Free The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno Page B

stacked their coats. Her father is late again; but what’s new? Thisbe frowns. Mr. Grisham, nervously pulling at his mustache, appears beside her and says, “Let’s not miss the grace notes tonight, Thisbe,” then touches her back with his creepy hand and hurries off once again.
    As soon as the curtain is drawn, and the chorus, in their awful taffeta gowns, steps forward, Thisbe begins playing, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” her fingers cramped, her hands shaking. Mr. Grisham, at the head of the chorus, is giving her a terrible look, but she refuses to glance up at him. She follows the black notes across the lined pages with her eyes, listening for Roxie’s voice to swiftly fill the room with burnished light. Susannah Gore has a cold and is like an anchor, the huskiness of her tenor chaining the rest of the chorus to the boards of the dimly lit stage. Thisbe misses two notes, still waiting for Roxie to really begin singing. She is standing there, in the back line, head down, her nose buried in her lyric book. She does not at all seem interested in being there. By the third song, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” Thisbe realizes that Roxie is only mouthing the words. The rest of the chorus trudges on, their voices like dull, metal weapons falling down a stone staircase, until the final number, “From a Distance,” lands gracelessly at the audience’s feet. The curtain falls, Mr. Grisham has begun shouting, Susannah Gore is coughing, some of the other tenors are crying, and Roxie stands in the back row, looking down at her nails, totally unconcerned.
     
     
    I N THE PARKING LOT, Thisbe chases after the girl, calling to her, then grabbing at the back of her ugly blue dress. “What’s wrong with you?” she blurts out, flushed with anger and what she believes to be an appropriate degree of indignation.
    “What?” Roxie mutters, thoroughly bored.
    “Why? Why didn’t you sing in there?”
    “Why don’t you fuck off?” Roxie asks, and Thisbe discovers she does not have an answer to that particular question. Roxie turns and cuts quickly through the parking lot, disappearing behind a crowd of disappointed-looking parents.
     
     
    W HEN T HISBE FINALLY finds her own sad relations near the Volvo, they are fighting, once again. Her father has appeared, looking like a mess, his tie untied, his jacket wrinkled. He is saying, “I’m sorry. I had to take a cab. I thought you said eight,” while her mother shakes her head and says, “Seven. Seven. That’s what I said. Seven. You never listen to me. You never listen.”
    “I do listen. You said eight.”
    “So now I have to be responsible for picking you up, too?” she asks.
    Thisbe climbs into the backseat beside her sister, Amelia. “Nice screw-up in there,” Amelia mutters, to which Thisbe does not reply.
     
     
    T HISBE PRAYS FOR an asthma attack on the way home. Her parents continue fighting in the front seat. The Volvo idles at a stoplight while her father—from the passenger seat, his blond beard uneven with wet gray hairs—whispers angry, though incredibly quiet words at her mother. When her parents fight, they do it in near silence. Thisbe has seen her mother wordlessly cry during her parents’ spats, her father looking away blank-faced and ashamed—but these disagreements are almost always impossible to hear from the backseat. Thisbe tries to stop herself from breathing so that she can make out a word or two, but all she hears is her mother mutter, “I told you I will not do this anymore,” before she smashes down the gas pedal, the Volvo lurching back into traffic.
    Thisbe begins praying to herself, roughly the same prayer she has been repeating for months now. Her parents, Jonathan and Madeline, too busy in the front seat, do not notice. Without their disapproval, Thisbe begins:
    Attention, God the Judge, God the Father, who Art in Heaven, give me one miracle, please. If You exist as I know You do, even if no one else in the world believes in You,