7

When Rachel explained how the stunt would work, the cast responded with pleasing excitement.

“So, she’s going to do the fall for real?” Chris asked, incredulous. His eyes sparked. Then he glanced sideways at Alice Claythorne and frowned. “That doesn’t sound safe.”

Alice sat slightly apart from the rest of the group. She studied her fingernails, supremely unperturbed.

Rachel nodded. “The plans Mr. Martin drew up call for a drop in the flooring right there. The square will measure ten feet by ten feet, and will have an inflated mattress under a removable panel—the kind of device firemen use in movies when people jump from buildings, only much smaller. Alice will be hooked to a wire to ensure that she falls directly onto the pad. Since the staircase is only fourteen steps high, and not as tall as a real staircase, the chances of her getting hurt are practically nonexistent.” At least, according to Lee.

Chris looked skeptical.

Jessica looked envious.

Alice looked disinterested.

Todd Perkins raised his hand. He squinched his nose to push up his glasses.

“Yes, Todd?”

“Is this why our parents have to sign a liability waiver when we get a part in the play?”

“Yes, Todd.” The falling-off-stage incident a few years ago had started the trend, but Rachel didn’t feel the need to bring that up. “But it’s just a formality. Nobody’s going to get hurt.” She laughed. “Then again, last year I broke my ankle, so I guess you just never know.”

Chris tilted his head to the side. “And how did you do that again?” he asked, his voice casual.

Rachel shot him a half smile. “I’ll never tell.”

Just last year, she had been a contented spinster with no drama and no prospects. She and Ann had rubbed along easily, working all week and spending the weekends bickering their way through dinners at Stu’s and movie marathons. Then within a relatively short period of time, Rachel had broken her ankle, mistakenly assumed she was being stalked by a serial killer, had moved twice, and had been forced to grapple with not one but two possible romantic partners: Detective Ian Smith and Call-Me-Matt Velasquez. Actually, she’d had three potential suitors if you counted Lee, which Ann and Lynn forced Rachel to do.

She couldn’t help but think that now, at the start of a new year, she had no way of knowing whether or not her life was getting back to normal—if such a thing were possible—or if she was poised at the beginning of an entirely fresh collection of disasters.

In this sense, Rachel envied fictional characters. For them, everything would eventually make sense. If she were fictional, all the random, ridiculous events of her life would mold into a recognizable shape, building toward something. She would recognize signs, portents, and foreshadowing. In real life, however, no such clues were forthcoming—at least not ones she could recognize.

She said as much to Lynn over the phone that evening, collapsed sideways on her loveseat, phone propped against right ear, and left ear pressed into the cushion to drown out the sound of her next door neighbors shouting at each other.

“It’s weird,” she said. “Because art is supposed to imitate life. But then, in a way, life does imitate art. The characters we love—and even the ones we hate—give us examples of how we want to live. So there’s some symbiosis there, I guess. But in books, it’s all easier to recognize. There’s a driving narrative.”

“Rachel, what are you talking about?” Lynn sounded distracted.

“My life. I can’t tell where the story arcs are. Or if they are story arcs, or just things I’ve built up into story arcs in my head. It all just feels so random.”

“But Rachel, aren’t you glad that you’re a real person, not a character in a book?”

“I guess.” Rachel sighed as if she just now resigned herself to human existence. “I just wish there were more rhyme and reason to it.” She could hear clattering in the background as Lynn shifted dishes in the sink.

“Let me ask you this question, then. Do you think the characters in books see the same thing you see when they look at their lives—the story arcs and all the rest of that stuff—or do you think they’re just as confused as you are?”

“That’s a good one. But it doesn’t make me feel any better, if that’s what you intended.”

“Well,” Lynn said with the tiniest of sighs, “I did my best. You probably just need some sleep.”

“You’re not wrong.” The walls practically rattled as her upstairs neighbor started his nightly jam session.

“Goodness,” Lynn said. “What’s that?”

“Free concert.”

“Have you had dinner?”

“No.”

“Eat some dinner and go read for a while. You know that always makes you feel better.”

“Lynn, I love you.”

Lynn chuckled. “Make sure to eat something high in protein before bed. Stop by for coffee tomorrow?”

“You know it.”

Lynn hung up, and Rachel fell asleep on the couch with the phone balanced on her face. Two hours later, she rolled over in her sleep and practically fell off the couch. Stumbling toward her room, she removed her outer layer of clothes and fell sideways across the bed.

~*~

As much as Rachel loved Shakespeare generally and Much Ado about Nothing specifically, and as much as she enjoyed the liveliness of the students in her first-period class, some mornings were just too much.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Chris said, leaning forward in his chair at a dangerous angle, fingers curled around the front of the desktop.

“Here we go,” muttered Ryan.

In the interest of class harmony, Rachel ignored this.

“Claudio likes Hero,” Chris said.

“Right,” answered Rachel.

“And Hero likes Claudio.”

“Right.”

“And Claudio wants to marry Hero.”

“Right.”

“And Hero wants to marry Claudio.”

Rachel twitched her eyebrows. “I hope you’re going somewhere with this.”

“Well, why doesn’t he just ask her to marry him himself? Or he could ask her dad, I mean, since that’s what they did back then. I don’t understand why he even needed to get Don Pedro involved at all.”

Rachel scanned the room to see who looked alert enough to take on this question. She made eye contact with Jessica Potts. Perfect. “Any ideas, Miss Potts?”

Jessica flipped her honey hair over her shoulder. “Yes.” Her voice rang with certainty.

“Would you care to enlighten us?” Rachel reached for her Sneaky Coffee and took a quick sip, fortifying herself against Chris’s inevitable eye-rolling over whatever Jessica was about to say.

“Who’s going to say no to a prince?” Jessica asked rhetorically. “Nobody. So Claudio had a much better chance of gaining Hero’s hand in marriage if Don Pedro asked for him.”

“Good job,” Rachel commended her, but she almost had to force the compliment out. For some reason, Rachel found it difficult to praise Jessica, even when she deserved it. Especially when she deserved it. This probably made Rachel a bad person, but she didn’t have time to consider that right now.

“That’s lame,” Chris said. “Claudio should have just been man enough to ask Hero himself. Then everyone would have been spared a whole lot of grief.”

In the back of the room, Alice Claythorne’s head was still in its customary position: pointed down at her script. At this comment from Chris, however, she tilted her head slightly to the side, as if she’d suddenly caught hold of a thought.

Rachel struck. “Any thoughts, Alice?”

“People still do that,” she said, her voice soft.

“Do what?”

“Ask for other people. They probably don’t propose that way. But they still send their friends to ask you questions and find out if you like them before they ask you out for themselves. They might even get someone to ask you out for them. That happens.”

Chris snorted. “In middle school, maybe.”

“You’d be surprised,” Jessica snapped.

For some reason, Alice looked uncomfortable.

The silence stretched. What was going on here?

Rachel cleared her throat, drawing everyone’s attention back to the point at hand. “Regardless of whether it was wise of Claudio, he did use Don Pedro as a go-between for himself and Hero. That action gave Don John room to create the first misunderstanding, when he made sure that Claudio overheard him telling his men that Don Pedro had wooed Hero for himself.”

Chris smirked. “…the bastard.”

Rachel leveled a glare. “That’s Don John’s title as an illegitimate son. It’s not to be used as an epithet, Chris, which you would do well to remember in the future. We shall address him as John or Don John or Prince John.” She sighed. “Or John the Bastard if you’re quoting a character who refers to him as such.”

“But just to be clear…he is a bastard?” Chris twitched his substantial eyebrows, his gaze mocking.

“He is a bastard,” Rachel confirmed, her face impassive.

Chris inclined his head in acceptance and slumped back against his seat. “Fair enough.”

Teenagers.

~*~

Lee informed Rachel that his new schedule made it possible for him to stop by rehearsals at least one afternoon per week, and that he didn’t want to miss meeting with the set crew the first day of building. Thus his first afternoon on campus to oversee set construction coincided with the blocking rehearsal for Murder Came Knocking.

The students were thrilled to see him. They overwhelmed him with questions about his new life apart from them, which he fielded in terse Lee fashion; about his love life, which he ignored completely; and about his innovative plan for Alice’s fall from the top of the steps in the final act.

“Right!” Rachel clapped her hands and called the cast away from their ecstatic huddle around Lee. “You’ll have plenty of time to talk to Mr. Martin after practice. Today we’re working on blocking!”

The cast groaned.

“I know it’s not very glamorous,” said Rachel, “or even interesting. But knowing where you stand and how you’ll be moving when you say your lines is pivotal. Now, I want you to take careful notes of every instruction I give you.” Rachel gestured toward her Stage Manager, Candice. “Candice will write down all of the blocking in case you miss something, but it’s going to be easier all around if you write it down correctly the first time. Don’t trust yourself to remember it all. You won’t. And be careful not to fall off the stage,” she added for Lee’s amusement.

Rachel heard his snorty laugh from over where he stood with the set crew, measuring something with yellow tape. She tamped down a private smile and commenced with the rehearsal.

Maybe they were back on track after all.

~*~

As Rachel walked through the naked bones of the set on Friday afternoon, imagining how it would look once the drywall was put in, she found the graffiti. Scratched deeply in pencil, scoured into the wooden frame of the set, written in tiny, square all-caps, were these words: For I shall have peace /As leafey trees are peaceful / When rain bends down the bough. / And I shall be more silent and cold hearted / Than you are now.