A Shot in the Shadows

Reading Through

Adrianna remembers a time when she loved the bookstore.

Not that she doesn't now... but the bookstore's been Adrianna's job ever since she graduated from college. She's been coming to this particular store since she was four, and she loves it for its expansive collection of cast recordings and librettos. It's perfect for her, really. Except when she's stuck organizing history books into pristine piles, or dealing with extremely rude and persistent customers, or trying to stop kids from knocking over the tower of heavy biographies she'd just made.

And, of course, when Adrianna's both extend her shift by an hour. That's never fun, especially today. It's something Addie normally took without complaining, but normally Addie didn't have a reading to get to after work.

Thinking about the reading makes Addie stressed. It makes her stressed because, really, every bit of her knows that this was just a filler job until she got her next big role. But she loves the bookstore, and the manager loves her (probably because the manager had been the one stuck with the children's weekend activities years ago, and Addie had been the only kid actually paying attention).

Adrianna hears a cough behind her and rushes to help the customer who has been trying to grab her attention.

I'll miss this place, Addie thinks, looking around as she leads the customer to the cooking books tucked away in the back corner. Lord knows there won't be much time to come back once the show gets started.

That's always been true of everything in Addie's life: when it comes to theater, everything else gets dropped and abandoned. It had been a requirement when she was younger and being cast in a national tour meant leaving behind school and friends and family for a while. She'd made it into her own routine ever since, filling her free time between shows and rehearsals with dance classes just to keep herself fit, and occasionally paying a visit to her old voice instructor (who by now had retired to her house and never minded when Addie dropped by with some gifts). All her other time was spent sleeping or recovering from shows, and that would definitely be the case now that Adrianna was a swing.

Adrianna stops by the arts section to put the librettos back in alphabetical order, thinking about the one other time she'd been a swing. Years later, she was still convinced she'd had a demented crew, because at every rehearsal she'd been made to go through the motions of almost all the characters she played.

Addie still shudders at the thought.

All this leads back to her thinking about how she could possibly break the news to her boss.

Hey, you know that show I've been talking about? Yeah, I'm a swing in that now! So we all knew this was coming... bye!

Adrianna decides to take her break now.

She spends her break mentally rearranging her schedule, which of course leads to the overload of theater going on in her head, which brings her back to how she's supposed to quit her job.

That's pretty much all Addie thinks about until the manager comes to tell her to go home.

Addie does, getting her stuff in order slowly while she thinks. She heads back out to the doors, and sure enough, the manager is still there, observing the cashiers.

"Hey," Addie says. "I'm kind of in a rush, but can I quickly bring something up with you?"

"Sure?"

"Well, I'm thinking I kinda have to leave my job here."

The manager is silent for a moment. "Oh. Okay. We'll talk about this when you come in on Friday."

Addie blinks. "Friday?"