Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens Read online

  Why does everyone keep saying that?! “I’m not! I mean, I am, but … look. We’re better than that bully line. All of us. We’re a company of stage folks. We are literally Faustus.”

  “I’m … not sure I follow.”

  “We all signed the contract, right? We want something from this.”

  They’re looking at me like I sprouted demons from my tongue. I breathe, and start again.

  ACT IV, SCENE 2

  We stayed late, all of us, until the caretaker stood over our circle, rattling his keys.

  Together, we wrote our story, though we didn’t change a thing.

  E

  (Steps forward.)

  I found my name, within this finest company.

  It’s Marlowe. I will write this story twice, and twice again until it’s right. For it’s important.

  ACT IV, SCENE 3

  CHORUS

  Faustus is in his study, surrounded by books and treatises that he knows by heart, a thousand roles and lines already mastered. And it is good. It is, but where to go from here? What role do you give to Romeo and Robin Hood when they have directed companies?

  FAUSTUS

  Oh, what applause that was. What rush! None could expect magics such as that onstage … and yet …

  (Casts gaze across the study, gestures.)

  This stage is empty of applause. ’Tis not enough.

  Our Faustus summons not an ugly demon, but a presence, all charm and flamboyance—the Spirit of Theater, ready to ensnare you with his wonders. This Mephistopheles has knowledge of the stage. Experience. And he has a crisp white beard, of course.

  Our Faustus-chorus asks him questions of success and staging. But the charming theater man answers in riddles and remembrances: of earnest Faust and his trapezing, cannonballing alternate, of intimate performance, of starred reviews and wild standing ovations. The chorus is enraptured.

  We write Desmond-proper into it, as well. And nervous Jenny, whom you won’t have seen at all until this moment in the play, because she hid her face behind a script or prop or person, and she never said a word although she desperately wanted confidence: That was her deal. And me. Sort of. The Marlowe who just wanted one more run (and then another), who would bargain with the universe to get it. All of us are here.

  ACT IV, SCENE 4

  I dump my bag beside the door and arch my back and shoulders, but all stretching does tonight is remind me exactly where the muscles lie.

  Dad emerges from the kitchen, amiably brandishing a chopping knife. “You’re late. And you look tired.”

  “I’m fine,” I say, concentrating on not rubbing at my lower back in front of him.

  He frowns. “I’m not sure this play thing is a good idea, love.”

  “Dad!”

  “I know, I know, but we had a deal, and if you’re coming home like this … You know, nobody would think anything less of you for dropping out.”

  “I signed a contract. And I said I’m fine.”

  How does he know?

  What does he know? I’m fine. Really.

  But I’m pulling pain meds from my jeans before my door is even closed. Telling myself it’s been a long day and anybody would be tired. That everybody’s muscles ache like this, and all I need is to lie down for five minutes.

  Or ten.

  Everything is buzzing heavy with the efforts of the day. Sometimes when it’s like this, I feel like I’m an old appliance, and I wonder how long it’ll be before they throw me out.

  Sometimes.

  But tonight it is well used.

  The body doth protest, though, clenching in on itself, gaining about fifty thousand pounds, and even though I’m sure there is a feast downstairs, I’m just … I’m just going to lie here for a minute.

  A minute, and a minute more, and then I’m gone, dragged into the cursèd sleep of princesses and the chronically ill.

  ACT IV, SCENE 5

  CHORUS

  (Dressed in blank-slate theater uniform of black T-shirts and leggings. Barefoot, unadorned.)

  MARLOWE

  (Center stage, to audience.)

  The first time that I stood upon a stage, I froze. Hot lights melting off my face, tears like razors in my throat. I hated it. But in the safe and dark of the drive home, I could not stop retelling everything, the story of the birth of Jesus, punctuated with the stage directions and the details of my fellow actors’ lives. How, really, Emily was far too brash to be a sheep, and Joseph would grow up to carry Jesus because he did much, much better groaning noises.

  By the time we pulled into the drive, I had elaborated, and the whole nativity was staged upon the moon, where it always looked like snow, because Christmas wasn’t Christmas without snowmen.

  In my terror, I’d soaked up the magic, and I loved it. And I wasn’t letting go.

  CHORUS MEMBER 1

  (Steps forward, takes Marlowe’s hand as they speak to audience.)

  Sitting in that big red velvet seat, my feet barely dangling off it, all warm and glowy in my bestest Christmas dress, I remember Peter flying—really flying—right out off the stage above my head. And I thought, I can do that. I can fly!

  CHORUS MEMBER 2

  (Dressed in Elizabethan costume. Steps forward, full of bravado.)

  I bite my thumb at you, sir!

  (Draws sword, parries back and forth across the stage.)

  I bite my thumb.

  (Steps back, takes Marlowe’s other hand.)

  CHORUS MEMBER 3

  (In tech-crew combats. Steps forward flamboyantly, gleans applause from audience.)

  You can hear the gasp whenever you raise up the lights. The pause as it ends. That’s you. It’s like …

  (Claps toward audience until they join, raises hands to increase applause, lowers to decrease.)

  THAT. Back there, you are the puppet master.

  (Steps back, takes place in chorus line)

  MEPHISTOPHELES

  (Now fashioned with a crisp white beard and dapper suit, as like Desmond as the crew could manage. Same player takes some of Faustus’s lines.)

  These wonders of the stage could all be yours, if only you will sign.

  ACT V, SCENE 1

  CHORUS

  Theater isn’t always easy magic. I suppose that if it were, no deals would e’er be made.

  CHORUS MEMBER 1

  Let’s try something new!

  (CHORUS, dressed in abstract costume, moves into a series of tableaux to mimic Kanso’s tortured oil paintings as they tell the tale.)

  CHORUS MEMBER 2

  We want stark. Traditional. Let Marlowe’s words reach ears on their own merit.

  CHORUS MEMBER 1

  (Sneaks up behind them with a placard reading: BOO!)

  CHORUS

  (Repeat with more opposing views. What starts civilized becomes a skirmish. Props used as swords and grenades. Eventually, they stop and come together.)

  This company is made of grit and steel. A thousand stories, told and still unfolding. You won’t see them all, but they’re in every choice we make.

  ACT V, SCENE 2

  Mrs. B froze when I asked her to bring Desmond to rehearsal. Barely, but enough that I’ll never forget.

  “Why, dear?”

  “It would—” ruin the surprise. My inner writer bristles, but a different tableau flashes through my mind, of an aged Lost Boy standing by the checkout with a Wendy he’s halfway forgotten, and of the way she holds on to his hand. “—mean the world to us for him to see it.”

  I explain. Staring mostly at the floor, because I cannot bear it if our play is misconstrued as something that could hurt.

  And at first she’s not convinced, so I tell her how different our Faustus is, that Desmond is right at its core.

  She sighs. “I just … I don’t want to push him.”

  And I wish that I could tell her that sometimes, sometimes we want to push, because if we don’t, we’re stuck. I want to tell her that a Lost Boy needs to remember his happy thoug
ht if he’s going to fly. But words are harder when you do not have a script.

  She sighs, sad and lost and hopeful all at once. “Let’s see how he is?”

  I worried all night about whether he would come. But they’re here, the Lost Boy and Wendy holding on to everything together as the company takes to the stage.

  CHORUS

  At Vanholt’s court, our Faustus seeks to please his audience, offers them tricks and delights as sweet and rare as ripened grapes in January. We offer you familiar and strange. We offer you ourselves, as flawed and incomplete as they might be, as people and as players. Doth it enchant? Have we performed it well?

  (Later.)

  CHORUS

  And soon it ends, and this chorus shall die. Let’s reminisce. Your favorite moments. Were they desperate times or triumphs? The theater?

  (Mephistopheles steps forth and bows.)

  Or the majesty?

  CHORUS MEMBER 1

  Or Peter Pan?

  CHORUS MEMBER 3

  (Steps forward, directs audience in rising and falling applause.)

  The rising of the lights!

  CHORUS MEMBER 6

  (Gleeful.)

  Oh, I don’t know. I’m rather looking forward to the part where Faust comes to a sticky end.

  CHORUS

  Or maybe it’s this. Standing here with you. And the promise that tomorrow is another night; we’ll tell the tale again. And when the run is through, we’ll carry it along to the next show, until our tapestry of plays becomes so rich and warm and glimmering it even beats his velvet.

  It’s knowing that you’ll take us with you, too.

  It’s the Spirit of the Theater rising up through broken memory because the pieces remain strong. It’s knowing that the company prevails: Prometheus can take the ring to Mordor; boys fly; devils and angels play in the same sandbox with discordant harmony—neither winning because then the game would end.

  It’s all of this.

  It’s knowing that you’ll sign a thousand deals to get it all again. Sweet theater, save us from ourselves with a curtain’s rising kiss.

  EPILOGUE

  The bell tolls midnight, and our script comes to an end. We freeze. Chorus and our audience of two caught in a moment bigger than any of us. And this, my friends, is where our Faustus becomes something else. Not tragedy but triumph.

  Sure, there’s work to do. There always is. Greasepaint and silks to apply and oh so many nuances to tweak, but we’ve made magic. Oh, sweet theater. And standing in this moment, my knees shaking with the effort and emotion, I’m okay, even if this is my last.

  Ballad of Weary Daughters

  KRISTINE WYLLYS

  EARLY SUNLIGHT, WEAK and pale, spilled through the small kitchen window, bathing Mama in shimmering gold. Dust motes danced around her in lazy circles, twirling higher before floating downward to settle back on the faded linoleum floor.

  I blinked, and for a second, the barest of beats, I saw Mama as she used to be, not so very long ago. When Daddy was still here and she was the one dancing, flowing skirt twirling, our laughter the melody she moved to.

  My hand slipped, spoon scraping against the side of the bowl, and it was a thunderclap in the too-quiet space. The kitchen felt haunted without Daddy holding court at the table next to me, Bible spread open, morning devotionals handed out to each of us depending on what the day’s agenda was. Quiet and the kitchen had never coexisted before. Now it was full of it in all the ways it wasn’t full of Daddy.

  Mama’s eyes slipped closed and I held my breath as her lips moved, silently asking for strength and blessings in a language I hadn’t had a chance to learn. Even this was new and wrong. Daddy had always led the morning prayers in his booming, pulpit voice, Mama only chiming in with an “Amen” at the very end. That had been the way of us. The good preacher and his family, always conscious of who we were supposed to be and who could be watching, ready to judge the slightest misstep.

  I didn’t exhale until she shook her head and cleared her throat.

  “Riv—” She paused with a frown and tried again. “Tabitha! You’re going to be late for the bus!”

  She was always doing that, mixing up our names, for as long as we had names to mix up. But what was once a family joke now seemed to have grown thorns for her. As if it were yet another reminder of just how exhausted she always was now. How we couldn’t win for losing.

  “River.” She said it firmly, as if my name were both the reminder of grace and promise of strength her Tsalagi grandmother, my elisi, had intended it to be when she picked it.

  I made a noise and met her eyes, brown like my own, but deeper and richer.

  Remorse swam in them. What soggy, generic cereal I’d managed to choke down turned to lead in my gut.

  “The littles have a doctor’s appointment today,” she said, and looked down at the soapy water their bowls were in.

  “What time?” My voice came out clumsy from lack of use.

  “Four.”

  I nodded. “I’ll have them there.”

  Relief was a drug, and it coursed through her, softening her features and making her shoulders sag.

  They stiffened again a moment later. The high never lasted too long.

  “Sharon needs someone to cover her shift this weekend. It’d put me into overtime, but I think I could get it approved.” She was asking for permission. It wasn’t framed that way—it never was—but Mama was standing there, in her faded hot-pink scrubs that made her brown skin look impossibly browner, asking her seventeen-year-old daughter for permission.

  “You should do it,” I said. I put my spoon down and stood, picking up the bowl of half-eaten mess that claimed to be as good as Cheerios and depositing it in the sink.

  “I’m gonna head out,” I said, and pecked her cheek, remembering at the last second to do it lightly so as not to smear her carefully applied contour.

  “Be good.” It was a whisper. Both a demand and a plea. It was a normal gesture, the old normal, and we were clinging to what was left of it.

  I nodded. Heaved my book bag up on my shoulder. Took a step toward the door.

  “Love you,” I told her.

  She smiled. Even with a tremble, it lit up the darkest parts of the room.

  “Gv-ge-yu-i.”

  I repeated it back to her, though the edges of it were too rough to be considered a perfect echo, with a smile that had never been as brilliant as hers and couldn’t come close now.

  I left quickly before she realized the effort it took to maintain it, the clock ticking off the minutes in the hallway an anxious bass line against my bones.

  * * *

  The walk from our brick parsonage with the cracked concrete porch to the curb was a short one, but the church’s looming figure was a heavy weight against my back. Not so long ago, it’d been my second home. Its members, the extended family I’d grown up with. But that was when my world still existed in colors, and things mostly made sense.

  Then Dad walked out two months ago. Literally packed up his bag and stepped out the door to get in his car with the girlfriend no one had known even existed, leaving behind his family and faithful congregation to pick up the pieces of his betrayal.

  The congregation probably thought they were doing their Christian duty, allowing their former pastor’s poor “Indian” wife and her mixed babies to stay in the parsonage for three more months. Maybe they were. Maybe that was all the Bible required: a handful of weeks’ housing for the woman they’d side-eyed for her skin despite her role in the church. Heaven knew I clearly had been misled on some things.

  My arms were covered in goose pimples when I lowered myself onto the curb, the night’s lingering chill biting into the back of my thighs through my jeans. Winter was close, its whisper in the air and, with it, the sharp reminder that time was running out for us.

  I scrubbed at my face, bare of any kind of makeup today, as it’d been yesterday and the day before, and stretched out my legs.

  I was too damn
young to feel this damn old.

  The door opened behind me, a creak followed by a slam that made my spine go straight.

  Tabby walked past me without pause, her silence a cruel punch to my already sore chest. She’d been the voice across the room when the night was thick. Now her resentment was as thick as most of our nights and days.

  I closed my eyes and counted breaths. Five in. Five hold. Five out. It was a grounding trick, something Dr. Briar had taught me for the moments when the anxiety crept rather than stormed in. I don’t think either of us realized how often I would feel like I was going to sink.

  The street shook itself awake around me. Doors slammed and people hollered and squirrels and birds chattered and chirped as cars roared to life. And cutting through that mild morning chaos, there was the familiar rumble of an old engine.

  I stood quickly, eyes flying open and immediately drawn to the black Grand Am rolling toward me. I was reaching for the door handle before it even came to a full stop.

  Lucy didn’t smile before noon, but her bright red painted lips quirked up as she reached for the radio, nail polish the same shade as her lipstick, and turned down Johnny Cash.

  “Rough night, Smith?” she asked, her voice still lined with sleep, as I settled in beside her as her copilot.

  “Could ask you the same, Vega.”

  She grimaced, her lovely face twisting around tired eyes.

  “Same old, same old. Ricky brought home another shit report card—he’s failing Spanish of all fool-headed things—and Marco didn’t come home again.”

  I winced, and for long moments the noisy idling engine was the only sound between us.

  She sighed, then nodded at the bottle of water in the cup holder and pulled back out onto the street.

  I rustled in my bag on the floorboard until I found the hollow blue compact with the compass on top. It swung wildly for a minute before settling on due north.

  On Lucy.

  She wasn’t watching me closely, she couldn’t and keep her eyes on the road at the same time, but we were always at least semi-aware of the other.

  “Just one?” she asked, brows scrunched together as I opened the compact and took out a pill. I popped it in my mouth and chased it with the water before it had a chance to leave a bitter coat on my tongue.

  “Yeah. I’m off the lithium.”