Free My Life: The Musical by Maryrose Wood Page B

couldn’t go up—Emily was no math whiz, but even she could see that the only thing that could go up was the ticket price.
    Emily ripped the notes for her paper out of her notepad and crushed them into a crinkly yellow ball. If, by giving this assignment, Mr. Henderson had wanted to demonstrate that facts had the power to persuade, he’d done it. Emily was persuaded: there was no way Broadway shows could be free. As far as she could tell, it was nearly impossible for them to be produced at all.
     
    Philip also awoke on Sunday with an uneasy feeling. Even in the abstract, the stop clause concept was causing him no end of discomfort. He didn’t like the idea behind it: everything could seem fine, life was putt-putting along without any significant bumps in the road, and then—one moment of weakness or inattention or plain bad luck and goodbye, Charlie, as Emily’s Grandma Rose liked to say.
    He took out his Aurora spreadsheets and tried to calm himself with numbers. But his mind kept racing back in time to that awful day three years before when he’d sat at this very table, listening to his mother’s end of a phone conversation that contained the following information: his father was getting remarried only six months after moving out—the minute the divorce was final, basically—and he and his new garlic-farming wife would be relocating to the other side of the continent of North America immediately following the wedding. . . .
    After the phone call Mrs. Nebbling locked herself in her bedroom, and Mark yelled a few choice swear words he’d learned from Grand Theft Auto. Then he stormed out to spend the night at a friend’s house.
    Alone, ignored, abandoned, thirteen-year-old Philip couldn’t hold still—he paced around the living room, which was still piled high with unpacked boxes (they had just moved into Birchwood Gardens, and they were all trying not to mention how much smaller it was than their old house). He shoved his hands into his pockets and took them out again. He literally felt like he might explode.
    So he swiped the grocery money from the glass jar on the kitchen counter, walked at top speed with his head down the whole way to the train station, and headed into the city on his own, which he’d started doing since his father left. Rules and limits didn’t seem to apply anymore.
    He bought his ticket on the train, which cost extra, but he didn’t care. He half ran from Penn Station to Times Square, and then, as the razor edge of his mood finally began to soften, he walked up to the first box office window he saw and bought what turned out to be the very last available ticket to the very first public performance of a new musical called Aurora . . . .
    “Dude!” Mark slapped a greasy pizza box right on top of Philip’s papers. “I made you some lunch. Bon appétit!”
    “Gross,” Philip said, snatching his spreadsheets away before they were ruined. “I’m not hungry.”
    “Watching your figure for the ladies, huh? Have you kissed that Emily yet?” Mark made noisy kissy lips.
    “Would you please just die?” Philip retorted. “Emily and I are just friends, I keep telling you that. Do you kiss your friends?”
    “ ‘Just friends!’ I rest my case, Your Honor. The ‘just friends’ alibi is Exhibit Gay, Philip Nebbling versus the State of Denial. ” Mark grabbed a hot slice out of the box and took a big, cheesy bite. The stink of garlic hit Philip like a slap. “ ‘Just friends,’ ” Mark said, the sauce dripping down his chin. “That’s a good one.”
    Thankfully, this unpleasant conversation was interrupted by the little snippet of “Never Be Enough” Philip had made into his IM alarm:
     

Never be enough,
My love for you could
Never be enough . . .
     
    It was Emily, summoning him to the computer for three o’clock, Sunday matinee time. He and Emily would chat online and play the overture together and Philip would feel much better.
    Philip moved a pile of dirty laundry