This was his chance. She was on the edge. All he had to do was nudge.You could stay here, he heard himself say.Make a life here… with me.
Sully opened his mouth. The sky darkened overhead. A fat drop of rain hit his hand. He flinched and glanced up. The sun was gone, and, now that he noticed, the temperature had dropped. Dark clouds hung in the sky, angry and threatening.
Alanna squeaked and shot upright, a drop of water running down the side of her neck. Laughing, she jammed her spoon into the pudding. “Quick! Rescue the pudding.”
“You know, I have a lid for the container,” he pointed out.
She gave him a scathing look. “That’s a defeatist attitude.”
“Fine.” He bumped her aside with his shoulder and dug out a huge scoop. “Every man and woman for themselves.”
She giggled, snatching his spoon and shoving it in her mouth.
“Oh! You play dirty,” he exclaimed.
“Damf rih I du!” she crowed around her mouthful of pudding. Stealing spoons, adding forks to the fray, and scrambling over each other, they managed to finish the pudding just before the small smattering of rain turned into a steady sprinkle. Sully wrapped the blanket around Alanna, then packed everything as fast as he could.
They jogged to the car, her chortling under the cover of the blanket. Tossing the cooler into the trunk, Sully unwrapped Alanna from the picnic blanket and draped her in a spare jacket he always kept in the trunk. Her short hair was ruffled from the blanket, and he gently patted it down.
“I have one more thing planned for tonight,” he told her, pulling the hood of the jacket over her head. In his mind, he thought,Initiate Phase Three ofProject Magical Date.“That is, if you don’t mind walking another block in the rain.”
She gazed at him, her face adorably framed by the dark hood of his jacket. The sleeves hung past her hands. “Despite what you may have heard, I won’t melt if I get a little wet,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He wrapped an arm around her, and, heads ducked, they jogged down the wet sidewalk as a low rumble of thunder echoed across the sky.
*
Sully had always known Phase Three ofProject Magical Datewas a risk. But as he and Alanna took their seats just before the opening curtain of the community play,Awareness Unto the Void, he worried this gamble would end in disaster.
The play was held inside a rundown building on Chaparral Drive called The Looking Glass. The place was half art gallery and half open space. Audience members sat in a cluster of metal chairs packed together in front of the stage. “Curtain” was a generous term for the black sheet connected to an overhead wire by clothespins. It partially hid a small, hand-built stage.
Surprisingly, every seat was filled.
“These things are the best,” confided a man with a silver ponytail sitting on Sully’s other side. His Grateful Dead t-shirt was so faded the tie-dye colors were barely visible. Sully vaguely recognized the man and tried to place his face.
“Roger!” Alanna called and waved from Sully’s other side. She eyed the large container in Roger’s lap.
“Where’d you get the popcorn?” She glanced around. “I don’t see a vendor.”
“I always bring my own,” said the older man before shoving a handful of popcorn in his mouth. Sully also noticed two sweating cans of beer under his chair. The man’s identity clicked in his mind. Roger was the Uber driver who’d taken them home on their first date.
The lights dimmed. A young woman in all black dramatically pulled the sheet aside, dislodging a clothespin that hurtled into the audience. Roger ducked as the projectile flew over his head.
“This is going to be so good!” he whispered to Sully with glee.
A spotlight swung jerkily, and, after two tries, managed to center on a skinny man with platinum blond hair and a face full of metal hoops who stood in the center of the stage wrapped in a sparkling cape.
“As we gaze unto the abyss, what do we see?” the young man bellowed in a nasally voice. He threw back his cape. “Is it our impending death?” He paused dramatically, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “Or could it be… LIFE!”
An unseen piccolo played a long, willowy note.
Alanna took Sully’s hand and squeezed. As the “play” unfolded, the man careened back and forth around the stage, shouting his lines too fast. Other actors trundled in and out of scenes wearing bright, shimmery costumes that were somehow supposed to represent the human soul.
The audience clapped and laughed and cheered heartily for one of the “souls,” an older woman who kept forgetting her lines and wobbled like she might faint with stage fright. They also politely ignored a bucket in the corner of the stage catching rainwater that dripped loudly from the roof.
In the second act, during a particularly stirring soliloquy, the man in the cape accidentally kicked over the bucket, sending water sloshing across the stage and onto the feet of those sitting in the front row.
The whole thing was brutal, hilarious, and somehow heartwarming all at the same time. Maybe there was a plot. Maybe not. Sully couldn’t tell, but he also found he didn’t care. Not with Alanna’s hand in his and the sound of her delighted laughter in his ear. When he pulled in a long breath, he could smell the faint vanilla of her perfume.
