Zara takes the train back to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving. The world outside blurs and slows. Blurs and slows. She passes from brick and cement to dead grass and the exposed bone of winter branches.
Zara stares down at her hands, thinking about how they touched Adrian Ward with tenderness and then with a white-hot energy, as pure and stripped down as the wire at the center of a lightbulb. All while her mind was on Eli.
She gets out her phone.
Are you headed home?
The answer comes in less than a minute.
Yes. Metro North is my pumpkin carriage. Don’t tell anybody but I just turned back into a teenager from Connecticut.
As long as you keep my secret, too.
Which is???
Zara can feel her heartbeat in her fingertips.
I intend to eat an entire cranberry pie WITH crumble topping.
Deal.
Zara stares at the little screen. It was supposed to be a joke, but Leopold really wouldn’t approve. She remembers him, his hand on her back, no one is coming to the Aurelia to see a modern slob. Cosima, shaking her head over Zara’s body, you look wrong. Zara has never wanted to be the kind of actress who doesn’t eat, even if eating costs her roles. She’s always known that plenty of directors default to skinny girls, but it’s never really shaken her before. Things feel different now. Zara doesn’t know why — because more people will be watching? Because she’s playing opposite a boy whose muscles are the definition of perfect? Because this is Echo, and she’s always secretly known she isn’t beautiful enough for the role?
She thinks of Eli, whose arms are like summer branches, whose waist is a long, smooth slope. Whose last girlfriend was an actress.
Zara’s parents hug her at the train station. Her mom even cries a little. When they get home, she helps her dad prepare green beans and sweet potatoes while her mom focuses on pie, and they don’t stop cooking until noon the next day, even though it will only be the three of them eating. Zara loads her plate. When she gets to the table, it takes less time than she expected for her parents to bring up boyfriends. Apparently her old one called to see if she has time to hang out.
“No,” she says, automatically. She hasn’t thought about him in two months. She’s thought about Eli twelve times in the last minute.
“Have you met anyone new?” her mom asks, treading carefully, like it’s a minefield and not an ordinary, everyday conversation. “Anyone . . . nice?”
She thinks about Eli’s dark eyes, her easy bravery. Zara wants to bring back a story to make her smile. “Yeah,” she says. “There’s this girl who’s doing the lights for the show. She’s about my age. She’s” — Zara can’t help smiling as she echoes her mother’s word — “nice.”
Her parents exchange a confused look.
That’s it. No follow-up questions. No awkward congratulations. No we love you no matter whats.
“How are rehearsals going?” her dad asks, changing the subject with the most obvious question in the world. It’s also the question Zara wants to answer the least. She pushes food from one side of her plate to the other and thinks about how Leopold pushes her around the studio, whispering in her ear.
“Good.”
She looks out the window, at clouds that ache with snow. Zara had no idea how easy it would be to lie. It’s not the same as acting, even though it would look the same to anyone on the outside. If acting is a key to some kind of truth, this is locking the truth up tight.
Her mom made the cranberry crumble pie just for her, and Zara knows that if she skips it, her parents will assume something is wrong. She takes the world’s tiniest splinter and a single dollop of whipped cream, excuses herself, and goes to her room.
There are all of her favorite plays lined up on the hand-painted shelf over her bed, the bite-size paperbacks waiting for her to flip through them. And there are her most-loved plays, her Echo and Aristons, covered with margin notes, little shreds of herself that she left at every age from twelve to eighteen.
Zara sits down gingerly on the edge of the bed.
It feels like a stranger lives here. A ghost.
A girl who doesn’t exist anymore.
Zara takes out her phone. She wants to tell Eli that she just came out to her parents but she doesn’t think it worked. They’ll probably go to bed tonight talking about how it’s nice that she made a new friend.
Hey.
She wants to say more than hey, but every time she lets herself keep typing, it gets too serious. Too fast. Soon she’ll be telling Eli that she wants to spend every minute with her. That they should probably have babies.
Eli’s text shows up a few minutes later.
Hey. Have you OD’d on family time yet?
Zara laughs and writes back.
Bone-dry stuffing and relationship talk for dessert.
Ha! My family doesn’t ask me those questions anymore.
Why not?
I only brought one girl home, and let’s say they did not fall in love with her. They just assume that will happen with my next girlfriend.
Zara folds onto the bed, holding herself tight across the stomach. My next girlfriend. Of course Eli will date someone else, maybe soon. The idea is perfectly reasonable, and it makes Zara feel perfectly sick. She polishes off her pie in a few bites. She gets in her pajamas and stays in them for the rest of the trip, eating nothing but plain turkey and soup. She spends her time with Echo and Ariston, worrying about how she’ll impress Leopold when she gets back.
At night, she dreams about Roscoe and wakes up screaming.
Her mom insists that she’s come down with some kind of flu and shouldn’t go back, but Zara reminds her that this isn’t school or a regular job — she can’t just call in sick. Besides, Zara’s not actually sick. She’s terrified.
Of course, she doesn’t tell them that.
Her mom insists on sending the rest of the cranberry crumble back to the city with Zara. After one more stale-smelling train ride, she rushes to the Aurelia. She doesn’t even have time to stop at Kestrel’s because the trains are running behind schedule. Zara shows up for the run-through exactly on time, which she knows is considered late in the theater world. The stage manager gives her a hard glare. Zara feels the right amount of guilty, but she’s also glittering from too much coffee and the fact that she gets to see Eli again. It only takes a second to spot her in the corner of the studio. Eli’s black curls hang down in perfect spirals over a gray sweater. Her jeans are still ripped, but it’s gotten cold enough that she layers black tights underneath them.
Zara walks up to her, and it feels like she’s back on the train. The rest of the room blurs. Slows. Zara has never felt this way about a girl before — which is immediately overshadowed by a larger truth. Zara has never felt this way about anyone.
Eli holds out her arm before Zara can even greet her. “Leftovers. I wish I could say I made them, but my mom and my brother did most of the cooking. I pretty much sat around and acted like a human armchair for my cousins and my niece to climb on.” When Zara doesn’t say anything — because she can’t find a single word that’s good enough — Eli fills the silence. “There’s macaroni and cheese in there, and plátanos. We only had side dishes left.”
“Thanks.” Zara takes the little plastic container. Suddenly, her appetite floods back into her. She rushes to her bag and comes back with an aluminum tin, holding it out in both hands, turning the dreaded pie into an offering.
“The famous cranberry crumble,” Eli says, pulling it close and taking a closed-eyes whiff. Zara can smell it, too. Cinnamon and tart berries. “How was your trip home?” Eli asks. “Did things get better?”
“They stayed the same. Which is pretty much the problem. I think I’m going to skip the day off for Chanukah.” Zara had to fight to get that day off in the first place, and now she doesn’t even want it. She’ll tell her parents that Leopold needs her for rehearsal. They won’t understand, but they won’t be able to stop her, either.
“Holidays in the city,” Eli says with a warm smile. “Sounds good to me.”
Part of Zara wants to say something, and part of her is happy just to stand there. To feel the strange combination of stillness and rush that comes from being near Eli. To run her eyes over those blue-green tattoos for the first time in weeks and learn them like lines in a play.
But then she sees the rest of the actors finishing warm-ups, which she hasn’t even started. She gives Eli a quick, lopsided grin and finds a spot in the corner to do a few stretches. Eli joins the rest of the designers where they’ve lined up along the far wall. Cosima with her pins, Barrett with a props list and a smug look. He’s going over something with Leopold when the director simply walks away — and all heads turn.
“This marks our last rehearsal in the studios, before we move to the stage and take our rightful place,” he says. “This is also the designers’ chance to watch before we slip into tech and they have to make everything work. The path to a perfect opening night begins here.” Zara expects more of a grand speech, but Leopold stops. He stands there in utter silence for a moment. Then he winces, as if he’s touched a hot stove that no one else can see.
“Let’s begin,” Meg says. “Shall we?”
The stage manager tells them to take their places, and Leopold returns to the long table, where Meg holds out a chair. She is so careful with him. So caring. She makes sure that he has water. Her pale-blue eyes are slicked with concern as he buries his face in his hands.
“Where’s Enna?” Toby asks.
Everyone turns around in circles, and a few people check the hallway, but no one can find her. The rest of the actors trade looks. No one seems terribly surprised. Zara remembers what Enna told her about low expectations.
The assistant stage manager goes to look for her.
Even with the ancient radiator clanking, the studio is shiver-worthy. They work through the first act without Enna. The stage manager reads her lines flat, which drags the energy down. Leopold is barely watching, anyway. His hands never stray far from his face. He downs his glass of water again and again, Meg refilling it over and over.
The mirror is a cold reflection of act 3, scene 2. The lovers meet.
Zara wants Leopold to see what she’s capable of. That she has something to bring to a love story. Adrian and Zara form a dance with their lines, their delivery smooth and seamless. That rehearsal before Thanksgiving must have worked because Zara can feel the difference. Adrian is more than off book. He’s right there with her, inside the scene. He holds out a hand to Zara’s face. Where before there was nothing — a crackle of brightness.
But Leopold is silent, a thumb and a forefinger pressed to his forehead as if something inside is trying to get out.
“I was a girl who owned greater than half the world,” Zara says. “I am a girl who has given that up.”
“Which world did you own?” Ariston asks. Zara has always imagined this line as playful, but Adrian is serious. He sets his nostrils wide and crunches his fists in readiness. He’s an action hero, ready to save Echo — not realizing that she’s already saved herself.
“None that was worthy of the sacrifice,” Zara says.
Leopold won’t look at her. He doesn’t care that she’s acting with her whole body, that she’s pushed herself through walls that she could barely see a week ago.
“You will be in need of a new world, then,” Ariston says.
“It is here,” Echo says, and Zara lightly touches the soft spot between her collarbones. Leopold still isn’t paying attention, but these words stir up something new. He isn’t the person that Zara needs right now.
Her eyes catch on Eli.
Look at me, she thinks. Please.
Eli’s eyes move from her notebook to Adrian and back again.
“You are what I have wandered for,” Zara says.
This is for Eli. Only Eli. “Those nights in the woods, you were with me. It would be safer if I cut out my tongue and lived the rest of my days in silence. But I have met you and I must speak.” The words are two thousand years old, but somehow Zara feels as if she’s inventing them. Meg told her that would happen when she was really acting. These words aren’t just Echo’s now.
They’re hers.
Zara used to listen when people in her drama classes called this scene too easy. Insta-love. Like what Echo felt for Ariston was as cheap as a cup of bad coffee. But there’s more, hidden in the fabric of the scene. Echo wants Ariston so quickly and so completely because she’s already fallen in love. She’s been hollowing out a place inside herself for years — and he fits.
Zara plays the statue game. She casts her arms back, clenches her fist, remembers Eli’s finger tilting her chin to just the right angle. She doesn’t close her eyes. “I have learned that fear is a kind of death.”
Eli looks at her as if she’s just woken up from a muddled sleep. Watercolor pink spreads across her cheeks. Zara looks straight at her. It breaks the fourth wall. It shatters the rules.
Zara doesn’t care.
And Leopold doesn’t notice. Whatever is happening in his head must be awful, because when Zara shifts her eyes away from Eli he is grimacing, his face contorted in a sort of frozen howl.
What is he seeing that’s so much more important than the play?
So painful?
Zara makes her exit, and Eli watches her all the way offstage. Zara only has a minute before her next entrance, but she leaves the studio.
In the hallway, Zara slides down the wall until she’s sitting on the linoleum. She holds that look on Eli’s face like she would hold water in cupped hands.
Meg slides out of the studio and looks down at Zara. She waits for the door to click quietly shut.
“Zara,” Meg says. “The performance you just gave was . . . interesting.”
Zara can’t believe she was so careless, that she didn’t think about Meg noticing what she was doing with her lines. Who she was delivering them to. The part of her mind not on Eli was so focused on Leopold, on what he was watching or ignoring, that she didn’t even think about anyone else.
Meg might be quiet, but she notices everything in this theater.
She crouches next to Zara. Everything about her is mild, soft. Her cardigan and khakis are so boring that when she’s not speaking, she almost disappears. Up close, she even has an inoffensive smell. Lavender soap. “I wanted to ask if, at the start of rehearsals, Leopold asked you for a promise.”
Zara nods. Slowly.
“What was it?” she asks. Meg’s not quite whispering, but her tone is low and careful.
“Commitment,” Zara says. “No distractions.”
“And you agreed?”
Zara nods again as the thought cracks and runs over her, making her cold. Meg is calling Eli a distraction.
“I’m going to tell you something,” Meg says, her voice a little hoarse. “Whatever you do, don’t forget. Leopold Henneman doesn’t take broken promises lightly.” Zara hears an echo of Enna’s words, like far-off footsteps.
Don’t fall in love with anyone in the theater.
“Now,” Meg says, standing up, back to her perfectly brisk self. “I think you have an entrance?”
Zara follows her back into the studio. She doesn’t know where to look, but she avoids glancing at either Eli or Leopold as she takes her place. Zara feels a sort of vertigo that sometimes comes before an entrance, but it’s worse than usual. As if she is standing on the highest story of a skyscraper, past the railing, and the wind is singing through her.
You started at the top. That’s a long way to fall.
She closes her eyes and tries to get back to that place where her breath is round and her heart is ready. But in the dark, all she can hear is screaming. She thinks it’s a memory of when she found Roscoe.
She wonders if they will ever leave.
But when Zara opens her eyes, the screaming is real and everything falls away. The door flies open.
“Stop.”
It’s the assistant stage manager. Her breath is ragged, hands on her knees. She would never cut off the run-through like this. Unless.
“It’s Enna.”