“Don’t move your arms, honey,” Ms. Gaspard mumbled through a mouthful of pins.
“So how’s it coming together?” I didn’t care, really—dance was never my thing, and I got bored watching anything with no dialogue—but in order to pump him for information, I had to go through the motions of social graces.
“Amazing,” he said. “Although I guess I can’t speak for Joy, since she’s working twice as hard as me.”
“Is it different now that you two are . . .” I let my ellipsis do the talking, and Diego blushed.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, no, but—it’s just better, you know? Everything’s better.” He smiled, like he couldn’t believe his luck, and I focused hard on making my face look normal, forcing the bitterness down.
“I’ve seen this happen so many times,” Ms. Gaspard said, placing her final pin in Diego’s velvet lapel. “Get kids together, rehearsing nonstop . . . something always clicks.”
“Not for everyone,” I said. “I almost had to recast, but luckily my leads got back on track.”
“Well, there’s an exception to every rule.” Ms. Gaspard turned Diego so that he could admire himself in the full-length mirror, and then busied herself getting my costumes off the rack. “But when it’s there, anyone can see it. You can fake a lot of things, but you can’t fake chemistry.”
I bristled. Your chemistry with Roth had been natural—that was partially why I cast him, even though he was way too classically handsome for the gangly, nondescript Rodolpho I had envisioned when I wrote the play. I hadn’t been worried because I thought you were mine then—and also because by the end of February you two had been constantly sniping at each other. It was only since I’d gotten back that things had shifted. Anything that had happened would have happened while I was gone.
Someone’s been here all week. They barely left. A stomach-turning casting choice for your “new friend” snaked its way into my brain with a venomous hiss.
He wouldn’t, I thought. It’s so sad and telling how I never doubted that you would. But not him. He was my friend.
“Can we, uh, get some more soot on this?” I asked, inspecting the vintage cap Roth would be wearing. I faced the mirror and put it on, turning my head slowly while keeping my eyes in the same spot.
If you narrow your focus enough, you stop using your peripheral vision, the Director whispered. You start to miss things.
“Looks pretty dirty to me,” Ms. Gaspard laughed. It took me a second to remember we were talking about the hat.
“He” couldn’t be Roth. He was the reason I had gotten into Janus in the first place. Without Dave Roth, one could argue, I never even would have met you.
Then again, without me, you never would have met each other.
No one could argue with that.
Chapter Twenty-Five
May 8
5 days left
“HEY, HANDSOME.”
The Monday before Showcase, you sat down next to me at the fountain, flashing a smile on the small section of your face that was still visible underneath your huge sunglasses, and I quietly seethed. Mom had been wrong. It was Shakespeare who’s been right. Like Romeo said, love could easily spring from hate. Or, as it so happened, vice versa.
“Hey, yourself,” I said, avoiding eye contact. You’d blown off school on Friday, which meant we’d had to reschedule our cue-to-cue, which meant that Roth had disappeared, too, and neither of you responded to messages over the weekend. I didn’t have any real proof yet, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d been leaving you guys alone in the theater as much as possible, taking prolonged coffee breaks, making an excuse to drag Chris with me, and then bursting back in when (I hoped) you least expected it. But so far, I hadn’t walked in on anything worse than you blasting Justin Bieber. The hardest piece of evidence I had to go on was that Roth had texted the word rehearsals, plural, when I’d asked him about break. You’d been very clear at dinner that there had been only one. But I couldn’t confront you with that. I’d look like a complete paranoid asshole.
Diego and Joy were slowly making their way across the square, apparently late because they had to stop every two seconds to kiss or whisper something to each other. I’d only witnessed them as a couple for a week and I was already sick of it.
“What’s up, E?” Diego said, sitting down and pulling Joy onto his lap. She winced slightly, which made me darkly happy. “Missing the beach yet?”
“No,” I deadpanned.
“You ready for the Showcase Showdown?” Joy asked.
“Wait, did you just drop a Price Is Right reference?” Diego beamed at her in mock horror. “That’s it, we’re done.”