BY THE TIME I got home, the street lamps were on, and it had started to snow—tiny flakes that would make for a relatively easy workout when I shoveled the driveway in the morning. Over the years, I’d become a better forecaster than the guys on television; it didn’t take a lot of Minnesota winters to learn that the early and late storms of the year featured a lot of heavy, wet snow, while mid-January’s bitter cold made the flakes smaller and grainier.
Years ago, my housemates and I had settled on a snow-clearing schedule. The Swensons were far too old to be tackling our driveway and sidewalk on their own, even if they did get preferential parking privileges. Maddy, Jules, and I took charge of the snow removal, and Mrs. Swenson kept the flower beds in perfect order during the too-short summer months. The arrangement might not be absolutely fair (some winters dropped so many feet of snow that the flower beds were almost-forgotten memories), but between the three of us in our upstairs apartment, the shoveling wasn’t too much of a burden.
I’d take first shift, handling this initial snowfall. We rotated responsibility, liberally factoring in allowances for our diverse rehearsal schedules. Maddy and Jules also had the boyfriend cards to play; if they’d slept over at their beaux, they were hardly expected to come home for snow maintenance. Years ago, we’d decided that shoveling was just One of Those Things—not worth fighting over. Sort of like borrowing food from the fridge.
That reminded me—I still needed to replace Jules’s lemon yogurt.
Shaking my head at my forgetfulness, I carried my stuff into my bedroom. I started to dump it all onto my bed, but then I took a minute to put things where they belonged. My backpack went on my desk, next to the LSAT application that Dad had completed for me. I draped my coat over the hook behind my door.
As long as I was on such a neatnik binge, I decided that I might as well do my laundry. I excavated the pile from the back of the closet, placing Teel’s lamp in a place of pride on my desk. I was home alone, so there wasn’t any chance of it being discovered by anyone else.
It took me about thirty seconds to separate the whites (my sheets) from the darks (every other garment I owned.) The washing machine and dryer were in the basement; I made short work of carrying down my first load and getting it going.
I had just stepped back into the apartment when I felt the electric charge that I’d come to associate with Teel. It started in my fingertips. I looked down just in time to see my flames flare brightly, and then the jangling energy flooded through my body. I squeezed my eyes closed against the charge.
When I opened them again, I was back in the place of nothingness. It didn’t frighten me as much this time; I didn’t waste my time trying to peer into the distance. I didn’t try to touch the floor, or any walls, or whatever invisible ceiling arced above me. I didn’t even attempt to move. Until Teel spoke from behind me. “There you are!”
I whirled to face…her. “Couldn’t you at least show up in front of me when you bring me here?”
“Sorry,” she muttered. She was dressed like a schoolgirl, her long blond hair held off her face by a black velvet headband. She wore a uniform, a durable polyester skirt in a hideous green-and- white plaid, a too-tight white oxford shirt, and a skimpy hunter-green cardigan. The outfit was ruined—or some might say, perfected—by knee-high black boots, sleek leather that left a few inches of vulnerable leg starkly visible. The vampy look telegraphed that the entire schoolgirl thing was intended as a joke.
That, and the bracelet tattoo of flames that sparked bright in the dull light of this nowhere place.
“Nice,” I said wryly. I shook my own hand, still trying to drive away the remnant tingle of my magical transportation.
She twisted a few long strands of hair around her right index finger, taking time to chomp on her gum and blow a bubble before saying, “Totally awesome, huh?” She blew me a kiss.
“You’re not quite my type,” I said.
She shrugged. “Are you ready to make your third wish?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s only been what? Twenty-four hours? Not even that!”
I expected her to be exasperated with me. Instead, she took a couple of steps away, raising her hands to curl her fingers in front of her. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that she was grasping the invisible-to-me iron gate. She closed her eyes and leaned back, breathing so deeply I thought she’d pop off one of her uniform buttons. “Can you smell that?”
“No.” I only realized after I’d answered that she’d meant the question to be rhetorical.
“Really?”
“No. I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The hyacinths are, like, totally in bloom.”
In college, I’d stage-managed a production of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata. Part of the play took place in the otherworldly Hyacinth Room. I had spent three days tracking down a bottle of perfume scented like the flower so that the cast would understand the imagery of the words they were reciting. The aroma had been intense, floral, the very essence of spring.
I definitely wasn’t able to smell hyacinth here. Curiosity got the better of me, and I asked, “How many more wishers do you have to serve before you’ll be allowed in?”
Teel sighed, like every disgruntled schoolgirl who had ever faced a parent’s absolute injustice. “Two. After you.”
Wow. So close. I wondered how long her visit to the Garden would last—she’d made it clear that she wasn’t senior enough to stay there forever. But the wistful expression on her young, perfect face almost made me come up with a random third wish, just so that she could enter—for any amount of time.
Almost. But not quite.
“I’m sorry, I said. I’ll think about it. I really will. But I’m just not ready yet. And your dragging me here won’t make me decide any faster.”
She looked up at me through heavily mascaraed lashes. “Yeah. I was just bored.” She stretched the last word into three full syllables.
“Really?” This was the first time I’d really thought about Teel’s life outside of my presence. I suddenly remembered Susan, the woman who had apparently locked Teel in his lamp decades before. Had my genie looked for her in the here and now? Had…he tried to track her down? Or had he realized that the intervening years had severed their relationship completely? It felt too prying to ask about Susan, especially asking a girl who looked like the only person she’d want to date was on the cover of Teen People. Instead, I asked tentatively, “What do you do when you’re not with me? You don’t just stand here by the gate, looking into the Garden, do you?”
“No. That would just, like, make me feel sorry for myself.” With a perfect pout like that, she could get herself on the cover of any magazine.
“So, what? Are you walking around Minneapolis?” That might explain the boots. Not the bare skin flashing between her skirt and the leather, but the boots at least.
“Yeah.” She was slipping into typical teen communication, obviously peeved that I was asking too many questions.
“But how do you fill your time? What do you do?”
“A little of this. A little of that.” She let herself look wistfully back at the invisible gate. “Shopping malls are safest. Or, you know, libraries. Movie theaters. Since you can call me, like, anytime, to make your third wish, I need to keep from talking to other humans. It would be totally bad form to disappear in the middle of a conversation, you know?”
Bad form. That was one way to put it. She could single-handedly have dozens of people committed to insane asylums if they ranted about talking to a disappearing minor. Or whatever form she chose to take.
Teel chomped on her gum, then wheedled, “I’d totally like to wrap things up here sooner rather than later, you know? Are you sure you’re not ready for your third wish?”
I looked down at my chest. “Seriously, Teel. Do I have some sort of time limit? An expiration date?”
A sly thought flickered through her wide eyes, just a flash, followed by her biting her bottom lip. This incarnation would make a lousy poker player. Teel shook her head before rolling her eyes and sighing in teen exasperation. “Nope. I’m yours till you decide on your last wish.”
“So how long do most people take?”
“The good ones?” She smiled winningly. “A day. Two at most.”
Her attempted manipulation was so transparent that I snorted. “Too bad for you I’m not one of the good ones.”
She sighed and tugged at her uniform skirt before whining, “Can I hang out with you, then? If I’m with you, I don’t have to worry about being called away. I can talk to people and stuff.”
Stuff. My genie’s vocabulary was truly well-suited to her appearance.
Nevertheless, I felt a twinge of guilt. After all, if I could just settle on my last wish, then Teel would be on to her next wisher, that much closer to the Garden. I almost matched my genie sigh for sigh. If she wanted to hang out with me for a few days, could that really be such a big deal? “What do you mean, hang out with me? You’d stay here at the house?”
“Sure. While you’re at home. And I’ll go to work with you, when it’s time for that.”
I gritted my teeth. “It would be really hard to have you here. You won’t let me tell Maddy and Jules what’s going on, and I can’t just have a houseguest appear out of nowhere.”
Teel frowned, then reached up and tugged her earlobe decisively, twice. A ripple of nothingness stirred through the indeterminate air, as if a stream of not-quite-light was weaving into all the other not-quite-light around me. When I blinked, there was a man standing by my side.
He looked like the proverbial pencil-necked geek, with a generous overbite and ears too large for his head. He wore a white short-sleeved dress shirt, with an actual pocket protector. His brown Dockers were about two inches too short, and his white athletic socks almost blinded me where they flashed above his black lace-up shoes. Even the flame tattoo looked geeky on this guy, as if he’d gotten it years ago, the one time he’d gotten drunk on a debate team trip, pounding back froufrou drinks with umbrellas in them.
“I could be your boyfriend,” he said, his voice cracking on the last word. “Someone you just met, that you’ve fallen head over heels for.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, wondering what Teel saw in me that led him to become Nerd Guy, instead of some muscle-bound superhero. I shook my head. “That’s not going to work, either. I haven’t been on a date in more than a year. They’d never believe that I’d fallen so hard for you—er, for anyone. Not without talking to them about it along the way. Not without sharing some details.”
He scowled and pushed his taped Buddy Holly glasses back up the bridge of his nose. His annoyance combined with his overbite to make him look like a math-genius beaver who had just calculated the water-to-tree-trunk ratio of his latest dam and found the measurement wanting. “Fine. Be that way.” Before I could reconsider, he said, “Can we compromise? I’ll stay out of your hair while you’re at home. But you’ll let me go to work with you, at the theater?”
I heard the longing in his voice, almost as strong as when he spoke about the Garden. I heard the desire to be part of something, to do something, to be rescued from the infinite boredom of avoiding human beings. I thought of Teel tagging along at rehearsal, though, lurking behind me every waking minute. Posing as my boyfriend, the King of Geeks. That was the last thing I wanted Stephanie Michaelson to see, to pass on to TEWSBU. The last thing I wanted Drew Myers to see, as well.
“You can come,” I said grudgingly. “But not like this. Not as my boyfriend.”
“As what, then?”
I racked my brain, trying to figure out something noncontroversial, something that wouldn’t embarrass me, no matter how Teel played with the form. “A college student,” I decided. “A theater major. I’ll convince Bill that you need to shadow me for a couple of weeks for a class. An internship, I’ll say. For TH 1322. That’s a Theater Arts class called Creating the Performance.”
I wasn’t certain that I could sell the notion to Bill. Not if it meant having a stranger sit in on rehearsals, watching the delicate bonds that were building between the actors. If that stranger, though, could contribute to the production… If that stranger could help further Bill’s crazy gender-bent conceit… “Show up as a woman!” I said. “Someone who can tell Drew Myers how a lovelorn thirteen-year-old girl thinks.” Someone whose breasts were a little more conversational than my own, I thought, but did not say.
“You want me to be a teenager?”
I thought of the little vamp who had just been standing there in nothing space with me. Then I imagined the questions Bill was likely to ask, the directions he would push our star little witness. The last thing we needed was for someone to report the show to the police, citing corruption of a minor. “No,” I said, making my voice firm. “You’ve definitely got to be legal. Just make it so that you remind them of Juliet. Can you do that? Do you know the play?”
The smile on Geek-boy’s face was a little predatory. A lot creepy. “Yeah,” he said. “I can do Juliet.”
“Good.” I tried to believe that this was an excellent idea. At least my breasts would never have to speak up at rehearsal, ever again.
* * *
As things turned out, Teel could have hung out around the house as my geek boyfriend, my lesbian lover, or my vacationing Aunt Minerva—Maddy and Jules would never have known. It was nearly two weeks before I saw either of them in person.
During that time, Maddy left a number of messages on the white board, all in pidgin German. From that, I concluded that her romance with Herr Wunderbar continued to flourish. If past experience proved an accurate predictor, the relationship had no more than a few days left before Maddy showed her dreamboat to the door. I hoped he was having as good a time as Maddy seemed to be.
Jules’s trip to Santa Barbara was followed by a week of heavy work reprising her role as Stubborn Defendant for a new training video. This one was called So You Lost at Trial, Here’s Your Appeal! I gathered that Jules was spending a lot of time stomping around in high heels, telling her “lawyers” all the mistakes they’d made when they didn’t follow the instructions from earlier videos.
Rehearsals sucked up almost every waking hour for me. I left the house before nine every morning, and I was lucky if I got home before nine at night. Bill had a million problems for me to solve, a thousand new details were introduced every day. I was learning more than I ever thought I could, but I tumbled into bed, exhausted, every night.
As if the theater weren’t enough to keep me busy, Teel pulled me into the nowhere space of the Garden every three days, like clockwork. My genie stared wistfully at the invisible iron gate, sighing about amazing floral scents that I could never detect. Teel adopted a different persona for each of those jaunts—one visit he looked like the classic genie-in-a-lamp with flowing Arabian pants and a turban; the next visit she became a spinster schoolmarm from the 1800s. Our trips to nowheresville got shorter and shorter—I still had absolutely no idea what I wanted to wish for, and I was disinclined to stand in nothingness while Teel wheedled.
After one particularly frustrating visit—Teel had adopted a beekeeper’s suit, complete with a heavily veiled hat, so that I couldn’t see his face as he berated me for my indecision—my housemates and I found a Thursday night to stay home together and order in from Hunan Delight. Outside, it was snowing lightly, and we’d made a big pot of oolong tea while we waited for our food. Jules had a set of porcelain teacups, white and handle-less, just like the ones in restaurants. The tea had nowhere near the caffeine content of the coffee that I regularly pumped into my veins, but it was hot, which was a substantial virtue.
I ran downstairs to pay off the driver. We’d placed the order early enough that the Swensons didn’t get involved; even if their doorbell had been rung by mistake, they didn’t get nasty until after nine o’clock.
Upstairs, I left my muffler looped around my neck, still too cold to take it off. Jules was flipping Scrabble tiles over in the top of the box while Maddy unpacked the order.
“Hot and sour soup,” she said. “Eight Treasures Chicken. Here’s your winter melon soup, Jules. And what is Dragon and Phoenix?”
“Shrimp and chicken, with vegetables, in a spicy sauce.” Jules made it sound as common as pork fried rice.
“Did they leave my Hunan sauce on the side?” I asked.
“Yep,” Maddy confirmed. “I can’t believe you didn’t order soup. And steamed vegetables? I don’t think you’ve ever had steamed vegetables in all the time we’ve been ordering from Hunan Delight.”
I laughed. “So you think that I should just get the same thing, every single visit?”
“Hey, I happen to enjoy Eight Treasures Chicken!”
“And I happen to enjoy steamed vegetables,” I said.
Jules and Maddy exchanged a look. Apparently, Jules was elected spokesperson. “Kira, Maddy and I have both noticed how you’ve lost weight. We hadn’t even realized how hard you were trying. These past two weeks must have really made a difference—we can really see it in your face.”
I felt a twinge of guilt. Dieters all across America would kill for a single wish from Teel. I brushed my flame-tattooed fingertips firmly enough that I felt the tingle up to my shoulder.
Sure, my new body had embarrassed me on its first public outing. But maybe it was time to grab the proverbial bull by the horns. Time to buy new clothes -- at least a new bra, so that I could wear my old clothes without spilling out of them. No matter how crazy my schedule was, I had to be able to find a few hours for shopping. Right?
For now, though, I needed to create a distraction. “You know how it is. Sometimes a diet just clicks, and it’s easy to follow. For a while, anyway. Until there’s a pepperoni pizza on the table.” We all laughed together, and then I edged the conversation away from me. “So,” I said to Maddy. “How’s the show? Did you finally make it bright enough and happy enough?”
“Oh, yeah. Just bright enough that the entire audience could see the curtain jam opening night. And they got a great view of the lid on the wishing well getting stuck. But it was all worthwhile when Bo-Peep totally lost it during curtain call. Her robotic sheep went right off the magnetic track and plunged into the audience. The kids got quite an education—they learned all sorts of new vocabulary words.”
Jules made a face. We’d all seen our share of disastrous opening nights. She asked me, “Speaking of an education, how are Transgendered R & J getting along?”
“As well as can be expected,” I said. “We’ve already gone through three boxes of Hefty bags, though.”
“Hefty bags?” Maddy looked at me like I was nuts.
I nodded. “Bill’s trying to turn everything upside down in the show. Our fair Verona all takes place in the sewers. Bill wants the actors to think about slippery stuff, about slime beneath the city streets.”
“Sounds really appetizing,” Jules said, making a face. She pushed her spoon around in her soup.
I hurried on. “He wants everyone wearing a Hefty bag at each rehearsal. He says it’ll help them keep in mind the ‘oppressive nature of the streets.’ I say it makes them all a bit, um, ripe by the end of a hard day’s work.”
“Eww,” Jules said, bravely spooning up another dose of winter melon. I thought that the white broth looked disgusting, but I didn’t say anything. I’d already done enough damage to everyone’s appetite.
“Let’s just say that some of them can carry it off better than others.” I smiled wickedly, thinking of Stephanie Michaelson trying to preserve Mercutio’s wit, her hair plastered to her head after an afternoon of swaggering around in a trash bag. If only TEWSBU could drop by rehearsal then…. Not that I actually wanted TEWSBU anywhere near our play. I forced my thoughts away from my ex. “Drew makes the whole thing seem almost normal.”
“Dreeeeeew,” Maddy said, drawing out his name. “Do tell!”
I blushed. I hadn’t made my comment offhand enough. “There isn’t anything to tell. He’s just a really good actor.”
Jules shared a sly glance with Maddy as she pounced on my words with all the bare-clawed determination of a starving panther. “I know that tone of voice! Really good actor. Right! Like you can tell that, with him reading all of Juliet’s lines.”
“He can read Juliet’s lines,” I protested. “That’s the thing. When he says them, they actually make sense!” I heard the vehemence in my voice and I hurried to explain myself. “I know it sounds like I’m a little brainwashed, but I really think that Bill was onto something when he did the casting. When a guy says, ‘Deny thy father and refuse thy name,’ it doesn’t sound like a whiny little girl, daring her boyfriend to prove his love. A guy makes it sound brave. Defiant. Like a statement of belief.”
Maddy sniffed. “That’s just because we’re preconditioned to think of girls as whiny and moonstruck, and to believe that boys are brave and serious.”
“Exactly!” I said. “That’s my point. That’s Bill’s point.”
“And Drew?” Jules teased. “Is that his point, too?”
I decided that it was time to move on from soup to main dishes. Instead of replying to Jules’s taunt, I scooped my dinner from the red take-out container onto my plate. Jules and Maddy both looked at my vegetables suspiciously, but I was truly pleased by the bright green of the pea pods, the soft yellow of the baby corn. I dipped the tines of my fork into my Hunan sauce and speared a bite of perfectly steamed carrot. “Mmm,” I said while I chewed.
“You’re not going to divert us with carrots,” Jules said. “Come on. What’s really going on with you and Drew?”
Oh, how I wanted to have an answer to that question.
I wanted to say that we’d had a dozen heartfelt conversations. I wanted to say that we huddled next to each other at every rehearsal, ducking out for a quick cup of coffee at breaks. I wanted to say that we shared private little jokes, secret glosses on the script, on the actors, on the way the show was evolving.
Unfortunately, our relationship—such as it was—hadn’t progressed to that stage yet. He mostly hung out with the guys, talking about the Wild’s losing hockey season. But every single time I talked to him, I got one of those ridiculous rushes, the sort of fits that made me giggle and gasp like I was in high school. When he looked up from discussing goaltenders and defensemen—even if he was just smiling absentmindedly as I called the cast to order—my heart started pounding like a wild creature trapped in a cage.
I was smitten.
I shrugged. “He asked me to run lines with him during lunch break yesterday.”
Maddy rolled her eyes. “Isn’t that romantic.”
“Like you’re one to judge!” I said. “Sometimes romance is more than just jumping into bed!”
I think I was more surprised by my vehemence than my housemates were. They both stared at me, and I put down my fork. I had to say something, so I muttered, “He brought me a muffin yesterday.”
I didn’t bother to say that he’d brought them for everyone who had the early rehearsal call. And Maddy and Jules didn’t need to hear that I’d taken the last one out of the bag. And they definitely didn’t need to know that the flavor had been orange coconut.
I hated coconut.
Teel had eaten my muffin, along with her own lemon poppyseed.
Nope. No need at all to bore my housemates with all the details of my busy theatrical life.
Jules speared a perfect butterflied shrimp and chewed carefully before asking in a breezy tone (Read: Changing the topic of our conversation entirely), “So, who’s this Teel person?”
I almost choked on a bite of broccoli. “Teel?”
Jules nodded. “Stephanie Michaelson mentioned her at the Little Women audition on Saturday, at the Spirit.”
Maddy interrupted. “I didn’t know you were auditioning for Little Women! What made you try for that?”
“Who wouldn’t want to play Jo?” Jules smiled.
Maddy snorted. “You? Jo? Maybe you could have pulled that off five years ago.” She forked another one of the Eight Treasures into her mouth. “Don’t look at me that way, Jules. You know how crazy this business is. Jo is supposed to be what, sixteen in the play?”
“Fifteen.”
“And you’re twenty-six. And you don’t play young.” Another bite of rice, to punctuate her evaluation. “Kira, come on, you have to agree with me! We all promised years ago that we wouldn’t lie to one another. Besides, Jules, Laurel Martin is directing that show! She’ll never cast an attractive woman if there’s a dog she can put into the lead instead.”
I shook my head. It wasn’t that I disagreed with Maddy. Laurel was legendary for finding the ugliest women she could for her productions. She always managed to find the prettiest boys, too—she was partial to long lashes and delicate features, even when she was casting hardened, soul-dry villains. Local reviewers had commented on her decisions in both the StarTribune and the Pioneer Press, but Laurel wasn’t about to change her ways. She craved the power that came with being the director.
Still, it wasn’t kind of Maddy, telling Jules that she was too old for the role. Each of us was getting older, every single day. And the theater was a cruel world for a woman who couldn’t play young.
When I remained uneasily silent, Maddy bulled on ahead. “Well?” she said to Jules. “How did the audition go?”
Jules drained her glass of ice water. She fiddled with her fork. She took a sip of tea. “She asked me to read for another role.”
“Which one?” Any minute now, Maddy was going to produce a glaring white light, demand to know where Jules had been on the night of July the thirty-first.
Jules whispered, “Marmee.” The mother.
“You’re way too young for Marmee!” I said, glaring daggers at Maddy. And then, even though I wanted to avoid the topic of Teel, I felt obligated to rescue Jules. Housemate loyalty made me slant the conversation back in a direction I would have preferred to avoid altogether. “So, Stephanie mentioned Teel?”
Jules flashed me a grateful smile. “Just to say that she’d been hanging out at rehearsals. Helping answer questions. I gather Teel’s a bit, um, outspoken?”
That was one way of putting it.
“Bill has this weird Method thing he’s doing,” I explained. “He wants the men to understand how a woman thinks, how we feel. He wants to get a woman’s view on the script, to share it with the guys, but he doesn’t want the women in the cast to share their thoughts, their experiences. They have to get used to thinking like men.”
Maddy and Jules looked skeptical. Let’s face it. I’d been skeptical, too.
Maddy said, “So what’s the deal? This Teel is like a translator?”
“Every time we start a new scene, Bill has Teel explain what she’d be thinking if she were Juliet. You know, when she first tells her nurse about seeing Romeo, about falling for this guy solely on the basis of looks. Teel takes an experience from her own past—from her real life—and shares it with the guys.”
“Uh-huh,” Maddy said.
Better Teel than me, I wanted to say. Instead, I tried to think of a good example. All I could remember, though, was the scene my genie had dredged up on her first day at rehearsal. Following our agreement, I had summoned her, pressing my fingers together and calling her name before driving down to the Landmark. Teel had chosen her appearance conservatively—she looked pretty much like every young college student on the University of Minnesota campus. Every one that weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. And wore jeans slung low around her hips. And a scarlet thong clearly visible above her studded leather belt. And a short ribbed T-shirt that bared the silver ring in her navel. And four piercings in the cartilage of her right ear. And, of course, the flames tattooed around her wrist.
I’d made her wait in the lobby while I asked Bill whether she could join us. As I’d predicted, he’d been reluctant at first, worried about her taking his ideas, sharing them with journalists or reviewers or other cultural spies before he was ready to disclose the ground-breaking nature of our production. He’d run a hand over his bald head and squinted up at the ceiling, talking to me about the sanctity of the rehearsal room, the compact that the cast members made with one another.
But then he’d looked out into the lobby and seen the compact little package that Teel presented. I could almost literally see the wheels turn in his all-too-masculine mind.
Teel was no fool. She’d smiled across the lobby, biting her lip with just the right semblance of timidity. She settled her hand on her hip. I’m pretty sure that she nudged the tattoo just a bit, too, made it sparkle across the room.
Bill invited her to join us, as if she were some long-lost friend.
And in almost two weeks, he’d never looked back at his decision. At each and every rehearsal, I’d heard way more than I cared to about the imagined love life of my genie.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t imagined. Maybe every single word of it was real. After all, Teel had lived through the sexual revolution. She had found her G-spot before my peers even knew that they were looking for theirs.
And she had a contemporary vocabulary to describe her experiences.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t heard the words before. They were some perfectly good nouns. A few decent verbs. A shockingly apt compound adjective.
But there was something more than a little unseemly about the way all the guys hung around her. Something inappropriate about the way they dredged up individual lines, asked about character motivation for each and every Elizabethan phrase in the script. There was something just plain icky about the way they worshipped Teel and her recollections, about the way they never seemed to realize that she went way beyond the text in her recollections.
“Give us an example,” Jules urged, spearing another bite of spicy shrimp.
I fumbled for one that didn’t make us all sound like perverts. “Well… We were talking about the scene where Juliet describes Romeo to her nurse, where she first learns his name. Juliet’s line is ‘Prodigious birth of love it is to me, that I must love a loathed enemy.’ Drew asked Teel if she’d ever loved an ‘enemy.’”
I leaned back in my chair, fiddling with my fork as I remembered how the conversation had played out.
“Teel told him about this time in high school, when she developed a crush on a guy who was completely wrong for her. She was a totally emo kid, a freshman on the literary arts magazine, in the photography club. But she fell for the guy who had the locker next to hers, literally the senior who was captain on the football team.”
I closed my eyes for a second, remembering the energy in the rehearsal room as Teel had spun out her story. Once again, I had no idea whether my genie was telling the truth or not. She might have just been creating a script, entertaining herself because she didn’t have anything better to do with her time. Then again, she really might have fallen for the wrong guy at some point in her past. She might have been taken in by a totally cut body, by a jawline too rugged to be true, by chocolate-brown eyes sparked by just a hint of green….
I dragged my mind away from Drew and told Jules and Maddy, “She said, ‘We did it in the locker room. After the team lost in the State quarter-finals. I’d come in to take pictures of what was left behind, the towels and the game programs and stuff. I hadn’t realized that he’d still be there, sitting all alone.’”
Teel had started crying as she spoke. Her words became more graphic as she described the specific things they’d done, the details of how she’d lost her supposed virginity. Woven into her profanity was a true story of love and loss, the true heartbreak of a girl who’d thought she was making a connection but found out that she was only being used. The quarterback had hurt her, had pushed her fragile shoulder blades into the cement floor. But the real pain was the next day, when he’d pretended nothing had happened, that he didn’t even know her. The real pain had lasted for the rest of the school year, when he never said another word to her, no matter how many times he saw her at her locker, first thing, every single morning.
I said, “A couple of the guys in the cast were blinking hard when she was through with her story. Bill whispered, ‘Marvelous,’ and he just kept staring at Teel, shaking his head. It was like she created something there. She made the story come alive. She gave Juliet’s line, Juliet’s enemy, real meaning.”
Maddy and Jules nodded, beginning to understand. For some reason, I didn’t tell them what had happened next. I didn’t tell them about how the touching scene had broken up.
There’d been a sound in the doorway, a cross between a snort and a cough. I’d looked up to see John McRae standing there, rolling a sheaf of drawings between his palms. He’d nodded at me, and his voice was too loud, too rough for the shamed, chagrined men in the cast when he said, “You got a second, Franklin?”
I’d glanced at Bill for permission before following John out into the lobby. He was chortling as he spread out his designs.
“What’s so funny?”
“The horseshit that friend of yours is selling,” he’d said, taking a pencil from behind his ear and starting to point to a specific drawing.
I hadn’t bothered explaining that she was, supposedly, my intern, not my friend. “How can you say that!”
“There isn’t a word she said in there that’s true.” He’d planted his hands on the table, fingers spread wide to anchor the pages.
“How do you know?”
“How many high schools put freshmen’s lockers next to seniors’?”
“I don’t know! A lot of them, I’d guess!”
“And what high school on the face of God’s green earth is going to let a freshman girl hang out in the boy’s locker room after a game? Without a chaperone? A coach? Anyone at all? It didn’t happen, Kira. I’m telling you. It absolutely didn’t happen.” He’d shaken his head, making me feel stupid for having been taken in.
I’d wanted to call him a liar. But I already knew that Teel wasn’t what she seemed. I knew that Teel’s very presence in the theater was an elaborate masquerade. She had told me that she was bored. Wasn’t it possible—likely, even—that she was just spinning out her stories to spark her own interest?
I’d sighed in frustration and taken a look at John’s drawings. “What is this?”
“The new design for Friar Lawrence’s cell.”
“What’s new about it?”
“Bill didn’t say anything?” I’d shaken my head. “He decided he doesn’t want to go with the trap door. Instead, he wants a culvert to fly in from the top.”
“A culvert?”
John had shrugged, as if he were asked to create sewer systems for every play he worked on. “There isn’t space to fly it in. We’ll have to roll it on from stage left.” He’d flipped back two pages to show me what he’d done. It was a good design, and it definitely added to the oppressiveness of underground Verona.
“What’s the problem, then?”
“It’s getting mighty crowded back there,” John had said, pointing to the offstage space.
“We’ll manage.” I’d sounded a little skeptical, but I was sure that it would all work out.
“It’s going to get expensive. Paying extra hands to move the damned thing.”
“That’s the Landmark’s problem. And Bill’s. We’ll get by.”
“I’m sure we will,” he’d said, rolling up his plans and tapping them against the table. “I just wanted to make sure you knew what was going on.” He’d looked at me steadily, inviting a return to our previous conversation, the one about Teel. I’d chickened out, though, and told him that I had to get back to the rehearsal. I was pretty sure that he’d watched me the entire time that I walked across the lobby, watched until I’d disappeared into the well-lit rehearsal room.
No, I wasn’t going to share John’s supposed insight with Maddy and Jules. No reason to make them think any more about Teel. Especially since my genie was sure to stifle most answers I could give about who she really was, what she was actually doing at our rehearsals.
In any case, I discovered an easy escape from the conversation. “Wait a second! Where are our fortune cookies?”
Maddy sprang up and grabbed them from the kitchen counter. “What?” Jules said. “You didn’t get into them before the food?”
“You didn’t give me a chance,” she pouted. She worked her cookie free from its cellophane wrapper, crushing it into two pieces without further delay. “You are about to go on a journey,” she intoned. “Wunderbar!”
“Hey,” I said. “How did we finish this entire meal without your telling us about the man of the month?”
Maddy waved away my exclamation, shrugging off her romantic interest as if he were already fading in her memory. “I figured I shouldn’t waste your time. Gunther heads out to New York next week. He’s a fight director. They’re doing Henry V at Shakespeare in the Park next summer.”
Jules laughed at Maddy’s typical dismissal. She opened her own cookie and read, “‘Today is a sunny day.’ That’s not a fortune!” she complained. “It’s a weather forecast. And it’s wrong!”
They both crunched on their cookies while I opened my own. The little slip of paper tore as I tried to take it out, but I could still read the words: “A wise man wishes for good.”
Maddy and Jules laughed at the simple sentiment, but the words sent a chill creeping down my spine. I dropped the cookie onto my unfinished plate of vegetables, taking the time to roll the fortune into a tiny scroll.
I wasn’t a wise man. And I didn’t know what was good. But I had a wish to make. A third wish—and it was starting to weigh heavily on me.
Jules was laughing and saying, “Really? But you don’t even speak German! How can you communicate anything to each other?”
“Wait!” I said, consciously shaking off my dark mood. “German! Herr Wunderbar? Go back! What did I miss?”
Maddy regaled us with tales of Gunther the Fight Director for the rest of the evening, as we cleared the table and settled into a ferocious game of Scrabble. I lost by a hundred points, though, unable to concentrate on wooden tiles when I thought about what I might choose for my third wish. Maybe I’d be boring and ask for an entire new wardrobe. After all, if my roommates had noticed the change in my appearance, then I might be just one killer outfit away from finally getting the attention of Drew Myers. If, that was, Drew could ever find my clothing more interesting than hockey. Or the stories that Teel was telling about her supposed deep, dark past.
And if I cast my third wish, then Teel would go away, wouldn’t she? I wouldn’t have to listen to her stories ever again. I wouldn’t have to debate whether she was telling the truth or weaving elaborate lies. I wouldn’t have to face John McRae’s patient skepticism.
I wasn’t ready to make Teel disappear. Yet. But I had to admit that the temptation was getting a little stronger every single day.