My Life After Now (19 page)

“Fifteen to places!” the stage manager announced to the women’s dressing room.

“Thank you, fifteen!” we responded in chorus.

I applied another layer of fire-engine red lipstick and stepped back to survey myself in the full-length mirror. Calf-high lace-up boots? Check. Red corset and prop sword? Check. Exposed upper arm threaded with dozens of black stitches? Check.

I grinned. I was going to be the most badass Mercutio this play had ever seen.

The energy backstage was electric, the way it can only be on opening night. I ran my hands along the thick, royal blue curtain until I found a breach and peeked, sleuth-like, out into the house. It was a sold-out show, and most seats were already occupied, but I sifted through the dense crowd until I found my people. Dad and Papa, having bought their tickets months ago, were sitting fourth row center, an enormous bouquet of roses laid across both of their laps. Lisa was a few rows behind them on the far side aisle. Papa kept glancing back every few seconds to make sure she was still there.

My attention shifted up to the balcony, where I located Roxie, her little brother Alex, June, Ahmed, and at least six or seven other members of the support group. Roxie had canceled tonight’s meeting so they could all come support me. My stomach turned over with a swell of appreciation as I watched them eagerly reading their programs and chatting.

“Cheater,” said a voice from behind, making me jump.

I quickly pulled the curtain closed and turned to find Evan standing there, a smirk on his face. Something stirred in me as my eyes drank him in. His white shirt was unlaced at the neck, his hair molded into deliberate disarray, his sword slung coolly over his shoulder. But I quickly told myself to snap out of it. So he looked good in his costume. It didn’t mean I should jump right back into a relationship with the guy.

“What?”

“You’re not supposed to sneak a look at the audience before the curtain goes up,” he said. “Takes all the fun out of it.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said, grinning. “I think knowing how many people are out there makes it
more
exciting.”

He rolled his eyes.

“So, break a leg tonight,” I said.

“You too. Or should I say ‘pop a stitch’?”

“Don’t even think it!” I said, instinctively checking to make sure my stitches were secure. “More bloodshed on this stage is the last thing we need.”

“You’ll get no argument from me there,” he agreed.

Max and Courtney joined us then. They looked so cute, in their matching powder blue Capulet and Lady Capulet costumes.

“Damn, Luce, you look hot,” Max said, eyeing me with raised eyebrows. Then he got a little mischievous glint in his eye and conspicuously turned to Evan. “Doesn’t she look hot, Evan?”

“
Max
!
” I hissed, before Evan could say anything. I shot Max an I’m-going-to-kill-you look. “Cut it out,” I mouthed.

Max just batted his eyelashes and looked back at me innocently.

“You really do look good, though, Lucy,” Courtney said. “Way better than this
contraption
I’m strapped into.”

I giggled. Her dress was pretty huge. But it looked good on her, in a stately sort of way. Perfect for the character. “Steven Kimani won’t be able to take his eyes off of you,” I assured her with a grin.

At the mere mention of Steven’s name, Courtney’s eyes got all dreamy and she was beaming like a love-struck schoolgirl. Which, I guess, was what she was. “He sent me flowers backstage,” she said.

“Good!” I said with approval. “He’d better keep it up too, or he’ll have the wrath of me to contend with.” I patted my sword meaningfully.

“Ooh, scary!” Max said mockingly.

“Places!” the stage manager yelled, crossing the stage with an authoritative stride while simultaneously adjusting the frequency on her headset. “Places, everyone! Right now!”

The four of us took a second for a pre-show group hug and then dispersed to our respective places in the wings. I didn’t have to be on stage for a few scenes yet, so I stood off to the side and closed my eyes, letting my head fill up with the beautiful sounds of flats being wheeled out and the flurry of heels clacking against the wooden floor and scores of excited whispers and the stage manager murmuring cues to the light booth and orchestra pit.

“Break a leg, baby,” a disembodied male voice interrupted the peaceful drone of stage noises. I squinted through the darkness and was just able to make out the outlines of Ty and Elyse a few feet in front of me. They must not have noticed me standing here.

“You too,” she responded, tapping him playfully on the nose. “I love you.”

“Love you more,” Ty crooned.

“No, I love
you
more!” Elyse countered.

“I love you the
most
!” he said right back, and Elyse giggled.

Hmph
, I thought.
Guess
they
made
up.
But the observation was wonderfully free of any bitterness or animosity. Those two could have each other for all I cared.

It did fleetingly occur to me that, now that they were back together, Elyse might tell Ty about my being positive. But I couldn’t worry about that now because all at once the orchestra began playing and the curtain was raised to the sound of applause.

A profound thrill coursed through me and I shivered with excitement. There was truly nothing else like this in the world.

Stephanie Gilmore, who was playing the Chorus, stepped into the spotlight and spoke the prologue directly to the audience. “Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene. From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

A grin spread across my face. We were underway.

• • •

It was magic. That was the only explanation.

The play that I’d been so certain was cursed, the play that had
never
once
run smoothly in rehearsal, turned out to be perfect in every possible way. By some divine interference, the cast and crew had come together to create something so much bigger than a high school drama production. This was art.

Even
I
was convinced that Elyse and Ty were meant to be together.

• • •

When the time came for our fight, I gave Evan a quick wink with my upstage eye. We so had this. We fell into step and waged battle on each other. The lights boring down on us had me sweating through my makeup, and I was crying out with each slash of the sword like a tennis player serving a ball. Again and again our weapons collided with ferocity, inducing involuntary gasps and shrieks of anxiety from the audience. I’d never had so much fun in my life.

But then I suffered my mortal wound and everything changed.

Though I’d said these very lines countless times before, suddenly every word I said seemed to be infused with double-meaning.

Ask
for
me
tomorrow
and
you
shall
find
me
a
grave
woman.

I
am
peppered, I warrant, for this world.

A
plague
o’ both your houses!

I fell to the floor as real tears fled down my face.

They
have
made
worms’ meat of me.

I
have
it, and soundly, too.

Your
houses!

Epiphany burst behind my eyelids like fireworks, and everything was abruptly, staggeringly in focus. I lay there, still as a portrait, as the other players continued on without me. But my mind was anything but quiet.

A plague. There was no better word for it. Call it a virus or a disease or an infection. Call it whatever you wanted, but this was truly what it was. A plague. A cureless, indiscriminating, unflinching plague.

I had it. And soundly too.

• • •

The curtain came down, the crowd still on their feet and going wild, and the entire drama club exploded into self-congratulatory celebration. When Andre finally made it past the adoring public and backstage, we quieted down so he could make his traditional post-performance speech.

“I have only one note tonight,” he said, deadpan. “Don’t. Change.
Anything
!”

We erupted in cheers again, and the party resumed. But I waited for an opening, and when I saw it, snuck away. There was something I had to do.

I quickly changed out of my costume and emerged from the dressing room with my stage makeup still on, hoping I hadn’t missed him. But I was brought up short when I found Evan leaning against the wall, waiting for me.

“Oh. Hi,” I said. I glanced around, but it was just the two of us. Everybody else was still on the stage. “Why aren’t you back there whooping it up with everyone?”

“I saw you duck out. Wanted to see if you were okay,” he said.

I blinked. “Why? Do I seem not okay?”

He considered the question. “You seem fine,” he admitted. “But you’re pretty good at hiding how you’re really feeling, so that doesn’t really mean anything. It seemed like something…
happened
to you during the show.”

How could he possibly have picked up on that? I’d stayed in character the whole time, I was sure of it.

I searched Evan’s face and what I saw did funny things to my heartbeat. Earnestness. Compassion. Understanding. Love.

He really did care about me.

“Trust you to notice,” I said with a you-caught-me sigh. “Yeah, I had a bit of a moment mid-death. But hey, the play
is
a tragedy—a little added melodrama can’t hurt, right?”

He stepped closer, his expression serious, and my breathing sped up. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Not right now.”

“Well, you know I’m here.”

I looked up into his dark, trusting eyes. “I know.” And then, before I could talk myself out of it, I raised myself up on tippy-toes and kissed him. He gasped in surprise but recovered quickly and pulled me closer to him, kissing me back.

He tasted like Chapstick and orange Tic-Tacs, and there was not one iota of fear or doubt in his entire body.

Entirely too soon, the stage door opened and throngs of hyped-up drama kids poured out. Evan and I pulled apart, matching perma-grins on our faces.

“I have to go take care of something,” I said regretfully. I didn’t want to leave him, but time was of the essence. I may have already been too late. “Don’t leave, okay?”

“Never,” he promised.

• • •

I weaved through the crowded lobby, searching. I spotted my dads mingling with Roxie and my support group supporters over by the coffee table, but I ran past them with my head down. I would talk to them later. Right now I had to find the principal. He always made a point of coming to the drama productions’ opening nights, so he had to be here somewhere. Unless he’d already left. I was really hoping that wasn’t the case, because if I had to wait until Monday to tell him my idea, I might lose my nerve.

Finally I saw him chatting with a few teachers, his rolled-up program sticking out of his jacket pocket.

“Excuse me, Mr. Fisher?” I said, tapping him on the shoulder. “Can I speak with you for a minute?”

Shock crossed his face. “Miss Moore! Um…yes, of course! Shall we step into my office?” I followed him as he unlocked the office door and invited me inside. “What can I do for you, Miss Moore?” He pushed his glasses up on his nose nervously.

I smiled. The man was terrified of me. Probably thought I was going to follow through on my lawsuit threat. I should have strung him along for a little while and let him swelter in his wildest fears, but I was eager to get this over with so I could go back to having fun.

“I have a proposition for you,” I said, and explained my plan.

“Did it start yet?” Dad asked worriedly, hurrying into the living room armed with snacks.

“Not yet. They said seven-oh-eight, so we have a few more minutes,” I said. I raised an eyebrow at the colossal popcorn bowl. “You do know it’s only a sixty-second commercial, right?”

“So I’m excited. Sue me. It’s not every day my daughter is on national television,” Dad said.

“I agree, Adam,” Evan piped up and helped himself to a giant handful of the buttery stuff. “This occasion absolutely calls for popcorn,” he said through a full mouth.

“We third that!” Papa said from the big red armchair, bouncing my little sister on his lap.

I rolled my eyes at the four of them, but I was secretly loving every second of this. I’d already seen the completed commercial, and I was incredibly proud of the way it had turned out. But Dad, Papa, and Evan had insisted on waiting until it aired to watch it—claiming it was more fun knowing they were watching it along with the rest of the country. Or, at least, the percentage of the country who tuned in to
Jeopardy!
at seven p.m. every night.

“Shhhh!” Papa said, as the show cut to commercial. “It’s starting!”

I didn’t pay much attention to my face on the screen. Instead, I took the full sixty seconds to observe my family as they watched, their faces full of pride and joy.

In the four months since
Romeo
and
Juliet
closed, I’d come to appreciate exactly how lucky I really was.

• • •

Mr. Fisher had turned out to be an incredibly useful ally in my mission to open the eyes of my peers. As I’d lain fake-bleeding to death on the
Romeo
and
Juliet
stage back in December, I’d realized that I had to do something. The HIV/AIDS plague wasn’t going away, and yet no one was really talking about it. At least, not in the same way they had a decade or two ago. We’d become complacent and we’d become ignorant. Dedicating a health class here or there to discussing statistics and the ways you could and couldn’t contract the virus clearly wasn’t doing much. If it was, Evan wouldn’t have been wary of touching me back when he’d first learned the truth. If it was, Elyse wouldn’t have been worried about having caught it through kissing. If it was, I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

We needed to talk about it, so that kids would understand that the plague was still spreading across every single demographic—including our own. There needed to be an unrelenting, ongoing discussion so that HIV/AIDS would no longer be this phantom, ghoulish hypothetical and instead be understood as
everyone’s
problem—something that we
all
need to be fighting, positive or not. And for the people who were already positive, people like me, we needed to stop the rampant discrimination and judgment in our schools and workplaces and families. The only way to do that?
Keep
talking
about
it
.

So, as my dead body rested on the stage floor that night, I’d asked myself what I could do. I still wasn’t comfortable with the assembly idea, and I wasn’t the preaching, happy-go-lucky, let’s-start-a-student-club type. But there
was
something I was good at.

Mr. Fisher and I approached Andre together.

“Lucy has come to me with a rather intriguing idea,” Mr. Fisher said, “and I’d appreciate your full cooperation.”

Andre narrowed his eyes at me in suspicion. “What idea?”

“I think we should do another straight play this spring,” I said simply.

Andre guffawed. “No way,” he said, shaking his head vehemently. “We always do a musical in the spring. It’s our biggest moneymaker of the year.”

“True. But Mr. Fisher and I have been talking, and we agree that we should do a show that has the ability to truly change our audience’s lives. Or, at the very least, make them think. Isn’t that the real purpose of theater, after all?” I challenged.

“Of course,” Andre mumbled, knowing he couldn’t very well disagree with that. “That’s why I chose
The
Sound
of
Music
. What makes you think more than Nazis?”

“
The
Normal
Heart
,” I said without missing a beat.

Andre quickly looked to Mr. Fisher. I could see the possibilities turning in his head and tried to hide my smile. We had him.

“The school would really let us do
The
Normal
Heart
?” he asked, cautiously optimistic,
The
Sound
of
Music
all but abandoned.

Mr. Fisher nodded. “Lucy has been kind enough to lend me a copy of the play, and though there is some…questionable language involved, I think the overall message is important enough that the school board will overlook the standing no-profanity rule. Just this once,” he added.

Andre’s face lit up, as the rare chance to do gritty, contemporary theater grew real. “Screw the musical!” he said with a conspiritorial grin.

As was his way, Andre played with casting so that the normally almost all-male play included a few women as well. It was an extremely brutal and challenging show, in my opinion even more of a tragedy than
Romeo
and
Juliet
. Set in New York City in the very early years of the AIDS crisis, before anyone even had a name for the mysterious disease that was killing so many gay men, the play tackled the very issues I wanted my classmates to be thinking about.

The cast had really stepped up and so far rehearsals were going brilliantly. Every day, I thanked my lucky stars that I lived in a community that was willing to let us do a play like this, and that the administration had such faith in our ability to pull it off.

It was a smaller cast than
Romeo
and
Juliet
, but all the central people in my life were in it. Evan, Max, Courtney, Ty, Elyse. It was scary at first, working on a project like this with them, when so many of them knew what I was going through and how close to home it rested with me. But I think that made them work even harder, like they didn’t want to let me down.

And as far as I could tell, Elyse had kept my secret from Ty. I was impressed, especially considering the fact that we were doing a show about AIDS and it would have been so easy for her to accidentally-on-purpose let it slip at any time. But she was keeping her word. So far, anyway. She and I would never be friends, but at least our feelings toward each other had evolved past sheer hatred and were hovering a little closer to tolerance. I considered that progress.

• • •

The commercial ended, and suddenly my family was pulling me to my feet for a deluge of hugs and kisses. I radiated with accomplishment—I was finally, officially, a professional actor. I had to admit, it felt good.

All at once my cell phone started chirping, and for a while I was busy fielding calls and texts from a gushing Max and Courtney, telling me again how amazing the commercial was—even though I’d already shown them my DVD copy. Then my dads started getting calls from my grandparents and their friends from work, so I took the baby and let them do the proud-parent thing while Evan and I went and sat on the stoop out front. The April air was warm, and the trees were beginning to blossom.

“You’re going to be a star,” he murmured in my ear. I turned my face to his and answered him with a deep kiss.

“I love you,” I whispered, my eyes still closed and my lips still grazing against his. I felt his mouth curl into a smile.

We still hadn’t had sex, but we weren’t in any rush. Sex complicated things, especially in our case, and after Evan’s HIV test had come back negative, neither of us was particularly eager to go down that road again. So, for now, we were perfectly content taking it slow.

I rested my head on his shoulder and readjusted my sleeping baby sister in my arms. She was the mellowest, happiest baby I’d ever seen. I couldn’t help but suspect that somehow, she knew what a bullet she’d dodged.

As planned, Lisa had stayed with us until she gave birth. After Papa’s virtual in-home imprisonment of her, we all knew she’d be out the door as soon as the baby was born, but what I never could have predicted was that she would leave the baby with us. My dads told me later, though, that they’d known it was a possibility for a while. Lisa asking me to name the baby was the red flag.

I don’t know how she looked at that gorgeous, tiny, healthy baby girl and saw anything other than perfection, but Lisa took one look at her and freaked, just as she had with me time and time again. I finally came to realize that it wasn’t me that wasn’t good enough; it was
her
. She would never be a mother, and she knew it.

I thought about it a lot, and my theory was that all Lisa really wanted was someone to love her. But when her drug addiction and severe lack of any form of compassion prevented that, she decided she would have a baby. In her mind, her baby would love her, no matter what. And who knows, that may have been true. But the variable in the equation was Lisa. After she gave birth, it became clear that she simply wasn’t capable of loving the baby in return. And that posed a problem.

So Dad and Papa adopted her, and I finally gave her a name. Viola Freeman-Moore. She’d only been in the world a month and already it was impossible to imagine life without her.

• • •

After dinner, I walked Evan to his car.

“I’ll call you later,” he promised, and kissed me good-bye.

I watched his taillights disappear around the corner, and then looked down at the object in my hands. A stamped envelope, addressed to Lee Harrison, 177 Spring Street, Apt. 5B, New York, NY, 10012.

Inside was a single sheet of hot pink paper: a schedule for Roxie’s meetings. I slid it into the empty mailbox and flipped the little flag up.

Maybe Lee would never show up, but maybe he would. And if he did, we would be there to help him. Because, when it comes down to it, life really isn’t all that bad.

And of that I was absolutely positive
.