Chapter Seventeen #2
As Danny stared out into the inky darkness, he was struck by another thought.
Perhaps he hadn’t been lying when he told his castmates that he had family out there, because he was sure he felt a presence standing with him that night.
He was singing along and guiding his feet and cheering louder than any voice in the room.
Danny didn’t pretend to understand how ghost rules worked, but if they could switch on lights, maybe they could cross rivers, too.
“I wanted such a little thing from life, I wanted so much,” Demetrius sang.
Maybe that was why Pippin had been one of Uncle Richie’s favorites—the longing to belong, the hope that your life would amount to something, and the prayer that people would remember you when you were gone.
After washing the makeup off his face and hanging up his costume, Danny made his way with Matteo and Demetrius to the lobby.
The second they pushed open the door, a chorus of cheers flooded the room.
Flashbulbs from disposable cameras flickered, and hands and lips reached past him to pinch cheeks and kiss faces.
Danny squeezed through the throngs of family members (some of whom were indeed wearing T-shirts with ironed-on photos of Matteo) and made his way to the exit.
“Great job!” a girl’s voice said as Danny passed.
“You were so funny,” another woman said.
“Thanks,” Danny called back, truly meaning it. Sure, they weren’t his family, but it still felt good.
And then a voice boomed from behind Danny that made all the hairs on the back of his neck turn into tiny icicles.
“Daniel Victorio.”
Danny turned around slowly and found himself face-to-face with the python who lived up on the third floor.
“Hey, Mr. Davenport,” Danny said, wincing, bracing for a fanged remark.
“You know,” the man said, adjusting the emerald lapels of his blazer. “I told Ms. Mellon she was insane for asking you to step in for Mr. Parker-Taylor. That you were untested. An amateur. Someone who would surely crack under pressure.”
“Uh-huh,” Danny replied, shrugging and now wondering why he hadn’t just snuck out through the back.
“Based on the rumblings I heard about your dress rehearsal last night, it seemed I was right to warn her.”
Danny dug his heels into the ground, praying for a satellite or meteor to land on this particular stretch of Sixty-Fifth Street. But instead, a peculiar thing happened. The python’s fangs retracted and his smooth lips turned into something that, if you squinted, could almost resemble a smile.
“But after tonight’s performance, I may need to revise my appraisal.”
“Yeah?” Danny wrinkled his forehead.
Mr. Davenport sighed, staring off into the distance. “I’ve seen a number of productions of Pippin, including the original, mind you, and the character of Lewis is always played the same.”
Danny narrowed his eyes warily. Where is this going?
“What?! A big dumb jock?!” Mr. Davenport gasped sarcastically, shaking his fists weakly in the air. “How truly radical! But… a big dumb jock from Stat-ten Island…,” he said, accentuating the syllables and folding his arms, frowning slightly and squinting his eyes. “Amusing.”
“Thank…you?” Danny shrugged again.
“Anyway,” Mr. Davenport said, inhaling dramatically. “I’ll see you in class next week. Let’s see if your scene from Little Shop is similarly…not obvious.”
And with that, Mr. Davenport turned away and began scrutinizing his program, clearly done with this rare moment of beneficence.
Danny figured this was probably the closest he was ever going to get to a compliment.
Amusing and not obvious were not too bad.
In fact, amusing and not obvious sounded pretty good tonight.
Danny continued snaking his way to the exit, and he would have made it if it hadn’t been for another voice calling out to him.
“Where ya going, tough guy?”
“Christian!” Danny said, spinning around, a surge of excitement rushing to his chest.
Christian Geronimo, Angel of Mercy, stood before him, looking more handsome than he’d ever been in a crisp white untucked dress shirt and baggy black jeans adorned with a row of safety pins on the purposely frayed pockets.
In his arms was a bouquet of orange flowers wrapped in green cellophane, and his smile looked like he had grown an extra ten teeth.
“You tryin’ to sneak out of here before saying hi?”
“No,” Danny said, feeling his excitement drain and the reality of the current state of their friendship setting in. “I guess…I guess I didn’t think you were gonna come tonight. I thought maybe—”
“Hey,” Christian said, cutting him off. “It’s okay. You really think I’d miss the chance to see you single-handedly ruin the entire fall production?” Christian sucked his teeth. “Please.”
“Real nice.” Danny couldn’t help but laugh.
They looked at each other with hopeful expressions.
“But seriously,” Danny said after a moment, “what’d ya think?”
Christian’s head tilted a little bit to the left, his face relaxing into one that didn’t know the word wisecrack.
“It was so good, Danny,” Christian said genuinely. “You were so good.”
“Aw, c’mon,” Danny mumbled, looking down at his feet.
“I’m being for real!” Christian beamed. “You belong up on that stage. You were funny and fierce. I’m not even kidding. The whole thing was just…amazing.”
Danny grinned a mile wide, even as he worried that a single word of thanks would make his voice crack in two.
Danny looked down at the flowers in Christian’s arms.
“Oh right. And I got you these,” he said, holding out the bouquet.
Christian must have caught the glint of anxiousness in Danny’s eyes, because he immediately added, “And don’t worry, tough guy. I got them for you because you’re my friend. Everyone—even straight boys—deserves flowers on their opening night.”
Danny let out a laugh, somehow both relieved and simultaneously breaking inside.
“Thank you,” Danny said, taking the flowers and bringing them up to his nose and inhaling their perfume. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“I got them at the bodega,” Christian said, brushing it off. “So they’re nothin’ fancy—”
“No, they’re beautiful,” Danny cut him off. “I’ve never gotten flowers before.”
“Well, thank God you were good and not a total mess, ’cuz I would have had to give them to Tiffany Totter and you know I think she overenunciates.”
Danny’s quick reflexes had saved him before—he always managed to swerve his bike to avoid broken glass, always lurched at the last second before stepping in dogshit, always ducked just in time to miss the rubber dodgeball hurled mercilessly at his face in gym class.
But Danny’s quick reflexes were rusty tonight.
His mind hadn’t had enough time to catch up with his body, hadn’t had enough time to think about what it would mean to reach out and hug Christian, or what the hug would mean to Christian, or what it would mean about him.
There was no thinking, just arms wrapping around shoulders and a boy suddenly wanting to tell his best friend everything—that he was wrong to blow him off, that of course he remembered everything, that he wanted to fly with him over the rooftops of Chelsea, that he was scared.
Scared of what he might be. Scared of what people would say. Scared he would end up like his uncle.
But Danny didn’t say any of these things because right at that moment, just over Christian’s shoulder, Danny saw a figure approaching, cranking the metronome of his heart to a thousand beats per minute.
“Ma?!” Danny cried, breaking free of his friend, nearly dropping the bouquet of flowers on the floor.
“There you are!” his mother said, clacking toward him in a tall pair of heels and a floral-patterned dress worn under a puffy winter coat. “I was worried you’d already left!”
“I thought you—”
“I called in sick,” she interrupted, squeezing the program that was rolled up in her fist. “I wanted to be here.”
“I can’t believe it,” Danny said, the air knocked out of him.
His mother looked around the lobby like someone who had just wandered off a spaceship. If Danny had felt out of place on his first day, his mother was in a whole other solar system.
“So…this is your school?”
“Yeah,” Danny breathed.
“It’s nicer than I thought,” she said, squinting a bit, like she was almost disappointed that there were no bars on the windows or graffiti on the walls.
“What did ya think of the show, Ma?” Danny said, trying not to sound too desperate.
“I liked it,” she said, smiling. “There were some really nice songs in there.”
“Right?” Danny laughed, his feet shuffling anxiously.
“Although if you want my God’s honest truth, some of those costumes were a little skimpy for a high school show.”
“Maaa!” Danny groaned.
“No, but I’m serious, I liked it. I really did,” she said, nodding. “And you…”
Her words trailed off, but her eyes looked up, truly meeting his own, brown and glassy and holding something that Danny could tell was pride, but maybe also a little bit of pain.
Pain, because she’d always struggled with compliments, or perhaps because she’d spent the past two hours watching her son do something completely on his own, and it was the first of probably a million times that he wouldn’t be needing her help anymore.
“I wish your father could’ve seen it,” she said, breaking away. “He’d have thought you were hysterical.”
Danny delivered his best attempt at a casual laugh.
“Who got you flowers? Someone’s showin’ me up!”
“Oh,” Danny shot up, a volcano trembling in his chest. He looked down at the flowers in his arms like a hot potato. His eyes darted to Christian, who was standing right next to him expectantly, clearly waiting for a proper introduction.
“Oh,” Danny said again, his mind flashing to the Next Magazine, to the night he’d come home late and thrust the blame on his friend “Christian,” and the realization that if his mother knew that these flowers had come from the very person he was explicitly told to avoid, the “shit” would unquestionably “hit the fan.”
“They’re not for me!” Danny heard himself blurt out, this time his mind moving faster than his body. “I got them for Nina.”
“Oh!” his mother exclaimed. “The young lady who played opposite you?”
“Yeah,” Danny said, then reached for the arm of his mother’s coat, hurrying her away from the live grenade that was Christian Geronimo. “I need to go give them to her—come on.”
Danny pushed past the family reunions and the Kodak picture moments and the thumbs wiping off lipstick kisses from cheeks.
He kept pushing, not even stopping to look back over his shoulder where he would have seen a very confused guy in a crisp white shirt, standing with his palms open in front of him and looking like he’d just been sideswiped by a bike messenger.
“So tell me about this Nina,” he heard his mom say. “I thought the two of you had such great chemistry.”