Off Book

        Pacing the empty street, she muttered to herself under the dim glow of a streetlamp. She looked sleek in her red dress and matching elbow-length gloves, her hair piled high in elegant curls, given any more than a cursory glance she was clearly little more than a girl. The dress had been cinched in the back, but the neckline was bunched and ill-fitting.  Crimson-stained lips and slashes of dark blush only marred her pale, youthful skin and highlighted the panic in her eyes.

               Down the road a low fog rolled in. Its silvery curls crept towards the girl. She stopped pacing and wrapped a loose white shawl tight around her bare shoulders.

               On the corner, on the outside edge of the circle of the streetlight, a dark figure appeared in the thick of the mist. The fog erased his outline, giving him an indeterminate shape, and his eyes were hidden under the wide brim of a jet-black fedora. Only the angle of his face and the hunch of his shoulders gave one the unmistakable impression that he was watching the girl. A sword gleamed at his side as he drew it slightly.

The girl looked the other way, oblivious to his presence.

            The dark figure suddenly doubled over and burst out in ragged, hacking coughs. As the girl spun around to face him, light flooded the scene from overhead.

               “Sorry,” the formerly dark figure wheezed between coughs. He whisked his hat off and fanned the fog away from the teenaged face revealed beneath. “Sorry, can we turn the fog machine down a little?” he asked heavenward.

               “Okay, let’s just make it a fifteen-minute break.” A nasally voice drawled into the God mic, reverberating around the theatre. “Back at two forty.”

               “Thank you, two forty,” the girl and the cloaked boy echoed. The boy made his way downstage, still racked with coughs and the girl followed behind him, subtly fingering off the mic pack strapped around her waist.

               “I swear to God, James,” she hissed. “If you ruin my first lead role coughing all over my big death scene, I will absolutely kill you.” She patted his back in an off-handed way in case the techs were watching, James presumed. She leaned in closer until her lips tickled his ear. “I will make the rest of your freshman year a living Hell. Get it together!”

               As she clicked away stage-right on red heels, James’s friend, Daniel, sidled up to him from the empty seats of the audience. He was dressed top to bottom in black with a headset perched around his shoulders. “Hey man,” he said. “I saw that. I think Elle’s totally into you.”

               James closed his eyes and flopped backwards, splayed flat on the stage. Why had he ever let Daniel convince him to audition?

He ruminated on it while he sat on the ragged couch in the greenroom and nursed the dixie cup of lukewarm fountain water Ms. Hammersmith had handed him. Last month he hadn’t once in his life considered doing a play. Sure, he liked movies, but the experience of watching gorgeous, demi-god celebrities flouncing around on screen wasn’t even a distant third cousin to the experience of plastering on stage make-up and drilling his own awkward lines.

               “Why, Delilah,” he had to say at one point. “Have you ever heard the trill of the bay-breasted warbler after the May rains?” Who talked like that? Not just now, but had anyone ever in the long history of humankind talked that way?

               We’ll never get in, Daniel had assured him outside the audition room. Ms. Hammersmith takes her techs from the kids who don’t get call backs and we’ll be able to hang out after school all month and go to the legendary Senior cast parties. Besides, it’s always almost all girls in the play except for the die-hard theatre kids. It’s like the same thing as joining the cheer team without having to learn how to do all those flips.

               And Daniel had been right. About Daniel. After Daniel screeched through eight bars of To Dream the Impossible Dream, he’d landed a spot on the crew, stage-left, and was already writing notes back and forth with a sophomore in the ensemble.

               James, however, had fixated on learning his song. Years of singing along to showtunes in the car with his mom and church hymns with his grandmother had clicked into place in his brain and resulted in a standing ovation from Ms. Hammersmith. The next thing James knew, he was memorizing three songs he’d never heard before from an ancient musical and an over-the-top villain monologue that outdid Dr. Evil.

               He didn’t have time to think about the girls on the crew or the cast, not that he had ever honestly wanted to. While hormones had driven his friends’ interests in relationships to new heights, James had been content to remain firmly in a supporting role in their lives as the person they complained to during raid nights. That had been the entirety of anything he could call a hobby. Until now.

               Now he liked twisting his way through the lines, contorting his voice and expressions until he hit that perfect delivery: something almost believable. He liked singing the same songs over and over until the settled deep into his bones and the choruses set the soundtrack of his dreams each night. And more than anything he loved the thrill of being on-stage. It was the first time he’d had so many faces focused on his every move and the thrill of it overpowered his awkwardness. And he hadn’t even made it past rehearsals.

               And if Elle was an insufferable leading lady, well, at least he got to kill her each night.

               “Two minutes remaining,” Ms. Hammersmith sang out as she flitted through the greenroom on her way back to her booth.

               A mousy girl shoved Daniel out of the make-up room and giggled as he leaned back in for a discrete kiss on the cheek. As Daniel passed him on his way back to stage-left he promised James he would set the fog machine lower this time.

               Elle let the dressing room door bang shut behind her and sneered at James. “Think you can make it through your act two entrance this time?”

               “I don’t know,” James replied with a shrug. He leaned forward and composed his features into a look of deepest concern. “Do you think you can make it through that high C in the closing number this time?”

               Elle rewarded him with an involuntary growl before she turned away and slammed through the stage door.

               James’s face broke as the door swung back into place, his shock at his own confidence plain as day. He hoped his jab would help her motivation for their big fight as he stood up and fitted his fedora back over his hairspray coated head.

               As he swept back his cloak and strode out to the stage, he marveled over the changes in himself. He the best way to find out who he was would be first becoming someone else.