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“You don’t need that much help. I saw your audition. And being scared is a good thing.”
“How do you figure?”
“It’s how you know you care.”
I turned my coffee mug around. “Being scared doesn’t feel like care. It feels like danger.”
“It is,” Isaac said. “It’s dangerous to put yourself out there. To rip your heart out and throw it to the audience. What if they hate what you’re trying to say? What if they don’t understand it? Or worse, what if they don’t care? The validation of your entire life is tied up in your art. So yeah, that’s pretty fucking dangerous. And scary.”
I glanced up at him over my cup as I soaked up his little kernels of knowledge I desperately needed. “You don’t seem scared. You seem cool as shit, all the time.”
He smiled faintly. “It’s all an act.”
“You said that before. At my audition.”
“I remember,” he said, only this time his short answer wasn’t a wall to the conversation but an opening.
“You also said I’d get Ophelia,” I said. “And you were right, because I took your advice. I told the story.”
He nodded. “It’s the only thing to do.”
I went back to my coffee, thinking he couldn’t be more right. I ran my finger along the edge of my coffee mug’s handle. “So, since we’re here, can I ask… Does it help?”
“Does what help?”
“Acting. I mean, why do you do it? For relief?”
He nodded. “Yes. For a little while. But there’s always more there. More story to tell, so to speak.”
“What’s your story?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I wanted to snatch them back. They were so horribly invasive.
And I couldn’t give mine in return.
“Well,” he said.
I waved my hands. “No, forget it.” I grabbed for my coffee and took a long pull to keep my mouth occupied.
He shrugged. “It’s sort of what we’re here for, right?” His lips pressed together and relaxed, as if he couldn’t decide to release the words behind them. His long fingers tapped the stirring stick I’d used in my coffee, his eyes far away.
Maybe he was like me. Maybe under the bravado and aloof manner and don’t-give-a-fuck, Isaac Pearce only wanted a little piece of normal. To sit over a cup of coffee and just talk.
“My mom died when I was eight,” he said. “She had a stroke. She was too fucking young to have a stroke, but… It was a blockage no one knew about. It killed her instantly.”
A slow horror crept under my skin.
Did he see her die? Please tell me he didn’t see it.
“I was at school,” he said, as if reading my mind. “I went to school with a mom and came back without one.”
“I’m so sorry.”
His smile was hard and quick. My stirring stick moved through his fingers, turning over and over.
“Sounds dramatic, but losing my mom so suddenly was like having the wind knocked out of me for an entire year. No way to process what happened. She wasn’t sick. One minute she was there, totally healthy, and the next minute she was gone. It was so fucking meaningless.” He shrugged, a casual, bitter acceptance of something terrible. “So I stopped talking. I didn’t see the point.”
“For a whole year?” I asked.
He looked up at me, his features hardening. “You heard that, huh?”
