Chapter One #2
A bright red envelope, addressed to Annie Lightfoot in a looping cursive script. No stamp. No return address.
“Hey,” Annie called to Sal. “Who dropped this off?”
Sal looked up from where he was topping off the shampoo bottles. “No idea.”
Annie edged a finger under the envelope’s lip. Inside was a note card illustrated with artsy line drawings of women’s breasts. Across the top, embossed in bold gold letters, read From the Desk of Jazz Whitaker.
Annie sucked in a breath of surprise. Jasmine “Jazz” Whitaker.
Annie hadn’t seen or spoken to the artistic director of the Rhodes Playhouse since the early days of the pandemic.
As soon as social distancing started, the theater closed.
Jazz Whitaker had rented out her house and gone West to ride out lockdown with her ex-wife, Terry, with whom Jazz was still close.
So it must’ve been six years, at least, since Annie and Jazz last spoke.
The handwritten note was brief.
Annie,
Please meet me at the Rhodes Playhouse this Sunday at four o’clock. I have something very important to discuss.
Fondly,
Jazz
That was it. No further clues.
Annie’s pulse skittered like a startled rabbit. Her mind zoomed to the worst-case scenario.
Multilevel marketing.
Something messy with money.
Or worse—Jazz was…dying?
Just like Annie’s beloved grandmother had, fourteen years ago, after a painfully long battle with heart failure. That had to be it. Jazz was dying and needed help or to say some sort of gut-wrenching goodbye.
Annie’s throat tightened. A terrified “Oh no” fell out of her mouth.
“What’s wrong?” Sal asked in alarm. “Who’s it from?”
Or, Jazz was as healthy as ever and this “important” meeting was good news. Champagne to celebrate her return to Rhodes! She’d always had a flair for the dramatic, after all.
“Jazz Whitaker,” Annie replied.
Sal frowned, trying to place the name. Unlike Annie, he hadn’t grown up here. He’d moved to Rhodes after the playhouse closed.
“She ran the Rhodes Playhouse,” Annie explained.
“That old theater, over on Myrtle, at the other end of town? Jazz used to direct shows there—champion community theater. She lives—lived?—in this incredible Victorian ten minutes outside town.” Annie hadn’t pictured Jazz’s rambling pink-and-purple dollhouse in years.
“She’s older, but we’ve been close since I was a teenager. Back when I was an…”
Annie pulled up short. She’d never told Sal about this chapter of her past. It wasn’t a secret. It’d just never come up.
Sal, sensing a story, nudged. “Back when you were an…”
“An actor,” Annie admitted. “A member of the Rhodes Players, the local acting troupe.”
“What?” Sal stared at Annie with a look of disbelief and salacious excitement. “You? Were in shows? I knew you went to see plays but I didn’t know you were in them!”
Annie blushed. “I wasn’t very good. Honestly still don’t know how I got cast. And all that was a million years ago.”
“What were you in?”
“Just small parts—a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
One of the shorter speeches in The Vagina Monologues.
” It was an effort to make all this sound somewhat trivial.
Especially the next part. “And then, when I was sixteen—which I guess makes it twenty years ago—me and three other kids played the Tragedians in a gender-swapped version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. By Tom Stoppard.”
Sal gave an uncomprehending shrug: None of that scanned. “What’s a Tra-gee-dee-uhn?” He spoke the unfamiliar word with vocal baby steps.
“Um, a troupe of traveling Elizabethan actors,” Annie replied.
“The story’s sort of set inside the play Hamlet from the perspective of two of the minor characters.
” No easy feat to spontaneously sum up the absurdist, existential tragicomedy.
“The four of us did mime and tumbling and physical comedy.”
But of course, the teen quartet was so much more than just castmates.
“Look at you and your multitudes.” Sal seemed impressed. He nodded at the note card in Annie’s hand. “So, what’d Jazz say?”
Mysteriously little.
The Rhodes Playhouse had been little more than background scenery for years—until now.
Memories surged, hot and fast, too big to shove back into the box she kept them in.
She could almost hear the hushed murmurs of the audience.
Feel the heat of the stage lights. See the secret spot in the green room backstage, where cast members scratched their names into the plywood.
Was her name still there, next to the others’?
Queen bee Vicky, with her take-no-prisoners ’tude. Insecure Dylan, the baby of the group, who’d followed Vicky around like a lovesick puppy.
And, of course, Lola Wilson. The girl Annie had trained herself never to think about.
Warm hazel eyes the color of golden hour. The broad, stunning smile not many could summon. A brain even more exquisite than her face. Everyone knew she was going to be a star. And now, she was. Globetrotting on movie sets, leading a life that was light-years away from Annie’s own.
The first girl Annie had ever loved.
The girl whose heart Annie had broken with a lie she’d never been brave enough to undo.