The second week of rehearsals starts, and Zara can’t look away from Leopold.
He moves through the studio as if he is on a mission to find all the air in the room and breathe it before anyone else can. He wears a gray suit, which feels strangely formal for the rehearsal process, but Zara has seen him in it so often that by now she has a hard time imagining him in anything else.
He smiles at her. There is nothing in the rest of his face or body that agrees with the smile.
“Shall we?” he asks.
Zara walks away from Carl and Enna, the actors playing Echo’s father and mother. Today is a family rehearsal. On the floor, red tape outlines a space the same size and shape as the one they’ll have to work with onstage.
Red tape spells out Echo’s home.
The stage manager measured and laid out the tape before rehearsal. She sits patiently now, taking notes. Meg is next to her, watching Zara’s every move.
Zara shakes out her shoulders, trying to rid herself of the worries that are piling up, making this worse. She feels the ghost of Leopold’s hands on her waist. His voice, telling her again. All she has to do is get through a blocking scene. She closes her eyes and tries to find neutral. But neutral isn’t enough anymore. She has to find Echo, the way she did with Eli at the Met.
You are not Zara Evans.
Enna flutters from Carl’s side to the edge of the red tape. Echo’s mother is a nervous, ragged butterfly in a dress that looks more like a dirty nightgown. Carl tosses out Echo’s cue and she starts across the hardwood floor.
Leopold rushes to cut her off. He blocks her path with his body. “Walk,” he says.
Zara can’t.
Leopold flourishes both palms, inviting her. “Walk.”
Zara takes a step, her chin up, stride deliberate. Leopold doesn’t budge. Zara catches herself a few inches from him, holding her entire body like a breath.
“Why aren’t you walking?” he asks.
Anger charges her in a sudden wave. Zara pushes into him. It’s a mess of sweat and muscles. “This is Echo,” Leopold says. “Stopped by her parents at every turn. Trapped but fighting.”
Zara knows this feeling — what it means to be stuck in a small box that someone else labeled home. She never even tried to tell her parents about that kiss at the Peter Pan cast party. Maybe not the kiss, specifically, but what it meant. She could see how they would react as if it were already happening. They would nod and look at her with thin, concerned mouths. They wouldn’t push her out of their red-tape-defined home. They would continue to love her, of course. But it would be one more thing they couldn’t get their minds around, mostly because they wouldn’t try.
Like theater.
Like abandoning her senior year of high school.
Zara can’t even think about going back to their tiny world without suffocating.
In a final rush, she breaks past Leopold and into the red-tape box with Carl and Enna. Panting. Pushing. Alive in her own body.
“Yes!” Leopold says. But the approval is gone in a blink. “Now. We can’t have every entrance take this long to block, can we?” He snatches the small victory away from Zara so fast that it makes her dizzy.
“You know how little time we have to rehearse,” he says in a voice that is louder, meant for all the actors, not just her this time. “That means we must push against our own boundaries. Safety is not a word that has a place here. Life is not safe, therefore our theater cannot be.”
Meg is looking at Zara exclusively. Enna is staring out the window as if she’s seeing something other than the skyline. Carl is staring at Enna.
The scene moves on.
Zara may need Leopold to teach her how to walk, but at least she can show him how well she knows her lines. These are the same words that carried her away from the too-small box she was raised in. They wrenched the world open. Wrenched her open. “I have done your bidding these many —”
“That sounds memorized.” Leopold treats the word like mouthwash, rolling it around, spitting it out.
Zara doesn’t know what to say. “. . . It is memorized.”
Leopold throws his hands into the air. He waves at Meg, who rushes to fill in the charged silence. “Echo doesn’t know what she’s going to say until the moment she says it. She’s not reciting lines. You have to feel what she’s feeling first, and let that lead you to the words.”
Meg is so precise, so prompt, that it slows Zara’s runaway heartbeat. “Okay,” she says.
Zara goes back to her mark and starts again, not even waiting for a nod from Leopold. She’s going to show him how well she understands. Zara doesn’t have to reach far to find a girl who knows love is important enough that she’s willing to trade her life for it. It’s always there, just under the surface of her minutes, her days. She’s wanted to fall in love like that ever since she found this play. Or maybe the wanting came first, and the words gave it form.
“I have done your bidding these many years,
But this I will not do.”
The scene speeds on and soon Zara forgets that she’s in a studio, forgets that she’s in a play. She lets herself think — maybe this is it. The moment when she turns from a normal girl into a true actress.
And that’s when Leopold takes her by the wrists and guides her gently to the floor. He doesn’t hurt her — he doesn’t push. Still, he makes it clear that he wants her to lie down, and then he sets his own body over hers so that it blocks out the lights coming from above. Zara doesn’t know what to feel, so she doesn’t feel anything.
“Yes,” he mutters. “This should work.”
He gets up. Zara waits there — afraid to move, afraid to stay.
Leopold snaps his fingers at Carl and then points to Zara.
Carl doesn’t budge. From her strange angle on the floor, Zara can see him cross his arms. “Is this really —”
“Necessary?” Leopold asks. “Yes. I need you to help a fellow actor.”
Carl frowns as he takes Leopold’s place. His body is even larger than Leopold’s, and his face looms over hers like an eclipse. She can see his stubble, a hundred tiny points of darkness. There is a minty aftershave layered over the harsh smell of his body, which is covered in the kind of sweat that comes from rehearsal. From exertion.
“Lower,” Leopold says. “Get close to her.”
Carl holds himself over Zara. She wants to close her eyes, but she knows that Leopold will take it as a sign of weakness. She wants to scream, or stop breathing. But that’s what an amateur would do.
That would get Zara sent back to her red-tape box.
Home.
It would help if Carl looked at Zara instead of focusing his livid blue eyes on a point just to the left of her face. It might help if she felt like they were in this together. Actors working on a scene. If she could find some connection there, it might feel safe. But then she remembers that it’s not supposed to feel safe. That’s the whole point.
Leopold crouches down next to Zara’s head. He drops his voice low. “Now you are trapped. Say the lines again.”
“I have done your bidding these many years,
But this I will not do.”
Carl’s body over hers changes how the words come out of her mouth. There are only two choices. When she stays perfectly still, she feels panicked and desperate. When she moves, Carl moves to contain her. Cages her body with his. Zara’s voice fractures and then builds into strength.
“I have no reason to stay here
And a world of reasons to go.”
The emotions coming out of her are strong and true. With a tight ball of sickness at the back of her throat, Zara realizes — Leopold’s technique worked.