Songs for a Teenage Nomad by Kim Culbertson

Author:Kim Culbertson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

We’ll have rehearsal today

at 5:30 SHARP! Kisses—H.

Eli closes his phone and takes a sip of coffee. “Maybe I can just set lights early,” he suggests, avoiding my eyes.

“Sure.” I walk away from the office and sit in one of the back theater seats. Outside, it has started to rain, erasing a four-day stretch of January sun. Through the smoky glass of the theater, the world is a swirl of gray. The lights on the stage snap on. I squint at the blinding white wash.

“Sorry,” Eli says through the speakers. The lights fade to blue; with the rain streaming down the window, we could be underwater.

The winter show, a festival piece Hecca wrote, opens in two weeks, and the set is nearly finished. The play is set in a fairy-tale world, and Alexa designed a large storybook whose pages turn for the six scene changes. We’ve been laboring over the canvas all week, at times frustrated with the lumpy un-fairytale-like quality of our images.

But with the wash of Eli’s lighting design, the blues and the ambers and the pale reds, the pages come alive. Alexa spent yesterday threading silvery strands of paint for accent—an accent I couldn’t see until now that the scenes are bathed in stage light.

“Wow,” Eli breathes, sliding in next to me. “It looks awesome.”

Eli is the only person I know besides my mom who says “awesome,” and I love it about him. “Thanks. Alexa’s so talented.”

“Not just Alexa,” he says.

My face burns, and I’m glad he has the lights on low wash so that I’m currently in shadow. “It looks good because of your lighting. Especially the moon.”

Alexa and I made a five-foot moon and suspended it from the ceiling on fishing line. Although two-dimensional, with Alexa’s creamy shading and Eli’s clever spotlight, the moon looms full bodied in the air above the stage.

He shrugs. “That moon was a great idea.” He knows the actual idea of the moon was mine, and I smile. I don’t deserve Eli. We haven’t talked for weeks. Before break, he avoided my eyes; during break, he was in Hawaii with his parents. His kiss seems far away in another world. Now, I just want to be near him. He smells like rain and coffee.

“I don’t think any fairy tale is complete without a moon,” I tell him. “Moons are so lonely and hopeful.” I sit up straighter, feeling silly. The light in the room, the quiet rain, have induced a trance. “I guess that’s sort of stupid.”

“No, it’s not,” he says quickly. “I think the whole play is sort of lonely and hopeful. I hope it’s good, that people like it.”

“They will.”

“Today’s our first day with partial costumes,” he says. “It should be fun to see the whole thing coming together.”

“I’m just looking forward to seeing you in a bunny suit.”

He laughs. Hecca has Eli as the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. He’s sort of half-narrator, half-character in the play. “Um. I’m a rabbit, thank you very much.”

“Sorry. Rabbit suit.”

He sighs as we watch the light on the stage.

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