We took the beers back to the table while I tried to decide if I was losing my mind. I knew Adonis liked me as a friend, he’d said as much a dozen times. But every so often, I got these flashes of something else that made me wonder if we could be more. The moments were gone before I could decide if I wanted to act on them.
“Drink up,” Adonis said with a signature bright smile. “Next round is on me.”
If I wasn’t sure whether Cleo had designs on Adonis, it became much clearer when she decided to make an effort to point out all the things that made me the strangest person she had ever met.
“So we have to talk about this play you’re doing for the showcase,” she said to me, leaning closer, so her barely covered chest pressed against my arm. “If it’s half as weird as all that shit you keep in your room, then we’re in for a show.”
“This is the mythology one, right? I think I heard some people talking about it,” one of Cleo’s friends said. His name was Paul, maybe. “What’s it about?”
Adonis answered before I could think of what to say. “It’s excellent, actually. Like a myth you’ve never heard before but will think you have, totally surreal and excruciatingly familiar at the same time. Might be the best one in the showcase.”
A burst of pride made me smile.
Cleo shook her head. “Well, the concept art I’ve seen is creepy as hell.”
“One man’s creepy is another man’s masterpiece,” Adonis replied, glancing at me before he looked away. “We’ll have to let the audience decide.”
The girl beside Paul set her empty beer glass down on the table with a loud clink. “Obviously, we know who’s going to play the male lead. Who are you casting opposite Adonis?”
My fingers played in the condensation on my glass, and I wished I were somewhere else. “I’m not sure.”
She was insistent. “You haven’t held auditions yet?”
To be an actor was to be desperate for attention at all times. It was a hazard of the job, nobody got into the spotlight by accident. They had to make a conscious decision to take it for themselves.
“We’re still trying to decide what we’re looking for,” Adonis said, sipping his whiskey.
“We?” Cleo repeated with a smirk. “I didn’t realize you were so involved.”
“What can I say, I’m invested.”
“Well then, you probably have a copy of the script. Seph has been keeping that thing locked up tighter than Fort Knox. Let’s see it.”
For a moment, he looked like he was going to deny it. But then Adonis shrugged and bent down to rummage in the shoulder bag resting against his foot on the floor. He drew out a sheaf of papers. “Final edits aren’t done yet.”
“Nothing’s ever done until the moment the show starts.” Cleo grabbed for the script, but Adonis evaded her and laid it down on the table between them. “I’m going to read for the female lead, even though I don’t need to audition for you to know I’d be perfect for the role.”
I wanted to beg them to stop. But I didn’t have a good reason for my sudden dread, so my mouth stayed clamped shut. Next time, I was going to risk Diana’s censure and stay home. This was excruciating.
“I haven’t done much work on the first part,” Adonis said, leaning closer over the script so that his head was close enough to Cleo’s that they practically touched.
Only theater students would sit in a crowded bar on Friday night and run lines.
“Why don’t we get together tomorrow morning?” I asked.
“Don’t be such a spoiled sport,” Cleo chided me. “We all just want to assuage our curiosity. If your play is as good as Adonis says it is, then you shouldn’t mind.”
Putting your creative work out into the world was like giving birth to a baby that you were forced to abandon on the sidewalk. Then all you could do was hope someone came along to take care of it before it died. For reasons that made no sense, I didn’t want Cleo reading the lines for the female lead, much less playing her on stage. I had no interest in acting, but the character felt like it belonged to me. It rubbed me the wrong way to hear her saying the lines.
In a gravelly voice that was completely uncharacteristic but totally worked for the role, Adonis read the first line. “Only you can save me from this life of darkness, dear princess. Please take my hand.”
Ever the drama queen, Cleo brought her hand to her breast and sighed. “You would destroy me.”
He laughed bitterly. “Lies from beautiful lips cut deeper than a blade. I would save you and love you. Ask me for the world, and you shall have it.”
Cleo’s voice was low and sultry. “You would make me your slave.”
“I would master you, serve you, and everything in between.” Adonis growled, sending shivers up the spine of everyone in earshot. “Just say you will be mine.”
“That’s pretty hot,” Paul commented “Anybody want to split some nachos off the late menu? The kitchen closes in like a minute, it’s almost midnight.”
“Wait, what?” I said, taken aback.
It couldn’t be that late.
I looked down at my wrist where my watch would normally be and realized that I must have taken it off when I got home. It was set with alarms for all the moments when one stretch of time transitioned into another. Like daybreak and sunset, solstices, equinoxes, and even the Chinese New Year. These were the times when it was most critically important not to step on cracks, walk under a ladder, or break a mirror.
Dangerous times.
Diana called it another one of my superstitions, but I’d always believed that these transitions were a point of transformation. The world was at its most vulnerable in the space between one thing and another. That was why I liked to be safely in bed behind securely locked doors whenever the sun was setting or rising.
There was a reason why movies always showed the spirits rising at the stroke of midnight. And why the witching hour was set at the time when daily prayers in the Christian and Jewish traditions halted. It was in the gap between spaces, when contrary states drew close together and the veil separating different planes of existence weakened, that the world became its strangest and most dangerous.
Times when spirits of the dead could walk the earth.
I reached for the script. “We should stop.”
Cleo pulled it away and read the next line. “Hades, god of the dead and king of the underworld, hear my plea— “
“That’s enough,” I insisted, rising the table. “Don’t read anymore. Not right now.”
But like always, Cleo didn’t listen to a word I said. “I want to be with you. Take me away. Take us away.”
That was when the lights went out.
Chapter Four
Before all the medication robbed me of my ability to remember what happened when I slept, I used to dream about my parents.
They died long enough ago that I couldn’t remember their faces. In my mind, I saw these ghostly figures shrouded in darkness. As a child, I would run towards them when I dreamed. But no matter how fast I moved, I never got close enough to see their faces clearly.
I didn’t have pictures, although I’d never quite understood why not. Diana told me that by the time she became involved, all I possessed was a suitcase full of toys and the clothes on my back. She couldn’t give me any insight into what may have happened before.