by C. A. Gray
“Maybe, then I’ll ask you again later,” he winked at me.
“Fine, then I will too!”
“Fair enough.” He grinned at me, swallowed another sip, and said, “So whose story will be next? After yours.”
“Why, do you want it to be yours?”
“Eh. I can’t quite envision my story animated…”
“It wouldn’t have to be, we could do it live action,” I pointed out. “Madeline has a really great camera on her, and we’ve got GreenScreen.”
“Huh. Well we’d have to cast it just from the people here, obviously. I’d need someone to play my dad, and my brother…”
“Mack and Jake,” I said at once. “Clearly.”
“Jake?” Liam pondered this. “Hmm. I guess he and I look more related than Nilesh and I do…”
“Oh, which reminds me, I promised Nilesh a role in one of these!” I snapped my fingers. “We have to cast him as something! Who can he be?”
Liam smiled. “He’ll be that character that shows up everywhere. He’s like the bank teller, and the sandwich shop guy, and the janitor…”
“Ooh, can he sing too? He wants to sing!”
“I see my story suddenly taking a very dark turn.”
I giggled again. “Okay. So broad strokes: you—your character, whatever—starts out in his ‘ordinary world,’ back when he was at General Specs, and he thought his revolutionary younger brother was an idiot, until his brother disappears. That’s his ‘call to adventure.’”
Liam nodded, his smile fading. “And then he starts to question everything. He quits, and starts investigating Brian’s disappearance.”
“Then he goes and gets a doctorate while trying to figure out how to stop the coming war, with a locus to get the word out, but the locus gets pulled. That’ll be the First Threshold.”
Liam added, “And then there’s this girl he works with who never gave him the time of day before. But after that, suddenly she believes that maybe there really is a conspiracy out there, and she joins his mission to spread the word.” I blinked, surprised, and Liam went on, “She’s stubborn and brilliant, and she’s the first thing he’s ever really cared about besides his mission, since his brother’s disappearance. She makes him feel like there’s a world out there that’s still worth fighting for.” He tilted his head at me. “Maybe you could play that girl?”
I laughed, and dropped my eyes to my wine glass, my heart racing with the same panic I’d felt when talking to Julie earlier—only more intense. “Oh, I don’t know. Do yoxu think the story even needs that character?” I wasn’t sure what I was saying—I was just talking so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes.
“Well, I’m sure glad she was there,” he said. But his tone was different: husky, probing. I felt him still watching me, saw him take another sip of wine out of the corner of my eye as he waited. When I didn’t reply, he patted my knee—a non-threatening gesture.
“It’s late,” he said. “We should probably get some sleep.”
The next thing I knew, the moment was over. We descended the stairs, he put up the wine bottle, rinsed the glasses, and walked me to my bedroom door.
“Good night Bec,” he murmured, laying a hand on my shoulder that then slid down my arm as he walked past me, clutching my hand just lightly before he let go.
I stood there, frozen for a moment, watching him go with mingled relief and dismay. Finally I opened my bedroom door, closed it, and rested the back of my head on the door.
“What’s wrong?” Madeline demanded, “are you okay?”
I walked over to my bed and flopped on it, leaning over the edge so I could look into her enormous, concerned eyes. “I. Am. A. Complete. And. Utter. Moron. What is wrong with me?” I told her the story as hurriedly as I could, just eager to get it all out. When I’d finished, I said, “When he asks if I want to play that girl, I say yes! That is the correct answer, for heaven’s sake!”
“So go tell him now,” Madeline suggested helpfully.
“What? I can’t go tell him now, we already said goodnight! He went to bed!”
“So? He’s probably not asleep yet.”
“I… well, I…” I stopped. Should I?
No.
But should I?
I decided not to. I changed, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and got in bed. Turned out the light. Tossed and turned. Turned on the light. Looked at the analog clock on the wall. Only fifteen minutes had gone by. My heart began to race again.
Go. Don’t think about it, Rebecca. Just go.
I got up, opened my door, and got halfway down the dark hallway. I stopped, turned back, and then turned again, making myself go on. I got to Liam’s door. I raised my hand to knock. I’m not sure I’d ever felt so terrified in my life.
My knuckles hovered over the door. Do it, I commanded myself.
But the knuckles refused to fall.
He’s asleep, I told myself. I waited too long. I’ll tell him tomorrow. Or, the next time he gives me an opening.
I thought I heard a creak inside. He’s not asleep. He’s up.
Ohmigosh he’s going to hear me out here and open the door and what am I going to say?
I just stood there, frozen, almost holding my breath. When I didn’t hear another creak, I took a step back as slowly and quietly as I possibly could. Then another. Then another.
I’ll tell him next time, I promised myself. Next time.
I couldn’t fall asleep for hours.
Chapter 25
It was hard to focus, but I spent much of the following day hammering out the details of the script on one of the netscreens from downstairs. Fortunately this didn’t require complete focus, since I already had an outline written. I could go through the motions, and write some fairly obvious and uninspired dialogue that fit with my archetypes. But uninspired was not going to have the intended effect.
At first I tried to keep myself aloof from the group, yet still accessible, just in case Liam decided to approach me again. But that didn’t work very well, because I’d never remain alone for long. Andy or Julie would join me, and interrupt me every few minutes. At one point Liam did wander through to check on my progress too, but there was no hope of resuming the conversation from the night before, because Andy was sitting right there. Jake later came in and announced that Nilesh had helped him print and assemble the components of a microphone and a MIDI keyboard—“So we’re ready to record whenever your script is done, Becca! And I think I’ve got all the characters ready to go on AnimatR too!”
“I should be done by this evening,” I promised, and then realized that if I was going to deliver, I really needed to be alone. I exerted my willpower and went back to my room to finish, put Madeline in ‘music mode’ and had her play something classical so that I wouldn’t pay too much attention to it. Then, I simply refused to allow my thoughts to stray.
But they wanted to… oh, they wanted to. I think most of my creative energy went toward suppressing the constant desire to daydream.
When I finally mastered my own mind, I basically had to scrap everything I’d written earlier that day as crap. I started over, trying to create a counter-message to Chiefton’s—tugging on heartstrings, but also appealing to reason. I wanted to teach people how to think, how to recognize and resist manipulation. I didn’t just want to counter-manipulate. I could never win at that game.
“Becca!” I jumped at the enthusiastic pounding on my door a few hours in, accompanied by a yip yip yip that told me Julie had Queenie at her heels. “Come down to the basement, you’ve got to hear this!”
“Okay, give me like two minutes!” I called back. I was just massaging the last emotional plea at the end. I wanted to make it feel like a call to action to the viewer, leading right in to Madeline’s interview with me after the film’s ending.
About five minutes later, I finished, as satisfied as I was probably going to be for now. I’d let someone—Julie, probably, since she wrote a
lot of essays in her college coursework—edit it for me before we recorded it.
About halfway down to the basement, I caught the first strains of what sounded like a piano concert. Assuming they’d had Matt send over a holograph of a performance, I opened the door and peeked down. They’d cleared off a table for a newly minted MIDI keyboard. Francis sat in front of it, fingers flying, filling the echoey little basement with the piano rendition of a symphony by Rachmaninoff. Julie, Jake, Larissa, Val, and Andy stood in an awed little semi-circle around him, and Julie turned to grin up at me as I descended the stairs. Larissa looked like she might burst into tears of admiration.
Francis’s eyes were closed, his brows knit, and he swayed with the music, matching his weight against the resistance of the keys. There was a moment of stunned silence when he finished, and Larissa began to clap almost at once. The others joined in, somewhat reluctant. I suppressed a smile at Francis’s self-complacent air as he accepted the applause, but I had to clap too. He truly was amazing, even if he was also insufferable.
“Hey! Ready to record?” Jake said when he saw me. “I thought ‘Someday Soon’ and ‘All I Ask’ would sound better with piano, and I figured since Francis said he could play…”
“Oh sure, absolutely,” I said, casting a sidelong glance at Francis. “I just thought he wouldn’t be caught dead contributing to such ‘peppy, poppy nonsense.’”
“It’s certainly no Rachmaninoff,” he said archly. “But… I suppose those songs aren’t the most terrible I’ve ever heard.”
I laughed. “High praise, Francis. High praise.”
Jake queued up the recording screen on RecordingStudio, and scooted one microphone toward me and the other toward his guitar. Francis’s MIDI was already plugged in. “Let’s do a dry run and just jam, and then we can record each track separately. Hold on, let me get a session drummer going….” He chose a pre-programmed beat. “All right, everybody ready? Take one! Three! Two! One! And—”
Jake strummed the opening chords, and Francis filled out the background in time with the session drummer. In four measures, I came in, singing:
If only…
If only I could speak my mind
And not fear the consequence,
If only I could sing full out
Without them thinking I’d lost my sense,
If I had the strength to be the girl
I know I’m meant to be,
Then I could change the world,
Then I could change the world.
If only…
Francis’s riffs swelled in the break between the verses and chorus. I had to admit, while the original recording of “Someday Soon” was orchestral, the piano-driven version sounded much better, at least the way he played it.
As I sang, I saw in my peripheral vision that Liam and Val came downstairs too. I willed myself not to look at them, not to miss a beat. I didn’t.
“All right, all right!” called Jake as the cheers died down after we’d finished. Liam approached Francis, shaking his head at him in mock amazement. Jake went on, “Let’s do a run-through of all the songs with Francis and the filled-out instruments, and then we’ll lay down each track and layer them. Liam? You’re up!”
He looked startled, glancing up from chatting with Francis when he heard his name called. “What? Now?”
I grinned at him. “Good luck!” I said, passing him the microphone and willing my face to remain neutral—as if I hadn’t been thinking about him basically nonstop since last night.
Jake set up the background tracks for “They Never Had A Chance,” and changed Francis’s MIDI input to orchestra rather than piano. Shrugging, Liam took the microphone from me, and I watched as his expression went from reluctant programmer who feels a bit awkward, to supervillain, in three seconds flat. He seemed to forget his own existence, feeling the emotion behind every lyric. I recognized it, because that’s exactly how I felt on stage. I knew first-hand that power to suck the audience in, to make them feel what my character felt and see what she saw. Liam was doing that to all of us now, whether he knew it or not—like casting a spell. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
When he finished and we all cheered, I felt Julie’s eyes on me. I glanced at her, and she raised her eyebrows, amused. I blushed, hoping no one else had noticed.
We went through Val’s song next, after which she excused herself to go upstairs and prepare dinner. “Andy? Do you want to help me?” I heard her ask.
He shrugged, and replied, “Sure, whatever. Not like I’m useful here.”
When Jake began to record Francis’s piano by itself, and then his own guitar, Liam stood somewhat aloof behind Francis. I gathered up my courage and approached him. Why did even that much take courage all of a sudden?
He glanced at me and smiled. “Hey.”
“Hey.” I racked my brain for how to fill in the ensuing pause. Come on, Rebecca, you and Liam have never had a hard time talking before. At last I settled on, “How come you never told me you could act or sing before?”
He raised his eyebrows, a little embarrassed, but he looked pleased. “I… didn’t know I could.”
I rolled my eyes, gesturing to the microphone to indicate what I’d just seen. “Come on. Yes, you did.”
He shook his head. “Honestly I’ve never tried before. I mean, except karaoke with Val occasionally, years ago, and that was always a joke anyway.” Then he added with a wink, “Musical theater was not exactly the sort of thing my dad would have approved of.”
“And you always did what he approved of?”
“Growing up? Oh yeah. I was being groomed for CEO. Not a toe out of line!”
I nodded, and confessed, “Well. You’re kind of amazing at it.”
He looked a little abashed. “Thanks. It’s a lot more fun than I’d expected.” He shot me a sidelong smile. “So tell me about the life I might have had. What do musical theater nerds do for fun when they get together?”
I laughed fondly—the question conjured so many images in my mind at once. “We’d play a lot of improv games,” I said. “acting or singing. I’m not very good at it, because I’m not as spontaneous as most of them, but two people would start a scene, and just make it up on the fly. As soon as someone in the audience saw a new scene opportunity, usually from the body language of the actors, they’d yell ‘freeze!’ and run up and tap one of the actors to go sit down while they’d take his place. Then they’d take over, redirect a totally new scene, and the actors on stage would just have to go with it. With certain people, it was hysterical. Or, we’d do ‘riff-off’ musical warm-ups, where one person would start singing the lead in a popular song, and everyone else had to fall into a cappella harmony as quickly as possible. Then as soon as someone else in the group heard a word in the song that reminded them of a different song, they’d hold up a hand to signal that they were taking over, then jump in and start singing that song instead. The rest of the group would immediately switch to fill in the background for the new song—musical instrument lines, beat boxing, whatever.”
“Seriously?” Liam laughed, shaking his head. “That sounds so hard!”
“Not when you play all the time, and you all know each other really well,” I grinned back. Francis and Jake had just finished, so in the momentary silence, I said, “So if I start with, ‘Remember me in the summertime, when all the snow is gone. I’ll think fondly of these long winter nights, as you hold me tight while the fire embers burn’—”
His eyes tracked with me for a few seconds. When I sang ‘burn,’ he snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Burn baby burn! I just can’t help myself, No, I’ll never, never learn—”
I laughed, snapping to his beat and filling in the harmonized do-wops in the background as he got into it, singing with mock intensity. The others had all turned to watch us. When he sang, “My heart’s an inferno for only you,” one hand over his chest, I raised my finger and cut him off with a slow ballad: “Only you can take
away my sadness, take away my shame—”
Liam started facetiously beat-boxing a slow, melodic groove. I choked a little as I sang to avoid cracking up. Jake, getting the hang of it, unslung his guitar and made a cutoff motion to me with his hand. “It’s such a cryin’ shame,” he crooned from an old country song, “that you’re never comin’ back to me no more—”
Liam clapped in approval, and with a glance at me, he began to sing the lead guitar line in bow-wow-wows, and I sang piano chords in do-do-dos. Jake went on for another few bars, glancing suggestively at Julie, Nilesh, Larissa, and Francis with a come on, jump in! motion with his hands.
Francis crossed his arms over his chest and looked as if he found our stupidity physically painful.
But when Jake sang, “I’ll be waitin’ here forever for you, darlin’, under this sad and lonely sky,” Larissa jumped in brightly, “The skies are blue, the rain is gone! The sun is shining on everyone!” She started to dance along with her show tune lyrics with exaggerated motions like a toddler, either not realizing how terrible she was, or not caring. I jumped up to dance with her when the upstairs door opened, and Dr. Yin peeked her head down.
“What on earth?” I heard her ask over Larissa’s high, warbly voice, as Jake and Liam attempted to sing backup, even though they could hardly find the melody. I knew the song at least a little bit, so I harmonized with what Larissa was supposed to be singing, correcting my notes as I went to whatever actually came out of her mouth. Dr. Yin lingered to watch us with a look of amused incredulity.
As Larissa sang, “I’ll never, no never be alone—” Liam made a cutting motion with his hand and started to rap: “—all alone, don’t mean I’m lonely. Keep to yo’self, don’t try to own me. You ain’t neva gonna be ma homie—”
Dr. Yin burst out laughing along with the rest of us, descending the stairs as Liam gesticulated with his hands like a gangster, and Jake and I beat-boxed in the background. As Liam rapped, “wavin’ my flag all over town, you ain’t neva gonna live this down—,” Francis stood up, clapped his hands, and rapped, “Gettin’ down, down, down, real low, too slow, on the flo’ —”