Backward in Heels
The scalper wanted triple. He paid it without negotiating and the scalper looked at him like he'd expected more fight and wasn't sure whether to be grateful or offended.
Back row. Last seat. The theater was small and old, the kind of place where the seats folded down on springs and the carpet was red and tacky and the ceiling had water stains in shapes that didn't match any country he'd been to. A man in the next seat was eating popcorn from a bag he'd brought himself. The woman on his other side had opinions about card manipulation technique that she was sharing with her friend and, by proximity, with everyone within eight feet. The marquee outside had said ZATANNA in letters bigger than the building deserved.
The lights went down.
She walked out from behind a curtain that parted on its own and the crowd went quiet.
Black hair, long, past her shoulders, catching the stage light. The tuxedo jacket tailored and she filled it with her shoulders back and her chin up. The fishnets. The top hat. She stood at center stage and her eyes worked the room before she said a word and the room was already hers.
He sat in the back row and his chest went tight. The same chest-tight from when he was twelve and she had a freckle on her wrist and a golden rabbit in her palm. Except the girl with the freckle was twenty and wearing fishnets and pulling fire from nowhere.
She opened with cards. A deck floated between her hands, spreading and reforming, and underneath the stagecraft there was real power. The cards weren't being thrown. They were being moved.
"Pick a card," she told a man in the front row. The man picked one. She made it appear in his wallet. His wallet was in his wife's purse. His wife was in the balcony. The man looked at Zee. Zee looked at the wife. The wife held up the card and the crowd lost it.
Then fire. She cupped her hands and spoke a word and flame rose between her palms, orange and gold, and she shaped it into a bird that flew across the theater trailing sparks and the crowd ducked and laughed and the bird dissolved before it reached the carpet.
He watched her work the room. Giovanni had charmed crowds. Leaned in, smiled, let the trick happen, let the audience feel like they were in on the joke. Zee didn't let anyone in on anything. She stood at center stage and bent the world and the audience watched because she told them to.
She pulled a dove from the hat. Real dove, not illusion. She held it on her finger and told the audience the dove's name was Gerald and Gerald had opinions about backstage conditions and the crowd laughed and the dove looked like it would rather be elsewhere. She talked about her father while Gerald sat on her hand, how he'd taught her the trade and how his rabbits were illusions out of respect for real rabbits and the crowd was quiet because she was quiet.
The water trick was last before the encore. She climbed into a glass case and chains appeared on her wrists and the case filled and the lid closed and the audience counted and she was submerged and the chains dissolved and she pressed her hands to the glass and spoke and the glass exploded outward and every drop of water hung in the air, suspended, catching the stage lights, and she stood in the middle of a thousand frozen droplets and the crowd was on its feet.
The water fell. She was dry. The stage was dry. The front row was dry.
The crowd screamed.
She took a bow and while she was bowing she looked up and her eyes swept the theater. Back row. Last seat.
She found him.
The fire in her next trick stuttered.
She'd been building another bird. The flame hiccupped in her palms and the left wing collapsed and she closed her hands around it and turned the recovery into a gesture, opening her hands to release the corrected bird, and the bird flew and the crowd cheered and she was already moving to the next bit. Professional.
Her left hand was shaking. She clenched it into a fist behind her back and kept going. Two more tricks, clean, professional, the shaking hand invisible to anyone who wasn't watching for it. He was watching for it.
She finished the show. Standing ovation. The popcorn man was on his feet. The card-technique woman was on her feet. He was on his feet. Zee took a final bow and her eyes found the back row again and held.
Backstage smelled like dust and old curtains and ozone. A stagehand told him performers weren't seeing visitors. He said tell her Bruce is here. The stagehand looked at him, looked at the hallway, went. Came back looking like he'd had a conversation he hadn't expected.
"She says go ahead. She also says, and I'm quoting, 'if he's not there when I come out I'm setting his coat on fire.'"
The hallway was narrow, exposed brick, cables running along the ceiling. A poster for a show from the eighties with curling corners. A fire extinguisher that hadn't been inspected since the building opened. He leaned against the wall next to her dressing room and waited. His pulse was doing a thing. He ignored it.
She came around the corner from stage left. Still in the jacket. The hat was gone and her hair was loose and damp at the temples from the lights. She was talking to someone behind her, mid-sentence, half-turned, wiping her hands on a towel.
She turned the corner and saw him.
The towel was in her hands and her mouth was open on whatever word she'd been saying and the word died. She looked at him. Shoulders. Chest. Jaw. She looked at his face and her mouth pulled toward a smile and then crumpled and then pulled again.
"You got tall."
Her voice cracked on tall.
She walked up and punched his arm. Hard enough that it would have hurt someone who bruised at a normal rate.
Then she hugged him.
Arms around his neck. She was taller than the goodbye but he was taller too and the math had changed. Her chin didn't fit in the curve of his shoulder anymore. Her face pressed against his neck instead and her arms pulled tight and her hair was in his face and it smelled like vanilla and ozone. Vanilla was shampoo or lotion or just her. Ozone was the magic, the burnt-clean smell of reality being bent, the same smell from when she was twelve and the golden rabbit had sat in her palm. Both were in his lungs and his arms went around her back and her ribs expanded against his forearms with each breath and she was warm and solid and shaking.
The goodbye hug had been two seconds past friendly with a sugar bowl floating behind them. He'd counted. This one went on and he stopped counting. Her hands pressed flat on his back, fingers spread, and her breathing was rough against his neck and her pulse was in her throat where it touched his collarbone. Quick. Her grip tightened and loosened and tightened again.
She fit differently now. Chest to chest. She was a woman and her body was a woman's body pressed against his and she was also still Zee with the chocolate chin and the bread rabbit and the rules she made up as she went and the note with the gold rabbit that had twitched its nose in the dark of his desk drawer for years.
She pulled back. Her eyes were wet. She laughed, the sound catching, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. The left one. Still shaking.
She punched him again. Same arm.
"Ow."
"You deserve it." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm. "Four years. Four years of letters and rabbits and you just- you show up at my show like-"
She didn't finish the sentence. She laughed again and her eyes were wet again and she punched his arm a third time, lighter, and left her fist there against his sleeve.
"You got tall," she said. Quieter. Looking at his chest, which was at her eye level, and then up at his face. Her fist against his arm. Her eyes dark and wet and the stage makeup smudged at the corners.
"You got loud."
She laughed. The real one. Seven years old biting the head off a bread rabbit. Twelve years old with a golden rabbit flickering in her palm. The laugh filled the hallway and a stagehand carrying a prop box rounded the corner, saw them, and reversed.
"I made it snow," she said. "In a pub. In London. Real snow. Actual crystallized water vapor from controlled temperature manipulation." She grinned. "And you weren't there."
"I know."
"I wrote you about it."
"I read it four times."
Her mouth pulled. The crumpling thing from before. Her fist was still on his arm.
"Your letters were terrible," she said. "Short. Boring. You wrote like someone who was busy being miserable in interesting places."
"I was busy."
"Were you miserable?"
He looked at her. Stage makeup smudged at the corners, hair damp from the lights. The left hand had stopped shaking. The girl from the charity gala who'd told him rabbits hated being pulled from hats and who'd talked the entire evening while he listened.
"Parts of it."
She nodded. Her fist uncurled against his arm and her fingers spread flat and she left her hand there.
"I had the fire stutter," she said. "On the second bird."
"I saw."
"I never miss on the birds. Gerald doesn't care but the birds are mine." She looked at her left hand. The shaking had stopped. "I looked up and you were just sitting in the back row like it was nothing. Like you just... showed up. And the fire-" She made a sound. Half-laugh, half-frustration. "The fire knows when I'm feeling things. It always has. Dad used to say the magic is the magician's heart wearing its inside on the outside."
"Giovanni said that?"
"Giovanni says a lot of things. Mostly in Italian. Mostly while cooking." She looked at him. "You made my fire stutter."
"Sorry."
"Don't be. It was a good stutter." Her hand was still on his arm. "I just wasn't expecting you to be... you. Sitting there. Looking like that." She gestured at his general existence. "When did all of this happen?"
"Gradually."
"Liar. Nobody gets shoulders like that gradually."
He almost told her about Kirigi's training and Shiva's drills and a mountain where the air was thin enough that his lungs had to rebuild themselves. He didn't. He told her about the food instead, which was worse, and she laughed and the laugh filled the hallway.
"Come on," she said. She grabbed his hand and pulled him down the hallway toward a door marked EXIT and her grip was warm and strong from years of cards and fire and reality and she didn't let go.