Well, yes. With everyone staying home and avoiding crowds, plenty of stores have had to close, and since the mail carriers use open trucks and mosquitoes are everywhere, they got hit especially hard by the Violence in the South, which has slowed down the delivery of the next-day packages everyone is so accustomed to. While life goes on in cooler climes, Florida is struggling to stay afloat with the effects of the pandemic. Missing clipboards are the least of Chelsea’s problems.
She takes an application, or whatever it is, and a pen and goes to sit by the sunny windows. The room is painfully chilly and sparse in the way of underfunded local governments. A crappy TV blares the news in the corner, and most of the people sitting in plastic chairs stare at either the TV or their phones. These people—they have a desperate look about them, one Chelsea can relate to. Like Jeanie promised, they are all ages, all sizes. Chelsea was expecting buff guys, but most of the hopefuls are just the sort of folks she would see at the store.
She sits cross-legged on the ground and uses her chair as a backing for the paper. It’s the strangest application she’s ever seen, not that she’s had a job since she was a teen, before David, and even then she only had to fill out one.
Name, birthday, address, phone, all that is normal. So are the spaces for past jobs and the skills they encompassed.
But then it asks for three emergency contacts and allergies and clothing sizes. It demands height and weight and information on health problems and past surgeries.
And then there’s a section for circling her skills. Gymnastics, sports, running, wrestling, martial arts, cheerleading, theater, singing, stunts, circus skills, clowning, barbering, makeup application, camerawork, PR, food service, commercial driving, forklift operation. The longer and stranger the list gets, the more Chelsea realizes that she has none of the skills they require.
At a loss, she circles theater, cheerleading, and singing. She did all three in high school, and she has a decent voice, even if she hasn’t sung in public in twenty years. She swallows hard, the memory hitting her like a wave crashing as her eyes go unfocused, gazing out at the empty brown field in the hot sun.
It happened the night of the high school talent show. She was a senior, and she and her best friend, Whitney, had been planning their act for weeks—“The Point of No Return” from Phantom of the Opera. Whitney was Christine, wearing a big, poofy gown she’d found at the thrift store and altered to look less 1980s party and more 1800s. Chelsea was the Phantom, her thrift store tux a little ill fitting but mostly covered by a vampire cape they’d dug out of Whitney’s brother’s closet. She had a half mask and was in the dressing room, penciling in stubble. She’d been doing theater all through high school and loved nothing more than the energy of the dressing room, the hot lights and giggles and frenzy, everyone running around half dressed and fizzing, their eyes outlined in black. As she leaned in, carefully stippling her jaw with a Dollar Store eyeliner, David appeared behind her in the mirror, his hand behind his back.
He’d been so hot then, his hair gelled and his skin tan from summers lifeguarding. Every time she saw him, she swooned. They’d only been on a couple of dates, but she spent most of her time thinking about him, hoping he’d ask her out again, praying that when they talked by his car in the lot after school, he would lean in and kiss her for the first time. He looked amazing, dressed up in a white button-down and khakis, and he was smiling, right up until he recognized her.
“What are you doing?” he asked, clearly confused—and not in a good way.
She capped the eyeliner and turned around, smiling brightly. “Makeup. You’re not supposed to be back here! It’s supposed to be a surprise.”
David squinted and cocked his head, taking in her face. She wore thick pancake, black eyeliner and mascara—the usual theater getup, even if half her face would be hidden by the mask. His lip curled in disgust, and her stomach clutched tight.
“I’m the Phantom of the Opera. See?” She took her wig from the Styrofoam form and draped it over her pinned-back hair, then added the mask for full effect. She’d done a lot of work putting it all together, and she knew it looked great. But his reaction didn’t change.
All that energy and frenzy she’d felt began to wilt, and everyone else in the room faded into background as the boy she was crushing on super hard looked at her like she was an absolute idiot—a hideous, absolute idiot.
“You look like a dude.”
“That’s the whole idea.”
She looked up at him, hopeful, wanting him to understand what all this meant to her, how she felt when the song’s notes soared up and up as the Phantom pulled Christine into his sick world. They’d chosen the song for max drama, and there were even gobo lights that would make it look like they were in an underwater cavern, with light-blue ripples dancing on the black wall behind them.
David pulled flowers out from behind his back—tulips already going limp—but instead of dramatically offering them to her, which should’ve happened after the show, anyway, he placed them on the table behind her. He gently removed the mask and her wig, but he didn’t put it on the form, he just flopped it down on top of the flowers. Her skin zinged at his touch, her knees weak.
“I thought you were going to be the girl. I was hoping to see you in a sexy dress.” He clasped her jaw in both hands like he was going to kiss her, running his thumb over her chin, smearing the stubble dots she’d so carefully drawn. “It’s just weird, right? You in a tux?”
“There’s a historical precedent for gender swapping in theater. All the parts of women in Shakespeare’s plays went to men.” She looked up at him, hating how he was staring at her like she was a gross bug. “Wait. Aren’t you in the talent show, too? Where’s your costume? I’ve never seen you in the greenroom.”
He pulled away, smirking, and pulled something out of his back pocket. It was a gold wire circlet of fake leaves.
“I’m reciting from Julius Caesar. I’ll put on my toga beforehand, and my laurels. But no makeup or anything.” He looked around the room at all the theater and dance kids getting ready, at the splashy costumes and sequins and rouged cheeks. “It’s crazy back here.”
“Yeah, but it’s fun.”
It was actually kind of weird that he hadn’t been in the greenroom. He wasn’t in drama or chorus, and he was a late entry to the talent show—his Academic Bowl captain had suggested it would look good on college applications, he’d told her.
“Are you not putting on makeup? It’s hard to see features from the audience without it. I could help you—”
He scowled. “Uh, no thanks. Not my thing, historical precedent or not.” He glanced back at the door. “I was going to ask if you wanted to come hang with us in the lobby, but…” He looked her up and down, frowning. Her heart sank. He couldn’t show her off like this, was what he meant.