Prologue #4
I felt reborn while the crowd cheered for us, like maybe I really had left something of the terrible black grief on the stage behind me, wrestled it from fiction into reality and then back to something in between, something more manageable because it had crossed the great divide between imagination and fact.
God, it sounds cheesy, but under the glaring stage lights, it felt like that performance could be the start of the rest of my life, like maybe this was one of those nights that was a fulcrum on which I would pivot my future.
I could go anywhere from here, be anyone, and the newfound magic could help guide the way.
And maybe— maybe, maybe because it felt too much to even hope for—I had made a fast friend, the kind that came in during your darkest hour and stayed for all that came after.
We let go of each other’s hands when the curtains closed. It was for the best. I needed a minute away to try to breathe, to collect myself.
I worked my way through the Shakespearean throng, past Girl Who Helps Nurse, past Nurse and a bloodied Tybalt, to check on Nyx, who was still in the bathroom in the grips of the sudden-onset stomach bug. I brought them a glass of water and called one of their friends to come help them home.
When I made it back to the front of the theater, there was too much to focus on, too many well-wishers and parents and people begging actors to sign their playbills for extra credit points from totally non-related classes like biology and philosophy.
But I found James easily enough, my head overflowing with ways to ask him to dinner, to coffee, to something to extend the night.
I wanted to ask him his least favorite book, his favorite book, the book currently on his nightstand.
I wanted to fill the new openness in my chest with him and his words and tell him I thought we were kindred spirits, that maybe it was fate or magic or something that knew we should be together, needed to be together, and that’s why I had cried on his dressing room floor.
I was still in my jeans and Juliet’s death dress, still had Nyx’s borrowed mascara on my lashes and childish na?veté beating in my chest as I watched a tall, gruff man place a stiff hand on James’s back.
They looked nothing alike, James and the man, but the man’s arm commanded a sense of ownership and his stance implied father.
They were both turned toward Girl Who Helps Nurse and her uncle, who was speaking in an overly animated voice.
“…bright future. Do you have headshots? A demo reel?”
The hand on James’s back tightened.
“Of course,” James answered. He shrugged a little beneath the weight of his father’s arm. “I could have them all sent to you this evening.”
“Do that.” The agent grinned. “And that girl, the last Juliet. Was she the understudy?”
“We didn’t have understudies,” James answered. “She was just a crew member who knew the lines.”
He couldn’t see my flinch at that just, I know, but maybe he felt it, because he rubbed the back of his neck where I was staring at him.
The agent whistled, impressed.
“Talk about an MVP,” he said. “No offense to the original Juliet, but that was one of the best Juliet deaths I’ve seen in my career. It’s like you…Well, forgive me. It’s as if Romeo really died and she was experiencing it for the first time. Astounding. Such raw talent.”
He laughed then, the agent, like he wasn’t casually rewriting my entire future, one where maybe instead of going into publishing like Mom and I had always planned, I had some sort of latent, undiscovered skill that could be the turning point and unlock what lay ahead.
(It’s dangerous to tell a millennial we’re particularly gifted at something when we were raised on Disney Channel original movies and parents who said we could be and do anything if we set our minds to it.)
And then everything would make some sort of sense.
It wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t make Mom’s death not the worst thing to happen in my life…
But if by channeling my grief over Mom into my performance of Juliet, I was somehow able to make this magical life for myself, the kind of life Mom always believed I could lead, maybe it would mean a tiny bit of justice.
The slightest indication that the world can give after it takes away.
Hope.
I held my breath, waiting for James to say he would run and find me, that the agent ought to meet me.
Maybe I did have some undiscovered flair for the dramatic, because I could see it so fully in my head, how he would say, You know, I didn’t actually catch her name.
Let me go find her. Then he would spin away, thinking he needed to race backstage, but there I would be, waiting.
And it wouldn’t just be the start of my career and a clear path forward that would be sparkling and easy.
No, the most important part would be that I had a friend, a new friend, but one who’d already proved he was willing to literally get down and dirty (on the gross dressing room floor) to sit with me in my sadness.
But James did not spin.
James didn’t so much as twitch as his father—the kind of tall that made me immediately pity whoever sat behind him during the play—placed his large hand back on James’s shoulders and kicked the fulcrum out from under my imagined springboard.
“He coached her through it,” Mr. Neely said, and his voice was loud and proud, though of himself or James I couldn’t be sure. “Isn’t that right, son?”
Here it comes, I thought. James is going to include me. He’s going to bring me along on whatever comes next.
“Yeah, I helped her,” James said. And that’s all he said.
“Mighty bright kid you’ve got here, Mr. Neely,” the agent boomed. “My niece seems to think so, too.”
The niece in question came to stand beside James. From where I stood, I could see the perfect curve of her cheek as she looked up into James’s face and grinned the grin of a girl completely smitten.
“I told you he was good,” she said, still looking at James. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips. “And I’m absolutely biased, but I really do think he’s got it.”
“You know,” Mr. Neely added, “he won’t get a credit for it because of academic politics, but James here helped the director with every aspect of this production and—”
I told myself the black pit in my stomach was disappointment from the death of my two-minute dream of being introduced to an agent.
It had absolutely nothing to do with the way Girl Who Helps Nurse was touching James’s arm and the way he shrugged out from beneath his father’s hands to pull her closer.
I didn’t stay to listen to more.
If I had been older, if I hadn’t been carrying around a heart that felt like it was made just to ache, maybe it wouldn’t have hit me so hard.
Maybe I would have stayed, waited for their conversation to be over and dragged James back to the dressing room with the grimy corners and asked him straight if he had kissed me, if it had meant something, and if it did…
Why was he with the agent’s niece? I might have demanded he introduce me to the agent, or maybe would have bypassed James entirely and done it myself.
But if the magic was gone—and surely it was—so was my patience.
On the walk back to my dorm and my chatty roommate who had waited up for me with a frozen ravioli meal, I started building the mountain back up, this time with boulders made in equal parts of sadness and the desperate urge not to get hurt again.
Ever. Not if I could help it. And if that meant forgetting magic ever existed, so be it.
It wasn’t worth the ache in my chest, the swift hope and the even swifter disappointment that followed. Nothing was.
I did not see James Neely again for a very, very long time.