We Made It All Up by Margot Harrison

Author:Margot Harrison [Harrison, Margot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Then

FIVE WEEKS AGO

(MONDAY, OCTOBER 14)

This was a nightmare.

The intro ended, and I drew a frantic, inadequate breath and released it, sending my voice out over the auditorium, and I was singing “On My Own.” Singing in front of people, accompanied by a pianist in her sixties who wore a sweater with a sparkly pumpkin on it and shot me a pitying glance as I faltered off-key.

The words tripped by too fast, garbled by my dry mouth. Toute seule. All alone. Sans une amie. Without a friend.

I didn’t want a part in Les Mis. I was auditioning because Vivvy dared me to, and then Vivvy broke up Joss and Halsey (sort of), and somehow this performance became something I had to do to show her that I, too, could make things happen. Make things real.

There was no pro stage lighting here, nothing like my fantasy, only rehearsal glare and people propping their feet on chair backs and crunching chips and checking their phones and gossiping in quiet clumps.

At least I’d made Vivvy promise not to stand where I could see her.

In my fantasy—no, our fantasy, the one we spun together—Joss was in the audience. Unlikely as that was, I was afraid to look beyond the first two rows, just in case.

There was one part of this I could control. Just one. I gulped a deep breath, dug my thumbnail into the pad of my pointer, and closed my eyes, gathering all my breath for the loud part.

Tried to be Éponine.

I was walking by the Seine. Night had fallen, and my evil family was out of the way, so the sleeping city belonged to me. I could tell myself the story of the boy who wasn’t here, walking beside me. The boy who didn’t love me. The boy who was not, did not, would never, unless maybe…

The pianist pattered delicately out of the verse into the warm, throbbing notes of the chorus. I was telling a story—a love story that began in the fairy tales of my childhood. The story of a girl who dreamed of a prince and woke up and found him.

A fiction. A lie.

My natural pitch was good, people always said, but my soprano voice was prone to shiver and break under the strain of nerves. I wasn’t nervous now, though. Not anymore. I was singing in my own language, one no one else here understood, and each note brought me closer to him, though he’d never know.

Tall. Blond. He gave me his hand, and together we walked along the silent quai in the rain, watching our shadows turn into giants wobbling on the black river.

Then came a wall. Slamming itself down between us, yanking us apart. The frigid stone of reality.

Frank’s pleading eyes. Those horrible texts. When I reached out for love, that was what I found.

The piano changed key, from romantic bliss to a cold, angry lament. Mounting, mounting, pushing my voice to high, furious notes as I confronted the truth.

My lover wasn’t here. Never had been. I’d invented him to give me what I needed—but he was a shadow, a phantom, an empty shell.

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