Spark

by Holly Schindler

  Epigraph

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players.

  —William Shakespeare, As You Like It

  Contents

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ads

  About the Author

  Books by Holly Schindler

  Praise

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  one

  When I dream, it’s always on a screen. And I’m always in the Avery Theater. And the Avery is always new—not the rotting, early-1900s building it is today. Every one of my dreams starts as I prop my sneakers into the balcony seat, hug my knees, and stare at the ornate gilded box seats, the brass faces of the theater. I get that dip in my stomach—the one that’s like a horn blaring, announcing excitement is on its way. And I smile as the red velvet curtains part and the ancient projector pops to life.

  In my most recurring dream, I see my mom, Dahlia, when she’s a little girl. It’s 1947, and she’s bursting from the side exit of the Avery Theater, squealing in pain and fear as the nearby bushes grab her brown pigtails and yank her backward.

  It makes total sense, really. Why wouldn’t I dream about this? It’s been my bedtime story since I was in pigtails, too. Always the last thing I ever heard before falling asleep.

  So it’s this same scene, flashing across the screen of my mind: Dahlia’s Mary Janes clicking as she races across the town square of Verona, Missouri. But she stops, her eyes wide, chest heaving, as she glances at the businesses that line the small town square. Few lights are still on, so late on that summer night. She whimpers because she knows no one will believe her, not about two bodies lying on a stage, not about Nick and Emma being hurt. “Oh, you silly little girl,” they’ll all say, rolling their eyes and scooting her back onto the sidewalk. “Trouble,” everyone calls her, the eight-year-old busybody who’s always barging into the florist or the hardware store or the barber’s, telling whoppers and getting tangled up in shopkeepers’ legs.

  But tonight there is trouble. There’s been a horrible fight inside the theater—and an accident. Involving Emma, the daughter of the Avery’s owner; Emma, the very first female valedictorian of Verona High; Emma, who has college waiting for her; Emma, who has always been so kind to Dahlia, letting her have free Slo Pokes from the Avery concession stand. Emma’s been hurt. Bad. And so has Emma’s boyfriend, Nick, the out-of-town musician. Dahlia’s afraid for Nick, too—even though he does call her Grace, after the smallest note in all of music, when Dahlia hates being reminded that she’s small, powerless, just a little girl.

  Dying, she thinks. They might be dying.

  Dahlia glances up toward her mother’s hat store. Her mother is one of the few still up, and she’s changing the front-window display, putting out the new straw sun hats that recently arrived from California, special delivery.

  But it would only take the mention of the Avery for her mother to frown and shout, “You slipped out of your room without permission to bother George again?” She won’t believe that George, Emma’s father, needs their help. She’ll only get after Dahlia for telling another wild story. She’ll be embarrassed that her little girl’s causing trouble again.

  Dahlia swallows the scream building up in her throat when she turns to see the only person in town who’s never called her by that awful pet name. Who’s never said, “Well, if it isn’t Trouble,” when she comes skipping past.

  “Bertie.” Dahlia breathes with relief, her feet attacking the pavement as she races to her side. “Help! Emma—Nick—they—” Dahlia jabs her trembling finger into the air, pointing toward the theater marquee that advertises, “TONIGHT! EMMA HASTINGS AS HOPE HARCOURT IN ANYTHING GOES!”

  But Bertie’s eyes are fixed on the sky beyond the theater, where the horizon burns a strange yellow-green—even though the sunset faded hours ago. Odd flames leap, forging a path through the stars. “The sky is talking to us, Dahlia,” she whispers. “We’re too far south to see the aurora borealis, so it can’t be that. It’s more. It’s magic.” At her side, the slender fingers of her right hand clutch the edge of the journal she always carries with her; its pages rustle in a sudden breeze, flipping back and forth.

  “No! No more talking skies,” Dahlia replies. “That stuff’s bonkers. Nick and Emma—they need help.” Disappointment makes her face droop. But she should have known, really. Bertie is a lot of things—she’s eighteen, for starters. The same age as the two people dying on the Avery stage. She’s also a kook—or so the entirety of Verona has proclaimed. Tragedy has scrambled her brains, poor thing, and now she walks the streets of town muttering gobbledygook about the skies talking. And magic.

  Which means that mostly, Bertie is terrifying. Because it’s easy to dismiss a crazy old woman. Wrinkles and white hair and an arthritic bend in the shoulders are easy to shrug away. But a crazy young woman, who is physically strong and can keep up with you if you try to run—she’s terrifying. To everyone but Dahlia, anyway.

  “Look how the stars are beginning to pop,” Bertie instructs. “Do you see the shape they’re taking? The stars are forming an X. It’s a sign! I know it is.” She flips through her journal, as though searching for a line that will help her decode the message in the sky.

  Bertie was a writer, too—just like I am. Or maybe it’s that we’re secret writers. Nothing more than scribblers, actually. But why wouldn’t we be so similar? Bertie, the biggest kook to have ever lived in Verona, Missouri, was my great-grandmother. Biological. And Dahlia, the little girl begging for help in the Verona square, the little girl who always had a soft spot for Bertie, is the one who adopted me.

  Which is surely another reason why this dream keeps finding me. It makes me feel like we’re all three a set of those nesting dolls—Dahlia a step larger than me, Bertie a step larger than Dahlia. All of us stacked one on top of each other. Me at the bottom.

  Like it always does at this point in the dream, a siren wails, growing louder as a single red fire truck tears through the streets of Verona.

  Headlights flash into Dahlia’s eyes; the horn blares its warning.

  Dahlia grabs Bertie’s arm, tugging her backward, making her step out of the fire truck’s path. The speeding truck kicks up enough wind to push Dahlia’s pigtails back, dry out her eyes.

  Shouts burst like firecrackers against the night as an emergency crew climbs from the fire truck, and as the front door of the Avery flies open.

  “Don’t tell me it’s too late,” Emma’s father begs the firefighters. “It can’t be.”

  “Did this happen on the stage?” Bertie gasps.

  “Yes,” Dahlia whispers.

  Bertie frowns, concentrating. “The stage. And the way the stars are lined up to form that X . . .” She drops her journal, grabbing Dahlia by the shoulders. “Star-crossed lovers!

  “A real-life Romeo and Julie
t. Right here—in fair Verona! It’s a play—it happened on the stage, just like this. You know the story, don’t you? Everyone does. They were torn apart, Romeo and Juliet, by outside forces—their families didn’t want them to be together. Just like George was afraid that Emma would run off with Nick! Yes! It’s all the same, don’t you see?”

  Dahlia shrinks, pulling her arms free at the same moment that the Avery marquee throws electric sparks into the sky, higher even than the odd green flames. And then it goes dark. Beneath the green swirls in the sky, the front of the theater turns black. The bricks crackle like decaying autumn leaves. The building withers on fast forward. It instantly becomes dilapidated and ramshackle, with cracked windows and broken front steps and a torn awning. The gargoyles along the roof darken, and their faces disappear as though they’ve all been rubbed away by decades of rough weather.

  “Did you see that?” Bertie whispers. “The Avery just died.”

  This, too, is nuts. Deep inside, all those years ago, Dahlia knew it. I’ve always known it, too—even when the grown-up Dahlia, who’d officially become “Mom,” first started telling me this story, her voice rising and falling between her dramatic pauses. Even back when I first started having my dream. It’s funny—I never did dream of Cinderella or princesses. But then, I never did get those kinds of bedtime stories. Maybe Mom, nearly retired by the time I was adopted, had a different idea about what was right to tell kids at night. A different idea about what made a great story. Maybe Cinderella bored her. But the square—and the Avery, which was at one time a living, breathing theater, a theater whose heart stopped beating the first time a true (and not play-pretend) tragedy unfolded on its stage—never did stop fascinating her.

  Still, though, I knew it—even when I first heard the tale. I knew it was full of nonsense spouted long ago by a woman with scrambled brains. A dead building. A dead theater. Sure.

  “But in the play, you know,” Bertie tells little Dahlia, “Juliet took a drug, and was dead but not dead. She came back. The skies are talking to us, making a promise. Yes. This story isn’t finished. It’s not over. Don’t you see?”

  Bertie tilts Dahlia’s chin so they can look each other square in the face. “Listen to me,” she demands. “When the right hearts come to the Avery—at the right time—for the right reasons—this sky will return. The magic of the theater will return. The Avery will come back from the dead.”

  It’s always at this point in the dream when I jerk myself awake, achy and sweaty. Like I do every single time without fail, I kick at the covers and grab my glasses from my nightstand. I pad across my bedroom floor, press my face against the window. And look up and down the square for any sign of magic.

  After all, Dahlia and I still live where she has spent the entirety of her seventy-plus years, right here above the old hat store (which is no longer a hat store but a perfumery). We live on the opposite side of the square—directly across from the Avery Theater. In full view of any magic that just might want to show its quirky face.

  I squint, inspecting the black brick and the rotten facade for some sign of life. For the aurora borealis to start swirling through the sky.

  But the Avery is dead. As it has been dead since that fateful night back in 1947 when two star-crossed lovers really did die on the stage. When my mom really did witness the tragedy.

  The sky is dark.

  I shake my head. Who am I to expect something magical to happen for me? I’m the great-granddaughter of the biggest kook to have ever walked the streets of Verona, Missouri. I’m a B-average student with big glasses and plain hair. Magic is for girls who have far flashier backgrounds and powers and look like drawings of superheroes in comic books.

  At least, that’s what I’ve always believed. That’s the kind of thing I always wind up telling myself after one of these dreams.

  But right here, at the beginning of it all, I have no idea how wrong I am about that.

  two

  In Verona High’s room 235, Advanced Drama is the catch-can for the senior nobodies.

  They’re all around me as I fidget in my fourth-period desk and stare at a “The Play’s the Thing” banner hanging above the chalkboard: the kids who are the personifications of those boxes at the bottoms of forms that say Other.

  Like in every other school—big, small, urban, country—we all get our brands the first day we walk in as freshmen. And are slammed into our chosen elective, herded off accordingly: the athletes toward the gym, the musicians toward the choir room, the doodlers—who illustrate their every math assignment—to pick out colored pencils from the art supply closet, the smarties toward debate or honors science. We move along for three years down prechosen tracks, like mechanical rats, until senior year, when we gather in our so-called specialty and undertake a giant collective “senior project”—last year the art kids all did a mural outside the cafeteria involving shiny garden vegetables. It caught a bit of online fire somehow, was retweeted fifteen hundred times. No joke.

  At Verona High, drama is not a place for the wildly extroverted. It’s not a place for anyone with any kind of burning theatrical desire. At Verona High, drama is for the shy, the foot shufflers, the shruggers who express no desire to stand out, the never-in-troubles, the rebelling-against-nothings. Good students who prefer the shadows. We’re the colors in the crayon box that no one ever reaches for. Not the eye-catching colors: Atomic Tangerine and Shocking Pink. We’re Burnt Sienna. Plain old Gray. We’re never expected to make our mark at Verona High.

  So there we are: for the most part, pretty good at most things but not likely to step up and say so. One row over, it also includes my best friend, Cass, who is the most incredible singer no one has ever heard. And just behind her, Dylan Michaels, who can, according to the owners of Ferguson’s Music Store, play any instrument with strings but who has never performed for anyone. And me, who refuses to show anyone anything I’ve ever written. Because sometimes what makes a nobody is the fact that they don’t have the burning desire to show off. Or maybe it’s that they can’t stand the idea of getting peeled back and critiqued on their most private thoughts. Or maybe it’s that the spotlight doesn’t fit everybody.

  And here we sit. And nobody’s breathing.

  I squirm in my chair; the Indian summer heat’s attacking me as relentlessly as the whack job in a Tarantino movie. My glasses keep slipping down my sweat-slicked nose. Large cursive letters left on the chalkboard promise, “After Lunch—Senior Project Announcement.”

  “It’ll be bad,” I hear behind me. “It’s bound to be. My mom had her. Horror stories.”

  Cass swivels, tossing me a sympathetic stare. She knows when I need a reassuring wink or an eye roll. Like she’s always known—ever since the days of afternoon naps and paste eating.

  The classroom clock announces Mom’s more than ten minutes late getting back from lunch when she finally stomps through the door.

  “Really bad,” another voice grumbles.

  Mom’s got that drill-sergeant look on her face. She flops a script on her desk, crosses her arms, and offers us one of her dramatic-effect pauses—the kind I’ve been the recipient of roughly twelve thousand times.

  Mom—no, Ms. Drewery. It’s Ms. Drewery when I’m in her classroom—came out of retirement to temporarily replace our former drama teacher, who was not a Ms. at all, but a Jenny. That’s what we all called her, anyway. Jenny, who was so fresh out of college, she preferred to eat in the cafeteria with us instead of in the faculty lounge. Jenny, who wore jeans and glittery T-shirts and had short curly hair like Shirley Temple and swung her feet as she sat on top of the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. Jenny, who got married last year and is currently on maternity leave. Jenny, who understood that we were not exactly Al Pacinos in training, and whose senior projects in the years leading up to our own senior stint involved asking all her students to memorize soliloquies or recite “Invictus” in unison.

  But Jenny was not exactly a staff oddity. The rest of the instructors a
t Verona High usually rule with a pretty light touch. Small-town friendly atmosphere pervades the corridors—which are as antique as the rest of the buildings in town. Noisy pipes race through the halls beneath the ceiling, and Truman-era spackle fills the holes in most walls. It’s a well-known fact that the hearts and initials carved into student desks belong to couples who’ve already celebrated silver wedding anniversaries.

  So faculty makes up for the lack of ambience. Maybe we don’t have some fancy modern glass-encrusted school, but we do have a meticulously mowed and fertilized football field, and a cafeteria serving comfort-food lunches prepared by the Verona women who grew up learning to cook in cast-iron skillets (and can make a stew of dirt and beef jerky taste like fine cuisine). And we have instructors who expect a little mischief now and again. Come on—what’s a sophomore year without a good food fight? What’s a senior year without a prank involving the school mascot, some Silly String, and the principal’s car?

  Faculty often refers to our “shenanigans” as minor earthquakes; they relieve the pressure, and as a result, litter rarely hits the hallways, library books are rarely overdue, and detention is a rarely needed punishment.

  Now, though, Mom (Ms. Drewery—in room 235, it’s always Ms. Drewery) is back after ten years. She’s standing in front of the class in a midcalf wrinkled skirt and what look like old-fashioned nurse’s shoes, her knee-high stockings rolled down to her ankles. She’s staring at us over the top of the only pair of wire-framed glasses she’s ever owned.

  Not that anyone’s staring at her outfit. They’re staring instead at the words she’s written on the chalkboard. And they’re waiting. And nobody’s breathing.

  “They want to tear it down,” Ms. Drewery proclaims as she begins to walk up and down the aisles studying every face.

  The entire class turns into giant question marks.

  “The Avery!” she shouts. “This is Advanced Drama, ladies and gentlemen. We must be aware when the city council threatens to destroy our town’s theatrical history. They’ve never talked this way before. It was always just—a whisper, here and there. Discussions that were tabled at meetings. Now, though—it’s serious.”