Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie

Nuala crouched on the edge of the stage, looking predatory, and we ran through the first scene. We made it halfway through, feeling even more idiotic with Nuala watching, before she stopped us.

“Wow,” she said, and took the script from me again. “You guys really do suck.”

“Who are you again?” Megan asked.

Nuala held a hand up to her like shut up and frowned at the script. “Okay, first of all, James, you’re all wrong as Leon. Ro—Paul should be Leon. Why do you have him playing Campbell? Campbell is a misunderstood megalomaniac musician prodigy. Clearly you’re supposed to play him.”

The others laughed.

“Is it that obvious?” I asked.

“Oh please,” Nuala said. She waved the script. “This has the subtlety of the bubonic plague. Campbell, the brilliant misunderstood magician genius, and his reliable friend Leon, torn to pieces by a sheeplike society that fears real magic? Boy, I wonder who you might be talking about there. But that’s part of its charm.” She pointed at Megan, who winced, like Nuala was about to shoot lasers from her fingertips. “I think you’ll have an easier time delivering those lines to a Paul-Leon than a James-Leon. Because thinking of James as Leon is like—ha—ha—” Apparently the idea was so implausible she couldn’t even think of a cutting comparison. “Anyway. Try it. And be Anna. Haven’t you read the script? Don’t you remember what happens to her?”

“Well, nothing, in comparison to Leon and Campbell.” Megan sniffed.

“That’s because you’re not reading it right.” Nuala flipped through the script, careful to keep the pages crisp and neat—God, I was falling for her so bad—and pointed to a page. “See this here? Crisis of belief. You’ve got to deliver every single one of these lines building up to this part right here so that when you say this line, the audience gasps oh shit and feels the rug pulled out from under them, just like Anna does.”

Megan rumpled through her script to the line. “I didn’t think of it like that.”

Nuala shrugged like well you wouldn’t and looked at me. “So you, you do Paul’s part at the beginning. You address the audience as Campbell. Do I have to tell you to believe in the role and make us believe it too?”

She didn’t have to, and she knew it. I didn’t have to take the script back from her because I had the first page memorized.

“Hold on,” Nuala said, and she walked over to the light dimmer switch. She turned off the lights over the audience and turned on another set of lights on the stage, making it an island of light in a sea of darkness.

Suddenly it was real.

“Now,” she said, in a voice just for me, and pointed. “There’s your mark.”

I walked to the front edge of the stage—be Campbell—and held my arms out on either side, like I was welcoming the audience or summoning down something from the skies. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Ian Everett Johan Campbell, the third and the last. I hope I can hold your attention. I must tell you that what you see tonight is completely real. It might not be amazing, it might not be shocking, it might not be scandalizing, but I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt: it is real. For that—” I paused. “I am deeply sorry.”

I lowered my arms to my side, bit my lip and looked at the stage, and then turned and walked off stage. Eric clapped in the audience as I joined Nuala by the edge of the stage.

“Thank God, that’s better,” Nuala whispered to me. She didn’t have to say that, either. We watched Paul and Megan play Leon and Anna, and wonder of wonders, Paul was a way better Leon, and either him being Leon or Nuala’s pep talk had made Megan a better Anna. They still had to glance at their scripts, but it actually looked … plausible.

“Parlor tricks, Leon. Sleight of hand,” Megan said. She even shrugged. I mean, like a real person would. “That’s all it is.”

And Paul actually blustered. I mean—he was Leon. “I was there, Anna. I saw him do it. There was a woman crying in the audience. They thought it was real. They knew it was real.”

I couldn’t stop grinning.

Nuala pinched the skin of my arm and when I turned to look at her, I saw she was shining, too, with the joy of creation. Something I’d taken for granted my whole life.

Thanks, Izzy Leopard, I thought.

“You needed it,” Nuala said, but I could tell what she meant was thank you too.

Guys weren’t allowed to bring girls into Seward Hall (under penalty of having your nuts chopped off and sent back to your parents via priority mail), so we waited for the Chinese delivery guy at the door and then dragged the world’s most comfortable chairs from the lobby onto the brick patio.

It was an absolutely gorgeous evening—all yellows, golds, reds, blazing across the hills behind the dorm. A little too cool for bloodsucking insects and a little too warm for goose bumps. Food had never tasted as good as the chicken fried rice eaten out of the box with a plastic fork, lounging on the world’s most comfortable chair with Nuala sitting on the arm.

“I’m trying to tell you, there are people who are allergic to water.” Paul spoke in between bites of something red and slimy looking.

“You can’t be allergic to water,” Megan protested. “The body is like, ninety percent water.”

I interrupted. “Not ninety percent. Nobody’s ninety percent water except for Mrs. Thieves. She practically sloshes when she walks.”

Eric snorted and coughed up some rice.

“Oh, that’s sexy,” Megan said, watching Eric kick the rice off the bricks. “Anyway, no one can be allergic to water. It’s like being allergic to—to—breathing.”

Nuala cast a scathing look toward Megan before speaking, “It’s true. There have been, like, two cases of it ever. I read about it. It was so rare they didn’t diagnose it forever and now those people have to do weird things to keep from killing themselves by living.”

Paul gave Nuala a grateful glance and added, “It’s like those people who are allergic to sunlight. They get super horrible burns when they’re babies, and if they don’t get kept out of the sun, they die of cancer. They have to stay inside with the blinds drawn all the time. Or they get, like, sick blisters all over.”

“That must be horrible,” Eric said. “It’s like being allergic to yourself, or to living. Like you were born to die.”