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  A robotic voice replied in the pitch of D, “Taking you to the studio, Miss Egg.”

  The camera panned out to show that Katherine was cruising in a driverless limo.

  “Here, in the Contempo Constellation, anything you could want is just a simple request away.”

  The show went to commercials.

  “What does she mean, just a request away?” I off the toppings on top of my third slice, as the show cut to commercials.

  “Whatever it is, the Universe seems to be even crazier than the hype.”

  “And they haven’t even shown Solar Stadium yet.”

  “I still can’t believe they’re getting rid of Star Stadium after this season,” I said.

  “This whole special is like a really expensive movie trailer, not a ‘behind the scenes’ look. More questions than answers.”

  “I don’t know, it seems pretty incredible to me. Almost makes me wish this season was over already so we’d be closer to the season ten debut in the Universe.”

  “I’m not hating on it,” Huck said. “It’s just missing a certain, oh what would Mrs. LeFever call it, j e ne sais quoi .”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “That ‘I don’t know what’ wouldn’t happen to be Sam, would it?”

  He laughed and gave a melodramatic sigh.

  “I’ll grant you that having the host of the real show also host the special would have made sense. But Katherine Egg was great! Plus, she has this one tiny advantage over Sam. She’s not boring!”

  “Hey! In what universe could blue eyes and a British accent possibly be boring?”

  I pointed to the screen.

  “In the Universe!”

  After a few more flashes of seemingly impossible locations—a towering white waterfall, planet topiaries, and a building in the shape of a piano—the special ended with Katherine Egg promising that the next season of America’s Next Star (and its billion-dollar price tag) would change not only the face of television, but the world as we knew it.

  Chapter Three

  ♪ Thriller ♪

  * * *

  I heard the deep G, “glug, glug, glug,” before I even saw it. The red paint overtook the stage like a tsunami conquering an island.

  Huck came running out, and tore his shirt off—like an action star in a movie’s climax—to ebb the flow right before it engulfed the twelve foot high tree we’d worked forever on. The only blessing was that, at close to eleven the night before opening, we were the only ones at our high school’s theater.

  “Don’t just stand there!” Huck called out.

  But that’s exactly what I was doing, that and surveying the tremendous amount of damage I’d caused with one errant (and admittedly over exuberant) step of my purple Converses. At least a twelve foot square was completely drenched in paint, as were parts of all the props I’d lined up to clean and retouch in time for opening night. As the assistant stage manager, I really should have done it a few nights ago, a point that Huck, the stage manager, hadn’t been shy about pointing out.

  “I told you not to bring that entire bucket out here just to touch up the baker’s sign!”

  Huck wasn’t often angry, but seeing all the props floating in red paint made him turn a color I’d never seen before.

  I was afraid that even the sound of my voice would piss him off more, but I the words spewed out anyway.

  “I’m really sorry…”

  Huck was furiously mopping the stage, still shirtless. He only paused to make his eyes almost as big as mine, serving as a cue to unfreeze my feet.

  “I’ve got it,” I called out.

  When I returned, he was still scowling as he studied the weapon I’d chosen to battle the lake of red paint: a whopping three of those scratchy brown things that masquerade as hand towels.

  His scowl dropped to a chuckle, which turned into a belly laugh.

  “What?” I said, but he kept laughing. I looked down at my hands and realized how ridiculous my solution had been, and joined in.

  “Three paper towels,” he said in between laughing/crying fits.

  When eventually the humor subsided, but the enormous red paint spill remained, we hatched a plan. With school starting in only eight hours, it meant an all-nighter. Our parents weren’t thrilled with it. Mom turned up unannounced, after she got out of work, under the guise of bringing us some food.

  Once we’d managed to get the red paint mostly off of the props, there remained the pool of red, now crusty around the edges. At close to three in the morning, we reached an awkward point of no return—it wasn’t going to take us all night to set everything right, but there wasn’t much point to going back home for so little sleep. Huck stared at the stage floor as what could only be an elaborate idea sprung up in his widening eyes.

  “We aren’t going to miss this glorious set opportunity,” he said. “ Music video time?”

  Fueled by vending machine Mountain Dew, and gratefulness to Huck for helping me clean up the biggest mess of my life, how could I decline? Back in our days of making our little music videos as kids, we’d never had an actual stage, complete with a giant p apier-mâché tree to work with.

  Huck always had a way of turning bad things into good things, just like Mom. It was a superpower I never possessed, because I tend to freeze when I should run. Good qualities if I was an ice cream cone, but not so much as a human. But I did have one thing that I never doubted about myself—the closest I could get to a super power, and I was about to use it.

  I pulled up the sheet music for Thriller on my phone, saw the pitch and instantly sang it. They don’t call me, “Pitch Pipe,” in chorus for nothing.

  Huck ran backstage, and soon music that played on repeat from the front porch of his faux-cobwebbed house on Halloween was blasting from the auditorium speakers. Michael Jackson’s voice boomed out through the empty seats. Huck resurfaced with his arms full of trash bags and duck tape.

  “Do you still remember the dance?”

  “To Thriller ? How could I ever forget?”

  Most of the time that things happen for the last time, and they slip by—like a little seashell being pulled away by a wave. The last time Mom made her spaghetti, or she gave me a hug, I would have no idea that was it.

  After high school, Huck was most likely bound for NYU, a fact which would likely be cemented the following night. Huck’s Dad was literally flying out the head of the technical theater department to check out the performance after calling in a favor from an old New York friend. Although it hadn’t been said directly, all Huck needed to do was put on a killer musical and his dream school would look the other way when it came to his SAT scores.

  I, and far too many of my classmates, would be bound for Huck’s safety school in Tallahassee—Florida State. So even though we didn’t say it out loud, we knew this was our last music video. It was like that time I “ironically” played with Barbies before high school. Or how I knew that once I went to FSU I’d have to give up balancing my homework on top of my lap in the old rowboat lashed to our dock at home.

  Huck demanded an even higher level of attention to detail than normal, and combining his love of Michael Jackson with his obsession of the Twilight series, had decided on a vampire theme—hence my bright red lips and fake fangs (thanks to last year’s production of Dracula ) . He stuffed me into a giant trash bag cut into a cape, and set up both our cell phones on tripods to record.

  Huck started up the fog machine, and I popped out from behind the fake tree that was still splattered in red. For the first time ever doing one of our music videos, Huck didn’t yell “Cut” ten seconds in.

  And as I flexed and creeped with the music, the trash-bag cape became a leather one, the fake tree seemed to come alive. Under the dim light of the LED moon leftover from last year’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , even the dummy seemed to be a human once I bit him with my vampire fangs.

  “Nailed it!” Huck said, the moment the music ended. It was the only time we did
a music video in a single take, and it felt like we’d ended our childhood tradition on a high note.

  Afterwards, Huck blasted the Into the Woods Broadway soundtrack through the auditorium, pausing to clip a mic to my shirt so that the whole place rattled with the every note I’d memorized. It was way more fun than if I’d actually auditioned and made it into the real play.

  Huck and I had a pact to never show our videos to anyone, but mopping up the red paint made me think of the red dress floating in my closet, and the promise I’d made to Mom about considering auditioning for America’s Next Star . I knew this video wasn’t good enough to email to the show (nothing ever could be perfect enough), but I found myself sending it to Mom when Huck left the stage for just long enough.

  Chapter Four

  ♪ American Pie ♪

  * * *

  T he next day at school, I managed to mostly pass off the fact that I hadn’t been home by wearing a hoodie scrunched in the bottom of my locker. After the final bell rang, I decided to walk back home to take a shower and maybe a nap before opening night.

  It was Friday, so my parents were probably at Panera. Mom worked nights as a sommelier at a fancy seafood restaurant that overlooked the ocean, and Dad, a reporter for Brevard Today , worked most weekends. Friday afternoons were sometimes the only days they really saw each other.

  I don’t know why I remember, but that day the sky was cloudless and full of sun. The late March weather meant the intense humidity of the summer was still months away. In short, it should’ve been a perfect day, instead of what would turn into the worst day of my life.

  As soon as I got home, I switched on a rerun of the second installment of the America’s Next Star special, where Katherine Egg was wearing a silver holographic bubble that surrounded her entire body, only sparing her from the neck up. It was hard to imagine a less practical outfit—until they zoomed out and showed that she was bobbing around an enormous moat, a grand castle in the distance.

  Mom had negotiated weeks ago to get Friday night off so she could see the play. Even though I told her not to worry about trying to get the night off, and that I was backstage anyway, she said she would never miss it. Even if it was just a chorus recital or me shuttling props around backstage, she always came to the first night of every performance I’d ever been involved with.

  And she always brought me flowers that were tied to the theme of the performance. For chorus recitals she often stuck with classic roses, but plays were always a bit more interesting. For A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the beginning of senior year, she’d brought a mix of wildflowers affixed with pinprick lights that glowed like fairies in the dark. For My Fair Lady , an enormous bouquet of the violets she grew (and candied) herself. I couldn’t wait to see what she’d bring to Into the Woods !

  On the TV, the sun was setting behind Katherine Egg.

  “You probably think this merely a window behind me,” she said. “But you’ll soon see that everything in the Universe is so much more than it appears to be.”

  The camera zoomed out, showing a huge floating bed, a chair shaped like a hand, and a red telescope. The setting sun was visible in all directions—the peachy light flooded the entire suite. The room had no corners and seemed to be in the shape of a glass egg. When the TV angle changed to include the floor, I noticed something I’d missed the first time I’d watched. The floor was also made of glass.

  My phone pinged in high A with a text from Huck.

  Wanna ride back to school? Ton of traffic on the bridge but could be there in about 40 mins or so

  I texted back sure , then accidentally nodded off when the special went to commercials, only waking up when an unfamiliar car door slammed in our driveway. I went to the window, and Dad stepped out of a shiny car I didn’t recognize.

  Dad didn’t greet me, or even look at me when he came inside. He was as silent as a cloud moving to cover the sun. He had this weird blanket draped over his shoulders like sheep herder. The lines on his face were deeper than I’d ever noticed before and he was shaking.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  He didn’t answer or react to hearing that question, but something told me he’d heard them. The words hung in the air like an unwavering ghost.

  Once I saw this show where the main character found out her husband died, and the first thing she did was take a bite of a Twix. Even as much as I love chocolate, that just struck me as BS, but it turns out there are more insane ways to act in real life when getting the absolute worse news.

  “Sit down,” Dad finally mustered. He looked up from the floor for the first time, and his blue eyes were ringed with red.

  “What’s going on?”

  I moved towards him, and it seemed to take all of his remaining strength to guide me down onto the couch. My mind swirled as I wrestled with needing to know what was going on and a stabbing thought that I couldn’t handle what he might say.

  “Look…”

  But Dad still wasn’t looking anywhere near me, and his voice was far too low. His eyes hung on Mom’s pink cardigan, flung over the back of her chair in the family room. Her pastel cardigans and raincoats seemed to multiply in that spot—like a breeding ground for butterflies.

  I don’t know if it was just all the sun that day, but the purple orchid by the window seemed to be sagging like Dad’s shoulders. I studied the drooping blooms and clung to the thought that I was just tired. That the spooky music video, staying up all night, and the Mountain Dew churning in my stomach had made me hallucinate this scene.

  Dad didn’t speak, but in saying nothing, I knew he must be telling me the worst. And we sat there frozen, our squeaky couch soundless for the first time, as if our lack of movement, of breathing, could rewind time.

  Then I heard Dad cry for the first time in my life. But I was still frozen, like a single note plucked on a piano with a tone that reverberated forever. All I could do was picture the musical pitches of his crying on sheet music, and it looked like a soprano’s climactic aria.

  “There was an accident,” he said, once he regained his ability to speak. “On the bridge…”

  That’s when the odd blanket, that I knew wasn’t ours, slipped from one of his shoulders, and I realized his shirt was stained with blood. I rushed closer to him but he waved me away.

  “I wasn’t supposed to leave the scene yet,” Dad said to himself as if admonishing a toddler.

  Both of our pairs of eyes hung on the blood of his shirt.

  “It’s not mine,” he said quietly. He began rocking back and forth. “It’s not mine,” he repeated as he cried, dodging my attempt to hug him or be hugged by him.

  I heard the blat of a horn that momentarily zapped me back into the world of the living. I saw Huck’s old black Mercedes through the window.

  “Go on,” said Dad, still rocking. “She’s gone.”

  I tried to comfort him again or work up the courage to ask how he was okay but he waved me off, like I was a bee swarming around him.

  “Go,” he said more forcefully, as he swam through his own grief. Like he’d just become self-conscious and it had dawned on him how vulnerable he was with his daughter seeing his sadness.

  As if the loss was his alone, and it wasn’t my own mom that had vanished into death.

  Then, under the weight of my world collapsing around me, I did something considerably more terrible than taking a bite of a candy bar.

  I walked out the door.

  “What the hell?” Huck said, rolling his eyes as I got in the car. “I honked like a billion times and we’re gonna be late.”

  “Sorry. I fell asleep,” I said, since they were the only words I managed to find.

  On another night, I think Huck would’ve noticed the tears I patted away at the corner of my eyes before they could fall. But opening night was something Huck had been looking forward to for a long time. So eventually I patted enough tears to make them stop, and I knew I couldn’t ruin this for Huck.

  I mouthed the words to Toxic , which
he was blaring, and was thankful that it was playing too loudly for him to notice that I’d lost my voice entirely.

  Chapter Five

  ♪ Another Brick in the Wall ♪

  * * *

  A light bulb lining a vanity popped and went dark. The mirror shot the flash of light around the room like a blade, catching on the snout of a wolf and the green nose of a witch.

  I was in the corner, scrunched into the couch with the other techies, biting my chipped black nail polish, sweating from my Converses all the way to my black button-down and trying to convince myself that what Dad told me earlier couldn’t have been real.

  Mr. Hille stared for a second at the red cloak with its satin bow resting on the empty chair in front of the lit mirror, and then the faces of all the actors huddled on the floor.

  “Look. We’ve got a packed house. Little red riding hood isn’t showing, and unlike the air conditioning, we’ll be on in five minutes.”

  Huck stood beside him. He pushed his headset down around his olive-toned neck, causing sweaty creases to surround the device. He lowered his voice to Mr. Hille, but I overheard anyway. “Should we consider rescheduling?”

  I silently prayed that we would cancel, until I realized that would mean having to tell Huck what had happened, and face Dad again.