Chapter Nine #3
For maybe the millionth time in their friendship, Danny shook his head.
“It means we get to see the second act of Les Miz for free,” she said, hunching over and scanning the sidewalk. “We just need to find some ticket stubs, pretend they’re ours, and then find some empty seats.”
Danny knit his brow. “Is that legal?”
“Well, it’s not illegal,” Nina said, dusting off a crumpled stack of tickets with obvious footprints stamped across them. “But it’s also not not illegal, so just, like, play it cool.”
Once the crowd thinned and the final stragglers stubbed out their cigarettes, Nina led the group to the theater’s entrance.
“We should probably split up,” she said, before expertly flashing her ticket at an old lady usher and marching in, head high, like she owned the damn place.
“Tickets…tickets,” the old woman said disinterestedly.
Danny waved his ticket and crossed the red-wine carpet up to a double set of doors and the soft murmur of an expectant crowd.
Danny hadn’t even realized he’d stopped walking—hadn’t realized he was blocking traffic.
He was caught in a trance, drinking in the sights and sounds of a real Broadway theater.
The seats were upholstered in fifteen hundred red sunsets, the balconies were plastered in amber, and the ceiling looked like it had been carved by a Roman god, covering the sky in a shield of gold.
“This way, Danny,” Christian said, tugging the sleeve of his jacket, pulling him clumsily up the stairs to the mezzanine level.
Christian pointed across the crowded auditorium to a pair of empty seats, standing out like a smile with two missing front teeth. They step-touched sideways to the center of the row, careful not to knock the Playbills off their neighbors’ laps.
“So you know this show, right?” Christian whispered. “You remember what happens in Act One?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Danny muttered. “That John guy breaks out of jail and rescues some girl and then some other guys start a war?”
“Frank Rich, eat your heart out,” Christian said, plopping down in their seats just as the houselights began to dim, cueing the sound of a hundred matinee-goers unwrapping their Act Two cough drops.
Nothing could have prepared Danny for what he’d experience that afternoon at the Imperial Theater.
He thought he’d heard beautiful music before, like the choir at St. Clare’s singing “Silent Night” at midnight mass, or that first time he listened to “If I Loved You” from Carousel through his uncle’s tinny earphones.
But they felt like mere blips, hardly radio jingles, when compared with the triumphant bellow of a thirty-piece orchestra and an army of forty men singing about blood in their hearts.
Danny could feel every hair of every bow as it skated across every metal violin string, every roll of the timpani rumbled inside his own chest, every crash of cymbal, every hum of clarinet, every voice of every soldier vibrating throughout his body.
The characters onstage were actual people, not just voices pressed onto magnetic tape.
They were men and women who would show up to work early to put their hair into pin curls and warm up their voices in the heated glow of a lightbulb-framed mirror.
Danny sat on the edge of his seat, gripping his boot-printed ticket, scared that if he even blinked, he’d miss something important, like a light cue, or a prop handoff, or the look on an actress’s face as she watched the character she loved disappear into the wings.
A strange thing happened somewhere around “On My Own,” strange even for a day like today.
It was obvious to anyone with functioning eyeballs that Christian and Danny were nothing alike.
They were two completely different people, almost two entirely different species, but for one moment, their bodies moved in exactly the same way.
As Eponine wandered the misty streets, dreaming of arms that knew how to hold tight, both Christian and Danny stretched their legs at the exact same angle, at the exact same second, so the seams of their jeans brushed up ever so slightly against each other.
At first, Danny braced for the inevitable burn, the worms under his skin to wiggle to the surface.
But to his surprise, there was nothing. No pain, or burning, or tightness in his chest. Just denim brushing denim, legs almost but not quite meeting.
When the song ended, he and Christian clapped wildly, and somewhere in the cheering, their legs drifted even closer.
Their knees were only millimeters apart—so close that Danny could almost count the fibers of thread between them.
And when they shifted their weight again, the atoms around them expanded and vibrated, shooting sparks of lightning up Danny’s leg and into his chest. It was terrific.
It was magical. But no one seemed to notice a thing.
No one clocked this miraculous change in the atmosphere.
To Danny’s amazement, everyone, including Christian, sat perfectly still, intently watching “A Little Fall of Rain,” oblivious to the thunderstorm happening fifty feet above the stage.
For a song and a half, Danny didn’t move a muscle.
He was too scared to shift, too scared to breathe.
His knee and Christian’s knee were definitely touching, leaning up against each other like the last couple on the dance floor.
Danny thought about skin. About fat and tissue and hair follicles and sweat glands.
How it could detect every movement, every touch, every particle.
How most things felt bad and painful and cold, but some things felt warm and soft and dizzying.
He thought about the way Christian smelled—candle wax and tangy hairspray and vanilla bean lotion.
He thought about the way he looked when he threw back his head in laughter: “You’re killin’ me, Smalls!
” Danny thought about men with singsongy voices and men with gelled hair and men in cafés and men who sang about “hearts full of love.”
And that was when the circuit broke. Christian pulled his leg away, suddenly crossing it over his other leg, rolling up his stolen Playbill in his hand, cutting the current with a dull, percussive thud.
And then Danny was back to normal.
Back to feeling like himself.
No thunderstorms or static or fluttering stomach.
Just a boy holding a boot-stamped ticket, his skin cooling in the air-conditioned draft.
Which was fine, he supposed. He was fine.
His blood was back to pumping at a normal pace, the way normal bodies do.
Now he could sit back and enjoy the play, no longer distracted by denim, or the smell of vanilla, or the guy who had probably just been trying to stretch his legs.
Danny tried to focus during “Bring Him Home” and as Marius sang about empty chairs at empty tables, but his attention kept drifting to the air that now separated him and his friend, and the impossible fact that sometimes a half an inch could be measured as a mile.
On the ferry ride back home that night, Danny stood at the railing, the harbor wind whipping through his curls, wondering if he’d been foolish to miss the second half of the second act of his first Broadway show because he was too busy worrying about a half inch of air.
But Danny hadn’t missed the sounds of the SoHo bazaar that day, or the smell of acrylic at Pearl Paint, or the woman covered in birds, or the lines of a poem written just for him in Washington Square Park.
And he didn’t miss the taste of strong coffee, or the laughs of men on white leather couches, or the flash of Orion’s camera, or the easy smiles of his friends.
Danny peered out at the Staten Island skyline, such as it was, emerging on the horizon like a low-slung barricade, letting his thoughts return to the Imperial Theater, to those final few moments of the show that had been playing over and over in his head.
If he closed his eyes tight, he could still see Fantine floating weightlessly in the glow of the sodium spotlight.
And he could still hear the sound of her voice as she guided the old man to heaven, while in the mezzanine, Danny bravely guided his own hand to the armrest that he shared with his friend.
Christian’s hand had been resting there, palm open, as if calling out to Danny like a song about tomorrow, and Danny could still feel that spark on his finger from the place where it had brushed up against Christian’s skin.
And he could still feel it in his chest, that memory of what it felt like when Christian let his fingers curl softly, perfectly, entirely around a hand made of lightning.
Perhaps it was just two friends holding hands, Danny thought—holding hands, the way that new friends sometimes do—two friends lucky enough to have found each other in the darkness surrounded by a few bars of pretty music and the memories of a perfect afternoon.
Or perhaps it was something more, something nagging, something reckless, something frightening, something thrilling, something strange, something sublime.
Because somehow with just a single touch, on a Saturday in late September, Danny’s life stretched out in an entirely new—and, maybe, not entirely unwelcome—direction.