, the blaze became apparent to the audience, and the actress turned to the crowd and called out, “Ladies and gentlemen, please stay calm.”
She lifted her arms as though to say more, but before the crowd heard anything further, a piece of burning wood fell from above and knocked her to the ground.
The theater burned to the ground overnight, leaving nothing behind but ashes.
—Screenshot from the Library of Congress website. Article originally appeared in the Beaconville Journal
Scene 2—Stage, Beaconville High School Theater
DAYS UNTIL SPRING MUSICAL OPENS: 164
“It was the curse.” From her perch up on the step ladder, Jasmin aims the power drill at the top of the scaffold and unscrews the beam in three easy, practiced motions, passing it down to where Dom’s waiting below. “It’s the only explanation.”
“I don’t know how you can be so sure.” Dom stacks the beam gently on the wheeled dolly. We need to save this wood for a future show. Hopefully the spring musical, if the teachers picked one that’ll give us an excuse to build something cool. “I don’t know how much time you’ve spent on YouTube, but things go wrong in theater a lot. One school did West Side Story and forgot the gun for the finale. Chino had to throw a shoe at Tony.”
“Things go wrong here more than they do anywhere else. Something’s up, and it could ruin the musical.” Fatima carefully wraps a light cable around the fixture on the pipe, then holds out her wrench so Gabby can loosen the C-clamp. The two of them are sitting on the edge of the stage striking the electrics on the pipe we flew in from overhead. It’s the first time Gabby’s gotten to work with actual tools, and she’s grinning like the true theater dork she’s turned out to be.
Gabby’s a freshman, and back in September, she thought she wanted to be an actor. She auditioned for Romeo and Juliet but didn’t get a speaking part, and when Ms. Marcus saw how disappointed she was, she suggested Gabby come on as my assistant stage manager instead. She turned out to be fantastic at it—she’s super organized and responsible, and she’s up for anything, from sweeping the stage to calming Malik down when he freaks out and forgets half the Queen Mab speech. We’ve all been trying to teach her stuff, the way the older crew members taught us when we were freshmen, and today Fatima volunteered to do the lights with her, since that’s a pretty easy job for a newbie.
The whole cast and crew are required to help on strike day, but we give the cast a call time that’s thirty minutes later than ours so we can do all the fun power-tool stuff without them getting in the way. Then we give the actors easy, boring jobs, like folding costumes and counting props.
“Are we positive the musical’s not Phantom?” Dom asks as Jasmin hands him another beam.
“We are.” I wheel in a new dolly from the wings. The one Dom’s loading is almost full. “Whoever at the district office was in charge of getting the performance rights failed utterly, so my money’s on Into the Woods or Sweeney Todd. Ms. Marcus is obsessed with Sondheim.”
“Who isn’t?” Gabby grins up at me.
“Hey.” Fatima elbows her, gently but firmly. “Focus. Lights.”
“Sorry.” Gabby turns hurriedly back to her C-clamp.
“Where’s Ms. Marcus now?” Jasmin asks as she unscrews the last beam.
“In the shop with Mr. Green. She said they’d be back once the cast gets here so they can announce the musical to all of us at once.”
“Perfect.” Jasmin passes the beam to Dom and dusts off her hands. “Because, Mel . . . there’s something we need to talk about first.”
A weird silence falls on the stage. The rest of the crew is still wrapping cords and unscrewing furniture and sorting scraps, but no one reacts to what Jasmin said. I’m the only one who even seems surprised she said it.
Uh-oh. That’s . . . not a good sign. I raise a quizzical eyebrow, but Jasmin holds my gaze without giving anything away.
This doesn’t make sense. Jasmin’s my closest friend, after Dom, and we tell each other everything. We sign up to work as partners on every class project, so she spends a lot of time at my house, and she eats dinner with us so often my dads always joke about putting out a plate for her even when she isn’t there, just in case.
It’s extremely unlike her to talk to the others behind my back.
“Um.” I force a laugh. “This sounds ominous.”
“Yeah . . .” Dom scratches the back of his neck, his eyebrow quirking under his scruffy dirty-blond hair. “Pretty sure you’re only supposed to say we need to talk if you’re breaking up with someone, Jazz.”
But his laugh sounds just as forced as mine, and I strongly suspect he already knows what Jasmin’s going to say. The others, too.
The crew’s been talking about me. That much is clear. This is either an intervention or a mutiny.
Stage Manager Calm. Stage Manager Calm.
“It’s about the superstition for the spring musical.” Jasmin climbs down from the ladder and reaches into the wing for her messenger bag.
“Oh, okay.” I sigh in relief.
We usually pick the superstition for the next show during strike on the show before it. During Joseph strike, we realized nine different people had gotten hit by swinging doors in rehearsals, resulting in at least two near-collisions and one emergency orthodontist appointment, so for R&J, the rule was that everyone on the cast and crew had to knock twice before they could come into the auditorium. It seemed simple enough, until Dad begged me to give him earplugs for the days he came in to help with set construction because all that knocking made his teeth hurt. Dad’s sensitive, auditorily.
Jasmin pulls out her phone, taps the screen a few times, and passes it to me. “We’ve done some analysis, and we have a proposal.”
I take the phone, trying to keep a relaxed smile on my face. Jasmin’s pulled up a note titled “Things That Went Wrong on R&J.” I scroll down the list, but it’s nothing I don’t already know—Liam’s doublet tore, a backdrop fell even though it should’ve been secure in the fly system, a sword kept breaking, the bottle of fake poison kept spilling even though Estaban triple-checked every night that it was sealed, Beth got scarlet fever even though we’d all thought that had been eradicated in the nineteenth century and barely recovered in time for tech, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, of course, the lights went screwy during the balcony scene on opening night.
I turn my hands down on my knees so my friends won’t notice that reading that last bullet made my palms break out in sweat. I’ve been trying not to think about what happened with Rachel, but it’s been impossible. We both had to show up at the theater for every performance after opening. She’s here today, too, but she’s back in the costume room, sorting clothes and probably thinking about what a horrible person I am.
I can’t remember how long the despair lasted after my last breakup. It’s all a blur, and I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. The only thing I know for sure is that this breakup is significantly worse.
The whole time Rachel and I wer
e going out, I honestly thought I was doing everything right. Until she walked into the booth, held up a metaphorical mirror, and showed me, for the first time in my life, what I’m really like.
Selfish. Bossy. Inconsiderate. . . .
“Thanks, this is really helpful.” I nod toward Jasmin’s phone, trying my hardest to act unfazed. “When you put it all in a list like that, you can see what a miracle it is we made it to strike without anyone dying. Ha. Send the list to me and I’ll put it on the shared drive, okay?”
“That isn’t all.” Jasmin sits down next to me on the stage. Fatima, Estaban, and Bryce glance at each other and come over quietly to sit beside her.
It’s obvious they planned this. The four of them are crew heads, just one tier down from me in the tech hierarchy. They have a lot of power, and the team is used to listening to them.
Dom and Shannon are still hanging back, though, and since they’re also crew heads, that’s comforting.
“We thought back over the last couple of years, and we noticed a correlation.” Estaban points at Jasmin’s phone. “More things tend to go wrong on shows when, uh . . .”
“When you’re not single,” Jasmin finishes for him, still looking right at me.
I wait to see if this is a joke, but no one laughs. Not even Dom.
Jasmin starts ticking things off on her fingers. “All the worst things that’ve happened have been when you were in a relationship, Mel. Like when that red dye bled into all the white costumes in the laundry during Joseph, and the time half the Fiddler cast got mono—”
“It wasn’t half the cast, it was, like, three people!” I gape at her, but she still isn’t laughing. “And—what are you saying, exactly? That I screw up more when I’m dating someone?”
“It’s not about you screwing up.” Jasmin shakes her head. “Everybody screws up. Besides, a lot of the bad stuff didn’t have anything to do with you, not directly. Which means it’s got to be the curse.”
“Wait.” I gaze back and forth between the four of them. They’re all nodding. “You think the theater curse is triggered by me dating someone?”
