by Mindy Klasky
“I wanted to check out the fly space. I don’t think there’s enough room up there to do everything Bill wants, flying in the sewers and all. Not if he really wants the tunnels deep enough to hold slime.”
“Slime?” I hadn’t heard that part of our staging plans. I was intrigued, even as I started to think of everything that could go wrong with slippery wet sets.
“We are going to turn the theatrical world on its ear,” he said with a shrug, managing to capture Bill’s trademark excitement even as his own twang stretched the last word into two syllables. “Do you have the key to the catwalks on that ring?”
I held up the useless tangle of metal. “I’m sure it’s here somewhere. Nothing’s labeled, though.”
“What good is that?” he asked, with a good-natured snort.
“My thoughts exactly. Here. You’re welcome to find it. I’ve got to get out to the rehearsal room, get things set up for today.” I passed him the heavy ring.
“I’ll bring them back when I’m done.”
“If you’re going to walk around back there, be careful. It’s a real mess.”
He glanced at the careless disarray around us, obviously as critical as I was of the state of the other stage manager’s handiwork. He said, “The Landmark was lucky to get you on this show, Franklin.”
Even though I was starting to agree with him, I could feel myself blush. The Landmark hadn’t been lucky. They’d been manipulated by a genie. They’d been forced by my wish. I muttered something about how this was a lucky chance for me, too.
John took my keys and started to walk away, but when he got to the door, he turned back. “I was sorry you left Mephisto’s so quickly. I hoped we could talk some, figure out a calendar. Start meeting with the other designers.”
Damn. Of course he’d noticed I’d run away. He’d seen and heard everything—my flirting with Drew, my embarrassment at the hands of TEWSBU. He had even tried to pick up the chair I’d knocked over—how had I even imagined that he wouldn’t notice my crazed departure?
Without thinking, I folded my arms around my belly, trying to wrap in the surge of nausea that came whenever I thought of the man I’d almost married. As my fingers closed around the fabric of my sweatshirt, though, I became even more self-conscious. The cloth pulled beneath my grip, emphasizing my waist, making my newfound bust stand out. I wiped my hands against my thighs with all the subtle aplomb of a zebra at the lions’ family reunion.
“Yeah,” I said, when the silence had stretched out for way too long. “Sorry about that. I remembered that I had to get home to, um, take care of some stuff. This show came up out of nowhere, you know, and I didn’t really have a chance to clear my schedule.”
John nodded slowly. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Mike said it must be something like that.”
Mike. Mephisto himself, who knew everything about me. What the hell else had he said?
“I—I’ve got to get out to the rehearsal room,” I stammered. I clutched my backpack to my side as I ran away.
A couple of actors were already waiting outside when I crashed into the lobby. As I opened the door for them, I said hello. Jennifer Galland and Stephanie Michaelson. Perfect. Just the two women I most wanted to see. Not.
Suddenly, I wondered how long TEWSBU and Stephanie had been going out. Had he left me for her? Had they been together for a full year? Had he started dating her before he broke up with me? Surely I would have heard that piece of gossip, if it were true.
I pasted a smile on my face, refusing to think about how idiotic I must have looked the night before. For her part, Stephanie smiled and pretended that we were perfectly good friends.
I led the way to the rehearsal room, hoping that they’d both interpret my flushed cheeks as some type of stage manager’s eager beaver will to do good. As soon as Stephanie entered the room, she sat on the floor, splaying her legs in front of her as she engaged in a serious stretching regimen. I wondered if she thought we were doing a walk-through, something that would require actual physical exertion, but then I realized that she was just used to showing off her spectacular actor’s body. Her incredibly well-endowed actor’s body. Her so-well-endowed-that-she-absolutely-could-not-have-come-by-that-chest-naturally actor’s body.
As if I had.
I wondered if TEWSBU had been attracted to her because she didn’t look like a stunted teenage boy. I couldn’t help but wonder what he’d think of the twin gifts that Teel had given me. What had my genie called them? Chef’s Surprise?
It didn’t matter. It absolutely didn’t matter. TEWSBU was history.
And if I repeated that to myself often enough, I might actually come to believe it some day.
As the rest of the cast drifted in, I covered my confused jealousy by handing out phone lists that I’d printed that morning. When I got to Stephanie, I looked away, giving both of us a chance to build up the pretense that we liked each other. Within fifteen minutes, it didn’t matter, anyway; the whole cast had gathered, and the room was humming with activity. Bill worked the crowd, saying hello to everyone, smiling and nodding and touching each person to say hello—a fleeting brush of his fingers on a hand, a sleeve. Each of the actors seemed to tune in to Bill’s frequency, to vibrate with a tightly controlled enthusiasm as he moved to the far edge of the circle of chairs. Within seconds of his sitting, everyone was poised, ready to start.
Bill panned his gaze around the group, his smile growing. “Perfect,” he said. “As you know, most shows would start to rehearse scene by scene. Well, we’re not most shows. We’re going to do things a little differently. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, figuring out the social bonds of sex and of gender, deciding where to shred our audience’s expectations. We’ll all work together for a couple of weeks, exploring issues that will be important for every actor, for every scene. Before we start, though, I want each of you to engage in a little thought experiment. Drew? On your feet.”
Of course, Drew had come in with all the other actors. I’d purposely not looked him in the eye, not paid any special attention to him, not acknowledged that he was the man I’d been willing to share my fries with. It seemed safer that way. More normal. More sane.
Who was I kidding?
I had noticed that he was wearing jeans. Comfortable, well-worn jeans, that looked like they’d known every line of his body for a lifetime. He had on a khaki T-shirt, as well, topped by a soft flannel shirt that must have been washed a million times. And his smile was every bit as dazzling as it had been the day before, perfect because of that one tooth that was just a hairbreadth shy of straight. Unconsciously, I found myself repeating the ten digits of his phone number, like a magical incantation.
As Drew took to his feet, I was immediately struck by the same swooping sensation that had led me to act like such an idiot at Mephisto’s. And that belly flip only became worse when Bill said, “Kira, could you stand up, as well?”
Obediently, I got to my feet, suddenly aware of being the target of two dozen eyes. I resisted the urge to clutch at my sweatshirt, to tug the fabric into some invisible magical shield. Wildly, I wondered how my flame tattoos would look against the fabric now. Could any of the cast make out evidence of Teel, when John had not seen it the day before?
I resisted the urge to shake my head as I forced my attention back to the rehearsal. Bill nodded as he stalked around Drew and me. The fluorescent light glinted off his freshly shaven scalp. He spoke to the cast, harnessing every drop of his legendary charisma. “Ordinarily, I’d leave Kira out of this. Let her work her stage manager magic.” He smiled at me, and my lips automatically curved in response, even as I wondered what he had in store for me, for us. “But for this exercise, I need to call on someone who isn’t in the cast. On a woman who isn’t in the cast.”
A woman…. That certainly didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. Drew flashed me a parody of a wolfish grin, leering with an actor’s comic exaggeration. The cast laughed good-naturedly, but I couldn’t even begin to reciprocate. Some
how, I feared that whatever Bill had up his dramatic sleeve was going to be a lot more embarrassing than my offering to share my food. And it just might be a hell of a lot more intimate.
Our fearless director went on. “People, as we work through these scenes, I want each of you to become aware of the conflict inherent in our casting. We’ve waged a battle by switching genders. You need to understand the struggles that the opposite sex goes through every day, the fights that they engage in every waking moment. These roles will be new to you. Your knowledge of your own flesh and blood will be shocking, astonishing, new. You must learn what your bodies have to say to you, what your bodies would say to you, if they possessed different chromosomes, different genes, different genders.”
Bill paused deliberately, taking the time to meet the eyes of each and every one of his cast members. He lingered for the longest time on Drew, as if he were trying to think some secret message to his star, trying to speak some hidden truth, mind to mind. Still holding Drew’s gaze, Bill said, “Kira, what do your breasts say to you?”
“Excuse me?” My voice sounded like a crow’s, cawing against the honeyed sweetness of the director’s hypnotism.
Bill shook his head, never breaking Drew’s gaze. “Kira, I need you to help us. All the other women in the room must start to think of their bodies as male. All of the other women must learn to question their senses, their sensations. But I need a woman to teach us. Teach us men. Teach Drew. Kira, what are your breasts saying to you right now?”
I wanted to melt into the floor. I wanted to run out of the room. I wanted to flee the scene faster than I’d run out of Mephisto’s the day before.
But I was a professional stage manager. My job was to support my director. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. And then I said, “They’re embarrassed.”
“Yes,” Bill crooned. “Go on.”
I started to cross my arms over my chest, but realized that my breasts wouldn’t like that very much. I forced my hands to dangle awkwardly by my sides. “They don’t like to be the focus of this much attention.” I thought of Teel’s wicked smile when he’d done his work the night before. “They’re not used to being noticed. Not used to being talked about. They’d like for you to focus on the men now. To ask about their…” I wasn’t sure how crude my breasts would be, how inclined they’d be toward slang. I decided that my breasts were more the clinical type. “To ask about their testicles.”
The cast laughed. Even Bill was amused. “Thank you, Kira. Now, Drew? How did Kira’s breasts make you feel?”
That was going too far. It was one thing to ask me to give a voice to my recently enlarged, if carefully hidden, body parts. But asking Drew to respond, and in such a personal way? I thought he would refuse. I would have refused.
Instead, he said tentatively, “They, like, totally confuse me.”
Well, that was deep. He sounded like some surfer dude. At first, I thought that he was mocking me, mocking Bill’s exercise. But no. Drew’s face bore the perplexed frown of a high school student caught unprepared during a trigonometry pop quiz.
Bill said, “That’s the man-you speaking, Drew. That’s the man-you who was listening to Kira. What would Juliet’s breasts say?” Drew squirmed, but Bill said, “No. Don’t tell us. Not with words. Bring it to your reading. Let us hear it when Juliet first speaks to her nurse.”
Drew’s jaw tightened, and he nodded. Around the circle, half the actors were nodding. I could see them talking to their own phantom organs, all of them building silent bonds to their characters’ gonads.
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
This was theater, after all. This was a sort of magic. All I had to do was sit back and watch the cast at work. All I had to do was let Bill weave his dreams. All I had to do was believe.
It turned out, my talking breasts were the high point of the rehearsal. The rest of the time, the cast plodded their way through Shakespeare’s immortal words, trying to become comfortable with the awkward-to-us “my lords” and “madams” as we turned our characters’ genders upside down. We wrapped up just as it was getting dark outside, having taken only the briefest of breaks for lunch. People shuffled out in small groups, and I listened to the strands of conversation as I stacked the chairs, extremely conscious of my talkative female body.
When I was finished, Bill thanked me for my help. I tried to believe that he wasn’t staring at my chest, but I wasn’t at all sure that was the case. As he got to the door of the rehearsal room, though, he stopped and said, “What’s this?” I turned around in time to see him pick up my key ring, along with a slip of paper. “Thanks, Franklin. Catch you later,” he read, curving the last three words into a question.
“Oh,” I said. “John borrowed my keys to do some work backstage. He must have left them there, instead of interrupting the rehearsal.”
Bill tossed the ring to me. “See you tomorrow, Kira.”
“Have a good night.” I glanced down at the keys, readily finding my old green standby. But now, I could make out a dozen plastic caps, each sporting a white paper label. The gleaming rectangles were filled with perfect, steady letters.
Costume shop. Catwalk. Prop closet.
John had labeled my keys.
Somehow, the gesture made the whole day a little bit better. The neat handwriting canceled out a little of my shame about Stephanie, about TEWSBU’s girlfriend. The labels covered at least some of my embarrassment, speaking for my new breasts in a roomful of strangers. The keys locked away a fraction of the desperate sense of breathless imbalance I still felt every time I looked at Drew Myers, every time I met his green-flecked eyes.
I made a mental note to thank John the next time I saw him. It was good to have another professional technician working on the show. I wondered when he’d left the keys outside the door. I could only hope that it was late in the rehearsal—well after my vocal breasts and I had settled into our chair and disappeared inside our sheltering baggy sweatshirt.
I tried to imagine what my down-to-earth set designer would have said if he’d been in the room for my interpretive role. I was surprised to find myself blushing, all over again. No, I didn’t really want to know what practical John would have said. Not at all. Not when his sardonic words would have been delivered in that already-familiar Texas drawl, stretching out my embarrassment even more.
We were producing art here at the Landmark. Art. I just had to remember that, as I locked up the theater and took my new breasts home.
CHAPTER 9
BY THE TIME I GOT HOME, THE STREET LAMPS WERE on, and it had started to snow—tiny flakes that would make for a relatively easy workout when I shoveled the driveway in the morning. Over the years, I’d become a better forecaster than the guys on television; it didn’t take a lot of Minnesota winters to learn that the early and late storms of the year featured a lot of heavy, wet snow, while mid-January’s bitter cold made the flakes smaller and grainier.
Years ago, my housemates and I had settled on a snow-clearing schedule. The Swensons were far too old to be tackling our driveway and sidewalk on their own, even if they did get preferential parking privileges. Maddy, Jules, and I took charge of the snow removal, and Mrs. Swenson kept the flower beds in perfect order during the too-short summer months. The arrangement might not be absolutely fair (some winters dropped so many feet of snow that the flower beds were almost-forgotten memories), but between the three of us in our upstairs apartment, the shoveling wasn’t too much of a burden.
I’d take first shift, handling this initial snowfall. We rotated responsibility, liberally factoring in allowances for our diverse rehearsal schedules. Maddy and Jules also had the boyfriend cards to play; if they’d slept over at their beaux, they were hardly expected to come home for snow maintenance. Years ago, we’d decided that shoveling was just One of Those Things—not worth fighting over. Sort of like borrowing food from the fridge.
That reminded me—I still needed to replace Jules’s lemon yogurt.
Shakin
g my head at my forgetfulness, I carried my stuff into my bedroom. I started to dump it all onto my bed, but then I took a minute to put things where they belonged. My backpack went on my desk, next to the LSAT application that Dad had completed for me. I draped my coat over the hook behind my door.
As long as I was on such a neatnik binge, I decided that I might as well do my laundry. I excavated the pile from the back of the closet, placing Teel’s lamp in a place of pride on my desk. I was home alone, so there wasn’t any chance of it being discovered by anyone else.
It took me about thirty seconds to separate the whites (my sheets) from the darks (every other garment I owned.) The washing machine and dryer were in the basement; I made short work of carrying down my first load and getting it going.
I had just stepped back into the apartment when I felt the electric charge that I’d come to associate with Teel. It started in my fingertips. I looked down just in time to see my flames flare brightly, and then the jangling energy flooded through my body. I squeezed my eyes closed against the charge.
When I opened them again, I was back in the place of nothingness. It didn’t frighten me as much this time; I didn’t waste my time trying to peer into the distance. I didn’t try to touch the floor, or any walls, or whatever invisible ceiling arced above me. I didn’t even attempt to move. Until Teel spoke from behind me. “There you are!”
I whirled to face…her. “Couldn’t you at least show up in front of me when you bring me here?”
“Sorry,” she muttered. She was dressed like a schoolgirl, her long blond hair held off her face by a black velvet headband. She wore a uniform, a durable polyester skirt in a hideous green-and-white plaid, a too-tight white oxford shirt, and a skimpy hunter-green cardigan. The outfit was ruined—or some might say, perfected—by knee-high black boots, sleek leather that left a few inches of vulnerable leg starkly visible. The vampy look telegraphed that the entire schoolgirl thing was intended as a joke.