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“Look, a bookstore,” said Mia, tugging Josie toward the shop next door. The front window display held books on wires as if they were birds in flight. “It’s bad luck to see a bookstore and not go in.”
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It had been so long since she’d really sung out, with her chin lifted, that she’d forgotten how the notes felt warm and bright rising from her middle, straight up her throat, and into the sky—not even touching her, just moving through her. She’d forgotten how her voice could snap at the words or flow over them like water around rocks, sometimes grounding the notes, and other times setting them free. She’d forgotten how when she sang, the sounds connected her to other people, sending out silver-fine filaments that came back again, linking them
It had been like this with Justin at first. Just his nearness had made her heart beat faster. His heat. His breath never smelled bad to her; his skin even after a workout was delicious. She’d read a magazine article about pheromones, those scented hormones that attracted creatures to each other, and figured that his were a good match for hers. But the pheromones couldn’t predict if he’d fall out of love with her. If his feelings would cool once she was no longer a star.
On days when Victoria didn’t need her and she had no auditions, Josie would skulk to the TKTS booth in Times Square to purchase a same day, highly discounted ticket to a Broadway show. She sat in the upper balcony, half obscured by a pillar, watched the spectacle down below, and yearned. Yearned so hard, surely those actors could feel it, her yearning pulling at them, ghost hands on their thickly made-up faces, tugging on their wigs and professionally laundered costumes.
She glanced out the airplane window just as the postcard-perfect Manhattan skyline disappeared from view, and promised she’d return. But even then she’d had a strange, ticklish feeling in her stomach. Will you, though? If her life were a novel like the kind she’d studied in English class, she’d have called it foreshadowing. But this was
reality, so she figured it must just be nerves.
“Being alone is stupid, Josie. I’ve been alone for twenty years. You think it’s noble? Plus I’ve got a disease—” “You don’t have a disease, Mom…” “I saw a thing: We all have rare diseases probably, only the symptoms are so small we don’t notice. Like right this very second, my finger is twitching. It never twitched when I was married. Why would you want to be me?
The whole experience reminded her of the dream ballets in musicals like Oklahoma! and An American in Paris and even La La Land—a sequence where the story and symbolism were amped up to eleven. Where what happened was separate from the actual plot. It wasn’t real, and yet it was more real—or more honest, anyway. Where the characters could be true about how they felt, could explore romance and ambition without fear of rejection, could really feel.
By dancing and singing about it. Musicals were better than real life. And if Josie could make a wish, she’d live in one forever.
“He’s a romantic,” said Bianca. “He gets these ideas, love at first sight, those sorts of things. He’s convinced that you’re the one.” “The one? Like, the one one?” Bianca raised her hand. “I swear on Zeus’s beard, those were his very words. But I can see that you’re not that into him, so I just want to say, don’t mess with his head, okay? Go for it or don’t, but anything in between will probably kill him.”
Then there was silence, just birds singing, totally unaware that a fight for life had just happened under their nests. Or maybe they knew and just didn’t care. Birds could be jerks.
Josie let out a breath that she didn’t know she’d been holding. And since people only did that in books, this was another irrefutable piece of evidence that she was, in fact, in a book.
“Alone, I’d never risk it. But with you…” He brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. It was stiff with dirt and sweat and clunked back into place. “Your hope is infectious. Not like infectious-disease infectious. Though similar. Like a virus, but not one that kills us. Though maybe it will kill us, if in the process of following this hopeful plan we get killed.”
She had no boundaries. No boundaries anywhere. In her loneliness and isolation, she tended to try to merge with whoever was nearest.
Josie wondered: If Hatchet had looked nothing like Justin, would she still be lying beside whatever random person the story had stuck her with? In this kind of story, would anybody do? Just to keep from being alone?
When Mia’s panicked breaths slowed, she pressed her cheek against Josie’s and said, “I love you the whole world. But the world is bigger than you. How do I love you more than a bigger thing?” Mia’s five-year-old logic seemed sound. After all, the biggest cookie on the plate was clearly the best one.
“Do we have family history of mental illness? I mean, besides Grandma’s PTSD. And whatever Dad’s deal is.” “Probably,” said Lorna. “Who doesn’t? I think I have the bipolar.” “You’re not bipolar, Mom.” “Yesterday I cooked four batches of snickerdoodles. Today I don’t feel like cooking a thing.” “Mom, bipolar is a real thing. It’s not just being motivated one day and not the next.” “You don’t know me.”
thought the Muses inspired artists to create,” Josie had said.
“A watered-down myth! The older legend is more gruesome. The Muses were supernatural beings that required human sacrifice to survive but would accept art as a substitute. For early civilizations, creating worthy art was a matter of life and death!” He’d laughed. “Remember that. You are dancing, acting, and singing for your lives. Make the story feel real enough for the Muses or they will feast upon you instead!”
Where were the stories about a nice guy and a girl just, like, having great conversations and eating good food and being cozy in sweaters?
“In the more modern myths, the Muses were benevolent creatures who inspired people to create art, poetry, music, dance, and theater. But digging into the oldest of the stories reveals a much darker origin, wherein the Muses were creatures born from the consciousness of the earliest humans. Not humans themselves, they were embodied thoughts
The early Greeks discovered that the Muses could feed on fictional stories nearly as easily as on real lives, and so art was a sly substitute for a human life, a way to appease their terrible hunger.
Without a sacrifice of music, poetry, dance, or theater, the starving Muses would instead turn back to human sacrifice, breaking open human bodies to suck out their souls.
“Adults can be messed up too, Josie.”
“This moment isn’t everything, you know.” “It’s not?” Josie said miserably. “It feels like it’s everything, but we are both of us so much more than what we are in this second. We are who we used to be, who we are now, and who we will become. Even if we can’t see it, we are never-ending, eternal, with limitless potential, the magnificent way that God sees us.”
“We tend to think of life as all linear,” Nina went on, “as if each moment, each year, has to be better than the last, and if it’s not, we failed. But we’re all of it at the same time. And then some. So be patient with yourself, Josie. Don’t judge yourself by any one moment. Allow yourself room to change.”
“People grow up,” said Nina. “People change. That’s okay. We don’t have to peak in high school and spend the rest of our lives sliding downhill.”
Theater is dangerous, she thought, and not just from cut wires. Pretending to be in love with someone when your heart isn’t free to follow through. Sometimes imagining emotions made them real. Basic acting technique. Sense memory.
In the musicals Josie really loved, the protagonists didn’t get what they thought they wanted. They ended up with something entirely different and unexpected—and maybe better than before. Better, because through the course of the story, a character changes. Elphaba and Glinda. Elsa and Anna. Maria Von Trapp, Eliza Doolittle, and Annie. They changed, so what they wanted changed.
She lifted her face toward the sunlight she could almost feel and imagined blue sky so big everything wasn’t below it but rather a part of it. The river more white than blue. May in Montana, the earth’s best idea since five-year-old kids.
Mr. Camoin used to say that theater inhabited a liminal place between life and death, truth and fantasy, ecstasy and pain. The wrestling between the opposites was what gave theater more life than life itself.
Mr. Camoin also used to say that butter was meant to be eaten by the spoonful, so it wasn’t like Josie agreed with him 100 percent of the time.
According to her grandmother’s books about the Greek myths, humans couldn’t simply climb Mount Olympus or spelunk into the underworld. In order to commune with humans, the gods and the mythological characters whispered to humans through oracles, listened t...
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they could walk with them on dusty roads. A human and immortal meeting required an in-between...
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“Wait,” she whispered. “A show is rehearsed and performed, the same lines night after night. Life is way more complicated and unexpected. There’s no third act and no curtain call; it just goes on and on till it doesn’t. Life’s nothing like a show.”
