“I’m tired, Jack.” There was profound weariness in her voice. “I want to rest. I just don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“Too much pain,” she said, wincing.
“I know.”
“Other worlds. It has to be more than we can imagine. Even more than you can imagine.”
Seth nodded, clinging to that hope. “Far more.” After a pause laden with reluctance, love, and loss, he added, “I don’t know what to do, Joy. You’ll have to tell me what to do.”
“You have to let me go, Jack.”
“I’m not sure that I can.”
I rose from my seat, clearing my throat, and took a couple of steps toward the front of the room. I spoke softly, as if the ghosts of Joy and Lewis might be disturbed by anything louder. “That’s all we have time for today, everyone. Thank you, Seth, Kate. Now go home, all of you. Do your homework. Get some sleep. In that order.” I looked around at the faces of stressed and tired actors and wondered, not for the first time, how I’d been blessed with such a hardworking and devoted cast. “I’m so proud of you all.”
There were some blushes and some thanks as the students gathered up their belongings and headed for the door. Meagan stayed behind to help me gather mine.
“You think they’re doing okay?” she asked, handing me the to-do list I’d asked her to compile.
I smiled wearily. “I think they’re doing great.”
Her eyes traveled to the spot where the scene had just ended, and she shook her head in awe. “How do they do that?” Her Southern accent was enchanting. “I mean, did you see Seth? I think there were actual tears in his eyes!”
I shouldered my bag and started flipping off the lights. I didn’t like talking about displays of emotion. “He’s pretty amazing.”
“’Specially when you consider how tough it was at the beginning. I mean, could you believe the stress between those two?”
It dawned on me, suddenly, that there had been a bit of a thaw lately in Seth and Kate’s months-long awkward stage. “You’re absolutely right, Meagan! What happened to them?”
“Don’t you know?” She gave me a where-have-you-been? look that put me in my place.
“I’ve been a little preoccupied, Meagan.”
“Well, the way I heard it is that the two of them finally started to mouth off at each other one day after practice. Kate kept yelling at him that he was a wuss and he kept telling her that she was too bossy and they finally just got madder and took off.”
“And that solved the problem?” The warped minds of teenagers. I locked the auditorium door behind me and headed through the foyer to the double doors that led outside.
“It only made things worse!”
I needed to get to Bev’s and pick up Shayla, and this story was keeping me from my daughter.
“So . . . ?”
“So they went to the kebab place the next day and were in the middle of duking it out—you know, for the sake of the play and all—and right in the middle of this major argument, Seth says something like, ‘It’s because I like you, okay?’ And then she went all Helen Keller and stuff.”
“Helen Keller?”
“Like, quiet.”
Right. I was fascinated. “How do you know all this, Meagan?”
“Jenny was sitting at the table next to them. She told me all about it.” She took a quick breath and rushed on. “And then Kate went all ballistic and stuff, but then she had to admit that she liked him too.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you telling me that Seth and Kate were acting like kooks this whole time because they like each other?”
“Yup. This whole time.” She was walking with me toward my car, which was the opposite direction from the van waiting to take her home to her dorm. “And then, once they told each other it was like, poof! And now they’re fine. And they’re acting great too, so that’s good news for the play ’cause it’s only, like, three weeks away.”
I laughed. “Well, thanks for catching me up on the news, Meagan.”
“No problem!” She stood there nodding at me, happy as a lark that she’d been the one to tell me the story.
I took her by the shoulders and turned her physically toward the van. “See those lights over there?”
She nodded.
“That’s your van.” I put on an ominous voice. “Go to the light, Meagan.”