“Just so you know, I’m having surgery. On my eyes. So by opening night, things will be a little…better.”

Tony’s lips slope downward beneath his goatee into the same miffed expression from the audition room.

“With that voice, no one’s going to be thinking about your face,” he says. “And neither should you.”

Piper slaps my butt after Tony walks away. I shield my eyes from the slanting afternoon light so I can see more than her silhouette. She’s smiling wide, bigger than I’ve seen her smile in a while, actually.

So even though I’m terrified about what I’ve just agreed to, I slap on a smile, too.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” I say.

“That Kenzie’s gonna have a coronary?”

“That. And you have seven weeks to perfect your standing ovation.”

27

Tony assigns the girl with the pixie hair to run lines with me for the next few weeks at rehearsal. Her name is Sage and she has the exact same temperament as a Labradoodle—bouncy, energetic, and so eager to please that you kind of want to turn a hose on her.

Turns out, when she’s not in Kenzie’s shadow, she’s nice and way too enthusiastic about helping me learn my lines. She says she’s glad to be doing something other than sitting around as Kenzie’s understudy.

“She likes me as her backup so she doesn’t have to worry about someone poisoning her lunch to get her part,” she says.

Lethal lunch? What kind of drama have I jumped into here? On the stage, Asad hammers together Dorothy’s farmhouse. Part of me wishes I were still black-shirted, helping behind the curtains and swapping old-school Broadway lines instead of learning my own.

But with Sage’s endless energy as my guide, I learn my songs (a hyperactive version of “Welcome to Munchkinland” and a cheesy-to-the-max song called “Already Home”) in a few weeks, and melt into the flow of rehearsal. Taking my mark, reading my lines, everything comes whooshing back to me like a wake-up call from my old life. Even Kenzie stays mostly out of my way, minus the occasional snide remark about how much I’m “improving” or how I’m “trying real hard.”

Sage tells me Kenzie fumed for a week over Asad’s curtain-plummeting trick.

“Not that we didn’t deserve it,” she says. She smiles genuinely, sitting cross-legged on the stage. “Of course, it doesn’t help that you stole her friend or that Tony’s been telling everyone you should have been Dorothy.”

She leans in closer to me, her eyes darting around for spies.

“Before the accident, she wasn’t quite so—”

“Demonic?” I offer.

“Intense,” Sage whispers. “I guess that crash kind of changed all of us.”

She pulls up her sleeve, showing a thick, wrinkled purply line wrapping around her forearm.

“You were in the car, too?”