Page 17 of In What World

“That’s all we’ve got,” I confirm.

She heads for the door. “Oh,” she says, turning back on her way out. “I can help with anything for the play today, if you need. I know they want you to hold the rehearsal.”

It’s a musical, dear, I hear Dallas say in my mind, one last reminder that this is the right choice.

“Thanks,” I tell her, knowing it’s a genuine offer but also something she does not actually want to do. “I think we’re okay for now. The problem is, if we’re going to do the show, I have to figure out who can play Dallas’s part.”

Spring Awakeninghas roles for adults. In a traditional staging, one man and one woman play all the adult men and women in the show. In true Dallas fashion, he’s decided to play all the women himself, and he’s cast one of our students as the man.

“Why not you?” Alice asks.

I set myself up for this, so I take great care when I say, “I’m not an actor,” wanting that to be final but not read as a challenge.

“Got it,” she says. “You know, even Jeannie was nice to me today. She thinks Dallas has done this as a stunt so they will name the theater after him.”

“What a shitty guess,” I say. “Jeannie is the worst.”

“The fucking worst.” Alice has almost closed the door all the way when she remembers something else. “I told them to add an extra pump of lavender to the coffee. I know you like that.”

Two pumps of lavender in my coffee makes it too floral. “Thank you, Alice. For everything.”

“Just text me if you realize there’s anything you need me to do for the…musical.”

“I will.”

She shuts the door softly.

Dallas has left out a stack of papers on his desk. He likes to write by hand, scrawling his thoughts and ideas and inventions. The police looked through these this morning, finding nothing worth taking. There’s no final note here. Nothing beyond the usual half-finished directorial thoughts and ideas. Still, I comb through it, searching for the answer to what “how to walk through universes” could possibly mean.

When the office door swings open again, an involuntary sigh slips out of my mouth. “Please, I just need some time alone,” I say, looking up to Alice with pleading eyes.

Only it’s not Alice Yeung gazing back.

It’s a pair of sunglasses atop the face of the devil. A walking middle finger to all of us here in Garden Meadows.

Cilla Cove stands with her hands on the hips of a full-length leopard coat, smirking like she’s waiting for the raucous audience applause to die down before she speaks her first line. This is a far cry from her natural, no-fuss look on the Zoom call. She’s all spectacle now, cherry-red lips to match her cherry-red nails—black widow markings that flag her as dangerous.

“Hello, Marlowe Jenkins,” she says, relishing every syllable of my name. “Don’tyoulook nice. Even with the tears. You’ve always had the most incredible face.”

She pulls off her sunglasses and unlassoes the small purse from her shoulder, tossing it all onto Dallas’s desk like she owns the place, plucking the stack of papers I’m still leafing through right out of my hands. A wave of her perfume follows her movement, and it’s so different from how anyone in Garden Meadows smells—heady and metallic and strangely intoxicating—I feel like she’s cast a spell on me with it. I can’t move. Can’t speak. Can’t even think.

“Yes, yes. It’s a shock I’m here,” she says, leaning against Dallas’s desk and crossing one leg over the other. She’s in a short black dress, and it slides up to expose so much of her upper thigh that I involuntarily cough at the sight. “You don’t think I needed to come. You want me to leave already. You wish I never existed at all.”

A firecracker goes off in my gut, adrenaline-fueled frustration I haven’t felt in so long I almost tip backward in the desk chair.

“Yes, the security at the front saw me enter,” she continues. “Yes, they know it’s me. I had to give them my ID. And no, I don’t carry some weird fake. Yes, they wanted to escort me around with an attendant, but I said that would be embarrassing, and I ran off without their permission. Yes, I knew you’d be in here.” She pauses to evaluate my reaction. “Anything I missed?”

“Why are you wearing a winter coat in May?” I ask. Of all the questions, this one surfaces first.

“Why not?” she says, tossing her fake-red hair over her shoulder.

“Okay, when was the last time you came back to Garden Meadows?” I try next.

“I left here the day after graduation, so…June of 2010? I always suspected Dallas would be the one to figure out how to drag me back. I just thought it would be because he’d named the theater after me.”

God. I hate her.

I really, truly do.