"So what, now we're going to live together?" Jamie takes another step towards me. "That's your idea of a good plan?"
Unwilling to back down, I poke a finger at his chest. "This is my family's house. Not yours. I have every right to be here."
"Newsfl...
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What actually ended up happening was that, after the curtains went up, I barely had three seconds to scan the crowd for Jamie before my inner thespian took over. The whole thing was over in a whirlwind. If anyone had asked, I probably wouldn't have been able to give them a single detail about how it went. All I knew was that one second I was stepping onto the stage, and the next I was sandwiched between Matty Davis and Cole Barker for the final bow.
As soon as the curtain went down, backstage dissolved into chaos like it was a fire drill and we'd been told to proceed in a calm and orderly fashion. After all, there were parents to greet and parties to get to. The adrenaline rush after getting something like that done and out of the way could keep you going for two days straight.
Cole pulled off his Major General hat and shoved it under his arm, running his hands through his hair to fix the hat head look. "I'm going to have nightmares about that for a week."
"Cole, you're an MVP," I beamed, reaching up to fluff a spot he'd missed.
He looked embarrassed. "I made up, like, half the words."
"But you stayed on key! And besides, nobody even notices the words." Which wasn't strictly true, but lacrosse sticks did sound a lot like acrostics, so it worked.
"Lissa!" Ana tackled my back, still in costume with a goofy wig trying unsuccessfully to hide her pastel hair. "We didn't suck!"
"I know!" I spun so I could throw my arms around her and squish her against me. "Tomorrow we might even really not suck!"
"A girl can dream," she sighed wistfully.
"Ana, wig!" Heather Macy snapped from behind us. As the costume manager, she was paranoid that we were all trying to steal something from set-probably because it happened every time.
"Whoops." Ana squirmed out of my stranglehold to go hand it in. I'd already started walking towards the other end of backstage when I heard her say, "Uh, Lissa?"
I turned around and found Jamie, slipping behind the curtain as comfortably as if he'd done it a million times. It shouldn't have surprised me, since in sixteen years of noticing everything he did, I'd never seen him look awkward or out of place. It was like every room he walked into, he immediately belonged there. But seeing him belong here, in my little theater world, gave me that fluttery feeling in my stomach.
Ana's wide eyes said we are so talking about this later, but she left me alone without embarrassing me. I'd have to thank her for that later.
"Hey." Jamie flashed me a crooked grin.
"Hey." I saw Heather giving him the evil eye, so I grabbed his sleeve and yanked him towards the first hiding spot I could find: a giant paper mache boulder. The maneuver meant that we ended up with barely half a foot of space between us.
Jamie raised an eyebrow. "Security?"
"Worse. Wardrobe." I looked up at him and smiled like this was a totally normal situation for us to be in, and my heart wasn't roleplaying as a racehorse in the Kentucky Derby. "So, what'd you think?"
