The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,39
said he wasn’t typical, and besides, what if he was hungry?
“You were great,” says Henry, and it’s true. Robbie is great—he’s always been great. That trifecta of dance, music, and theater required to get work in New York. He’s still a few streets off Broadway, but Henry has no doubt he’ll get there.
He runs his hand through Robbie’s hair.
Dry, it is the color of burnt sugar, a tawny shade somewhere between brown and red, depending on the light. But right now it’s still wet from the final scene, and for a second, Robbie leans into the touch, resting the weight of his head in Henry’s hand. His chest tightens, and he has to remind his heart it is not real, not anymore.
Henry pats his friend’s back, and Robbie straightens, as if revived, renewed. He holds his rose aloft like a baton and announces, “To the party!”
* * *
Henry used to think that after-parties were only for last shows, a way for the cast to say good-bye, but he’s since learned that, for theater kids, every performance is an excuse to celebrate. To come down from the high, or in the case of Robbie’s crowd, to keep it going.
It’s almost midnight, and they’re packed into a third-floor walk-up in SoHo, the lights low and someone’s playlist pumping through a pair of wireless speakers. The cast moves through the center like a vein, their faces still painted but their costumes shed, caught between their onstage characters and their offstage selves.
Henry drinks a lukewarm beer and rubs his thumb along the scar on his palm, in what’s quickly becoming a habit.
For a while, he had Bea to keep him company.
Bea, who much prefers dinner parties to theater ones, place settings and dialogues to plastic cups and lines shouted over stereos. A groaning compatriot, huddled with Henry in the corner, studying the tapestry of actors as if they were in one of her art history books. But then another Bowery sprite whisked her away, and Henry shouted traitor in their wake, even though he was glad to see Bea happy again.
Meanwhile, Robbie is dancing in the middle of the room, always the center of the party.
He gestures for Henry to join him, but Henry shakes his head, ignoring the pull, the easy draw of gravity, the open arms waiting at the end of the fall. At his worst, they were a perfect match, the differences between them purely gravitational. Robbie, who always managed to stay alight, while Henry came crashing down.
“Hey, handsome.”
Henry turns, looking up from his beer, and sees one of the leads from the show, a stunning girl with rust-red lips and a white lily crown, the gold glitter on her cheeks stenciled to look like graffiti. She is looking at him with such open want he should feel wanted, should feel something besides sad, lonely, lost.
“Drink with me.”
Her blue eyes shine as she holds out a little tray, a pair of shots with something small and white dissolving on the bottom. Henry thinks of all the stories about accepting food and drink from the fae, even as he reaches for the glass. He drinks, and at first all he tastes is sweetness, the faint burn of tequila, but then the world begins to fuzz a little at the edges.
He wants to feel lighter, to feel brighter, but the room darkens, and he can feel a storm creeping in.
He was twelve when the first one rolled through. He didn’t see it coming. One day the skies were blue and the next the clouds were low and dense, and the next, the wind was up and it was pouring rain.
It would be years before Henry learned to think of those dark times as storms, to believe that they would pass, if he could simply hold on long enough.
His parents meant well, of course, but they always told him things like Cheer up, or It will get better, or worse, It’s not that bad, which is easy to say when you’ve never had a day of rain. Henry’s oldest brother, David, is a doctor, but he still doesn’t understand. His sister, Muriel, says she does, that all artists suffer through their storms, before offering him a pill from the mint container she keeps in her purse. Her little pink umbrellas, she calls them, playing on his metaphor; as if it’s just a clever turn of phrase and not the only way Henry can try to make them understand what it’s like inside his head.