3

My dripping paintbrush creates the sweetest rhythm as it swipes color across the particleboard. I dip the bristles into the stony grey again, and the wet paint reflects miniature versions of the hot stage lights into my eyes. I can almost hear waves crashing with every brush stroke, back and forth, up and down.

I love the sound.

Grant is working on the opposite side of the stage. He’s building a giant, colorful bed for the second act, which rolls on casters and towers thirteen fake mattresses high. I look over at him, perched on top of the giant contraption, whacking a hammer with Thorlike precision. He is hunched over the side with his dark hair flopping across his increasingly sweaty brow. As if on cue, his head snaps up. He’s too far away and the lighting is too weird, so I can’t really see the details of his eyes, but that’s okay. I’ve had them memorized for years. He looks right at me, standing in front of a half-painted castle wall. I’m staring with my lips apart like an idiot, paint from my brush dripping down the back of my hand ’cause, well, that’s what paint does.

He lifts his chin and tries to shake his sweaty hair out of his eyes as he gives me a big smile.

“You okay?” he mouths. I nod at him and stifle a laugh. He’s dangling off a ten-foot tall platform and haphazardly using power tools, but he’s the one checking on me. Grant crosses his eyes and sticks his tongue out just as Jonathan walks up and asks for help lifting a platform.

I laugh as Grant pulls his tongue back in his mouth and tries to act like a self-respecting stage manager, jumping down from his perch and dusting off his hands. Jonathan looks back in my direction with a grin and shakes his head slightly before punching Grant in the shoulder and then guiding him to the large, heavy step that belongs further upstage.

I lower my brush and wipe my paint-smeared hand across the leg of my already color-crusted tech day jeans. Just then, Grant and Jonathan lean over and pick up the giant platform on “three,” and I feel my eyeballs pop out of my head.

I can see Grant’s arms as he hefts the platform. He’s not “buff,” but he’s strong and looks good in his bright green shirt. It has white block lettering in two rows. The top row says, “NaCl,” and under that are the letters “NaOH.” Of course, I wouldn’t have any idea what this means if he hadn’t taken the time to explain to me once that it was actually a guffaw-worthy science joke: “The base is under a salt!” If he weren’t so tall and fast, I would have beaten him over the head with the nearest Bunsen burner.

Brice sits on the floor beside me. He’s been painting the shadows around each of the castle’s stones as I finish them, but it seems he’s taken an eye candy break as well. He’s also staring across the stage at this public display of brute strength, and without moving his eyes, he reaches up and holds his phone out in my direction.

“Here. Take my phone,” Brice says.

“What do you want me to do with this?” I ask.

“Call the ambulance. I’ve just died and gone to Heaven.”

We turn our faces toward each other and lock eyes before bursting into hysterical laughter.

I gasp for air while Brice is now rolling into a ball on the floor. I’m giggling so hard I plop down onto the floor beside him, and I have to wipe my eyes just to see him at all. I’m suddenly aware of the kids in the stage left wing sorting props into neat piles and the girls stacking gels and focusing the spotlights on giant ladders. Drill bits are whirring, and hammers are clanking. Our director is nowhere to be found, and somewhere backstage, someone is listening to the Wicked soundtrack. Again.

Only in the theatre. Two people are making complete idiots of themselves, rolling around on the floor deliriously, and no one’s even noticed.

In between gasps, Brice is mimicking his phone call with imaginary EMTs. “Yes, please hurry. My boyfriend is doing manual labor in a tank top, and I don’t think I’m gonna make it!”

The bang, like a gunshot, when Jonathan drops his end of the heavy platform, drawing our attention back to the boys. Jonathan shakes out his left hand as if it’s been injured before shoving it deep into the pocket of his cargo shorts. Grant looks at me, and his eyes open with surprise.

He smiles as he cocks one eyebrow disapprovingly. “What are you two laughing at? Are you okay?” Grant hollers while Jonathan wipes his brow.

“It’s nothing! We’re fine!” I call as I try to shrink my smile. My cheeks ache, and my deeply buried ab muscles are sore from laughing. This was not listed as a side effect of happiness in my “So You Wanna Kick Depression?” pamphlet.

“We’re okay,” Brice shouts loudly across the stage. “But we might need mouth to mou—”

“WHOA MYGOD!” I dive on Brice and practically smother him with so much skin and laughter. Grant and Jonathan snicker and head backstage just as someone cranks up the volume on “Defying Gravity.” Again.

“Miss Keegan? Mr. Wilson?” The sound of Mrs. Gild’s voice stops all giggles in their tracks. I sit up straight and pull my shirt out at the waist. We face the rows and rows of velveteen auditorium seats, and standing in the center of the house is our director with a stern look on her face. I have seen some sad, scary things.

I have been hospitalized for panic attacks. I tried on a pair of shorts last year. But nothing—nothing—chills a theatre kid to the bone like the roar of a pissed-off director.

“If you two cannot be productive, you’re welcome to take the rest of the afternoon off.”

Under his breath, Brice mutters, “Sweet. I could use a break.”

I jab at him with my elbow as Mrs. Gild pushes up the sleeves of her charcoal grey cardigan. I can feel the eyes of the rest of the techies, who are all standing at attention because that’s what we do whenever our director speaks.

“As a matter of fact,” Gild begins, “you can take the entire semester off and just forgo this production altogether, unless you wouldn’t mind getting back to work.” Her voice is singsong-y, and just as she sets her jaw and stares at us with her steely eyes, the speaker backstage bursts into the loud, ominous, dissonant music of the last thirty seconds of Wicked‘s first act.

Gild’s posture, combined with the music, seems to say, “I’ll get you, my pretties, and I’m gonna ship you back to Kansas if you screw up my sets.”

It feels like a punchline, and I swear I see Gild’s mouth twitch as she resists a smile. She loves a good sound cue almost as much as I do.

“Yes, Mrs. Gild,” Brice and I reply in unison.

She gives us a wink, and the corner of her mouth pulls up into a grin. When she turns to her clipboard, the stage jolts back to life with banging and talking in equal measure. Brice and I return to our paintbrushes and half-done walls.

“So, what’s your excuse?” Brice asks as he drags the soggy brush over the particleboard and outlines another stone. I look over at him as he works. His sandy blond eyebrows are drawn tight with concentration, and his tongue is just barely sticking out of his thin-lipped mouth.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Jonathan and I’ve been going out for about three months now, thank you very much, so I’m entitled to periodic fainting spells when he’s being all adorable.” He flip-flops his head from side to side as he emphasizes his point. “But you and Grant are just friends and you keep telling me you’re just friends, and while I’m sure you are just friends, you still have a little drool right—” He reaches up like he’s going to wipe my chin, and I swat his hand away.

“We are, though. Really, I swear.”

I swear. I swear. You have no idea how much I swear.

I bite at the edge of my thumb. All I want in the whole world is to look over my shoulder and see if I can spot Grant again. Not to ogle. That was a moment of temporary frivolity. Grant is not the kind of boy you leer at. He’s the kind of boy you love. My neck aches to turn around. I just want to be sure he’s still there.

I always feel better when I’m sure.

Brice lowers his chin and looks up at me with a sly smile as he gives his thin paintbrush a perfectly timed twirl. “Well, your words say you swear, but your face looks like a fish on a hook. Mouth all gaping open—”

“Briiiiiiiiiiice, no!” I feel my face spreading into another huge open-mouthed smile. I cover my face when I realize I do actually look like a largemouth bass. I lift my heel to gently kick him in the knee, and behind me, I hear Grant’s voice. He’s shouting something to someone up on the catwalk. His voice cuts straight into my eardrum. I’m like a radio that only picks up one station.

If he could feel the flush on my cheek, if he could see the way I’m biting my bottom lip.

Obvious. Readable. Again.

I reach higher with my paintbrush, and my long-sleeved shirt tugs at my wrist and lifts in the back. These paint fumes. I look to the open stage door—I can just see a sliver of the outside world through the rows and rows of hanging curtains in the wings.

Maybe I should make a dash for the fresh air.

“—tongue all hanging out, I mean, please. You’ve gotta play it cool like me,” Brice says.

I reach down, drop my brush into the drip tray, and then pull at the hem of my shirt and my sleeves. I turn my back to the set and pull my ankles in as far as they’ll go—which isn’t very far—as I look out over the auditorium chairs.

“Right. Cool like you,” I say.

“Right. But seriously, you like him.” He lowers his voice. “He likes you, too. What’s the problem?”

I should have jumped out of Therapist George’s window when I had the chance.

I keep my lips pulled into a smile for Brice’s sake, but in my head, I’m seeing an exaggerated version of our little display of school-girl behavior. All giggling and blushing and desperate looks. I imagine myself leaning forward and staring at Grant with a let me love you look of desperation smeared across my face.

And it makes me sick.

If Brice saw it, did Grant? He’d never tell me if he did. Grant would never want me to feel embarrassed. But if he saw it, he’d know what it was. He’d know what every look meant. And I’d promised myself those feelings would be buried for good.

Just the way he wants it.

He’s made it perfectly clear that whatever lightning I think is buzzing between us is an illusion. A misinterpretation.

“Brice, we’re just not like that. We’re best friends.” I use too much emphasis. I sound like an actor trying to say a line they don’t fully understand.

Beside me, Brice shifts around on his knees as he paints on another contour. I watch as Mrs. Gild marches through the rows of seats with three techies behind her, tripping over their attempts to keep up. With all of the houselights up, the auditorium is utterly unextraordinary. I miss the magic.

“So you’ve never been anything else? Not even a kiss? That really surprises me. Something about the way you look at each other. I really thought you had history.” When Brice speaks this time, his voice is more tender. He doesn’t look away from his work in the same way people don’t look at an animal in the wild so it doesn’t spook and run off.

“Well, we’ve got plenty of history. You have no idea.”

My head aches with the sight of Grant behind my eyelids. I can see him sitting there, his face in his hands. I remember the way my bed pulled down as he sat by my side. I remember thinking the bandage on my arm was too tight. I remember the icicle lights next door flickering, sending light falling onto my bed like snow. I think my head may actually pop open.

“Ah-ha! You have kissed!” My pause causes Brice to jump to the wrong conclusion. His pale face lights up like an excited puppy as he turns toward me and waits for the details. Details he’s definitely not going to get.

“No,” I interrupt him. “We almost, maybe, kinda had something almost happen last year, but it was not a kiss and it was not a good idea. It was a mistake.”

“A mistake, how?” Brice asks with trepidation, his eyes lifting into a concerned shape. His head tilts to the side as if it were so easy to convey compassion.

“‘Cause he pulled away from me. I thought there was something more, but I was wrong. He doesn’t like me like that. So can we drop it, please?”

Boom.

Grant and I have been best friends since writing our names required twenty-five minutes and an entire sheet of paper. He has been the most constant part of my life.

Grant is my gravity. He doesn’t force anything, but he is a force. Something I never even notice until I realize I haven’t drifted away.

He loves me and has shown me that love over and over.

But it’s not every kind of love.

It’s just one kind.

And it’s a really good kind.

But it’s not the only kind.

It’s not the kind of love that grew in me.

It’s not like the love that snuck into my heart and set up shop, slowly taking up more and more space until there wasn’t a single cell not filled with it.

Just like that, I feel the pressure of invisible clouds hovering over me. Fat and aching with rain they’re desperate to spill.

Brice has shut up. And the look on his face as he wipes off a drip of grey tells me he realizes he’s just stuck a red-hot poker deep into an unhealed wound.

“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t know,” he says without looking at me.

“Let’s just keep painting, okay?” I force myself to take a deep breath and blow it out slowly as one of the freshman techies drops a giant ladder he was carrying back to the scene shop. The clatter gives me an excuse to turn my head toward the rest of the stage.

I dip my brush again into the grey and look over toward Grant. His back is to me, but I imagine he can feel my eyes on him. I imagine he turns around and looks at me from under his dark hair. And then he crosses the space between us and puts his face near mine and whispers in my ear that he loves the way I laugh.

But he doesn’t turn. He’s running to help the kid who lost his ladder. I shake off the ridiculousness of my daydream and get back to work as I reach down to resume the act of turning plywood into stone.