A Shot in the Shadows

You Know, That First Awkward Cast Party

Hey, guys. I'd just like to take a quick moment to mention that I'm a very kid friendly person, and I don't swear much myself, but on occasion there will be a mild bit of swearing in this story. Nothing extreme or anything above like, PG-14 (?), just the odd bit here or there when the character calls for it.

Okay, keep reading :)

Lara's running late.

For all of two minutes, she sits in the middle of her bedroom, trying to decide whether or not she should take her mom's car. During those two minutes, her phone buzzes off the hook until Lara is forced to pick up the darn thing and read all the messages from Riley, who of course is ridiculously early to this cast meeting when she's always absurdly late for everything else.

dude are you coming?

They have food Foooooooddddd.

I think this is a party.

Duh, Lara says to herself, deleting that text.

Why don't you have an understudy?????? hahaha im a swing i get to play everything

THEY HAVE SCRIPTS ABORT ALL OTHER MISSIONS LARA THEY HAVE THE SCRIPTS HERE FOR US GET YOUR ASS DOWN TO THE THEATER PRONTO

There are four other texts other that, but Lara's phone is already face down in the carpet as she dashes to her closet. Lara sadly reflects on the fact that she has no clue what to wear because she normally doesn't care, but she wants to make a good impression.

Lara starts to panic. She eventually settles for a ratty faded pink sweater over her paint-splattered jeans, and only just remembers to grab a hair tie and her phone on the way out of her room.

Getting the car is a whole new problem. Lara's mom is sitting in front of the television, watching some loud, obnoxious reality TV show that gives Lara a bad case of the chills. She sneaks around the kitchen and grabs the keys from the counter, then dashes from the kitchen to the front door. Lara swings the front door open hard as she simultaneously shoves her feet into her boots.

"MomI'vegotthisthingatthetheaterI'mtakingthecarbebackintwohours!" Lara shouts, scooting out the door and closing it before her mom can finish calling her name.

Lara pulls out of the driveway faster than she intends to, but from sixteen years of being with her mom she knows that the woman won't be bothered to get up and go  after her. Lara knows she also won't call her father. Yet.

In typical Lara-luck, all the people who have yet to go home after work are now crowding the streets. Lara regrets pulling onto one of the smaller roads almost as soon as she does it: it's completely packed with cars and there's no bigger road to turn off on until the theater itself, by which time there would be no point.

It's twenty past seven when Lara's trudging her way to the rehearsal rooms. Her feet hurt from jamming them into her shoes, and she's really wearing the wrong jeans to be carrying both house and car keys in her pockets.

Her mood lightens considerably as she hears loud, familiar music: they're working their way through one of the playlists of showtunes Lara had made for one of her theater classes here. It's one of the livelier ones, one that Lara had struggled with because she hadn't been energetic at all at the time, but it had been a class requirement. So Lara had went around libraries collecting cast recordings to pull songs off of: she'd figured that was considerably less illegal than downloading them off the internet, and that was only for a few songs that she didn't already have in her massive (and expensive) iTunes collection.