Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
Renee does not get the job at the theater in the suburbs.
The news hits her inbox on a Friday morning at Grounds Crew, and she lets me read the email over her shoulder. It’s terse and impersonal; they don’t even bother to wish her the best.
She’s kept a level head and a stiff upper lip since her rejection from the Philharmonic three weeks ago, but I know this one stings.
We’ve spent dozens of hours at this very table prepping for all four rounds of interviews they put her through—ludicrous for an administrative position.
She was so sure she’d get it. And now? A single email, and she’s back to square one.
Renee stares blankly down at her laptop track pad like she’s praying it might move on its own and take her straight to a website with the perfect job, the perfect opportunity, the perfect next step.
I can’t sit and watch her sulk like this.
I close my notebook on a failed draft of a wedding speech. “Come on. We’re taking a break.”
Renee doesn’t budge. “We haven’t earned a break,” she mumbles, not looking up.
“I didn’t say that we earned it. I said we’re taking it. We’re not going to get any work done if we’re in a bad mood.”
“We’re not going to get any work done if we stop working either.” Renee lifts her gaze, but only to shoot me a look. “Not getting a job is not a great reason to take a break from applying for jobs.”
“But what if we took a break and felt better and more motivated on the other side?”
“Or the break could suddenly become the rest of the day.” Renee arches a brow. “Like Monday night?”
Right. Monday night, when Renee was applying for a fundraising role at a culinary institute, I swore that watching an episode of MasterChef Junior would help her dial in her cover letter.
Maybe it did but only after we fell gracelessly into an all-night marathon.
Renee lay in my lap while I played with her hair, fingertips buzzing each time they raked through her soft blond strands.
I’m still struggling to convince myself it was the sort of thing Renee does with all her friends.
“That was my fault,” I admit, shaking off the memory.
Nevertheless, I persist in my efforts to…
get us to stop persisting. At least for the afternoon or until some of the pain leaves her eyes.
My attention wanders to the pastry case, an evergreen distraction.
“Should we grab those last two chocolate croissants to go?”
Renee frowns, skeptical, but she accepts my credit card when I slide it to her. “Only because I’m hungry,” she insists. “This is not an endorsement of your proposed break.”
While Renee falls in line at the register, I get to work, kicking down the door of every blog and community calendar in search of alternative afternoon plans.
My eyes light up on the park district website right as Renee returns with a butter-stained pastry bag.
Before she can sit, I pocket my phone, shove up from the table, and duck under the strap of my messenger bag. “C’mon.”
“Come on where?” Renee presses.
“My place first. After that, you’ll see.”
Renee grumbles in protest the whole walk back to my apartment, where I haul two camp chairs out of my storage locker, each one folded and stuffed in its nylon drawstring sack.
We each sling one over our shoulders, and I check my broken internal compass against the map on my phone. “It’s a bit of a walk,” I warn.
“A bit of a walk to where?”
“The park.”
Renee waits for more of an explanation, but I don’t offer one. I just lead us off in probably the right direction.
“Why the park?” Renee presses, not willing to drop the interrogation. When I don’t respond, she grinds to a halt, dropping her chair on the sidewalk with a swishy clatter. She folds her arms over her chest, one brow cocked in a challenge. Once again, she’s calling my bluff.
“What if you just went with me on this?” I suggest, knowing that, for her, this is an enormous ask. “What if you didn’t know all the details ahead of time? What if you trusted me?”
We stand in silence for a long moment. Renee doesn’t quite smile, but her face relaxes, all the hard creases smoothing out to something softer. More willing. “Okay.” She bends to pick up her camp chair. “I trust you.”
Those three little words echo through me like a song in a canyon.
She trusts me. A metallic feeling coats the entire inside of my body as we walk the rest of the way to the park, where a group of parents, siblings, and strangers have laid out a patchwork of picnic blankets.
I find us a spot and set down my camp chair, freeing it from its nylon prison.
“Is this Shakespeare in the park?” Renee guesses.
“Nope. Better.” I unfold my chair and motion for Renee to do the same. She obliges, and we sit down with our chocolate croissants just in time for the show to begin. Eight minutes late. I like these people already.
“Good afternoon,” a woman in a floral muumuu greets us. “Welcome to the Chicago Park District Kids Theater Camp production…”
Renee twists to look at me, eyes wide with disbelief. “A children’s theater camp production?” she whisper-shouts with the enthusiasm I’d expect had I brought her to a Broadway production.
“Please silence all cell phones and avoid talking during the show,” the muumuu woman says directly to us.
“These kids have worked really hard for the last six weeks, and they’re excited to show you what they’ve learned.
” She swoops a hand across the stage—more of a platform, really—and steps aside to make room for three miniature pirates, each of their costumes at entirely different tiers of effort.
One looks to be handsewn, another cobbled together from the best Village Thrift had to offer, and the final of the three kids wears his street clothes and an eye patch.
This proves to be a bit of a theme throughout the performance.
There’s a real breadth of effort and enthusiasm among the cast of whatever G-rated pirate show this is.
I can’t hear much of what the kids are saying, and the ones who enunciate are let down by their castmates who skip entire lines and seemingly scenes, but over the course of forty-five minutes, I watch Renee come alive.
She’s the first on her feet for a standing ovation, eyes welling up with tears when the cast lines up for one final bow.
The pirates grab each other’s tiny hands, reach them toward the sky, then all at once fold in half at the hips to the raucous applause of their parents, siblings, babysitters, and neighbors. And us.
On the walk back to my place, Renee is still buzzing as we take turns recounting our favorite parts of the show.
“I liked how the pirate with the eye patch sang all of his lines,” Renee says. “That was a bold choice. He really committed.”
“That was good,” I agree. “But was it as good as the girl who kept accidentally slapping people with her fairy wings every time she turned around?”
“Nothing could be as good as that,” Renee insists. “Actors will study her physical comedy for decades.”
“And to think we may have seen some of her earliest work,” I muse. “For free, nonetheless.”
“Yeah, how did you find this, by the way?”
“I remembered what you said about your dad signing you up for all those theater camps at the park district, and I knew there was a park district not too far from here.”
Renee’s pace slows as she blinks the wonder from her eyes. They’re a soft, velvety blue, almost awestruck. “I can’t believe you remembered that.”
“Of course I did. That was the first time you made the theater face.”
“The what?”
“You know. Your theater face. The face you make when you talk about theater.” I close my eyes, referencing the memory of her in my kitchen, swinging her legs and rambling about productions long gone. “You look…glowy,” I say. “Confident. Like…like the world is made out of hope.”
I open my eyes, and Renee looks back at me, raking her teeth over her plush bottom lip. “Hope, huh?”
“Yeah.” I shrug. “It’s the theater face. It’s really cute.”
The last part slips past what little filter I have, and my chest pulls tight, but Renee’s smile is a perfect crescent moon, and her eyes stretch like she’s trying to look at all of me at once.
We long ago graduated from her icy-blue stare, the one that kept me frozen in the past, a person Renee used to know and never cared to see again.
But I’ve been trapped in her eyes a hundred times this summer, and they’ve never looked quite like this.
Glassy as Lake Michigan on a cool, windless morning, sparkling in the sun.
Cold, yes, but not in a way that feels dangerous, not anymore.
Just brisk enough to restart my nervous system, to wipe clean whatever I was thinking or feeling before and leave nothing on my mind but this moment we’re in.
She’s not looking ahead at where we’re going or behind at who I used to be.
She’s looking at me, right here and now, like I’m a view worth taking in.
For a moment, I’m sure she’s about to say something.
Instead, Renee steps forward, presses to her tiptoes, and brushes her lips against my temple in the softest, sweetest kiss.
It’s no stronger than the flap of a butterfly’s wing, but my body swells in a feeling that can only be glory.
It has to be. Anything else would be too much to hold.
“Thank you,” Renee whispers, still close enough for her breath to breeze over the apples of my cheeks.
It sends a lava-hot flush down my throat, and I’m nearly certain that, whatever this is between us, she’s feeling it, too.
She takes a slow step back and hitches the camp chair up her shoulder, and my skin still thrums where her lips barely landed, but Renee is already walking again.
Soon we’re back to our normal pace, neither of us saying much until we pass by the brick building plastered in Cold Sweat posters, advertising next week’s show.
Renee tenses and speeds up a little, steering me away, but I linger, sizing up the grayscale Solas Callaghan looming large in the center of every poster.
Solas’s red hair, vibrant tattoo sleeves, and deadpan green eyes have all been reduced to black and white.
He’s less intimidating this way. Less complicated.
He’s just a person, same as me, and I’m sure neither of us are who we used to be.
“Maybe we should go to that,” I decide, surprising myself.
“Really?” Renee pulls back, then, doubly surprised, “We? Am I invited?”
“Only if you want to go.”
There’s a beat; then she hooks her pinkie into mine, and I’ve never been so aware of my own skin. Every breeze feels like a gust. The tiniest touch could knock me down.
“Do you want me to go?” Renee asks softly.
I want her to go everywhere with me.