The Space Between Our Names

The auditorium smelled like dust and old velvet and the particular sour-sweet of floor wax baking into wood. Quinn Delgado stood at centre stage, arms loose at their sides, counting the empty seats in the dark. One hundred and twelve of them, rising in curved rows toward the back wall where the sound booth sat dark and silent. Quinn had never stood on a stage this big, had never felt the weight of so much empty space pressing in from every side. The house lights were off. The stage lights blazed, halogen and unforgiving, and Quinn had already sweated through the back of a navy hoodie, faded at the elbows, drawstrings chewed to frayed nubs. Their mother had bought it three sizes too big two years ago and Quinn had worn it every single day since. They had been there since twenty past eleven. Auditions were not until noon. *I am not what you think I am. I am not what I think I am.* Rowan is the name Quinn has spent two years pretending to have forgotten. Rowan is also, as of that afternoon, cast opposite them, which nobody warned either of them about and which the department treats as a scheduling detail. The arrangement that follows is supposed to be for the programme, for the showcase, for the people who need to see two leads who get along. Cass builds the props table. Jamie reinforces the risers with scrap lumber from the maintenance shed. Mira contributes fairy lights liberated from the theatre department's storage cupboard. What follows: a name pretended forgotten, a door left ajar, a role somebody was born for, a dance chosen deliberately to lose, a braid that comes undone, a defence nobody asked for, a kiss that was not a scene, a confession made in the dark, an ultimatum delivered over a lunch tray, a fight in the wings, and a truth that is misheard by exactly the wrong person. A contemporary new-adult romance between two nonbinary leads, set across one college theatre season, about first love returning as a casting decision and the phone call to a parent that neither of them can put off much longer.