I hardened my heart against his thoughtfulness, against the restraint that he had shown. “I went to bed early,” I lied.
Drew reached toward me, curving his fingers as if he were going to cup my jaw. I shied away like a wild horse, but I almost regretted the move when I saw the baffled pain in his eyes. He said, “Kira, I’m sorry. Sometimes I just say stupid things. It’s not like I mean them, it’s not like I even give them any thought. The words are just there, like lines in a play.” He paused in his desperate explanation long enough to look over his shoulder at John. “Hey, dude, can you give us a minute?”
John didn’t even spare him a glance. Instead, he took a half step toward me and said, “Franklin?”
I wanted him to stay, to stand beside me with his cowboy lankiness and his solid, supportive silence.
But there were some things that should be said in privacy. I owed Drew that much. I’d taken the guy’s independence with Teel’s spell; I’d stolen his free will. A little time alone was the least that I could give back as I broke his bewitched heart. I nodded at John. “It’s okay. I’ll see you inside.”
He looked at me for a long moment before striding into the theater. As the door opened and closed, I could hear the cast chatting loudly inside. Bill was probably waiting for us, growing impatient at the delay. I looked down, as if I could magically discover a script in my hands, a concrete reminder of the conversation that I’d written in the car, on my way to work. I found that I was still holding the travel mug of coffee, my gift from John. I resisted the urge to fortify myself with more caffeine, to put off even further what I had to say.
“Drew,” I started. “I’m sure that when you were in college, you had a bunch of friends. I know that you could joke with them, that you could say whatever you were thinking. You could call them ‘dude.’ and slap their backs, and talk about all the hot babes, and you knew that they’d always be there, laughing with you, hanging out with you. I get that. I totally understand it.”
He nodded, a pitiful smile of gratitude flooding his face. For just a second, my heart stopped beating as I took in the beauty of his features.
But then I continued with the rest of my message. “But you’re not in college anymore. You can’t just go around saying whatever you’re thinking. This isn’t some frat house; we’re not hanging out at an endless beer-pong tournament.”
His lips trembled. Those lips, which I’d spent the past six weeks kissing. Those lips that softened the rugged handsomeness of his planed face. “I’m sorry, Kira. But I can’t help what I think.”
“You weren’t just thinking! You were talking!” My anger was closer to the surface than I’d thought.
“I didn’t mean it!” he yelped, and I suddenly pictured him as a little boy, as a freckled Tom Sawyer explaining his way out of some childish prank. His mother probably let him get away with murder. But he stumbled on now, trying to fix what he had broken with me. “I mean, I did mean it. When I said it. You do have a great rack—”
I shook my head, suddenly completely exhausted despite the coffee from John. “Drew, it wasn’t just what you said. It was who you said it to. You knew about Norman and me. Everyone knew about Norman and me. And yet you had to say it. You had to talk about me, like that, to him. To Norman.”
Gee. I went without saying the guy’s name for more than a year, and now I couldn’t stop myself.
Drew shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure you are,” I said. “But you have to understand, I can’t be with you right now.”
He nodded, taking my decision better than I’d expected. “But we can get dinner tonight? After rehearsal?”
I gritted my teeth. I should have written a less-ambiguous exit line. “No, Drew. We aren’t going to dinner.”
“Oh. Is it already time to deliver the rent check to your father?” I shook my head, but he went on. “Are Maddy and Jules going to be home? I was thinking that maybe we could order from Indian Palace, instead of getting Chinese. We could all get appetizers. Share them.” He was getting more desperate. “Maybe play a game of Parcheesi!”
I shook my head. “No. No dinner, no rent check, no ordering in, no games. No more, Drew. We’re done.”
I’d read in books that people went pale with shock. I’d seen dozens of plays where characters remarked on each other’s pallor, where they noted surprise and astonishment. But I’d never really seen it before, in real life, never seen the color drain from a grown man’s face. He stammered a little as he said, “Wh-what do you mean?”
Hating myself for what I’d done, for how I’d used Teel’s powers, I pressed on. “We need to stop seeing each other.”
“Kira, I love you!”
I winced.
Drew didn’t love me. Drew didn’t even know that I existed. Not when he was himself. Not when he was free. Not when he was spared the tendrils of Teel’s spell. “No,” I said. “You don’t.”
He clutched at me, closing his fingers around my upper arms. “You can’t do this to me. To us. I made a mistake, I know it, but you can’t just walk away like this. It was just one stupid thing that I said!”
One stupid thing. That was true. Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t doom an entire relationship because of one idiotic comment.
But these weren’t ordinary circumstances. “Drew, stop and think. You don’t even know me. This has all happened so fast, you just think you’re in love with me.” The immediate panic was fading from his grasping fingers. I continued my patter, as if I were gentling a frightened animal. I kept my voice low, singsong, making my words as private as possible. “You know how it is when you’re working on a play. We both do. You think that you’ve got something going with the cast. The crew. Everything seems to mean more, to be more important.”
He shook his head, getting ready to deny my appeal to his logic. Before he could say anything, though, the door to the theater exploded open. Bill Pomeroy stared at us, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise. He extended his arm with exaggerated exasperation, stared down at his missing watch. “Kira?” he asked, conveying an entire lecture in the two syllables of my name.
“Yeah, Bill,” I said. “Drew and I were just going over his last scene. He had a question about his motivation.”
Bill’s lips curled in a sardonic smile. “I think the rest of the cast can speak more to Juliet’s motivation than you can. Let’s go. I have a special announcement to make.”
I wanted to take exception at Bill’s imperious tone, but it was more important for me to get away from Drew, to get him back to rehearsal, back to the life he had led before Teel got in the way. Before I got in the way. “We were just coming in,” I said.
Drew followed me into the theater, and I purposely made my way up to the front row of seats. I collapsed next to John, grateful that someone’s casually discarded coat filled the seat on my other side, making it impossible for Drew to sit there. I heard him throw himself into the row behind me, but I didn’t allow myself to turn around, didn’t permit myself to gauge his frustration.
I could feel everyone’s eyes on the back of my head. The entire cast and crew were assembled; everyone had watched my late entrance with Drew. Even the people who had not been at Mephisto’s the night before must know what had happened there. Gossip burned through theater people faster than boiling water melted snow.
I fished my notebook out of my backpack, craving the distraction as I burrowed for my favorite pen. “What?” I thought about screaming. “What the hell do you think you’re looking at?”
I scrunched lower in my seat, pretending that I needed to balance my notebook across my knees. John leaned down beside me and whispered, “You’re a lot braver than you look, Franklin.”
His smile was lazy, slow, and I felt an answering grin blossom across my lips. “Thanks a lot, McRae.”
Bill began speaking before John could say anything else. “Now that we finally have everyone together…” he began, with a pointed look at me. His
gaze skirted off behind me, and I couldn’t help but turn around, couldn’t help but see Drew staring at me, wounded, like a puppy tied to the back porch while his owner went off on some exciting journey.
Bill rubbed a hand over his skull. “I’ve made a decision,” he announced.
I glanced at John, but he shrugged just enough to let me know that he didn’t have any idea what Bill’s latest announcement would be. My belly tightened a little in dread, and I wondered what technical feat Bill was planning for us now, what disaster he was going to unleash with less than three weeks to go before the first preview audiences crossed the threshold. I settled my arm a little more firmly on my armrest, knowing that the action would take me closer to John. He didn’t pull away.
“There comes a time in every production…” Bill began, and I immediately thought of the conversation I’d just had with Drew. Bill was breaking up with us. He was telling us that the relationship we thought we’d built was over. Broken. Gone.
But no, he was saying something worse. “We’ve reached that time,” Bill was saying. “We’ve reached the moment when our show has to stand on its own two feet, when we have to let our child venture out into the world on its own. We’ve reached the time when we’re ready for previews.”
John was on his feet before I was. He didn’t bother to keep his voice down, didn’t bother to hide his Texas twang. “We still have three weeks.”
Bill gazed at him with the peaceful satisfaction of a Buddhist monk. A monk dressed in black leather, but a monk all the same. “We had three weeks,” Bill said. “I made some changes to our schedule. The critics will join us on Tuesday, along with our producers and the first paying audience members.”
John didn’t back down. “We’re not ready to go.”
Bill looked over the entire cast before he answered, and when he finally did reply, he used the patronizing tone of a parent instructing a very young child. “We’re doing something special here, John. We need to find our proper audience. We need to invite everyone in early, so that the people who need to know about us will find us, will be with us, will celebrate what we’re doing. I hardly have to tell you that we’re building a very unique show. A very unique show deserves a very unique launch. Three weeks of preview performances is perfect for what we’re doing.”
I wanted to point out that our Romeo and Juliet couldn’t be “very unique.” Unique meant one of a kind. Our show couldn’t be “more unique” than any other.
I realized that I was obsessing about English language usage so that I could avoid the import of what Bill had really said. He was throwing us to the theatrical wolves. He was ready to unveil our monstrosity of a play. He was launching the last show I would ever work on, the last production in my professional life, the Romeo and Juliet that would go down in history as the worst play ever performed in the Twin Cities.
No one would ever hire me again.
I might as well walk out of rehearsal. I might as well head over to the library and start studying for the LSAT. It was time to turn my life over to reading comprehension essays and analytical problems, logical grids, and whatever else they were going to quiz me on before my lifetime practicing law.
“We’re not ready,” I said, before I realized the words were out of my mouth.
Bill stared at me incredulously. “Of course we’re not ready, Kira! We’re evolving! With a show like this, with a show that speaks to the essential break between the genders, with a show that embraces the entire human condition, we’ll never be ready! We won’t be ready the night we close!”
If Bill had his way, we might be closing the same night that we opened.
But he continued to wax eloquent about our development process, pouring himself into his rallying speech with all of the charisma that had made his name, that had built his reputation for years. “All of you actors have been so brave. All of you have been so brilliant. And now we’re going to share your accomplishments with our audience. We’re going to bring the audience into our process. We’re going to let them see, let them share, let them know the very complicated ways that art—that life—comes into being.”
A quick glance at the cast showed that they were eating out of Bill’s hand. All of them stared at him with the intensity of war-torn citizens of Verona. Most were nodding. Several were actually taking notes, recording every last word of Bill’s dramatic manifesto.
I had a choice.
I could stand up. I could disagree with Bill. I could say that our production was intolerable, untenable, unwatchable crap. I could argue that our only hope was to exploit the next three weeks, to take the twenty-one days that remained before our scheduled previews began, to smooth down the roughest of the rough spots, to create the barest bones of a viable production. I could step to the front of the room and say that the emperor had no clothes.
I looked at John, to see if he would stand beside me. His face was pulled into a mask. At first, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, what was going on inside his head.
But then, I recognized his expression. I identified the thoughts that deepened the lines beside his mouth, that creased his forehead.
John had moved on. He was taking the “A” train. He was stepping back, letting Romeo and Juliet devolve to its logical, disastrous end. He was freeing himself from Bill.
And as I realized what he was doing, I recognized the same emotions in myself. There wasn’t anything left for me to change. There wasn’t anything left for me to do to make this show a success.
We were going to stage a gender-shifted, iron-bound, water-stained, flashlight-lit, hip-hop-supertitled, heart-breaking production of Shakespeare’s classic love story. And when it bombed, my life as a stage manager would be over. I’d be nothing but a punch line to a Twin Cities theater joke.
I’d hardly care, when I was ensconced in law school somewhere.
Law school. My own personal “A” train.
Utterly unaware of my thoughts, Bill clapped his hands together three times. “Let’s go, people! Kira? Get the set wet down. Actors, in your costumes. We’ll start in five. Remember, everyone! Three more days, and then the public sees our masterpiece!”
Bill glared at me, and I cleared my throat. “Okay, everyone,” I said, faking my best stage-manager-in-control-of-everything voice. “Places in five minutes!”
As the stagehands rolled the giant manhole-cover frames into the wings, I knew that things were going to go very, very badly on Tuesday night. Not even a grim smile from John was enough to melt the chunk of ice in my belly.
CHAPTER 16
TWO DAYS AND seven hours of sleep later. Opening night. Brain dead. Words. Lost.
Despite my best efforts to keep the cast and crew on track, we were running nearly an hour late. The lobby was filled with a restless horde, the critics and avid theatergoers who had responded eagerly to Bill’s attempts to drum up early business.
Everything was insane backstage. Just that afternoon, John had discovered that the iron manhole-cover frames were rusting, leaving dried-blood streaks across the set every time they were dragged to a new position. Bill loved the effect; he’d ordered the crew to drag the frames around in random patterns.
The theater smelled vaguely like a swamp—Bill’s brilliant plastic sheeting was retaining puddles of stagnant water. Costumes were splitting at the seams, and I’d already made two emergency runs for additional hot-glue guns. The printer had not been able to complete our programs on our expedited schedule; we’d been reduced to photocopied black-and-white pages. The projector for the supertitles jammed. One of the running crew dropped a crate of flashlights, breaking more than a dozen bulbs. The sound system developed a hum that sounded like the birthing pangs of feedback.
Ordinarily, I thrived on the rush of adrenaline that came with a show’s opening night. Tonight, though, I knew that we were pitifully unprepared. Tonight, we were displaying our unformed show to hordes of fascinated critics, to eagle-eyed professionals who were going to destroy my theater career forev
er.
When a show was in crisis, however, I moved onto another plane. My stride lengthened as I walked up and down the aisles, draping programs over seats because we hadn’t lined up ushers for our early opening. My fingers tingled as I applied my hot-glue gun to costume after costume, encouraging the actors to use more baby powder to ease on the balky things, to reduce the pressure on the seams. My lungs burned as I climbed up to the catwalks, as I disassembled and reassembled the balky projector. (We lost one slide, which melted into a hopeless pool of goo, but I figured the audience wasn’t going to understand a word of the foul-mouthed hip-hop gibberish anyway.)
This was why I lived in the theater—this feeling of being alive, of being poised on the edge of disaster, of having the power to save everyone, to save everything. This was the energy—the charge—that I would miss when I settled down to take the LSAT. To apply to law school. To commit my life to maximizing profits per partner.
At least my father wouldn’t be in the audience. Our theatrical change in schedule had caught him by surprise; he couldn’t get out of a charity benefit that he was hosting. Likewise, my high school debate coach was unaware of tonight’s chaos; he still had tickets for our originally scheduled debut. This would be my first opening night that either of them had missed, but I was actually relieved.
I took a deep breath and completed my preshow responsibilities with the brisk efficiency that had always served me well at the dinner theater. I reminded the actors when they had half an hour left, then fifteen minutes. I peeked out from the theater’s wings to see some of the most prominent critics in the Twin Cities, some of the most vocal voters for our local Ivey Awards. I could see Bill pacing at the back of the theater, arms crossed over his chest, head freshly shaved. His black turtleneck made him look pale, cadaverous.
“Do you think it’s too late to get out of Dodge?” John’s question was a whisper in my ear, and I realized that I’d subconsciously heard him come up behind me, felt his broad chest against my back.
Act One, Wish One Page 26
