Opening night was fated to be disastrous from the start.
The protests, and the resulting traffic and road closures, caused everyone in the cast to arrive late. Despite the panicked, cack-handed haste with which we changed into our costumes and applied our stage makeup, the curtain didn’t rise until twenty minutes past eight. It rose to a nearly empty house. In light of the traffic—and the fact that the Thursday night cast was, for once, identical to the Friday night cast—even the most supportive parents could rationalize skipping the Thursday night show. Waiting in the wings for my entrance, I could hear the threadbare applause, the devastating silence after every joke. It was indistinguishable from the previous night’s dress rehearsal but for the inaudible voices of Bottom and Daylily, and for the pervasive feeling of doom.
When I took the stage for the “Carried Away” scene, I was blinded by the spotlight and briefly believed I was performing to a black void. Only the occasional cough revealed the presence of a sparse handful of people sitting in the Meetinghouse benches, wishing to be elsewhere. The collapse of the dinosaur skeleton at the end of the scene was a technical tour de force involving a team of stagehands on the backstage side of the flat, holding each individual bone on a string and letting go all at once. How I had looked forward to the audience reaction! There was none—save for a single sharp intake of breath, suggesting that someone had mistaken the meticulously staged accident for the real thing. Outside the Meetinghouse window I heard screeching emergency sirens. “We got carried, just carried away,” Theo and I sang to each other. The chagrin in my voice was unfeigned. I heard myself go sharp on the high note.
The lights went down. Theo and I exited the stage, dodging the rest of the cast as they stampeded onstage for the “Lonely Town” ensemble number. Theo and I collapsed onto a wooden bench against the wall, too demoralized even to whisper to each other.
“Lonely Town” began with a solo from Bottom, but Bottom’s voice was well and truly wrecked. He was hoarsely Rex Harrison–ing his way through the lyrics, speaking rather than singing, and even that sounded painful.
I wished for Nell beside me. I wanted her to pound her fist against mine, silently telling me that I’d sounded amazing out there. She wasn’t in the “Lonely Town” number, so she must have been nearby, backstage in the dark. But she didn’t come to me.
Somewhere on the street outside, a car alarm went off. I mentally sang along with it, anticipating from memory each of its eight-beat movements—shrill allegro, low vivace, descending-slide moderato, ascending-slide largo, screeching adagio, two-tone lento, and back again to the beginning. Helplessly, the ensemble sang over it. “And every town’s a lonely town.”
Theo edged toward me. I edged toward him. His white sailor pants snagged against my pantyhose. He bounced his fist on my knee, silently suggesting a game of rock-paper-scissors. We counted to three on our fingers, then flung out our hands simultaneously. We both chose scissors. Or perhaps I half-consciously cheated, delaying my own choice for the fraction of a second it took me to perceive him choosing scissors so that I could imitate him and exult in our sameness.
He smiled, then slipped his hand, still in scissor formation, under the neckline of my blue rayon dress. I felt his scissor-blade fingers slide over my bra, then into my bra. He found my nipple and pinched it, hard. In my ear he murmured, “Does this hurt?”
I shook my head no. Onstage, the lights went down. The audience clapped feebly.
Theo pinched harder. “Does this hurt?”
It did. I shook my head no.
Character heels clacked on the risers as the ensemble girls crashed their way backstage.
Theo pinched, squeezed, twisted roughly. “How about now?”
Pain radiated through me. I pictured Theo’s touch electrocuting the whole breast until it crumbled to ash. Convulsing silently on the bench, I shook my head no.