I come out of the bathroom into the long empty hall. I’m thinking about what Mr. Apple said about the show.
Is it really bad?
That’s the thing about the theater. Everyone tends to worry about themselves, whether they look good. Actors want to act, techies want to tech.
Who’s thinking about the big picture?
The director. Mr. Apple.
No wonder he needs a paper bag.
I stop in the hall and lean against the cool surface of the wall. I see the way the light bounces off the gloss paint, some of it reflected upward, some absorbed into the linoleum on the floor.
“Stand here, Adam,” Dad said one summer afternoon in his painting studio. He gestured to a place across the room, at an angle to the window. “Look at the light.”
I looked and saw a bright, sunlit room.
“Now watch,” Dad said, and he picked up a pile of chalk shavings from his workbench. He stepped over to the light, held up his palm, and blew hard.
The shavings flew into the stream of light, and what seemed like bright sunshine in general became a dozen shafts of light, each a river of light moving through space on its own trajectory.
“You can’t see light itself,” Dad said. “You only see light’s reflection.”
I look down the hallway now, at all the places light is reflected.
A fairy comes walking around the corner at the far end of the hallway. She’s in bare feet with white flowing gauze around her, long black hair falling in clumps at her shoulders. When she steps into the light, the sparkles in the gauze twinkle like stars.
It’s the dark-haired actress from the theater, the one who looked up while everyone was looking down. She stops in the light, and I shrink back into the shadows and watch her.
“Hail, mortal!” she says.
At first I think she’s speaking to me, but then she looks in the opposite direction, raises her hand in greeting, and says again, “Hail, mortal.”
It’s Peaseblossom’s line. Peaseblossom is one of the fairy characters in the play. She has maybe three or four lines and a couple scenes. Nothing much.
The girl takes a shuffling sideways step and starts to spin. The fabric in her costume swirls around, and the skirt starts to rise. I look at her bare legs. They’re very pale, white and pink and speckled in that way pale people are so you can see the veins beneath their skin. She keeps dancing, and the skirt keeps rising. It goes higher and higher until I see a flash of bright red underwear.
A girl’s underwear is such a private thing. If you know what color it is, it’s like knowing this huge secret. You can never look at her the same way again. Every time you see her, you can only think about her underwear.
Now I know three people’s secrets. Grace’s, Mr. Apple’s, and the fairy’s. That’s a lot of secrets for one day.
The fairy girl spins one more time, then she starts to practice a dance move from the play. She points her toe and steps forward with one leg, trying to do a kind of curtsy, but she screws it up midway, tripping over herself.
She curses and punches herself in the thigh. This is a violent fairy. She tries the move again, a look of deep concentration on her face. This time she does the curtsy, then stops, noticing me for the first time.
Her mouth puckers and she lets out a surprised, “Oh.”
She tugs at her skirt.
“I didn’t know anyone was there,” she says.
I try to speak, but nothing comes out.
She says, “I’m not going to see that on YouTube, am I? Fairies Gone Wild.”
I want to laugh, but my mouth isn’t working right.
“Okay, you’re creeping me out just the tiniest bit,” she says.
I want to tell her that I’m the lighting guy, she doesn’t have to be afraid.
I want to tell her my name.
I want to tell her how pretty she is.
But it all sounds stupid in my head. I’m a zit-faced techie with a dead father, standing in the dark looking at her legs. That’s not exactly high romance.
A moment passes, the two of us watching each other.
“Okay, I’m going to head back to the Fairy Factory now,” she says, backing away down the hall.
I have to say something to her.…
But I don’t.
I watch her go, her pale legs receding farther and farther until they disappear in shadow at the end of the hall.