Moon Dance (44 page)

“
Oh, he graduated from
here a few years back,” she said. “He directed the premiere of,
um... what’s it called? Oh,
Scats and
Dreams
.”

My eyes widened. “That was
him?” It was a brand new play, but it had taken the Tonys by storm.
It was being adapted into a movie now. I’d wanted to go so badly,
but, of course, I couldn’t afford it.

“
Yeah,” she said. “So, it’s
a good school.” She stopped and opened a door. “And this is our
room.”

The room contained two beds
with wrought-iron headboards, two large desks, and two chests of
drawers. One side was covered in open, overflowing
boxes.

“
I took the left side,” said
Nell, “but if you want to switch...”

I stepped inside. “No, it’s
fine.”

“
We can’t make bunk beds, as
you can see.” She gestured to the iron headboards. “But it’s okay,
because our rooms are a little bigger up here, and we have our own
bathrooms.” She pointed.

There was a door in one corner. I
looked inside to see black and white tile, a claw foot tub and a
toilet.

“
Plus, I totally got us an
adorable shower curtain,” she said. “Do you like Disney
villains?”

“
Um...” I was a little
overwhelmed. I was going to live here. Really. I’d somehow made it
out of my family home, away from my crazy aunts and my mentally ill
mother. This was happening. I smiled at Nell. “Yeah. Absolutely.
This is great.”

* * *

I gazed up at the cathedral
ceilings in the theater. It was the most gorgeous place
I
’d ever been in, nothing like the
rinky-dink community theater I’d been performing in for years. This
theater had been built sometime in the 1700s. It was ornate and
opulent. The chairs were red plush, the curtain on the stage the
same. The vast expanse of the audience spread out in front of the
stage. Eventually, the seats climbed high above, so that sitting on
the top row meant an audience member would be peering down at tiny
actors. Dripping, jeweled chandeliers hung from the high ceiling to
light the theater. But right now it was dark. Only tiny house
lights on the wall illuminated its splendor.

I stood with Nell on one of the
balconies, looking down on the stage, which looked so
small.

“
This theater can be hard to
fill,” she said. “It really only gets used for the big play in the
spring.”

“
The musical?” I said. “The
one done in tandem with the music department?”

She nodded. “Yeah. It
depends on who’s directing. Two years ago it was Bancroft, and he’s
a pushover, so none of the theater majors got big roles. But last
year when Ricter was the guest director, I got cast.”

“
You did?”

She grinned. “Yeah, it
wasn’t a big role or anything, but I got to work with him, and it
was awesome.”

I looked down at the ornate
theater. “This theater is beautiful.”

“
Come on, if we go to the
other side of campus, I’ll show you the two black box theaters
where most of the plays get put on throughout the year. And your
classes will be in there too, probably, or in one of the practice
spaces.”

“
Okay,” I said, following
her out.

The outside of the theater
building was just as imposing as the inside. Like all the buildings
on campus at Thornfield, it was old and stone. The theater was even
decorated with gargoyles though. They perched on the edges of the
building, grinning madly down on me.

Nell was still talking. “The
black boxes are cool because they’re really versatile. Like we can
change the configuration of the audience really easily. My freshman
year, we did theater in the round all year long, and it was so
weird to block.”

“
In the round? I’ve never
done that.”

We started down a set of
ivy-covered stone steps, descending down off the hill where the
theater was located. “Oh, it’s so cool. It’s like the audience is
everywhere. You feel completely surrounded. It’s a
rush.”

“
Sounds cool.”

“
So, did you mostly do
community theater before coming here?”

“
Yeah,” I said. “I’ve done
every Rogers and Hammerstein musical ever produced.”

She laughed.
“
The Sound of Music
?”

“
Liesl,” I said.

She pointed at herself.
“Greta.”

“
When you were
younger?”

“
When I was in high
school,” she said. “I was even shorter then. This is the way I
look
after
a
growth spurt.”

She was fairly short, but I
hadn’t thought she was abnormally so. “Short is good, though. I
mean, you don’t want to be taller than the male lead.”

She shrugged. “I’m not a
lead actress. I don’t even want to be. The way I figure it, the
lead is always the most boring character. The villains are always
cooler than the heroines.”

I considered.

“
Don’t say it,” she said. “I
know I’m too cute to be a villain.”

“
I wasn’t going to say
that,” I said.

We reached the end of the steps and
waited at a crosswalk to go across the street.

“
This way is quicker,” said
Nell. She pointed. “You can walk all the way around, and you’re on
campus the whole time, but this is a quicker walk. However, it does
mean that you have to walk through a little bit of the residential
part of town.”

We crossed the road and were
on a house-lined street. The houses were stately, with wraparound
porches, several stories, and tall, reaching towers. Thornfield’s
architecture seemed halted in time, like it had never quite entered
the twenty-first century.

“
You can see Professor
Alexander’s house, too,” she said, pointing.

The house was set back from
the street a bit, shrouded in tall, willow trees. Their fronds
brushed against the ground. A man was standing on the porch. I
couldn’t see his face, but at the sight of him, a jolt went through
me.

“
Professor Alexander,” I
said. “The one you were telling me about.”

“
Yeah,” she said. “That’s
him on the porch. He’s young, but he’s tough. I’ve never had him
for class, but he was an assistant director for one of the shows I
did last year, and he doesn’t hold back. He sent the main actresses
home in tears more than once because they weren’t giving him what
he wanted.”

I squinted. Why did he look
familiar?

He moved forward, out of the shadows,
and I saw his face.

I gasped.

It couldn’t be.

He was waving. “Hello there,
Miss Sutton.”

“
Hi Professor,” she called
back. To me, quietly. “He’s really formal. Some of the professors
let you call them by their first name, but not Professor
Alexander.”

He stepped off his porch.
“Is that Miss Moss with you?”

How did he know me?

He was coming closer.

My heart thudded. Sweat
began to bead up on the back of my neck.

Nell nudged me. “Say
hi.”

I couldn’t breathe. I
couldn’t move. No way could I talk.

Professor Carter Alexander was the dark
man from my dream.

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