Chapter 21: Run of Show

On Thursday night we rehearsed in the Summit ballroom, an hour after the hotel staff left.

It is a huge beige room on the ground floor of a downtown hotel, with chandeliers and a carpet the color of old oatmeal.

Two hundred chairs stood in rows facing a stage three feet high.

Someone had hung work lights from the rig, flat white and unforgiving.

A stage technician sat at a folding table at the back with a laptop, a coffee, and enormous headphones.

He had not looked up when we came in.

"Fifteen minutes," I said, stepping onto the stage. "The first thirty seconds are mine."

Drake stepped up beside me.

"You walk to center, you stop, you say hello to the room," he said.

"And then I open with a joke."

"A small one."

"It worked at the trade show."

"At the trade show you threw a carabiner at my head."

"That was a different sort of attention."

He walked to the podium and set the slide clicker on it.

I started the clock on my phone, and I did my opening, and he did his, and we ran the whole thing straight through.

I did the tent.

He did the pack.

We took turns pointing at each other's flaws and then at each other's fixes, with the new seam tape on the screen behind us.

We interrupted each other at the exact places we'd planned.

Halfway through, I stepped backward to give him the center of the stage, and my heel missed the edge.

For one long half-second I was falling.

Then Drake's hand caught my arm, and his other caught my waist, and he pulled me back against his chest.

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