“It’s, well, it’s a little bit sexy,” I admitted.
She laughed softly. “There has to be some perk to being a theater geek, I guess.”
“What play’s this for anyway?” I went over and lifted a sheet from a hanging clothesline. The laundry tag on it read Pottery Barn.
“Oklahoma!”
“Oklahoma?”
Lena quirked an eyebrow. “You’re not saying it with the exclamation mark. I can tell.”
Absently, I ran my finger over the fresh line tattooed into my wrist. The skin there still stung. “So you’re an actress? Do you sing?” I asked, exploring the set pieces. A wood facade stood on its own. Out of it was cut a window with tattered curtains that looked like old tablecloths.
“Hardly.” She crawled out of the wheelbarrow. “Lights and media specialist,” she said. “Fancy name for someone whose face nobody wants to see on camera.”
“I don’t know about that.” I grinned and flipped the viewer on the camcorder open and peered through the lens at her. Lena’s figure had a yellowish night vision tint to it. I hit the red button at the top and a caption on-screen popped up to read, “record.”
Lena ducked behind one of the hanging sheets and poked her head out. “What are you doing?” she squealed and disappeared under the prop. “Are you seriously recording this?”
“Say hello,” I said, moving around to the front of the stage to get a better angle.
She stepped out. A compressed smile pinched her cheeks. “You’re insane, you know that?” She cocked her head. “Hi there.” She waved and then suppressed a round of giggles with her fist.
“Do something,” I commanded. If we were going to be here, I wanted Cassidy to somehow feel it like I felt her. I wanted to exorcise her.
“Do what?”
“I don’t know. Something, anything.”
Lena hesitated, then cleared her throat. “To be or not to be…”
“Lame.” I lowered the lens. “Tell me something that nobody else knows.”
She shifted her weight. “Nobody?” Her hands twisted together. She stared off into the auditorium wings where a tangle of ropes and pulleys waited.
“I…” She started to say something and then appeared to change course. “Hate sleeping with socks on my feet. I can’t go to bed.”
I rolled my eyes. I lowered the camera to my chest so I could look at her dead on. “Something real,” I said. “Something for just us.” I raised the camera up again, nodded, and waited.
Lena looked off to the side wings of the stage and then, slowly, back at the camera. “Okay, then…,” she said. “I tried to kill myself last year.” I zoomed the shot tight on her pale face until practically all I could see were her eyes. I heard her sigh. “I took a handful of my dad’s sleeping pills and swallowed them all. Ten seconds later I realized what I was doing and forced myself to throw them all back up.” She looked straight into the camera. “Not too impressive, I know.”
“Why’d you do it then?”
“Because my mom committed suicide when I was little. I guess I just figured the same thing was probably in me, too. Bound to happen sooner or later.”
I walked left, and shot her profile. “But it’s not, then?” I asked, trying to imagine the Lena in front of me cold and lifeless with bluing lips.
“I guess I just don’t know yet. Like if you hadn’t found me that night. If those boys had … I don’t know. Maybe then … Maybe I’m just, like, waiting for my first big tragedy before I fall completely apart.”
I let the camera scan from her eyes to her mouth. She licked her lips nervously. She turned to me. Outside the viewfinder, I could see her roll her eyes. “Okay, not funny anymore. I feel like a moron. What is this, reality TV?” She walked toward me with her hand outstretched until it blacked out the screen.
“Hey!” I protested.
She wrestled the camera away from me. “Now let’s see who’s camera shy. Do something,” she said, mimicking me.
I held up my two middle fingers and walked back from her and then held them up to where the audience would sit, to the rows and rows of empty chairs. Somehow when I did this I felt like I was showing up Cassidy. A rush of power pulsed through me. I was here. I was invading her space. It was happening at last. I was taking over.
“Oh, that’s nice. Real nice.” Lena kept the camcorder aimed at me.
“I wasn’t made to be nice.”
“Hey, you called me lame.”
Then at once, Lena and I both froze. She lowered the camera. The whites of her eyes ringed her pupils. “What was that?”
“Shhhh … keep your voice down.” I listened. There was a metallic click followed by the whir of the air-conditioning starting up overhead.