THEATER KID
I am in the theater. The doors are locked, and it’s dark. I can see my friends, the people I’ve been in classes with and done shows with and done stupid fun and occasionally embarrassing stuff with—my theater family.
And my drama mom Mrs. Dean is an outline at the main door, which we blocked with pieces of our set. These are my peeps, and I wouldn’t want to be with anyone else right now, but I am. I’m surrounded…by ghosts.
The ghosts of all the kids who didn’t get to grow up to be rock stars or poets or teachers, to dance like nobody’s watching or to tick off items on their bucket list or to come home.
By ghosts with backpacks and math books and half-eaten grilled cheese sandwiches, still clutching their iPhones with cracked screens, the jackets they wore no matter how hot it was, and the baseball gloves that never got broken in. Every moment it gets thicker and thicker, and it’s getting hard to breathe.
They’re all around me, one after another, crowding into this row and the next one and the one after that. I wonder if soon they’ll be standing on each other’s shoulders, and will the floor support all that weight, or will the rest of us sink into the ground and be swallowed?
(Beat.)
So many faces and names from so many places, and I think it’s up to me to name angels like astronomers name stars.
(If this were a full production, the names of victims of school shootings would project in the theater like stars in the sky, perhaps clustered like constellations, with a “legend” for each constellation telling the audience where it was and when. For example,“Columbine High School—April 20, 1999.” Obviously, this wouldn’t happen in a stand-alone monologue performance.)
So if I make it out of my school today, I promise I’m gonna learn every name of every person who never did.