Spark

by Holly Schindler

  Bertie ignores her, insisting, “The magical love I’m describing will have the power to change things, Dahlia. Don’t be like the rest of the foolhardy adults in this town. Don’t stare at your feet! Look up! It’s all true. Remember that. What I say is true. When you get older, don’t let anyone tell you that magic doesn’t exist. Always remember that it does. Okay? Always remember to look up, Dahlia. Let yourself be part of the magic.”

  The images fade; I’m staring at a blank screen washed in yellow light. But the light and the screen break up as the fireflies stop blinking in unison and begin to flash in their own rhythm. They pull apart, some flittering up toward the ceiling, some swooping down to the front of the stage. Just a swarm of bugs, all of them twinkling and swirling and zipping about.

  In a single swoosh—as if having been called to return—the fireflies all dive straight into the journal lying open on the stage. They hit with such force that the book jumps into the air a couple of inches, then flops closed.

  I aim my flashlight on the front of the journal. Now that I’m looking for it, I can see the old, faded, rubbed-out cursive letters. My name, hovering like a ghost behind Alberta’s.

  I pick up the journal, hugging it to my chest. If Emma is like a modern-day Cass, and Dylan is a modern-day Nick, am I Bertie? Another weird parallel in this story?

  The possibility of carrying forward Bertie’s legacy is terrifying. I haven’t said a word to anyone about what I’ve witnessed. What happens if I do? If I tell this story, will I be shunned like Bertie was?

  I carry the journal outside, into the alley. And I stare up at the sky. There’s no light show tonight.

  Only my flashlight directing me home.

  fifteen

  Cass is upset when I knock on her bedroom door the next morning. And not just a little.

  Jerry Orbach knows it; he’s licking her hand incessantly, trying to soothe her.

  “Look at this,” she says, showing me her phone.

  Cass’s face fills the screen, her birthmark in full view thanks to choosing to wear that Yellow Submarine scarf, her voice sounding about as appealing as the cries of a tortured turkey.

  “Of course he posted it. Choir jerk from first day of rehearsal,” she moans.

  I take the blow right along with her. I’ve got a sore spot in my stomach where I’ve been punched. How did she find the video? Has she been Googling obsessively ever since our first rehearsal? The idea of her spending so much time tormented by it, worried about it, lands another blow in my gut.

  “Nobody’s even watched this thing,” I tell her, pointing at the number of views. “It’s not worth agonizing over.”

  Sure, she nods in agreement. She even shrugs and tosses the phone in her bag, offering Jerry Orbach a rub on the head like all is well. But I get the feeling there’s a white lie in that nod. So I make it a point to check in on her between classes. Every time, without fail, when I come up behind her in the hallway, her locker door is open, and her unzipped backpack is propped against her knee, making it seem as though she’s only changing out her textbook for her next class. Wrapping my arm around her neck, though, I catch it, just over her shoulder: that dumb video, playing on repeat on her phone.

  “Cass, quit,” I try after fifth period. “You’ve been at this all day.”

  I attempt to wrench the phone from her hand, but she only tightens her grip. “People are posting comments,” she moans. “They are watching.”

  She shoves the screen under my nose. The comments aren’t exactly oh, you poor dear sweet, but they’re not really the hard-core stuff of online bullying, either:

  Can’t wait for this!!!!!

  Got my tickets!!

  Will laugh till I pee.

  “These are from our own lovely Verona High students,” I reason. “Have to be, if they say they’re coming to the show. The only lookers are surely the friends of the creep who shot the video in the first place. Turn it off and come on.”

  “Are you going to say anything at rehearsal? About the video?”

  “Absolutely not. You can’t expect day one to be great. Onward and upward,” I insist.

  Only, that day’s rehearsal makes me question whether “upward” is even remotely accurate. Actually, the next three rehearsals make me question it.

  On the day Mom’s check sheet announces (with a smiley face) that we should be reciting lines from memory, I wind up with a sore throat. Because I spend the entire rehearsal feeding lines to the cast.

  On the day the check sheet indicates (beside a line of hand-drawn eighth notes and a treble clef) that we should have the title number down pat, Cass sings in little more than a whisper while staring at her feet (so softy, I honestly can’t even tell if she’s in tune yet or not). Dylan’s accompaniment is weak at best, since he’s doing little more than chording—skipping any attempt at a melody line. He shrugs off questions from the other singers, merely pointing at the sheet music.

  And Kiki—when the class comes in to sing together, she’s the worst of the lot. No wonder she was upset about being onstage. She’s every bad televised singing competition audition all rolled into one. Off pitch and off tempo. She has no rhythm. She can’t even pretend to dance.

  When the check sheet flaunts the smiling face of the theater and a note insisting it’s time to run through the entire first act, getting the hang of the curtains and the rhythm of speech and of moving seamlessly from one scene to the next, we step all over others’ lines and lose our places in the script and even forget, a couple of times, the names of the characters we’ve been assigned. We are uninspired and look, in short, like absolute morons.

  I’m quickly losing hope that we’ll get our acts together.

  For some reason, Mom shows up to class looking especially happy three weeks into our bumbling attempts. Probably, I figure, because all she really knows about what’s happening at rehearsal is that we show up and I’m crossing off the items on her check sheet. She’s really worked up, her wire-framed glasses repeatedly falling to the end of her nose as she leans forward to change out DVDs, showing us snippets of different amateur Anything Goes productions. Productions that actually came together.

  Halfway into fourth period, Mom flicks on the classroom lights. “I’ve got another batch of videos to show you when we come back from lunch,” she promises. “Different approaches to costumes!”

  Getting to lunch always involves a little internal pep talk and some gearing up for it—like getting yourself ready to run five miles. The crowded hallways are nothing compared to the consistently packed-tight cafeteria, which is small enough that lunch breaks have to be divided into twenty-minute chunks throughout fourth period—kids from woodshop show up covered in sawdust, kids in art show up with paint on their forearms and clay under their nails, and the kids in gym are always guaranteed to get the first shot at lunch (nothing like running wind sprints on a full stomach of loose-meat sandwiches). I fiddle too long with the money shoved into the front pocket of my bag. Cass takes off ahead of me today—and Dylan’s long gone, too, before I slide out of my desk. At the doorway of Mom’s classroom, I hold my breath and take the plunge myself.

  Familiar voices are calling out to one another in single-syllable words that sound like punches: “Hey.” And “Come on.” And “Watch it.” And “Quit.”

  The masses are hungry. And maybe a little afraid the rest of the masses will beat them to the last Tater Tot.

  The cafeteria is its usual rowdy mess, with French fry missiles and unending shouts.

  Three red baseball caps surround me as I fork my money over to the lunch lady. Which instantly makes me nervous. When I arrive at the small table usually only reserved for me and Cass, everyone’s already there. The entire drama class. Chairs have been pulled from the neighboring tables to accommodate them all.

  “What’s up?” I ask casually, as though the entire world is peachy loveliness.

  Liz is the first to speak. “What are we going to do?”

  “Do?”
<
br />   “About the musical,” Kiki grumbles.

  “We’re bad,” one of the red hats says. “Admit it. We’re really bad. It’s not fair. Everybody else around here gets to do something they’re pretty good at. Stuff they like. I kind of think the only way to make this mess fair is if the rest of the senior class all has to switch departments—like musical chairs, you know? Like the football guys have to make some giant sculpture, and the debate team has to play soccer.”

  “Do you have any idea how many tickets have sold?” Kiki asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Enough for the entire school to come. Not just the senior class. The whole school.”

  Cass groans and slumps deep in her seat.

  No wonder Mom looked so happy. She’s selling tickets. Filling seats. Raising money.

  We’re definitely going to wind up going viral. Fifteen hundred retweets the art department scored last year will look like nothing. We’re not just going to be embarrassed in front of our class or the school or even the town of Verona. We’re going to be embarrassed in front of the entire world.

  Maybe, I think, worry could actually be a good thing. Maybe they’re all ready to get to serious work. No more silent-movie eyebrows or SS Down in Flames signs.

  I sit staring at their faces, trying to tell them with my own pleading eyes that I’ve put out the welcome mat for any stray idea that might be looking for a home.

  Apparently, though, nobody has one to send my way.

  “We need to make it our own,” I blurt. It’s all I can come up with.

  “What’s that mean?” Liz asks.

  “I don’t know yet,” I admit. “Not for sure. But those clips Ms. Drewery showed us weren’t all exactly the same. We’ve got to figure out how to do this in a way that makes us look good while tapping into our own best abilities—even though those abilities are weak. I’ll give you that. Maybe we’re trying too hard to be something we’re not. So let’s all go home tonight and think. I know I need to. There’s no sense spinning our wheels after school, going over the same material before we have any new ideas. Let’s take a breather. Regroup at the end of the week. Anything we can come up with has got to be an improvement at this point.”

  “I say we do it in the dark,” one of the red ball caps grumbles.

  “Maybe you should practice,” Kiki growls at him.

  It’s not much, but somehow, what I’ve said is enough—satisfies them that maybe there’s a tiny little flicker of hope in this somewhere. Everyone grabs their trays and begins to wander off, toward their usual seats surrounded by their usual clumps of friends.

  Dylan starts to retreat to the back corner of the lunchroom, where he usually sits alone and no talking is expected.

  “Practice,” Cass grumbles. “We’ve been practicing. Maybe what we need is a miracle. A magic wand.”

  This makes Dylan freeze. “Ww-we c-couldd p-p-practic-ce.”

  “Together?” I ask. “The two of you? Work on the music?”

  “Y-yyeah. I kn-n-now wherr-rre w-we c-cann p-p-prac-tic-ce.”

  He touches the skeleton key bulging beneath the neckline of his T-shirt. I know exactly what he’s thinking.

  “Thanks, Dylan, but I don’t—” Cass starts.

  I can’t let her turn this down. Sparks flew when Cass and Dylan were separated by the walls of the old theater. What could happen if the two of them sat side by side in the pit—stood together on the stage?

  “She’ll be there,” I say.

  sixteen

  It’s Cass’s turn to carpool, which means it’s her VW Bug that putters to a stop outside the Avery later that afternoon. “There’s no way,” she mutters. “There is no way we can practice inside that thing.”

  “You liked the idea at lunch,” I remind her.

  “No, you liked the idea at lunch,” she corrects. “And I went along with it because it was just a vague concept floating around—you now, like someday, you think it might be fun to skydive. Only, now here I am, and I’m staring at the plane.”

  “Dramatic much?” I tease.

  “Just el stupido.”

  “I don’t think that’s right.”

  “What do I know? I’m only in Spanish I. Speaking of—Maybe I should go home and study for our test. Or while I’m here, put in an extra shift at Duds.”

  “And this is why I’m staying with you,” I announce. “To keep you from chickening out.”

  “You seem awfully sure about all this,” Cass says as we slam the doors of her Bug. Today she’s got on a decidedly nineties look: baby doll dress, choker, big black boots. The Indian summer has begun to fade, but not so much that those boots don’t look uncomfortably hot. Actually, judging by that look on Cass’s face, everything feels uncomfortable at this moment. The boots are a minor inconvenience.

  I shrug into my backpack as we walk down to the alley behind the Avery. Dylan’s already waiting for us, leaning against the back door of the theater.

  “Why this place?” Cass asks. “Why not Ferguson’s?”

  Dylan offers a crooked grin. “B-b-better ac-coust-tics.”

  “Are you serious?” Cass challenges.

  “Lik-ke a ch-church-ch.”

  Cass shakes her head as Dylan pulls the skeleton key from behind his T-shirt.

  “Where’d you get that thing? How do you have a key to get in here?”

  “D-d-dadd g-gavve it-t to m-me. H-hhe r-rentts h-houses. Th-this c-camme f-fromm on-ne o-f-f th-the o-o-lddest-t h-houses he ownn-ns. I ll-likked it-tt.”

  “And it works?” Cass presses.

  Dylan takes a deep breath. Those last sentences were hard for him to get out. He’s sweating from the effort, actually. “F-f-file.” He mimics the motion of filing down the key.

  “You filed it to fit,” I say. And chuckle. He must have watched the same pick-a-skeleton-key-lock video I did. He nods and unlocks the door, and we all slip inside. It’s dark—like always. Dylan’s got us all covered, though. He’s brought some sort of enormous camping flashlight—the stream it sends out looks more like a searchlight, actually.

  “Smells kind of sad,” Cass says, glancing about the old place.

  Dylan aims his flashlight as Cass climbs the steps, heading toward the set in the middle of the stage. She stares a long time. And then it hits her, I think, like it hit me on my own first visit—she knows this is where it happened. Where Emma and Nick died. She doesn’t so much shiver as she kind of shakes her chest and arms, like she’s trying to toss off all the bad feelings associated with that toppled set.

  She begins to back up, obviously eager to get away. But she pauses when she sees an enormous clothes rack at the side of the stage.

  I flash a crooked grin at Cass’s inability to pass by anything vintage. She starts riffling through it all, hangers screeching against the metal rack.

  “If we’re going to practice, we ought to have costumes,” Cass says, holding a jacket toward Dylan and attempting to lighten the atmosphere.

  Now it’s my turn to shiver. This is the same jacket I saw Nick wear the day he arrived in Verona. It’s in color now, a light-brown summer tweed. But it’s Nick’s. I know it is. Strange, I think, that it’s on the rack with the costumes—but what hasn’t been strange lately?

  Dylan places his flashlight on the stage, letting the beam point straight to the ceiling and toss a soft glow across the three of us.

  He reaches for the jacket; the moment both his hand and Cass’s are on the hanger, his flashlight sputters and dies.

  The entire theater goes black.

  “Now what?” Cass asks. “We can’t do anything in here if it’s pitch-black.”

  I squat, crawling along the edge of the old stage. At first, I’m trying to get out. Get to the back door. But I stop when I wonder if I ever tossed my own flashlight into my backpack after my late-night trips to the Avery.

  I run my hand along the far end of the stage. Deciding this is as good a place as any, I sit, drag my bag into my lap, and throw back th
e zipper. Riffle through the contents.

  As my fingers bump into textbooks and loose pens and stray pieces of gum, the sconces along the sides of the theater buzz and snap to life, tossing a warm glow toward the stage.

  “Quin?” Cass asks.

  I want to answer, but my mouth doesn’t work. The lights in the Avery are on. What’ll come next? Another scene on the old movie screen? Will Cass and Dylan see it, too?

  “I think she might’ve left,” Cass tells Dylan. She can’t see me where I’m sitting, on the far end of the stage. “Do you still want to practice?”

  Cass turns back toward the rack and grabs a hat—it’s blue, with mesh that’s attached to the center and drapes over the front. When she turns the hat to place it on the crown of her head, sparkles of light tumble down her face. Cass doesn’t seem to notice, though; she simply holds out her hands, as though asking Dylan to tell her how she looks.

  I’m frozen as Dylan forces his arms into the jacket. It’s too small for him—I mean, Dylan’s not exactly linebacker material, but Nick was so skinny. I can’t imagine anyone from Verona High being able to wear his clothes. Instead of giving up, though, Dylan sucks in a breath and squeezes himself inside it. When he gets it up around his shoulders, a puff of similar-looking sparkles hits the air, then fades, like the gold burst of a firecracker against a night sky.

  He starts to chuckle at himself, pressed into such a tiny jacket, when he glances up and his face droops with surprise. “Cass,” he says. “Your face.”

  He raises a shaking arm to point at the mirror poised on top of the costume rack.

  When Cass turns, she gasps, leans forward, and paws at her face.

  “What?” she asks, leaning closer to the mirror.

  But the “what” is as obvious as it is inexplicable: her birthmark is gone.

  She glances down, brushing the front of her baby doll dress, lifting her boots to examine the stage beneath her. As though her birthmark could have accidentally fallen off, like a fake eyelash.