A Shot in the Shadows

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"They changed your number."

"What?" Lara asks. She's just come out of an hour and a half of chemistry, and her brain is functioning at slightly below normal capacity.

"They changed your number," Riley says, echoing Annie and sounding thoroughly bored.

"What do you mean, they changed my number?" Lara asks again, sitting down at the table and pulling her lunch out of her bag. "Riley, I don't think I follow..."

"They cut one of the verses from your solo," Cameron says, looking apologetic for all of three seconds before he ruins the effect by gulping down a mouthful of instant noodles.

The last bit makes its way into Lara's brain, and she unconsciously drops her water bottle back into her bag. "What?" she repeats dumbly, even though at this stage she fully knows 'what'. Like the rest of the cast, she'd gotten the new pages after the show, but she'd been really tired andshe'd gone home for the first time in almost a week. Lara hadn't had the time or energy to look at the new revisions.

"Which verse did they cut?" Lara's already scrambling through her bag for her binder, but Annie beats her to it, sliding her own script across the table. Lara quickly leafs through it, finding her number and running her finger down the page.

"Damn," she whispers, her finger stopping at the blank between two verses. Once upon a time, her favorite verse in the whole show had rested in that space. "Damn, damn, damn."

"Sorry," Annie says, taking her script back. "We know how much you loved those lines."

"Its fine," Lara mumbles, starting to eat. She's had a rough week, and Lara knows its just four lines, but they were four lines Lara had relatedto. Lara knew that shows were ever changing, and she knew that she should not let this cut get to her... she didn't think she would last the rest of the day if she let the revision cloud her thoughts. "Thank God it's Friday."

"Amen," Riley hoots, earning condescending stares from the people around them.

"Two show day tomorrow!" Flynn chimes in, sounding actually enthusiastic.

There's a chorus of groans from around the table.

Lara's almost ready to ignore it all: she's already flipping through her script to find the new pages, but then she remembers a question that she'd been meaning to ask for a while.

"Hey, are we sleeping over at anyone's house tomorrow night?" Lara asks, interrupting the face-making game that had broken out in the three seconds she'd stopped paying attention.

"Nope," Riley says. "My cousins are all coming tomorrow afternoon to see the show and they're spending the night. There isn't room for us and them."

Lara feels a sinking feeling begin to stir up in her chest. "Paige?" she asks, trying not to sound too desperate. "Annie?"

"Sorry," Annie says, shrugging. "I'm driving with my dad to the city after the show tomorrow night, and I'm not going to be back until call time on Sunday."

"Guess we're not having a movie night this week," Riley says.

"You can sleep over at my house, Lara," Flynn suggests, ducking immediately as Riley chucks her script at him.

Lara ignores his suggestion, beginning to panic inside. She'd only been home last night for a few hours: she'd snuck in some time after the show, locked her bedroom door before going to sleep, then had left through the back door early in the morning, walking to the closest McDonald's where she read for an hour before walking back to catch the school bus. In that short time frame, she'd overheard her dad talking about a business deal he had at work that he had a final meeting for on Saturday, and it wasn't going well. Lara had looked up the company he was dealing with and already had a pretty good idea how things were going to turn out: her dad would already be miffed about having to go to work on a Saturday for one meeting, the company would turn down the offer, her dad would be reprimanded by his boss, her dad would get really, really angry, then he would come home and take out his anger on Lara.