The Bear’s blunt nose gleamed, its ridges of fur coarse with daubs of gold. Here and there, patches of frosted glass shone through the leaf. The statue was smaller than I’d expected, maybe eight inches tall, and almost delicate, with its outstretched paws less fearsome than pleading. It looked like it knew it was in the wrong hands.
As I approached, Isaac turned the Bear over and over. “What do you think?” he said.
My brain said to put it back. Everything I’d just heard made me want to smash the thing against the wall.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Isaac set the Bear on the projector. Its heavy resin base thudded onto the metal. “Is Trav coming up?” Isaac asked. “We should show him.”
“That wasn’t Trav,” I said, trying not to sound so hollow.
“Then who?”
“It’s one of the Minuets. Nihal’s talking to him.”
“Shit.” Isaac made for the corner. “Let’s get our stuff before he tips them off.”
“He won’t,” I said quickly. “He and Nihal are friends.”
“Huh.” He stopped. “I didn’t know the Minuets had ‘friends.’ Isn’t that against their cult rules?”
“Yeah, well.” I approached the projector, tracing the contorted line of the Golden Bear’s back. “People probably say the same thing about us.”
“And they’re right,” he said. “I don’t really care about anyone else.” Isaac stopped on the other side of the projector, folding his arms on top of it. We looked at each other for a second. His attention flickered down to my lips, and my body was too warm, all of a sudden. I remembered how kissing him felt, a searing memory.
I leaned on the projector too. Our arms lined up against each other, and he slipped his hand over mine. “How’s your face doing?” he asked.
“Not bad.”
“Good.” His thumb passed across my knuckles.
Feet clattered up the stairs. We jerked back as Trav appeared in the threshold, scanning the room.
His eyes lit on the chest, and he sighed. “Thank God. Let’s get this to Arlington.”
As he made for the chest, he passed the Golden Bear, and his steps faltered. He stopped by the projector, his eyes fixing on the statue.
“I found it under the—” Isaac started.
Trav’s eyes narrowed. Then, in one sharp motion, he smacked the Bear into the air.
It caught the light as it spun for a split second, resin base over distended golden jaws. Then it crashed to the floor, shattering into a thousand glass splinters. And the most wonderful look spread across Trav’s face, a look I’d never seen before—a broad, dizzying, don’t-give-a-damn sort of smile.
“My mistake,” he said. He crossed to the corner, hoisted the chest, and carried it toward the steps. “Let’s go.”
For once, both Isaac and I were wordless. We followed, stunned, as he sauntered down the stairs.
Connor had disappeared by the time we entered the foyer. Trav split off from us to carry the chest back to Arlington. We offered to help, but Trav seemed determined to martyr himself. “Go home, save voice, and sleep,” he ordered, already marching off with the chest, so we trudged through the snowy plains back toward the south of campus.
Our footsteps crunched. Nihal had been quiet since we’d left. I wanted to ask if he was okay, but there was no way to split up from Isaac to do it. The blank look on his face worried me.
Ahead, the theater quad peeked out of the night, dark silhouettes gilded with lamplight. I tried to steer us right, toward the street.
“Can we swing through Palmer?” Nihal said. He sounded shaky. On the verge of a breakdown. “I need to . . . um, to use the bathroom.”
Isaac shot me a questioning look. I gave my head a shake as we veered toward Palmer.
We pushed inside as the bell tower boomed a solemn 11:00 p.m. Palmer’s side door opened onto a hall lined with dressing rooms that snaked beneath the mainstage theater. Framed posters of student shows crowded the cinderblock walls, signed by their casts, dating back to the forties. The posters made this hall popular with visiting parents, all obsessed with picking out famous people’s signatures from when they’d been our age.
Nihal sped forward, head ducked, and disappeared into the guys’ bathroom. Isaac flitted from poster to poster, studying the ones with celebrities. I was restless. The sooner we got out of here, the better.
My eyes fixed on one of the girls’ dressing rooms, an individual one reserved for a lead. It still had Anabel’s name on the door. I could practically see her in front of the wide mirror, beneath the wide white bulbs, penning thick eyeliner in above her eyelashes. I’d always wanted one of those rooms to myself.
“You okay?”
I startled, looking over at Isaac. He leaned against the wall beside me, fiddling with the zipper on his coat.
“Yeah,” I said, leaning next to him. Against him.
“Long semester,” he said absentmindedly.
I glanced over at him. He looked distant. “I bet,” I said. “College apps and all. You’re done, right?”
He sighed. “Yeah, thank God.”
“Where’d you apply?”
“Um.” Isaac rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re going to laugh.”
“Will I?”
He glanced over at me. “I applied to sixteen schools.”
“What?” That seemed like a terrible way to spend five hundred dollars or so.
“I know.” He tilted his head back, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t even know why. My parents didn’t ask me to, I just—Trav was applying to fifteen, and my friends from home were doing a dozen each. So.” He rubbed his forehead. “Waste of money. I just wish I knew what was happening already. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even care if I get into half these places.” He thought for a second. “Okay, no, I care. But I care less about getting in than just knowing, you know? That there’s something after this that I’ll be happy with.”
“You think you’ll miss it?” I said. “Kensington, I mean?”
Isaac laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “Just, of course I will. I had no idea who I was before I got here.”
The door to the boys’ bathroom swung open down the hall, and Nihal drifted through. His silence from before had turned to sluggishness. He stopped just outside the door.
“Ready to go?” Isaac called, but Nihal didn’t move.
“Nihal, come on,” I said.
Still nothing. Then his eyes fixed on mine, and he said in a small voice, “Julian, can I talk to you?” It barely carried down the hall.
Trading a look with Isaac, I saw my worry reflected in his eyes. I turned back to Nihal. “Yeah.” I jogged down the hall to him. “What’s up?” I said as I broke from my jog, ready to console him, all but ready to tell him to cry into my shoulder if he wanted. Nihal pushed back into the bathroom. I followed him in.
As the door shut behind us, Nihal swung the first stall open.
My body went cold. A poster for the monologue showcase hung on the back of the door. I remembered Ash Crawford saying, “The best place to hang up posters . . .”
Nihal’s brown eyes brushed me up and down, and I felt an inch tall. His scrutiny turned me into a jester in my false face and bulky clothes—an actor who’d walked out into the world wearing some inappropriate costume.
“So,” he said, tapping the photograph. “That’s you. You’re a girl?”
There was no use denying it.
I slid my glasses off and nodded.
A long moment passed. Nihal looked back at the poster, then down at the water beaded on the rubber ridges of his Bean boots. He tugged at the edge of his turban. Deep red, today.
He was waiting for me to fix it. Waiting for my apology. Back in the Prince tower, the same air of unhappy disappointment had hung over him.
What could I say? “Sorry” seemed so minuscule.
My time ran out. Nihal spoke. “I feel like an absolute idiot right now,” he said, as frankly and disinterestedly as he would’ve said any other sentence.
I blinked fast, baffled. Everyone had bought it, not just him. He had to know that, right?
“I’m just thinking,” he went on, “about the night I told you all that about me and Connor.” His lips moved a bit farther than necessary to form each word, and otherwise every other muscle of his face was perfectly still. This was anger. This was what it looked like on him. My heart dropped.
“I was standing there,” he said, “and I was thinking, Thank God, someone who gets it. I felt lucky, you know? Grateful. I’d been so nervous about telling everyone, to the point where I literally felt ill, and suddenly, oh, divine providence! Here’s someone who can get why, and who can understand what it feels like. All of it. That’s what I was thinking.” His mouth tugged down at both corners, and I realized all at once that he was on the verge of tears.
He finally met my eyes. The firestorm of anger and hurt there made me want to hide my face behind my hands.
“And what were you thinking?” he said. “You must’ve been standing there calculating. How do I act like I understand? How can I fool him about this, too? What an inconvenient roadblock.”
I had no words. That was wrong, so wrong. But how could I convince him? What was the strategy here?
“I can’t do this. What a cherry on top of the perfect day.” Nihal drew the back of his hand over his eye, crushing back a tear before it arrived. He sucked down a huge, shaking breath.
“I wasn’t trying to fool you,” I said. “You have to believe me. It wasn’t—it wasn’t about you.”
Hurt bled across his expression. “Of course it wasn’t,” he said. “I didn’t say it had to be. Funny how that works. Sometimes you want people to—not even to put you first, or anything, but to just think about you a little, you know?”
His words expanded outward. This wasn’t just me. This was Connor lashing out first and apologizing later. This was his parents treating him like an afterthought, gushing over his med school sister like he didn’t exist. This was everything in his life, and I was the tipping point.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You deserve better.”
Nihal looked so tired. The anger in the air had gotten lost somewhere.
I peeled off every layer I had. He deserved my honesty, even if it was too late. “There were a million times I was going to say something, but I kept choking, because, I guess, what if you hated me, or gave me away? I—I tried out for Sharps because of the competition; it was supposed to be simple. I just . . . got in over my head. I got scared.”
Nihal sized me up with new eyes. His careful examination of me seemed complete. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said in a voice stiff with formality. “Everyone’s scared.”
He walked out. The door drifted shut, leaving me drifting, too, out on a massive ocean. I’d floated out into the doldrums and only just realized I had no map, no oars, no compass. There was no getting back to where I’d started.
It took me a long time to get ahold of myself. I came out fifteen minutes later to find an empty hall. Isaac was gone.
He must have followed Nihal. Maybe he’d tried to explain for me. Hopefully not—it wouldn’t do anything except get Nihal mad at him. Not productive. Not useful.
None of this had been useful. Thirty-six hours, and I’d be slinking away with my tail between my legs, a failure whose chances had run right out. Nihal would tell the guys. That would be it.
I slipped my glasses into my pocket. The poster across the hall caught my eye: Les Misérables. The cast stood in double-file, military coats neatly buttoned, tattered dresses hanging off shoulders. All smiling as if they’d been invited back for a half-dozen curtain calls.
I moved down the hall, out through the hush of night, and back to Burgess. In my room, I shed my disguise.
Somebody was humming in the shower when I got there, in the stall next to me. “The Clockmaker.” Over and over, as too-hot water coated the gummy flip-flops on my feet.
When I got back to my room, I packed up my life at Kensington.
Pencils and notebooks went in my backpack. The clothes I would take home barely filled my suitcase. None of the boys’ clothes—I folded all that into a brown paper bag and left it on my dresser. They could do what they wanted with it when I left. Good riddance.
My desk lamp flickered, casting a blip of darkness over the room. The momentary dark reminded me how exhausted I was. Today seemed years long.
Anabel’s knock came on my door. I glanced at the clock—eleven thirty, my next-to-last check-in. “Present.”
Running a hand over the Les Mis poster by my window, I thought of the smiling Kensington cast, and a strange sense of peace washed over me. Why should I stay? What did I have to show for this place, after all? A list of failed auditions, a roll call of people I’d let down, and a fistful of rose-tinted memories.
And Isaac. For one afternoon, Isaac. I shouldn’t have let him sneak up on me.
I crawled onto my bed, resisted the urge to collapse beneath the sheets. Another quick series of knocks hit the door. “I’m here, Anabel,” I repeated.
The door opened, but it wasn’t Anabel.
It was like he’d read my mind.
Isaac closed the door. “Hey.” He crossed the room, taking in my messy suitcase, my half-opened drawers, and the makeup spread across my desk. He stopped by my bed.
“You doing okay?” Isaac said. He unbuttoned his felt coat, loosening the scarf at his neck.
“How’s Nihal?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He didn’t say anything. We went back for check-in, and . . . yeah, nothing.”
My hands were folded tight in my lap. “Right.”
“How’d he find out?”
“There was a poster in Palmer for my Greek Monologue showcase.”
A tight silence.
Isaac’s hand landed on mine, his string-roughened fingertips a reassuring scrape. “It’s okay,” he said.
“But it’s not,” I managed. The words broke the seal. For the second time that day, my eyes burned with tears. I hadn’t meant for it to be like this. I’d been thinking only of the music, and of the future.
No. You were thinking only of yourself.
I tried my best to keep my breaths quiet. It was late. Nothing worse than an inconsiderate breakdown. Nothing worse than being selfish.
“Hey,” Isaac said. “Hey. Blue jay.”
I managed a bit of a smile.
His hand weighed briefly on the side of my neck, still cold from outside, and then he lifted my chin. I looked into his kind, uncertain eyes. “So it’s not okay,” he said. “But it’ll be better tomorrow. At least a little.”
I wiped my eyes, avoiding the tender swollen spots.
“There’s the competition, and then he has all of break to think it over,” Isaac said, building up steam. “I swear, by the time we get back, start up rehearsals and everything, he’ll probably think it’s funny.”
My throat grew tight.
“Isaac?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not coming back.”
The words sat there between us, impossibly huge. I searched his face for shock. Confusion. I didn’t find it. Instead, his eyebrows drew close in determination.
“You can’t quit,” he said. “It doesn’t matter that you’re a girl. We need you there.”
“No, I meant—”
“I need you there.” His words rushed out. An accident.
Our eyes locked, our mouths shut. My heart went missing for a moment, wandered off between beats, leaving me with tingling fingertips.
I sank into a strange haze. For once, my head wasn’t consumed with whatever might come next. The boy in front of me was a past and a present and a future. I felt outside time altogether, with him looking at me like that, knowing everything and wanting somehow to know more.
Nothing is so startling, so awakening, as when someone looks at you and you know they see you. Not just what you’ve polished to smoothness and perfection but the jagged edges, the rough patches, and the uncertain tangles in your center. All of you.
I rose to my knees with a creak from the bed frame and cupped my palm against the back of his neck. I leaned in and pressed my lips to the line of his eyebrow. The tip of his nose. He was perfectly still; I could tell his breath was held. I kissed his mouth deep and slow, and as he shifted against me, I closed my eyes tight and let myself vanish. I tilted my head and breathed him in, a slow inhalation through my sore nose. He was as cold as new snow. The lapels of his coat were chilly as I held them.
He drew back, his coat rustling. “Hey,” he whispered, his hands curled loosely around my forearms. “We’re going to figure this out, okay? I’ll help with the guys—it’ll work out. I know it’ll—”
“Hush.” I hooked one finger into the neck of his T-shirt and pulled. He slipped up onto the bed with me. I pushed his coat off his shoulders, hung it from one of the bedposts, and he kicked his winter boots off. Then his hands warmed my waist, and the rough wool of his scarf scraped up against my collarbones. I tugged it from around his neck and let my hand trace the angle of his jaw, the column of his neck, the light muscles over his bony shoulders. We keeled toward the bed and kissed, and with his back to the light on my desk, his face was shadowed and his lips were sweet, and his crooked fingers drew music out of my skin.
He touched me with the barest traces, like I was something he was imagining with his hands, some formless collection of fire or wind. I pressed closer, urging him, wanting him, until his hands closed tightly around my waist. We kissed for God knew how long. Long enough for my lips to learn the rhythms he kissed by, forceful until he turned meek, wanting until he turned fearful, the music until the quiet.
“Isaac?” I said, finally.
“Yeah?”
I swallowed my pride. It was late and dark and I didn’t want to be alone. “Will you stay?”
“Sure,” he murmured. “Didn’t want to put my shoes back on, anyway.”
A smile tugged at my lips. “Hit the light, would you?”
He leaned over to flick the desk lamp off. The sudden darkness made him tentative as he settled against me, settling one wiry arm over my waist. He dropped a kiss onto my forehead before drawing the covers over us.
“I like winding up with you,” he murmured into the stillness, a breath’s worth of words that ghosted across my cheek.
“I . . . yeah, you too,” I whispered back, inelegant, insufficient. My voice, which had gotten me so far, gave out. My heart pulsed slow and painful and full. I moved closer, holding on tight to him, and for an instant I felt like I had it: the whole world, gathered up in my arms.