Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
CHLOE
The building housing Flemming Community Arts Center used to be a high school, I think.
Red brick. Wide front steps. A faded banner advertising summer camps and pottery classes.
Nothing about it gleams. No press line. No marble.
No staff in headsets speaking into their cuffs.
Just a bulletin board by the door with flyers layered over each other, and a woman carrying a tote bag full of sheet music hurrying inside because she’s late and not because a photographer might catch her bad side.
My chest aches at how ordinary it is. I want ordinary so badly it frightens me.
I check my reflection in the visor mirror.
I look better than I did this morning, which is not a high bar.
My eyes are still swollen, but concealer has done what it can.
I’m wearing jeans, a black sweater, and flats because I couldn’t bear to put on anything that looked like Mrs. Sebastian Austen stepping out for a tasteful community engagement.
My left hand looks naked on the steering wheel. I turn the visor mirror up with a snap.
“Get out of the car,” I tell myself. I don’t.
My phone sits in the passenger seat, powered on now because the audition confirmation came through by email and I’d needed the address. I haven’t unblocked Sebastian. I haven’t opened the texts from unknown numbers or entertainment sites or anyone with the word urgent in their subject line.
I did read Jessica’s messages.
Jessica:
Tell me when you get there.
Don't make me track you like a true crime podcast.
Also, if anyone is mean, get their full legal name.
Me:
I’m here.
Her reply comes almost instantly.
Jessica:
Good. Go be terrifyingly talented.
I stare at the words until my throat tightens. Then I get out of the car.
Inside, the arts center smells like old coffee. A folding table is set up in the hallway with a sign-in sheet, blank audition forms for people who didn’t fill them out online, and a basket of pencils. A teenage volunteer with blue streaks in her hair smiles at me.
“Name?”
For half a second, I almost say Austen. Habit rises before pride can stop it.
“Chloe Pennington,” I say.
She scans the list. “Got you. You’re auditioning for Shelby?”
“Yes.”
“Great. We’re running about fifteen minutes behind. You can wait in the black box. Braden will call you.”
I follow the hallway to a set of double doors and step into a small theater with black walls, risers, and mismatched chairs. About twenty women sit scattered around the room, some reading sides, some whispering, some staring into space with the blank intensity of people trying not to panic.
I remember this feeling.
Before Austen Parks. Before Sebastian. Before being moved out of frames by women with pearls and poison under their tongues. Before I became someone people recognized only after reading a badge. I remember wanting a part because it mattered. I remember nerves that belonged to me.
A woman near the front is reading for Truvy, her voice warm and broad. Another laughs too loudly at something someone says near the door. Someone’s water bottle falls over and rolls beneath a chair.
The whole thing should feel small. It doesn’t. It feels like standing on the edge of a country I used to know.
“Chloe Pennington?”
I look up.
The man at the door is not what I expect from community theater, which is unfair because I don’t know what I expected.
A cardigan, maybe. A clipboard and frazzled hair.
Braden Markham is tall, dark-haired, and wearing a black button-down with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. He holds a clipboard, yes, but somehow makes it look less like office supply equipment and more like a prop he’s chosen.
His eyes move over my face with quick professional interest, then pause.
“Hi,” he says. “Thanks for coming in.”
I stand. “Thanks for letting me come in. That sounded normal in my head.”
His mouth curves. “Most things do. It’s one of the great tragedies of speech.”
A laugh slips out before I can stop it. Small, rusty, but real.
He gestures toward the stage area. “Come on down.”
The performance space is only a few steps below the risers, marked out with tape and a couple of chairs. A long table sits at the back of the room where two other people sit with notes. Braden introduces them as Lila, the stage manager, and Mark, the community theater's social media manager.
Braden looks down at his clipboard. “You put Shelby as your preferred role.”
“Yes.”
Braden studies me for a second, then glances at the sides in his hand. “I know you came in for Shelby, but I’d like to hear you read M’Lynn.”
The room changes temperature. At least, my body thinks it does.
“Oh.” My fingers curl around the edges of my sides. “I don’t know if I’m right for M’Lynn.”
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not. That’s what auditions are for.”
“She’s…” I stop because every word I could choose feels too small. “That’s a tall order.”
“It is.”
“I prepared Shelby.”
“I figured.” He holds out another set of pages. “You don’t have to be polished. I just want to see something.”
Something. The word opens a door I don’t want opened.
“Braden,” Lila says gently, watching me more closely now, “we can stay with Shelby if you’d rather.”
I almost say yes.
Shelby is safer. Shelby lets me be brave without having to stand inside the part of me that hasn’t stopped bleeding.
Shelby lets me want things. M’Lynn asks me to survive the worst thing I can imagine and still stand upright because other women are watching me and the world hasn’t had the courtesy to end.
I think of Jessica’s red arrows around the audition notice. I think of Sebastian’s face on the porch when I told him not to follow me. I think of Katrina in my house, looking comfortable enough to belong there.
I think of Janine’s hand on my elbow, moving me gently out of view. Janine, who would likely find my funeral inconvenient if it interrupted a launch window. Janine, who looked at me for years as if my body’s failures were a bad investment tied to her family name.
And under all of it, I think of three tiny futures I never got to hold.
I take the pages. “I can read M’Lynn.”
Braden’s expression shifts, not pleased exactly. Attentive. “Take a minute if you need it.”
I look at the page. I don’t read the words aloud in my head.
I know the scene. I know the emotional map.
A mother standing in the aftershock. Rage because grief has nowhere else to go.
Love with no place to land. The obscene fact that everyone else’s body keeps working, that people breathe, swallow, blink, and go home while yours has become a locked room.
My hands begin to shake. Good, I tell myself. Use it.
When I start, my voice is too controlled. I hear the actress in it, the trained performer, the woman who spent years making sadness pretty enough for families on vacation. I stop after three lines.
“Sorry,” I say.
Braden doesn’t interrupt. He only nods once.
I start again. This time, I don’t aim for pretty. The page blurs a little. I let it.
I let myself remember a hospital room at two in the morning.
Sebastian’s suit jacket thrown over the back of a chair because he’d come straight from a board dinner.
His hand around mine, warm and too tight, like he could keep me from leaving my own body by force.
The way he whispered my name into my hair.
The way the nurse avoided my eyes when she changed the bedding.
I remember the second time, when I hadn’t told anyone but him because I was scared of being congratulated too early.
I remember the third, because by then hope had become cautious. By then I’d learned not to look at nursery furniture online. By then I’d trained my face not to light up until the doctor said it was safe, and it still didn’t matter.
The words on the page become less like lines and more like a permission slip. I let my anger come.
Not loud at first. Loud would be too easy.
I let it arrive the way mine does, through my teeth, through my hands, through the forced steadiness of a woman who has spent years making pain convenient for everyone else.
I let it sharpen when the scene demands fury.
I let my voice crack only when I can't hold it anymore.
I’m not thinking about the room.
I’m thinking about being told everything was fine when it was not fine.
I’m thinking about private kisses and public absence.
I’m thinking about the cruel arithmetic of womanhood, the way people can reduce a body to what it produces and then blame it for failing to perform.
I’m thinking about babies no one got to meet.
By the time I reach the end, my breath is coming hard. The final line leaves me in pieces I can't pick up quickly enough.
Silence. Not polite silence. Not the soft shuffle of people preparing to move on. Real silence.
I lower the pages. Lila has one hand over her mouth. Mark is staring at the floor. Braden watches me with an expression I can't read, and because I can't read it, my fear fills in the blanks.
Too much. I went too far. I cracked myself open in a black box theater in front of strangers for a role I didn’t even ask for.
Heat floods my face. “I’m sorry,” I say. My voice sounds strange. “That was probably…” I don’t know how to finish.
Braden sets his clipboard down on the table. “Thank you, Chloe.”
That sounds final. It sounds like a man trying to be kind before he suggests voice classes or emotional restraint or perhaps a nice hobby where no one has to watch me come apart beneath fluorescent lights.
I nod. “Of course.”
“We may call you back later tonight,” Lila says, and her voice is softer than before.
“Sure.” I force a smile. It feels stapled on. “Thank you for the opportunity.”
Opportunity. There. I can still use civilized words. Somebody alert the committee.
I walk back up the aisle on legs that feel detached from the rest of me. A woman waiting near the door moves aside, her eyes shiny. I don’t look at anyone else.