Say It Out Loud

Prologue

The magic died with Mom.

When I was little, the magic was always right there: a swirl of particles in sunlit windows, the way the breeze would bend a flower toward me as if a magical wind god were offering me a gift, or how all the terrible things seemed to right themselves in the end, like the time my cat ran away only to turn up curled on the library steps the next week.

Like she’d been waiting for me all along.

Like magic.

Or maybe I’ve always just read too much for my own good and it was delusion, not magic.

Whatever the reason, getting older meant the magic shifted.

I had an uncanny knack for always finding what I was looking for: parking spots, a friend’s lost keys, an earring gone missing in a pool, or the perfect passage to round out my essay comparing Beowulf to Little Women. (That essay was a banger, by the way.)

And if I really thought about it, if I looked the magic straight in the face and didn’t call it stupid or uncanny or dumb luck, sometimes it would really reward me.

Like the time in high school I went into my bedroom closet, scrunched up my eyes and nose and hands, and told the magic that if it would please, please help me get tickets to the final Meadow book’s sold-out midnight release party at the biggest bookstore in Dallas, I’d never ask for anything ever again.

I got the tickets. Well, technically Mom did. She won them through a local radio station by accident. She called in to ask the name of a song—because Google was never her first instinct—and happened to be caller number five.

So yeah. Magic was finicky and unpredictable, but undeniably real.

Or it was until Mom died and the flowers stopped bending toward me and I lost keys and earrings and my sense of self all at once.

It was like all the wonder and mysticism in the world had been sucked out of my life. It left me feeling like an empty soda can, and I wasn’t sure if the magic would ever come back to fill it again.

—

My life felt particularly empty the night of the meet-angst.

There was very little cute about my first time meeting James Neely.

It was the end of my last semester of college, the night of the one and only performance of my stupid Introduction to Theater class’s Romeo and Juliet, and—most important—it was the six-month anniversary of Mom’s passing.

I was a wreck.

But it was okay-ish because at least I didn’t have to be onstage.

I just had to flip a couple of special-effect switches on cue and then I could go back to my dorm with the leaky roof and the chatty roommate, eat a decidedly not-magical protein bar from the box of “mandatory snacks” Dad kept mailing me from Colorado every week, maybe fill out another application for a publishing internship I could never hope to afford, and call it a night.

I can’t even remember what set me off. Maybe it was the way the director patted my back when I passed her at the stage door—absently, maternally, like it was all too natural to touch me when I hadn’t been touched by anyone in months.

Whatever the reason, I was full-body sobbing in what I thought was going to stay an empty dressing room when he came in.

His arms were full of costume pieces and a makeup kit.

His cellphone was tipping out of the pocket of the jacket slung over his arm, the collar trapped beneath the strap of his black leather messenger bag.

He didn’t look clumsy, though, even as the top part of him more closely resembled an overcrowded coatrack than a human.

His stride was sure but harsh, like he was punishing the floor for existing as he came into the room and slammed the door behind him.

And his face was murderous. Even in my frazzled state, I knew to flinch away from it. His was the kind of anger that could level the world, and even the mountain range of sadness I had been steadily building around me for the last half year didn’t stand a chance.

James Neely. James Freakin’ Neely depending on who you spoke to.

Like me, he wasn’t even supposed to be in this class, but we were stuck in this wrong timeline for different reasons: me because the blow-off media arts class that was supposed to fulfill my art credit was canceled last minute, him because he had been told he could direct the Intro to Theater play to get an honors theater credit, until the department head caught wind of it and shut it down.

One of the girls who ran the lights—Jessica, I think her name was—had a huge crush on James and had told me all about it one class when there was nothing for us to do but watch the rehearsal from the wings.

“ He’s so good, ” she said. “ Like so good. He’s going to make it big. I can feel it in my bones. And then Dr. G is going to regret not letting him have his directorial debut here, because that would be a big selling point for the university. Even if he is the perfect Romeo. ”

Not much permeated my post-Mom’s-funeral haze, but still I thought it odd, Jessica’s reverence.

Nobody great came from this public university in middle-of-nowhere Texas, and if they did, it was only because they were on their way to somewhere better, a layover.

I was only here because the campus was just close enough to Mom for dinners and easy weekend trips but far enough away from her little house in a suburb of Dallas to necessitate my dorm room, my own space.

I couldn’t imagine not having her nearby, not being able to pop in for a dinner of whatever they had been sampling at her local H-E-B that she just had to buy and inexplicably leaving with my arms full of fruit that you might as well take, Junie B.

, because they’re going to go bad before I can eat them all, and toilet paper.

You can never have too much of it. Take a roll or two for that broom closet you call a bathroom.

I had every reason, the best reason, to be here. What did James have?

If he was as good as Jessica—and everyone else in the theater department—made him sound, he would have gone to New York or Boston or somewhere where lawns were green and covered in five-hundred-year-old trees instead of brown grass and clumpy soil.

But it made Jessica happy to ramble on about James, so I let her.

Even when those ramblings turned to how the never-identified “they” begged her to play Juliet but she just didn’t have time in her schedule because she wanted to be done with basics by her sophomore year and that’s why she chose to be on crew, you know?

There on the dressing room floor, I almost wished I was with Jessica and her chattering instead of James Neely, who stood above me looking like a bloodthirsty god come down from Mount Olympus. I could ignore Jessica, but James had the kind of presence that was impossible to look away from.

And I was not interested in looking.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked.

He turned his back to me and set his stuff on the long table in front of the vanity with its two functioning light bulbs.

I tried to answer, tried to make my arms and legs engage with my one thought of Get out of here, go, leave. But I couldn’t. I was paralyzed as James huffed and spun to finally look down at me.

It’s like he didn’t realize until that moment that I was on the ground, as if he had registered a human and nothing else when he barged into the room.

“I told them I didn’t need help with makeup,” he began, and again, like his eyes were catching up with his words, he paused. “Are you… crying ?”

He said the last part with such horror, such disdain, it almost made me laugh. His response was so preposterous that I forgot who I was talking to—who I was and who I had lost—just long enough to snort through my tears.

“Is that a question? I thought actors were supposed to be keen observers of the human condition to improve their craft or something.”

James wasn’t quite smiling, but he wasn’t frowning, either, when he crouched beside me. He must have forgotten himself for a moment, too, because he reached forward and tapped the cuff of the dark sweatshirt that identified me as a stagehand.

“And I thought crew members were supposed to be neither seen nor heard.”

“Fire me, then,” I said, jerking my arm away from him and rubbing my nose on the itchy black sleeve. “Fail me. Whatever you want to call it. I would love nothing more than to go home.”

Home had always been a weird concept for me. Mom and Dad had divorced when I was a baby, so home had never been one place for me growing up. But just then, with the grief of Mom hanging over me like a black shroud, home was wherever she was.

And I couldn’t get there.

Which was not a novel concept, but my body chose now in front of James Freakin’ Neely to make a sentiment found on every agonizingly cliché throw pillow into a Whole Thing ? that I needed to cry—and cry hard —over right this very second.

All James got as a warning was a watery hiccup before I started sobbing. Again.

He looked understandably startled at this turn of events, which…

fair. I hadn’t cried this hard at her funeral, hadn’t cried this hard at all since she passed, come to think of it.

But there I was, sitting on the grimy floor of a room I never should have entered and weeping like I was trying to flood the world and everyone init.

James Neely stared at me for a long moment, and for the first time he looked at a loss, running his hands through his hair like maybe he could divine a way to stop my crying if he pulled on the strands hard enough.

“Hey,” he said.

I couldn’t stop crying.

“Hey.”

His tone was just insistent enough, just authoritative enough to help me take a gasping breath mid-sob and say, “Yeah?”

“Do you have a least favorite book?”

I blinked at him.

“Don’t you mean a favorite book?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “A least favorite.”

I wiped at my eyes.

“That’s a weird question.”

My voice was watery and gross, but it was at least approaching human.