The greenroom is dim. Zara doesn’t turn on the lights, just in case she’s not supposed to be in here.
She finds the most comfortable spot on the well-loved couches and looks over the printed and bound pages that the stage manager handed out at the read-through. This is the fourteenth version of Echo and Ariston that Zara will add to her collection. But it isn’t just another copy of the play. This is Zara’s script. It has Echo’s lines highlighted. Soon it will hold her stage directions scribbled in light, hasty pencil. There is a promise in these pages that was never there before.
For the first time, Zara feels the threat that comes with it.
What if she can’t fall in love like she’s supposed to? That’s what she’s here to do. That’s what Echo’s story is about.
Zara’s secret ripples inside her like dark water. She thinks back to the auditions, Leopold needling: Who do you love most? Zara’s never been in love. Now she has to hope that her director doesn’t notice.
Eli shows up and flicks on the lights. “Have you been lurking here in the dark?” She’s wearing the same sort of outfit she wore at the read-through: gray T-shirt, ripped jeans, stomping boots.
“I wouldn’t call it lurking,” Zara says.
“Skulking?” Eli asks. “Lying in wait?” The words fly out at a pace worthy of David Mamet. Eli is pretty enough to be an actress, smart enough to be a playwright, talented enough to be a lighting designer. Zara feels an inner flutter — intimidation, envy? It can be hard to tell flutters apart.
Eli sets one hand to each side of the doorframe, looking at Zara with an intensity that locks her into place. “I need to ask you something that will make your day much worse.” Zara lets out a small laugh. Eli cocks her head. “I did say worse, right?”
“Yeah. But the way you just . . . said it. I like that.” Zara holds up her script, butterflied open at the spine. “It’s what a character in a Greek play would do. They always say what they feel.”
The small smile that Eli gives Zara goes straight to her head. Eli finally leaves the doorway, but doesn’t make it all the way to the couch. Instead, she hovers halfway across the room and takes the Leatherman out of her belt holster, flipping out several blades in one swift, shiny motion.
“What did you want to ask?” Zara says.
Eli speaks while shifting a long knife back and forth, “What you saw. That day. With Roscoe.”
Zara blinks, and he’s there. His body on the ground. His blood everywhere. She can hear broken breathing, and her own starts to shatter. Zara needs to be done with this story. She recited it to the police, slowly, carefully, and then did her best to forget.
“I’m sorry,” Eli says, curls flying as she shakes her head. “It’s just . . . Roscoe’s death is the wrong color.”
“What does that mean?” Zara asks.
Eli puts away the Leatherman. She paces, stubbing the reinforced rubber toe of her boot against the wall. “So when I’m deciding how to light a scene, there’s a lot of practical stuff I’m thinking about, a lot of little choices that have to do with the equipment and the setup. When it comes down to it, though, whether a moment has the right color is — a feeling. This feels wrong.” She turns directly to Zara. There’s a sadness in her eyes that can’t be faked, even by the world’s best actor. “They’re making it sound like he was some old man whose brain came unwired. Like he couldn’t keep his balance. I’ve seen Roscoe walk a tightrope with two forty-pound lights in each hand.”
What happened to Roscoe was an accident. Zara doesn’t doubt that. But how can she refuse to even talk to Eli about it? That’s how her parents deal with hard things.
They just stop.
“Okay,” Zara says.
Eli leads her out of the greenroom in a disorienting rush, down halls and through an unmarked door. Up a thin metal ladder that never seems to end. Zara looks up and finds herself staring at the bottom of Eli’s boots, the dark valleys of the treads. She wonders what she’s gotten herself into.
When she arrives at the top, there’s nowhere to go except a thin strip of a balcony. “I’m not afraid of heights,” Zara says.
“Good,” Eli says, already halfway across.
Zara raises her voice, to hide the quiver. “I’m not not afraid of heights. I respect heights.”
Eli doesn’t give Zara the pep talk she hoped for, or the rolled eyes that probably deserves. Instead, Eli just stares at Zara, eyes dark and unblinking. That look could pull someone across a room, across an ocean.
Zara takes the balcony one careful step at a time.
When she makes it to Eli’s side, she assumes the worst is over. Then Eli leaps onto the railing. Zara’s heart slides in her chest. Eli settles into a crow’s-nest posture, perfectly casual. “Roscoe was here. He comes up here when he wants to think about the design. It’s the best view in the theater.”
Zara tips her face over the edge of the railing, and the world falls away. She’s looking at the Aurelia the way a bird would look down on the earth. White scrollwork like sand. Rows and rows of red seats, waves on a bloodstained sea.
“It wouldn’t be hard to fall,” Zara says.
“It would if you know what you’re doing,” Eli counters. “Would you die making a cross from upstage left to downstage right?”
“No,” Zara admits.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Eli says with satisfaction. “That’s your job. That’s what you do.”
Zara spent her first rehearsal at the Aurelia as an outsider, the answer to one of these things is not like the other. In one offhand comment, Eli made her feel like a real actress.
“So . . .” Eli says. And Zara can tell that it’s time to revisit what happened to Roscoe, to crawl back inside that moment. She doesn’t want to tell it numbly, the way she did to the police. She takes her time, looking for words that have the shine of truth. The keys to the story. “I was walking the boards. When I got to the edge of the stage, I saw Roscoe in the orchestra pit. I didn’t know who he was then. I rushed down the rehearsal stairs. And I . . . I knelt down. And I called 911. And I talked to him, although he never talked back.”
Zara wants to rush ahead — past the part where worry and fear hit her in a fresh wave — but she holds herself in the moment by force. “No. I’m sorry. I’m wrong. I asked all these questions and he never answered them, but he mumbled something. I don’t know if he even knew I was there. He was staring up and he said . . .” Zara can’t quite grab the word. It’s there, like a character waiting offstage, impossible to see behind the curtains.
Eli waits while Zara presses her fingers to her forehead. “He said . . . angels.”
Eli cants one dark eyebrow. “Angels?”
Zara asks weakly, “Was Roscoe religious?”
Eli puts a thumb to the soft hollow of her neck. “I wore a rosary one day and he went out of his mind with happiness.”
“You’re Catholic?”
The question almost asks itself.
Eli shrugs. “It’s how I grew up. I converted to theater. They have a lot in common: rituals, costumes, a voice that fills this big echoey space and makes you believe in something.” She smiles, and there’s teasing in there. “What about you?” She bounces on the balls of her feet, still crouched on the railing, and Zara feels it in her nerves. “Let me guess. Episcopalian. No. Lutheran.”
Zara knows her last name throws people off. Her dad’s father converted when he married Zara’s grandmother, the one with the theater heritage and the perfect sufganiyot recipe.
“I’m Jewish.” And since there are a hundred different ways to be Jewish and Zara is only one of them, she adds, “Culturally Jewish.”
Eli nods. She drums her fingers on the wooden railing. Zara’s eyes are drawn to her wrists, where the tattoos start. She follows the path all the way up Eli’s arm, to her slim shoulders. There are stars and moons, islands and seas. Flowers that bloom in unexpected places. Zara wants to tell her it’s beautiful.
But that’s not why they’re up here.
“So what do you think it means?” Zara asks. “Angels?”
“Roscoe saw some, I guess. White beams and whatever. He was probably trying to figure out how to do a light plot for it.” Eli’s smile dies a quick death. “What else?” She’s been patient so far, but now there’s an urgent boil underneath her words.
“That’s it,” Zara says with a useless shrug. “Angels.”
She feels it again, how high up they are. Zara looks down at the floor of the balcony, littered with cables and cardboard boxes that hold extra bulbs. But looking down just reminds her that Roscoe fell a very long way.
So she looks up instead.
On the plaster ceiling right above her head, there are paintings of gods and men. And angels. Not the kind with gentle smiles and softly feathered wings. These angels have faces that storm with righteous anger.
Zara taps at Eli’s wrist. She points to the fake sky.
Eli jumps down from the railing to the balcony. She works a cluster of keys from her belt and puts one into the wall right below the angels. Zara doesn’t even notice the door until it’s opening.
On the other side is a sort of dark cave. Its floor is the plaster ceiling of the theater, and a few feet over that, a walkway spans the empty space. It’s even less safe-looking than the balcony. A skeleton of metal and air.
“Where does this go?” Zara whispers. The theater has secrets everywhere, and it feels like speaking too loudly might shake the wrong one loose.
“This leads to the lighting booth,” Eli says. “Only people who know the Aurelia would come this way.”
Eli strides onto the walkway like it’s nothing.
Zara takes a step, looking straight ahead. Eli doesn’t look back, expecting Zara to be brave. But Zara’s nerves tell her that she’s falling. She reaches out and grabs one of Eli’s hands.
And everything stops.
Eli turns around to face her, long, delicate fingers twisting to lock with Zara’s.
Eli holds on tight.