Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,213

Phillip practicing the piano with his mother and deliberately altering the melody as they count in French. He wants to do it his own way, not hers. That’s layered with his little rap to his dad about how his dad did it a different way than he will. But then you layer that with The Ten Dual Commandments, and then factor in that Phillip doesn’t finish counting with his mother as he dies… It’s like you pull one thread, and it opens up this whole new understanding you had no idea was just waiting there for someone to uncover it.

“Can you imagine the creativity and courage it took to even start writing something like that? Lin-Manuel Miranda took all these characters… Did you know that every character speaks in their own rhyming pattern and a lot of them have their own melody motif, so when he layers songs, the melodies all intersect and intertwine?”

“Hm. No.”

“But that’s cool, right? That’s cool to you?” she asked as if needing his stamp of approval for her to be fascinated by it.

“Cool. Absolutely.”

“And the more I watch it and study about it, the more I want to know, the more I want to uncover.”

“Obviously.” He let out a breath. “Maybe we could watch it again tonight. You can tell me all that stuff.”

Hope and excitement jumped inside of her. “Are you serious?”

“Sure. It’ll beat studying.”

“Cool. Okay, but we do have to study first.”

He sighed. “How did I know you were going to say that?”

Studying took precedence, but after another couple of hours of studying and eating, they sat together on the couch and started the movie. Taylor’s excitement leapt around inside her, and she shivered trying to keep it from erupting from her and scaring him. She hadn’t watched the movie on a screen so big since cinema class, and although this one wasn’t nearly that big, she knew it would be a different experience than watching it on her cramped laptop screen.

“So tell me something I missed the first time,” Greg said, knowing he might drown in the deluge that simple bit of permission might start. Nonetheless, deadly as it could be, he loved watching her passion and rapturous excitement surrounding it. It was like touching a live wire and never wanting to let go because it felt so alive. “Start small.”

“Okay, start small,” she said, and he was grateful she was going to at least try.

“You know the story at the end of Burr and Hamilton?”

“Right. Burr shot Hamilton in a duel.”

“Right, but watch Burr throughout. He always hesitates. He’s always holding back. He doesn’t want to stand for anything or tell anybody where he stands on anything. He lost his father and mother when he was really young, and he’s decided that what saved him was being cautious and circumspect about life.”

“Circumspect?”

“Yeah. Like looking around and being really careful about everything.” Taylor took a breath. “He’s kind of like Eliza in that way, always begging Alexander to look around, to stop and just live rather than always having to go a thousand miles an hour with his hair on fire. But holding back all the time while watching Hamilton go full-steam-ahead for what he wants eventually creates this resentment in Burr. He sees Hamilton getting what he has always wanted.”

“Burr?”

“Right. And finally, he’s just done waiting. He’s mad and he’s frustrated that life hasn’t turned out like he thought it would. He thought that waiting was the key, that if he waited, life would work out. But by the end, he’s lost his wife—that’s not in the play, I read that… well, somewhere. She got sick and died. He lost the election to Jefferson, and he resents Hamilton for pretty much his whole life going wrong. But I think the thing he resents most was that waiting didn’t fix life the way he thought it would. He’s mad because Hamilton didn’t wait for it, and his life seems to have worked out.

“Of course, Hamilton has pretty much come to the opposite conclusion because by being brash and rash and not being a little more circumspect, he lost his political career because of the affair and how he handled it.”

“I remember that one.”

“Don’t we all? And he very nearly lost Eliza, twice. So at the end, the two of them—Hamilton and Burr—have basically switched philosophical ideologies. Burr becomes brash, and Hamilton holds back from taking his shot—even though he spends the entire time saying he is not going to throw away his