NOVEL EXCERPT
The first time I clapped eyes on Echo Wolfeson she was playing a kangaroo.
New in town, I’d gone to meet the coaches. In Jackson, the sport was politicized. More oligarchy than meritocracy. I went into the Field House prepared to make my case. Show film. Stats. I had it all ready. A highlight reel on tape of me catching foul balls in the bleachers. Gunning down runners who thought they were fast. Three championships. Old cleats and a glove slick with sweat from years of hard play in case they wanted to see my stuff there and then.
Coach Foster, wiry and dry-eyed, with a gut so distended he looked like a pregnant tree in his mossy oak coverall, brushed it off like dust. He’d knew who I was. Been expecting me in fact. Knew Papo and the whole wild tribe of aunts and uncles. Randall was an old drinking buddy, though Foster was on the wagon. Six months and counting.
His sidekick, the aptly named Hitchcock, winked when Foster said this, like we all knew how it would end.
Anyway. Randal had called ahead. They’d checked my stats. Said they’d see me on the field. Monday morning. Eight o’clock sharp.
So okay. At least I’d get a chance to earn my spot. Riding that relief, I went looking for the front office to fill out the forms but got a little lost and wandered into the auditorium by mistake.
That’s where I saw her.
She was on stage beneath the lights. Her voice like water passing under stone. I stood at the back of the auditorium and didn’t move. She didn’t see me for the longest. That felt right.
She moved like she knew the room belonged to her. Like Shakespeare got it backward. Not all the world’s a stage but the stage is all the world. All of it that mattered anyway. And she owned it.
The name came later. Echo. I said it out loud. Just once. It echoed back in my skull all down the afternoon.
Had I ever seen a more beautiful face?
I stood there a beat too long. She noticed. Got flustered. Had to step off stage to collect herself.
I left. The sky hung low and yellow. It occurred to me then she might have a boyfriend. Maybe that big, faggy guy playing the Cat. No matter. Just one more thing to fight for.
Windows down, air thick with the reek of sour mud. Freemont, MS. The town where Theresa grew up and fled like a house on fire the day she turned eighteen The kind of place where nothing much happens unless it has—even then, the town resists change. Like it knows the world’s gone batshit and figures it can wait it out.
On the truck radio they said Zarqawi was dead. Killed in an airstrike this morning, they say, like it’s the end of something and not the start of another wave. Bombed north of Baqubah. They used two 500-pounders. Brought the whole house down. Maybe others inside. No matter. Today my world narrowed to a single stage, a single girl, the long vowels of her laughter echoing through the West Freemont High School auditorium.
A kangaroo. Dear God. I wanted to crawl inside her pouch, let her syllables hum through my bones.
Home with Papo nursing an Old Mil in the La-Z-Boy, I watched the Braves game on TBS. Smoltz took the mound like a man with something to prove. Pitched a gem. They edged the Nationals in the ninth, after Chipper went yard. Felt like something was right with the world for a change.
That was an early rehearsal for Seussical the Musical, the performance of which would mark the culmination of a theater camp for neurodivergent children from the elementary and middle schools, which I helped Ms. Weiland run every summer. The kids mainly got bit parts while Patrick Sweeney played the Cat in the Hat and I played the Sour Kangaroo.
At the Point of Contact, I was on stage with Ms. Weiland’s daughter Glory B. Glo, a child with Down Syndrome, played the hapless, lovable elephant Horton with such a perfect blending of sweet-hearted confusion and operatic gusto she was bound to steal the show. I’d just begun to lambast her for talking to a speck, talking to a speck, talking to a speck of dust when this lunk of a Norse god drifted in then stood there staring.
I did my best to ignore him, but, while I was used to playing to larger crowds, this rapt audience of one shattered the fourth wall. He was watching me like I was a country where he aimed to plant his flag. It unnerved me. I kept flubbing lines.
Ms. Weiland had to stop the rehearsal and pull me out into the wings to ask what was wrong. Was I drunk? Had I been drinking again?
“No. Sorry. I’m fine,” I said. “Just got distracted,” I said. “Won’t happen again,” I said. And by the time I’d stepped back on stage, he was gone. Good.
But the space he’d occupied at the rear of the auditorium looked dimmer now, like someone had pulled a moody gel across it, the kind we used for scenes just before something broke—a fall, a betrayal, a twist no one saw coming.
Maybe it was just nerves, or too much coffee, but my skin was buzzing like I’d missed a cue. Not a line, exactly—more like a moment. A shift in blocking I hadn’t been warned about. Something offstage had changed, just slightly, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever it was, it wasn’t playing.
The practice field was back of the school. I got there twenty minutes early but they were already warming up. Seven boys, two coaches. None of them even looked up as I approached the chain-link—like maybe I wasn’t real yet. Just a rumor. That bittersweet cut-grass smell always set my pulse thrumming. Gravel crunch under cleats felt like hope and hell and home all rolled up into one. Echo in my mind like a secret map. She was the only thing I was sure of.
“That the catcher from Jackson?” someone muttered.
“Yeah. Big hitter.”
“Big ego.”
I stepped onto the baseline with ground-glass in my stomach. The infield dirt wasn’t red like in Jackson. This was pale river silt flecked dark gray like ashes. It smelled like fish. I loved it.
First thing Coach had us run a mile out and back along the gravel road that crooked off into the woods that bordered campus to the south and west. The others all bitched like that was some inconceivable distance. I just locked in, pulling out ahead of the others without much effort.
A quarter mile in the road narrowed to a one-lane crowded by trees. Pine mostly. Some oak and sweetgum and I don’t know what all. A lot of thorny vines. Just short of the turnaround, we passed the ruins of an old cotton gin. The roof collapsed. Kudzu climbing what remained of the walls. Place looked ancient. More like some blasted pagan temple than a factory.
Back on the field, Hitchcock led us through some basic stretches. Then Foster paired me up with a black kid named Deonte Shaw, a junior with a ropy pitcher’s arms and a downturned mouth. I caught clean and quiet and never looked away.
“You good?” he asked, after the tenth pop in the glove.
“Good enough.”
True. I’d broken records back home. I’d dented the left field scoreboard at Prep in the postseason. None of that followed me over the county-line bridge. Here I was just another boy with a bat and a dream no one else could make come true.
Somewhere in there, I had Echo. At some point over the weekend, I’d determined to marry her. That thought stayed in me now, lodged behind every crouch, every throw.
After drills, Coach pulled me aside.
“You play like you mean it,” he said.
“I do.”
He looked at me for a long time, then spat on the ground.
“Something wrong, Coach?”
“Just remember,” he said. “Sometimes the strikeout teaches more than the home run.”
“What?”
“The glove opens to catch. The heart must do the same,” he said.
I nodded. “Sure Coach. Whatever you say,” I said, but I was thinking of something Papo always said about how every man had to learn to paddle his own canoe. So be it.
…
It rained hard Tuesday night. The field was soggy, and the air smelled like rust and leaf rot. We practiced. Coach said, “Rain delays the game, not the growth.”
I figured it grew blisters and torn calluses but didn’t argue. My hands bled through the tape. Good. No faking blood. No more in baseball than in love.
Deonte was working on his slider and kept missing. High and wild. I caught them all, even the ones that bit. When I pulled the mask off, I saw the whole team watching me like I was something dangerous.
That’s okay. I didn’t come here to make friends.
Still hadn’t spoken to Echo. Our paths crossed twice, coming and going. She stared through me like smoke. That’s how I knew. No girl looks that way unless she’s afraid it could be real.
That this was written and only waiting to be revealed.
That afternoon, I walked by the auditorium again, cleats laced together and draped over my shoulder, ball cap backwards. Slow. Casual even.
Someone had used a cinderblock to prop the door as if to let in the breeze though there wasn’t any. The air humid and stifling.
She was on in there, moving around with dayglo orange tape, tearing off strips and pressing them down here and there around the stage. Preparing to block the scene as I’d come to know, though I didn’t yet. After a while she stopped and stood in the center of the stage looking around, one hand on her hip. After a moment’s consideration, she went back around, tearing up some of the tape and replacing them a few inches to the left or right of where they’d been. Looked up and saw me then. Not smiling. Not a frown either. Just stared like she could see inside me.
Like she knew something I didn’t. Like she could unmake me with a word.
The drama teacher stepped on stage then. Josephine Weiland. A devastating beauty herself, though I hardly noticed it at the time. She followed Echo’s gaze all the way to me. Said to get lost unless I was planning to understudy for a Who.
“Ma’am,” I said and backed out. Making a point of not hurrying. Holding Echo’s stare until I was out the door, then touching my cap, just once. The way Papo would do when he saw lightning popping close.
Outside, the clouds had begun to gather again, heavy and low and dark, rolling in off the river like a long intake of breath. I loved that too. Back home, in Jackson, things moved at a different pace. Here, the world felt older. Slower. More rooted. Even the wind had an accent.
I walked back, sat in the dugout, staring at the empty field until the last of the light was gone. I thought about her voice. The shape of it echoing off the cinderblock walls of my mind.
I knew what I had to do. But what would she do back?
…
Sunday morning. Shiloh Primitive Baptist sat white as a sun-bleached jawbone, nestled in a thicket of crepe myrtle and camellias that had played out a month ago. No musical instruments, since the Lord gave us lungs and tongues and that ought to be enough. Respect. There’s something holy about embracing limits.
Papo asked me to come. Or at least I think he did. He says a lot of things these days. A lot of it nonsense. Alexandria and Tam brought him every other Sunday, hair pulled back tight, sweating off the night before with trembling hands and bloodshot eyes.
“I swear to God, if Brother Doug gets to shouting today Ima crash out,” Tam whispered as we slid into the pew. “My skull feels mule-kicked.”
Alexandria nodded. “Tequila sunrise?”
“Who’s talking?”
Papo sat beside me, wearing a decades old brown suit worn shiny at the elbows and knees. Holding black large-print Bible like a lifeline in his shaky hands.
Brother Doug took the pulpit with his Bible already opened to Luke. Voice soft at first, like the story was a secret he was about to trust us with. The Prodigal Son.
The parable always felt unfair to me growing up. Kid runs off, burns the whole world down, comes back barefoot and wrecked and sorry, and the father throws him a damn hootenanny. Meanwhile the good brother’s out in the field doing the right thing and gets jack for it.
I’d heard it a hundred times, but something hit different today. The leaving, the hunger, the pods the pigs ate. I saw the shame in the dirt. I saw the coming home—not triumphant, but necessary.
Brother Doug raised two fingers to his chin like a gunslinger blowing smoke off the top of a pistol he’s just fired. “There can be no sin too loud for grace. No boy too far gone for the Father to run to meet him.”
I looked down at Papo’s hands. Thought of my own. Felt pretty emotional. Didn’t cry or anything. Just sat there with my aunts leaning like wilted flowers and Papo humming a hymn I didn’t know.
After the benediction, we walked slow to the car. Alexandria lit a cigarette and exhaled a stream of smoke like the preached truth had cut too close to the bone. “You all right, baby?”
“Fine,” I said. And was. But not in the way she meant. Where was Echo Wolfeson? What was she doing right now? Leaving another church in another part of town? Sleeping in? Hard to imagine her not on stage. The heat was brutal. The sky blue and hard and empty.
…
You can tell most of what you need to know about people by how they throw.
After a few weeks of practice, I’d seen all I needed to see: most of these boys played like they were apologizing for something. They weren’t bad. Just tentative. Hesitant.
Not Deonte Shaw. Not me.
Coach had me catch every bullpen. Said he wanted me to get a feel for the pitching. What he really meant was: let’s see if you can earn it. So I could. I did. I caught and blocked and threw down to second.
Behind the plate, everything narrows. No room for anything but seams and fingers and dirt. Echo Wolfeson. I kept seeing her on that stage—all yellow fur and attitude. I wasn’t in love. Not exactly. Call it hunger.
Echo Wolfeson. Her name like a prophecy etched in stone.
She’d been around campus all week, flitting between the auditorium and the annex building where they stored costumes and other supplies. I’d seen her through windows but didn’t speak to her again, not yet. I watched for the right moment.
On Friday, I took a foul tip straight to the mask and laughed through it. Deonte threw heat that ran in, like he was mad I existed. I loved it. We jawed a bit, just testing the fence.
“You always this full of it?” he asked.
“Not full of it. Built of it,’ I said.
He laughed once. Hard. Ugly. “Damn. Echo’s gonna eat you alive.”
That stopped me. I took the mask off, asked what he knew about it.
“Everybody knows everyone here. Theater geek. Too smart for her own good.”
I spat and said nothing.
“You think you’re the first?”
“The first to what?”
He laughed again.
I wanted to say I’d be the last but held it.
Practice ended with wind sprints that left everyone gasping. A few hurled. Coach watched us like a man watching crops grow.
The sun dipped down over the river and turned the field ochre. Dust hung in the air like ancient memory.
I walked off alone.
Past the dugout, past the pickups and cars, toward the auditorium where I’d left Papo’s truck. Hoping to catch a glimpse.
Through the back door window, she was there again, mid-rehearsal, backlit and wild. Yelling about Horton, something else I didn’t catch or need to catch. Her voice full of gravel.
…
Thursday night, Coach let us scrimmage under the lights. Maybe he wanted to see what kind of men we turned into when the shadows got sharp and the ball got hard to see. Or maybe he just liked drama.
Deonte threw first. I caught him like we were forged in the same furnace.
I grounded out in the bottom of the second, got another chance in the fifth. First pitch, I turned on it and sent the way up high over left center. The lights swallowed it whole.
There weren’t many people there. A few parents and girlfriends in the stand. None of them cheered much. Just a few grunts. A cough. Maybe that’s how they show respect here—by not pretending they’re surprised.
Echo was there.
Up in the bleachers. Off to herself. Way down the right field line. Wearing a red windbreaker like a riptide flag. She didn’t wave. Just kept her eyes on the field like it was a play.
Back to the plate in the seventh. Another bomb. Aluminum bat like an exclamation mark.
After, while the others clowned in the dugout, I went out to her, bag over my shoulder.
She’d waited. I knew she would.
“You play like you were pissed at the world.” She crossed her arms.
“I play clean.”
“That second hit was pure rage.”
I shrugged, trying to decide if that was compliment or condemnation.
She studied me. I could feel flaying me with her eyes. Not flirting—more like a forensic investigation.
“You don’t smile much,” she said.
“Maybe I’m waiting for you to give me something to smile about?”
She looked past me, toward the field, where the lights still buzzed like dying wasps. Her face softened, something like a frown. “You think you can win me.”
“I don’t think.”
“Boys like you get swallowed up in this town.”
“Maybe.”
We stood there a moment, then she turned to leave. I didn’t follow. Behind me, the field lights shut off with a heavy thunk. The dark came fast and full.
Ditch frogs sounded like bones dragged across the teeth of a comb. A dog barked twice, then stopped. The air smelled of ozone and sour mud.
Rehearsals had a pattern, though not one you could pin to a schedule. There was the script, of course, Seussical printed in smeared type-writer font and bound packets dog-eared and taped in places, lines highlighted, crossed out and re-written in the margins like a code only half the cast could follow. The true rhythm lived elsewhere: in the arrivals, the late snacks, the heaped tangles of costume, the sudden cloudbursts of tears, the elation that came out of nowhere and burned too bright to last. I’d long since stopped trying to organize any of it. My job, as I saw it, was to bear witness with equal seriousness to both the chaos and the grace.
Ms. Weiland called it “theater camp,” though it resembled very little of the sort of productions I’d grown used to. It all happened in the school auditorium, which reeked of paint fumes and pinesol, the cast ranging from six to sixteen. Some verbal. Some not. Some danced whether the music was playing or not, and some sat still until prompted by a whisper or touch. Some only when the spirit moved. All, in their own way, insisted on being seen and deserved to be seen.
Glory B played Horton. Of course she did. Ms. Weiland said it was because she had a good memory and could carry a tune when she wanted to and wasn’t too tired or crabby, but I suspected it had more to do with the fact that she believed in the story. Not the plot, not Horton’s egg or the Whos or the speck, but the ache at the center of it, that urgent, unrelenting loyalty: a person’s a person no matter how small. Glory didn’t just say the line—she offered it up like a prayer, often with tears that weren’t in the script and couldn’t be summoned on cue.
We’d known each other forever. Glory B had been born a month before I turned five, and from the start there had been something about her that seemed to slow time in the best and worst ways. Glo taught me, long before I could put words to it, how love and frustration could coexist. I felt both/and, always, watching Glory forget her lines and often improvise something better, watching her shout I AM THE ELEPHANT long before her cue. Or decide she was tired or bored and lie down across the jungle vines. I felt it now, too—this big, aching, luminous love that expanded to hold everything: the missed lines, the melted-down props, the chorus that would never, ever be in step.
Opening night was a week away. Most of the kids still didn’t know where to stand. Still a Grinch borrowed from another show for reasons no one could explain— who preferred to crawl. Yertle the Turtle had taken to hiding under the risers and hissing. And through it all Ms. Weiland pressed on. She handed out costumes with holes in them and praised every cracked note like it had been sung at the Met. Her hair tied up in a big, frizzed, messy bun. Her clipboard was mostly symbolic now, but her smile had a kind of defiance and clarity I’d come to admire. She knew this show would be a train wreck. I was certain of it. That was the magic. Her willingness to take this big foolish risk.
And there was something radical, even holy, in the way Ms. Weiland loved these children—loudly, visibly, at scale. Not because they were inspirational or exceptional but because they were themselves. She took them seriously in a way most adults didn’t and maybe couldn’t. She let them take up space. She encouraged them to do that. Even when that space was full of glitter and rage and glue sticks and sounds no one could quite decipher.
And then there was Grif.
When he’d started showing up, I couldn’t say. Only that he did, most afternoons now. Not inside the theater, but on the edge of it: lingering by the band hall doors, crossing the courtyard at a slow diagonal slow as if he had nowhere to be, leaning against the cinderblock wall with that practiced, deliberate slouch like a method actor cast as James Dean.
At first I thought it was a coincidence, the way our paths kept crossing. Then a pattern emerged.
He was handsome in that annoyingly, undeniable way—like a muscled up young Redford in all his sandy haired, blue-eyed, Barefoot in the Park splendor. Glo noticed him. Naturally. Even Ms. Weiland seemed unnerved.
Of course he wasn’t my type. But then what did that mean? Or why did I have to have a type? Wasn’t the whole notion of romantic taxonomies a bit passé. If pressed, I’d have said I preferred boys with soft hands and sharp thoughts. Grif looked like he thought with his shoulders.
Still, there was something about him.
The way he watched—not leering or predatory, but…invested. Like he was waiting for me to step into a role he’d written for me.
It flattered me and rattled me in equal measure. I was used to audiences but not being seen that way—like a riddle. But even when I tried to ignore him, I felt his presence like radio static.
I caught myself glancing at the glass doors between scenes. I told myself it was just curiosity. Or boredom. Or, if I was honest, the wish for something strange and new to appear in the familiar theater air.
I sat in the front row during tech run, script in hand, though I rarely looked at it. I watched Glory sing “Alone in the Universe,” her voice wobbling but true, hands flapping like startled birds. The spotlight caught the glitter in her costume, and for a second she looked like something half-angelic, half-camp disaster. I swallowed hard.
There would be no illusions come showtime. The sound system would cut out. Lines would be lost. A child might walk off stage mid-number or cry during bows. But the audience—mostly parents, siblings, aides, and a few brave strangers—would rise to their feet when the final note played, and not out of pity. Out of awe.
Because something had happened here.
Something as absurd and improbable and deeply needed as an elephant hatching an egg in a tree.
I closed the script. Smiled.
I was seventeen that summer. I’d been in seven full productions and three black box workshops. I’d worked under a director who made freshmen cry and played Desdemona for a man who talked about deconstruction like it was a kind of flavor of ice cream.
But this was the one that counted. The one I’d carry with me. Even if he was out there watching. Maybe especially then.
The seat was too small. Too tight in the hips, too short in the legs. I wedged myself in like a jackknife, knees jammed against the seat ahead, shoulders hunched so I didn’t block the view. The grandpa in the next seat smelled of mothballs and breathed loud through his nose. A lady on my other side had a plastic orchid pinned to her sweater fanned herself.
The curtain was made of thick gold velvety material fringed at the bottom and didn’t close all the way. Through the crack I could see shapes moving, some kids flapping their arms. I’d never been much of a theater goer, but here I was. For her.
She hadn’t even looked at me since that strange, charged conversation under the field lights, but here I was.
The lights dimmed. Music started—tinny, off-key. A mic screeched. The curtain caught halfway on the left, bunched up like a shower rod. A woman in black jogged out and fixed it while the audience laughed gently, the way people do when they’ve already decided to forgive something.
Then the show began.
It was—well, it was something. What my aunts would call a hoot.
Bright costumes, loud songs, too many colors at once. The stage flooded with kids in neon fur and painted-on whiskers. Kids moving in clumps, some too fast, some not at all. One boy just wandered offstage mid-number. Another sat down and wouldn’t get up. A tall girl in green shouted every line like she was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
I watched without watching, arms folded tight across my chest.
Then Echo stepped out.
She was the Sour Kangaroo—whatever that meant—and carried herself like a queen on bad terms with her royal court. When she spoke, it wasn’t loud or desperate. It just was. Like the words had chosen her. Like she was there to keep the whole thing from falling apart, and somehow knew she could.
I watched her move. Not dancing, exactly. More like a series of graceful pivots, redirecting chaos when it veered off-script. A kid skipped a whole verse, and Echo swept in, built a bridge with her voice, her body. Nobody noticed. Except me. I noticed everything.
And that boy playing the Cat—Patrick Sweeney according to the program—tall, confident, maybe seventeen or eighteen, with a jaw like he shaved twice a day and some kind of mince in his walk. All limbs and flair. Did cartwheels between scenes and spoke in rhyme like he was born to it.
I didn’t know his name.
There was something soft about him. Not weak. Just…too pretty. The kind of handsome that didn’t try hard. Like the world had just handed him the look and he’d learned early how to make it work. When he smiled at Echo, something under my ribs got hot and restless. Jealousy, maybe. Or just the itch of not knowing where I stood.
Didn’t like how close he was to Echo in every scene.
Halfway through the second act, the Cat flubbed a line and improvised a rhyme that worked better than the original. The crowd laughed. Echo raised an eyebrow at him, just slightly, and smiled with the edge of her mouth. Not flirty, exactly. But familiar.
I noticed that too. Didn’t like that I noticed.
Didn’t like how many times that Cat ended up near her—hovering like they shared some invisible string. They probably were a couple. It made sense. Theater kids and their secret languages. All that time in rehearsal, costumes, in-jokes. I sat there thinking about all of it, letting it scrape at the edge of my thoughts like a dull blade.
But Echo—damn.
And that girl playing Horton—Glory B, the program said—looked smaller than I remembered. A round face and a trunk that kept falling off. But she sang that song, the one about being alone, like she believed every word. Her voice wavered and cracked, but she kept going, and that cracked something open in me too. Nothing big. Just a hairline fracture in the ice.
I leaned in. Hadn’t meant to. It just happened. And that boy, that Cat, faded some.
The second act stumbled. A mic died. A fight almost broke out between the Grinch and a Who. Echo held it all like rope, tugging, coaxing, turning disasters into detours. At one point, Glory missed a cue and wandered to the front of the stage, arms wide, announcing that Horton had found the speck. But it wasn’t time for that yet. Everyone froze.
Except Echo.
She crossed to her, knelt down like they were sharing a secret, and said something only Glory could hear. Then, smooth as anything, she turned to the crowd and said: “Well, that certainly came early.” Laughed. Waited. Let the audience laugh with her.
Then the scene went on.
I exhaled, hadn’t realized I’d been holding it.
By the end, kids were waving handmade clovers. The chorus mumbled the final lines. A toddler in the front row shouted “NO” during the bows, then clapped wildly. Parents rose. People cheered. Flashbulbs popped like gunfire. Glory B curtsied four times, in four directions. Echo just stood there, still in character, regal and sharp-eyed, nodding like she knew something they didn’t.
I stayed seated. Couldn’t move right away.
I didn’t have the words for it, but I knew enough to recognize the difference between a performance and a moment. This had been the second kind. Raw. Messy as hell but True.
The crowd moved around me—parents crying, siblings yawning, phones flashing. But I just sat, breathing slow, letting it all settle.
I’d come to see a girl and ended up seeing something more.
Then, as the house lights came up and the actors started spilling into the aisles, I saw the Cat again, laughing near Echo, that practiced ease back in his shoulders. She laughed too—soft, private. Not for the crowd.
Maybe I should’ve stayed home. Played it safe. But I was already up. Already looking for the path through the crowd. Already thinking about what I’d say—if I’d say anything at all.
…
The lobby smelled like ax body spray, oranges, and sweat. Kids in costume slipped between legs, voices ricocheting like bullets off the cinderblock walls. Grandparents parents held bouquets of flowers.
I spotted her across the way—yellow costume half-zipped now, makeup smudged at the corners, hair coming apart like a storm. She was radiant in the way someone looks when they’ve just walked away from a near-fatal crash and haven’t had time to process.
The Cat stood beside her. Still in full costume. He had one hand on Echo’s elbow and was bent toward her, saying something low and soft, a crease between his eyebrows. I couldn’t hear the words but didn’t need to. It was a familiar posture—protective, maybe possessive.
I kept moving toward her. Toward them. Chin up. My expression flat.
She saw me first. Her face didn’t change, not much. But her spine straightened a little. The Cat followed her gaze, looked at me. Something passing between them then. Not quite challenge. Not quite permission. Something in between.
Echo nodded. He murmured something, then patted her arm and stepped back. He gave me a longer look—taking my measure. Right. In the next moment, he’d disappeared into the crowd like he was still on stage.
I stopped a few feet in front of her.
“You were good,” I said.
She arched an eyebrow. “That’s all you have to say?”
“It was like you were holding the whole thing together. But I reckon you know that.”
She shrugged, like it was nothing. Exhausted but pleased. “Glory B held it together. I only patched a few holes.”
“That’s not nothing.”
A pause. Long enough to let the air shift.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” she said.
“Yeah. Me too.”
She crossed her arms, studying me like she was waiting for the punchline. “Why’d you come?”
“You know why.”
Her mouth twitched. A smirk that didn’t reach her eyes. “Do I?”
I didn’t blink. “You want to go out sometime?” The line came out too flat. Blunt. Like tossing a stone into the river to see how far it would sink.
“Out where?” she said.
“Dinner and a movie.”
“How original.” She looked past me for a long beat, chewing her lip. Her expression unreadable Then she said, “I’ll think about it.”
That stung more than I would have expected. Think about it? The irritation blindsided me, but I tried not to let it show and only nodded once. Tight. “Okay.”
“Is it?” she asked. We stood there in the noise and echo of the lobby, a still point at the center of all that chaotic movement.
I wanted to say something else. Something clever and cutting. Or maybe just honest. But instead I just said, “Call me when you decide.”
“I will.”
“I’ll be waiting,” I said.
“I know,” she said. And I would. Even if it grated me. Because the truth was, something shifted inside me as I watched her on that stage—like a tectonic plate in my soul. A fault line starting to groan.
Someone called to her then, and she spun away into the crowd.
I walked out, hands shoved in my pockets. The night was clear after a week of overcast and rain. When I got to the truck, I didn’t get in right away. I just stood there, gazing up at the dead and dying stars.
I’d recall that conversation later. After everything fell apart and burned down and left a scorched smokey aftertaste that lingered months on my tongue. How easy it would have been to say no outright. Walk away in that moment and never look back.
I watched them. I watched Echo. I watched Grif. I watched Echo and Grif together.
She held her hands like this, like dancing hands. He moved too slow. Slow. Like something pulling him.
He smiled at me once. Once. He said hi. I said hi back. Then I said Echo Echo Echo. Three times. For luck. But not lucky. Not lucky.
Grif is loud inside. His eyes shout. His mouth is quiet but his eyes shout. Echo couldn’t hear.
I dreamed it. I did. I dreamed the dark and the broken glass and the red-red. Red like stop. Like Exit. Red jello. Red dye #6. I MUST NOT EAT red dye #6 scrambles my brains.
Echo said he was sweet, but I knew. I felt it. Felt it in my belly when I saw him. Felt it in my teeth. I chewed and chewed and the taste was wrong. Wrong.
He chased her backstage. I saw. I said Echo Echo Echo. But she laughed.
And I knew it would happen. I didn’t know the words but I knew. I knew. I knew. I knew. I knew.
Paul Rankin’s work, which has received support from the Mississippi Arts Commission, has also appeared Dark Mountain, American Writers Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Jackson, Mississippi, where he teaches writing workshops, manages a community garden, and hosts a podcast and grief-and-growth circles for families impacted by gun violence.
