Dahlia stands on her tiptoes, leaning over the edge of the balcony. A fight is erupting. A real fight, in the middle of the stage.
“No,” George bellows. “No.”
Embarrassed to be treated as a child in front of Nick, Emma shouts at her father, “It’s none— You don’t—”
“I know,” George shouts back. “He looks different to you here. That’s the magic of the theater. Everything looks different—”
“Clearer,” Emma cries. “Don’t you think he sees me differently in here, too? That in his eyes, in here, I’m not clumsy, practical, bookish, predictable Emma Hastings? That I can be—”
“—did not raise you to be some musician’s wife—”
“Wife?”
“Some lowly musician no better than a hobo—”
The shadows in the Avery lengthen—the angry voices grab the darkest spots and tug at them, dragging them, making them bigger. This argument is vicious. It has teeth.
I squeeze the wooden arms of my seat, hold on against the words swirling like wings, whipping against the inside of the theater, smacking my face, threatening to shove me right out of the balcony.
“Did not raise you—”
“I’m not—”
“You will—”
“. . . love!”
Emma’s shout acts like a blow to George’s chest, pushing him backward, making him stumble across the stage.
Silence overtakes the theater as George touches his chest. I can hear his heart thump. Dahlia pants in rhythm to the beat. George’s pulse has become hers—become mine—become the pulse of the Avery. Dahlia covers her ears, the beat threatening to burst her eardrums.
George stares at the couple at the edge of the spotlight, still seated on the stairs that have been built for the set. Grasping each other as though to protect themselves from his wide, angry eyes.
“Love him,” Emma whispers again. With Nick still holding her glasses, she can’t see the impact of her words striking her father.
“Love,” I whisper, as though it will sound softer coming from me. I want George to hear me up in the balcony, and to believe it. Want him to stop sending his frantic, out-of-control words to crash through the theater.
Instead, the atmosphere only grows tighter, like a fist. Even the drama masks on the sides of the stage look wracked with pain. I expect desperate wails to pour from their open mouths.
The argument continues to swell, all three voices firing shots at one another. Dahlia presses her hands tighter against her ears, trying to block it out.
George lunges for Emma. Nick holds on tighter. A struggle erupts. A battle over Emma, pushing and kicking and crying out.
Emma squirms to get away. Suddenly, she’s climbing—a spur-of-the-moment reaction, it seems—up the narrow stairs with no railing. But she doesn’t have her glasses. Nick does. She can’t tell where the steps are exactly, not in that blurred mess in front of her. Her feet falter. She stumbles.
“Don’t, Emma—” Dahlia warns, but Emma doesn’t hear her. Nor does Nick or George.
Nick and George are still shouting, still struggling, when Emma begins to climb again. Her arms fly out in front of her body.
“Emma!” I screech. “Watch out!” The angle of her body is all wrong.
But she can’t hear me—no one can.
Emma puts her weight down. She screams at the same moment she finds no step beneath her—only open air. She drops to the stage below, crumpling into a terrible-looking heap, her arms and legs motionless.
George howls, fighting to break himself free of Nick’s hold. Trying to get away from him and closer to his daughter. “Emma—” he cries.
Nick hasn’t seen her fall. He only wants George to go away. Nick grips George tighter. “Stop it,” he shouts. “Leave us alone!”
“Move! She fell! She’s hurt,” George bellows. Nick spins, seeing his Emma in a scattered-looking pile on the stage.
Nick wails—no words, just utter pain, desperation, shock. His Emma, his love, lying motionless.
Nick’s feet pound against the stage. He’s running—but he’s never been good at running. Dahlia’s fingers fly to her mouth; she knows how weak he is, of course she does; how could she forget the day at the depot?
He lunges, grabbing Emma’s body and trying to lift her.
His heart isn’t up to so heavy a task. Even on the opposite side of the theater, I can feel his chest rip apart, splintering. He screeches and tries to ignore the pain, even as his body fails.
George pushes him aside, or Nick collapses—I can’t be sure which at first. His side hits the stage, though, and he stops moving completely.
In George’s arms, Emma’s limp—her head twisted to the side unnaturally—her neck broken.
Two pairs of footsteps echo through the Avery—George’s, as he races to call an ambulance, and Dahlia’s, as she races out of the balcony, so fast, she doesn’t stop to realize that she’s dropped her cloth flower.
“Dahlia!” I cry out. I race down the stairs, chasing after her.
She bursts through the side door, holding her ears—this time, I know, fear is ringing inside them like cymbals being frantically beaten.
“Bertie!” She races across the square to grab the hand of the young woman staring up at the sky. She shakes her arm, trying to get her attention. “They’re dying! Nick—Emma—on the stage! I promised—her neck. Help!”
Above, the sky is on fire—yellow and green. And the stars are sliding across the sky, forming a giant X.
“The sky, Dahlia. Look. We’re too far south to see the aurora borealis, so it can’t be that. It’s more. It’s magic.”
“No! Not now. Don’t you understand? They’re dying. And you’re looking at the sky?”
Dahlia screams because she’s never in her life seen anything so horrible—even though it happened on the stage, it isn’t play-pretend. It’s real. She screams because this time, finally, someone is going to listen. They’re not going to treat her like silly little Trouble.
She screams until her mother drops her hat in the front window and the waitresses in the corner booth café and the owner of the hardware store come running. But her mother’s shaking her finger at her, and the hardware store owner is relieved because he thought she was hurt, and it’s all moving far too slowly. Nick and Emma will never be saved.
A tear trails down Dahlia’s cheek. “It’s too late,” she begins to mutter.
“No,” Bertie insists, pointing to the sky. “They aren’t dead. Don’t you see? You can’t believe an end that isn’t really an end. Don’t you remember what I told you? The skies talk. They make predictions. The next time pure hearts meet up in the Avery—at the right time . . . You’ll see. The next scene will play out. The final act. This sky, Dahlia. It will come to life, and it will change things. Next time . . .”
“Emma is too dead, Bertie.” Dahlia’s pain brings tears to my own eyes. “I said I’d watch out for her. I didn’t save her.”
In the background, a distant siren finally begins to wail.
thirty-one
My eyes pop open. Dahlia’s little-girl scream is pulsing inside my ears. The dream was different. For the first time in the roughly ten years I’ve been having it, the details have shifted. I’ve never seen Nick’s and Emma’s deaths. I’ve never heard Mom scream on the square. The scene was alive—is alive. I can still feel the intensity of the fight that erupted between Nick, Emma, and George—the desperation that shredded the air inside the Avery.
More than that—I feel like I’m caught in a fight of my own. I feel as though I’m being shaken awake. I kick at the blankets, jumping out of bed as if I’ve suddenly found it filled with spiders.
The Avery. It comes to me with urgency: Go look at the Avery.
I race across my room, sliding on my glasses as I press my face close to the window. The neon sign above the theater is broken, no longer able to send out a yellow “Avery” to glow against the black sky. The marquee is blank—no current pro
duction, no starring names. Streetlights on the square—and throughout Verona, for that matter—give the horizon a soft-white glow. But it’s too dark to tell if the rust-scab is still stretched over the front door, barring entrance.
The dream feels so close. I wasn’t just watching this play out on a screen; I was in the balcony with Dahlia. In the square with Bertie. It wasn’t like I had the ability to change anything that happened. No one even knew I was there. But I was there—wasn’t I? I had to be. I can easily recall the plush, velvety feel of the balcony seat’s upholstery. I can smell the lingering scent of butter in the lobby. Usually when I dream of the night in 1947, I see it all in larger brushstrokes. This last dream—it was as though someone drew it in using the tiniest, most intricate pen tip. I saw it all—including the strands of hair that had worked loose from Dahlia’s pigtail and the mole under Emma’s left ear. How does a mind come up with all that? Or does it? Are dreams ever that elaborate?
What just happened?
I’m waffling back and forth: Do I dismiss the dream as an overactive imagination able to see more clearly because the story is far more real to me now than it ever has been? Do I empathize with Mom—and Emma and Nick—more than ever? Or do I think the Avery had something to do with it? That it’s sending me a message?
I’m still staring at the front of the building when a white crack tears forcefully through the sky. It draws a jagged line between the stars, smashing against the earth with an eardrum-shattering boom. My hands fly to my ears, which pop and ring like my head is a cymbal that’s been whacked with a mallet.
“What was that?” Mom calls from her bedroom.
She patters into my room, sticks her face against the window. She stares through a separate pane from the one I’m looking through, but our faces are so close, our cheeks nearly brush. Smoke billows from a distant spot on the horizon.
The phone rings; Mom and I both jump. She darts back out of my room to answer. Her voice is agitated. Her conversation short.
I stare, watching the smoke continue to billow.
“Quin!” she shouts. “Hurry. We’ve got to go. The school’s on fire.”
We burst out of the house, Mom wearing mismatched flannel pajamas beneath a beige overcoat and chenille slippers. I come out in my sleep sweats and flip-flops. It’s too cold for the flip-flops; the moment the chilly night air starts chewing at my toes, I instantly regret them. But there’s no way I can ask Mom to wait for me to grab another pair. Not the way she’s moving; the car engine roars to life before I’ve even swung the passenger door open all the way.
My eye is on the Avery—dark and silent in the rearview—as Mom’s car lurches out of her parking space. As she backs up, the front of the old theater looms larger. I think I see it, beneath the nearby streetlight: a padlock on the front door.
Is the rust-scab gone? Why? Has it healed? Has it opened itself back up? Why did it lock me out in the first place?
What are you saying? I want to scream at the Avery.
The theater quickly shrinks as Mom’s car careens out of the square.
She flips through radio stations until her dial hits a spot offering local news. I recognize the voice—this is her former student, the one who interviewed us at his station. “. . . word that a fire has broken out at Verona High. Verona fire teams are on their way. As soon as there’s an update, we’ll be breaking into regular programming live. . . .”
Mom swerves into the lot, her tires squealing. At least, I think they squeal. It’s hard to tell for sure because sirens are on top of us now. She pulls to the side as a red fire truck passes by, kicking up the kind of gravel-filled burst of wind that makes my eyes sting.
The truck comes to a stop in front of the school, and firefighters in enormous yellow suits climb out. Knee-high rubber boots hit dry pavement.
There are no puddles here in the parking lot. Absolutely no sign it rained. But I know I saw a lightning bolt. A giant white crack etching its way through the sky. Followed by thunder. But there was no rain?
The parking lot lights illuminate Verona High. The familiar two-story redbrick building has always seemed to take on different appearances depending on the time of year: In early fall, when summer heat lingers, it looks like a pizza oven. In midwinter, surrounded by two inches of snowfall, it looks like the start of a Norman Rockwell painting. Now, though, under the garish parking lot lights, with headlights from vehicles drawing an ever-moving pattern across the front and with smoke pouring out through the roof, it looks kind of sinister.
I cross my arms over my chest, trying to protect myself against the chill of night. Mom stomps toward a crowd of faculty members, all of them in their pajama bottoms and house shoes.
Other cars are pulling into the lot, too—students and parents arriving, coming to see the show. My classmates are aiming their phones, some of them at the building, some at the shocked faces of the crowd, and others at the sight of the principal in his red-checkered robe and matching pants.
Most of the faces in the crowd are recognizable: the teachers, Vanessa from Duds, Dylan’s dad, Cass’s mom, the librarian. I pass by most of their faces often enough that they seem like town landmarks. And every one of them stares up at the school with the same mix of disbelief and shock. Because they all once called Verona High their own. After all, nobody moves to Verona as an adult—what would draw them here? You’re born in town, and you either move away or you stay and get old. If they’ve got gray hair, they were born in Verona. Period.
Verona High is part of who they are. It’s the gym where they scored the winning game point and the lunchroom where they met their future husband. The hallway where they had their first kiss, in the middle of their first formal dance. The desk they carved their initials into in room 103, English III. The stairwell where they sat to cram, last minute. The water fountain they tampered with to squirt straight into the eyeball of anyone who stopped for a drink.
No matter the sign of aging—graying hair, reading glasses perched on the ends of noses, potbellies hanging over the drawstrings of sleep pants—tonight as they sadly put their fingers over their mouths and shake their heads, memories wash over them, making them all look seventeen again.
Verona High is our story. Mine, and Emma’s, and Mom’s, and anyone else’s who happens to be standing in that parking lot.
And it bothers me—a lot, actually—that our combined stories might very well be going up in flames inside the school.
I watch the action playing out around me. My eyes settle on the firefighters barking into walkie-talkies, then on the hoses, which they’ve tugged free from the truck and which now lie flat on the parking lot. No water.
Why aren’t they aiming giant, forceful streams at the building? Why aren’t they extinguishing anything? Why are the majority of them standing by—doing nothing?
Advanced Drama clusters together, muttering questions and getting no answers. The red ball caps whisper, point at the building, shuffle their feet. Liz tugs at her bottom lip, worriedly muttering, “Oh, dear.” Kiki wears her signature scowl. And Cass and Dylan appear at the same time, stepping into place beside me.
Cass even sleeps in vintage—or as close to vintage as possible. I already know that, but it’s a source of amusement for everyone else. Tonight, her fuzzy pants are covered in a pattern featuring forties-era pinup girls in boy shorts, long legs, high heels.
Once everyone stops talking about Cass’s sleepwear, the group falls serious again. The entire parking lot starts to take on the feel of a hospital waiting room crammed full of the anxious family members of a patient in surgery.
We fidget. After what seems like an eternity, the fire chief pulls his helmet from his head and waves the crowd closer.
We rush toward him, like fans at a concert all vying to be the first to touch him. He’s got something we all crave—the answers: “How bad is it?” “What happened?” “Is it all gone?”
Because of my lousy shoe choice, I’m slower than the rest—at this point, my
feet are practically numb, they’re so cold. I get pushed toward the back. The fire chief’s already speaking by the time I get to him. “Lightning,” he’s saying. But his voice is muffled. I can’t make out the rest. And I can’t see him at all.
Others begin to shout, “Speak up! We can’t hear you!”
He grabs a megaphone from the truck and begins again as I push my way closer.
“Lightning hit the auditorium directly.”
I look for Mom. It’s easy to pinpoint her stark-white hair in the crowd. And even though I’m staring at her back, I can tell from the curve of her shoulders that she’s dropped her face into her hands.
“Now, the strike was strong in intensity but relatively short in duration. It didn’t start a fire. Its effect was more like an explosion.”
“How could—” I’m not even sure I’ve said it out loud until every face in the crowd turns toward me. “How could there be a lightning strike when there was no rain? No storm?”
“Good question,” a bathrobe-clad science instructor praises in his best third-period Intro to Earth Science voice. “There is such a thing as a dry thunderstorm.” His voice gains strength, as if to indicate we should all be taking notes. “Precipitation evaporates before it hits the ground—”
“But we’re the completely wrong climate here in Verona,” another answers. “A dry thunderstorm occurs in the desert.”
“Rogue strike,” the firefighter says as a way to end the debate.
A flurry of questions flaps its wings all around me: “Electrical system?” “Rest of the building?” “School tomorrow?”
But my mind is stuck on the lightning—the wrong climate for dry storms.
“Now, the lightning,” the firefighter goes on, “came straight through the ceiling, hit the stage. Knocked a nice-sized hole in it. Lots of smoke, no fire, like I said. We’re doing a building check, but the way it looks right now, I see no reason why you can’t hold classes tomorrow. Especially since the auditorium’s the only area hit. You still have electricity. But the auditorium will definitely be off-limits.”
My eyes turn toward the sky.
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