Laini Taylor - Night of Cake & Puppets

Damn it.

I wonder what the flyer was. I’ll have to check on my way out. Not sure I want to, though. I’m afraid it will confirm my suspicion that she was just trying to avoid me.

The moment I walk into the musicians’ lounge, a voice cries my name, and I cringe. ‘Mik!’

Cinzia. ‘ Meeek ,’ she pronounces it, and it sounds like a condemnation: meek! And then she’s right in front of me and I shrink a little. I can’t help it. Being looked at by Cinzia is what I imagine having a red dot painted on your forehead by a sniper rifle feels like. Tuck, duck, and roll.

‘Did I sound not good tonight?’ she asks in English, with an exaggerated expression of woe. Everything about Cinzia is exaggerated, from her eyeliner to the way she walks, every step hip-slamming an invisible bystander out of her way.

‘What? Uh. You were fine.’ Just what every soprano longs to hear at the end of a show. You were fine.

‘I was give a shock, is difficult to be calm, for singing.’

I have no plans to ask the source of this shock, but she’s already telling me. I’m at my locker, opening it, not really paying attention, when I hear the words puppet girl and tune abruptly in. ‘She did what ?’ I ask.

‘I send her for coffee, she bring me cup full of cigarette butts. Can you believe?’

Actually, I can’t. ‘You sent her for coffee?’ This is the part I can’t believe. Had Cinzia failed to notice the voodoo eyes? ‘She’s not a coffee-girl. She’s a puppet-maker.’

Cinzia blinks. ‘No. The girl, the small one.’

I nod. ‘Right. The small girl.’ Absurdly, I feel possessive talking about her. I think that this is the first time I ever have talked about her, and I have no wish to do so with Cinzia. ‘Anyway,’ I tell her, ‘we get our own coffee here.’

She frowns at me. ‘She put cigarettes in my coffee,’ she says, like I’ve missed the point, and all I can do is try not to smile, because yeah, that’s what you’d do to Cinzia if you were the kind of person who just did what you wanted. So I guess Zuzana is the kind of person who does what she wants? That doesn’t exactly bode well for me, because wouldn’t she have talked to me by now if she had any interest in me?

How pathetically passive, waiting for her to do the talking. That’s not who I want to be. I want to be the guy in a movie who’s, I don’t know, out walking his rabbit on a leash (I don’t have a rabbit) and knows exactly how to strike up a quirky, compelling conversation. Though maybe if you’re walking a rabbit on a leash, you don’t even have to speak; the rabbit does the work for you. Not that Zuzana seems like the rabbity type. Maybe if I were walking a fox on a leash. Or a hyena. Yeah, if I had a hyena, I’d probably never have to start a conversation again.

Except for, ‘Sorry my hyena ate your leg.’

I take my violin case out of my locker and open it, and…there’s something in it. A scroll of some sort, with burned edges like a pirate’s treasure map. Some gimmicky party invitation? I don’t know. I guess I stare at it a second too long, because Cinzia follows my gaze, and what she says next changes the weight of the air.

‘ She had this!’ she declares, in a tone of triumphant denouncement. ‘The small girl. She had this when I give her coffee cup.’

What? Zuzana? My brain turns slowly. How could…something that Zuzana was holding…end up in my violin case?

Hope is tentative. The cat does not approach, but it’s possible that it’s regarding my outstretched hand with something like interest.

It’s also possible it’s all just a mistake.

Cinzia reaches for the scroll and, without thinking, I knock her hand away – lightly – and when I look at her face, her nostrils are flared. She’s giving me how dare you eyes, cradling her hand like I just took a hammer to it. I don’t apologize, but lift the scroll out myself, lightly, like a relic. The blackened edges flake under my fingertips.

It doesn’t feel like a mistake. It feels like a door opening, and lungfuls of fresh air rushing in.

‘What is it?’ Cinzia asks.

I don’t know what it is. I very much want to know, but I do not want Cinzia to know, or Radan or George or Ludmilla or anyone else milling around looking mildly interested. ‘Nothing,’ I say, putting my violin and bow away. I don’t set the scroll down while I put on my coat and backpack, but switch it from hand to hand, having no doubt that Cinzia would snatch it and feel entitled to open it. In which case maybe I would take a hammer to her hand. I tuck the scroll into my inside jacket pocket, ignoring Cinzia’s hooded glare.

‘See you tomorrow,’ I say as a general announcement.

Radan is surprised. ‘Not coming to the party?’

‘No,’ I say, because whatever is or isn’t in the scroll, I am done with default Saturday nights, and Stooge’s, and trying to block Cinzia from sitting on my lap, and spending the whole time imagining this alternate reality where a porcelain doll with voodoo eyes might be drinking tea in an oarless boat coursing down the Vltava with a parasol open to keep off the snow.

Or, you know, something slightly more likely than that.

I consider the bathroom for privacy to look at the scroll, but the door’s in view of the lounge and Cinzia is still watching me with narrowed eyes, so I leave the theater. It’s snowing. I pause on the steps to glance at the flyer that caught Zuzana’s eye earlier.

It’s gone.

It was a red page with a phone-number fringe at the bottom. Hanging in its place now is a sheet of white paper with one ragged margin. Torn from a notebook? It’s unlined, so: a sketchbook. Something is written in tiny letters right in the center. I have to lean in close and squint to read it. It says:

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you

because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.

Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

—Roald Dahl

And I know, I know it’s for me. A message. But what am I meant to see? I look out over the street, taking in bent-headed figures hurrying through the snow. No one catches my eye. A slice of river is visible as blackness in a gap between two buildings, and the lights of the castle cast a glow on the underbelly of the crouching sky. The falling snow is light powder spun by gusts, like a dance out of The Nutcracker . If there’s anything specific I’m supposed to see, I don’t know what it is, but I know that my eyes are open, and I’m not sure they’re glittering, but the world is.

I take the page down, careful not to rip it as I unstick the tape and roll it up to join the scroll in my jacket, then rush across the street to a pub, where I don’t even order a drink or sit down at a table. I hope I won’t be lingering. I grab the scroll out of my jacket and slip the black satin ribbon off, and…I unroll it.

And there she is.

A beautiful drawing of a beautiful face. Her big, dark eyes look wide and expectant. She’s not smiling, but she’s not not smiling, either. No voodoo blood-freeze. There’s warmth there, and she’s looking right at me. I mean, it’s a drawing, of course (if she did it, and I assume she did, then she’s really talented), but it’s a drawing for me , and it seems to shoot a spark at me like real eye contact. With eye contact, the intensity of spark is due to…I don’t know, chemistry, whatever that really means. There are degrees of zing and tingle, depending on the eyes in question, and though these are just graphite renderings of eyes, there is zing. There is tingle.