I knew who Thomas Ricter was, and I’d even heard about his stint as guest director here. “Carter Alexander?”
“Oh, he graduated from here a few years back,” she said. “He directed the premiere of, um... what’s it called? Oh, Scats and Dreams.”
My eyes widened. “That was him?” It was a brand new play, but it had taken the Tonys by storm. It was being adapted into a movie now. I’d wanted to go so badly, but, of course, I couldn’t afford it.
“Yeah,” she said. “So, it’s a good school.” She stopped and opened a door. “And this is our room.”
The room contained two beds with wrought-iron headboards, two large desks, and two chests of drawers. One side was covered in open, overflowing boxes.
“I took the left side,” said Nell, “but if you want to switch...”
I stepped inside. “No, it’s fine.”
“We can’t make bunk beds, as you can see.” She gestured to the iron headboards. “But it’s okay, because our rooms are a little bigger up here, and we have our own bathrooms.” She pointed.
There was a door in one corner. I looked inside to see black and white tile, a claw foot tub and a toilet.
“Plus, I totally got us an adorable shower curtain,” she said. “Do you like Disney villains?”
“Um...” I was a little overwhelmed. I was going to live here. Really. I’d somehow made it out of my family home, away from my crazy aunts and my mentally ill mother. This was happening. I smiled at Nell. “Yeah. Absolutely. This is great.”
* * *
I gazed up at the cathedral ceilings in the theater. It was the most gorgeous place I’d ever been in, nothing like the rinky-dink community theater I’d been performing in for years. This theater had been built sometime in the 1700s. It was ornate and opulent. The chairs were red plush, the curtain on the stage the same. The vast expanse of the audience spread out in front of the stage. Eventually, the seats climbed high above, so that sitting on the top row meant an audience member would be peering down at tiny actors. Dripping, jeweled chandeliers hung from the high ceiling to light the theater. But right now it was dark. Only tiny house lights on the wall illuminated its splendor.
I stood with Nell on one of the balconies, looking down on the stage, which looked so small.
“This theater can be hard to fill,” she said. “It really only gets used for the big play in the spring.”
“The musical?” I said. “The one done in tandem with the music department?”
She nodded. “Yeah. It depends on who’s directing. Two years ago it was Bancroft, and he’s a pushover, so none of the theater majors got big roles. But last year when Ricter was the guest director, I got cast.”
“You did?”
She grinned. “Yeah, it wasn’t a big role or anything, but I got to work with him, and it was awesome.”
I looked down at the ornate theater. “This theater is beautiful.”
“Come on, if we go to the other side of campus, I’ll show you the two black box theaters where most of the plays get put on throughout the year. And your classes will be in there too, probably, or in one of the practice spaces.”
“Okay,” I said, following her out.
The outside of the theater building was just as imposing as the inside. Like all the buildings on campus at Thornfield, it was old and stone. The theater was even decorated with gargoyles though. They perched on the edges of the building, grinning madly down on me.
Nell was still talking. “The black boxes are cool because they’re really versatile. Like we can change the configuration of the audience really easily. My freshman year, we did theater in the round all year long, and it was so weird to block.”
“In the round? I’ve never done that.”
We started down a set of ivy-covered stone steps, descending down off the hill where the theater was located. “Oh, it’s so cool. It’s like the audience is everywhere. You feel completely surrounded. It’s a rush.”
“Sounds cool.”
“So, did you mostly do community theater before coming here?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve done every Rogers and Hammerstein musical ever produced.”
She laughed. “The Sound of Music?”
“Liesl,” I said.
She pointed at herself. “Greta.”
“When you were younger?”
“When I was in high school,” she said. “I was even shorter then. This is the way I look after a growth spurt.”
She was fairly short, but I hadn’t thought she was abnormally so. “Short is good, though. I mean, you don’t want to be taller than the male lead.”
She shrugged. “I’m not a lead actress. I don’t even want to be. The way I figure it, the lead is always the most boring character. The villains are always cooler than the heroines.”
I considered.
“Don’t say it,” she said. “I know I’m too cute to be a villain.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” I said.
We reached the end of the steps and waited at a crosswalk to go across the street.
“This way is quicker,” said Nell. She pointed. “You can walk all the way around, and you’re on campus the whole time, but this is a quicker walk. However, it does mean that you have to walk through a little bit of the residential part of town.”
We crossed the road and were on a house-lined street. The houses were stately, with wraparound porches, several stories, and tall, reaching towers. Thornfield’s architecture seemed halted in time, like it had never quite entered the twenty-first century.
“You can see Professor Alexander’s house, too,” she said, pointing.
The house was set back from the street a bit, shrouded in tall, willow trees. Their fronds brushed against the ground. A man was standing on the porch. I couldn’t see his face, but at the sight of him, a jolt went through me.
“Professor Alexander,” I said. “The one you were telling me about.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s him on the porch. He’s young, but he’s tough. I’ve never had him for class, but he was an assistant director for one of the shows I did last year, and he doesn’t hold back. He sent the main actresses home in tears more than once because they weren’t giving him what he wanted.”
I squinted. Why did he look familiar?
He moved forward, out of the shadows, and I saw his face.
I gasped.
It couldn’t be.
He was waving. “Hello there, Miss Sutton.”
“Hi Professor,” she called back. To me, quietly. “He’s really formal. Some of the professors let you call them by their first name, but not Professor Alexander.”
He stepped off his porch. “Is that Miss Moss with you?”
How did he know me?
He was coming closer.
My heart thudded. Sweat began to bead up on the back of my neck.
Nell nudged me. “Say hi.”
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. No way could I talk.
Professor Carter Alexander was the dark man from my dream.
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