Page 81 of The Young & the Sinner

“You can tell me about your day until you fall asleep.”

Oh. He meant talking. I blushed and was glad no one was around to see. “It’s late. I don’t want to keep you from your sleep.”

“Don’t worry about that. I function on way less sleep than you do. I’ll be fine. Besides, it’s Saturday. I don’t have to be in the office tomorrow.”

I smiled and settled more into my pillow. Then I told him about my day. About school and all of my classes. About how I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. About cakes and coffees and Lizzie and Henry.

I fell asleep halfway through my recounting, and it wasn’t until I woke up in the late morning that I realized I had stopped thinking about going to Max’s room during my talk with Mason, and I probably had one of the best nights of sleep I’ve had since the day my mom left.

* * *

There was justsomething about being in a room filled with students discussing our biggest play of the year that got me all tingly. It was no joke.

The small group of us was sitting in a circle so that we all faced each other, Cato’s Rapture laid out in front of us on the desk beside a notebook while we planned the production.

In the last few weeks of summer, before we started school, Lizzie submitted her play to the head of the theater department for review.

Dr Keen loved it at first read. She couldn’t get over the story and decided it should be performed by the school. It wasn’t long before we were putting together a group of people and beginning production.

Unlike a high school theater group, everyone here took our production pretty seriously. A lot of the student had dreams to make it big in the theater world. It wasn’t fun and games for them. It was their lives at stake.

We were going through the script to see if there were any changes that needed to be made, scenes that needed to cut, and whatnot. This was the part that Lizzie hated most, mainly because she’d put her heart and soul into each and every word written in the script, and she always took it personally when we had to delete something.

All eyes were on Dr Keen as she talked about a particular scene in Act 3 that I knew was Lizzie’s favorite part of the entire play.

“But what about the dream makes it so significant to the story? I don’t see how this moves things along or even how it helps us transition into the next scene.” Lizzie’s fist clenched under the table. Only I noticed.

I raised my hand and spoke up. “I think the dream is important. It’s doesn’t help transition us into the next scene, no, but it clarifies so much about his past that the audience would miss just from having seen the first two acts. At the beginning, we focus more on Cato’s physical state—the physiological effects of drugs, the impact it has on his life—and though we get a glimpse into his hallucinations, we don’t get the whole picture.

“This dream tells us about his guilt. It tells us about the mental state of a man who had everything going for him in life, and yet still manage to mess it up so thoroughly. It lets the audience sympathize with him, when before he was made out to be nothing more than an anti-hero no one really understands. I vote we keep it in.”

Several heads nodded along with my assertion, and I sat up a little taller. Lizzie shot me a small smile. Dr Keen took several moments before she answered, and I bit my lip nervously. When she smiled, I relaxed a little in my seat. “Well, you’re the director. We’ll keep it. Let’s move on to the next scene.”

I smiled and looked back down at the script. I never felt more comfortable in my own skin than I did discussing a play. If only I could find it in me to make a career out of this. But unlike Lizzie, who was willing to put everything in her dream of being a playwright, I couldn’t bring myself to do the same.

I knew what it was like to struggle with money, and being in this profession was not the most practical thing to do. I could end up a failure and would have to live with Max for the rest of my life.

At eighteen, it was alright. But if I ended up doing that at thirty… well, that was a depressing thought.

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