Starry-Eyed Read Online Free

want to ask Henry what he means, why the star of every show, the object of envy or desire of most of the student body, wants to be forgotten, but we’re inside the auditorium now and Mr. Sandberg is waving at me.
    We’re picking up at Chloe’s big entrance scene. Walter the Sound Guy is still working on the body mics, but it doesn’t matter to Chloe. You can hear every word, catch every gesture, every bat of an eyelash. She’s dazzling. For the first time, I wonder what it’s like to be Chloe Pavone. To come alive in front of a crowd, instead of withering. To want to be seen.
    She’s not dazzling to Henry, though. His character is supposed to lust after Chloe’s, but instead he’s squeezing the puffy ball of a perfume sprayer like it’s one of those lung inflator bags you see on TV medical shows. As ever, Henry DeRuyter is playing Henry DeRuyter.
    â€œHold!” Mr. Sandburg shouts. “Where’s the spotlight on Chloe? Why is she standing in the dark!”
    Jenny Jackson in the lighting booth has been having an off night. She gets into a back-and-forth with Mr. Sandberg about how it’s not her fault, the computer’s not working, and a Bach partita churns in my head, soprano and tenor weaving over, under and around each other, tick-tick-tick-tick . . .
    â€œOkay, let’s take it from ‘Thank You, Madam.’” Mr. Sandberg and Jenny have agreed to disagree, and I give the cast their opening chord.
    . . . . .
    At nine o’clock we still haven’t even finished the first act. So much for my first period history test tomorrow. Walter the Sound Guy left for coffee half an hour ago, Jenny Jackson is in tears, and Mr. Sandberg just called Ben an asshole for dropping a line and then threw everybody out of the auditorium for twenty minutes so he can scrape together a few shreds of sanity.
    It’s counterintuitive, I know, given the manual juice press around my temples, but I escape to the practice room. I take Kreisleriana out of my bageven though I know it by heart. Seeing the dove gray cover of the manuscript with its old-fashioned font grounds me.
    I start with my favorite movement. The music is unhurried and gentle, a murmured conversation between two intimate lovers that I’ve imagined a thousand times. I hear the man’s voice, deep and bold, full of stops and starts like he’s holding back the full intensity of his feelings. The woman’s answer is lyric and lovely, with no reservations whatsoever. The lovers’ songs echo and sway, their music soothing and generous. A minute or so into it, the juice press around my head is gone and so am I. My eyes are open. I see the keyboard and the manuscript on the music stand, but I also see a drawing room in nineteenth-century Leipzig. I see women in empire waist dresses and men in gray waistcoats perched on settees and straight-back chairs. I see vases of white peonies, honeyed by candlelight.
    I see Henry DeRuyter.
    I yank my hands away from the piano.
    â€œHoly cow, what was that ?” he says.
    â€œUm, Kreisleriana .”
    â€œChrysler—what? No, I mean, I had no idea you could play the piano like that.”
    Henry is looking at me like you’d look at a centaur in your backyard. Or maybe a cyclops, I can’t tell which.
    â€œI usually only play classical for myself.”
    Henry leaves the doorway and stands in the crook of the piano. “Well, you shouldn’t. You’re incredible. That was the most incredible piece of music I’ve ever heard.”
    â€œBetter than the Rolling Stones?” My face burns. Did I really say that out loud? Why did I say that? Maybe because the Rolling Stones are pretty much the only rock band I can name off the top of my head because my dad listens to them all the time and that’s how big a loser I am.
    But Henry laughs. “Way better. Nobody in the Rolling Stones could play—what’s it called