Chapter Text
Todd Anderson tells people he wanted a quiet summer.
It’s not entirely untrue, though it sounds more intentional than it is when he says it out loud, like a decision rather than something he backed into after every invitation to go somewhere else slowly dissolved into other people’s plans, other people’s friendships, other people’s lives moving forward without him quite knowing when he stopped being included in them.
The truth is that most of his classmates are somewhere else now.
Coastal roads and borrowed cars, someone’s parents’ beach house, a camping trip that was organised in a burst of enthusiasm months ago and now exists as a series of photos he has not been sent.
Todd is in town.
He takes a summer job at Henley Hall because Mr McAllister from school mentioned it once in passing at the end of English class, something about needing extra hands backstage and “good steady workers, not the dramatic type,” and Todd remembers nodding without really knowing if he meant to accept or if he simply didn’t know how to say no quickly enough to avoid it becoming real.
There had been other conversations happening around that same time—people talking about college in the autumn, while Todd nodded along and said he was going too, because he is going, technically, to study English at a place that looks very good on paper and keeps appearing in brochures on the kitchen counter, even if it still doesn’t feel like something he is stepping into so much as something he is being placed inside.
At home, it had been discussed in careful tones people use when they are trying not to insult or diminish despite their misgivings.
His older brother Jeffrey had never needed that kind of carefulness; everything he did had already been correctly aligned with expectation: top grades, clear direction, the kind of certainty that made adults relax when they said his name. He had gone on to study finance, something with structure and outcome and a clear shape at the end of it, something that made sense when explained at family gatherings.
Todd, by comparison, had found himself answering questions that were not quite accusations but were not quite curiosity either.
What exactly do you do with English?
What job comes after that?
Are you planning to teach?
Write?
Is that really enough?
His mother had asked them gently, like she was trying not to disturb something fragile in the asking.
His father had asked them more practically, like the answer might eventually resolve itself if they looked at it from the right angle.
And Todd had realised, somewhere in the middle of those conversations, that he did not actually have a clearer answer than they did.
He only knew that when he thought about everything else—everything more “useful,” more defined, more certain—his mind slipped away from it the way it always had in school, drifting instead toward books, toward lines of dialogue, toward the small private sense that language might be the only thing he understood without having to translate himself first.
It wasn’t confidence, but perhaps closer to recognition.
Not that English would save him, or lead him somewhere obvious, but that it was the only subject he could imagine living beside for a long time without feeling like he was pretending to belong to it.
As of now, he is standing outside a brick building that looks older than anything else on the street.
Inside, the air changes immediately.
It is cooler, but not fresh; instead it smells of dust that has been warmed and cooled and warmed again over decades of rehearsals, of paint that has soaked into wood, of fabric that has absorbed the shape of bodies that are no longer here, and Todd finds himself slowing without meaning to, like the building is not just a place he has entered but something that has begun to notice him back.
“Ah,” says a voice, sharp enough to cut through his thoughts. “You must be Todd Anderson.”
Todd looks up.
The man is older, maybe fifty, with paint under his fingernails and a clipboard held like it has personally wronged him.
“Yeah,” Todd says, and then immediately wishes he had said it differently, something more confident or at least more complete.
“Campbell,” the man says, as if that explains everything worth knowing. “You’ll be doing whatever needs doing. If I ask you to move something, you move it. If I ask you not to break something, you really don’t break it.”
Todd nods.
He is very good at nodding.
Campbell starts walking without checking if he is followed, which turns out to be an expectation rather than a suggestion, so Todd follows, weaving through corridors that narrow and widen unpredictably, past rooms full of wooden frames that look like half-built memories and shelves stacked with paint tins that have names written in faded marker along their sides.
The theatre is bigger than he expected.
Not in the way cinemas are big, or malls are big, but in the way old things are big, where space is not just empty but accumulated, layered, as if every performance that has ever happened here has left something behind that still takes up room even after the actors have gone.
“This is the stage,” Campbell says eventually, pushing aside heavy curtains with the impatience of someone who has done it thousands of times and no longer thinks it deserves ceremony.
Todd stops.
The auditorium is empty, but not in a hollow way; it feels occupied by absence, rows of seats fading into darkness like they are waiting for something to return, and the stage itself is enormous in a way that makes him suddenly aware of his own body in it, too small and too temporary to belong there.
Campbell glances at him.
“You get used to it.”
Todd is not sure he believes that, but he says nothing, because he has already learned that silence is safer than saying the wrong version of what he means.
The day becomes work after that in the most ordinary sense of the word: paint, carry, sweep, repeat, his arms beginning to ache in a way that feels strangely grounding, like effort is a language he understands even when everything else is uncertain.
He is given small tasks that require no interpretation.
Move that flat.
Hold this while I screw it in.
Go find Campbell.
Go away again.
People pass him constantly, but few of them look at him for longer than a second, and he realises this is what it means to be new in a place that already has its own ecosystem, its own gravity, its own sense of who matters and who is simply passing through.
At lunch, he sits alone on a wooden crate outside the loading doors, eating a sandwich that tastes like paper because he packed it in a hurry and forgot everything except the fact that he would need to eat something.
Inside, he can hear laughter from the crew.
Someone is telling a story that ends in shouting and applause.
Todd does not try to join them.
He is not sure where the boundary is between “not included yet” and “not included at all,” and he has learned not to test it unless necessary.
Around 3pm, while he is trying to figure out where he is meant to be useful next, someone calls him from the lighting booth above the stage.
“New guy?”
He looks up.
A girl is sitting cross-legged among equipment, hair pulled back, hands already moving before he has fully answered.
“Yeah,” he says.
“I’m Maya,” she adds, as if that is all that is required before returning to what she is doing.
Later, when he is handed up to help her untangle a coil of wiring, she glances at him properly for the first time, like she is measuring whether he is the kind of person who will either break things or learn quickly enough not to.
“You just finished school?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“College next?”
“Yeah.”
There is a pause that feels slightly heavier than it should.
“What are you studying?”
“English,” Todd says, and hears how flat it sounds even as he says it, like something that belongs on a form rather than in a life.
Maya nods once, considering.
“That’s… specific.”
“I guess.”
“You don’t sound very sure.”
Todd almost laughs, but doesn’t.
“I don’t really know what I’m supposed to sound like.”
That makes her look at him again, briefly.
Not unkindly. Just like she is noticing something she doesn’t need to fix.
“Most people don’t,” she says, and goes back to her wiring.
Which, for some reason, feels more reassuring than it should.
The afternoon stretches and work continues in fragments. Slowly, people begin to leave.
Crew members disappear in pairs, then alone, then in small clusters that dissolve into the corridors.
By the time Campbell finally appears again, the theatre feels less like a workplace and more like an emptied version of itself, as though it is exhaling everything that had been filling it during the day.
“You staying late?” he asks.
Todd hesitates, then nods.
Campbell shrugs.
“Suit yourself. Lock up when you’re done. And don’t burn the place down.”
“I won’t.”
“That’s what they all say,” Campbell mutters, already turning away.
Todd takes out his notebook. It is not large, but its leather cover looks old and beaten up.
Inside are fragments.
A note about two people who keep missing the moment where they should stop pretending everything is fine.
A line of dialogue he wrote down earlier and then crossed out, then wrote again underneath in worse handwriting.
A description of a late-night setting—nothing specific, just “somewhere open late, where people stay longer than they meant to.”
He turns a page.
There are character profiles too, written unevenly, like he doesn’t quite trust himself to commit to them yet.
One of them is someone who talks too much when they are nervous, then regrets it immediately after.
The other is someone who says very little, but notices everything anyway.
He hasn’t named them.
He flips to a blank page.
For a while he does not write anything, only listens to the building around him, the distant creaking, the wind pressing lightly against the loading doors, and then, slowly, as if he is not entirely deciding to do it, he begins.
He writes ideas first.
– a server closing up while someone keeps talking because neither of them wants to leave
– a conversation that starts about work and almost becomes something else, then doesn’t
– silence that lasts too long but somehow doesn’t feel empty
– a line someone says that the other person remembers incorrectly later
He pauses.
The pencil hovers above the page.
Then, underneath it all, he writes a single sentence, just a simple stage direction:
[Enter a boy who wanted the stage more than anything.]
He stares at it.
It feels ridiculously melodramatic.
He picks up his eraser to rub it out, but before he can, someone calls his name out behind him.
“Hey! Todd.”
He flinches, shuts the notebook quickly, and tucks it back into his bag as if it has been caught doing something illegal.
Maya is standing in the doorway, holding a coil of cable slung over one shoulder like she has forgotten it is there.
“You heading out now?”
“Nah. I’ll stay behind a bit longer.”
Maya nods and walks past him, crossing the stage with the easy familiarity of someone who knows exactly where not to step even in the dark.
Then she reaches the centre, bends slightly, and without ceremony switches on a single bare bulb mounted on a portable stand.
The light clicks alive immediately. A small circle of brightness spills onto the stage floor, interrupting the dimness that has gathered there.
“Why did you turn that on?” Todd asks.
Maya pauses, one hand still resting on the stand.
“Because we’re leaving soon,” she says, like that should be obvious.
“I mean, yes—but what is it?”
“You don’t know what a ghost light is?”
Todd shakes his head.
Maya blinks once, then lets out a short laugh.
“Oh. Okay. You really have never worked at a theatre.”
“What?”
“It’s alright, I guess I expected someone to have mentioned it before” She gestures vaguely around them. “Campbell must be in a mood.”
Todd shifts slightly. “He didn’t really explain much.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That tracks.”
She crouches beside the light stand, speaking more easily now, like this is one of those things she’s said many times before but still finds slightly interesting when someone is hearing it for the first time.
“It’s practical,” she says first. “You leave it on so no one hurts themselves walking onto a dark stage. There’s pits, cables, bits of set that never get cleared properly, all of that. Last thing you want is someone breaking their neck falling into the orchestra pit.”
She taps the stand lightly with her fingers.
“And it’s cheaper than leaving the whole theatre lit all night. One bulb versus everything else.”
Todd nods slowly, absorbing it.
Then she straightens again, brushing her hands together like she’s finished with the practical explanation.
“But,” she adds, a little more lightly, “theatre people are also, unfortunately, a bit weird.”
Todd looks at her.
Maya tilts her head.
“You’ll hear different versions depending on who you ask,” she says. “Some people say it’s bad luck to leave a theatre completely dark. Like if you shut everything off, the place sort of… forgets itself.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Todd says automatically.
“It doesn’t have to,” she replies. “It’s theatre, everything’s made up.”
Then she adds, “And some people say it’s for the ghosts.”
Todd frowns slightly. “Ghosts.”
Maya shrugs, but there’s a faint smile in it now, like she’s letting herself enjoy how absurd it sounds out loud.
“Yeah. Every theatre has its own, or many. Old actors, crew, people who never really left. So you leave a light on so they’ve got something to work with.”
She glances at him.
“Most people don’t mean it seriously,” she says. “But nobody wants to leave the theatre completely dark.”
For a moment, Todd just looks at the light.
The theatre doesn’t feel haunted. But at the same time, Todd has never believed in ghosts.
Maya starts gathering her stuff again, cradling things in her arm with practised efficiency.
“You’ll get used to it,” she says, almost as an afterthought. “Or you won’t, and you’ll leave.”
Todd doesn’t know how to answer that.
“Well, goodnight Todd. Don’t fall off anything. Campbell gets weird about paperwork.”
And then she’s gone, disappearing into the wing with the easy confidence of someone who knows exactly where the exits are even in the dark.
The theatre settles again, dormant.
The ghost light stands in the centre of the floor, its pale circle of illumination spilling across the worn boards. Beyond it, the rest of the auditorium dissolves into shadow, rows of empty seats disappearing one by one until he can no longer tell where the audience ends and darkness begins.
He thinks about Maya's story.
Ghosts. Old actors who never left. Theatres refusing to go dark.
It sounds ridiculous.
Then again, so does dedicating your life to pretending to be someone else in front of strangers, and people do that every day.
The thought makes him smile despite himself.
Only a little.
The smile disappears almost immediately, but it was there.
He reaches down and pulls his notebook from his bag again.
The same half-formed characters and the same unfinished ideas are there.
And, at the bottom of the page:
[Enter a boy who wanted the stage more than anything.]
Todd grimaces.
It is still embarrassingly dramatic. It sounds like something written by someone trying very hard to sound like a playwright.
For a moment, he genuinely considers getting rid of it. He picks up the eraser and pauses.
Maybe the line is terrible.
Maybe the entire play is terrible.
At the moment, he isn't even sure if it qualifies as a play at all.
But for the first time all day, that uncertainty doesn't feel quite as paralysing as it usually does.
He lowers the eraser and picks up his pencil instead.
Underneath the stage direction, he writes:
A summer. A diner. Two people who work too late.
Then, after a moment:
One of them is leaving.
He stares at the words.
He feels the faint satisfaction of having put something down before it could disappear.
Outside, a car passes somewhere beyond the walls.
Inside, the ghost light burns steadily.
Todd writes another line.
Then another.
And long after everyone else has gone home, the theatre keeps him company while he does.