The Impaler

Mom.”

Cindy smiled. Too expensive, she shouldn’t have done that, blahdy-blahdy-blah—but oh God, how glad I am that she did!

Cindy felt on; felt ready and rested and relaxed. She had slept until noon that day and blew off her one o’clock biology class for the gym. Cindy hated biology—hated anything having to do with science and math in general—but would most likely be able to squeak out an A-minus if she buckled down for the final. Cindy hated A-minuses. She’d maintained a solid 3.8 for three years now and wasn’t quite sure how an A- minus would affect her GPA—suspected it would drop a point or two and felt a sudden wave of anxiety at seeing the 3.79 on her transcript.

You’re too much of a perfectionist, she heard her mother say in her head.

Right you are, M, Cindy replied, and arranged the flowers in the vase so she could see every one.

Cindy removed her script from her backpack and placed it directly in the center of her dressing table. Then she lined up everything parallel and at right angles around it: her makeup, her hair spray and hairbrush, her cough drops and her coffee mug. “Cluttered desk, cluttered mind,” she had heard someone say once. OCD kiss ass, she knew that two-faced slut Amy Pratt would call her behind her back. But Cindy didn’t care. After all, Amy Pratt had been called worse behind her own back.

Cindy changed into a Harriot T-shirt and sweats and turned on her iPod, scrolled to the folder titled PRESHOW, and ate her supermarket sushi in the green room. She’d splurged for opening night; felt sorry for not eating her mother’s leftover lasagna but didn’t want anything too heavy messing with her stomach.

The music pumping through her earphones was from the movie Amadeus. One of her professors had shown a clip from it in theatre history class, and for some reason Cindy had fallen in love with it. She downloaded the entire soundtrack that very afternoon and had since listened to it every day. The music grounded her—made her feel more like herself, she thought (whatever that meant)—and had even helped her nail her first big audition at Harriot. Now, Amadeus was a staple of her preshow ritual, part of a complex good luck charm, and Cindy was convinced her performance would suffer without it.

Superstitious? Beyond superstitious, Cindy thought. And although she wasn’t that hungry, she knew she’d also have to eat an orange later in the dressing room. Cindy had picked up that little habit the year before from a guest artist who swore it made him focus better onstage. Cindy wasn’t sure if the orange helped her or not, but nonetheless it had become part of her preshow ritual, too.

You down with OCD? Yeah, you know me!

Cindy finished her sushi and lay down on the green room couch. She closed her eyes and let the music enter her bloodstream as she focused on her breathing and began going over her lines. She had just finished her big scene with Macbeth, the one after he murders Duncan, when something startled her—movement, a chair scraping on the floor.

Her eyes sprang open.

It was Bradley Cox.

He sat at the green room table with his earphones plugged into his laptop—caught Cindy’s gaze just as she opened her eyes and jerked his chin to say hello.

Such a dickhead, Cindy said to herself.

She had no idea how long he’d been sitting there, but knew he’d moved his chair on purpose to get her attention and fuck with her while she was focusing. He’d loosened up over the past week; had tried making casual conversation with her during the technical rehearsals and (and Cindy could not believe this) had even tried flirting with her backstage before final dress. The bruise she’d left on his ego had finally healed, she thought. Only took two fucking semesters.

Cindy nodded her hello and closed her eyes—tried to relax into the music again but quickly became irritated with herself when she realized her costar’s presence was making her uneasy. She turned up her music, but her iPod wasn’t loud enough to drown out what she heard next.

“Hey, Amy,” Cox called. “You hear about this shit?”

“What?”

Cindy opened her eyes to see Amy Pratt entering the green room. The fiery redhead threw down her book bag and stood behind him, rubbing Cox’s shoulders as she looked at his laptop. Cindy’s stomach flipped with disgust as she thumbed her volume down to hear what they were saying.

“Says they found some guy dead in the woods,” Cox said. “North of Raleigh. Says he was stuck in the ground with a pole up his ass. Been dead for over a month. Cops think it’s a serial killer. Vlad the Impaler, they’re calling him.”

Cindy had seen the breaking news report earlier that afternoon as she was getting off the treadmill at the gym. She couldn’t hear the newscaster above all the hip-hop and the drone of the elliptical riders, and only got the gist of the story when she opened her AOL homepage on her computer back home. She glanced at the article quickly: some guy found impaled, details still sketchy, might be connected to the murder of some lawyer in Raleigh.

“Ew,” Amy Pratt said, reading. “That’s sick. People are so fucked up nowadays.”

“Maybe you should give him your number, Amy,” Cox said. “Word on the street is you like it up the ass, too.”

Amy giggled and slapped him playfully on his shoulder—but she kept massaging him and whispered something in his ear. Cox smiled, then looked over at Cindy and nodded. Cindy pretended to turn down her volume.

“You say something?” she asked.

“Just wanted to know if you were ready for tonight,” he said smugly. Cindy didn’t take the bait—knew that he and Amy had an inside joke going and wanted her to say “yes” so they could pretend she was agreeing to whatever it was that Amy had just whispered in his ear. Their version of the “Douchebag says what?” game.

Childish, asinine, easy to defuse.

“You mean am I ready for the show?” Cindy asked.

“Yes,” he said, smiling wider. “I mean for the show.”

Amy smiled wider, too—thought it brilliant, Cindy could tell, the way Bradley had salvaged their little joke by emphasizing show.

Okay, whatever, Cindy said to herself. She didn’t feel like playing, but at the same time she didn’t want to leave the green room and let Mr. and Mrs. Dipshit win.

“Just go with your heart, Bradley,” she said, deadpan. “Therein resides the only answer you’ll ever need.”

Bradley looked momentarily confused—as if he couldn’t figure out if he’d just been insulted—then sighed and rolled his eyes over to Amy.

“Guess I’m not good enough for a straight answer,” he said. Cindy could tell he was about to follow up with a snide remark, when the break she was looking for came over the intercom.

“Testing, one-two-three,” said the stage manager. “It’s ten minutes ’til our official call. Don’t forget to sign in on the callboard.”

And in a flash Cindy was off the couch. She’d signed in nearly an hour ago but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get away. She turned up the volume on her iPod and hurried down the hall, past a group of students and straight for the electrics shop. She hoped the door was unlocked—wanted to find a quiet corner to finish going over her lines before going back to the dressing room.

I should’ve had one of the star dressing rooms upstairs, Cindy thought, while simultaneously chastising herself for being such a diva. Who cares if Mr. Dickhead and his boys have more quick changes—

The doorknob pulled away from her hand just as she reached for it—startled her and caused one of her earphones to fall out.

It was Edmund Lambert.

He stood in the electrics shop doorway looking down at her—black T-shirt, his face dusty but unfazed. He’d been checking the trap to make sure everything was running smoothly, Cindy knew. Even more OCD