“Wait, here?” I asked, my stomach plunging, as I suddenly understood why everyone was running around. “ Tonight?”

“Tonight,” my mother said grimly, depositing another stack of plays into my arms. “We weren’t exactly prepared.”

“Living Room Theater?” I heard Frank echo behind me.

“Did someone cancel or something?” I asked.

“Well,” my mother said, “we technically did volunteer to host it this year. But that was before we knew we would be writing. And your father thinks that e-mail is interfering with his creative process, so he missed the reminders.”

I closed my eyes for just a moment. “How soon?” I asked.

My dad looked at his watch and winced. “An hour.”

“Um, what’s Living Room Theater?” Frank asked me, as this information seemed to panic the rest of my family, who all sprang into motion again.

“Well, unless you leave now,” I said, realizing it might even be too late as my mother dropped a stack of printer paper into his arms, “I think you’re going to find out.”

JULY

One year earlier

“Explain this to me again,” Sloane said as we—me, Sloane, my parents, and Beckett—walked up the driveway to Pamela Curry’s house. “You guys don’t get enough theater during the school year?”

My mother smiled and took a step closer to Sloane, linking her arm through hers. The two of them had gotten along right from the beginning, and a lot of times when she stayed over, I’d come downstairs in the morning to see Sloane and my mom sitting across the kitchen table from each other, talking, almost more like friends than anything else. “It started a few years back,” she said. “At a theater/English department meeting about parking, of all things. We ended up talking about all the plays we loved, and how they had to be so carefully selected at the college—not to offend anyone, to cast as many students as possible, come in under budget, all the usual concerns. And then someone . . .”

“Harkins,” my dad piped up from the other side of our group. “Remember? He got this thing going and then left when he got tenure at Williams.”

“Anyway, Professor Harkins suggested that we get together once a summer—both the theater and English departments—and put up a play that would have been impossible to do during the school year. No props, no costumes, everyone holds the book.”

“Sounds fun,” Sloane said as we reached the front door, and my mother knocked once and then just pushed it open and stepped inside. Living Room Theater tended to make things a little more casual, and there was usually enough chaos going on before the show that people weren’t bothering with details like answering the door.

We walked in and, sure enough, the downstairs was packed, mostly my parents’ colleagues from both their respective departments, plus their kids. Kids were always invited to Living Room Theater, unless it was Mamet, in which case there was a strict thirteen-and-over rule. People were milling about, tonight’s actors were walking around holding scripts and muttering, and everyone else was clustered around the food table.

I looked around, trying to be as subtle about it as possible, but apparently not succeeding, because Sloane leaned closer to me and whispered, “Seen him yet?” I felt myself blush as I shook my head. Pamela Curry and her two kids had moved here the year before, and she’d started working with my dad in the English department. Her son and daughter had been seniors when I was a sophomore, and I really only knew her daughter, Amy, because she’d shocked the whole school when she’d started getting all the leads in the plays, as a newcomer, right out of the gate. But I’d had an irrational and kind of gigantic crush on Charlie Curry, even though he went on to captain the tennis team and didn’t seem particularly interested in dating non-tennis-playing underclassmen.

“Andrea! Scott!” Pamela Curry rushed up to my parents, giving me and Sloane a quick smile—Beckett had already disappeared in the direction of the food. “We’re having a crisis.”

“It wouldn’t be Living Room Theater without one,” my dad said sagely.

“We’ve lost our youngest sister,” she said. “Susan Greene has the flu.” Even though Susan, one of my mother’s colleagues, was at least ten years older than my mom, Living Room Theater had always been cast age-blind.

“In Crimes of the Heart?” my dad asked, his eyes widening. “That isa crisis.”

“I know.” Pamela winced. “Babe is such a great part, too, but if it’s not done well . . .”

“Why can’t your thespian daughter do it?” my mother asked, and Pamela shook her head.

“She and her boyfriend are backpacking across Europe,” she said. “Otherwise, I would have tapped her weeks ago.” She looked suddenly to me and Sloane, her eyes lighting up. “Maybe one of you two?”

“Um,” I said, trying to ignore my mother’s encouraging smile, “not me.” I looked at Sloane and raised my eyebrows. “Want to step in?”

“I’m happy to,” she said, looking from Pamela to me, her brow slightly furrowed. “But Emily . . .”

“Wonderful!” Pamela said, almost collapsing with relief. “I thought I was going to have to do it, and believe me, that’s something nobody wants to see. I’ll get you a script.”

A colleague called out to my parents, and they headed toward the other side of the room as Sloane turned to face me. “Why don’t you do it?” she asked. “I’m pretty sure you know this play much better than I do, considering I’ve never heard of it.”

“I didn’t want to be in it,” I said, even though this wasn’t exactly true. And I couldn’t blame it on not wanting to make a fool out of myself in front of Charlie, since he was nowhere to be seen. I just knew Sloane would do a much better job than I would.

“I’m not sure about this,” Frank said as he peered around the dining room door and into the TV room, where the couch had been pushed aside to create enough space for a makeshift stage, and all the chairs we had in the house—and then pillows in front of them, once we’d run out of chairs—were lined up in front of it. We were both still in our running clothes and sneakers. I could have changed, of course, but since it was because of my parents that he was doing this, I didn’t want him to be the only person there in athletic gear. It was five minutes to showtime, and Frank was looking a little pale. But given everything that had occurred in the last hour, I didn’t exactly blame him.

“I tried to warn you,” I pointed out, and Frank just nodded as he clutched his script. I had a feeling this was not particularly comforting at the moment.

When I had seen the tornado that was Living Room Theater approaching, I had pulled Frank aside before my dad could enlist him in any manual labor. “You need to leave,” I said seriously. “Now.”

Frank glanced into the living room, where my dad was yelping in pain. He had accidentally stepped on Godot, and the cat had wasted no time in enacting his revenge. “But it looks like your parents need help,” he said.

I shook my head. “Seriously, get out while you can.” Innocent bystanders had a tendency to get cast in these things, which was how two years ago, the plumber who’d come by to fix a leak had ended up playing Mercutio and had almost fainted.

“Em!” my mother said, rushing up to me and depositing a stack of plays in my arms. “Find something we can use, can you?”

“You haven’t even picked a playyet?” I asked, aghast things were running this far behind.

“Hi,” Frank said, holding out his free hand to my mother. “I’m Frank Porter, I’m a friend of Emily’s.” I looked over at him when he said this, and realized that it was true—he was a friend of mine, as much as I was still getting used to this.