Chapter 1
Marlowe
December
Dallas Winthrop offers me the rest of his croissant as we walk side by side through Wilbur Reed High School. Even though I’m not hungry, I take it, catching the falling crumbs in my palm as our steps fall into sync down the English hallway.
Classes are over, but the after-school activities haven’t started yet. In this brief interim, our school becomes a museum, with us teachers serving as the docents, eager to share all the new history that’s unfolded today among these withering WRHS artifacts.
See that spot beside the water fountain where the linoleum is cracked?
That’s where Brayden McCaffrey shoved Asher Kincade after lunch, earning Brayden his first-ever in-school suspension.
What neither boy knows is that is also the place where class of 2010 alumna Marlowe Jenkins got rejected when asking class of 2009’s Katy Thatcher to her final homecoming.
That spot, you see, is a place of great suffering.
I wipe potential croissant flakes from the corners of my mouth and pop my head into my girlfriend’s classroom. “We’re on our way to break the news,” I tell her.
“Good luck!” Alice says, smiling as she makes little cheerleader fists of enthusiasm.
Dallas, wearing a handmade velvet cape and a matching velvet beret, stumbles backward into the lockers outside Alice’s door. He clutches his stomach, staring down as if he’s been stabbed, hands trembling in performed shock.
Alice Yeung, never one to remember the conventions of theater, even after six months of dating me and almost twenty years of knowing me, palms her forehead. “Sorry! I’m fried from reading essays,” she says. “I meant to say break a leg.”
Dallas continues clutching his imaginary wound. “If you keep sticking your foot out to trip me, I just might.”
“I’m sorry!” she says again, her eyebrows sloping downward in regret.
“I’ll forgive it.” Dallas lets the sentence linger, the obvious completion being but I won’t forget.
Alice and I went to WRHS at the same time.
She was a grade below me, but we did yearbook together for three years.
Graphic design was legitimately Alice’s passion, and she had a knack for it that went far beyond any other student on staff.
She loved the creative aspect of putting together the yearbook, and her work won our school multiple awards.
I just knew yearbook was a good activity for college applications, and I liked having something non–theater related to do between shows.
Alice and I both consistently turned in our materials early, and we were always among the first to volunteer for the miscellaneous field trips that sprung up, like visiting the printing press or going to the three-day-long yearbook convention.
I recognized in her then the same thing I used to see in myself—a determination to go above and beyond, believing that the more you committed to something, the more you’d be rewarded, like there was some sort of cosmic scale that weighed your effort and provided you the appropriate compensation in return.
When Alice got a teaching position at WRHS last year, it felt like fate had pulled her back into my orbit.
The cosmic scale had betrayed her in the same way it had betrayed me, placing zero value on our dedication to our respective crafts.
She’d been laid off from her graphic design position, replaced by AI, and was forced to return to her hometown in pursuit of the kind of job where she couldn’t be exchanged for a computer.
At least not yet.
She’s gotten even more stunning since we were teens.
Her long black hair is still as shiny as I remember, but now it looks professionally styled every day, which I’ve since learned is due to her evangelical commitment to her Dyson hair dryer.
She’s traded in her Old Navy polo shirts and flip-flops for flowy, neutral linens that turn her into this very hot, very competent-looking woman who you’d want to do knife-sharpening ASMR for you as you fall asleep.
“Will you still be here in an hour?” I ask her. “We can have dinner together.”
“I’ll be here,” she says. “That sounds great.”
“It could be longer. We might get held up by some…questioning parents,” Dallas warns, putting on his best grande dame voice to emphasize the drama of it all.
“We really might,” I say. It wouldn’t be a Dallas Winthrop production if someone wasn’t furious about his decisions.
He’s made it a tradition to keep the spring musical a secret until the December before it will open, and because he has a penchant for choosing risky shows, there are often some overzealous parents eager to discuss the show’s subject matter with us.
“I can wait,” Alice tells me. “I’m sure I’ll still be reading these essays. Remind me why I asked them to write these by hand?”
“So you wouldn’t have to suffer through reading twenty papers written by AI,” I remind her.
“That’s right. Down with the evil robots. They’ll never take our souls. Well, break a leg. They’re going to love the play you picked.”
“It’s a musical, dear,” Dallas tells her.
“They’re going to love the musical,” Alice corrects.
As we continue down the hallway, Dallas puts his arm around me, tilting his head toward mine.
He doesn’t like Alice for me. He’s never said it, and I’ve never dared to ask, but two decades in his presence have made me acutely aware of his teaching style.
He isn’t trying to make Alice learn proper theater etiquette.
Very few members of our faculty know or remember it, and Dallas doesn’t make a spectacle of correcting anyone else by pretending to be mortally wounded.
He’s trying to emphasize how wrong Alice is for me by finding ways to point out our fatal incompatibilities—me, a lifelong theater nerd, dating a woman who can’t remember to say “Break a leg” even though she went to this very high school and has had plenty of continued exposure to the arts, thanks to Dallas and me.
It’s just not the lens through which she views the world, I always want to argue. She’s still a creative like you and I, but she sees things through the eyes of a designer, not a storyteller! Talk to her about our costumes, or our set! You’ll get it then.
That’s me fighting the Dallas who lives only in my mind. He accepts my one-sided arguments with no pushback. The real Dallas would surely make some kind of devastating-yet-true observation in return that I’d never be able to forget. Which is why I’ll never actually bring it up.
“Did you hear the news?” real Dallas asks.
Closer to the auditorium, he’s hung up three gigantic posters of Priscilla Covington-French like championship banners. Or, excuse me, they are of Cilla Cove, as she is professionally known, supporting cast member on the critically acclaimed, widely beloved TV medical drama Heartbeats.
I give Dallas a wry glare, then look to Cilla’s face the way a person might examine their own reflection, scouring her every nonexistent pore for clues as to how she ended up near the top of a career she swore she didn’t want to pursue.
Every single school day for the last few years, I’ve had to pass by her gigantic twinkling eyes and cloyingly sincere smile. She always manages to look like she’s recently finished giggling, perpetually in on a secret you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to decode.
“I don’t think anyone on staff missed the three separate emails you sent on the matter,” I say to Dallas.
“Was it really three? My keyboard’s been sticking.” He smiles. “Maybe I should send another? Just to apologize for the duplicates. And to make sure everyone read what the other emails said.”
“Should we go ahead and print flyers, too, for anyone who might want to cut down on their screen time?” I ask. “What’s the loss of a tree or two if it means celebrating the success of Cilla Cove?”
“I like the way you think,” he says.
Dallas has every right to be proud of Cilla, who secured her first-ever Golden Globe nomination this morning for her work on the final season of Heartbeats.
After all, it was Dallas who plucked her out of his freshman English class and begged her to audition for the fall play.
She owes her success to him in a real way.
“It’s very cool,” I continue, knowing he expects more from me and incapable of stopping myself from giving it, no matter how heavy my tongue is in my mouth. “I’m sure she’s excited.”
“There’s a lot to celebrate.” He puts a hand on my shoulder and leads us farther down the hall. “You’ve both gone on to do great things.”
“Oh yes,” I say. “My own Globe nomination is right around the corner. Just as soon as I finish assistant-directing another high school musical with you.”
“Soon you’ll be directing,” he reminds me. “And I already know you’ll lead these kids to big things. I see Jimmy Awards every single year. A whole roster of award winners.”
“Billy Larsen is already in line for his future Tony as we speak,” I joke.
“You never know,” Dallas says. “No one’s life ever works out the way they expect it will.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” I reply.