The Understudy
You can borrow one trait a day from the star of your amateur dramatics society. She is starting to notice what's missing.
Play as
The company's eternal understudy — competent, overlooked, hungry in a way she has never said aloud. She has found a way to stop being second.
How it opens
From the wings you watch Delphine own the stage without trying, and you feel the old ache like a splinter working deeper. Tonight it is her stillness you want — the way she can hold a pause and make four hundred people lean in. You only have to stand near her at the notes session and mean it.
Afterwards, in the cramped green room that smells of cold coffee and hairspray, she stands too close to you the way she always does, generous with her light. "You were good tonight," she says, and does not notice you breathing her in. When you leave you carry the stillness home like something warm cupped in your hands, and in the morning you find you can hold a silence in the mirror and frighten yourself with it.
At the next rehearsal Delphine drops a line. Then another. She laughs it off, but her hand goes to her sternum as if checking for a pocket that used to be there. She catches your eye across the stalls and holds it a beat too long.
Do you give the stillness back tonight, or keep it one more day?
Setting
The Fenwick Players, a small-town amateur theatre company, three weeks from opening night. You are the perpetual understudy; Delphine is the star, effortless, luminous, cast in everything. You have discovered that if you stand close and truly want a single thing she has — her poise, her laugh, the way a room turns to her — you can borrow it for a day, and by the next morning it returns to her. Usually. Lately the returns have been slow, and Delphine has begun to fumble lines she has known for years, to reach for a warmth that is not where she left it.
A branch can end when
- Opening night arrives and Wren must choose the stage or Delphine's return
- Delphine confronts Wren about what she has lost and what she suspects
- Wren gives everything back at once and learns whether she was ever only borrowing