Starry-Eyed (29 page)

The fairies darted onto the stage. Their faces were sharp-featured but childlike, and their skin had been dusted or painted to look almost metallic, like moonlight on dark water. They were freakishly thin, without standard fairy wings, but with long, tapering fingers that made their hands look almost like twigs or roots—like something inhuman, but alive.

Liam leaned toward me. “What's with their hands?”

“Finger extensions,” I whispered back. “Haven't you ever seen
The King and I
?”

We both turned back to the stage. Liam didn't say it, and I didn't say it either, but we'd both noticed that the fairies' fingers weren't stiff like the ones worn by the movie's Siamese dancers—they seemed to bend and move all the way to their pointed ends.

There was a flourish of orchestral music. The lights striking the boards grew dim. From the dark space above the stage, hundreds of tiny, silvery lights floated down and hung in space, like a sky full of stars, or the sparks of a firework refusing to die away.

There were audible gasps all around us.

“How the hell . . .,” muttered Liam.

And then Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, swept onto the stage with their retinues.

The buzzing audience fell silent.

Liam and I both sat up straighter in our seats.

The actors on the stage had the right number of limbs, the usual amounts of eyes and noses. The voices that came out of their mouths seemed natural, even if they were a little bit too loud and too pure for ordinary people. It was something about proportion. Or about the color of their skin. Or maybe it was their golden eyes, or the way their necks seemed so impossibly long and graceful, or the exaggerated, liquid slow motion of their too long, too slender limbs.

“They look like
puppets
,” I breathed into Liam's ear. “But there aren't any strings.”

“Those aren't puppets,” he whispered back.

The twinkling lights changed from silver-white to red-gold. Masses of flowers seemed to sprout and bloom straight from the black floorboards. The buzzing around us resumed, growing louder. Liam actually wiped his glasses on his shirt, like a professor in some bad sci-fi film. He leaned on the seat in front of him, squinting at the stage, his eyes two dark pinpricks.

I leaned next to him. “How do you think they—”

But I couldn't even hear myself. Around us, the buzzing changed to murmuring, and then the murmuring changed to actual, out-loud, rude-guy-on-cell-phone-in-movie-theater talking. For a second, I thought about craning around and hissing at everybody to
shut up
.

“It's her. Look!” a girl two rows away was saying.

“No way . . .”

“Are you sure?”

In one of the upper rows to our right, someone stood up. He leaned toward the stage, his hands clenched around the back of the seat in front of him. In the dimness, I could see his silhouette, but not his face.

“Mara?” he shouted.

Everyone else fell silent: the audience in the house, the actors on the stage. The air around us seemed to have turned to glass, still and clear and breakable.

“Her brother,” Liam whispered.

“Mara!” Jack Crane yelled again. I hadn't heard his voice in years. “
Mara!
”

Onstage, the cast remained perfectly still.

The fairies were crouched, not moving, beside Bottom and Titania in their patch of impossible flowers. They were all long-limbed and perfect-featured, posing with the grace of dancers.

And one of them had dark red hair.

Something about her face had changed. Her eyes looked larger, her jaw longer and narrower, her bones closer to the skin. But there was no question. It was
her
. Mara Crane.

Mara Freaking Crane.

The cast remained frozen.

Then someone downstairs shouted, “Lucy Porter?”

One of the smallest fairies gave a twitch.

She'd been ten years old in the picture on the news—the picture from 1987. She looked ten years old now. At the same time, there was something in her features, or in her eyes, that made her look much, much older.

The news: that was where I'd seen Quince too. Now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure I had seen several of the other actors' faces before, in black and white, without the tricks of light and makeup. If it
was
makeup. I'd seen them on posters, on TV, on those sad fliers that get stuck inside packets of junk mail.
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

Here they were, surrounded by faces that I didn't recognize, by Oberon and Titania and Puck, who looked even stranger, even older and thinner, even more inhuman than the rest.

The noise in the house was rising. Everyone was on their feet. Some of Mara's friends had scrambled into the aisles and were running toward the balcony rail like crazy fans at a rock concert.

And then, as the noise in the auditorium reached its peak, the illusion shattered. You could actual
feel
the moment it broke, its shards hanging there in the motionless air.

The actors stopped. Slowly, dropping their poses, their eyes flickering out into the darkness beyond the fourth wall, they became what they really were.

Something else.

Something not like us.

Something with limbs that were too long and voices that were too loud and teeth that were too sharp and eyes that were too wide and yellow and bright.

They gathered across the lip of the stage, forming one long, glittering, terrifying row. Together, they stared out into the darkened seats. Straight at us.

The audience froze: Downstairs, in the boxes, on the balcony. Every single one of us.

As though there had been some silent command, we all slunk back to our places and sat down.

The actors waited. When everyone was still, they glided back to their marks. There was a beat, like an indrawn breath, and then the show went on.

. . . . .

When the velvet curtain finally closed, the noise that filled the house wasn't quite applause. It wasn't theater applause, anyway, which is usually somewhere between a tennis match and a wedding where everyone knows the marriage won't last. It was a roar—a weird, rushing release of joy and fear and relief and awe.

The curtain stayed shut.

The crowd clapped, and shouted, and clapped, and waited, but no actors appeared to take their bows. A few ushers, who had been standing uncertainly in the downstairs aisles, disappeared into the darkness beside the stage. Another minute passed. Finally, the blue velvet curtains drifted apart.

The stage was empty.

The backdrops, the fountain, the strange growing trees, the impossible hanging lights. Everything was gone.

For a beat, the theater quieted. Then there was an even louder roar, as if half the audience thought that this was the last big trick of a magic show, and the other half thought that the trick was on them. While part of the crowd went on clapping and cheering, beaming up at the empty boards, the other part—the part that picked up Liam and me like two pieces of purple plaid driftwood—raced up the aisles, through the theater lobby, and out into the street. I caught a last glimpse of Mara's brother tearing down the snowy sidewalk, still shouting her name, before he disappeared into the flood of bodies headed toward the stage's loading doors.

Later, there were rumors of a huge black tour bus zooming out of the alley before anyone could get in its way. But I didn't see it. I'm pretty sure there was never one to see. There was nothing left onstage, or backstage, or
coming out the doors. The Camino Real Theatre Company was gone.

Without speaking, Liam and I scuffed through the snow toward the waiting charter bus.

. . . . .

Back in the parking lot of Lincoln Grove High, the crowd scattered. The kids who had skipped the show hurried off to their cars. The ones who hadn't slumped softly, slowly away, holding on to each other. “It wasn't her,” I heard someone saying, his arm draped around Jack Crane's shoulders. “It couldn't have been her.”

Liam and I shuffled toward his ancient black Honda.

“Want a ride?” he asked, not looking at me.

“No, thanks,” I said, not looking at him either. “I feel like walking.”

I headed away from the school, along the deserted sidewalk. A few cars coasted slowly past me, their headlights slicing yellow strips out of the darkness. After I turned a corner, the streets grew quiet.

The air seemed to have gotten colder, or maybe I was noticing it—really noticing it—for the first time. The sky above me was clear as ice, with tiny stars prickling through it, small and very far away.

My house looked like something hibernating. The curtains were drawn, the front lights switched off. No one had remembered to leave them on for me. I tiptoed through the unlit living room, down the hall. The TV still buzzed behind Mom's door. A band of light slipped over Kyle's threshold; I could hear the click of computer keys.

I sat down on my own bed, in the dark, with all of my clothes still on, even my jacket and shoes. But I couldn't keep still.

I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to be in this room, this house, this little town. I didn't want to be in my own body.

I trudged out across the backyard, the puffs of my breath leaving smudges in the perfect air. The snow's crust snapped under my feet, dropping me through the surface with each step. I had never felt so heavy.

At the back of the yard, a ribbon of trees unwound through the darkness, leading away across the fields, toward the forested hills. The air was still. No wind. No sound. I stepped into the grove, into the black cobweb of bare branches, and tilted my face toward the sky.

For a second, I imagined that the stars above me were the same tiny, twinkling lights that had hung over the stage like the sparks of a frozen firework. I imagined that the bare black grove around me was unfurling with mist and magical leaves. I imagined myself in Mara's place, part of the illusion, not watching it from the darkness outside.

But the stars were high and small and cold, and the grove around me was perfectly still.

“Why?” I yelled. My voice shattered the frozen air. “Why did you take her? Why couldn't you choose
me
?” I reached out my arms. “Come on! Take me! I'm right here!”

The sound dwindled away into the dark and the snow.

I stood there, shivering, until my toes had gone from burning to numb, and the tears on my eyelashes had frozen in clumps. Then I turned back toward the house. I followed my own set of footprints, the hollow spots leading me back, taking me away from the dark, and the cold, and the trees and the stars, and everything else that might lie just beyond.

ANECDOTE: ANTHONY FEDOROV

I've been singing since I was barely two years old. It started back in the Ukraine, where I was born. It's always been in my family.

Both my dad and my brother played the guitar and accordion and my grandma was a singer. I think I got my vocal ability from her. What inspired me initially, though, was my dad; he had his own band back then. They played Russian pop music. We would sing old school Russian pop songs; at parties for friends, or at different festivals. It was just something we did as a family.