The next morning, I was still trying to get my mind around the meaning of thirty pounds. If I pictured thirty blocks of butter molded around my waist, okay, that was a lot. But it wasn’t like I’d been one of those morbidly obese people they wrote newspaper articles about, the ones who are physically incapable of getting out of bed. Even at my heaviest, I wasn’t a poster girl for the annual scare stories about the dangerous food at the state fair, about how Pronto Pups and deep-fried Snickers will kill you.
But I had to admit, dropping thirty pounds overnight made me incredibly aware of myself, made me realize just how much I’d changed in the past year.
It wasn’t only the weight. I’d harmed myself by doing more than eating nonstop. I’d built up some really bad habits, truly destructive ways of thinking about myself, about my life.
The morning after making my second wish, I lay in bed after I woke up. My first thoughts were the same that they’d been every morning since TEWSBU left: I was alone. I was alone, and the pillow beside me was untouched; the sheets were still tucked in on the far side of the queen mattress, pristine after I’d made up the bed the night before.
That morning, though, the empty bed wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t a defeat. Rather, it was a special present that I’d left for myself. I’d slept in the center without any fight about who was stealing the covers, about who had whipped the blanket and the sheet into such a tangled froth that it was necessary to remake the bed just to doze back to sleep.
Something about losing those thirty pounds had helped me to sleep more soundly than I had in months. I hadn’t awakened once, didn’t remember a single bad dream.
When I stumbled into the kitchen to grab some breakfast, the white board stared at me. Maddy had been home some time during the night; she had scrubbed away her Italian greeting and posted in its place: “Guten morgen allerseits!” Beneath the message, Jules had printed in her bubbly script, “Do we get a scorecard?” She’d turned the bottom of the question mark into a heart.
Wow. Mauricio had lasted a mere six days. Was that a comment on where Italy and Germany stood in world history? Current events? The relative skills of those particular lovers?
Poor Mauricio. I hoped that Maddy had let him down gently. As for Herr Wunderbar, whatever his actual name might be, I doubly hoped that he had a strong constitution. He was going to need it in the nights to come. Whatever had brought about Maddy’s linguistic change, I’d slept through the transition, like a sleek, svelte Rip Van Winkle.
I was sure that I’d hear more about this romantic development the next time Maddy and I managed to be in the house at the same time, but I was going to be crazy busy, with Romeo and Juliet getting into full swing, and I wasn’t quite sure of Maddy’s schedule, only that her play was opening in a few days. She would spend most of her free time making last-minute changes to her lighting design. Herr Wunderbar would be put on hold before getting the full range of her attention, and we, Maddy’s intrigued housemates, would have to wait to hear all the details about this new so-called love.
I shrugged and glanced at the kitchen clock. Jules and Justin must have headed out to the airport already, jetting their way to Santa Barbara and the ill-gotten fruits of Justin’s legal career. Like a patient taking my temperature, I asked myself whether I was jealous, whether I wanted to be at a law firm retreat. The answer was still no. I continued to recoil instinctively at the thought of following in my father’s footsteps, of fulfilling my mother’s dream.
I had to admit, it made my life a little easier, having no housemates around. There was no one to notice that my robe was sashed tighter around my waist. No one to say that I’d regained my bridal figure. No need to explain away the change, since I was fairly certain Teel hadn’t relaxed his rules about my mentioning his very existence.
I opened the cabinet above the stovetop, automatically reaching for my box of Cap’n Crunch. Except this morning, I didn’t really want that nostalgic brown sugar boost—even if it did come with Crunch Berries. If I was going to be perfectly honest, I’d have to admit that the cereal was so sweet it made my teeth ache.
In the past, I’d treasured that ache; it reminded me of early mornings in elementary school, when Dad had poured me a bowl of golden barrels to go with a tall glass of milk, before sending me out in the winter snow to walk the four blocks to school. Surely, it was coincidence that I’d ended up with a half-dozen cavities by the time I was ten.
I shoved the cereal back into the cupboard and opened up the fridge instead. We housemates generally did our own grocery shopping, but we’d been together for long enough that we could supplement a meal from one another’s stock without launching World War III. I pushed aside Maddy’s packaged ravioli and sniffed at a carton of orange juice, only to discover that it was well on its way to becoming citrus wine.
But there, toward the back of the top shelf, was the perfect breakfast—a container of lemon yogurt. It had to belong to Jules; I’d never bought the stuff, and Maddy was more of a frozen-waffle kind of girl, on the rare occasions when she found herself home for breakfast in the first place. I shrugged. I could replace a container of lemon yogurt easily enough, before Jules got back from California.
I actually ended up liking the flavor. It was cold and creamy, and the lemon taste was just the right amount of tart—my lips weren’t frozen into a permanent pucker.
I ducked into the bathroom as soon as I finished breakfast. My morning shower was…interesting. While I might have soaped and shaved a slim body thousands of times in the past, I’d never had the opportunity to clean one that was quite as well…endowed as Teel had left me. I frowned as I wrapped my towel around my chest, not trusting my casual terry tuck to stay in place. I surprised myself, though, by making it back to my bedroom without unscheduled interruption.
It wasn’t until I opened my chest of drawers that I realized the problem that Teel had created. Sure, I could slip right into my old trousers, the earliest ones in the archeological site that was my closet. But I was going to need some new bras before I could show off the current state of my upper body. For that matter, I’d need some new blouses, as well; anything tailored that I currently owned would either be baggy at the waist, or it would gap open across the bust.
Shrugging, I pulled on my familiar black sweats. It was better to lounge inside the now-oversize jersey knit, than to tumble out of one of my older blouses. Besides, there was something comfortable about the clothing, something that let me hide from myself, from the new me that my genie had charged into existence just the night before. I’d scope out a new wardrobe soon enough.
I found a parking space just one block from the theater and still had time to drop into Club Joe for a large skim latte, with my requisite four shots of espresso. The smell of the coffee almost knocked me over—it was so rich, so perfect. In fact, all of my senses seemed on fire after Teel had worked his little magic trick the night before. The lemon yogurt had tasted more; my shower had proved more refreshing than any five minutes of hot water had a right to be. Even the cloudless sky seemed brighter—as if I’d never seen that shade of blue before. The temperature wasn’t any warmer than it had been the day before, but now I smiled as my breath fogged the air in front of me.
I dug in my pocket for a set of keys that Bill Pomeroy had given me. The key ring was enormous—I felt like I was some sort of medieval keeper of a castle as I spun through the bits of brass. The front door key had a green plastic sleeve wrapped around its top. Green for go. Green for new growth.
I laughed at myself and pulled the door closed behind me.
I hadn’t even ventured into the actual theater yet; all of my time had been spent in the glass-walled rehearsal room. Well, no time like the present. I fumbled for a few minutes but managed to find the key to the door between the lobby and the theater itself. Sipping my coffee, I walked down the house right aisle.
A bare lightbulb shone from the center of the stage, glaring atop a plain iron floor lamp. Ghost lights were a tradition in most theaters. Some people said that they were mandated by the actors’ union, Equity. (They weren’t.) Some said that they were required by management once Equity came into existence, so that rehearsals could be completed without needing to call in a union stagehand to turn on the lights. (They weren’t.) Some said that they were demanded by theater owners, after an unlucky burglar fell in a darkened theater and broke his leg and sued successfully for damages. (They weren’t.) Some said that they were left to placate ghosts, so that the production would not be haunted. (Maybe, just possibly, they were used for that.)
Whatever the explanation, setting out the ghost light was one of the stage manager’s last responsibilities at the end of every workday. My counterpart for the Landmark’s current production had dutifully done so, and I used the glare to find my way into the wing at stage left.
The current show was a hyper-modern version of The Crucible. The set was made out of plain gray blocks, structures that could be fashioned into a church, a cottage, the bare, desperate life of earliest America. The show was already up and running—they’d have the theater space for another month. Then we’d strike their set and create our own, replacing their dry, austere construction with our underground Verona.
Every theater was different, but every one was the same. I could smell dust in the legs, the utilitarian black velvet curtains that cut off the audience’s views of backstage. I wondered what John would do to mask the angles for our production; the amazing sketch I’d seen didn’t show anything. The plain black that worked so well for the stark Crucible would likely be replaced by something reminiscent of Verona, fabric patterned after stone or something similarly evocative.
Squinting into the shadows, I just managed to make out a panel of multiple light switches on the wall. Palming the entire set flooded the backstage area with harsh white overheads. The back wall of the theater was made of cinder block. It was painted a flat black, a color that swallowed up light, hiding a myriad of minor flaws. I looked above the stage and saw a dozen pipes, heavy metal rods that held mammoth lighting instruments and several backdrops.
The stage manager for the current production could not exactly be called a neat freak. The floor was gritty with dirt, and a number of dust bunnies looked large enough to consume unsuspecting small children. Two wooden tables were pushed up against the walls, holding a jumble of props and bits of costumes, all interspersed with trash—a broken-toothed comb, a sprung hair scrunchie, a dozen sheets of paper covered with doodles and telephone numbers.
A large garbage can stood beneath the light switches, almost overflowing. I sniffed sharply, but I couldn’t smell rotting food—at least some professionalism was evident there. A dozen chairs were scattered in the space, a few of them stacked, but most lying on their sides, as if someone had kicked them over in an acting exercise, then forgotten to clean up. A push broom lay on the floor, just waiting for people to trip over it, or to step on the bristles and brain themselves when the handle came flying up.
If this was the caliber of stage management expected at the Landmark, my first wish might not have been as unfair as I once had feared. The Crucible stage manager wasn’t doing a great job—at least not from the look of things back here. Maybe the Landmark really needed a stage manager who could manage, someone like me who could keep a professional theater neat and clean even in the midst of a chaotic production.
Maybe I could land another job before my father’s May LSAT deadline.
I took a few steps further into the wings, reaching for a glinting silver doorknob. It turned easily enough, but the door groaned as it opened. I’d have to scare up some WD-40. A creaky door like that could make itself heard in the last row of a theater, especially during a quiet scene onstage.
At least the light switches were where I expected them to be on the wall. I flipped both to reveal a dressing room as disorganized and messy as the rest of the backstage space. Mirrors lined the far wall, with frames of bare lightbulbs carving out space for individual actors to sit and apply their makeup. A dozen bulbs were missing, though, a clear indication that someone had not paid attention to the most basic of facilities (not to mention the risk of leaving a bare light socket accessible in a busy workspace.) A makeup-stained T-shirt was crumpled on the counter, and a disgusting fluff of hair teased from a now-missing brush skittered across the floor in the breeze of my own footsteps.
A double door occupied almost all of the wall to my left, its intriguing access cut off by a hefty padlock. I jostled my massive key ring again, determined to see what was back there. Of course, it was too much to hope that the appropriate key would be clearly labeled. Aside from the green plastic cap for the front door key, there was nothing to distinguish one bit of brass from another.
Sighing, I set my backpack on the floor and decided to try each one. Once I found it, I’d put it beside the green one. That would have to do until I could create some labels, until I could turn the key ring into a useful tool instead of a frustrating guessing exercise. Steadily, I started testing each option, one by one.
I was halfway through the ring when I heard the voice behind me. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a deserted place like this?”
“Ah!”
I’d never thought of myself as the sort of girl who screamed. I’d never believed that I was the type of stage manager who would jump three feet into the air when she was taken by surprise. I’d never imagined that I was the sort of woman who would whirl to face an intruder, shoving her hand deep inside her backpack to pretend that she had a super-secret weapon ready to dispatch an invader.
“Oh,” I said weakly. “Hi, John.” As soon as I realized it was him, I felt a little embarrassed, ashamed about running out of Mephisto’s without even saying goodbye. I breathed a silent prayer that he hadn’t noticed (Read: That he’d somehow been struck blind and deaf as I staggered out of the Mamet Room like a drunk madwoman.)
“I didn’t mean to startle you, Franklin.” John McRae took a lazy step back, holding his hands out by his sides, as if to prove that he was harmless.
I began to say that he hadn’t surprised me, but that was stupid; he obviously had. I settled for shrugging and saying, “I should have expected other folks would show up early for rehearsal.”
“I wanted to check out the fly space. I don’t think there’s enough room up there to do everything Bill wants, flying in the sewers and all. Not if he really wants the tunnels deep enough to hold slime.”
“Slime?” I hadn’t heard that part of our staging plans. I was intrigued, even as I started to think of everything that could go wrong with slippery wet sets.
“We are going to turn the theatrical world on its ear,” he said with a shrug, managing to capture Bill’s trademark excitement even as his own twang stretched the last word into two syllables. “Do you have the key to the catwalks on that ring?”
I held up the useless tangle of metal. “I’m sure it’s here somewhere. Nothing’s labeled, though.”
“What good is that?” he asked, with a good-natured snort.
“My thoughts exactly. Here. You’re welcome to find it. I’ve got to get out to the rehearsal room, get things set up for today.” I passed him the heavy ring.
“I’ll bring them back when I’m done.”
“If you’re going to walk around back there, be careful. It’s a real mess.”
He glanced at the careless disarray around us, obviously as critical as I was of the state of the other stage manager’s handiwork. He said, “The Landmark was lucky to get you on this show, Franklin.”
Even though I was starting to agree with him, I could feel myself blush. The Landmark hadn’t been lucky. They’d been manipulated by a genie. They’d been forced by my wish. I muttered something about how this was a lucky chance for me, too.
John took my keys and started to walk away, but when he got to the door, he turned back. “I was sorry you left Mephisto’s so quickly. I hoped we could talk some, figure out a calendar. Start meeting with the other designers.”
Damn. Of course he’d noticed I’d run away. He’d seen and heard everything—my flirting with Drew, my embarrassment at the hands of TEWSBU. He had even tried to pick up the chair I’d knocked over—how had I even imagined that he wouldn’t notice my crazed departure?
Without thinking, I folded my arms around my belly, trying to wrap in the surge of nausea that came whenever I thought of the man I’d almost married. As my fingers closed around the fabric of my sweatshirt, though, I became even more self-conscious. The cloth pulled beneath my grip, emphasizing my waist, making my newfound bust stand out. I wiped my hands against my thighs with all the subtle aplomb of a zebra at the lions’ family reunion.
“Yeah,” I said, when the silence had stretched out for way too long. “Sorry about that. I remembered that I had to get home to, um, take care of some stuff. This show came up out of nowhere, you know, and I didn’t really have a chance to clear my schedule.”
John nodded slowly. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Mike said it must be something like that.”
Mike. Mephisto himself, who knew everything about me. What the hell else had he said?
“I—I’ve got to get out to the rehearsal room,” I stammered. I clutched my backpack to my side as I ran away.
A couple of actors were already waiting outside when I crashed into the lobby. As I opened the door for them, I said hello. Jennifer Galland and Stephanie Michaelson. Perfect. Just the two women I most wanted to see. Not.
Suddenly, I wondered how long TEWSBU and Stephanie had been going out. Had he left me for her? Had they been together for a full year? Had he started dating her before he broke up with me? Surely I would have heard that piece of gossip, if it were true.
I pasted a smile on my face, refusing to think about how idiotic I must have looked the night before. For her part, Stephanie smiled and pretended that we were perfectly good friends.
I led the way to the rehearsal room, hoping that they’d both interpret my flushed cheeks as some type of stage manager’s eager beaver will to do good. As soon as Stephanie entered the room, she sat on the floor, splaying her legs in front of her as she engaged in a serious stretching regimen. I wondered if she thought we were doing a walk-through, something that would require actual physical exertion, but then I realized that she was probably just used to showing off her spectacular actor’s body. Her incredibly well-endowed actor’s body. Her so-well-endowed-that-she-absolutely-could-not-have-come-by-that-chest-naturally actor’s body.
As if I had.
I wondered if TEWSBU had been attracted to her because she didn’t look like a stunted teenage boy. I couldn’t help but wonder what he’d think of the twin gifts that Teel had given me. What had my genie called them? Chef’s Surprise?
It didn’t matter. It absolutely didn’t matter. TEWSBU was history.
And if I repeated that to myself often enough, I might actually come to believe it some day.
As the rest of the cast drifted in, I covered my confused jealousy by handing out phone lists that I’d printed that morning. When I got to Stephanie, I looked away, giving both of us a chance to build up the pretense that we liked each other. Within fifteen minutes, it didn’t matter, anyway; the whole cast had gathered, and the room was humming with activity. Bill worked the crowd, saying hello to everyone, smiling and nodding and touching each person to say hello—a fleeting brush of his fingers on a hand, a sleeve. Each of the actors seemed to tune in to Bill’s frequency, to vibrate with a tightly controlled enthusiasm as he moved to the far edge of the circle of chairs. Within seconds of his sitting, everyone was poised, ready to start.
Bill panned his gaze around the group, his smile growing. “Perfect,” he said. “As you know, most shows would start to rehearse scene by scene. Well, we’re not most shows. We’re going to do things a little differently. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, figuring out the social bonds of sex and of gender, deciding where to shred our audience’s expectations. We’ll all work together for a couple of weeks, exploring issues that will be important for every actor, for every scene. Before we start, though, I want each of you to engage in a little thought experiment. Drew? On your feet.”
Of course, Drew had come in with all the other actors. I’d purposely not looked him in the eye, not paid any special attention to him, not acknowledged that he was the man I’d been willing to share my fries with. It seemed safer that way. More normal. More sane.
Who was I kidding?
I had noticed that he was wearing jeans. Comfortable, well-worn jeans, that looked like they’d known every line of his body for a lifetime. He had on a khaki T-shirt, as well, topped by a soft flannel shirt that must have been washed a million times. And his smile was every bit as dazzling as it had been the day before, perfect because of that one tooth that was just a hairbreadth shy of straight. Unconsciously, I found myself repeating the ten digits of his phone number, like a magical incantation.
As Drew took to his feet, I was immediately struck by the same swooping sensation that had led me to act like such an idiot at Mephisto’s. And that belly flip only became worse when Bill said, “Kira, could you stand up, as well?”
Obediently, I got to my feet, suddenly aware of being the target of two dozen eyes. I resisted the urge to clutch at my sweatshirt, to tug the fabric into some invisible magical shield. Wildly, I wondered how my flame tattoos would look against the fabric now. Could any of the cast make out evidence of Teel, when John had not seen it the day before?
I resisted the urge to shake my head as I forced my attention back to the rehearsal. Bill nodded as he stalked around Drew and me. The fluorescent light glinted off his freshly shaven scalp. He spoke to the cast, harnessing every drop of his legendary charisma. “Ordinarily, I’d leave Kira out of this. Let her work her stage manager magic.” He smiled at me, and my lips automatically curved in response, even as I wondered what he had in store for me, for us. “But for this exercise, I need to call on someone who isn’t in the cast. On a woman who isn’t in the cast.”
A woman…. That certainly didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. Drew flashed me a parody of a wolfish grin, leering with an actor’s comic exaggeration. The cast laughed good-naturedly, but I couldn’t even begin to reciprocate. Somehow, I feared that whatever Bill had up his dramatic sleeve was going to be a lot more embarrassing than my offering to share my food. And it just might be a hell of a lot more intimate.
Our fearless director went on. “People, as we work through these scenes, I want each of you to become aware of the conflict inherent in our casting. We’ve waged a battle by switching genders. You need to understand the struggles that the opposite sex goes through every day, the fights that they engage in every waking moment. These roles will be new to you. Your knowledge of your own flesh and blood will be shocking, astonishing, new. You must learn what your bodies have to say to you, what your bodies would say to you, if they possessed different chromosomes, different genes, different genders.”
Bill paused deliberately, taking the time to meet the eyes of each and every one of his cast members. He lingered for the longest time on Drew, as if he were trying to think some secret message to his star, trying to speak some hidden truth, mind to mind. Still holding Drew’s gaze, Bill said, “Kira, what do your breasts say to you?”
“Excuse me?” My voice sounded like a crow’s, cawing against the honeyed sweetness of the director’s hypnotism.
Bill shook his head, never breaking Drew’s gaze. “Kira, I need you to help us. All the other women in the room must start to think of their bodies as male. All of the other women must learn to question their senses, their sensations. But I need a woman to teach us. Teach us men. Teach Drew. Kira, what are your breasts saying to you right now?”
I wanted to melt into the floor. I wanted to run out of the room. I wanted to flee the scene faster than I’d run out of Mephisto’s the day before.
But I was a professional stage manager. My job was to support my director. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. And then I said, “They’re embarrassed.”
“Yes,” Bill crooned. “Go on.”
I started to cross my arms over my chest, but realized that my breasts wouldn’t like that very much. I forced my hands to dangle awkwardly by my sides. “They don’t like to be the focus of this much attention.” I thought of Teel’s wicked smile when he’d done his work the night before. “They’re not used to being noticed. Not used to being talked about. They’d like for you to focus on the men now. To ask about their …” I wasn’t sure how crude my breasts would be, how inclined they’d be toward slang. I decided that my breasts were more the clinical type. “To ask about their testicles.”
The cast laughed. Even Bill was amused. “Thank you, Kira. Now, Drew? How did Kira’s breasts make you feel?”
That was going too far. It was one thing to ask me to give a voice to my recently enlarged, if carefully hidden, body parts. But asking Drew to respond, and in such a personal way? I thought he would refuse. I would have refused.
Instead, he said tentatively, “They, like, totally confuse me.”
Well, that was deep. He sounded like some surfer dude. At first, I thought that he was mocking me, mocking Bill’s exercise. But no. Drew’s face bore the perplexed frown of a high school student caught unprepared during a trigonometry pop quiz.
Bill said, “That’s the man-you speaking, Drew. That’s the man-you who was listening to Kira. What would Juliet’s breasts say?” Drew squirmed, but Bill said, “No. Don’t tell us. Not with words. Bring it to your reading. Let us hear it when Juliet first speaks to her nurse.”
Drew’s jaw tightened, and he nodded. Around the circle, half the actors were nodding. I could see them talking to their own phantom organs, all of them building silent bonds to their characters’ gonads.
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
This was theater, after all. This was a sort of magic. All I had to do was sit back and watch the cast at work. All I had to do was let Bill weave his dreams. All I had to do was believe.
It turned out, my talking breasts were the high point of the rehearsal. The rest of the time, the cast plodded their way through Shakespeare’s immortal words, trying to become comfortable with the awkward-to-us “my lords” and “madams” as we turned our characters’ genders upside down. We wrapped up just as it was getting dark outside, having taken only the briefest of breaks for lunch. People shuffled out in small groups, and I listened to the strands of conversation as I stacked the chairs, extremely conscious of my talkative female body.
When I was finished, Bill thanked me for my help. I tried to believe that he wasn’t staring at my chest, but I wasn’t at all sure that was the case. As he got to the door of the rehearsal room, though, he stopped and said, “What’s this?” I turned around in time to see him pick up my key ring, along with a slip of paper. “Thanks, Franklin. Catch you later,” he read, curving the last three words into a question.
“Oh,” I said. “John borrowed my keys to do some work backstage. He must have left them there, instead of interrupting the rehearsal.”
Bill tossed the ring to me. “See you tomorrow, Kira.”
“Have a good night.” I glanced down at the keys, readily finding my old green standby. But now, I could make out a dozen plastic caps, each sporting a white paper label. The gleaming rectangles were filled with perfect, steady letters.
Costume shop. Catwalk. Prop closet.
John had labeled my keys.
Somehow, the gesture made the whole day a little bit better. The neat handwriting canceled out a little of my shame about Stephanie, about TEWSBU’s girlfriend. The labels covered at least some of my embarrassment, speaking for my new breasts in a roomful of strangers. The keys locked away a fraction of the desperate sense of breathless imbalance I still felt every time I looked at Drew Myers, every time I met his green-flecked eyes.
I made a mental note to thank John the next time I saw him. It was good to have another professional technician working on the show. I wondered when he’d left the keys outside the door. I could only hope that it was late in the rehearsal—well after my vocal breasts and I had settled into our chair and disappeared inside our sheltering baggy sweatshirt.
I tried to imagine what my down-to-earth set designer would have said if he’d been in the room for my interpretive role. I was surprised to find myself blushing, all over again. No, I didn’t really want to know what practical John would have said. Not at all. Not when his sardonic words would have been delivered in that already-familiar Texas drawl, stretching out my embarrassment even more.
We were producing art here at the Landmark. Art. I just had to remember that, as I locked up the theater and took my new breasts home.