Eli doesn’t have to tell Zara they’re leaving the Aurelia: they do it without speaking. They stride through the stage door and down the alley, their shoulders absurdly close to touching.
Zara and Eli don’t say anything for blocks, as if the theater might be able to hear them. Eli keeps catching the tail end of the looks that Zara is giving her. Nervous, wispy looks. Then they are down the stairs to the subway, flashing through the darkness in an overbright train car. No one has ever looked good in this lighting. It’s one of the small evils of the world: at the beginning and end of every day people have to see each other in, literally, the worst possible light. But when Zara hugs the pole and examines the list of stops, Eli has no desire to look away.
They wordlessly agree to get out at Union Square.
Eli gets a dose of Christmas lights, a double dose of holiday shoppers looking for sales.
She pulls Zara through all of it, to the Strand. This would be perfect for a date, and as a bonus, it’s a place Eli never came with Hannah. Eli’s ex-girlfriend preferred the kind of things that were more fun to post pictures of online than actually fun to do. But this is Eli’s idea of dately paradise. The store is filled with books to huddle over, to cherry-pick sentences from and read out loud.
A couple of beautiful boys hold hands by the new fiction tables, their winter coats touching, then everything touching. Eli whips up a daydream involving her lips, Zara’s neck, and the history section.
She takes off her hat and does her best to cool down. She turns into the YA section, leaving Zara’s neck untouched. “So. Enna.”
Zara rocks back and forth on her boot heels, hands in her pockets, coat swishing. “Yeah.”
“You really think . . .”
Zara gives a flustered nod.
“But . . . I mean . . . actually . . .”
If they want to do this, they’re going to have to start filling in the blanks. It makes Eli think of the first time she achieved nakedness with another girl. They kissed and tore things off each other like they were so experienced, then fumbled around for hours. It all came down to whether they were brave enough to start using words. Asking specific questions. Of course, there’s a world of difference between Does this feel good to you? and “You think someone killed Enna?”
“I don’t know. She thinks someone did,” Zara says, keeping her voice low.
“No one’s going to hear us,” Eli says with certainty. “The employees just want to shelve things.”
“What about the customers?” Zara asks, eyeing a clutch of hipsters with slouchy hats.
“Nope.” Eli inches her voice louder to prove her point. “Too busy with their own problems. That’s one of the good things about living here. Nobody cares.”
“That’s good?” Zara asks.
“Look,” Eli says, not able to deal with this particular brand of innocence right now. “Sometimes caring gets in the way. My parents cared so much that they couldn’t let me pick out my own shoes when I was sixteen. They love me. But they think that means getting to have a say in everything. Like dating. Let me give you a hint: girls were not their first choice.”
Zara looks sorry for her, and Eli doesn’t want that.
“They got used to it,” she says. “And even if they hadn’t, I would date whoever I want.” Well — that last part’s not really true, because if it was, she’d be with Zara by now, standing four steps closer, hands in a borderline inappropriate place. Eli forces herself back to the original topic. “We can shout about two deaths in a cursed theater, and it won’t be the weirdest conversation I’ve heard in Manhattan this week. It won’t even rank.”
“Really?” Zara’s eyes go luminous with interest. “I want to know the other things you heard.”
Either that husky glory is Zara’s flirting voice or Eli has completely lost her grip. It’s true that Zara has been standing closer than she used to, sometimes so close that Eli can feel every micromovement of her body. And yes, there’s been a certain amount of hand touching. But girls touch each other all the time. Girls have intense friendships that have nothing to do with wanting to tear each other’s clothes off.
“Tell me about Enna,” Eli says, hoping that last thought didn’t leave a mark on her voice.
Zara gives Eli the facts about the dressing room, shares her grainy cell-phone photos, and explains the Gertrude line. Eli stacks it on top of what she knows about Roscoe. Two deaths. An accident and an overdose.
“They found alcohol in Enna’s system,” Eli says. “Drugs, too.”
“Yeah,” Zara says. “I know.”
“So you don’t think she just drank the drinks and popped the pills and then got a little . . . dramatic with the walls?”
“Enna told me she didn’t drink anymore,” Zara says. “Or do drugs.”
“A fact that nobody has ever lied about in all of history,” Eli deadpans. Her thoughts swerve in a new direction. She starts to walk, because all of a sudden she can’t stand still. Book spines flash as she goes up one narrow aisle and down another. “What about that article you gave me?” she asks. “Kestrel’s theory? The curse?”
“You believe in that?” Zara asks.
“When you call something a curse, it takes on a life of its own,” Eli says. “Broken bones, accidents, backstage fights, these happen at theaters. Besides, it can go both ways, right? What if someone is using the curse, the idea of it, to cover up normal murders?” Eli looks back at Zara, who doesn’t even bother to hide her disbelief: it explodes from her expression. “It sounds like something theater people would do,” Eli adds. “Smoke and glitter to distract from the nitty-gritty of a set change. It’s like when the stage door was left open. The police called Roscoe’s death an accident, but what if they hadn’t? That door changes the story. If it’s locked, Roscoe could only have been pushed by someone in the theater. If it’s unlocked, it could have been anyone in Midtown.”
Without meaning to, Eli has led them straight to the theater section. Next to Ibsen and Chekhov is a shrine to Echo and Ariston. There are face-out copies of five different translations.
Eli picks one up and ruffles the pages. “No escaping it, I guess.”
“It’s still safe to be at the Aurelia, right?” Zara asks quickly, looking at Eli like she’s qualified to give this answer. To save her from leaving. Eli doesn’t say anything right away, and when Zara grimaces, Eli has to push down the desire to reach out and smooth away that pained look.
“Of course,” Eli says extra softly to make up for the too-long pause. “We’ll keep each other safe.”
Zara gives her one of those wild stares, like she did at the read-through. The one that gave Eli hope. She puts down the copy of Echo and Ariston and heads out of the bookstore into the holiday-drunk night.
Eli loves it: the whole bright season. In her family, Christmas isn’t really a day. It’s six weeks of presents and food stretching from Thanksgiving to Three Kings Day. Leopold stormed all over the best part of the year with his production schedule and didn’t even apologize, like nothing could possibly be as important as his play. At least Eli has a little tree in her apartment and she has lights everywhere and it feels like Christmas. She glances at Zara. “Does this Christmas stuff bother you?”
“I’m used to it,” Zara says, but it feels like an automatic answer. Then she slows her pace and presses her lips together, really thinking about it. “I guess it still makes me feel . . . lonely. That’s not the right word. There are millions of people around. But that’s how it feels.”
Eli looked up the dates for Chanukah a while ago. Now she stops in the middle of Union Square, right there on the bench-lined walkway, and even though the timing is less than ideal, she reaches into the silky lining of her deep coat pockets. One hand stays down there. The other pulls out a little box wrapped in silver paper. It looks like a tiny moon, sitting between them.
Zara takes it, looking straight down at the box. Like it will disappear if she looks away.
She pulls up the tape, eases the box open. Eli is nervous — she has no idea what Zara will think. If she’ll act like it’s strange that Eli got her a present in the first place. Zara lifts out a leather cord with a key hanging on the end. Eli found the key at a secondhand store in a cut-glass bowl. She probably could have stolen one from the Aurelia’s prop storage, but it wasn’t worth risking Barrett’s creepiness. Besides, she likes that she had to go out into the world and find it. She likes the way it looks sitting in Zara’s palm. Weathered, like it had to travel a long way before it found her.
“For your imaginary locks,” Eli says.
Zara stares up at Eli. Like she might disappear if Zara stops looking. “No one’s ever gotten me something like this.”
“Well, good,” Eli says. “Because you’re about to get seven more somethings exactly like it.” She has the rest of the keys in her bag. She’s been carrying them around for days, clinking as she walks, a reminder of the feelings she can’t seem to get rid of.
She hands them all over, because she just can’t wait.
Zara sits down on a bench to string the keys. She ties the cord around her neck. Eli wants to ask if she can help, but she keeps her words and her hands and her feelings to herself. If this is something Zara wants, she’ll have to make the first move. Possibly all the moves. Eli just stopped feeling alone for the first time since Roscoe died. She needs a friend, not another hopeless love story.
“What do we do now?” Zara asks, looking up at her, eyes gone golden in the streetlights. The eight keys slide into each other and tug the necklace down, chiming softly. It settles against the soft valley of skin at the opened top button of Zara’s pale-blue sweater.
Eli swallows hard. “We keep our eyes open.”