The little boy on the stage was the son of a famous actor, the kind college girls used to press their lips against posters of, who was one evening found face down in a hotel swimming pool like Gatsby, except there was no bullet in his back. 

 The little girl seated in the first row was the fifth second violin of the pit, but today and for the next two weeks she would be in the audience, watching rehearsal while she recovered from corrective jaw surgery. She was usually, but not always, the one who was playing out of tune when the conductor hopped off his platform and went hunting with a grin down the aisle, placing his hands on his hips so as to counteract his narrow shoulders, declaring, ‘I know someone here is playing out of tune.' She herself had broad shoulders, broader than she figured, in her humble opinion, a twelve-year-old girl who liked to wear rosewater pink ever ought to (and such a concern, let it be known, occupied a far more inflated portion of her grievances now that she no longer suffered from a fierce overbite), though at the very least they provided a snug resting place for a violin. 

 From the third row of the auditorium, she watched the youth theater company rehearse the second act of Les Mis. Now unfolding was the death of Gavroche, portrayed by the little boy, and she couldn't help but notice his body was still as a stone as he was carried off the stage. Later, he came and sat next to her and told her of how he couldn't stand it when a character died onstage and yet, because their actor's chest continued to rise and fall, they didn't look dead at all, and so to combat this he'd held his breath for as long as he was under the lights. 

"Did you really?" the little girl half-scolded, half-exclaimed. 

He shrugged. "It wasn't difficult."

"Is that your new rule now? What if you were, say, oh, what's a role where the dead man has to stay on the stage for a very long time?"

The little boy thought for a moment. "The Young Syrian in Salomé?"

"How did you know that?"

"When I was young, my mother read me a lot of plays." He shrugged once more. "Even the gory ones. Especially those."

"What if you were the Young Syrian in Salomé?"

He looked past her now, as if she hadn't spoken at all. Together, their eyes traveled back to the stage where now Javert was dying. 

"Rehearsals are awfully boring when you're dead," the little boy remarked with a sigh. 

The little girl now couldn't take her eyes off him. He looked sad when he said this, not bored. Nowadays, little boys were always bored or angry or mean. Sad was fresh. Sad was even beautiful. 

 From out of her bag on the seat beside her, she took out her walkman and pressed play on a cassette of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major. 

"Here, listen to this," she said, lifting the headphones to his ears. "This is what I want to sound like. Though it will never happen because I never practice."

~

 The next day the little girl wore her mother's powdered concealer to cover the lingering bruises on her jaw and told the conductor she was nearly cured of her pain and ready to play. He told her that her chair was waiting. When Gavroche died, this time, she took all her notes in a single slur of her bow so as to mimic the single breath being held in his chest, all the while pressing down her jaw as hard as she could, feeling ecstatic and cheeky only until she knew what it meant. The conductor stopped the scene and lingered down the aisle, murmuring, ‘I know someone here is out of harmony.'

 When the rehearsal let out, she stayed back until she thought everyone had left the auditorium and she began to destroy her violin, knocking it like a club to the floor. Behind her, at some stage of this, appeared the little boy. 

"What are you doing?" His young, round face was contorted into something of mountains and valleys as plump tears fell from his blizzard-blue eyes, his son-of-a-famous actor eyes. 

 He gaped at the detached scroll and fingerboard, which she still held in her hand. She brought it against the naked organs of the mutilated instrument and it split in two, one half falling to the floor with a hollow thud. He soon dropped to his knees and his chest contracted in a sob—a young woman's sob, a Cosette sob, it occurred at once to the giddy girl—and with a pathetically futile tenderness, he picked up the stray wooden bridge, which had lay under a bed of coiled strings, between two fingers and dropped it into his fleshy palm. 

"I wanted to punish myself for something silly I had in my mind," she told him with a sigh. "And it's torture to be in the audience when I know I could've been right under the stage." 

The little boy nodded, for a moment taking an intermission from his tears. "You're exactly right. Worse than anything."

"Besides, now my father will buy me a full-sized violin. Or maybe he will let me switch to cello." She watched him too long as he mourned the violin, head all drooped and covered by the shadow of his hair. "Show me how to cry like that," she demanded at last. "I will have to when I present these pieces to the conductor."

~

Just beyond the parking lot of the high school was a small playground equipped with a slide, a set of monkey bars, and two swings, in one of which sat the little girl after the morning dress rehearsal before opening night. She had let her feet drag back and forth for so long that she'd broken entirely through the snow to reveal a patch of black dirt beneath her. When she spotted the little boy across the lot, she called his name. He came in his costume, his little pageboy hat and scarlet neckerchief, and he tried to hand her a dandelion he'd acquired from one of the patches of ground where the snow had melted. 

"Keep it," the little girl said. "I don't want a flower."

"Are you sure?" he asked without a frown. 

"Positive." She then tried to smile magnanimously in apology. "Did I tell you my father says he's going to buy me a cello now because, as we know, some catty girl destroyed my violin out of jealousy? I've always wanted to switch to cello. I think now I'll be quite the serious cellist. I think now I'll be first chair."

The desperation in the little boy's voice was clear: "Do you want anything?"

"I want you to tell me you're not really the son of a dead actor, that it's all fiction."

"I am not really the son of a dead actor," he lied with much honesty in his thick brows, much contortion in his plush lips. "My father was a nobody. So much of a nobody that my mother felt bad and before we moved here, let me decide for the two of us who he was going to have been and I chose a dead actor."

"Brilliant, brilliant!" The little girl hopped up and applauded him, and grinned in a way that caused her jaw to throb and sent wedge-like creases into her cheeks, creases that made her appear not very young or little at all. 

With that, and with no other prelude at all, he kissed her hastily on the hand and ran far, far away, first into the woods before swerving back at the honk of his mother's van that had just pulled up. 

That evening, the little girl would come to visit him backstage wearing a white tank dress with a rosewater pink sash. It would make her shoulders appear especially broad, and while this grievance of hers was none of his, he would think to himself how it was a shame they were not attractively burdened with a violin. He would feel the urge, again, to hand her something like a flower, but thinking better of it this time, would slip into her palm the bridge of her demolished instrument.