Rehearsal is long over, and I’m still up in the catwalk. The house lights are at 50 percent. Even though the theater is huge, it feels intimate, like a room lit by candles.
The spotlight sits untouched out over the audience. I walk across the catwalk and stand behind it.
I grip the handles on both sides. I swing the metal, feel the mechanism swivel. Even though it’s new, the side screw sticks slightly. It needs a shot of WD-40. I make a mental note.
“Hello!” I shout into the theater. “Anyone here?”
I’m alone. I flip the power switch on the light.
There’s a humming sound as the fan comes to life, and then I press and hold the red button that sends a spark across the wires.
A beam of light shoots out the end of the spot and paints a hard circle on the stage floor.
It’s like my Maglite, only on a giant scale.
I move the circle from side to side, pan up the wall and down again. I change the iris, shrinking and widening the beam. I do it fast and hard like a rock concert, then I do it smoothly like you would in a straight play.
I flip the spot up to the ceiling, look at it high in the air, then slash pan back down to the stage.
Someone is there.
It’s the actress with black hair, standing alone in the center of the stage.
“Hello?” she says.
Sweat breaks out on my forehead.
“I know you’re up there,” she says.
I want to speak to her, but I have a real tendency to say the wrong thing when I talk to girls.
The best I can do is wag the light back and forth a little so she knows I heard her.
She looks up at me, cocks her head to one side.
Then she steps into the light.
Startled, I move the light off her, about two feet away to the side.
She puts her hands on her hips like she’s pissed. Then she hops to the side, landing in the center of the light again.
I laugh. I can’t help it. She looks so funny.
“I can hear you laughing,” she says. “So I know you’re not an alien.”
I move the light away from her again. She slides to the right, keeping up with me. I move it forward and she moves forward, then I move it back and she moves back. Almost like we’re dancing.
Dancing with light.
She looks up at me, holding her hands above her eyes so she can see.
“My name is Summer,” she says.
“That’s a strange name.”
“Thank you very much.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I guess I meant—I don’t know how I feel about it.”
“About my name? Why would you feel anything?” she says.
Summer. There are so many things I hate about summertime, so many that I love.
“I have issues with summer,” I say. “It’s a long story.”
“Do you have issues with me?”
“I don’t even know you.”
“Good. Then we’re starting from scratch.”
I dim the light so it doesn’t blind her.
“Are you the guy who almost killed Miranda?” she says.
“That’s a lie.”
“The actors believe there’s some techie trying to kill them.”
I think about what Johanna said. I’m watching you.
“Actors are crazy,” I say.
“Look who you’re saying that to. Actor,” she says, raising her hand.
This is why I don’t talk to girls. I make a mess of it.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I feel bad for Miranda. Really. It was a stupid mistake, but it wasn’t my mistake. I just got blamed for it.”
“Why you?”
“I’m the lighting guy. They always blame the lighting guy.”
“Why?”
“The same reason they blame the techies. It’s easy.”
“Does the lighting guy have a name?” Summer says.
“Just lighting guy.”
“That’s kind of mysterious.”
“You’re the first girl in history to find techies mysterious.”
“What are you talking about? James Bond is all about tech,” she says. “He’s pretty mysterious.”
“He uses tech, he doesn’t make it. He gets everything from Q. You don’t see Q doing a lot of dating.”
“Not on-screen. But off-screen he’s a player.”
“Is that right?”
“Oh yeah. James goes on a mission, and Q is sleeping with female spies two and three at a time.”
I laugh.
“I know I’m not supposed to be in here,” Summer says. “But I really need to practice for my audition. And it feels different standing on the big stage, you know?”
“I was practicing, too,” I say.
“Maybe we can practice together.”
I swing the spot towards her and pull focus so she’s centered in the middle, head to toe in light.
She gives me the thumbs-up.
Her whole posture changes. Her shoulders slump, and she grasps at her stomach with one arm like she’s exhausted and hurting. Then she does lines from the play:
SUMMER
Never so weary, never so in woe,
Bedabbled with the dew and torn with briers,
She kneels on the stage, her legs all but giving out beneath her. I focus in tighter so her body is wrapped in the light. At the same time I start to dim the spot.
SUMMER
I can no further crawl, no further go;
My legs can keep no pace with my desires.
I fade the spot further, changing the iris until the light shrinks down to a circle on her face. She sighs, curls herself into a ball on the stage floor.
SUMMER
Here will I rest me till the break of day.
I fade the spot the rest of the way, dimming it until there’s just a glow over her sleeping form. Then, in the silence, I click off the light. It makes a loud snap that echoes through the theater.
Summer kneels onstage looking up at me, her face partially in shadow.
One of Dad’s paintings comes to mind. He called it Woman Reclining at Night. It’s a large expanse of white and yellow with the barest hint of a woman lying off to one side, her skin nearly the same tone as the rest of the painting. It’s like a pun on the idea of night, because instead of seeing nothing because of the dark, you see nothing because of the light.
I imagine what it would be like to go home and tell Dad about this girl, tell him how I thought about his painting when I was looking at her.
“Did my acting render you speechless?” Summer says.
“I was thinking about something else,” I say.
“Not what an actor hopes for.”
“Sorry. Your performance was great.”
“I auditioned with that soliloquy, and I got cast as a fairy. So I suck,” she says. “It’s pretty obvious.”
“You don’t suck.”
“I mean, I’m okay, but I’m not great. You know how there are some kids who get As and hardly do anything, and other kids who work super hard just to get a B? I’m the second kind.”
“Wow. That’s harsh.”
I’ve never heard anyone who’s as tough on themselves as I am.
“Harsh but true,” she says. “Anyway, I can’t do a Hermia speech. Johanna will kill me. I need a Helena speech, and I don’t even know which one to do.”
“Maybe you could do—” I stop myself.
“What were you going to say?”
“I’m not supposed to be talking to you,” I say.
“According to whom?”
“You know.”
“I don’t know.”
“There are rules about things like this,” I say.
“Oh, that. Yeah, you guys are weird at this school. In my old school the actors got along with the crew.”
“There’s a lot of history here.”
“What kind of history?”
“I don’t know exactly. It’s like the Hatfields and the McCoys. Someone stepped on someone’s ballet slipper a hundred years ago, and we’ve been at war ever since. No one remembers why.”
“It’s kind of silly.”
“Extremely,” I say. “On top of that, there’s the techie code.”
“The code?” she says.
“We don’t tell you how to do your job—”
“And we don’t tell you how to do yours.”
“No, you tell us, and we hate you and talk about you behind your back.”
She laughs. “I need some help, mystery lighting guy. I give you permission to break the code.”
The fan is whirring inside the spot. The vibration carries through the handles and into my palms.
If Reach were here, he’d kill me.
I look at Summer onstage, waiting for my help.
Reach on one side, Summer on the other.
“Anyway—” Summer says, starting to walk offstage.
“I was thinking about the speech ‘Happy is Hermia,’” I say.
“Ah,” she says, her face lighting up. She takes a breath, steps back, shakes out her hands. Her smile disappears.
SUMMER
Happy is Hermia, wheresoe’er she lies;
For she hath blessed and attractive eyes.
She pulls at her hair in frustration.
SUMMER
How came her eyes so bright? Not with salt tears:
If so, my eyes are oftener wash’d than hers.
“I love that speech,” she says. “It’s sort of like, if crying made people beautiful, I would be the most beautiful girl in the world.”
She smooths down her hair, white fingers running through black.
Beautiful.
“You must cry a lot,” I say.
“All the time,” she says.
She stops, thinks about it.
“Oh, I get it,” she says. “Thanks for the compliment.”
I’m sure I’m blushing. I’m glad she can’t see me.
“Do you cry because you’re sad?” I say.
“Sad, happy, frustrated. Lots of reasons.”
“I guess it’s okay for girls to cry.”
“You don’t cry?”
“Not for a long time.”
Ignacio appears onstage dragging the ghost light behind him.
“Who are you talking to?” he says to Summer.
“The guy on the spotlight,” she says.
“Nobody is supposed to be up there, not without my permission.”
He looks up to the catwalk.
“Who’s there?” he says.
“Hello,” Summer says. “Lighting guy?”
“What his name?” Ignacio says.
“He didn’t tell me his name.”
“Answer me,” Ignacio shouts up at me. “Chain of command!”
The spot has cooled down, so I click off the fan and run for it.
I hear Summer and Ignacio calling behind me, but I’m already gone, retreating on the catwalk, slipping down the backstage ladder, and disappearing into the shadows at the rear of the theater.