Illyria by Elizabeth Hand Read Free Book Online Page B

showed a cartoon of a subway entrance, with pink smoke welling up from the black tunnel.
    "What--"
    Rogan put his hand over my mouth. "Shhh. Listen."
    He played me two songs about a girl named Jane.
    "That's us, Maddy," he said when the songs were over. "Our lives were saved by rock and roll."
    I gave him a funny look. "That's more like your life. I can't sing."
    "It's both of us." He grabbed my arm and dragged me toward the attic door. "Come on, Mad-girl--"
    Afterward we lay side by side in the dark. Rogan pried the board loose and we gazed at the glimmering stage, our own tiny cosmos. There was no snow this time. Wherever the stage was, whatever it was supposed to represent, it seemed to be the middle of the night. The footlights cast a flickering cobalt glow across the stage.
    I told Rogan what I had seen the day before. Snow; a full moon.
    "Do you think there's anyone there?" he wondered, and stroked my back. "That we can't see?"
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    "I don't know."
    I touched my fingers to his lips, then kissed him. I was afraid to guess at what might be there, beyond the tiny stage; afraid to give a name to what we saw there, just as I couldn't give a name to what I felt for my cousin.
    Magic; love.
    Endless longing; a face you'd known since childhood, since birth almost; a body that moved as though it were your own. These were things you never spoke of, things you never hoped for; things you could never admit to. Things you'd die for, and die of.
    "Rogan," I whispered.
    "What?" He turned to me, and his eyes gleamed peacock-blue in the footlights. "Maddy? Why are you crying?"
    "Nothing. Rogan." He put his arms around me and I trembled. "Just you."
    ***
    ROGAN'S PARENTS DIDN'T MAKE A BIG DEAL OVER
    him going to the play.
    "They didn't care," he said a few days later. "They're going out Friday anyway. All they said was don't get lost in the city."
    "Maybe because it's Aunt Kate? Or Shakespeare."
    "Yeah, maybe." He sounded unconvinced.
    After school on Friday we changed for the theater. I wore a long
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    granny skirt and embroidered blouse and a macramé vest, and my new Frye boots. Rogan put on a clean flannel shirt and a different corduroy jacket than the one he'd worn to school that day.
    We walked together from Fairview down the drive to Aunt Kate's house. It felt different: the two of us together in the waning daylight, wearing what passed for nice clothes, with a common destination and our parents' approval. Inside the carriage house, Aunt Kate hurried about, looking for her purse, the tickets, her expensive lipstick. She looked elegant--glamorous--in black velvet cigarette pants and a cream-colored silk blouse, a cropped bolero jacket. She wore no jewelry other than her emerald ring. Suddenly she stopped and stared at me.
    "Maddy." Her eyes narrowed. "Don't you have a coat?"
    I shrugged. "Just that yellow one. It didn't really go."
    Aunt Kate winced. "That thing from Sears? You're right. That's an awful coat."
    She stood, thinking; then turned and ran upstairs. Minutes later she returned, holding what looked like a blanket.
    "Here." She opened the door, walked out onto the top of the stairs, and shook the blanket vigorously. "This has been in storage all these years, I just had it dry-cleaned this summer. See if it fits."
    She stepped back inside and handed it to me. Not a blanket but a long cape, of royal-blue velvet lined with white satin, with three gold buttons at the top to fasten it.
    "That was your great-grandmother's opera cape," Aunt Kate said as I pulled it on. "Madeline used to wear it after every performance. Wait--"
    She adjusted it over my shoulders, then buttoned it. "Those are
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    real gold. Wow. Maddy! It fits. It looks great. Utterly glamorous. Go look at yourself," she urged.
    I walked into the living room and stood before the big old mirror there. Someone else stared back, me but not me. The deep-blue velvet made my hair look glossy chestnut, not mousy. My eyes seemed to have darkened as well, to midnight blue