The Girl Who Waited in the Wings
Wesley Anderson Hall, Highland High School · Bakersfield, California
The girl shook her head.
“Crew?”
Another shake.
From the house, the director called Mara’s name. She stepped through the curtain, read six lines from The Glass Orchard, and forgot about the stranger until the cast list went up the following afternoon.
Mara had been named understudy.
Beside her name, written in faded blue pencil, were two words no one admitted adding:
She waits.
Rehearsals at Wesley Anderson Hall lasted late into the evening. After sunset, the campus windows became black mirrors and the auditorium seemed to detach from the rest of Bakersfield. Beyond its doors there were parking lots, traffic signals and the orange haze of the city. Inside, there was only the stage.
Mara spent most rehearsals in the wings, following the lead actress’s lines under her breath.
The girl in blue stood beside her.
No one else acknowledged her. Actors squeezed past without turning. Crew members carried scenery through the space where she waited, and the flats briefly shivered with blue light.
Each night she came closer.
On Monday, she stood beside the rope rail.
On Tuesday, beside the prop table.
On Wednesday, Mara felt the cold edge of her skirt brush against her hand.
“What do you want?” Mara asked.
The girl unfolded her script.
Every page was blank.
Then the house lights snapped off.
In the darkness, a man whispered from somewhere above them.
“Do not give her your name.”
The work lights returned. An older man in a dark vest stood on the catwalk with a clipboard tucked beneath one arm. He regarded the girl with an expression that was neither fear nor anger, but exhaustion.
Mara blinked, and he was gone.
The girl touched one blank page.
Blue handwriting appeared beneath her fingertip.
Who are you?
Mara remembered the warning and said nothing.
The girl smiled anyway.
From then on, Mara began losing things that proved she existed.
Her name vanished from the cast list. Her student identification card showed an empty white oval where her photograph had been. In the rehearsal pictures on the drama department’s computer, the actors around her remained sharp while her own body blurred into a vertical blue stain.
People forgot conversations with her.
Her best friend asked why Mara had stopped attending rehearsals while Mara was standing three feet away.
Even her mother paused at the dinner table one night and counted the place settings twice.
“I thought I put out one too many,” she said.
Mara did not sleep.
The next morning, she climbed into the costume loft before school. Dusty clothes crowded the racks: soldiers’ coats, sequined gowns, false uniforms and dresses carrying the perfume of performers who had graduated years before.
At the far end hung the blue dress.
A paper tag had been pinned inside its collar.
JUNE BELL — UNDERSTUDY.
Beneath the name, someone had written a date in 1957.
Mara carried the tag to Leila Moreno, the student stage manager. Leila listened without interrupting. When Mara described the older man on the catwalk, Leila looked toward the empty control booth.
“I’ve seen him,” she said.
“Who was June Bell?”
They searched yearbooks, production programs and boxes of uncatalogued photographs. They found no June Bell. There was no record of the play named on the tag, no cast photograph and no explanation for how a costume dated before the school could have reached its theater.
At the bottom of the final box, however, they found a single page of a script.
Its title was The Girl Who Waited in the Wings.
Only one speech remained legible:
A part unplayed does not disappear. It waits inside the boards. It learns the footsteps of the living. And when at last an actor speaks its name, it steps into her place.
Leila folded the page.
“Opening night is tomorrow,” she said. “You cannot come into this building.”
“I’m the understudy.”
“That’s what she was.”
Opening night sold out.
Mara stayed home until seven thirty-one, when her phone rang. Leila’s voice came through beneath a roar of frightened conversation.
The lead actress had collapsed three minutes before curtain.
Her lips were blue. She could breathe, but she could not speak.
Mara drove to the school with the surviving script page on the passenger seat.
When she entered the auditorium, the audience was waiting in darkness. The stage curtain remained closed. Behind it, actors stood motionless in the glow of the work lights.
The girl in blue occupied Mara’s place among them.
She no longer looked translucent. Color warmed her cheeks. Her shoes pressed real dents into the dusty floor. In her hands she held a script filled with Mara’s notes.
Mara looked down at herself.
Light passed through her fingers.
“You took my name,” she said.
The girl opened her mouth.
Mara’s voice answered.
“You left it everywhere.”
The curtain began to rise.
Leila grabbed the rope, but it pulled through her hands. Beyond the widening gap, hundreds of faces turned toward the stage.
At the center of the first row sat the older man with the clipboard.
He tapped one finger against his watch.
“The show has started,” he whispered.
The girl walked toward Mara’s entrance.
Mara stepped in front of her.
For one frozen moment they occupied the same place. Mara saw a thousand unfinished scenes: the girl rehearsing alone before empty chairs; the girl waiting in borrowed costumes while other names appeared above hers; the girl growing older in no mirror, trapped at sixteen because the stage remembered only the age she had been when she first asked to be seen.
There was no death.
There had never needed to be one.
Some people vanished while they were still alive.
Mara raised the surviving page and began to read.
“A part unplayed does not disappear.”
The girl stopped.
Out front, the audience grew quiet. They believed the speech belonged to the play.
“It waits inside the boards,” Mara continued. “It learns the footsteps of the living.”
The older man stood. He lifted one hand toward the lights.
A white spotlight opened at center stage.
Mara held out the script page.
“June Bell,” she said, giving the ghost the name from the tag but not her own. “This is your entrance.”
June stared into the light.
Fear crossed her face.
She had waited so long to be seen that she had forgotten how.
Mara took her hand. Together they walked through the curtain.
The audience saw two teenage girls in the spotlight—one in rehearsal clothes, one in a blue dress from the 1950s. June unfolded her blank script.
This time, words appeared.
She spoke them in her own voice.
“And when at last an actor speaks her name, she does not take another’s place.”
June looked at Mara.
“She finds her own.”
The auditorium filled with applause.
Not all of it came from the living.
Figures occupied the empty spaces along the walls and beneath the balcony: actors in forgotten makeup, stagehands dusted with plaster, children in costumes from plays whose programs had been thrown away. The older man stood among them, smiling for the first time.
June bowed.
When she straightened, the spotlight contained only the blue dress. It collapsed gently onto the floor.
Mara’s body became solid again. From the wings, the lead actress gasped and found her voice.
The company performed The Glass Orchard from beginning to end.
Mara played the lead.
Afterward, they returned the blue dress to the costume loft. The tag inside its collar was blank.
The photographs restored Mara’s face. Her name returned to the cast list and to her mother’s memory. No one found any record of June Bell.
But on opening nights, a girl in 1950s clothes is still sometimes seen walking near the stage.
She no longer waits in the wings.
She crosses center.
And if an understudy is watching, the girl stops beneath the brightest light, bows and mouths four silent words:
Your place is your own.