“You good?” Nancy hovers over him.
James jumps, his throat tickling as a cloud of floral perfume encroaches on him.
“Just this damn article,” he says. “Trying to get it done by three.”
She leans on his desk. “You’ve been working hard lately, James, but don’t spread yourself too thin. Take a break if you need it.”
“It’s okay, it’s already half past—”
“No, a breakafterwork.” Nancy purses her lips. “Look at me, James.”
He does, reallylooksat her, for the first time. She’s not old, maybe twenty-six? Her glasses are red plastic, her lipstick the shade of fresh blood, her hair carefully curled. Black eyeliner wings cut into her temples. She ispretty, a fact that somehow James hadn’t seen until now. Maybe it has to do with her looming above him.
“I have two tickets to a walking performance ofThe Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobeat Riverside Playhouse, if you want to come with me. My date canceled.” The perfume that previously suffocated James starts to smell like a field of wildflowers.
Her nails rattle against the laminated wood of his desk.
James swallows. All summer, he has thought of Nancy as his boss, hiselder.
“How old are you?” he asks, immediately feeling a twinge of regret.Not the right thing to ask a woman who just asked you out, idiot.
“Twenty-five,” she says, and to further prove her youth, “fresh out of grad school. Why, do I seem older?”
“No, no.” His finger jitters on the space bar. “You seem, uh, very young. Notveryyoung, but—”
Nancy peers down at him. Within seconds, her dusty-librarian aura became a sexy grad-student vibe, and James has lost all ability to speak coherently. Not the sparkly nerves he feels around Nelle, but adjacent. This is the anxiety he recognizes fromanytime an attractive girl has talked to him.
Can you go back to being my boss, please, so I can think straight?he almost asks.
But a night with a girl whoisn’tNelle might be exactly what he needs to cast her and her craziness out of his life forever.
“What do you say?” Nancy jangles her keys. “I’ll drive.”
When they arrive at Riverside Playhouse, a half-hour drive from Lincoln, the sun edges the field, painting the grass gold. James and Nancy trot down a gravel path to a check-in booth and hand their tickets to a man wearing a cashmere coat. Manure, sweet and putrid, rides the breeze from a pasture of grazing horses. Past the honey-thick haze in the air, a creek gurgles.
The show starts in a barn decorated to resemble the interior of the English country house where the Pevensie siblings stay at the beginning of the novel. James stands in the front of the crowd on a designated path, vaguely aware of his knuckles brushing the back of Nancy’s hand. She sucks in a sharp breath.
When the four child actors discover a wardrobe built into the wall, James and the rest of the audience follow them outside into a field transformed from a hot July evening to a winter wonderland. Fake snow blankets the ground, the trees are frosted, and a horse-drawn sleigh gallops across the landscape. Stuffed snow owls hoot from high branches.
James finds himself sinking into the show, watching in awe and wonder, full of imagination he hasn’t felt since he was a child.
The production ends with a battle and the Pevensie children returning to the mansion in the English countryside, far from Narnia and Aslan. James follows them through the hole in the wardrobe, though the snow has been stripped away now to reveal emerald grass and full trees. Back inside, the barn is a gray husk of what he glimpsed moments ago. He wants to go back.
When the show ends, Nancy asks him what he thought about it, but he can’t find the words to describe how it made him feel. Like magic is real. Likeanythingis possible. Like for the first time in years, he is alive.
Immediately, he wants to invoke that feeling in someone else, to stoke that fire within himself. A poem, a novel, a lyric. His fingers itch to create.
“Yeah, I liked it. Thanks for inviting me.”
They make small talk on the ride home—Where did you grow up? Any summer plans? How’s the layout coming along for next week’s issue?—but James is only half in the conversation. His other half is plotting a secret move to New York. He has some money saved up that he can use to help pay for rent if Jessie lets him stay with her. He will have to get a job to afford out-of-state tuition if hewants to go to school there. His parents would never help him be so irresponsible, even if they could, especially if he is going for a degree in the humanities.
Slow down, slow down,he tells himself.Start by finishing a novel. Get a practical degree in the meantime. Then see if you still want to wreck your life.
It’s what his mom would say. And he can’t argue that she would be wrong.
Half an hour later, Nancy parks her car outside the newspaper office.
She hesitates, hand on the door handle. “I had fun tonight.”
