Chapter 16
Priscilla
We take the drama hallway to the backstage entrance, leaving a trail of honey oat granola crumbs along the way. When we pass what should be Dallas’s office, we can see through the small pane of glass that the athletics department appears to be using the space for storage.
“Who needs the arts when you’ve got sports?” Marlowe asks.
“You asked for the worst version of reality, and we sure got it.”
Back on the stage, Marlowe doesn’t walk to the Memory Machine. Instead, she crosses the deck once again, using the pulley to open the curtains. “We need some light,” she tells me.
“For what?”
She disappears into the tech closet beyond the stage left wings. “Here,” she says when she returns, handing me a crusty paintbrush and an even crustier-looking gallon of paint.
“Are we…remodeling?”
“No. We’re vandalizing.”
“I never thought I’d hear those words come out of your mouth.”
“This has been an exercise in impossibility, hasn’t it?” She goes and gets herself another gallon of paint and her own brush.
Both gallons have a thick layer of oil settled on top of the paint.
It’s globby and weird, but still wet, which is all that matters.
Marlowe swirls her brush through her can, her forearm muscles flexing as she works.
She looks so good I forget myself, my leopard coat more suffocation than style, smothering me with even more warmth than the heat pooling low in my belly.
Finally, a bright blue paint reveals itself. Marlowe takes her overloaded brush and carries it to center stage, not bothering to cup the bottom to stop any drips from falling onto the deck.
With long, sloppy strokes, she writes FUND THE ARTS.
Though I agree with the sentiment, the delivery of the message is way too earnest for my taste, so I open the other can and mix it up until it produces a strange shade of green, and I paint the word Losers at the bottom of Marlowe’s message.
Marlowe caterpillars her brows.
Judging by that look, I am fully expecting her to paint over my message, but instead she adds a single swipe—a comma.
“The sentence needed it, or it would read like we want them to fund the arts losers,” she explains.
“The arts losers deserve compensation,” I say. “I should know, I’m an award-losing artist myself.”
“I became an arts loser the second I willingly paid tens of thousands of dollars to go to acting college,” she replies.
“Cheers to the arts losers!”
Marlowe does not laugh. Instead, she gets that look again. The one that’s not the Arsenic stare but is still a yard-long gaze into some mysterious corner of her mind. “I’m going to tell you why I stole the costumes freshman year.”
This isn’t what I expect her to say, but I’d accept this story on my own deathbed. Hell, I’d accept it postmortem. I’d barter with the forces of the afterlife to give me front-row tickets to this long-standing mystery.
I sit down. Somehow, I’ve earned the right to this secret, and I’m prepared to give it my full attention. “The stage is yours. As it always has been.”
“My sister, Lana,” she starts, setting her paintbrush on the rim of one of the paint cans.
With only that, I start connecting the dots, the mental math adding up so rapidly that I can already predict what she’s going to say next.
But I’ve always enjoyed watching Marlowe speak, so I keep quiet, letting it unfold at the pace she wants.
She can take minutes. Or hours. My time is hers to use as she sees fit.
“When we were kids, Lana used to talk to me all the time about how much she loved dresses,” she continues.
“More than once she’d tell me how interesting it must feel to put them on and see sequins catch the light while they were on your body.
I was such a tragically dorky lesbian then and already knew I would only wear a sequined dress if a character forced me to, or if my mom insisted on buying me something for the school dance.
In fact, I’ve never met a single dress I’ve ever wanted to put on my body, or a lipstick I needed, or a curling iron I hoped to use or whatever.
But Lana always loved all of that stuff.
“When she first confided in me that she thought she might be a girl, I tried really hard to think of a way to show her that to me, she already was one.
That no matter how she had to present for however long, I could see the sparkle-loving femme inside her already.
Of course, I was fourteen at the time, so I had absolutely none of the words to tell her that.
But I did have access to an incredible collection of custom-made gowns and dresses and spectacle-making pieces.
“Dallas would’ve let me have them. I’m sure he would have.
But at the time, Lana wasn’t ready to share the truth with anyone else.
Only me. So I started stealing dresses for her.
She didn’t know they were stolen, of course.
I made up some lie about getting them from the thrift store.
When I gave them to Lana, and she put on that first dress, it was all worth it to see her look in the mirror and feel like, for the first time ever, she recognized the girl staring back at her. ”
“I take back every mean thing I ever said to you in that parking lot,” I tell her, my vision blurred with tears. “I had no idea.”
She reaches up under her glasses to swipe away her own tears, forgetting the thick globs of paint currently smeared all over her hands. With one swipe, she’s got a blue streak on her face.
“Oh shit,” she says, instinctively grabbing her face again to fix it, which only makes matters worse.
To stop her panic, I take my brush and swipe it across my own face. It’s messy, but I don’t care. So is life.
Marlowe smashes her finger into the tip of her brush and pulls back the bristles like a slingshot. A spray of blue lands all across my coat and up onto my face. I can taste some at the corner of my mouth.
As slowly as possible, I swipe the spattered paint off my cheek, looking down at the smudge of blue atop my thumb and my expensive leopard coat, now ruined. With calculated precision, I pull off each sleeve, laying the destroyed coat to rest on the stage, leaving me in only my black dress.
“I’m really sorry,” Marlowe says, closing the distance between us. “I thought we were having a moment. I shouldn’t have just—”
Right as she places a sympathetic hand on my shoulder, I swipe her with my brush, working so fast that my intention to hit her stomach misses and I end up doing a long stroke of green across her boobs.
“You tricked me,” Marlowe says, giving me her best Et tu Brute.
She’s good. She always has been.
But I know a Marlowe Jenkins performance when I see one.
I jerk myself left in the nick of time, barely escaping her lunging attack.
And so begins our chase. We run across the stage, flicking paint and yelling schoolyard taunts as we find new ways to dodge each other.
It’s ridiculous, and exhilarating, and it’s been ages since I’ve felt so spontaneous and free.
It only happens when I’m pretending to be someone else.
For this, though, I feel like only myself.
As the game evolves, it becomes less about chasing each other and more about finding different places to leave paint marks.
We swipe the cobwebs with paint. We place handprints on the battered back walls, the dusty side curtains, and almost every inch of the deck.
The whole stage becomes a mess of blue and green paint, like an artistic interpretation of a map of the world. Our world.
“We should write our names somewhere,” I say. “Make our mark in this reality.”
“Good idea,” Marlowe replies.
We choose a spot right in front of the Memory Machine. It’s remained untouched by paint, neither of us bold enough to compromise it, but the floor we’ve stepped out onto in every life, the wooden slats covered in matte black stage paint—that’s fair game.
PCF + MJ, I write, the strokes sloppy and imperfect.
Marlowe regards it for a while.
She squats down to add something else.
In Every Life.
When she rises up to meet me, we are chest to chest.
We lived this exact moment, in this exact spot, sixteen years prior. This is precisely where I kissed her in the middle of our final performance of RENT.
This time, it’s Marlowe who closes the distance between us. Her lips only brush mine, that first tentative connection, still gauging distance, and noses, and hands, and intention. It’s not really a kiss, but the moment just before a kiss, when everything turns into a hum.
Still, it burns through me, twenty years of anger and desire and confusion working their way up to the surface so I can meet this moment with the intensity she deserves.
“What am I going to do about you?” she whispers against my lips.
A loud crack startles us apart.
The auditorium doors have been thrown open, and three police officers are storming into the space.
“Stop what you’re doing right now!” one of them commands, running toward us. “You’re under arrest for trespassing!”
Marlowe’s eyes go wild with panic. I grab her hand and pull us to the Memory Machine door, where we fumble in together, taking our respective sides.
“Remember,” she says frantically. “Best-case scenario.”
I’m already living it, I think.
We close the door before the police can grab us.