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“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Atkins sighed.
Carmina glanced over inquisitively, so Atkins guided me away until we were in private. “When did you get this?”
“Right before I went out on stage. It’s the reason I missed my cue! What do we do?”
Atkins looked out on stage, where Braden was in the throes of his song. We had the rest of this song, and then a scene between Braden and Dorian, before I had to go back out. I could see the indecision in the director’s eyes.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “If I call the police, they’ll want to stop the show to investigate.”
“We can’t!” I blurted out. I knew I was in danger, but halting everything now seemed like a worse fate than falling through a trapdoor. “It’s going well. It’s sold out!”
“If this were a random note, I’d ignore it,” he said. “But we know the saboteur has made good on his promises. I hate risking your safety.”
“So what do we do?” I repeated. I was hoping he would find a magical solution where I simultaneously stayed safe, but got to finish the show. Now that I had a taste of the crowd’s applause, I couldn’t wait to please them with some of the larger songs later on.
“Let me work on it,” he finally said, pulling out his phone. “Focus on your singing and trust me. I’ll do everything I can do keep you safe.”
Braden finished his song to a smattering of applause, and then he launched into his dialogue scene with Dorian. Two neighbors meeting at the picket fence separating their yards, chatting about the day.
A stage hand appeared next to me with the props for the next scene: an apron for me to wear, and a plastic apple pie to carry out to the men. Jane was a model American wife if you ignored all the adultery.
“Focus on the show,” Atkins said as he put his phone to his ear. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Who are you calling?”
He walked away while talking into the receiver.
I turned back to the curtain, listening to Dorian’s voice. “Of course we don’t mind you joining us,” he was saying loudly for the benefit of the audience. “In fact, let me see if Jane’s done with dessert…”
I put on my fake smile and carried the pie back out onto the stage, an wondered if I was going to survive the night.
57
Braden
It was good to get back into the groove of the show, singing and dancing and performing the lines I’d been rehearsing for so long, because otherwise I was a hot mess of emotions. I’d been trying to figure out how I felt all week, and I was no closer to any sort of clarity.
It took me several days to calm down after the dinner with my parents. I was a white-hot ball of disappointment and frustration in the aftermath of that disaster. It wasn’t even the weird fact that Nadia and my mother already met each other at the department store, and that Nadia had cussed her out. That could be forgiven as a weird coincidence of the universe. What I was really upset about was that she’d forgotten the dinner altogether. It was literally the most important event since she’d started living with us, the entire purpose that I had let her live in my townhouse in the first place, and she forgot.
Then, when she did eventually get there, she was so drunk that she slurred her words and insulted the owner, a good family friend of ours. The woman I had posing as my girlfriend turned out to be a sloppy, drunken asshole of a woman in front of my parents, whose opinion I was desperately trying to sway.
I wasn’t an asshole. There was no way I was going to kick her to the curb for fucking up our deal. But I couldn’t be around her, so staying with my parents in Long Island for a week was my only option.
I struggled all week with my emotions. The easy solution would have been to tell my parents we broke up. They would never have to see her again, and my parents would believe that I was straight. Two birds, one drunk stone. But deep down inside, I rebelled against the easy solution. For some reason, I couldn’t accept that way out.
And it took me a week to realize why: because I wanted her to be my actual girlfriend.
Nadia wasn’t just ruining our fake relationship. She was ruining any potential for a real one in the process.
Now that I was back here, on stage with Nadia, I could feel my emotions returning. They had been dormant while I was angry but they were unavoidable now. Nadia strode onto stage holding a fake pie, smiling widely at me. I beamed back at her as my stage directions required.
“That’s a nice looking pie,” I said. It was a bad line. A cheesy line. But then again, this entire show was a little bit over the top.
She did a little dip, then twirled to make her dress spin through the air. “Don’t tell anyone, but the crust was store-bought.”
“It’ll be our little secret.”
Our eyes locked in an exaggeratedly-long moment for the audience’s benefit.
