I laughed. “That would have required taking risks, and she wasn’t ever really good at those.”
“She never met a risk she didn’t run from,” Trey said wearily, his head rocking against the blue wall. “And look where that—”
“Shhh!” I whispered urgently. The heels were moving faster yet, this time, and they stopped abruptly outside the door of our refuge. Trey and I both had our friendliest smiles in place when Saccharine Psycho walked in.
“Looking for us?” Trey said.
“Where have you been?” she asked, the spark of impatience in her eyes in contradiction with her soothing tone. “Your guests have been waiting to pay their respects, and I’ve been searching high and low for you.”
Trey stood and extended his hand to help me up from the floor.
“We’re sorry,” I said. “We just needed to get away for a couple minutes.”
She placed a hand on my arm in a gesture calculated to be comforting. “These are sad times,” she said quietly. “Losing a mother is one of the hardest blows life deals us.”
I wanted to laugh. I really did. But unexpected tears somehow shoved their way past my strained sense of humor. Trey saw them and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, walking me from the shadowed quietness into the pastel bustle of grief.
19
THE FADED COLORS of Lewis’s living room and the austere grandeur of the professors’ dining hall had replaced the blank, bare stage. We’d even constructed a backstage area and wings by hanging temporary curtains from the beams high above and propping up makeshift walls with two-by-fours and bricks. The transformation had sublimated the performances of the students as they were carried by the sets and props to a time and context none of them had known. The only unfinished item was the wardrobe, the centerpiece of the set, critical to the story, which Scott was in the process of assembling onstage. He’d recruited the help of some of his basketball players for the job, but it still was proving to be a frustrating, unwieldy task. The pieces weren’t coming together as planned, and after two hours of effort that should have taken only minutes, with ten cast members waiting to take possession of the stage for a critical rehearsal, things didn’t seem anywhere near a resolution. I approached him to ask when he thought he might be finished, but his only answer was a scowl followed by “I’ll be finished when I’m finished.”
So I retreated to my front-row seat and tried not to let his shortness get the best of me. Meagan and I spent the wait going over a laundry list of small details needing attention, while the cast occupied their time in various forms of stress release and Shayla wandered around the stage in tight circles engrossed in a loud and seemingly endless version of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Seth paced back and forth across the back of the room, practicing his final monologue at breakneck speed. Two other guys made ape sounds and flounced around in the balcony in a semblance of jungle warfare. And several others were involved in an animated discussion about the social and cultural importance of Paris Hilton. Jessica thought it was commendable that she’d made such a name for herself when all she’d been before was a pretty girl with a pedigree, while two of my more outspoken male actors compared the hotel heiress to a hollow-headed manipulator masquerading as a trashy debutante. It was an entertaining conversation, to say the least. As their voices blended with the ape noises coming down from above, the murmured lines at the back of the auditorium, Shayla’s singing, and Meagan’s incessant commentary on the goings-on around us, I wondered if I might have somehow gotten trapped inside the psychedelic chaos of Ozzy Osbourne’s mind.
“Hold that side higher, Kenny,” Scott instructed in a tight voice, lightly hammering his side of the structure so it would line up with the set wall next to it. Kenny strained to lift the bulky frame a little higher off the ground, and in doing so, raised it so high that he pushed Scott’s side off-kilter.
“No, Kenny!” he said in exasperation, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. I heard him mutter something under his breath as he slammed down the hammer and used brute strength to force the heavy wood back into place.
Thomas and Kate chose that moment to step onstage and begin a sort of demented parody of the play, their voices raised in a