“It’s time to grow up, Sasha.” Her mother takes a deep breath, a sign that she has heard enough arguments she considers senseless. “You’re not going anywhere,” she announces in a voice swollen with anger. “I’m your mother and I’m not letting you go. You will stay here and go to college and get a decent job. And that’s that.”

Sasha doesn’t know how her mother or Grandpa can stop her from leaving, unless they bar the windows and double-lock the front door. The thought that they are powerless makes her sit up and pull her shoulders back.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed, this gesture of defiance, and she sees her mother pause, but it’s a pause before a storm.

“Why can’t you be normal, like everyone else?” Her mother’s voice is both authoritative and pleading. “Can’t you see that acting will take you nowhere? That all you’ll be doing is wasting your life?”

“I’m wasting my life now!” Sasha spits out.

Her mother gasps. “Better than an actress, why don’t you join a circus and become a clown! You’re certainly acting like one.”

“An actress?” roars Grandpa, who has been uncharacteristically silent. He throws his spoon to the table and fixes his blue-eyed stare on Sasha. “I won’t allow you to make this house into the laughingstock of the entire town. Do you hear me?”

His ridicule of Theater makes Sasha livid. “If I want to be a clown, I’ll be a clown!” she cries out in what remains of her stage voice. “I’ll be anything I want to be! Even a circus is better than this pretense of life.”

“Don’t you dare yell at us!” her mother shouts. “What makes you believe they will even look at you in Moscow? You think those plays you put on in your drama club were so great? They weren’t. They were pathetic. Pathetic plays in a pathetic theater in a pathetic little town. You’re nothing but a fool, like all the other young fools from all over the country who race to Moscow like flies to sugar, all wanting to be stars, all thinking they’re the next Sarah Bernhardt.”

Sasha cringes because she fears her mother may turn out to be right. The best drama school in Moscow, the one where she wants to go, admits only twenty-five applicants a year from all over the country, and there must be thousands of people like her who have been infected with the germ of Theater and who will do anything to have a life of real make-believe. The thought that she may fail makes her anger blaze even hotter.