I used to be one of them—a stage-adrenaline junkie. The thrill of opening night, the energy of the theater coursing through me as I took my mark. The lights in my face. The blackness of the audience in front of me. I knew my parents were there, Mom probably cursing her phone for not having enough storage space and Dad uncontrollably saying my lines with me.

The stage was my second home. A place I felt safe. Alive. Confident.

A girl prances across the stage barefoot, and I instantly recognize her as the girl who called me Freddy Krueger. Piper’s right; she does look like she’s about to sneeze-fart.

She leaps across the stage (nowhere near as gracefully as Sara would have) and takes a bow in front of a boy, who gives a fake clap. She tousles his hair and, as she stands up straight, catches me watching her before I can turn away. She whispers to the boy, who turns to look at me, too.

The news of my attendance spreads quickly, judging by the not-so-covert head turns rolling like a wave through the crowd: Alert! Alert! Drama crisis! The Burned Girl is here. In our theater.

I scrunch farther down into the velvet seat, trying to shake a feeling that I’ve never associated with the sanctity of a theater before.

Fear.

How am I going to get on that stage if just sitting here makes my skin crawl?

I guess the fire claimed both my homes.

As the seats fill, except—noticeably—the ones by me, I hug my bag as I fish out my headphones. I’m about to put them on when a boy actually scoots into the row, and I look up into dark eyes and hazelnut skin.

“Asad, right?”

He points behind us to the hallway.

“Out there, I’m just Asad. In here, I’m Asad Ebrahim, stage-lighting manager extraordinaire!” He punctuates his sentence with some over-the-top jazz hands. His arm brushes mine on the armrest and—perhaps even more alarming—he doesn’t recoil in horror.

“What about you? Cast or backstage crew?” he says.

Backstage? Piper and I decided I was going to try out for a part, but I hadn’t even considered the crew option. Backstage totally still counts.

“Crew,” I decide quickly. I put the headphones back in my bag. “Definitely crew.”

“Cool. Me too.” He points behind us at a small boothlike room with large, round lights facing the stage. “I handle all the lights, so I’m usually trapped up there.”

He looks around me and his smile fades for a millisecond.

“So Piper really didn’t come, huh? Aren’t you two attached at the hip?”

“She’s not doing drama anymore.”

“Bummer,” he says. “She was the only one of the drama queens who ever bothered to learn my name. I think some of them actually think it’s ‘More spotlight!’ ”