Say it Out Loud E-Book

Ashley Schumacher

• Herausgeber: Bedford Square Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 479

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Once Juniper's life was filled with magic. Little things went right – and sometimes big ones, like that enchanted night at college when she found herself playing Juliet opposite her secret crush James as Romeo. But then her mother died, and Juniper's world has grown cold. After misguidedly selling the rights to her growing podcast, she finds herself back in her hometown, in her old bedroom, with no job in sight. When a mysterious email invites her to audition for a starring role in the audio drama adaptation of The Meadow, the beloved, bestselling vampire romance of her teenage years, it's the opportunity of a lifetime. Or it seems to be, until she learns that it all hinges on her co-star, James from college, now on the cusp of breaking through as one of Hollywood's leading actors. He broke her heart ten years ago; can she trust him now?

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BEDFORDSQUAREPUBLISHERS.CO.UK

For anyone who is still waiting for a sparkly vampire to come to their bedroom window.

And for my wizard of an agent, Thao Le, who would have had the whole werewolf/vampire treaty sorted out in one afternoon with enough time left over to grab some well-deserved mushroom ravioli at La Bella Italia. I can’t thank you enough.

Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.

– William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

Time has brought your heart to me.

– Christina Perri, ‘A Thousand Years’

Prologue

The magic died with Mom.

When I was little, the magic was always right there: a swirl of particles in sunlit windows, the way the breeze would bend a flower toward me as if a magical wind god were offering me a gift, or how all the terrible things seemed to right themselves in the end, like the time my cat ran away only to turn up curled on the library steps the next week.

Like she’d been waiting for me all along.

Like magic.

Or maybe I’ve always just read too much for my own good and it was delusion, not magic.

Whatever the reason, getting older meant the magic shifted. I had an uncanny knack for always finding what I was looking for: parking spots, a friend’s lost keys, an earring gone missing in a pool, or the perfect passage to round out my essay comparing Beo­wulf to Little Women. (That essay was a banger, by the way.)

And if I really thought about it, if I looked the magic straight in the face and didn’t call it stupid or uncanny or dumb luck, sometimes it would really reward me. Like the time in high school I went into my bedroom closet, scrunched up my eyes and nose and hands, and told the magic that if it would please, please help me get tickets to the final Meadow book’s sold-out midnight release party at the biggest bookstore in Dallas, I’d never ask for anything ever again.

I got the tickets. Well, technically Mom did. She won them through a local radio station by accident. She called in to ask the name of a song – because Google was never her first instinct – and happened to be caller number five.

So yeah. Magic was finicky and unpredictable, but undeniably real.

Or it was until Mom died and the flowers stopped bending toward me and I lost keys and earrings and my sense of self all at once.

It was like all the wonder and mysticism in the world had been sucked out of my life. It left me feeling like an empty soda can, and I wasn’t sure if the magic would ever come back to fill it again.

My life felt particularly empty the night of the meet-angst.

There was very little cute about my first time meeting James Neely.

It was the end of my last semester of college, the night of the one and only performance of my stupid Introduction to Theater class’s Romeo and Juliet, and – most important – it was the six-month anniversary of Mom’s passing.

I was a wreck.

But it was okay-ish because at least I didn’t have to be onstage. I just had to flip a couple of special-effect switches on cue and then I could go back to my dorm with the leaky roof and the chatty roommate, eat a decidedly not-magical protein bar from the box of ‘mandatory snacks’ Dad kept mailing me from Colorado every week, maybe fill out another application for a publishing internship I could never hope to afford, and call it a night.

I can’t even remember what set me off. Maybe it was the way the director patted my back when I passed her at the stage door – absently, maternally, like it was all too natural to touch me when I hadn’t been touched by anyone in months.

Whatever the reason, I was full-body sobbing in what I thought was going to stay an empty dressing room when hecame in.

His arms were full of costume pieces and a makeup kit. His cellphone was tipping out of the pocket of the jacket slung over his arm, the collar trapped beneath the strap of his black leather messenger bag. He didn’t look clumsy, though, even as the top part of him more closely resembled an overcrowded coatrack than a human. His stride was sure but harsh, like he was punishing the floor for existing as he came into the room and slammed the door behind him.

And his face was murderous. Even in my frazzled state, I knew to flinch away from it. His was the kind of anger that could level the world, and even the mountain range of sadness I had been steadily building around me for the last half year didn’t stand a chance.

James Neely. James Freakin’ Neely depending on who you spoke to. Like me, he wasn’t even supposed to be in this class, but we were stuck in this wrong timeline for different reasons: me because the blow-off media arts class that was supposed to fulfill my art credit was canceled last minute, him because he had been told he could direct the Intro to Theater play to get an honors theater credit, until the department head caught wind of it and shut it down.

One of the girls who ran the lights – Jessica, I think her name was – had a huge crush on James and had told me all about it one class when there was nothing for us to do but watch the rehearsal from the wings.

‘He’s so good,’ she said. ‘Like so good. He’s going to make it big. I can feel it in my bones. And then Dr G is going to regret not letting him have his directorial debut here, because that would be a big selling point for the university. Even if he is the perfect Romeo.’

Not much permeated my post-Mom’s-funeral haze, but still I thought it odd, Jessica’s reverence. Nobody great came from this public university in middle-of-nowhere Texas, and if they did, it was only because they were on their way to somewhere better, a layover. I was only here because the campus was just close enough to Mom for dinners and easy weekend trips but far enough away from her little house in a suburb of Dallas to necessitate my dorm room, my own space.

I couldn’t imagine not having her nearby, not being able to pop in for a dinner of whatever they had been sampling at her local H-E-B that she just had to buy and inexplicably leaving with my arms full of fruit that you might as well take, Junie B., because they’re going to go bad before I can eat them all, and toilet paper. You can never have too much of it. Take a roll or two for that broom closet you call a bathroom.

I had every reason, the best reason, to be here. What did James have?

If he was as good as Jessica – and everyone else in the theater department – made him sound, he would have gone to New York or Boston or somewhere where lawns were green and covered in five-hundred-year-old trees instead of brown grass and clumpy soil.

But it made Jessica happy to ramble on about James, so I let her. Even when those ramblings turned to how the never-identified ‘they’ begged her to play Juliet but she just didn’t have time in her schedule because she wanted to be done with basics by her sophomore year and that’s why she chose to be on crew, you know?

There on the dressing room floor, I almost wished I was with Jessica and her chattering instead of James Neely, who stood above me looking like a bloodthirsty god come down from Mount Olympus. I could ignore Jessica, but James had the kind of presence that was impossible to look away from.

And I was not interested in looking.

‘What are you doing in here?’ he asked.

He turned his back to me and set his stuff on the long table in front of the vanity with its two functioning light bulbs.

I tried to answer, tried to make my arms and legs engage with my one thought of Get out of here, go, leave. But I couldn’t. I was paralyzed as James huffed and spun to finally look down at me.

It’s like he didn’t realize until that moment that I was on the ground, as if he had registered a human and nothing else when he barged into the room.

‘I told them I didn’t need help with makeup,’ he began, and again, like his eyes were catching up with his words, he paused. ‘Are you… crying?’

He said the last part with such horror, such disdain, it almost made me laugh. His response was so preposterous that I forgot who I was talking to – who I was and who I had lost – just long enough to snort through my tears.

‘Is that a question? I thought actors were supposed to be keen observers of the human condition to improve their craft or something.’

James wasn’t quite smiling, but he wasn’t frowning, either, when he crouched beside me. He must have forgotten himself for a moment, too, because he reached forward and tapped the cuff of the dark sweatshirt that identified me as a stagehand.

‘And I thought crew members were supposed to be neither seen nor heard.’

‘Fire me, then,’ I said, jerking my arm away from him and rubbing my nose on the itchy black sleeve. ‘Fail me. What-ever you want to call it. I would love nothing more than to go home.’

Home had always been a weird concept for me. Mom and Dad had divorced when I was a baby, so homehad never been one place for me growing up. But just then, with the grief of Mom hanging over me like a black shroud, home was wherever she was.

And I couldn’t get there.

Which was not a novel concept, but my body chose now in front of James Freakin’ Neely to make a sentiment found on every agonizingly cliché throw pillow into a Whole Thing™ that I needed to cry – and cry hard – over right this very second.

All James got as a warning was a watery hiccup before I started sobbing. Again.

He looked understandably startled at this turn of events, which… fair. I hadn’t cried this hard at her funeral, hadn’t cried this hard at all since she passed, come to think of it. But there I was, sitting on the grimy floor of a room I never should have entered and weeping like I was trying to flood the world and everyone in it.

James Neely stared at me for a long moment, and for the first time he looked at a loss, running his hands through his hair like maybe he could divine a way to stop my crying if he pulled on the strands hard enough.

‘Hey,’ he said.

I couldn’t stop crying.

‘Hey.’

His tone was just insistent enough, just authoritative enough to help me take a gasping breath mid-sob and say, ‘Yeah?’

‘Do you have a least favorite book?’

I blinked at him.

‘Don’t you mean a favorite book?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘A least favorite.’

I wiped at my eyes.

‘That’s a weird question.’

My voice was watery and gross, but it was at least approaching human.

‘Give me an even weirder answer,’ James Freakin’ Neely said. ‘Tell me about it without giving the title or author.’

A literal snot bubble came from my nose as I exhaled, and there’s no way that James didn’t see it form and pop, but he pretended not to.

‘Why?’ I asked.

He shrugged.

‘Because you’ll have to think about why you really hate it and not just its easy identifiers.’

I stared at him.

He made a waving motion at me, like he was shooing me away, and I idly wondered how long he could sit crouched like that with his knees completely bent and his heels hovering just above the floor without falling flat on his butt.

‘Go on, then,’ he said, waving again. ‘Let’s hear it.’

Looking back, I know it was a tactic to distract me, to take my brain somewhere else. But at the time, I didn’t see it for what it was. I was just befuddled as to why the boy who was supposed to play Romeo in less than an hour was bothering with me at all.

‘Um… I guess I haven’t really thought of it before. I guess it’s—’

‘No title, remember,’ he interrupted, his eyes not letting go of mine. ‘Just describe it to me.’

I opened my mouth, stuttered, and then tried again. I found that once I started, I couldn’t stop. For the first time in weeks, months, I was caught up in something other than my own choking thoughts.

‘It was stupid,’ I said. ‘So stupid, because they made us read it twice in high school. It was this narrative that I think was supposed to be about colonialism and it was a story-within-a-story kind of thing.’ I had to pause and take a deep breath to steady my voice. ‘But it was just confusing and a parade of the darkest, grossest parts of humanity. Anything we were supposed to take away from it was lost because the language was so bloated and…’ I paused, started again. ‘You want to know the worst part?’

‘Tell me.’

His voice wasn’t irritated or put-out or resigned. It was interested, like he might actually want to know what I thought.

Even then, with the black feeling of grief simmering in the bottom of my stomach, I hated how much it made me like him, his interest. I didn’t want to like him. Much safer to imagine myself into fiction than to deal with the messiness of reality.

‘There were so many other things we could’ve been reading,’ I told him as I mentally stepped onto my soapbox. ‘So many new books that came out that year that would have gotten us hyped to read instead of dreading it: the new Hunger Games, John Green, Rick Riordan. But because they weren’t going to be on the standardized tests and they weren’t “part of the canon”’ – I curled my fingers to make air quotes – ‘they couldn’t be taught. Isn’t that ridiculous? No wonder so many people leave school and never pick up another book again. They had the joy bludgeoned out of them, canoned out of them.’

James was watching me like those National Geographic extreme photographers watch wild animals: a little bit wary, a lot in awe.

I was in awe, too. I had said more all at once to James Neely than I think I’d said to any other person since Mom died, even my ever-persistent roommate.

It was lost on him, of course, but not on me.

He could have said any number of things in response to my tirade. He could have guessed at the book (Heart of Darkness, ugh); he could have nodded and slowly backed away.

But he didn’t.

‘You have a great natural speaking voice,’ he said instead. ‘Like a siren. It just lulls me.’

I wouldn’t have believed him except he sounded begrudgingly admiring, like he would rather have hated my voice than done anything else.

It was also not lost on me that I’d stopped crying altogether and that my heart was pumping fast in my chest for a reason other than just grief.

‘Thanks,’ I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve. ‘I made it myself.’

He pity-snorted. ‘Better?’

‘Surprisingly yes.’

And it was true, I found. It still startled me, all those months later, how quickly grief could go from high tide to low tide with no warning.

‘Good,’ James said.

It looked like he was about to say something else, and because I could sense the conversation ending and for some reason couldn’t bear for it to be over just yet, I said the first thing that popped into my head.

‘You were mad,’ I said. ‘When you came in, I mean. You looked pissed.’

His eyes narrowed, and it was like I could see him throwing up a wall between us. Whatever closeness we had gained in those last ten minutes he was going to either crush beneath his godlike rage or block me from accessing entirely.

It did not take a great deal of intuition to see that James Neely was more than willing to parade emotions on the stage, but off-stage was a different matter.

‘Everyone has problems,’ he said, like that was an answer.

It wasn’t, but it would have to be enough. Clearly, James Neely was ready to be done with me now that I wasn’t crying my eyes out, so I decided to put us both out of our misery and end… whatever that moment was. That blip in the timeline. That last gasp of magic bringing us both to the same place at the same time.

I got to my feet, brushed off my knees, and proffered my hand down to where James still crouched. I tried to look confident and cool even though I knew my eyes and nose were going to be red for hours. My insides felt better, though, like they always did after a jagged cry.

‘Come on,’ I said, trying to infuse my words with the overt thank you I knew he wouldn’t accept. ‘I’ll get out of your way so you can go break limbs in the name of success.’

James Neely looked at my hand for a full minute, for an hour, for a year, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he looked up at me with devastatingly brown eyes, the kind that make poets forget blue ever existed.

‘Why were you crying?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t say.’

‘Everyone has problems,’ I intoned.

His mouth quirked at that.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

I wonder if he realized that was the second time he had commanded words from me that evening.

I was already feeling better than when he’d found me, but I was still too tired to argue, too wrung out from the latest grief attack. And since we were still in the glitch in reality, in that pocket of time that shouldn’t exist, I answered honestly, my arm dropping to my side as I made myself meet his eyes again.

‘My mom,’ I said. ‘She died over Thanksgiving break.’

James absolutely froze, and it made me think of a scene from my favorite book, The Meadow, where William is so worried about losing control and hurting Arabella, he goes still as a statue while he collects himself.

When I thought about it, James was more than a little like William: tall with brown hair that might look reddish if the light hit it just right, brown eyes, definitely fair-skinned if not vampire-pale. And he was… cute? Hot? I had never felt comfortable with those adjectives – any adjectives – to describe guys, but James was attractive. Objectively. Clinically. Like he was designed in a lab.

There was something else, too, beneath the glossy surface. Something about the intensity, the way he looked like he contained worlds and universes inside of him. Nothing like the few guys who had expressed interest in me over the last four years. If they contained anything other than the latest football stats or the places that gave the best Thursday-night beer discounts with a student ID, they had me fooled.

James was scrambling to school his features, which had flashed from alarm to sorrow and then to something like regret, all while still crouched stone-still beside my legs.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said finally. ‘About your mom.’

I’d heard that phrase from dozens of lips since November and I knew I would hear it dozens more, but it wouldn’t sound as sincere as it did coming from James. Maybe somewhere in his stillness was empathy instead of sympathy… or maybe he was as good an actor as Jessica claimed after all.

Whatever the reason, I was still trying to be cool, so I shrugged like losing Mom wasn’t the biggest deal in the universe and quoted Lady Capulet: ‘Some grief shows much of love, but much of grief shows still some want of wit.’

James stood up, then, his eyes never leaving mine. He was tall, but not the kind of tall that made you feel like a different species to stand next to him. Just enough to feel the way my neck brushed against my sweatshirt when I tilted it back to meet his gaze.

‘You know the play,’ he said, surprised.

And then I did laugh outright.

‘It turns out you can memorize just about anything after watching it at least a hundred times from start to finish,’ I said. ‘And, you know, being a lit major helps, too.’

That could have been the end of it – James and I – should have been.

Even with what came later, I don’t remember how we parted after that. Awkwardly, I’m sure. It was a stolen moment that should have been returned to its rightful place of nothingness.

I left his dressing room, the play started, I performed my crew duties, intermission brought twitters backstage of a big-shot acting agent in the audience who just happened to be there to see his great-niece’s debut in the supporting role of Girl Who Helps Nurse.

And then, out of nowhere, the nothing moment we shared in the dressing room was plucked from obscurity.

‘The girl,’ James Neely was shouting, his voice echoing backstage. ‘Someone find that girl!’

Act 4 had just ended with Juliet taking the vial of sleeping draught, but I was only half paying attention. My role as Girl Who Flips Two Switches had been fulfilled, and I was playing a mind-numbing game on my phone in a corner far backstage waiting for the play to be over and to receive permission to leave.

I could hear Jessica’s baffled voice drawing closer, like she was following James and he was coming here.

‘What girl?’

‘The girl! The crying girl! Long hair, blue eyes, black outfit.’

‘I have long hair and blue eyes,’ Jessica pointed out. ‘And all the crew is in black. It’s mandatory.’

They were about two feet from my hiding spot tucked behind an abandoned set piece, some hanging fabric, and an old speaker. If I’d been wearing anything other than black, there’s no way James wouldn’t have spotted me, but as it was, I was invisible.

James Neely was the opposite of invisible in his Romeo getup, puffy sleeves and all, hair swept to the side and perfectly in place despite the agitated way he kept running his hands through it.

‘Nyx is sick,’ he told Jessica. ‘They’re throwing up in the bathroom as we speak, and we need someone to put on their costume, read Juliet’s lines, and make it passably okay so that I can finish this thing because there is a literal talent agent here and—’

He broke off and closed his eyes, seeming to count to ten as he inhaled.

My plan was to sink farther back into my hiding place, to wait out the not my monkeys, not my circus scene playing before me. But because I was terribly, terribly unlucky or maybe because the magic felt jilted or maybe it was just a fluke… my turned-on-silent-mode phone decided then was a great time to start playing the theme music from Angry Birds at full blast.

The fabric was jerked aside instantly.

Jessica was looking at me openmouthed. She asked something along the lines of, Where did you come from?

But I didn’t really hear her, because James was staring at me with the same intensity as when he’d come into the fitting room and found me crying, but this time it was the opposite of murderous.

It was relieved.

Like I was the sun in the east and he was standing below my balcony as Angry Birds continued its chipper ditty and…

‘You,’ he said, and it was half a word, half a breath. ‘Can you do Act Five?’

‘Can I do… What?’

He pulled me from my perch onto the ground beside him, reaching for my phone and turning it back to silent in one smooth motion.

‘Act Five,’ he repeated. ‘You are mostly lying there fake-dead and then you are dead. The knife is retractable, you literally can’t mess it up. Do you know the lines?’

‘Do I know the—’

James affected a girl’s voice. It wasn’t just that it was high-pitched the way most people did when they were trying to be feminine; it was like he was becoming Juliet in front of me with just one line. His countenance softened and his voice came from a different part of his chest than his regular speaking voice.

‘What’s here? A cup closed in my true love’s hand?’ he recited as Juliet.

I rolled my eyes and quoted after him, finishing the line I had heard Nyx say at least a million times since January. ‘Poison I see has been his timeless end!’

Jessica had yet to close her mouth, her eyes darting between us.

‘You can’t be serious,’ she said. ‘She can’t be Juliet.’

James and I were still staring at each other. His lips tilted a little, the suggestion of a smile, but his eyes were still intense, nearly frantic.

‘Go change,’ he told me, ignoring Jessica completely. ‘The show, as they say, must go on.’

I blinked, the reality of the situation hitting me full-force as I turned to Jessica to get a brief reprieve from James’s intense gaze.

‘Don’t we have understudies or something?’ I asked her.

James was the one to answer, forcing me to look at him once more.

‘It’s a one-semester class with one showing of the play. We were lucky to have enough people to put Romeo and Juliet on to begin with. Understudies weren’t an option.’

‘Wait,’ I said, like he could be reasoned with, like I could talk myself out of the inevitable. ‘Wait. I can’t… This is… I’m going to freeze up! It would be better to end it here. The agent has seen what you can do. There’s no reason to—’

‘Come play with me,’ he said, and the way he said it – like we were the only ones in the world, like we were eleven instead of twenty-one, like he was welcoming me into his universes – did something to my stomach.

‘It’s all just make-believe,’ he said. ‘It’s a play. It’s supposed to be fun.’

Now I was really panicking.

‘I’ll mess it up for you,’ I said. ‘I’ll make it not fun and it’ll ruin your life and—’

‘You do not have to do this,’ he interrupted, and somehow he was even closer than before. ‘But I think you’ll always regret if you don’t. Who knows what could happen?’

It was enough for twenty-one-year-old me to dumbly take the costume from a rather green-looking Nyx, shove it on over my bra and the jeans I didn’t bother to take off because we had to be onstage now and did I mind using Nyx’s stage mascara if someone brought me a cotton swab?

He was enough. James Freakin’ Neely with his convincing eyes and mouth and…

The curtain rose.

It did not go seamlessly, of course. How could it? Even with hours of watching rehearsals and table reads and lines being run as I flipped the same switch over and over again, I couldn’t have remembered all the blocking, the nuances that had been worked out under the careful eye of the director and the even more critical eye of James.

But we made it work, he and I. We got my secretly-denim-wearing self to the wooden platform painted to look like marble and then – beneath the stage lights someone else clad in black was operating beyond the coughing, rustling audience – we played. Just like he promised.

James transformed before me. Through the smallest of slits in my eyes, I watched as he found me, how he wept. Was he actually sweating in distress? When James clutched me to him, I stopped being Juniper Green and started being Juliet Montague and he stopped being anyone other than Romeo, like he was squeezing the character into me through my torso.

I’d been a reader all my life. When we were made to read Romeo and Juliet our freshman year of high school, I hadn’t scoffed at the language or been confused like so many of my classmates. I hadn’t thought it was just a silly play about silly teenagers – a favorite litmus test for intelligence by English professors, I would learn later when I made it my major – but instead saw it for what it was, what I think Shakespeare intended it to be: an entertaining love story that could have gone on longer if not for the hubris of those who were supposedly older and wiser interfering.

But even then I couldn’t know what it feltlike to be Juliet, couldn’t really envision how her arm would reach out to cradle Romeo’s poisoned body, how she woke expecting to find him there with her, yes, but alive.

For the second time that night, I felt the tears coming.

Something unlocked in me after the Romeo-James hybrid fell spectacularly to the stage. Flashes of the police report, of the kind EMT who I spoke with at length when my therapist at the time recommended I do so to find closure in the wake of Mom’s death, and of the images I had painted in my head of Mom’s final moments brought sobs to my throat, to Juliet’s.

I can only imagine what the audience saw: a girl hysterically crying, maybe with jeans peeking out from the bottom of her gauzy dress, smushing her face against Romeo like she could bring him back by will alone or, if not, like she could suck just enough poison to go after him.

‘To make me die with a restorative,’ I managed to say through my tears, against his lips. I didn’t recognize my voice. I didn’t recognize me. That moment was so different from sitting in my room imagining myself into a book. ‘Thy lips are warm.’

I remember the clattering of the watchmen offstage, how I raised the stage knife to my breast and christened it happy dagger before slumping beside Romeo’s body. And then came the hardest part of my unforeseen performance: I had to stop sobbing.

We were dead, of course. No matter the directorial liberties taken, that was indisputable. Juliet could not be weeping.

But Juniper Green could. Juniper Green felt simultaneously healed and mortally wounded, like the thousand and one cuts – of realizing I couldn’t pick up the phone to call Mom, that she would never text me again and ask my opinion on awards seasons red-carpet outfits, or that we would never rewatch the 2005 Pride and Prejudice – all came for me at once.

I think I might have gone on crying forever if James Neely – definitely not Romeo, because he was clearly dead – hadn’t begun to whisper in my ear.

‘Leave it here,’ he said, his breath hot. ‘You can leave it all on the stage if you want. Nobody can come and pick it up if you want to leave it here, not even you if you wish it hard enough.’

We were lying next to each other, our characters no longer the focal points as the enthusiastic watchmen ran about the stage, calling for the prince and for the friar.

‘How do you know?’ I asked, my lungs forced to inflate properly to draw the words.

To this day, I’m not sure if I imagined his thumb caressing my hand, but I know I didn’t imagine what he said next.

‘I do it all the time,’ he whispered back.

And then, I swear – on all the books I’d ever read, on Mom’s grave, on my own life – his lips brushed my wet cheek. Just once. It was off script, out of character, out of common sense… but it felt like an enchanted sword coming out of the lake, like a future. Like a friend. A friend who understood.

It was one of those moments that felt bigger than me, bigger than the stage and everyone on it. A shiver went down my spine like an echo of the magic Mom took with her, and I wondered if this was not its dying breath but its return.

Maybe if a person could take magic with them when they died, another could bring it back.

The play ended. Romeo and Juliet were dead, but James Neely and Juniper Green were ever so alive as he dragged me by the hand for the final bow, my cheek burning red from the standing ovation or his lingering kiss, I couldn’t tell.

I felt reborn while the crowd cheered for us, like maybe I really hadleft something of the terrible black grief on the stage behind me, wrestled it from fiction into reality and then back to something in between, something more manageable because it had crossed the great divide between imagination and fact.

God, it sounds cheesy, but under the glaring stage lights, it felt like that performance could be the start of the rest of my life, like maybe this was one of those nights that was a fulcrum on which I would pivot my future. I could go anywhere from here, be anyone, and the newfound magic could help guide the way.

And maybe – maybe, maybe because it felt too much to even hope for – I had made a fast friend, the kind that came in during your darkest hour and stayed for all that came after.

We let go of each other’s hands when the curtains closed. It was for the best. I needed a minute away to try to breathe, to collect myself.

I worked my way through the Shakespearean throng, past Girl Who Helps Nurse, past Nurse and a bloodied Tybalt, to check on Nyx, who was still in the bathroom in the grips of the sudden-onset stomach bug. I brought them a glass of water and called one of their friends to come help them home.

When I made it back to the front of the theater, there was too much to focus on, too many well-wishers and parents and people begging actors to sign their playbills for extra credit points from totally non-related classes like biology and philosophy.

But I found James easily enough, my head overflowing with ways to ask him to dinner, to coffee, to something to extend the night. I wanted to ask him his least favorite book, his favorite book, the book currently on his nightstand. I wanted to fill the new openness in my chest with him and his words and tell him I thought we were kindred spirits, that maybe it was fate or magic or something that knew we should be together, needed to be together, and that’s why I had cried on his dressing room floor.

I was still in my jeans and Juliet’s death dress, still had Nyx’s borrowed mascara on my lashes and childish naïveté beating in my chest as I watched a tall, gruff man place a stiff hand on James’s back. They looked nothing alike, James and the man, but the man’s arm commanded a sense of ownership and his stance implied father. They were both turned toward Girl Who Helps Nurse and her uncle, who was speaking in an overly animated voice.

‘… bright future. Do you have headshots? A demo reel?’

The hand on James’s back tightened.

‘Of course,’ James answered. He shrugged a little beneath the weight of his father’s arm. ‘I could have them all sent to you this evening.’

‘Do that.’ The agent grinned. ‘And that girl, the last Juliet. Was she the understudy?’

‘We didn’t have understudies,’ James answered. ‘She was just a crew member who knew the lines.’

He couldn’t see my flinch at that just, I know, but maybe he felt it, because he rubbed the back of his neck where I was staring at him.

The agent whistled, impressed.

‘Talk about an MVP,’ he said. ‘No offense to the original Juliet, but that was one of the best Juliet deaths I’ve seen in my career. It’s like you… Well, forgive me. It’s as if Romeo really died and she was experiencing it for the first time. Astounding. Such raw talent.’

He laughed then, the agent, like he wasn’t casually rewriting my entire future, one where maybe instead of going into publishing like Mom and I had always planned, I had some sort of latent, undiscovered skill that could be the turning point and unlock what lay ahead. (It’s dangerous to tell a millennial we’re particularly gifted at something when we were raised on Disney Channel original movies and parents who said we could be and do anything if we set our minds to it.)

And then everything would make some sort of sense. It wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t make Mom’s death not the worst thing to happen in my life… But if by channeling my grief over Mom into my performance of Juliet, I was somehow able to make this magical life for myself, the kind of life Mom always believed I could lead, maybe it would mean a tiny bit of justice. The slightest indication that the world can give after it takes away.

Hope.

I held my breath, waiting for James to say he would run and find me, that the agent ought to meet me. Maybe I did have some undiscovered flair for the dramatic, because I could see it so fully in my head, how he would say, You know, I didn’t actually catch her name. Let me go find her. Then he would spin away, thinking he needed to race backstage, but there I would be, waiting.

And it wouldn’t just be the start of my career and a clear path forward that would be sparkling and easy. No, the most important part would be that I had a friend, a new friend, but one who’d already proved he was willing to literally get down and dirty (on the gross dressing room floor) to sit with me in my sadness.

But James did not spin.

James didn’t so much as twitch as his father – the kind of tall that made me immediately pity whoever sat behind him during the play – placed his large hand back on James’s shoulders and kicked the fulcrum out from under my imagined springboard.

‘He coached her through it,’ Mr Neely said, and his voice was loud and proud, though of himself or James I couldn’t be sure. ‘Isn’t that right, son?’

Here it comes, I thought. James is going to include me. He’s going to bring me along on whatever comes next.

‘Yeah, I helped her,’ James said. And that’s all he said.

‘Mighty bright kid you’ve got here, Mr Neely,’ the agent boomed. ‘My niece seems to think so, too.’

The niece in question came to stand beside James. From where I stood, I could see the perfect curve of her cheek as she looked up into James’s face and grinned the grin of a girl completely smitten.

‘I told you he was good,’ she said, still looking at James. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips. ‘And I’m absolutely biased, but I really do think he’s got it.’

‘You know,’ Mr Neely added, ‘he won’t get a credit for it because of academic politics, but James here helped the director with every aspect of this production and—’

I told myself the black pit in my stomach was disappointment from the death of my two-minute dream of being introduced to an agent. It had absolutely nothing to do with the way Girl Who Helps Nurse was touching James’s arm and the way he shrugged out from beneath his father’s hands to pull her closer.

I didn’t stay to listen to more.

If I had been older, if I hadn’t been carrying around a heart that felt like it was made just to ache, maybe it wouldn’t have hit me so hard. Maybe I would have stayed, waited for their conversation to be over and dragged James back to the dressing room with the grimy corners and asked him straight if he had kissed me, if it had meant something, and if it did… Why was he with the agent’s niece? I might have demanded he introduce me to the agent, or maybe would have bypassed James entirely and done it myself.

But if the magic was gone – and surely it was – so was my patience.

On the walk back to my dorm and my chatty roommate who had waited up for me with a frozen ravioli meal, I started building the mountain back up, this time with boulders made in equal parts of sadness and the desperate urge not to get hurt again. Ever. Not if I could help it. And if that meant forgetting magic ever existed, so be it. It wasn’t worth the ache in my chest, the swift hope and the even swifter disappointment that followed. Nothing was.

I did not see James Neely again for a very, very long time.

1

TEN YEARS LATER

My stories never begin in the right place.

In high school, when I first read the Meadow books, I started with the second one because the girl who told me about them in Spanish class misremembered the titles.

‘Forest Dark,’ she said with great certainty. ‘And then The Meadow.’

‘I thought The Meadow was first,’ I remember asking. ‘That’s why the fans are called Meadowers, right?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m just telling you,’ she said, ‘that’s how I read them and it totally made sense.’

By then, I was fairly sure I was the last person in the world to read the books, the distinctive black-and-red covers seemingly on two desks of every class period at least. Popular was an understatement. It was part of the reason I hesitated to read them, worried they’d be too hyped and my expectations would be unreachably high.

So when I finally broke down and read them to escape the FOMO, I read them out of order. I immediately jumped into the middle of Arabella and William’s heartbreak, how vampire William split them up for months and months to protect human Arabella from his vampire family, from his nature, from himself, and then later realized I had been right about The Meadow being the first book.

It was the wrong order for the series, but the right order for me, because the wrongness of my timeline didn’t stop with The Meadow.

There had been Mom’s passing when I was in college – as unexpected as it was fast – and how the police had said she must have died moments after we’d said goodbye from my Thanksgiving break visit. She was near the door when they found her, just past the lopsided rug she had crocheted herself. They told me she was smiling, like the undiagnosed heart disease had snatched her out of existence before her lip muscles had time to register the loss of her.

Then there was graduating with, of all things, an English degree during a huge recession. I had intended to go into publishing. Mom always said I would flourish if I surrounded myself with books and the people who loved them. I wanted to be on an editorial track, to midwife other people’s books from mind to bound copy. And I wanted to prove to Mom – wherever she was – that this dream she believed in for me could still happen now that she was gone.

But because of the timing thing, it was destined to fail. After a year of trying and failing post-graduation to get so much as an unpaid internship I almost definitely wouldn’t have been able to afford – some with notes attached from well-wishing hirers that said things like, ‘If only you had graduated last year, we would have snapped you up in an instant!’ – I counted my losses and took a job as a front desk manager for a chain of dental offices in Dallas disturbingly close to Mom’s old house. Like a homing pigeon returning to its deserted post bearing nothing but disappointment.

Even the podcast I started in retaliation against what was beginning to feel like a claustrophobic life was confirmation of being unlucky with timing. How I hit just off the mark enough for it to be popular but not mega-popular – too many podcasts already cramming the headphones and aux cords before I made it on the scene – but then being just right enough to attract the crappiest buyers. The ones who promised me royalties and performance fees would follow the measly two grand they used to buy the rights to the show, its title, and the theme before they ghosted me, replacing me with a YouTube personality to attract more listeners.

It’s my own fault, in a way, the podcast. I should have known better than to even try to deviate from normal, no matter how much it rubbed me the wrong way that my mother, if she were still here, would be so disappointed that my life is despairingly average. If she showed up like a Dickens ghost, she would probably do it in New York, haunting from building to building looking for a daughter she wouldn’t find because I just couldn’t swing it, our dream.

Juniper Green is many things, but extraordinary isn’t one of them. The extraordinary – the magical and ghostly and everything in between – I’ve learned, is best left to books.

Maybe my perpetual bad timing is a result of the magic leaving, too. Because lately (like, the last decade lately), I’ve wondered if I’m a step out of time, like somewhere in my life I sneezed too hard and blew myself backward or forward by a second or two and now I’m doomed to spend eternity trying to claw those moments back.

I’m always half a step too late, just off the mark. Finding things at the exact incorrect time, just tantalizing enough to feel real, but just wrong enough not to go the distance.

Which is exactly how it feels to be standing here in front of the sleekly modern recording studio nestled into the trees: Like I’m too late. Like I skipped a chapter entirely. It reminds me of that awful night in college, stepping out from stage left as a character in a play expected to know the lines that were never hers to begin with. Or more recently, the late-night Google searches of ‘Is it normal to feel this unfulfilled?’ only to find lengthy articles about millennial exhaustion and think pieces about the caricature of the burnt-out gifted-and-talented kids as adults.

Of course this is nothing like that. If I stop and think about it, really think, I can trace the timeline that led me to this moment like fresh steps in snow: the podcast being just successful enough for me to quit my job, then selling the podcast thinking it would mean more work but instead finding it meant none, then the steadily rising rent in Texas combined with my inability to find another job forcing me to ask Dad if I could move in with him in Colorado for a little while to figure things out…

And of course I remember the email. The email. The one that was impossibly forwarded to my current inbox from my long-deleted On the Same Page podcast account. The one ‘personally’ inviting me to come to an open audition for a high-profile dramatized audio series at – get this – Tatum Sound Studios.

Which is a ridiculous sentence all on its own, and not just because it’s almost certainly a scam to get me to pay money for audio equipment or something.

When I was a kid visiting Dad during the Colorado summers, Tatum was a singular school for all twelve grades, a row of tourist shops bookended by the local grocer and the half sporting goods, half junk shop that looked as old as the mountains that envelop the town, and a diner just off the road leading to the big ski resort towns.

The biggest thing that ever happened here was when they filmed one – as in the singular – post-wrap scene from the final film of the Meadow series in the mountains above Tatum. It wasn’t even a pivotal scene: It was a one-off dream sequence where Arabella looks at William through snow. Apparently, Tatum was conveniently blanketed at the time and both of the hotshot actors could get here no problem and thus, every single gift shop in town now lays claim to this factoid by selling Meadow gifts including william was here keychains.

Even still, I think the town probably only got, like, two tourists from the ordeal.

But even if I’ve been stuck somewhere outside the regular course of time, Tatum hasn’t.

I passed a Target on my way here. A Target. I used to have to beg Dad to drive me the hour into town just to have more than the two tampon options carried at Drew’s Drugstore. Now Tatum is town.

Even the electric chime that sounds above my head as I stand frozen in the cracked doorway of the sound studio sounds new and expensive and like progress, as if the recording studio belongs in LA or Chicago or a place where 99 percent of the citizens wear something other than cowboy-chic athleisure.

I really shouldn’t be here.

I’m thirty-two. Not twelve, not sixteen, not even twenty-one.

Thirty. Two.

It’s time to start acting like it and stop wasting my time.

I’m about to turn around, to not step into the studio to begin with – because, god, when will I learn – but then the heavy black wooden door opens wider and a woman is standing in front of me and smiling with teeth straight out of a toothpaste commercial. She beckons me toward her as the iPad in her hand catches the sun’s setting rays. I am momentarily blinded by their reflection enough to walk forward, a fish caught in a net of confusion rather than fiber.

It’s like my superpower: Juniper Green, life stumbler.

‘Welcome, welcome. Are you here for the audition? We’re so excited you could join us,’ the woman says, shutting the door behind me. ‘We’ve had quite the turnout as you can see, so please go ahead and make yourself comfortable.’

About a dozen or so women look up from the leather couches and chairs of the lobby. I am not the only fish in this sea.

‘I’m Haniya,’ the woman continues. ‘I’m helping Ms Harding out with auditions today. And you are?’

I’m making awkward eye contact with a woman directly in my eyeline, another auditioner, obviously. She has one of those expensive self-heating travel thermoses beside her with a tea bag, a tiny jar of honey, and a leather portfolio that is balanced on her perfectly bent knee. She looks like she belongs here in the sea of nice pants and nice shirts that almost certainly didn’t come from Old Navy four years ago like my maxi dress.

I look down at my empty hands, wishing I had a folder or sheet of paper or something to hold.

‘I’m Juniper,’ I tell Haniya.

Her eyes widen, just a smidge. She glances down and taps aggressively at the iPad.

‘Juniper Green?’

She sounds surprised.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s me.’

Haniya is back to tapping on the iPad.

‘Excellent,’ she says, not looking up. ‘Catarina said to send you straight on back when you arrived. Follow me, please.’

I can feel the eyes of the women in the lobby following me, burning into me. I want to turn and assure them that this must be a fluke, an outright mistake. Or maybe it’s not and they’re calling me back to tell me they’re not sure how my name ended up on the list for an audio drama when I have no prior experience and I can go home now and stop wasting everyone’s time.

Haniya’s heels click pleasantly down the long hallway of doors. She still hasn’t looked up from the tablet, is still typing. The air-conditioning is freezing in here – much too cold for a fairly mild June in Colorado – and now I’m deeply regretting not bringing a sweater. My hair is well past my shoulders, and it’s thick… but not thick enough to function as a makeshift poncho.

Everything about this is giving me the kind of anxiety that feels like I accidentally swallowed a large chunk of ice and there’s nothing to do but wait for it to melt.

‘Here we are,’ Haniya says, like she can sense I’m about to bolt. ‘Would you like some water? Juice? Tea?’ She opens the door and keeps it propped open with the hand not holding the iPad. ‘Catarina will be right with you and she said to make yourself at home in the meantime. Look around, get a feel for the room if you’d like.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Was that a yes to tea?’

I nod, hoping my smile doesn’t look like my ice-in-throat anxiety feels.

And then she’s gone, leaving me to examine the recording room, the booth with a music stand and a light clamped to the top, a printed set of instructions on navigating the mic that hangs from above, and a small table with a bottle of water and headphones beside it.

It’s a nice setup, to say the least. The room is professionally built for acoustics, nothing like my walk-in apartment closet in Texas that I lined with Ikea rugs to record my podcast.

But just seeing the microphone, the headphones, is enough to bring it all back: The burn in my back, the way I would hunch over my laptop for hours totally absorbed in recording and editing and posting. How I would dream, the way I felt more in touch with other people through working on my show in that cramped closet than I did in the middle of a crowded mall or the busiest of grocery store aisles.

I built my own little world in those twenty-five square feet.

And then… I signed it away, too taken in, too stupid to remember that I should never ask for more than what is normal. A smart woman would have kept on going, grateful for the podcast she had without the promise of more.

I shouldn’t be here. I should learn the lesson life has repeat-edly tried to teach me before it gets a chance to take another swing.

But I couldn’t ignore the godforsaken email that mysteriously showed up in my inbox. The email had said ‘competitive salary.’

That’s why I’m here.

If I keep telling myself it’s about the money and not reclaiming some sense of self, not thinking I can get back to the same joy I found in my recording closet and that one time in college on a stage that wasn’t mine to begin with, then maybe the inevitable disappointment won’t feel so much like another ice cube swallow.

The door opens again.

‘Juniper!’ The woman is smiling from ear to ear. ‘It’s so good to finally meet you.’

‘Nice to meet you, too,’ I say, but the words come from my autopilot brain.

She is acting like she knows me, which – unless in addition to being out of the correct timeline I am also out of my mind – is weird, because I’m certain we’ve never met.

‘I’m Catarina. I’ll be directing this project and also handpicking the voice actors. I am a big fan of your podcast,’ she says. ‘I can’t tell you how many book recommendations I’ve gotten from On the Same Page.’

Oh.

‘And it’s such a cool interview vehicle to ask people to describe their most favorite books without ever mentioning the title or author until the very end,’ Catarina continues. ‘How did you come up with it?’

There’s the anxiety again. James Freakin’ Neely might as well be standing in the corner of the room with that smug look on his face while I stutter and try to find the words.

‘A friend from college,’ I finally say, but ‘friend’ comes out sounding like ‘frand’ in my distress.

A great way to start my audition for a job that requires I read clearly and confidently.

Not to mention my answer is a total lie. We were not friends. We weren’t exactly enemies, either. We were a good memory that turned sour before it finished forming. We were both of us a step too far in the wrong direction, already passing each other by before we could even say hello.

And yet I feel a minuscule flare of anger just hot enough to melt any ice left in my throat.

‘But he just asked me the question,’ I tell Catarina, smiling in what I hope is a confident, charming kind of way. ‘The opposite, actually. He wanted me to tell him about my least favorite book. I had the idea to turn it into a podcast and make it the primary interview question.’