THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up ravenous, despite having polished off all of my crispy sesame chicken the night before (and having enjoyed a celebratory handful of Oreos after winning our Scrabble game, due to placing “quiz” on a triple-word score with double points for the Q). I mowed my way through the kitchen, supplementing a bowl of Cap’n Crunch with a couple of Little Debbie Nutty Bars that were sitting, abandoned, in the back of the pantry. My housemates had cleared the premises well before I awakened; I was usually the last one up.
I didn’t bother making coffee; I’d have time to grab a caffeine-fortified cup at Club Joe’s before the Romeo and Juliet read-through. Before stepping out the front door, I dragged my knit muffler across the lower half of my face. The temperature had settled into its heart-of-winter basement; I doubted that the thermometer would climb to zero during the day. I felt all the more cheated because the sky was a shocking blue, not a cloud in sight. A true Minneapolis winter—when it got too cold to snow.
I couldn’t continue complaining, though. The barista at Club Joe added my four shots of espresso without treating me like a crazy woman, sending me on my way so efficiently that I got to the theater with a full half hour before the cast was supposed to arrive.
Someone had already opened the front door, though. Lights were on in the rehearsal room, and chairs were distributed in a neat circle. I called out a tentative hello, but no one answered.
Slinging my backpack onto the floor, I dug out my notebook and a handful of pens. (I always kept extras ready; cast members inevitably forgot their own, and I wasn’t about to stop a perfect scene to rummage around if mine ran out of ink.)
As ready for rehearsal as I could be, I closed my hand around my coffee cup, gripping the paper sleeve as I administered a healthy dose of caffeine. When I lowered the cup, the eerie tattoos on my fingertips caught the light. I shifted the coffee to my left hand and gazed at my marked hand as if it were some fascinating museum display.
I wondered if anyone else could see the mark of the flames. I mean, Teel had kept me from telling Maddy and Jules about my wishes the night before, about the impact the genie was making on my life. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense to offer that sort of protection and then let anyone who cared see the magic writ large, literally, on my hands.
“Morning, Franklin” came a deep voice from behind me, and I started as if I’d been doing something dishonest.
I curled my fingers into a fist and turned around, fighting to quell a guilty crouch. John McRae stood in the doorway. His nose was red from the cold, and he stamped his feet as if he despaired of ever restoring circulation to his toes.
“Good morning,” I said. Meeting his easy grin, I felt guilty about ducking out of the cast get-together the night before. “I—I’m sorry that I didn’t get over to Mephisto’s last night. My housemates and I ended up having dinner at home—one of them is about to start tech rehearsals and the other is going on a cross-country trip. I won’t be seeing them for weeks.”
Stop, I told myself. This guy doesn’t need your entire life story. Just. Stop.
“No problem,” he said, shrugging. “Most of us left around eight, anyway. Had to be ready for today’s rehearsal.”
And that was that. No federal case. No need for endless apologies. No need for further, contorted explanations, about TEWSBU or Teel or anything else.
“Did you set things up?” I nodded toward the circle of chairs.
“Yeah,” he drawled. “I got here early and figured I might as well be useful. Mandatory morning calisthenics.”
I grinned, more at the image of this laid-back cowboy doing some official military workout, than out of any actual amusement about the rehearsal room. “Thanks. I feel like I’m not carrying my weight around here.” I almost winced at my own words. Leave it to me, to call attention to my weight. Desperate to change the topic of conversation quickly, I nodded toward a heavy cardboard tube in his hands. “What’s that?”
“Drawings for the set. Left ’em in the truck by mistake and had to go back out there.” He peeled off his coat and shook his head ruefully. Even though I was a big fan of Minnesota, I understood his reaction to the bitter winter cold. It must be particularly difficult for him, Texas transplant that he was. He brandished the tube. “They’re sketches, really. Bill wanted to photograph them this morning, to use as a background for some pages in the program.”
I tried to hide my surprise. At Fox Hill, the program was always a last-minute scramble, proofread by me—or anyone else awake enough to see straight—a week before the show opened, then sent off to Kinko’s for quick printing, folding, and stapling.
I tried to sound a little bored, like I was used to the Landmark’s professional way of producing programs. “May I see?”
He smiled self-deprecatingly. “I thought you’d never ask.”
We crossed to the worktable against the wall. I was impressed by the way his strong fingers pried the cap from the end of the sturdy tube—I always needed to resort to screwdrivers to lever those stupid things out. John’s hands were large, tanned, even in the middle of winter.
I remembered my own tattooed fingers. Suddenly, I was overcome with the urge to test him, to test the visibility of Teel’s magic. As John unrolled the sheaf of papers, I made a point of anchoring two corners, spreading my right hand across the white surface of the paper. I tilted my wrist to make the iridescent fire shimmer as much as possible.
From my perspective, the flames glowed; I could make out specific licks of crimson and vermilion and topaz, as if the design was stamped there in Technicolor. I waited for John to leap back in astonishment, to swear in surprise, to stare at my hands in slack-jawed amazement. Or, at the very least, to dip his head and say, “Cool tats.”
Instead, he tugged at his belt, deftly detaching a tape measure to weigh down my side of the drawing. “Thanks,” he said, anchoring the curling far side himself. He gestured at the top drawing. “For the opening scene, I picture the guys on this platform, looking down on the rest of the town square. Bill and I talked about moving each scene lower, deeper into the streets, into the sewers.” John’s twang softened his words, made them less of a lecture and more of a conversation.
I wasn’t ready to give up on the tattoo thing quite yet, though. I pointed vigorously toward another area of the drawing, as if I were showing off the world’s most expensive manicure. “What’s that?”
“A trap door,” he said, oblivious to the magic sparking before his very eyes. “We’ll use it to take out Friar Lawrence, at the end of his first scene.”
Nothing. He obviously couldn’t see the marks on my fingertips. Teel would remain a secret, even if I saw evidence of magic every time I waved my hand.
I blinked and actually paid attention to the drawing for the first time. Now that I was no longer trying to measure my Visible Genie Quotient, I could see that John had done a great job of capturing his design ideas. His drawings were obviously only sketches, ideas that would be modified as they were turned into models, then actually constructed by the Landmark’s renowned carpentry shop. But the lines were firm, the overall design confident, quietly competent in a straightforward way that many theater designers lacked.
“How will you handle the balcony scene?” I asked. Even as I voiced the question, I remembered Jennifer and Drew reading the day before. I resisted the urge to wrinkle my nose—as much as I respected Bill Pomeroy’s daring ideas, I didn’t like the notion that the gimmick of reverse-gender casting might ruin the audience’s appreciation for the stagecraft evident in John’s drawings.
“We’ll use this platform here.” He gestured toward stage right. “Juliet’s bed will fold down from the back wall. I want it out there, really obvious, so that her—his—whatever…” he said, stumbling over his pronouns, and I wanted to tell him that I sympathized. Teel had made me question my own use of the English language, just the evening before. I could only imagine how confusing the next few months would be here in the theater, with genders switching minute by minute. “Her sexuality,” he finally continued, with enough irritated emphasis that the second word unexpectedly made me blush, “is clear from the start, but I also have to get it out of the way for the entire ballroom scene. That’s when this level doubles as the entrance hall.” He shrugged. “I might go down in history as the first set designer to give Juliet a Murphy bed.”
I laughed—it just struck me as funny. There we were, talking about one of the greatest lovers in all literature, and the only thing I could picture was every bad slapstick routine I’d ever seen, with mattresses slamming into walls at the most inopportune times. “That Juliet—she’s quite a decorator.”
John still seemed annoyed by the pronoun confusion. A quick frown creased his forehead, and he rubbed a hand down his mustache. “Damn fool casting,” he muttered.
“Don’t let Bill hear you say that,” I warned teasingly, glad that I wasn’t the only person who found our courageous production a little…silly. At least at this stage. Maybe rehearsals would change my mind.
“Don’t let Bill hear you say what?” The question, predictably, came from Bill himself. “Ah!” our director exclaimed, coming to look at the drawings. “Wonderful! I want the entire cast to see these, so that they can start to live the physical realization of this show.”
Live the physical realization. (Read: “Get familiar with the set.” But “living the realization” sounded so much more grand.) John rolled his eyes just the tiniest bit, and I bit my lower lip to keep from smiling with him.
Most of the actors had drifted into the room while we’d been talking, and Bill quickly called everyone to order. “All right, everybody! Take your seats! We’ve got a lot to do today!”
The group settled down immediately, with a tangible air of expectation. This was a company of professional actors, intent on making theatrical magic come alive for themselves, for their director, for the audiences that would be stunned by our creation, come April.
Surreptitiously, I dug out a listing of the cast that Bill had given me the day before. Working my way around the circle, I made sure that everyone was present, on time for this important first read-through. I was pleased to see that I could match every name on my printout to a face.
Bill called on John to explain his basic design, to annotate verbally the perfectly clear sketches, for everyone’s benefit. I used the time to go back around the circle, to test my ability to name every cast member without the aid of my written list.
Just as I got to Drew Myers, he looked up. It was almost like he’d heard me call his name. His dark brown eyes met mine, hints of green sparkling as if we were in the middle of an animated conversation. His smile was immediate, dazzling. Surprised by the unexpected attention, I looked away, pretending that I’d been distracted by something in the general area of the rehearsal room door. When I gathered my courage to glance back, Drew was leaning over to whisper something to the actress sitting next to him.
I fought off a scowl. Why hadn’t I just smiled back at Drew like a normal person? Why hadn’t I accepted his silent offer of friendship? What the hell was wrong with me?
I knew what was wrong with me.
Drew Myers was the most gorgeous guy I’d seen in ages. He was the first man to make me catch my breath in…I couldn’t even say how long.
I was afraid of my reaction to him. The last time I’d felt like that, I’d ended up engaged to the guy. Engaged to TEWSBU. I wasn’t going to make that kind of mistake ever again—not if I needed to avoid every smile from every actor in every play I ever worked on, for the rest of my life.
I folded my flame-tattooed fingers into a fist and bent over my notebook, forcing myself to take meticulous notes as Bill instructed everyone to turn to the first page of their scripts so that we could begin our read-through.
* * *
At the end of the read-through, a group decided to go to Mephisto’s. It was two o’clock when we finished the rehearsal; enthusiasm was wearing thin as everyone grumbled about being hungry. The cast filed out quickly, but John stayed behind to help me with the chairs. Again. After accepting his assistance, I could hardly refuse his invitation to grab a burger with everyone else.
Even if I was leery of Mephisto’s. Even if my pulse started to quicken as we hurried through the bitter cold to the nearby block of low-rise, family-owned businesses.
The storefront wasn’t anything to look at from the street. Careful lettering on the plate glass window announced Mike’s Bar and Grill. That same window was half covered with theater posters from productions dating back to the 1970s.
Hmm… Teel would have been perfectly at home there, if he’d first manifested in the back room of the dive. At least his disco suit would have been deemed “retro” instead of simply weird.
Inside, the lighting was dim, the tables were close together, and the bar took up the better part of the left-hand wall. There were private rooms in the back, each large enough to host the cast and crew from a medium-size show on opening night. The food at Mike’s was simple and good—burgers, fries, and onion rings, with a killer green salad for leading ladies constantly on diets. Not that I’d ever actually ever tasted the salad in all my years of coming to the place, but I’d been told that it was good. At least, the blue cheese dressing was to die for. (Read: Leading ladies lie to themselves about what they eat just as much as everyone else does.)
Mike Reilly, our very own Mephisto, was the father of four daughters, each of whom had struggled to make her way in the local theater scene. Kelly, the oldest, had actually succeeded enough that she’d left us all behind, for Broadway (or off-Broadway, or off-off-Broadway, or for a few bit parts in a community theater in Queens⎯we never asked for too many details).
Two-thirty in the afternoon was an odd time for anyone to arrive at Mephisto’s; Mike was more likely to see customers stroll in at two-thirty in the morning, after a particularly grueling rehearsal. In fact, when John and I ducked through the door, Mike was behind the long zinc bar himself, a clear sign that his evening staff had not yet arrived.
“Kira Franklin!” he exclaimed as I stepped into the dark restaurant. I blinked to hasten my vision’s adjustment. He set down the rag that he was using to wipe clean the spotless bar and settled his hammy fists on his hips. “How long has it been, stranger?”
“Just about a year,” I said, surprised to find myself grinning, despite the reason that I’d kept my distance. Mike had been one of the invited guests, that night at the Hyatt. I was certain that TEWSBU still ate here on a regular basis; he’d always claimed that Mike spiked the French fries with crack.
Well, it was funnier when he said it. Back when I’d thought everything he said was funny.
I wiped my suddenly slick palms on my shapeless sweatpants, trying to cover my awkwardness with an attempt at being polite. “Have you met John McRae?”
“Met him?” Mike boomed. “I’ve fed him half his meals since he came to town. How you doing, John?”
“Just fine.” My set designer (my set designer! I was still incredibly thrilled to think of the Landmark’s staff as my own) smiled easily and crossed the room to the bar. Mike had already pulled a dark and foamy mug for him—it looked like John had an unfathomable appreciation for Guinness. Smiling laconically, John looked over his shoulder and said, “What’ll you have, Franklin?”
But Mike was a better bartender than that. He’d already scooped up the largest of his glasses, filled it with ice and shoved three limes onto the rim. As he shot the glass full of tonic water from his six-button dispenser, I tried to calculate how many times I’d bellied up to his bar.
I retrieved the glass from Mike with a grateful smile, sneaking the quickest of glances at John to see how he registered the nonalcoholic beverage. About half the guys I met thought I was the strangest specimen of humanity they’d ever met outside a zoo. The other half gave me a sad little smile and a half shake of the head; most of those immediately launched into a conversation about loved ones who were twelve-stepping through some program.
John didn’t seem to notice what I was drinking. Instead, he said to Mike, “You taking orders out here? I’ll have a black-and-blue burger, with fries.”
I thought I saw Mike’s smile tighten as he turned to me. We both remembered that TEWSBU loved Mike’s Cajun-spiced hamburgers, built around a pocket of blue cheese that melted into a redolent sauce more compelling than any gourmet kitchen’s snooty offering. “Cheddar and bacon,” I said, determined not to let John’s unfortunate order get me down. And then I decided to toss all care to the wind. What the hell, twelve months was too long to stay away from Mephisto’s. “And grilled onions and—”
“Mushrooms,” Mike finished. “Welcome back, Kira. It’s been a long time.”
I tried to think of something to say, but all of my responses sounded awkward. It occurred to me that I owed John some sort of explanation; the guy had no idea of my sordid past. But I wasn’t quite sure what to tell him, how much anyone would want to know about the greatest embarrassment of my life.
Typically, Mike saved the day. “I half expected to see you in here asking for an apron, Kira.” As I’d alluded to my father, Mike was famous in the theater community for handing out jobs to those in need. When roles were really scarce, Mike had one waiter per table. When shows were doing well, though, you could wait half an hour for the place’s one harried server to take your order. We theater folks were always grateful when it took a long time to get refills on drinks.
“The rumors of my demise were greatly exaggerated,” I said with a grin that was only slightly forced. I had Teel to thank for that, of course. I rubbed my tattooed fingers together, shivering a little at the electric tingle that hummed down my spine.
“Glad to hear it,” Mike said. “Go ahead, you two. Everyone’s in the Mamet Room. I’ll bring your food when it’s ready.”
The Mamet Room. Every time I ducked through the velvet curtain of the private space, I felt like I should swear like a sailor. Swear, and talk as fast as possible and tell everyone about my sex life, in the raunchiest terms imaginable. Yeah. As if I had a sex life at all. Mamet just brought that out in a girl. Or at least his plays did. I’d cut my teeth on his early piece, Sexual Perversity in Chicago. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Really.
Still, I was more comfortable in the neighboring Shakespeare Room, all things being equal.
John held the curtain for me as I ducked into the Mamet, careful to keep from spilling my tonic water. I pasted a smile onto my face, the better to greet my new acting family. Mechanically, my eyes swept over the bevy of actors, the women who were going to play Mercutio and Benvolio and Paris. And Friar Lawrence. After our morning read-through, I was more convinced than ever that the show was going to be strange. Wonderful, groundbreaking, breathtaking. But strange.
I shrugged mentally. “Strange” was how a theater made its reputation. “Strange” was how a company made its mark. Besides, who was I to talk about strange? Me, the woman with a genie at her beck and call?
I tried to brace myself against the silly swoop I knew my belly would make when I caught sight of Drew Myers. Sure enough, he was sitting with his back to John and me, right by the entrance. There were a couple of chairs open beside him, and I knew that it would be the most natural thing in the world to take a few steps forward, to put my glass on the table, to sit beside him.
I ordered my feet to move, but they refused to listen. I told my smile to stretch a little more widely, but my teeth seemed to get in the way. I instructed my voice to form a greeting, but I had apparently forgotten every word I knew in the English language.
It had been a long time since I’d tried to socialize with anyone, much less with a drop-dead gorgeous guy like Drew. I’d grown accustomed to living in the convent of my apartment. It was harder than I’d expected to make the transition back into the real world.
In fact, I felt as stifled as I’d been when Teel kept me from mentioning the genie stuff to my housemates. Worse, even, because I knew there wasn’t anything magic about this. Nothing more magic, that was, than the fact that Drew was unbelievably, unfairly handsome.
But he was an actor, I remonstrated with myself. The type of guy who had a dozen women hanging on him, even on a slow day.
“Hey, y’all,” John said, putting an end to my internal debate by pulling out a chair for me—the chair closest to Drew!—and taking another for himself.
There was a chorus of greeting, and I was freed to sit down, my momentary awkwardness released. I took a sip of tonic water, hoping that the bitter tang would cool the furious blush that I could tell was painting my cheeks.
Drew spared me a small smile as I put my glass back on the table, but even that blast of casual half-normal wattage sent my stomach tumbling over itself. “Hi, Kira,” he said. I could not think of a reply; I was unable to muster a single complete sentence in English.
I glanced at John, hoping to find that he was miraculously prepared with some topic of conversation. Instead, he was already talking to a woman across the table, a pretty brunette whose name I suddenly couldn’t remember, despite the fact that I’d seen her here, in Mephisto’s, for years, before TEWSBU led to my self-banishment. The woman was playing Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, the brute who thinks with his sword instead of his brain. John was nodding at something she was saying, something about how a winter storm was expected to blow through by Monday.
I gulped my drink and turned back to Drew, simultaneously pleased and chagrined to be on my own. I forced myself to say, “So, this production is going to be like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Did you know about the reverse casting when you auditioned?”
Drew smiled again and shrugged with the sort of frat-boy abandon that made me want to run my fingers through his already-tousled hair. (Read: I was ready to invite him home then and there, regardless of what Maddy and Jules might think when they saw a guy—a guy I’d only mentioned once before—swaggering through our front door.)
I’d forgotten what it was like to be this interested in someone. I’d forgotten what it was like to plot out conversations three exchanges down the line, to have a constant monitor running in my head, reminding me that if I asked about this, I was likely to open up a line of discussion good for another five minutes; if I asked about that, I could glean a minimum of seven minutes….
I used to be really good at this game.
But that was before TEWSBU. Before the past year of self-enforced celibacy, and the year before that of engagement, and the year before that of exclusive dating with the guy I’d believed was the man of my dreams.
Wow. I’d been out of circulation for a long time. Could it really have been three years since I’d experienced this breathless, pounding, flushing feeling? (Yeah, there was that time I had the flu, last January. But that didn’t count.)
In fact, I was so far out of the swing of things, I’d forgotten to listen to Drew’s answer to my question. He’d said something about the auditions, about Bill’s plans for Romeo and Juliet, something that would have given me some idea—any idea—what to say next. And I’d missed it, because I was anxious, feeling sorry for myself, sorry for the me whose life had been ruined by an insensitive, cold-blooded, bastard ex-fiancé. I drained my glass, searching for my next line.
Luckily, John had overheard whatever Drew had said, and he dropped easily back into our conversation. “I wish I’d been there for those callbacks,” he drawled. “Just to see the expression on y’all’s faces, when Bill told you to switch roles.”
Again, Drew dazzled us with that smile. Dazzled me, anyway. I was pretty sure that John wasn’t affected. “I thought it was an acting exercise, you know? ‘Think about what Romeo’s sword feels, as it plunges into Juliet’s breast. Feel that emotion. Act out the role of the sword.’“
I laughed, and John joined in. We’d all worked with our share of touchy-feely directors. Method acting in its simplest form—it was a technique where actors tried to re-create the emotions of their characters by drawing on their past experiences. It was one thing, though, for someone to build Ophelia’s insane love of Hamlet by thinking about an actual failed high school romance. It was another when directors pushed Ophelia-actresses to build their madness on the loss of some other relationship, say a childhood friend who’d moved away. Or, in one disastrous production I had stage managed in college, on the loss of a favorite angora scarf.
That production gave all new meaning to Hamlet’s line, “There’s the rub.”
Yeah, we theater people were strange.
Drew’s good-natured mocking of the audition process was what I needed to finally put me at ease. At last, I could remember how to breathe, how to act like a calm, cool, and collected stage manager, instead of like a seventh-grader at my first school dance. Thinking of another method-acting disaster, already famous in Twin Cities theater lore, I asked, “Did you see the Richard III they did last year at Epiphany?”
Drew smirked. “Dude! It’s one thing to make Shakespeare come alive, but it was totally broken to give Richard a sword fetish. Especially with those leather costumes.”
John said dubiously, “I wish I’d seen that.”
“No you don’t!” Drew and I both said at the same time.
As we laughed together, Mike pushed his way through the velvet curtain. He swooped my plate down in front of me, bowing from the waist as if he were a courtier and I was some type of queen. John didn’t get quite the same level of attention, although Mike made sure that a bottle of ketchup rested evenly between us. Like a mind-reader, he replaced my empty glass with a full one, saying, “And another tonic water, extra lime. Anything else I can get for you guys right now?”
I shook my head, breathing deeply of the magical smell of fresh-from-the-fry-basket potatoes. Why had I stayed away from Mephisto’s for so long?
As if he’d read my mind, Mike favored me with a broad smile. “Enjoy. Kira, it’s great to have you back.”
“It’s great to be back, Mike,” I said as he returned to the bar. Before I could devote an appropriate level of attention to adding salt and pepper to my fries, Drew leaned close, settling one hand on my sleeve. He nodded toward my fresh beverage and said, “I went to Alateen for years. That really helped me learn how to deal with my father.”
“Yeah,” I said, slipping into my well-rehearsed explanation, even as my adrenaline glands pumped into overtime at the thought of his hand touching me. Down, girl, I thought. “Actually, I’m allergic to alcohol. I’m not an alcoholic. Um, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, not that it’s different from any other illness. Like tuberculosis.”
Damn. I was usually a bit more smooth than that. I fought the sudden, ridiculous compulsion to tell him about my allergy symptoms, to explain that my cheeks would turn bright red (as if he could tell the difference, given how furiously I was blushing), or that my palms would start to itch, or that my mouth would begin to tingle.
Yeah, that would make me really popular.
Before I could commit any more social crimes, I took the time to cut my burger in half, grateful that my black sweatshirt would camouflage the worst of my gustatory sins.
My first bite of burger was even better than I remembered. Swallowing hard, I sat back in my chair with a sigh. Drew laughed, which made me sit up a bit straighter. “Dude, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone enjoy one of Mike’s burgers that much, even when I was on the late shift.”
“You used to work here?”
He ducked his head, as if admitting to a secret past. When he smiled up at me through his eyelashes, my heart did another round on the flying trapeze. “Guilty as charged. I’ve had my share of auditions that didn’t go as planned. Mike’s a totally great guy.”
“He is,” I agreed.
“So how long have you been coming here?”
I laughed. “Is that like, ‘What’s your sign?’”
Drew aped the worst sort of pickup artist, smoothing a nonexistent mustache and leering as he said, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
I giggled. I. Giggled. Me, the girl who hadn’t talked to a new guy in a year. The girl who had sworn off men for the rest of my life.
I couldn’t help it. He was funny. He was knock-down gorgeous, breezily friendly, and he was funny.
I played along, remembering the almost-forgotten steps in the dance of flirtation. Barely wasting a moment to wipe my hands on my napkin, I settled my fingers on his forearm, daring to measure the taut muscle beneath his soft cotton shirt. My belly—or something lower—dove when I let myself imagine the dusting of dark blond hair that was sprinkled across that forearm. I immediately forbade myself from even looking at his hands, because I knew that I would completely throw myself off track if I even thought about what those fingers could do.
Instead, I answered in my best mock-little-girl voice, a parody that would have put Jennifer Galland’s rehearsal voice to shame. “Me? A nice girl like me?”
I summoned my finest smile to let him know that I was totally joking, that I was completely aware that we were playing, acting out stereotypes more absurd than the worst plays either of us had ever worked on. He grinned back, and I realized for the first time that one of his front teeth was just slightly out of alignment. For some reason, that tiny flaw, in the midst of his otherwise unblemished Leading Man perfection, made me swoon.
Almost literally. I was back to the silly, heart-pounding, throat-closing, belly-tightening impossibility of talking to him.
Apparently unaware of the crisis building in my traitorous body, Drew nodded toward my plate. “Are you going to eat all of those fries?”
“Please!” I said, and I hoped he wouldn’t realize how abnormally high-pitched my voice had become. I was so excited that he’d continued our silly conversation that I barely heard what he’d said.
“Kira Franklin deigns to share her French fries! Will wonders never cease?”
For one insane moment, I couldn’t place the voice. I’d heard it so many times in my dreams—in my nightmares. I must be imagining it here, in Mephisto’s, surrounded by my new cast, sitting next to my new crush.
I’d had endless discussions with that voice. I’d ranted to it. Raved. Told it exactly what I thought.
But now, hearing it for real, I was struck utterly dumb. Knocked as silent as some poor heroine in a Jane Austen novel. Thrown absolutely and completely for a loop.
TEWSBU. The Ex Who Shall Be Unnamed. Here, and in the flesh, in the middle of the Mamet Room.
How had I not noticed that he was sitting here with my cast? My cast. From my show. From my new life.
I thought a long string of expletives, but I managed to reduce them all to a choked, “Wh-what are you doing here?” as I spotted him halfway down the table.
A strange silence fell over the room. In one breath, all of the chatter drained away, all of the mindless discussion about the morning’s rehearsal, about Bill Pomeroy, about the production that we were devoting the next three months of our lives to create.
Gone.
After all, we were all experienced in the theater. We all knew good drama when it came and slapped us in the face. We all recognized an exciting little play being performed in our very midst.
I forced myself to meet the eyes of the man I’d pledged to marry. They were as blue as I remembered , an amazing blue, a blue that he always—always!—emphasized with an offhand touch of color, a perfect broadcloth shirt, a subtle silk tie. Today, he wore a casual tee; I’d give my next wish from Teel if it wasn’t Hollister’s newest color.
His smile was the one I remembered as well—his perfect white teeth, never capped, in a world where half our acquaintances had their paychecks deposited directly into their dentists’ accounts. His white smile was all the more striking because of the strong lines of his cheekbones, the worn hollows of his cheeks that always made him look like a tortured artist.
He sounded totally normal and utterly untortured when he answered my stammered question. “I’d never pass up one of Mike’s burgers, you know that, Kira. Besides,” he said with an indulgent shrug, “I wanted to meet the people that Steph is going to spend the next three months with.”
Steph. Stephanie Michaelson.
As if a cameraman were laying out my heartbreak on film, my focus changed from the face of the man I once had loved to the puzzled pout on the lips of the woman sitting next to him. As we’d gone around the circle yesterday, she’d introduced herself without a hint of who she truly was, what she truly meant to me. She was playing Mercutio, Romeo’s best friend. A reckless free spirit who managed to make a pun, even as he died at the end of Tybalt’s sword.
I wished I had a sword, right then.
I glanced at Drew, who had frozen with my French fries halfway to his lips. I could see that he was confused, embarrassed, wondering why it was such a big deal that I’d agreed to let him take some of my food. After all, I had a generous plateful. I felt obligated to say something, to smooth over the situation, to make everything better.
“Please!” I said, and my voice was twice as loud as it should have been. “Have my fries! Eat them all!”
I pushed the plate toward him and looked down, suddenly all too aware of my shapeless sweatshirt, covering up my shapeless body, hiding the shapeless blob that I’d become in the past year. Tears burned behind my eyes, and I blinked furiously to keep from shedding them. I tried to swallow away the searing mixture of embarrassment and shame, of outright rage that coated the back of my throat.
I was furious. Mike should have told me that it wasn’t just us cast members here. It wasn’t just the Romeo and Juliet crowd hanging out in the back room. He knew me. He knew what this encounter would mean to me.
I stared at my burger and tried to remember how I had ever enjoyed fried onions and mushrooms—right now, they looked like noxious slime, oozing from beneath the bun. Somehow, I pasted a smile on my lips and said to Drew, “Really! I mean it! Have all the fries you’d like! I couldn’t eat another one! Please!” I shoved the plate in front of him, eager to get as far from it as possible.
I wasn’t lying. The plate of food was ruined. I wasn’t going to touch them. I might never eat at Mike’s again.
And TEWSBU laughed. He laughed in that easy, confident way that I had admired so many times. He laughed like a carefully calculated director, like a master craftsman who was used to having the attention of everyone in the room. He laughed like a man who pitied the less fortunate. “I didn’t think you’d actually share your food. Give it away, maybe, but never share. It’s nice to know that some things never change.”
I pushed back from the table and scrambled to my feet, suddenly wondering if I could keep down the few bites of late lunch that I’d managed to swallow before everything had collapsed around me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw John jump up as well. Smart man. He recognized a madwoman when she was flailing next to him. Like the laid-back cowboy he resembled, John was clearly ready to protect his herd, to keep the cast safe from my insanity.
Now that everyone was staring at me, I became completely self-conscious. These people—the cast that I was going to live with, eat with, drink with for the next three months—they were staring at me like I was some kind of selfish, hoarding freak.
They’d all made the connection now, even the ones who hadn’t realized exactly who I was, who hadn’t remembered year-old gossip when we went around the circle the day before, reciting our names. But now they all knew. Now they could all phone up their friends, text messages to actors they’d met three, four, five shows back. They had a story to tell. I could see them storing away this little circus scene for the next time they needed to pity a fellow actor—a character—on stage.
And beneath that pity, on a few of the faces, the final emotion on the hit parade—a tiny curl of disgust. Disgust at a person who didn’t fit into their mold of Body Beautiful, into the self-conscious, size-zero vision of perfection that so many cast members strived for.
I couldn’t look at Drew, couldn’t force myself to see how his face had changed. I couldn’t make myself recognize the jagged shards of the flirtation that had seemed so natural only a few moments before, the easy, silly chatter that had just seemed right.
I had to get out of there. I had to get away from Drew, away from the cast, away from TEWSBU, away from my past.
I jumped back from the table so fast that I knocked over my chair. I fumbled for it at the same time that John did. We nearly bumped heads, and he reached out a hand to steady me, saying, “Easy, Franklin.”
I leaped away as if I’d been stung, my eyes starting to burn from my concentrated effort not to blink. I scrambled for the straps of my backpack and turned on my heel, ducking under the velvet curtain before my flight unlocked everyone else, set them free to move, to speak, to laugh.
“Kira!” Mike called as I burst into the front room.
“Gotta go, Mike,” I said, with too much energy. I fumbled in my pocket, found a crumpled bill, looked down just long enough to realize it was a twenty. “Thanks. Keep the change. It’s been way too long.”
And then I was bursting through the front door, bulling down the sidewalk, gulping in great breaths of freezing air, and trying to remember what it had been like before TEWSBU had ruined every last thing in my life.