Page 52 of In What World

I sit down. Somehow, I’ve earned the right to this secret, and I’m prepared to give it my full attention. “The stage is yours. As it always has been.”

“My sister, Lana,” she starts, setting her paintbrush on the rim of one of the paint cans.

With only that, I start connecting the dots, the mental math adding up so rapidly that I can already predict what she’s going to say next. But I’ve always enjoyed watching Marlowe speak, so I keep quiet, letting it unfold at the pace she wants. She can take minutes. Or hours. My time is hers to use as she sees fit.

“When we were kids, Lana used to talk to me all the time about how much she loved dresses,” she continues. “More than once she’d tell me how interesting it must feel to put them on and see sequins catch the light while they were on your body. I was such a tragically dorky lesbian then and already knew I would only wear a sequined dress if a character forced me to, or if my mom insisted on buying me something for the school dance. In fact, I’ve never met a single dress I’ve everwantedto put on my body, or a lipstick I needed, or a curling iron I hoped to use or whatever. But Lana always loved all of that stuff.

“When she first confided in me that she thought she might be a girl, I tried really hard to think of a way to show her that to me, she already was one. That no matter how she had to present for however long, I could see the sparkle-loving femme inside her already. Of course, I was fourteen at the time, so I had absolutely none of the words to tell her that. But Ididhaveaccess to an incredible collection of custom-made gowns and dresses and spectacle-making pieces.

“Dallas would’ve let me have them. I’m sure he would have. But at the time, Lana wasn’t ready to share the truth with anyone else. Only me. So I started stealing dresses for her. She didn’t know they were stolen, of course. I made up some lie about getting them from the thrift store. When I gave them to Lana, and she put on that first dress, it was all worth it to see her look in the mirror and feel like, for the first time ever, she recognized the girl staring back at her.”

“I take back every mean thing I ever said to you in that parking lot,” I tell her, my vision blurred with tears. “I had no idea.”

She reaches up under her glasses to swipe away her own tears, forgetting the thick globs of paint currently smeared all over her hands. With one swipe, she’s got a blue streak on her face.

“Oh shit,” she says, instinctively grabbing her face again to fix it, which only makes matters worse.

To stop her panic, I take my brush and swipe it across my own face. It’s messy, but I don’t care. So is life.

Marlowe smashes her finger into the tip of her brush and pulls back the bristles like a slingshot. A spray of blue lands all across my coat and up onto my face. I can taste some at the corner of my mouth.

As slowly as possible, I swipe the spattered paint off my cheek, looking down at the smudge of blue atop my thumb and my expensive leopard coat, now ruined. With calculated precision, I pull off each sleeve, laying the destroyed coat to rest on the stage, leaving me in only my black dress.

“I’m really sorry,” Marlowe says, closing the distance between us. “I thought we were having a moment. I shouldn’t have just—”

Right as she places a sympathetic hand on my shoulder, I swipe her with my brush, working so fast that my intention to hit her stomach misses and I end up doing a long stroke of green across her boobs.

“You tricked me,” Marlowe says, giving me her bestEt tu Brute.

She’s good. She always has been.

But I know a Marlowe Jenkins performance when I see one.

I jerk myself left in the nick of time, barely escaping her lunging attack.

And so begins our chase. We run across the stage, flicking paint and yelling schoolyard taunts as we find new ways to dodge each other. It’s ridiculous, and exhilarating, and it’s been ages since I’ve felt so spontaneous and free. It only happens when I’m pretending to be someone else. For this, though, I feel like only myself.

As the game evolves, it becomes less about chasing each other and more about finding different places to leave paint marks. We swipe the cobwebs with paint. We place handprints on the battered back walls, the dusty side curtains, and almost every inch of the deck. The whole stage becomes a mess of blue and green paint, like an artistic interpretation of a map of the world.Ourworld.

“We should write our names somewhere,” I say. “Make our mark in this reality.”

“Good idea,” Marlowe replies.

We choose a spot right in front of the Memory Machine. It’s remained untouched by paint, neither of us bold enough to compromise it, but the floor we’ve stepped out onto in every life, the wooden slats covered in matte black stage paint—that’s fair game.

PCF + MJ, I write, the strokes sloppy and imperfect.

Marlowe regards it for a while.

She squats down to add something else.

In Every Life.

When she rises up to meet me, we are chest to chest.

We lived this exact moment, in this exact spot, sixteen years prior. This is precisely where I kissed her in the middle of our final performance ofRENT.

This time, it’s Marlowe who closes the distance between us. Her lips only brush mine, that first tentative connection, still gauging distance, and noses, and hands, and intention. It’s not really a kiss, but the moment just before a kiss, when everything turns into a hum.