There is no callback.
Zara settles into the fact that she has lost the part. That she never could have won it in the first place.
“Open casting was a stunt,” says one of the girls in the senior class play. Zara is sitting in an orange plastic seat in the high-school auditorium, trying not to remember the Aurelia. It feels like holding back a tidal wave with one hand. “Leopold does stuff like that,” the girl continues, as if she and the director are old friends. “It drums up attention for his shows.”
Zara nods. She doesn’t offer up her story. Zara doesn’t want anyone to be nice to her and give her a series of consoling nods while secretly thinking that she wasn’t good enough.
She learns her lines for Hello, Dolly!
She makes a date with her boyfriend. Watches him eat all the breadsticks in the basket at Olive Garden, order more, eat those, and then break up with her. He tells her she’s been acting weird.
Zara can’t deny it.
She settles into the fact that she has lost the part. She does not settle as well into her old life.
There’s college to think about. Applications. She shoves those thoughts down, but they keep coming back like the tap, tap, tap of a headache at her temple.
The first week of October, her name surfaces in a headline in the New York Times. Her parents get the paper every weekend, although they hardly ever read it. Zara is the one who inhales the Arts section every Sunday. So she’s the one who sees: NEWCOMER EVANS PAIRED WITH WARD IN FAMOUS TRAGEDY. Zara reads the first paragraph, about how she beat out two thousand girls for the chance to act opposite Adrian Ward, one of Hollywood’s prettiest young leading men. Her mind drifts over the rest of the article in a detached way that makes her think she must be dreaming. Or dead.
A second shock follows. As she’s running around the kitchen getting ready for school — late because she spent too long staring at the newspaper — her phone rings in her pocket. A soft, troubling pulse. When she looks at the screen, there’s an unknown 212 number. Zara picks up, expecting the casting director, maybe the assistant stage manager or the AD.
Leopold Henneman is on the line.
“Is this Miss Evans?” he asks. Zara noticed his slight accent during auditions. She tries to trace it to the country of origin but dead-ends somewhere in Europe. “This call is the most delightful part of my job,” he says. “Of course, I should have been the one to tell you the news. Our cast list must have been leaked to the press.”
“Oh,” Zara says. “Right.”
His voice pushes through the phone, making him feel much closer than New York. “Strange, I know, not to hold callbacks. The Aurelia producers wanted to fight over it.” He laughs. Gently. “Don’t worry. I convinced them that you’re perfect for this role. For this production. I’m sure you’ll prove me right. And this is a nice little moment, don’t you think? Your dream has come true.” Zara doesn’t know what to say. Her words have flown away, like birds before a storm. A few seconds later, when she still hasn’t answered, he says, “You must be overwhelmed.”
Zara sits on the kitchen floor. “A little.” The tile looked like a good idea when she was standing up, but now that she’s down here it’s cold and gritty.
“That’s natural,” Leopold says. “Your life is about to change in so many ways. But I’m going to be with you, from the moment you arrive at the theater. If you need anything, you come directly to me.”
Zara nods. Then she remembers that Leopold can’t see her. “I will. Thank you.” She says it again, knowing the words will never be big enough. “Thank you.”
Zara asks her mom to drop her off at school, because it’s still possible she’s dead, and dead people shouldn’t drive cars.
Her weekly acting workshop takes place that afternoon. The teacher is waiting in the lobby of the arts annex, and when he sees Zara, he gives her an endless hug and congratulates her on being his first student to “really make something of herself.”
So the article was real. The phone call actually happened.
She’s going to play Echo.
Zara rushes to the bathroom where the girls warm up because the tile has such good acoustics.
“What if it doesn’t work out?” one of the girls says, right after hugging her. From the tone of her voice, it sounds like she wants to prepare Zara for the worst. “The Aurelia’s a really big deal.”
“I know,” Zara says.
The girls — all five of them — lean toward the mirrors to retouch their makeup. Zara has thought of them as her friends, but they don’t study together or talk about their lives. They don’t spend time together outside of class. They work on their scenes and talk about their dream roles.
Your dream has come true.
The girl standing closest bumps Zara playfully with her hip. “Are you going to be okay standing this close to Adrian Ward? I think he might blow your sweet little mind. He’s really famous. And hot. I can’t tell if he’s more hot or more famous.”
“Hot,” says the first girl. “Definitely.”
They all laugh. The sound turns hard when it hits the tile.
“There’s a curse on the Aurelia,” another girl says. She tries to sound like she’s just teasing, but an edge breaks through. “You’re not worried about that, are you?”
Zara knows they are saying these things to bother her, but the last one stays with her longer than it should. Which is silly. Theater superstitions are like Ouija boards — everybody loves them, but nobody really believes in them. The Aurelia’s curse is just a string of accidents made to sound ominous.
It’s nothing.
The play is everything.
Late that night, Leopold calls. He lights up her cell phone, rips her out of sleep. “Apologies,” he says. “I didn’t realize it was so late.” He calls the next night, and the next, and just when Zara is getting used to it, he doesn’t call for six days.
When he finally does, Zara grabs her phone and stares into the painful glow of the screen. It’s 2:37 in the morning.
“Hello, my dear. I’m sorry if it’s late where you are.” Leopold fans out his excuses. He’s in Brussels. He forgot she has school in the morning. He’s so excited about a detail of act 2, scene 3 that he didn’t even think about the time.
“What is Echo feeling here?” he asks.
Zara has thought about this before. She stares up at the ceiling and says words that she never thought anyone would want to hear. She is telling a famous director what she feels. “Echo wants to run away, she’s ready. But it hurts.”
“Because she’s leaving so much behind?” Leopold asks.
“No.” Zara shakes her head. “Because she’s taking so much with her.”
“Mmmmm.” Every time Zara tells Leopold something about Echo, he makes an appreciative sound, as if she’s laying out a feast for him. Leopold acts like everything she thinks about Echo is delicious.
The next night, he tells her about a vision.
“I saw you onstage in white,” he says. “Organza, I think. It clung to you in a very becoming way.”
Zara wants this to be true. She needs it. In just twelve weeks she’s going to be in front of hundreds of people, and they will expect her to be beautiful. “How do they work?” she asks. “The visions?”
“They’re simple, really. The visions show me how to create a perfect story. And then, if need be, I help things along.”
“Have they ever been wrong?” she asks, thinking of the white dress.
He is quiet for so long — not even breathing — that she thinks the call must have been cut off. “No.”
Zara wakes up in a haze. She doesn’t tell anyone about the phone calls that keep her up until dawn — who would she tell? Her theater friends are so jealous their faces curdle when they see her coming. Her parents wouldn’t like it if they knew she was up so late, especially because of the play. It’s already disrupted her life so much. So Zara keeps Leopold a secret. She waits for the soft, dark center of the night, and the call that might be coming. She thinks about Echo, who is completely fictional, but feels more solid than anyone she’s seen in weeks.
Zara’s last day of school is here and then gone. She won’t graduate with the rest of her class in the spring. She won’t go to prom. She’ll miss the spring play, which used to matter so much, and now has been eclipsed to the point that she can’t even see the bright edges of what she used to care about. Her parents are the ones who worry about her missing out on all the normal teenage milestones. They support her decision, but in the next breath they make her promise to finish her coursework, promise to take the GED, promise to apply to colleges for next fall, even if she has to defer. They wince as she picks out school after school in New York City. She adds Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, to make them happy, and then promises herself she won’t go.
“We know how much this means to you,” her mom says, which only proves it doesn’t mean as much to them. Still, they cluster her with hugs, douse her in support. They even throw a small party a few days before she leaves. There’s ice-cream cake and a fistful of balloons, because they don’t know how to celebrate in a way that is not identical to her eighth birthday.
October flares like a match, then dies. Wind strips the trees. The world that Zara called real for so long is falling away.