The Stage Door (Camren/Norminah)

Who Are You?

Mike POV

As Clara and I watched Camila walk off the stage I heard Clara laughing and clapping along with the crowd from beside me, "She looked so little and so young when she was standing on our porch, I was not expecting a song like that to come out of her mouth and such a beautiful voice too!" My wife said turning her head to look at me with a large smile on her face.

"It was definitely something else," I told her with a laugh, before my thoughts became serious. "Freshman year, that makes her fourteen, she's young, just a year younger than-"

"Mike, not today, please?" Clara pleaded with me and I just sighed and nodded my head, Clara didn't like to talk about the baby we had given up for adoption all those years ago, but I knew she thought about her often. We were just children ourselves with no income and no idea how to care for a child; And now all these years later she preferred to focus on the two children we did have, but walking around The Stage Door campus earlier in the morning when we had arrived, surrounded by students many of whom were the same age she would be today, I couldn't help but think about the perfect little girl who had ten tiny fingers, ten tiny toes and weighed just 6 pounds 6 ounces, the baby girl that was only in our lives for a short time before the social worker assigned to our adoption case came to take her away.

I shook the child from my thoughts and started to picture my youngest daughter Taylor attending the school we were sitting at, because she was the reason Clara and I had come. We had caught the freshman drama classes performance of short skits and scenes re-imagined from famous movies that had been just before the Music and Composing class performances we had promised the four girls who delivered our invitation that we would attend and I knew that Taylor would be in her element, I also noted that even though the school acted mainly as a boarding school, we lived close enough that Taylor could remain living at home with her Mother and I, to me that was a plus. I was shaken from my thoughts as Clara pointed to something on the brochure in her hands.

"They only take 50 freshman students a year," Clara commented concern for Taylor's chances in her voice, "Over thousands apply."

I didn't have a chance to respond, the MC coming over the loud speaker to address the audience. "Welcome back, we're all set up and ready for the next performance, please give a big round of applause to the very talented singers and songwriters from Mr. Rinaldi's freshman class, this is Fifth Harmony's Dinah Jane Hansen, Normani Hamilton."

"Mike it's the girls who came to the house," Clara told me even though I already knew the second the MC had said the first name."

"Ally Hernandez, Camila Cabello, and Lauren Jauregui," the MC concluded. 

The curtain started to open and my heart stopped as I turned to Clara who was staring at me with wide eyes, "Did they just-" she started to ask and I swallowed the lump in my throat that had been there since the familiar name came across the loud speaker.

"It can't be, there's no way-" I started to say. "Her last name is Lopez now and-"

"It's her," Clara said as her eyes landed on the girl sitting on the second stool from the end, Clara had one hand covering her mouth while the other reached shakily for mine, moving it so she was holding my hand against her chest, her heart thumping and eyes not leaving what was quite possibly the daughter we had given up.

I looked to the girl Clara was staring at and if we were wrong, if the name was just a weird coincidence than someone needed to explain to me why the teenager on the stage looked almost identical to my wife, but had my eye shape and when she looked to Camila who was sitting three stools down from her looking a little more innocent than she had earlier, I noticed that she also had my smile. The music started and I braced myself to hear the voice I had wished I could hear every time I heard Taylor or Chris laughing or talking about their day.