Chemistry Lessons by Meredith Goldstein

Author:Meredith Goldstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

13

Whit had taken me to this theater space before. He liked to have his film-major friends read drafts of his scripts here while he sat in the audience and made notes for himself. The seats were arranged as bleachers, like the kind you’d find in a gymnasium. The sides were covered by black sheets that hung haphazardly to hide props.

Like a zombie unable to control my own path, I had traveled there straight from the lab. Andrea Berger’s most recent social media post had read Black box read-through!!, so I knew she’d be here.

I don’t know why I was so desperate to see her in person. I knew it would make me feel worse, and that it was reckless, but that hadn’t stopped me. All I wanted was a glimpse. I tried to talk myself out of going at least three times during the half-hour T ride to the BU campus, but my feet kept moving. Step after step, toward a horrible decision.

For all the signs about campus security, it was easy to enter the building without a student ID, and even easier to make my way into the black-box space without being noticed. The night’s rehearsal appeared to be a lights-off affair, so it was easy to shuffle into the space beneath the bleachers without anyone knowing I was there.

The view wasn’t great because of the black sheets draped on all sides of me, but there were pockets of light that gave me a sense of what was happening onstage. Two girls read dialogue from pages they held in their hands.

It wasn’t until they started speaking that I came to terms with where I was and just how low I had sunk in the past two hours. Kyle had blown me off, and now I was hiding under bleachers at a college I didn’t attend so that I could see my competition. Still, I wasn’t going anywhere.

I kept as motionless as I could to remain undetected. My breath was shallow, and I crossed my arms so that I wouldn’t hit anything and make noise.

The words sounded familiar, I thought. The women onstage took turns reading their lines, but otherwise it was quiet. This wasn’t Andrea Berger’s script; it was Whit’s. I had read these lines before, with Whit, at my house, after he’d written them.

“Okay,” a female voice said from offstage.

Then I saw her, Andrea Berger, walking toward the actresses, her feet in flip-flops that made a popping noise as they smacked the ground beneath her.

“Sorry to interrupt again,” she said. “I was just thinking, can we try it faster? Almost like you’re finishing each other’s sentences.”

Her voice was thin in a way that made her sound young. Not nasally, but higher than mine. She looked different in person, with new, perfect bangs that were straight and stopped just short of her eyebrows. She was more beautiful than Genevieve Moran, and a lot more stylish. She wore tight jeans and a pale blue tank top. Her arms were half-marathon, I-go-to-the-campus-gym arms.

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