Spark (12 page)

“The theater. It died. But you don't want the city council to tear it down. You want to save it. You still think it can be resurrected. That's not dead.”

“I never stopped believing,” Mom admits. “Even after the Avery went black and the building scared me. I never stopped believing in the magic inside it. Maybe something physical—maybe that can die. But magic's like the theater's soul, isn't it? That doesn't die. It's always seemed to me that all it would take would be a few new windows, some paint, and some elbow grease. And a story, of course. A new story that would finally allow the stage's last tragedy to escape—like soured air locked in a room too long. And suddenly, everyone would have the ability to experience the Avery's magic for themselves.”

It's all here in front of me: Mom, the past; Cass, the
present—and maybe the future. And maybe, just maybe, I'm the one who's supposed to connect the two.

But do I have that kind of power?

“Another scene,” I whisper. Out there on the square, Bertie said the story wasn't finished. The last scene still needs to be written.

Maybe it's mine to write.

When I glance back at my backpack, my name is still lighter than Alberta's, but darker than it was a moment before.

I
become obsessed with Bertie's map. Why wouldn't I be? The journal's where she kept track of the way things really were, but the map's where she wrote her predictions. I want to know more about what she saw. Maybe it'll provide some guidance. About what's to happen. And how I'm supposed to pull this whole thing together.

I spend the next few days studying it with a magnifying lens. I thumbtack it to the wall above my bed and stand on the opposite side of the room, thinking maybe something will emerge when I stare at the big picture. I scan in the smallest sections and blow them up on my computer. I'm searching for my name. But it's nowhere to be found.

How can that be, though? My name was clearly on the
journal. Why would she include me but not predict anything for me?

And while we're at it, why have I been trusting her every word? Some of it has been a hundred percent true: the sky's return. The rise of the Avery from the dead. But is
all
of it true? Did she ever make a mistake? Flat-out make stuff up?

Anything's possible, after all. For one thing, why would the Avery spark back into existence, only to quit breathing all over again? I'm suddenly doubting my own eyes. Is it the power of suggestion? Was Bertie really as wacky as people said she was?

For my own peace of mind, I need to know exactly how much is true.

I bow out of carpooling with Cass that Friday, claiming to be behind on a history paper, and ride to school with Mom. I bury myself in the library.

In all honesty, the Verona High library is a little slice of ridiculousness. We have far more shelves than we have research materials anymore; the volumes that remain are all turned face out in order to make the bookcases look full. We rely, for the most part, on internet access. And occasionally, we use the archives of the
Verona Times
. They were meticulously scanned in a few years ago, by a librarian I figure had gleefully leaped at a chance to finally have a work-until-your-last-piece-of-hair-falls-from-your-bun job. And besides, isn't the only real item
of value in any small town—research-wise, anyway—its old newspapers?

The rarely used library's completely empty before school; the librarian's not even here yet as I sit at one of the computers and pull up the
Times
archives. I type in the first name from Bertie's map: Frank Andrews. And find a listing for August 6, 1947—the same date she scrawled beside a dark cloud. “Heart attack,” I read aloud from her map.

“. . . in his home of an apparent heart attack . . . ,” Frank's August obituary echoes.

Engagement announcements, death notices, all match up with her notes.

I look up her own obituary. It's incredibly short: mother of Nancy, wife of Charley. Survived by her mother and daughter. That's all—a stack of women, nesting dolls all one step smaller than the one who came before. Under Nancy, my mother. There's another obituary in there somewhere—one I don't want to look up. One that mentions a car accident and my mother and Nancy.

In all of it—all these little paragraphs, these “survived bys,” there's no mention of Dahlia. Which doesn't seem right. And suddenly, my family doesn't look like a set of nesting dolls—it's back to looking like that old connect-the-dots picture that's not a picture at all, but a scribble every bit as confused as the contents of Bertie's mind.

A muddled brain, talking to the sky, forecasting wild
events—no doubt that was the reason for the short obituary. There's no mention of the tragedy she faced or the way she reacted. She's summarized in headstone generalities: “Always remembered.” “In our hearts.”

According to the archives, though, Bertie passed away in July of 1947—so there's no chance that any of the heart attacks or deaths or births on her map could have been penned in after the events took place. They're all a part of Bertie's fortune-telling. And so far, every single one of her predictions is true.

“Let's try Geraldine,” I mutter, typing that name into the search box on my screen. “Geraldine Fields.” That's the name that Bertie's written on her map, surrounded by a tear-shaped raindrop. I pull up her obituary, finding her with two married names. And the children listed as survivors have her second husband's name—indicating that the first marriage didn't last all that long.

She should not get married. She will be cursed with unhappiness. It's not the right time. And he's not the right love.

“You were right,” I whisper, as though Bertie can hear me.

So what does that say about me—why was I on the cover of her journal at one point? It has to mean something.

Am I supposed to discover my own heart's desire? Uncover a wish that means as much to me as being without a birthmark and stutter mean to Cass and Dylan? As much as the Avery means to Mom? I suddenly feel like a girl holding a
magic lamp, rubbing it frantically, desperate to free the genie before she's worked it out in her mind what to ask for.

I'm still staring at the screen when a chair screeches against the floor. Cass plops into the seat beside me. She's got on an eighties-era neon-orange T-shirt with the neckline torn so that it hangs off her left shoulder, exposing the strap of the neon-yellow tank she wears underneath. “Jerry Orbach missed you this morning.”

“Tell Jer I owe him a belly rub.”

“Everything still good to go?” she asks.

“For—?” I'm still so focused on Bertie's predictions, I'm not sure what she's talking about.

“Rehearsals. We're still having them this afternoon, right?”

I nod. “Of course.”

The smile Cass flashes is one part excitement, one part
I know something you don't . . .

T
hat afternoon the auditorium feels as tight as a rope in a game of tug-of-war. And everyone's staring at me, daring me to relieve the tension.

I start babbling, “We can do this. Of course we can.”

The faces that stare back at me are all slathered with an identical expression. It reads, in short,
Yeah, sure.

“We've passed the one-month mark,” Kiki informs me. “We're more than halfway to the show, and we don't have a decent set, and no one knows their lines, and music—” she rolls her eyes toward Dylan. “What music?”

“We all agreed to come up with ideas to make this our own,” I remind her. “Let's hear some.”

Cass stands. “We have something,” she says, gesturing toward Dylan.

She approaches the piano, leaning against the cabinet as Dylan sits on the bench, props his music on the stand.
We?
I think.
We have something?
These past few days, I've been far more absorbed in the map. The play had faded a bit into my background. But how could it have faded so much that I didn't know Cass and Dylan had been working together? What are they up to?

He plays a few chords; Cass closes her eyes. And she opens her mouth and begins to sing.

In what is maybe even a more magical turn of events than anything that has happened so far, Cass's voice emerges both strong and in tune. This is no longer the stumbling, horrific voice that has graced our practice sessions. Instead, this is the voice I know—the one that fills my bedroom nearly every weekend and the passenger side of my car as she fiddles with the radio. It's the voice that Mom's listened to for the past decade—the one that began as a cute elementary school squeak and blossomed into a stirring soprano. The same voice that made sparks fly from the front of the Avery. The same voice that filled the Avery during her private rehearsal with Dylan at the same moment that the theater began to rewind, the piano sounding new again, the seat beneath me no longer feeling like a relic of a lost time.

When she reaches the refrain, she sucks in a lungful of air and belts the lyrics so powerfully and with such feeling, they actually buzz against the walls.

Dylan responds; he backs her up, his fingertips offering their own staccato notes to echo her clipped words during the verse. He hammers the refrain, then backs off when her voice dips in volume.

“Anything goes!” Cass cries out, in a way that begs us all to listen. To understand. At that moment, I swear she's singing from experience. “Anything goes”—when I hear these words, I interpret them to mean the awful double takes, the second glances, the pinball eyes that she finally, for the first time in her life, was able to push aside, thanks to the magic of the Avery. She saw it. Of course she did. She had to. She's singing about it now. Anything goes
—
she's getting rid of all of it: the bad feelings, the embarrassment. The belief that spotlights aren't for her.

Through it all, Dylan's fingers answer,
Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about.

When the song ends, we're frozen, every last one of us. In shock. Silent.

Finally, Liz jumps to her feet and begins to clap. She sticks her fingers in her mouth and starts whistling, cheering enthusiastically.

I tense up a bit. I hope this isn't coming across as condescending—not like her “Good for you” comment did over in Duds back on day one. Because Cass really does deserve our applause. They both do. I stand, tucking my script under my arm, and start clapping, too. I'm followed by everyone else in the cast.

“Now, if the rest of us can figure out how to do
that
,” I say, “we'll all wind up on YouTube for the right reasons.”

Rehearsals suddenly become the destination of choice. The place that everyone from Advanced Drama runs to after the final bell. And running is not exactly easy, not in Verona High's corridors (which are as clogged as some of the grease-laden drainpipes in fast-food joints). They all show up breathless. They show up flipping through their spiral notebooks to get to the page where they've jotted down their latest ideas.

Once the hallways have completely cleared out, they drag in pieces of freshly painted sets from the backs of their pickup trucks. Liz hauls in armloads of clothing courtesy of Vanessa at Duds. She trails after everyone with a measuring tape. She jots down sizes—including shoes. Makes notes about colors that would look nice next to each cast member's hair coloring.

And it's all because of Cass and Dylan—their stellar performance has lit a fire under everyone.

Not that the rest of the student body is aware of it, since we continue to practice behind closed auditorium doors. Which means that I have suddenly become the recipient of the entirety of Verona High's student body ribbing. I'm the object of choice pranksters seek out when they need to relieve a little of their own tension, create a minor earthquake.

It means that I arrive on a Monday morning to find my locker door branded with a giant chalk “Miss Directed.”

Oh, yeah. Ha.

It also means random shouts of “. . . be sure to have my phone charged opening night” fly my way through the cafeteria, along with fry missiles.

It means I find the narrow hallway leading to my English class blocked by two sets of quarterback-width shoulders.

“Hey,” one of them says, “watch this. Tell us what you think. Seriously.” He points to his friend, who attempts a silly soft-shoe routine. When he's finished, he plants his feet wide and wiggles his jazz hands at the sides of his face.

“Not bad,” I say. “Wouldn't be too quick to give up the team, though,” and crawl through the space between them, rushing off to class.

It means I'm stopped in the lunch line to listen to a couple of art geeks recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in an overly dramatic way that ends with them both biting the knuckles of their index fingers.

“You guys have no real passion,” I say, stealing a fry from one of their trays.

It becomes so pervasive, even the shyest members of the math team feel free to get in on it as two members wait for me in front of my locker, all to “audition” by singing a rousing rendition of “Anything Goes.”

“Flat,” I say, pushing them aside as I reach for my combination lock. “You can always try next year, though.”

I've learned to put on a good face. I wear it like makeup,
forgetting that it's there, for the most part. The truth is, though, that just because we've got a fire lit beneath us, it doesn't mean that we've suddenly found the answer to every one of our problems. We're not exactly picking up the pace, breezing through putting this production together perfectly. A good portion of our bits are incredibly clumsy. Rehearsal after rehearsal, even though we're continuing to cross items off Mom's check sheet.

We're actually struggling to get through one such scene—one we aced the day before—when I stop groaning and rubbing my forehead long enough to catch Liz trying to convince Kiki to accept a pair of peekaboo toe pumps.

Kiki rolls her eyes—I swear, she probably rolled her eyes at her stuffed animals back in elementary school—and finally slides the shoes out of Liz's hands. After dropping them to the floor, she kicks off her own sneaker and tries desperately to force one of her feet into the high heel.

Back onstage, the players are bumping into each other, and their movements are so stiff—they look like blind robots up there. The lines I'm hearing are forced, mechanical.

I raise my script to cover the bottom half of my face. I'm laughing. I can't help it. Kiki's the mirror image of what's happening up there behind the footlights. Trying to force something that will never fit.

“Okay, okay,” I say, waving my hands as I decide it's time for me to attempt to kill their collective misery. I carry my
script to the stage. “What would you say?” I ask one of the red ball caps. I press him again. “Your words. If you were that character, in real life, what would you say?”

He stares at me wide-eyed. He finally ekes out a sentence that sounds, to me, a little like the hallway shouts that fill the air as the Verona High stream flows to lunch. Staccato grunts. But it comes out of him naturally. Finally. I nod. “Write it down in your scripts. All of you.”

“You mean change the line?” the ball cap asks.

“Yes,” I say, scratching the dialogue out of my own manuscript and writing his sentence above it. “Change the line. Make it your own.”

I return to my seat. But something has happened to me with the scratching out of that sentence. It suddenly sends my mind spinning. I'm staring at the entire scene now—not just that single line of dialogue. And I draw a giant X over the page.

There's no room in the margins for what I want to do, so I reach into my backpack and pull out Bertie's journal. I flip to the back. But this time, as I fill one page, another blank page appears behind it. I write frantically. Beneath a rapidly spreading sense of relief. This is fun—more so even than refusing to let the hallway goons get to me. And it hits me that it
should
be fun. I'm giggling under my breath, pressing so hard against the pages that I nearly tear them with my pen tip. Until I hear my name.

When I glance up, I realize Kiki's annoyed scowl, plastered onto her flushed face, is directed at me. “You're not even watching,” she accuses me.

Maybe it's because I've been backed into a corner. Maybe it's because I'm looking at her face and remembering all the times that she ratted someone out for having equations written on the inside of their wrist during algebra exams. But now I'm visualizing everything that could happen if I were to slam the journal shut and shove it in my backpack, go back to the scene we'd just been working on, which was only barely limping along.

I'm seeing myself in the principal's office, in front of his desk, slumped into a chair that feels every bit as unforgiving as Kiki's words:
It's her
mother.
Why
wouldn't
she have gotten the director's job? I'm not one to be critical.
(At this point, I picture the principal's eyes flashing Kiki a look he's picked up from the student population, something along the lines of “Gimme a break.”)
But she's not offering us the kind of direction we really need,
I imagine Kiki continuing to say.
She's spending rehearsals not paying any attention at all! She's coasting. Completely. Of course, I would be completely happy to give up my role and step in. Save the musical. We could just switch places. . . .

I refuse to give Kiki any ammunition. “I'm listening to everything you say,” I insist, standing. “And revising it as we go along.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” she asks. “Revising?”

I begin to read what I've written. At first, it's nothing more than a chain reaction. Kiki's kicked me and I've kicked back. As the minutes pulse, though, what I'm doing sinks in. And it starts to scare me. A voice in the back of my head reminds me that there were plenty of reasons why I didn't get shunted off to journalism with the rest of the writers during freshman year. I'm not the person who reads aloud from my own work. I don't have a blog where I post my latest flash fiction for the world to read. I'm a closet scribbler, a girl with hatboxes full of stories that have never seen sunlight.

Once I've started, though, I can't stop. I'm suddenly reciting the passages I'd scrawled in the back of Bertie's journal word for word. Every once in a while, someone actually laughs. A welcome chuckle here and there.

As the players move around, they occasionally let out an “Oh—yeah—okay, that's better,” and then, later on, a few begin to say, “Hey, Quin, what if—” And we're brainstorming, and the scene is changing completely, but who cares? We're laughing and this feels better—it's a shoe that actually fits.

“I have no idea how that's going to work in with the rest of the musical,” Cass admits as we wrap for the day and the class is gathering their stuff, heading for the exit. “But it was a blast.”

She's right—I know she is. All the way home, all I can think about is tying the threads together. Connecting the dots
between the musical and what we've just practiced. So I burst into my room, and I flip to the scene I've written at the end of Bertie's journal. “Anything Goes Notes,” I've scribbled at the top of the first page.

Why not? What if (literally) anything goes that doesn't work?

Suddenly, I'm attacking this boy-wants-girl story, scratching out whole scenes, whole passages in the manuscript, adding new lines and scenarios. The next afternoon, at rehearsal, I share them.

The cast sits cross-legged on the floor, leaning forward, shouting out an occasional “No—it'd be like this—” Or “What if—?”

The entirety of Advanced Drama is responding. It's a collective give-and-take now.

Mom's still off having signs printed, taking out ads in the newspaper, coming up with advertising slogans to be featured during the nightly local news. She's on the phone, calling all the muckety-mucks she can find within the city limits—like a cold-call sales pitch, a “Can I put you down for two tickets, then?” She wants everyone to come out—and she's telling them we're picking up right where the Avery left off. Finishing the
Anything Goes
run—just imagine what we could do inside the theater! Of course we can't let the city tear it down!

Except that's not what we're doing. The play keeps shifting. I'm not sure, exactly, what Mom's going to say when she
sees it. But I'm oddly protective of it—it's a work in progress that I'm not quite sure how to describe yet. So I keep all our revisions to myself. The rest of the cast follows my lead. No one says a word about it in class. Not even when Mom asks for status updates. We're purposefully vague.

“Hey! Quin!” Liz shouts toward the end of the week, at the close of one particularly long rehearsal. All the players are breaking up, finally dispersing, filing out through the doors that lead to the vacant hallways, then the parking lot. “I was thinking. Why don't we have the audience show up in vintage clothes? Wouldn't that be cool? Do you think you could tell Ms. Drewery? She could put out the word. It would be another way to get some advertising. We could put up some signs in Duds. Maybe she could get that on the radio, too. Make it kind of sound like an event or a party, not just a high school play.”