A red tainted Silence Read Free Page B

not going to know what to write in your essay if you don’t stop looking at me.” She laughed. “I saw it last night,” she whispered back. “This is the last performance.
    That’s why I called you.” She squealed then and said, “Here he comes! That’s Nicholas!” I sat back in my chair, glad Jenny’d dropped my hand. I gripped my knees and watched as this boy -- he hardly looked old enough to be a senior -- with black hair and dazzling blue eyes in a pale, dirt-smudged face entered the scene and turned and grinned.
    The audience went wild.
    I looked at Jenny, stunned.
    “They love him,” she said, and all I could do was nod.

    A Red-Tainted Silence
    11

    He had the audience -- including me -- eating out of his hand. And, oh, how he knew it, as he strutted around, flashed that grin, lived his part. His timing was perfection, his moves practiced and sure. He totally stole the show from the boy who played Joseph. I had to wonder why he hadn’t gotten that part. Except he was a little short; the guy who played Joseph towered over him. And I guess was better-looking, in a hard kind of way.
    But it was Nicholas who entranced me. He smiled, laughed, delivered his lines in such a way that we were there. I was there with him, beside him where I longed to be. He and the guy who played Joseph and all the others tore into the next musical number, and I found myself completely lost as to what was going on.
    I didn’t care. I was too busy falling in love.
    I felt Jenny’s eyes on me, felt her hand touch mine. My own hands were clammy, the auditorium steamed. My jeans felt two sizes too small, and I shuddered with embarrassment.
    As the song came to a stop, I felt torn into tiny bits when he exited the stage. I realized I’d stopped breathing. I wiped my hand across my mouth. I was shaking. Oh, fuck, I was shaking. I closed my eyes, felt Jenny’s arm wrap around my shoulders.
    I groaned. My face burned. She’d witnessed my complete disintegration. I was mortified as I turned to look at her, but the loving, delighted grin she wore on her face reassured me like nothing else could have.
    And then the stage faded to black, except for a single circle of light. In the middle of that light sat a battered wooden bench, and as I held my breath, mesmerized -- as was everyone else in the audience -- “Jacob” walked into the light and sat down, his hands clasped between his knees. I held my breath, my body throbbing as strains to a song I’d never heard filled the auditorium.
    He began to sing.
    I don’t think anyone breathed for the next five minutes. I know I didn’t.
    Now that he sang alone, I could hear exactly what had made Jenny think of me. His voice, clear and strong, higher than I thought it would be but oh-so-perfect, filtered over us -
    - over me -- wrapping itself around my senses. I was possessed, entranced. I couldn’t move, couldn’t take my eyes off him as I drowned in the words and the music. My heart thumped wildly in my chest, and I knew then, as his calm gaze settled on me -- on me! -- in the darkness, where I knew of course he couldn’t see me, that I’d found him.
    Jenny was right. Here was our singer -- my singer.
    I had to have him.
    At that moment I knew that he and I -- somehow, someway -- would live, write, work, and love together. No one else could give him what he needed -- the music to carry that remarkable voice higher and higher.
    The guy was a fettered star, and I wanted to be the one to break him free.

    12 Carolyn Gray
    It didn’t matter that I was hardly more than a kid myself. Shit, I was barely seventeen, he about a year older, I guessed, and, to my chagrin, not a dropout like me. But I knew. I knew. He left me breathless, and any shame I felt for the throbbing heat exploding in my groin was forgotten as the last strains of the song ended.
    The stage darkened and the lights went up. The audience went wild. Jenny turned to me, her face triumphant. “See? He’s perfect!”
    All I