Free Servants of the Storm by Delilah S. Dawson

lost and alone as I do. He smiles and squeezes my fingers, and I squeeze back briefly before pulling into the alley behind the Liberty.
    “Do you want to get a burger at 616 after rehearsal?” I ask once we’re out of the car and heading to the theater.
    As soon as he turns to look at me with his face all lit up like a Christmas tree, confusion washes over me. He’s not looking at me like I’m his childhood friend and companion in sorrow. He’s looking at me the way guys look at girls they like . . . right after they’ve agreed to a date.
    “That sounds great, Dovey. I haven’t eaten there in ages. That’ll be great.”
    He holds the door open for me, and I try to return his smile. I wanted backup on my mission, not a date, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings. And I don’t want him to know that I think I saw Carly last week and now she’s telling me what to do in my dreams. I have this sense of déjà vu about being downtown. Something about running and a tiny plastic sword. I shake my head and hope the details will come back to me. More holes in my memory are not something I need right now.
    We part ways with an awkward half hug, and I walk into the girls’ dressing room. It seems oddly quiet, and I realize that there’s an empty spot in front of the mirror.
    “Where’s Tamika?” I ask.
    Jasmine tosses her hair and says, “Guess Little Miss Pyromaniac was too scared to come back in a burned bedsheet.”
    “She probably just got sick of smelling your perm,” I say, almost without thinking.
    She turns those cold, green eyes on me and does her little head shake again.
    “Don’t you go messing with me, psycho,” she says. Then she puts on a fake, sugary-sweet smile. “Did we forget to take our crazy pills again, Miss Dovey?”
    “No, but I might have accidentally taken one of your bitch pills instead.” I step into her personal space and stare into her eyes, hard.
    Finally, that backbone and fire I inherited from my mom and learned from Carly are coming back. Jasmine and I glare at each other for a long time, and I don’t blink. She does.
    “Whatever,” she says in a bored voice, rolling her eyes and moving to the makeup bin. “Who’s got the mascara?”
    I smile to myself. I won that round. And I’m not even back at full force yet.
    In rehearsal Rosewater doesn’t say a word to me. I dance my dance and act fluttery behind my mushroom. When I finally get sick of hearing the awkward pause where her assistant should be reading Tamika’s lines as the main Ariel, I just start filling them in by rote. It’s like that whole time when I was in the numb fuzz, the dramatic part of my brain was soaking it up. Rosewater eyesme sharply but says nothing, and I don’t stumble a single time.
    Back behind my mushroom I stare past the footlights into the musty corners of the Liberty. I don’t see a single soul. Not Old Murph, not the fox-eared girl. The theater is empty and showing its age more than I remember, with cobwebs clinging to the droopy red velvet curtains and springs poking out of some seats. Even more houselights are out today, the constellations dimmer and the floor cloaked in shadow.
    The skin between my shoulder blades tickles. Even though I know there’s no one there, I have the sudden sensation that someone is aiming for me, like a gun is pointed right at that spot. Icicles shiver down my spine, and my heart beats so loudly that I know Mrs. Rosewater is going to call “CUT!” any second and yell at me again. I spin around and scan the stage behind me, but all I see is the curtain.
    I squint up into what’s left of the catwalk. Lumpy sandbags dangle amid the broken boards and snapped ropes that have hung, unused, for years. The seniors always tell the incoming freshmen this spooky story about how some kid was up there to shake fake snow down for a scene, and a rope snapped, and he fell to his death onstage in a big pile of soap flakes. Later on they’ll find some kid with dandruff