The Cave is our electrics room and the unofficial home of the techies. Usually the place is packed with lighting instruments, but Derek has nearly everything onstage or up on the catwalk waiting to be hung. There are a couple broken instruments scattered on the floor and a single lightbulb overhead.
“Here’s what kills me,” Grace says. “He acts like it never happened. But I still have the mark.”
She tilts her head back and points to a black-and-blue circle the size of a nickel under her chin. A hickey under the chin. The Mark of Derek. Nobody can figure out how he gets under there. Reach says he has an extendable jaw like the Alien.
“It’s fading,” she says, “but it’s still there. You can see it, right?”
“A little,” I say.
“More than a little,” Grace says. “It’s the Scarlet Letter. That’s why nobody will talk to me.”
“It’s more than that,” I say. “It’s because you broke the rule.”
If a girl ends up with Derek, she gets exiled from the techies. I’m not talking about a little silent treatment. I’m talking serious, Techie-in-the-Iron-Mask stuff. It’s kind of ironic. I mean, high school is all about who’s in and who’s out, and by almost any measure, techies are out. You don’t get onto the crew riding a wave of popularity, so you’d think we’d have this open, compassionate system, but we don’t. The only difference between techies and everyone else is that you don’t get rejected by us because you look funny or have dyslexia or zits or something. Those are more or less prerequisites.
For techies it’s about two things: skill set and loyalty.
If you have one, you make the crew.
If you have both, you stay forever.
But there are a few things you don’t do. Certain rules that demand banishment:
You don’t rat people out.
You don’t betray another techie.
You don’t get friendly with actors. You don’t talk to them at all, unless you’re telling them where to stand or how not to electrocute themselves.
And if you’re a girl and you want to be on the crew, you don’t date Derek.
Simple, right?
“What was I thinking?” she says.
“Good question.”
“Maybe… I thought I was in love.”
“People do crazy things when they’re in love,” I say.
“Have you ever been in love?” she says.
“No.”
She looks away like maybe I shouldn’t be commenting on something I know nothing about. I can’t really disagree with her.
“But I know what it’s like to miss someone,” I say.
“Yeah?” she says.
Her face softens. The lightbulb is swinging slightly in the air above us. I hear the sound of hammering onstage, a distant tap tap that echoes through the Cave. I think about what we look like sitting here together, two bodies in a pool of light.
“So you do get it,” Grace says.
“A little. Yeah.”
“You want to know the craziest thing of all?” she says. “I want him back.”
I think about Dad.
“That’s not so crazy,” I say.
She smiles.
“You’re a good guy, Z.”
“That’s what my mom tells me,” I say.
Grace laughs and looks around the Cave. On the far side is the Techie Wall of Fame, where we hang the pictures of people when they get accepted into the Light and Set Club. All of our pictures are there, posed with these crazy Elvis glasses Reach bought at a street fair in Hoboken. That’s how you know you’ve made it as a techie. You get a space on the wall where you can pose like a bad Elvis impersonator.
“I still want to be a techie,” she says. “I’ve got serious skill set.”
“What do you do?”
“I can fix anything. I’ve been working on our house since I was twelve. My father picks up a hammer and his IQ drops to single digits.”
“It sounds like you’d make a good set carpenter.”
An idea pops into my head. A way to get Grace on the crew permanently.
“I think I’ve got a plan,” I say.
“What kind of plan?”
Her face gets this hopeful look, the same kind of look Reach got last year when a cute exchange student appeared in school and didn’t know she was supposed to avoid techies.
“Lay low for a while,” I say. “I’ll put in a word for you with the guys. Then we wait for them to come around.”
Her face gets this disappointed look, the same one Reach got when the cute exchange student realized techies were social anthrax.
“It’s not much of a plan,” she says.
“I know.”
It’s just not the same coming up with a plan without Reach. The evil genius aspect is missing.
“I’ll refine the plan as we go along,” I say.
“You think it will work?” she says.
I try to remember a time someone has made it back from techie exile, but I can’t.
“Just don’t quit,” I say. “Whatever you do.”
Because that’s the last of the techie rules:
You don’t quit, no matter how hard things get.