Chapter 7: The Empty House

I told everybody I was staying late to fix my torn zipper.

The board chair locked the front doors at eleven and gave me the key to the stage door, the way she had since I was fifteen.

"Ghost light on when you go," she said.

"Always."

Then the Juniper was empty.

I stood in the middle of the stage in my jeans and listened to the building tick as it cooled.

Two hundred and forty red seats.

The painted peach branches over the proscenium, faded pink in the dark.

The smell of dust and old velvet.

I had spent more of my life in here than in my own house.

At eleven-twenty, the stage door opened and closed.

I heard his footsteps come through the wings.

He stopped at the edge of the curtain, still in shadow.

"You said the light," I said.

"I did."

I walked to the wall and threw the big switch for the work lights.

They slammed on overhead, white and flat and ugly, the kind of light that shows every stain on the floor.

He stepped out into it.

No cap.

No sunglasses.

Just a grey T-shirt and jeans, and his face with nothing between it and me.

I had seen it on a poster, on a mug, on the news, in the moon, under a bulb.

Never this.

He had a tiny chip in his front tooth.

Freckles on his nose, faint, that no photo ever showed.

His eyes were a darker blue than the posters, almost navy.

He looked tired, and younger than twenty-six.

"Okay," he said. "This is it. This is all there is."

"You look like a person," I said.

He laughed, surprised.