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what your stage will look like, correct?”
    “We’re deeply engaged with this play, Mr. Nightray. I can’t stress how thankful we all are that you’re providing the furniture and props.” Anna smiled. The noisy, amusing girl from school was gone… but then again, while she was a bad liar, she was a great actress and she had this “nice girl persona” down to a “t” from attending her parents’ parties. I let her do the talking and stared at the room some more.
    It oozed… class or riches or standing, I don’t know. Everything was delicate and antique and expensive, but it didn’t look like it had been bought or exposed to show off the family wealth. It looked unassuming, elegant, like it belonged right where it was.
    Funnily enough, the result was more humbling that an overt display.
    “This way, please,” Mr. Nightray said, pulling me from my musings.
    Anna led us this time, Dave and I close behind her, and we went back to the corridor, up a flight of stairs so wide that the cheerleading team could have done their number on them without falling, and then through a set of double doors.
    “Here it is,” he said, stepping aside to let us see, with a tinge of pride in his voice. “Lady Windermere’s drawing room.”
    Muted gold and green upholstery. Heavy curtains. Mahogany shining deep and rich everywhere. A spider chandelier. It was nothing like our list, nothing like we’d discussed with the group.
    But, it was perfect. “How are we going to fit all this on stage?” Dave muttered by my side, and I knew he felt the same way.
    After all, he’d asked how to fit it, not what we’d leave behind. 

     

CHAPTER 6
    So, how did we fit it? Tightly.
    Of course, we didn’t grab the stuff and lug it away to the school ourselves. In fact, I doubted the importance of our visit, as Hubert—that’s Mr. Nightray’s given name—just showed us the room that should be Lady Windermere’s and informed us that it’d arrive at school on Monday.
    What he wanted to give us exceeded the list of Mr. Hedford’s about one to four, but the truth of the matter was that it looked perfect and no one found the heart to break the setting. Which brought us to Monday after school—to a crammed stage and a backstage that started to smell like sweat, stuffed with too many items and too many breakable things for any reasonable high school.
    Most of the theater folk were there: Mr. Hedford, of course, directing the proceedings; Anna and Dave, who had roped Ray into volunteering some muscle; Lena and Jack, who had brought two mates of Jack’s. I didn’t even know them by name because they had brains on par with a mollusk. Then there was me. And Keith.
    Three hours’ worth of teamwork and the whole set-up refused to move any closer to completion.
    “It seemed smaller at the Nightray’s,” Anna grumbled as she heaved and shoved at a lovely settee, trying to angle it enough to face the public without being obvious.
    “The room at Nightray’s was about three times the size of this stage,” Dave grunted, pulling from the other end of the settee. “How about it, Alice? Looking good now?”
    I tilted my head. No, it wasn’t as perfect as it had been, but we had moved it around so much that I started to get sick.
    “Yeah, that’s fine.” I dropped a cushion on the settee, my mighty contribution to the move.
    In my defense, Lena didn’t do much more than I did.
    “Come on, guys! On three, I want that shelf against the wall!” she said.
    “It is against the wall,” Jack complained.
    “No, it’s one foot from the wall and that’s quality space we need elsewhere! Now, push!”
    “And on she goes,” I muttered while watching her. My voice was low enough for no one to hear, but it was as if I had conjured her attention.
    “Alice! You’re not helping. Bring the vases! I think we’re not going to move that bureau anymore.”
    I sighed and gave her a mock salute. “On it.”
    Vases. Hubert had also given us vases and