Eli leads Zara down Fifth Avenue, the wall of Central Park running along one side, the cobbled sidewalk under their boots. It’s a medium-freezing day, but the sun is shining like it’s got something to prove before it goes down. Eli is not looking forward to full-blown winter. She hates the cold, and how by January it feels like there’s only one color left in the entire city, gray from street to sky.
Right now there’s a red sliver of sun, turning the world pink and yellow and orange. There are jackets in bright colors, which will soon be replaced by dark wool and long puffy coats like trash bags.
Eli turns to face Zara, braving the wind, as a few curls make a jailbreak from under her knitted hat. Zara is painted in beautiful colors, but the look on her face is still furtive, as if Eli has stolen her from the Aurelia. Maybe she has.
“Where are we going?” Zara asks again.
Eli hasn’t answered the question yet. She’s learned a thing or two from doing theater, like how to build the suspense.
The park breaks open and there is a building: huge, classical, stunning. Zara’s eyes pretty much triple in size. The Met is one of the only places in the city that can hold a candle to the Aurelia. As Eli leads Zara up the wide, shallow steps toward the arches and pillars, she gets a stretched-out feeling in her heart. A hopeful ache.
She needs this as much as Zara does.
The light plot is done, but Eli has no idea if Leopold will like it. And if he doesn’t, she’s done. Her job at the Aurelia, her dream career, gone in the time that it would take to hit a single cue. And then there’s Roscoe, and the questions that hang over Eli’s head like dark, gray clouds.
Eli leads Zara into a large room where they purchase tickets. Eli says, “Hey, let’s check our coats.”
“Why?” Zara asks.
“Why?” Eli repeats. “I’m afraid if I turn my head, you’ll run back to the theater at full speed.”
Eli hopes for a laugh, but Zara looks pained.
It’s not her job to make Zara Evans feel better. And it’s definitely not her job to flirt. Zara helped Eli when she needed it, so she’s doing the new girl a favor in return. This has nothing to do with Eli’s crush.
She tells herself that so many times that she almost believes it.
They step into a courtyard with a high ceiling that feels like it’s open to the night sky. Dark blue swims down through squares of glass. There are no paintings in this room. It’s a lot of statues in grim bronze or glittering white marble. Everyone is Greek and Roman and gorgeous.
Almost everyone is nude.
Zara looks around, but Eli can tell that she isn’t really seeing anything. The girl is completely in her own head. Eli’s had that kind of week, too. But sometimes a person has to step outside of that and really see the world again. You can’t make art if you have nothing to make it out of.
Eli circles around a trio of women. Their dimpled backsides shine like beacons. “The Three Graces,” Zara reads off the card on the base of the statue.
“These ladies are nice,” Eli says. “But they’re not what we’re looking for.”
She winds a path around the pedestals. Zara follows so close that she’s like Eli’s impatient shadow. Eli stops in front of a girl. She has one hand at her naked breast, the other clenched tight at her side. At the base of the statue, small waves lick at the girl’s feet, hungry as flames.
“Echo,” Zara whispers, and looks up at Echo’s stubborn body, her beautiful face.
That’s what Zara looks like. Not every detail, but the general idea is the same. Eli doesn’t say that out loud, of course. There are limits to how much truth she can tell a girl who probably doesn’t even like other girls.
Also: the nudity thing.
“How did you find her?” Zara asks.
“Hannah,” Eli says, and it comes out bitter as black coffee, like her ex broke her heart last Tuesday. The logical part of her knows that it happened a year ago and she should be over it by now. But here’s the real truth: time doesn’t work in neat, predictable ways. It doubles over on itself. Finds new ways to hurt you. “Hannah was at Tisch — acting major, but she took all these fine-art classes. We would come up here on Sunday mornings after an ungodly stack of pancakes. I mean, when we were dating.”
There it is. The ex-girlfriend, the outing, all at once. Eli can’t always tell how much people guess. How much they assume.
Zara nods and swallows. The brightness of her cheeks does not escape Eli. Is she embarrassed? Flustered? Does thinking about girls that way, together, make her confused or excited? “Was she pretty?” Zara asks.
“Sure,” Eli says. “She was pretty and then we broke up.” She doesn’t mean to add more, but she’s terrible at keeping her mouth shut around Zara Evans. “It was a big deal when I moved away from my family, to the city. To be with her. It was for her as much as the work. That’s ridiculous, right?”
She waits for Zara to agree, but instead Zara shakes her head emphatically.
“I couldn’t go home after Hannah broke up with me. I loved it here too much. So I asked my family to give me a year to make it work. And to put away money for school. That was always part of the plan. But the thing that made it all harder was Hannah never wanting to see me again. You’d think, in a city this big, it wouldn’t be a problem. But we’d been living together. I worked at her theaters. I hung out with her friends. That was . . .” Eli uses her fingers to scatter imaginary dust. “Gone. I went six months without a gig. I didn’t have anything saved up for school, and I was sneaking into theater classes at NYU just to get that feeling.”
Now Zara’s nodding. Because here’s the thing: once you start doing theater, it’s impossible to stop. Once you make room for it, there’s this empty, echoing space inside you that absolutely needs to be filled with late-night rehearsals and sweat and motion and lights and people.
“One of the kids there hooked me up with a bottom-feeder job. Echo and Ariston at an experimental theater. Doing the world’s most heartbreaking play while I lived through my own love-shaped catastrophe. I was crashing with people I didn’t know, sleeping on Ikea futons, living from ramen to ramen. That’s when Roscoe found me.” She still remembers the day she met him. How he showed up at the stage door with his heavy-lidded eyes and his fairy-godmother plan.
“Light-board operators kept quitting on him,” she says. “But it wasn’t because he was mean. Just hard to figure out. Talking to Roscoe was like learning another language.” Zara cocks her head. More words come out. “I’ve always had to do that. Change how I talk to people. English or Spanish, electrical wiring or artsy art stuff. Queer, not queer.” She cuts her eyes to Zara. “How am I doing with Zara-speak?”
Zara laughs, looking down at her shoes. “Ummmm.” Her straight brown hair waterfalls over the side of her face. “You’re almost fluent.”
Eli has always been good with colors, so it’s easy to name the one that quick-blooms inside her: red.
Bright red.
“When I was having a hard time with Echo, I would visit her.” She nods up at the statue. “Watch the sunlight move across her body.”
That wasn’t what Eli meant to say, but Zara doesn’t seem to notice. She stands up and circles the statue. Takes a deep breath — and starts to change. Her chest strains forward, her feet searching out the right places.
“What are you doing?” Eli asks.
“Playing the statue game,” Zara says, like it’s a thing everybody knows about. “When I was little, I thought it would turn me into someone else, but only if I got it just right.” Zara checks the statue, makes adjustments. The clenched fist. The proud cast of her mouth. She closes her eyes, because that’s what Echo’s doing.
Eli lifts a hand and lets it hover for a second. “Is it okay if I . . .” Zara seems to understand, because she gives a tiny nod. Her eyelashes are so dark, her eyelids so delicate. Eli puts a finger to Zara’s chin, tilts it a fraction of an inch. “There.”
A smile spreads across Zara’s lips. They’re covered in clear gloss, which lets the true color, a brownish pink, shine through. She has a little freckle trapped inside her top lip, just left of center.
“You’re almost making me like this play again,” Eli says.
Zara’s eyes snap open. “How can you dislike Echo and Ariston?”
Eli knows that this play is Zara’s life. But that doesn’t mean she can hold back her own truth. “Look at those waves.” She nods at the water rising to cover the statue girl’s feet.
“So?” Zara asks, looking full-on betrayed. As if Eli has the power to hurt her that deeply.
“Why does Echo have to die?” Eli asks, reaching for her Leatherman, stopping just short of flicking the blades. “Because she fell in love with the wrong person? Because she did it on her own terms?” Eli’s hands feel dangerously empty, but playing with knives would be a good way to get kicked out of the museum.
Zara stays quiet, like maybe Eli asked her something she’s never asked herself before.
“I don’t hate the play,” Eli admits. “I hate the ending.”