The smell hit him first, dust and old wood, the smell of the Alden Playhouse, and underneath it a bigger smell that hadn’t been there before, the smell of a room that nobody had bothered to open all summer.
Wes stopped just inside the doors.
The house lights were off.
The stage lights were on, the two overhead beams cutting down through the dusty air onto bare boards, and the folding chairs that used to ring the stage in a sloppy half circle during rehearsal were stacked against the wall in towers, retired.
Last spring this room had roared.
Seniors shouting notes over each other, costumes draped over every rail, somebody always laughing too loud near the prop table.
Today the stage felt hollow, a kingdom of dust, and sitting on the very edge of the stage with their legs dangling into the light were two boys he’d never seen before.
“Is this the place? This is the Theater Club, right?” said the lanky one, and his voice cracked on the last word like it did that professionally.
“Yeah I think so, but where is everyone?” said the other, a chubby kid in a shirt one size too small, looking around the empty hall like the population might be hiding in the wings.
Wes stepped into the light of the overhead beams.
Both boys jumped so hard the lanky one nearly fell off the stage edge.
“I’m Wes,” said Wes.
“I’m the lead here.”
“Whoa. You’re the guy,” said the chubby one, scrambling up so fast he wobbled.
“You’re the one they call the Prince! I’m Des, Des Okoro, and this is Freddy, we saw your posters from last year, the one with you holding the skull, my mom has it saved on her phone!”
“Nice to meet you,” said Freddy, nodding so hard his glasses nearly slid off his nose.
“But where are the girls? Because we heard this club was where all the beautiful seniors hung out.”
Wes let out a long breath and sat down on a folding chair he pulled off the stack.
“They graduated. All of them. As of this semester, I’m the only veteran left, so it’s just us for now.”
The two freshmen looked at each other and their faces dropped in perfect sync, like twin balloons losing air.
“So no girls at all?” said Des.
“Damn. My brother said this was THE place to be if you wanted to meet a girlfriend,” said Freddy, and he said it like the information had been the entire reason he’d shown up.
Wes looked at the two of them, one terrified and one eager, sitting in his kingdom of dust, and he felt the irony land somewhere funny in his chest, because twenty four hours ago he’d been a virgin getting lectured by his aunt in a hotel suite, and this morning he’d pinned an elite professor against a wall, and tonight he had a photograph of a stranger to follow through the dark.
The Prince of an empty castle.
Life kept handing him material.
Then something shifted, because he stood up, and when he spoke again his voice came out different, lower, planted, a voice that had nothing to do with the Chapel Prince.
“Listen to me, because this is important. The seniors are gone, and the glory days of this club are currently in the trash. So it’s up to us to restore the honor of this theater, and we are not starting with Shakespeare.”
“Then what are we starting with?” said Des.
“Seduction,” said Wes.
The two freshmen blinked, mouths hanging open in the stage light.
“The world is your stage, and not just these wooden boards. Every interaction you will ever have with a woman is a performance, and right now you two can’t even perform a handshake. So we fix the foundation first. Breath, posture, eyes. In that order.”
And he taught them, for the next hour, standing in the dust of the only home he’d had before room 714, and somewhere in the middle of it Wes realized the strangest thing.
Teaching it was sharpening it.
Every time he explained breath to Freddy, he felt his own diaphragm drop and settle.
Every time he squared Des’s shoulders, he felt his own spine remember.
The taught had become the teacher somewhere between the midterm and the Warden’s wall, and he hadn’t even noticed the promotion.
“Now we’re going to do some field work,” said Wes.
“Wait, like right now?” said Freddy, his voice cracking into the third octave.
“Right now. Let’s go.”
He led them out to the campus plaza, where the evening crowd drifted between the dining hall and the dorms, and he picked his targets like a director casting a scene.
“Freddy. The girl reading on the bench. Walk up, ask her for the time, and hold the conversation for thirty seconds. That’s the whole mission. Go.”
Freddy gulped and marched over, and halfway there, right in front of God and everyone, his knees visibly turned to jelly.
The girl looked up, confused.
“What?”
“TIME! CLOCK! YES!” Freddy shouted, and bolted back across the plaza with a face purple as a plum.
“Horrible,” said Wes.
“Des, you’re up. The girl at the vending machine is yours. Go.”
Des puffed out his chest, strolled over like a man in a commercial, and tried to lean casually against the machine, and his elbow slipped off the edge and his whole face slammed into the glass with a THUNK that rattled the snack rows.
“GAH! My nose!” said Des.
“Are you okay?” said the girl, stepping back.
“I am… I am the theater… thirsty… please…” said Des, and he stammered and shuffled back to Wes, defeated, holding his nose.
“I can’t do it, Wes. I just freeze up and my brain shuts down,” said Freddy.
“I felt like I was having a heart attack,” said Des.
Wes looked at the two of them, and he remembered being exactly where they were.
Not on a stage.
At a motel counter with fourteen dollars, and a girl laughing so loud the whole lobby turned, and a brain that shut down and never came back up for eight years.
He knew the freeze from the inside.
He’d lived in it.
“You failed because you’re trying to be yourselves,” said Wes.
“So stop. Stop being Freddy and Des. Be the characters we practiced, because if you can’t handle a thirty second conversation, you’ll never survive the real world.”
He checked his watch.
Almost five thirty, and he had a woman to follow through the dark in a few hours, and prep to do.
“I have to go. Practice the command presence in the mirror until your eyes hurt, and I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Wes.
He left them there in the plaza, shivering in the afternoon breeze, two disasters holding each other up, and he walked off campus toward the address Hollis had given him, a place called the Copper Lantern, with Fane’s photograph in his pocket and his own acting about to face its ultimate test 2.