Servants of the Storm Read Online Free Page B

raindrop could shatter it all.
    Parking is always sketchy, but I manage to squeeze into a space in a back alley. My school puts on two plays a year, andsince we don’t have a stage, we take over the old Liberty Theater downtown for a week of dress rehearsals and a weekend of shows. It’s pretty broken down, which is why they let a bunch of high school kids invade it with paint and makeup and glue guns. And the owner is this seriously grouchy old guy named Murph who is always yelling at us in the girls’ dressing room, trying to catch a peek during costume changes.
    Baker trips on a chunk of concrete as we pass the creepy antiques shop next door to the Liberty, and the old lady inside frowns at us from the window, where she’s dusting a hideous painting of a monkey in a hat. This is my third year doing plays here, and I’ve never seen a single person in the shop besides her. It doesn’t even have a name, and the junk in the dull windows never seems to change. Sometimes I wonder if maybe the doors are locked from the inside, if she’s just trying to keep all of her oddities and antiquities to herself. We hurry past and cross in front of Savannah’s oldest theater.
    The Liberty looks dilapidated and sad, even though Josephine left it miraculously undamaged. The front windows are all pasted over with moldering posters from past plays, some so ancient that they’re still in black and white. The whitewash over the bricks has seen better days, and the awning hangs in flaps like it was raked by giant claws. Most of the lightbulbs around the marquee are broken. Still, it’s better than performing Shakespeare in our school’s cafeteria, which smells like burned beef sticks and swamp farts. The four front doors to the Liberty are always chained, except onopening night. As we pass, I reach out to touch the rusted links held together with a shiny new lock. Someone has jammed gum into the keyhole.
    “People are monsters,” Baker says with mock sadness and a hand over his heart.
    The street is almost empty. The tourist crowds will pick up closer to Christmas, but for now, in that dead space between Halloween and Thanksgiving, Savannah looks her age, possibly older. Faded flags and swags of moss flap in the breeze, and I hug myself and wish I’d brought a heavier coat. Hard to believe we were having a freak heat wave before Josephine, and almost exactly one year later it smells like snow that will never fall.
    I open the theater’s side door, and Baker follows me into the darkened hallway. I stop, caught in a wave of memories. The first time Carly and I burst through that door, we were giggling, freaking out over our first speaking parts in our freshman show. Joining drama club had been her idea, but it became my passion. We were here after school, painting sets on the weekend, running lines back and forth with our backs against the bricks. We hugged our parents in this hallway, our makeup and glitter rubbing off on their Sunday suits, bouquets from the Piggly Wiggly in each hand. A senior once gave Carly a carnation after a show, right here where I’m standing, and she blushed so brightly that I could see the pink, even through her blue-black skin. They went on one date, and when he tried to feel her up, she kneed him in the nuts, and he was out of school for a week.
    This is the first time I’ve been here since the flood, smelling the wet-rot of the water overlaying the centuries of cigarette smoke and wood.
    “You okay?” Baker asks.
    I reach for the wall, one hand to my head. It’s starting to ache, and I hear a weird hum right on the edge of my consciousness.
    “I’m fine,” I say, focusing on the peeling green paint under my hand. “Just a headache.”
    Honestly, I didn’t think I would feel any effects this quickly from dropping the meds. The pills arrive in an unmarked bottle of old-fashioned glass, and the white tablets aren’t stamped. I couldn’t pinpoint the formulation online, so I don’t know exactly