Chapter 6
The theater is within walking distance of my parents’ house, the way a rectory is close to a church: We must dwell close to the source. I’m halfway home when I hear footsteps running behind me, and a voice.
“Mirabel!”
Only one person calls me that. I turn around to look. “Theo.”
“Hey!” he says. He comes to a sudden stop and nearly crashes into me. He is out of breath.
“Hello,” I say, as though I was expecting him to be chasing me all along. Which I was. Hoping, anyway.
“I didn’t get to talk to you.” His face is wide open, smiling.
“Oh.” I pause, my heart racing again. He never used to make me nervous. “What’s up?”
“Just, like, hi! How are you?” He looks so genuine. “I was hoping we could talk earlier but . . .” At the break, he was absolutely swarmed by the cast, all wanting to chat with him and remind him of whatever vague connections they claim to have with him.
“Yeah, no worries. You have a lot of admirers.”
“I come home a lot,” he says. “I’ve kept a lot of connections here.” He means nothing by it, but it stings.
“Yeah. That’s nice.” We are standing awkwardly on the sidewalk. My parents’ house is just another two blocks. I was looking forward to a nice bath and a very stiff drink. “Well, it was great to see . . .”
“You wanna grab a drink?” he asks in a rush. I realize he’s also nervous.
“Oh! Um.” I glance down the street toward my bathtub. Yes, I want a drink. I was hoping to enjoy it in silence. To be honest, I’ve been dreading this encounter. Theo is the only person who has always seen right through me.
“I just felt like . . . we should, well, catch up.” A gracious phrasing.
On one hand, I have zero energy to catch up with Theo Raye. On the other hand, we are going to spend the whole summer together. Might as well get this part out of the way.
“Yeah. Okay. Sure.” I remember to smile.
“Oh, amazing!” This is a guy who the entire town, nay, country, fawns over, and I might be the only person he has had to convince to hang out with him.
“Peasants?” he asks. Peasants Pour House, the most popular pub in town.
It will be full of people we kind of know.
They will all stop at our booth, and I will hate my life.
“Actually . . . my dad has some pretty good whiskey?” He knows. We used to pilfer it when running lines in my bedroom.
“Ah, yeah, classic. Let’s do it.” We start to walk home. He falls into step with me in the self-conscious way he always did, deliberately meeting my pace. An entire life in slow motion, just because of his height. Another reminder of how we never quite aligned.
At the house, Theo leans against the counter in my parents’ kitchen while I get drinks.
My dad has an extensive whiskey collection, and I reach for my favorite, Writers’ Tears.
I pour us modest glasses, instinctively pouring only enough that my dad won’t miss.
Teenage habit. I remember that I am an adult now—I can buy more whiskey.
I pour more generously. Theo seems completely comfortable, smiling as he looks around.
“It’s funny, it’s like coming back to my own childhood home.” We spent a lot of time here in high school. Theo has never been away from home long enough to develop the levels of nostalgia he’s talking about, but I know what he means. I hand him the drink. We hesitate, then clink awkwardly.
“Outside?”
“Sure.”
My mother pays a local guy to tend to their garden, but takes all the credit, openly bragging about how well her roses are doing. We make our way to the white Muskoka chairs down by the firepit. I switch it on (of course, my parents only stage fires). We lean back and sip our drinks in tandem.
“So,” we both say at exactly the same time. He laughs and I look down into my drink. There is a long pause.
“So,” he says again. “How the hell are you?” He’s so open, so earnest. I want to both bury my face in his hair and send him away.
“Oh,” I say. “You know.”
“I mean, I don’t.” He looks into his drink, then back at me. “We don’t . . . You stopped talking to me.”
“I didn’t.” I did. “Just, I don’t know . . . life . . .” It sounds lame, and it’s a lie. Not speaking to Theo Raye has been a particular project of mine for at least seven years. “You don’t talk to me either!” I try to pass the buck, but he’s not having it.
“Can we . . . Look, we can do the whole thing, we can do small talk.”
“No, thank you.”
“Okay, or we can actually acknowledge the fact that . . .” He looks at me pleadingly.
“That we used to be best friends, and now we are strangers.”
Best friends. Yes. But also, more. A small pang runs through me.
“Or we can just be professional and get through this summer without forcing a friendship that ended.” The words fall out of me, bitter and biting. I can’t stop myself. He looks so wounded. It’s a low blow and we both know it.
“I know things ended . . . weirdly. But I thought I’d hear from you.
What . . . happened to us?” He got famous, that’s what happened.
Among other things. He knows. I shrug. “Is that what you want, Mira?” His voice has dropped an octave.
“’Cause, like, I can do that. We are both trained actors.
We can pretend there’s nothing to talk about.
For my part, I’m sorry.” He leans in. “Really, truly.” He stares at me, waiting.
I say nothing.
He shakes his head, downs the rest of his drink. “There’s way better whiskey than this, you know,” he says.
I shrug, lean back, and take a long, languid pull from my glass to stop myself from speaking more. It burns. I deserve that. I’m being an asshole. I don’t know how else to be with him anymore.
He rolls his eyes. “Jesus. You haven’t changed.” He stands up. “See you at rehearsal, Miranda.” He turns to leave, pauses, and turns back. “Whenever you’re ready to act like an adult, you know where to find me.”
I sit outside for a long time after he has gone.
My chest hurts from the whiskey. I hate myself.
I have built a whole wall of bitterness toward Theo, and I don’t know how to begin to dismantle it.
I rehearse ways to tell my parents I can’t stay: A job has come up in the city, I am not available after all, I have to go.
They would be pissed, and these spiderweb-thin strands of connection that we’ve been forging this week would dissolve back into our usual nothingness.
I’ve lived in that before. I can handle it.
It’s not even a sense of duty that makes me want to stay.
They replaced Genevieve Chen. They can replace me.
It’s not like I’m a spectacular bit of casting or anything.
No. The thing that roots me back into reality is the simple truth that I have nothing and no one else in my life right now except this play. And that feels like shit.
And worse than that, worse than any of it, is the fact that the sight of Theo seizes my heart.
It brings it all back, all that happened and did not happen between us.
All that did not happen for me. The truth that, in all these years, I never stopped missing him.
I’ve never stopped loving him. I make my way inside to run the bath, bringing the bottle with me.