BACKSTAGE, THE CURTAINS SMELL LIKE DUST. IT'S easy to forget myself here, drowned in the dark.
Whispers scurry along the wing from the girls who play my daughters. Whispers that beg for my attention.
Focus, Kat.
I tuck my hair behind my ears, digesting the lines that pass onstage, beat by beat. It's Emily's monologue out there—her plea for relevance.
Focus …
The backstage whispers scrape at me again, harder this time. Anger prickles hot in my palms. The others should be listening for their cues. They should be taking this seriously.
"—and I'm tired of waiting," Emily says. My cue.
I stride onstage and lose myself completely.
Here in the blinding lights, I shed layers of myself like a knight casting off her armor plate by plate. I move with purpose, with want, with drive. Kat Scott is nobody. Nowhere. If she even exists, I'm not concerned with her.
"You're tired of waiting?" I demand.
The girl across from me takes half a step back. She's not Emily, not anymore. Now that I'm standing across from her, she's Natalya Bazhenova: a mathematics professor who made a promise to my character years ago. She promised to sweep me away from my Russian town to an elite school and nurture my mathematical talent. Between acts 1 and 2, I reached thirty-seven years old waiting for her to rescue me from this life, but she never did. She forgot me. And now she dares to come back.
"You're tired of waiting," I say. "You, Natalya, who left me in this town?" I step closer, snarling my way through the questionable translation, hunting Natalya down with my eyes. "Look at me. Look at what I am now."
"I am looking at you," she says.
"Look harder."
"I see a loving mother, a caring sister. I see—"
"You see nothing," I whisper. "I am nothing anymore except wasted potential. Nothing!"
My voice echoes back from the far reaches of the auditorium, and silence ricochets afterward like a boomerang. Dead, beautiful silence.
I speak more slowly now, tasting the bitterness in every word. "You were supposed to be my teacher. You said I was brilliant—a prodigy, you said. You were supposed to take me away, teach me everything, but instead you ran the first chance you had. And now you come back and say you're tired of waiting?" My voice hardens to a condemnation: "You hypocrite."
"I'm sorry, Faina," she says.
Before it happens, I know our director is going to stop us. "Hold," calls Mr. García from the front row. I drop character, slouching down to take a seat in the kitchen chair. Everything that was held tight in my body goes loose, every muscle, every bit of focus.
It's a relief to get out of that headspace. God, the Russians were miserable. This play, The Hidden Things, was written by a man called Grigory Veselovsky around the turn of the century, and by the end, exactly zero of the characters are happy. Our pal Grigory must've been a sadist.
Mr. García hops up onto the edge of the stage. Our drama teacher, Mrs. Stilwater, has to plan some regional conference, so García's directing the fall play. He's technically an English person, not a theater person, but he knows what he's doing.
I've heard he's not getting paid for this, though, which is insane. Not that I'm complaining. There wouldn't have been a fall play otherwise, and most days this feels like the only reason to get out of bed.
García jogs over to my scene partner. "Emily, push it more, I think. You can heighten the physicality of being afraid. And cheat a little to the right; we're losing that section of the audience."
And now the volume problem …
"Also, I hate to say it, but we're still losing your lines."
"I'm so sorry," Emily says, obviously on the verge of tears.
I purse my lips. Damn right, she's sorry. He's given her this note a hundred times already. The show goes up in under three weeks, right before Thanksgiving break, and I'm starting to think she might never get it.
"It's okay," García says. "Hey. Emily? Don't be upset. We'll do some projection exercises later, all right?" He gives her a thumbs-up. "It's a matter of trusting your voice—a confidence thing. You have this."
God, García is patient. I would've yelled at half the people in this cast by now, but in five weeks of rehearsing, he hasn't so much as raised his voice.
Emily nods once, her mousy hair falling into her eyes.
"Oh, and that's another thing," he says, scribbling a note on his omnipresent clipboard. "You've got to tie your hair back or something. It keeps hiding your right eye."
I sigh, slouching down in my chair. He's told her that note before, too. I don't get why people can't follow simple directions. Sometimes it feels as if García and I are the only ones giving this show everything.
It's not that I think I'm more talented than the rest of the cast—the other kids are all good, in their own way. But … I don't know. They don't seem to need the stage, the space to fill, the echo of the voice, and the punch of the words.
"Kat?"
I look up. "What?"
García approaches me. "You're doing great, but there's something missing in the way you're tackling this scene, I think." He puts his clipboard on the table. "What's your character's objective in this scene? What does she want from Emily's character?"
I figured all this out when I did the script work back in September. I answer without hesitating. "She wants Natalya to apologize."
García runs a hand through his hair, making it stick straight up. He looks like a hungover college student, with his stubble and thick-rimmed glasses and messy hair. He's a new teacher this year, but he's chill and doesn't give too much homework, so he's doing pretty well by most people's standards. "Yeah," he says, "I can see the apology motive. But what else do you think it could be?"
I frown. "I'm pretty sure that's it. Natalya ruined my character's life, so it—"
A fit of giggling bursts out backstage. The frustration that's been burning low in my chest ignites. I twist around in my chair. "Could you shut up?" I snap. The giggles die.
García's eyes glimmer with amusement. "You can let me do that, you know. Believe it or not, I, too, am capable of saying, 'Quiet backstage.' "
"Sorry," I mutter.
"Don't be. Just don't make it a habit." García checks his watch. "Ah, nuts. Okay." He hurries back to the lip of the stage, hops off, and retakes his seat in the front row. "All right, one more thing before it's five o'clock. Let's jump ahead to the last scene."
Emily, who still isn't off-book for this scene, runs to grab her script. We don't have all the props yet, so I mime a chalkboard at center stage.
"Okay," García says as Emily scurries back into place. "Last little bit of scene 6. Let's take it from 'What do you think?' Whenever you're ready, Emily."
A short silence. Then Natalya Bazhenova says to me, "What do you think?"
I look at the blank space in the air, where my fingers hover over an imaginary chalkboard. I scrutinize an imaginary equation. "It's beautiful," I say. "It's beautiful work."
"So you see why I had to go? Why I had to resume my research?"
"No, I don't. But it is still beautiful work." Letting the imaginary chalk drop, I turn around. The lights won't be set for two weeks, so all the brights are on too high. I squint into them.
Natalya approaches me. "Do you want me to show you the rest?" she asks, making me thirsty with imaginary want. "I could try to find a way," she says. "I could go back and ask the other professors if you could join us at the university. I could—"
"Mama?" says a voice. I turn stage left. My character's daughter enters. "I did it," she says. "I made dinner. And—and we are all waiting for you at home."
I study the sight: the lines of my daughter's face painted a harsh white by the stage light. "Thank you, sweetheart," I say mechanically. I turn back to Natalya. "No," I say. "I can't go with you."
"But—"
"I won't go," I say, defeat filling the words. After a long second, I follow my daughter off left. Natalya stares after us.
"And lights down," García calls. "Great. Everyone, onstage."
We sit on the edge of the stage, the rest of the cast talking and joking. The guy who plays my husband flirts with Emily, who doesn't seem to realize it. I sit off to the side, as far as possible from the girls I yelled at. I shouldn't have snapped—I know it's García's job, telling them to be quiet—but it maddens me, people not having the basic decency to shut up during rehearsals.
García runs over his notes from the scenes we worked today. "Kat," he says finally, "what do you think the play's ending means?"
The rest of the cast looks at me. I feel the eleven pairs of eyes like spotlights. I shrug, avoiding their gazes. "I lose," I say. "My character loses. She's been at home waiting fifteen years for her teacher to come back, and by the time it happens, she has this kid to raise, so, like … you know. She can't chase her passion. She loses."
"That's what I thought you'd say," García says, dashing off a note on the clipboard. "I want you to rethink that. And I want you to rethink the apology thing from earlier. Okay?"
I nod, almost relieved to have notes for once. Usually García spends so long fixing people's blocking, he doesn't get to characterization.
His questions baffle me, though. How could I want anything but an apology from Emily's character, after a decade and a half? And of course I lose at the end. My character's dream goes out the window, and she's saddled with a life she never wanted.
García tucks his clipboard into his satchel. "Kat, thanks for being off-book already. The rest of you, remember to off-book those last few scenes by Thursday. Nice work, everyone."
I hop off the stage, hurrying out the side door ahead of the others. I jog down the grass of the hill, squinting into the sunset. I'm still not used to the sun setting so early thanks to daylight savings, which doesn't seem to save much daylight at all. Though maybe that's because we're locked in school buildings until sunset.
Crossing the parking lot toward the street, I pass Juniper Kipling's empty Mercedes, a shimmering foreigner in the crowd of scuffed Jeeps and mud-splattered pickup trucks. Weird—I thought Juniper was driving my sister home today.
As I reach the sidewalk, I stick my hands deep in my pockets, steeling myself for the journey. It's not a long way home—two miles, maybe—but it's getting cold these days. Soon I'll have to start asking people for rides after rehearsal. I dread the awkward car conversations already.
No matter what, when I talk to people, I come off as an asshole. They should leave me alone, for their sake as much as mine. Whenever someone breaks my privacy, my head fills with panic, panic, panic. I lose my thoughts in white noise and fuzz. A short, sizzling fuse. And what comes out of my mouth is always angry bullshit.
Life is better when it's scripted.
