“Fine, but nothing more than hello,” she said. “I mean it. I won’t have you mixing with these sordid people.”

Lindsey had never suspected that Joanie Peet could be such a judgmental shrew. She was boggled that the woman who had raised Dylan, one of the nicest kids she’d ever had work at the library, could be so awful.

Dylan looked miserable, but he nodded his head. Lindsey watched the two of them leave. She wondered if she should have leapt to her friends’ defense. But then, she sort of suspected Joanie was right about Robbie. The comments about Violet, however, really chapped her.

“Lindsey, how goes the mask?”

“Huh, what?” she asked. Lindsey turned and found Beth standing beside her. Beth was looking at her with concern.

“I think your hands are going to harden into claws,” Beth said.

Lindsey looked down at the mixture on her hands. Then she glanced at the chicken wire she had been trying to wrap with the soggy newspaper strips.

“I think we can safely conclude that papier-mâché is not my forte.”

Beth lifted up the chicken wire, which Lindsey had molded into the shape of a donkey head.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think you’ve almost got it.”

Lindsey watched while Beth deftly dampened a few dry strips in the bowl of paste and smoothed them over the frame. She carefully folded a few more strips around the ears and managed to fill in the sad gaps that Lindsey had missed.

“There,” she said. “When this dries and you paint it, it will be fabulous.”

“I’d hug you, but we’d probably get stuck together forever,” Lindsey said.

Beth grinned. “Come on, let’s go wash up.”

The bathrooms for the cast and crew were at the back of the theater near the dressing rooms. They could hear Violet’s voice directing the cast on stage mingling with the set builders, who were pounding nails on the loading dock out back.

Lindsey wondered if Sully was here tonight. She hadn’t seen him earlier—not that she was looking for him she reminded herself, refusing to acknowledge any disappointment.

Trying not to touch anything, they walked through the theater with their hands up in the air like surgeons. Beth pushed through the swinging door that led to the ladies’ room with her hip, holding it open for Lindsey. The bathroom was empty, and they each took a sink.

Lindsey had just gotten the last of the goop off of her hands and was reaching for a paper towel when a crash sounded from the stage followed by several shouts. She and Beth exchanged surprised glances and hurried toward the sound of the commotion.

When they managed to push through the curtains at the side of the stage, Lindsey’s heart caught in her throat when she saw Robbie sprawled on the ground with a large tree, saved from a previous play to be used in this show, lying across him.