The lights are so bright I can't see the crowd, which is the only reason I'm not throwing up.
"Smile," Eli hisses out of the corner of his mouth, eyes still on the audience. His mic is hot, mine is about to be, and my palm is slick against the smooth plastic handle.
"I am," I say through my teeth.
From out here, the auditorium is just a wall of dark—rows and rows of silhouettes rising into the balcony, a sea of shifting outlines lit only by the glow of a hundred phones. The stage lights burn white into my eyes, hiding every individual face. It should make them feel less real. It doesn't.
Behind us, the curtain rustles as the last of the props from the previous act vanish into the wings. A stray feather from the Bollywood fusion costumes drifts across the boards and lands by my shoe.
"And that was our incredible South Asian dance team!" Eli booms. Applause crashes over us, a physical thing, all claps and whoops and that high, shrill scream some girls do with their fingers in their mouths. "Give it up one more time!"
The crowd obeys. Sound swells, peaks, then ebbs.
I keep my eyes fixed on the little red tape X marking center stage. If I look up, I'll start counting heads, spotting teachers and administrators and parents whose approval is now mathematically impossible to achieve all at once. I prefer my chaos in spreadsheet form.
The side-stage monitor shows a tiny, delayed version of us. In the corner of my vision, I see my own face blown up, pale and flat under the lights, my expression tipping just on the edge of deer-in-headlights.
"Breathe," I tell myself. "You rehearsed this."
Eli lifts his mic slightly away from his mouth and drops his voice for me alone. "On three, we do the donors spiel. You good?"
"Fine," I answer. My voice sounds thin, but at least it comes out. "Where's Rhea?"
He blinks. "Backstage, I think? Why?"
"She was supposed to be at the curtain left cue table for the blackout," I say, the words tumbling out in automatic checklist order. "She said she'd be there."
He shrugs a shoulder in a way the audience can't see. "Singh probably has it."
That is exactly not the point. Aanya runs tech; Rhea runs the entire night. Every arrow on my schedule web points back to her.
Before I can press, the house lights dip a fraction. It's the pre-blackout warning we added this afternoon. My stomach flips.
"Showtime," Eli says, smile snapping back on. He swings the mic up to his mouth. "All right, folks, as our crew gets ready for the next act, we want to take a moment to thank some very important people…"
His voice pours into the speakers, smooth and easy. He's done this a hundred times for pep rallies and assemblies. I have not.
I lift my own mic, catching the faint smell of disinfectant on the foam cover, and feel my heartbeat in my throat.
"Tonight wouldn't be possible without our staff, families, and community partners," I hear myself say. I cling to the words like a script, which they are—they're printed in twelve-point Arial on the card in my left hand. "Your support is the reason we get to celebrate all our cultures on this stage."
My tone is steady. Good. One thing in order.
Somewhere above us, the rig hums as Aman and the tech crew shift the lighting board into blackout mode. We walked through this an hour ago: at exactly 7:32, the stage goes dark for ten seconds. House lights down, emergency aisle strips on, then everything back up with a new color wash and the next act in position.
Simple. Controlled.
"—and a huge thank you to everyone who volunteered their time tonight," Eli finishes. "Can we hear it one more time for our crew?"
While the applause swells again, I glance at my watch. The tiny digital numbers blink: 7:31.
My eyes flick automatically to the wings. Stage left: a tangle of bodies in half-costumes, someone adjusting a drum harness, Aman's baseball cap just visible above the tech cart. Stage right: the curtain shadows hide most details, but I know what should be there—a narrow table with a clipboard for cue sign-offs, a stack of extra programs, and Rhea.
She is not there.
Instead, I see Iris perched on an amp case, headset half-on, taping down a rogue cable with silver gaffer tape. Her pale hands move fast in the dimness. Next to her, a flash of gold sequins as Maya squeezes past, breathless and glowing from the opener, hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. No Rhea. No familiar planner's posture, no lanyard multipack of keys.
A tiny, irrational spark of annoyance flares in my chest. She knows better than to abandon a station mid-program. We planned this down to the minute. We—
The stage plunges into darkness.
The noise changes immediately. The crowd doesn't go silent—they never do—but the quality shifts, ripples of laughter and mock-screams and the rustle of people turning to look for the emergency lights.
The aisle strips along the floor flick on in thin, ghostly lines. A faint green EXIT sign glows above the back doors. From backstage, someone whoops. "Blackout!"
I wrap my free hand tighter around the edge of the mic card. This was my idea on paper: "containment test" for the hallway lights, making sure everyone can see the exits even if something glitches. The liability write-up that's already filed in the student council binder says as much.
But onstage, in the pitch-black, the logic feels far away.
I can't see Eli. I can't see the front row, or the empty curtain in front of us, or the gap at the edge of the stage that I suddenly want to measure with my foot.
"Ten seconds," I remind myself. "This is fine."
A quiet chime sounds in my earpiece from Aanya's backstage channel. "Stand by… and we're back."
The stage lights slam on again, a wash of bright blue flooding the boards. The crowd cheers. Eli throws his free arm wide like he planned all of this for their entertainment.
"And we are officially awake!" he crows. "Ready for our next act?"
The rest of the intro blurs. My eyes take longer to adjust than the cameras'. For a few seconds, the audience is just afterimages and spotting patterns. When outlines finally resolve again, my gaze goes straight to stage left, to the gap in the curtain where I expect to catch a glimpse of Rhea's silhouette.
Nothing.
A prickle crawls up the back of my neck.
The band kids file past us to take their places, instruments gleaming. We retreat toward the wings as we practiced, timing our steps so we don't collide. At the border where bright stage meets dim backstage, I risk a whisper to Aman as he passes with his headset.
"Have you seen Rhea?"
He keeps walking, fingers flying over the tablet he's using as a cue sheet. "Thought she was with you," he mutters. Then he's gone, swallowed by the tangle of cables and bodies.
Behind the curtain, the sound changes again. On stage, it's cymbal hits and the murmur of the audience settling. Back here, it's the scramble and hiss of a machine you only hear from inside—Velcro straps ripping, props thumping, the low buzz of comms.
I weave through it automatically, scanning for a flash of Rhea's maroon jacket, her lanyard, the messy knot of hair with pens stabbed through it.
Nothing.
"Lena!" A parent volunteer materializes with a stack of programs. "We're out in the left aisle, can you—"
"Table by the main doors," I say without slowing. "There's a backup box under it with a label. Use those first."
"Oh, right," she says. "Of course you already thought of—"
But I don't hear the rest, because I've reached the narrow notch of space that passes for our "backstage office"—a folding table jammed between a curtain pulley and a coil of extra extension cords. There should be two clipboards here: one for act check-ins, one for incident logs.
One is gone.
The hook on the side of the table—where the key ring for the practice rooms usually hangs—is also empty.
I stop short.
"Where is—" I start.
Iris's hand materializes out of nowhere, pushing a head mic into my free palm. "You're off script for the next block," she says. "No intro between the jazz trio and the spoken word piece. You remember?"
"Yes," I say automatically, my brain whirring on a different track. "Where's Rhea? And the room keys?"
She blows a stray strand of hair off her forehead. "Rhea went to put out a fire somewhere. Not literal. I think." She points her roll of tape toward the wing. "She took the keys with her."
"She's supposed to log them out," I say.
"Pretty sure the world won't end if she doesn't sign the sacred clipboard for once," Iris replies, already turning away.
"That's not the—" I cut myself off. There's no point arguing about procedure during a live show with someone who thinks forms are optional.
The band's first song kicks in, a wave of brass and drums that makes the stage floor vibrate. Out front, the crowd roars. Back here, all the small sounds get swallowed: the scratch of my pen, the click of keys, the rustle of paper.
A thread of unease winds tighter in my stomach.
Rhea is allowed to abandon the key hook. She's allowed to forget to sign something, technically. She's allowed to be human.
She is not allowed, in my internal rulebook, to go completely silent.
I pull my phone from my pocket under the pretense of checking the time again. Notifications line the screen—group chats, a calendar alert, a missed call from my mom that I swipe away without opening. No messages from Rhea.
I open our chat anyway. The last text from her is from an hour ago:
Rhea: can you double check the volunteer check-in sheets? pretty sure we're missing two shift swaps
I'd already done it. I'd replied with three checkmarks and a photo of the updated table. No new messages after that.
The band segues into their second number. Somewhere behind me, a prop tower wobbles and someone curses. The overhead fan above the wings rattles slightly with each bass hit. The sound seeps into my bones.
I tuck my phone away. Maybe she's just in the council office smoothing some adult's ruffled feathers. Maybe she's in the lobby dealing with the ticket scanner that always dies at the worst possible time. Maybe she's in the music room like she told Aanya earlier, sorting out some crisis with—
My brain snags on that detail. Music room.
The memo.
The keys.
"You have three minutes," the little project manager in my head says. "Use them."
Between acts, there's always a sliver of transition time, a tiny pocket where no one will notice if I'm not exactly where they expect me to be, as long as nothing catches fire and the next performers hit their marks.
I scan the run sheet clipped to the table. Jazz trio now, then a poetry piece with no tech changes, then the middle school drumming group that Rhea insisted on squeezing in because "representation matters, Lena."
I chew my lip. If I leave now, I can reach the music wing and back before the drummers start. In theory. Assuming no one grabs me en route to sign something or fix something or answer some question only "operations" can answer.
Chaos hates a vacuum. So does responsibility.
"Two minutes," I tell myself. "Just to check."
Without fully deciding, I start moving.
The backstage corridor is a compressed version of the main one—same cinderblock walls, same scuffed tiles, just less decoration and more gaffer tape. The further I walk from the stage, the more the sound flattens into a muffled thud-thud, like a heartbeat behind a wall.
At the junction, I hesitate. Left goes to the loading bay and the storage closets. Right goes toward the music rooms.
The music hall lights flicker slightly as I step under them, a tiny pulse in the fluorescent tubes that makes the shadows jump. I add "maintenance request" to the running list in my head and keep going.
I pass the practice rooms we booked out for instrument tuning earlier. One door is half-open, a cello leaning inside like a person slumped in a chair. Another is shut, a hand-lettered "VOCALS ONLY" sign taped crookedly to the glass.
When I round the last corner, the hum of the auditorium drops away almost completely. It's just me, the buzz of the vents, and the soft squeak of my flats on the floor.
The music room door stands at the end like it always does—solid, window inset, memo taped at eye level. I recognize the document from our last-minute policy scramble: DOOR TO REMAIN LOCKED DURING ALL PERFORMANCES. Rhea's name at the bottom as "Event Lead." Aanya's initials in the little confirmation box.
The door is closed. The narrow vertical window is dark, the room beyond lit only by the ghost of spillover from the hallway.
I reach for the handle.
It doesn't move.
Locked. Good. That is what it is supposed to be. That's what we wrote, printed, and taped up. A small knot in my chest releases.
I let my hand fall.
As I turn away, something glows at the edge of my vision.
On the floor against the wall just a few feet from the door, in the narrow wedge of shadow behind a stack of folded risers, a rectangle of light pulses quietly. Bright, then dim, then bright again.
I step closer.
It's a phone. Screen up, case scuffed at the corners. The lock screen background is a photo I've seen a hundred times—our whole group crammed into a booth at the diner downtown, Rhea in the middle holding a milkshake straw like a sword, whipped cream on her nose.
For half a heartbeat, my brain rejects the connection. Lots of people have that photo. It's the default, the one she sent everybody after she printed it for her bedroom wall.
Then I see the charm hanging from the case—tiny silver treble clef, slightly bent from when she caught it in a locker door last year.
"Rhea," I breathe.
The phone buzzes again in my hand as I pick it up, like it's relieved. A notification banner slides down from the top before I can stop myself from reading it.
Unknown: you can't ignore this forever
The timestamp in the corner of the screen reads 7:37 PM.
Three minutes ago.
Another buzz. Another banner.
Unknown: we're not done
I swallow, mouth dry. The little messaging app icon shows a string of unread texts. My thumb hovers over it, every nerve suddenly awake.
I shouldn't look. It's rude. It's a violation of privacy. It might be nothing—some spammer, some wrong number, some dumb prank.
It might be exactly the kind of thing that makes Rhea slide her phone into a pocket and say "later" when people ask what's wrong.
The band's set changes songs somewhere in the distance. The faint thump-thump shifts tempo. Out in the lobby, someone laughs. Down the other end of the hall, a janitor's cart squeaks as a wheel hits a tile crack.
Here, in this thin slice of space between the locked music room and the rest of the night, it is suddenly very, very quiet.
I flip the phone over, half-expecting some apology note taped to the back, some explanation for why it's lying on the ground and why its owner is not in any of the places she is supposed to be.
There's nothing. Just a faint smear of glitter near the camera where Maya must have hugged her earlier and transferred half her costume.
The screen pulses again, lighting up my face in the reflection.
Unknown: answer me
My heart kicks against my ribs.
Rhea's phone is on the floor outside a locked door she should have access to. She is not at the curtain table, not in the wings, not beside me onstage, and not answering messages that sound, in my head, like the echo of something we've all been too busy to ask.
"Lena?" A distant shout snaps the thread. It sounds like Eli, faint but unmistakable. "We need you backstage! Now!"
I flinch, clutching the phone tighter than I mean to. The old, familiar instinct rises—get back to your post. Don't leave a gap. Don't be the missing piece.
I look at the locked door. At the memo with my name buried in the fine print. At the glowing screen in my hand.
Then I do the worst, smallest, most ordinary thing.
I press the power button, and the light dies.