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director. I stood on the stage with the others, and Bev stood in front of us, her clipboard under her arm, looking at us as if we were her tiny sculptures, perfect objects she could pick up and place wherever she wanted.
    Bev got to select the play she was going to direct. With the help of the drama teacher, this guy named Drew who was so busy being a rising star of the San Francisco theater community that he got all his sleeping done during rehearsals, she chose a contemporary farce called
Melancholy Play
. I played a therapist named Lorenzo who is in love with his patient, Tilly, who was played by Meg. Lorenzo is supposed to have an Italian accent and feel nothing but happiness until he falls in love with Tilly, which happens very suddenly and for no reason except for the fact that Tilly is sad and does strange things, like open his office window during their therapy session and put her hand out to feel the rain. Like I said, the play’s a farce, so when Lorenzo falls in love and makes these grand statements, I was really going for it, gesturing wildly and accentuating the accent, and grabbing for Meg, who was dodging from chair to chair, trying hard not to laugh so she wouldn’t break character.
    When we finished our second run-through of the scene, Bev stood up from her seat in the middle of the theater and leaned back on the armrest. She consulted her clipboard and scribbled a note.
    “Okay, Colby,” she said. “You need to channel something.”
    She left her perch on the edge of a chair and walked up onto the stage where I was standing. It was a journey: past the chairs to the aisle, from the aisle to the steps, up the steps to the stage, across the stage to me. She looked at my faceand then up to the ceiling, searching for the cure to my bad acting.
    “You shouldn’t be that funny,” she said. “The play should be funny, but Lorenzo doesn’t know that. Lorenzo’s serious. Lorenzo is in love. So imagine being in love and confessing it.”
    She stepped to the edge of the stage.
    I started:
“Tilly—my mother abandoned me at a sweetshop.”
    That part was easy to say convincingly; the rest would be harder. The problem was that while I knew how it felt to be in love, I knew even better how it felt to hide it. Because Bev and I were best friends and that’s the way it had always been. Because every day at our school people broke up and cheated on each other and hooked up at parties and pretended not to remember anything about it the next day. Because I feared the unraveling of everything that we had become to one another from the time we were nine years old.
    “Why are you telling me this?”
It was Tilly’s line, but as Meg spoke I found myself looking at Bev. Her blond hair falling over her left shoulder, stopping at the curve of one of her perfect small breasts. She waited for me to continue.
    I said,
“Because—the heavens have cracked open—I suddenly want to tell you everything.”
    The next line caught in my throat, but I turned to Meg, who was feigning Tilly’s alarm but rooting for me with herfocused brown eyes, and forced it out, quieter this time, without the armor of overacting.
    “I think I’m in love with you, Tilly. They say that’s what happens when you fall in love. You want to tell people things. You especially want to tell them sad things. Hidden sad things from the past. Something like: I was abandoned at a sweetshop in an unspecified European country. Tilly.”
    I had always found that last part strange. Her name: not a question but a statement. A one-word sentence. But when I said it right then, it made sense. Not,
Tilly?
As in,
Do you love me, too?
But,
Tilly.
As in,
Your name is all I that can manage to say.
    Meg pranced across the stage to hug me, and I tried to recover from the feeling that I had just confessed my love for my best friend on the stage of our school theater with the drama teacher napping in the front row and the entire cast and crew watching from the