Priya was sixteen, and she worked backstage at the city theater. She swept the stage, carried the props and watched every rehearsal from the wings, so quietly that the actors forgot she was there. She knew the whole play by heart: every line, every movement, every change of light. It was a play about a girl who runs away to sea.
On opening night, ten minutes before the curtain, the young star, Camille, lost her voice. She could only whisper. The understudy was in the hospital, and six hundred people were waiting in their seats. "We must cancel," said the director, Madame Vega, who was over seventy. In the wings, Priya was saying the first line to herself. Madame Vega turned around. "Do you know the part?" she asked. "Every word," said Priya.
The costume maker pinned the dress on her with safety pins, and Priya walked into the light with shaking knees. Her first line wobbled. Then she heard six hundred people holding their breath, and her voice grew strong. In the second act, the other actor forgot his words, and she gave them back to him inside her own speech. When the play ended, there was a long silence, and then the whole audience rose to its feet.
Backstage, Madame Vega took her hand. "When I was your age, I was a girl with a broom in these same wings," she said. The next morning Priya was back on the stage with her broom, humming her lines.
