We're sitting in the square on a bright sunny lunchtime. It's me, David, and the newest recruits for the Growth Stock Company. We're sharing the two for a dollar hot dogs from Wal-Greens, and drinking one can of soda between the five of us.

Payday is still a couple days away and none of us have much money left. It took serious scrounging to find the $1.50 we needed for lunch. Usually David and I could split the cost of the hot dogs and soda and have plenty, but the newest members were starving and demolished the first hot dog before David had put mustard on ours. We took a bite, one from each end of the hot dog, and then handed over the rest, unable to eat with the puppy dog eyes begrudging our every bite. It was gone in an instant.

The newest employees of the Growth Stock Company are young- barely 17, and David says they lied about their age to qualify for the position.

They are street punks, wise in the ways of the street and brazen. They aren't scared of anything on the outside, projecting bravo and sass to the world. Their eyes say differently. In their eyes, I see the horrors of a world too cruel and a darkness that lingers around the edges of their carefree laughter.

Sam has curly blond hair that bounces when you pull on a lock and let it go. He leans against me and closes his eyes, exhausted and pale. I play with his curls. I watch them zing back into shape and grin. He curls up on the bench, his head in my lap, and smiles. I wind his hair in my fingers until my fingers are tangled. From the minute we met, Sam claimed I was his big sister. I was happy to have a little brother again, especially one as sweet as he was. I look at the dark circles under his eyes and wonder if he'd eaten a vegetable in weeks.

David and the youngest one, Vic, are in a heated debate about something. My mind had been far away and I missed the beginning of the argument. Vic is clicking and unclicking the buckle to his overalls. The other strap has already fallen free, and he teases David as the buckled strap swings free. David grabs it and rebuckles it. I watch as David tries to stop Vic from leaving.

He is cajoling, nearly begging, and from the pain in his voice that I'd only heard him use on stage, I slowly realize that the new recruits aren't here by accident and weren't sent to us by bored state workers. David has a relationship with them that I don't understand. The boy pushes David away and walks toward a business man on the busy street. One strap swings with each step he takes, caressing his butt as he walks.

David pounds his fist in frustration on a street sign and kicks at the bench next to mine. The only time I've seen him this angry in the year and a half that we've worked together was when he fought with Gee about his acting ability.

"Chill, D," Sam says sleepily. "The boy's good. When Vic comes back, we'll have plenty of money for dinner tonight."

"Steak tonight, I bet," chimes in Tommy.

David shoves Sam off the bench and sits next to me.

Sam slides good-naturedly to the ground, a giggle in his voice. "Steak," he says teasingly.

David and I watch as Vic slides his arm around the stranger's and whispers in his ear. Sam leans against my leg and reaches out to touch David's arm. David swats Sam's hand away angrily and stands up abruptly as Vic and the stranger go around the corner out of sight.

"I've got lines to run," David mumbles as he takes off for the cast entrance, nearly running. I begin to go after him, but Sam holds me back.

"Give him space," Sam suggested.

"He always gets like this when Vic's working," Tommy agreed. "He'll get over it. He always does."

 Of the five of us, I'm the oldest, and yet the most innocent. My confusion showed on my face.

"It's no biggie," Sam explained. "We all do it. It's a quick twenty."

"Yeah," Tommy said, "But Vic is the best. They love his baby face while Sam and I have to rely on our skills."

"Skills?" I ask stupidly.

Tommy drains the last of the soda and hands me the can. He stands in front of me and starts to go through his routine. I look away, but already the busy lunchtime crowd has noticed his movements. I hide my face, not wanting to watch, but I can't keep from peeking as Tommy moves closer to me, his body inches away.  I blush as a crowd gathers to watch his sexy, come-on dance.  Sam laughs at my red face and bounces up.

Sliding up a pant leg suggestively, and flouncing his skinny butt, Tommy gyrates and wiggles. Sam joins him and they re-enact sexual acts as if in a slow and passionate dance. Tommy's eyes meet a man's across the crowd, and he wags a finger goodbye to Sam as he slides through the crowd and negotiates a price.

Sam flops down on the bench again and the crowd melts away after a smattering of applause.

Sam's head back in my lap, his curls between my fingers, we are silent. Tears are in my eyes, but Sam is nearly asleep, as if nothing happened.

"Aren't you scared?" I ask softly.

Sam doesn't answer.

"It scares me," I continue. "You could get hurt, or ..."

I can't finish it. Sam is asleep, and I watch over him protectively.

Lunchtime is nearly over when David rejoins me. His eyes are red and puffy. I know Vic's fundraising habits scare him too. 

"Gee's looking for you," David says as he hands me an ice-cold Coke.

"Where'd you get the Coke?"

He smiles, and I see a bit of the fear in his eyes recede. "I stole it from Gee's fridge," he confesses.

I pop it open, take a long drink, and hand it back to him. He drinks nearly half the can before setting the cold can on Sam's face.

"Time to go to work, boy," David says authoritatively. "Time to make some honest money for a change." 

David was happiest on stage, lost in another character besides himself. From the time he was assigned a part until the last performance ended, David lived and breathed the character. Occasionally, he'd break character and we kept score. Vic was ahead. Vic could make David break character with a smile. I was last. I could never make him break character, but I didn't try very hard. I loved watching him work. His serious expression while we ran lines, his determination to find the perfect motion, and his willingness to fight with Gee for what he believed in impressed me from the beginning.

From the day I showed up to work at the Growth Stock Theater Company we were friends. At first, it was him, Rose, and me. Rose and I were stuck on the dusty, unair conditioned third floor. I was supposed to help Rose sew, but she had little patience for my lack of skill and no time to teach me. Rose sewed and I ran lines with David until I knew every single line of the play backwards and forward. After Rose left, it was just David and I against the world it seemed. The yogurt eating, yoga doing, bike riding piano player tried to butt in between us, but she left long before David or I, and then it was just David and I again. It didn't help that Gee played favorites and no one wanted to cross the line he drew on stage in a fit of rage.

He and David were fighting about David's interpretation of the role- or rather Gee was screaming in an odd combination of French/English and using cuss words in both languages. David stood opposite him, fists clenched. The rest of the cast and crew gathered around to watch, afraid that if we made the wrong move, the world would crumble. Screeching about the French Resistance, Shakespeare, and betrayal, Gee ranted, and I giggled. The room fell silent.

I understood just enough French to know he was comparing his role in the French Resistance to the role of Julius Caesar, and it struck me funny. Laughing at the spitting mad little French director was a bad idea, but the more I thought of him wearing a toga and the crown of leaves, the more I giggled. David looked at me dumbfounded and the anger drained from his face. A bit of a smirk flashed across his face while Gee glared at me. The more Gee glared, the more I laughed. I couldn't stop.

"Enough!" Gee shouted. "Fini!"

I hiccupped, bit my tongue, and held my breath as Gee stood nose to nose with me.

"Are you done?" I tried to look remorseful.

"Go to him," Gee said nastily, shoving me roughly across the stage. I skinned my palms badly and sprained both wrists as I caught myself right before doing a nosedive at David's feet. David moved down slowly to pick me up as Charlie, the stage manager, stepped toward me as well. I signaled David back and blew on my hands. The Business Manager held Charlie back. I stared at Gee  from the floor and he looked away.

Dragging his left foot across the stage, Gee drew a line in the dust, separating us from the rest of the crew. "Anyone else want to join them?"

"Forget about it," David said. The line isolated us as the cast and crew tiptoed around. David didn't care. He was in full rehearsal mode and rarely needed me to run lines anymore. But I was lonely.

I spent my free time on the third floor, cutting Rose's fabric remnants into tiny piles, forming little pictures with them, and scattering them around the room until it looked like a parade had been through the space. About six days into the isolation, David found me silently destroying another piece of fabric. He handed me a Coke, and watched me cutting tiny shapes, making small pictures, and shoving them off the table.

"I have an idea," he said finally.

"It will make Gee forgive me?" I asked, tearfully.

He shook his head no. "He can forgive me for challenging him, but you laughed at him. Nobody laughs at him."

The boys appeared at the theater a few days later. There were three of them, streetwise punks, barely 17, full of life and energy: Vic, the dark-haired tease who owned David's heart, Sam, the one who claimed me as a sister instantly, and Tommy who wore his sexual preferences the way most girls wear makeup. We clicked instantly. I was no longer alone.

"Told you I'd fix it," David bragged during one of his rare breaks.

"You take her to Garcia's yet?" Sam asked mischievously.

"Not at night," David said shortly. "We've been for lunch."

"That ain't goin' to Garcia's," Tommy scoffed.

"Payday," Vic demanded. "After the last performance."

Garcias looked like a normal Mexican place on the outside, but it wasn’t known for its food. Smoke filled and smelling like rancid grease, the place was jammed. I was the only girl in the place. The boys were thrilled to have me there, introducing me to people, moving in and out of the crowd like experts, picking out the perfect booth. Tommy cranked the jukebox and jumped on a chair to dance, showing off all his special moves. David sulked at our booth. At first, I thought he was exhausted from the performance. He was usually pale and drained afterwards, but this was different.

"What's wrong?" I asked finally, tired of watching him flip open and shut the container of chili a thousand times.

He nodded toward the corner. In all my naivety, I hadn't understood before that very moment. I never connected the dots. I watched David watching Vic and another male making out hot and heavy in the darkness. David ordered a beer for him and another Coke for me.

"He likes to make me jealous," David said, flipping open the container of green chilies again.

Crawling out of the green chilies, waving his feelers like he was slightly drunk, was a cockroach. I screamed and jumped up on the bench. The cockroach smiled at me as he scurried down the side of the container and across the table- coming straight right for me. I kicked at it, and connected firmly with the container of green chili, like it was a soccer ball. It threw through the air, streaming green chilies behind it, before landing smack against Vic's back. The remaining bits of green chili in the container slid down his back past his belt.

"Nice kick," David said, roaring at the expression on Vic's face. I jumped up and down on the leather seate, trying to get the cockroach off my pants, sobbing hysterically. Sam and Tommy were at my side instantly, dusting off my pants, trying to stop the noise coming out of my mouth, pretending to stomp on imaginary cockroaches. Vic stormed over to the booth and slammed his fist on the table.

"Cockroach," I sobbed.

David laughed. He looked at Vic and laughed. "Cockroach," he said.

With that, we had the power to make David break character. It was as easy as that. When he came off stage, drenched in sweat, tight as a tangled slinky, one of us would point at Vic and say, “Cockroach!” Instantly, he was himself again, with a smile in his eyes.

And me? I still don’t care for green chili. I figure anything a cockroach can climb out of and look that happy about isn’t anything I want too close to me.

(Part 2 of the Growth Stock Theater Company)

Set honour in one eye and death i' the other,
And I will look on both indifferently,
For let the gods so speed me as I love
The name of honour more than I fear death.
(Brutus. Act 1. Scene 2)

The Growth Stock Theater’s home was the empty library building on the abandoned downtown square in Springfield. The city rented it to Gee for a dollar a year plus utilities. It was three stories high with a basement on the corner of the square. Designed as an experimental stage, a theater in the round, the audience sat in folding chairs at huge wooden spool tables on the edge of the stage, as if they were part of the cast instead of the audience. Candles in wine bottles cast a soft light on the rough edges and distracted the viewers from the raw wooden beams and the matte black paint slapped on everything. The ushers reminded audience members that once the play started, they needed to stay in their seats because it was difficult to see the steps in the dark. Gee used to claim it was for safety reasons, but we all knew he thought any distraction from what was happening on stage was a fatal sin.

Gee used every bit of space, weaving his actors in and out of the audience, sitting them at tables with the audience while they waited to go on, and the audience loved it. As an actor spoke his first line from a table, the people would buzz and point, stunned that the polite young man was one of the actors, or that the girl pouring their wine was actually the main character. It connected them with the story instantly, and the madman was a pure genius.

He made Shakespeare come alive. He did Julius Caesar in black tee-shirts and jeans, with no music, no intermission, and no break in the story flow. Each scene continued as if it was part of the last scene, and each Act built on the last. The stage was barren, and props were only what we carried with us: a simple scarf, a knife on the belt. You were alone on the stage, with just your talent and the talent of the actor next to you, and the audience forgot to breathe from the first line to the last. The politics of the play preached louder than the street preacher on the corner, or the politicians in sessions making new laws.

The theater company was the fulfillment of a madman’s dream. The federal government footed most the bills of the company since Gee had sold the idea of using chronically unemployed people as slaves to build his dream to those in charge of dispensing federal funds. I’m sure the idea of using the arts to clean up the streets appealed to the decision-makers, and Gee was a persuasive man.

Society women in their pearls and furs, accompanying their husbands for the current legislative session down state, would show up on Gee’s arms during afternoon rehearsals. They’d watch us transform the black void into color and light and would sigh at how well Gee was doing at changing us into employable citizens from the people of poverty we were. They’d attend the evening performance, bringing their own wine, and clapping feverously at the final curtain call. We’d open their wine bottles, pour their wine into disposable plastic Champagne cups, and act our hearts out for their entertainment. They left feeling sated, as if they’d done something for society by simply being at our performance. Gee would beam afterwards and the winos among us would scoop up the bottles left behind for their own celebrations after the lights went out.

The cast and crew of the GSTC was a mixed bag. Gee was a man of his word, and he hired, for slightly less than minimum wage (since the rules were different then for federally funded job programs than for the small businessman), people that the job placement people couldn’t place elsewhere. The druggies and winos were put to work as stage crew (when they showed up) building sets and repairing the building. It was the perfect job for them since it was rare that anyone, including the manager, Paul, showed up before 1 pm. And as long as they didn’t OD in the basement during performances, Gee was content to keep paying them.

You exited off stage, out one door, down a flight of stairs, ran like hell across the basement, up another flight of stairs, in the door, on to the stage, not breathing heavily, breaking out into a sweat, or making any noise on the uncarpeted metal stairs. You were expected to stroll on stage, totally in control and sometimes Gee left just enough time for a person to make the trip- much less regain one’s composure. No one ever stopped running before they hit the second landing. Water waited in the stairwell, you’d grab a cup if you had time before your next entrance and wait, calming your rapidly beating heart. Even the fittest among us needed a few seconds to regain their poise.

There was no time in the mad dash to notice the new man, nodding off in the battered arm chair, never changed his position. During the First Act, we all thought he was sleeping. By Act Two, David said something to Charlie (the play's stage manager) about the new stage crew guy being able to sleep so soundly when we ran by. Usually the stage crew would stretch out their hands as we ran by, slapping our palms soundly as a sign of solidarity, but this guy slept. By the end of Act Two, Charlie had a few spare minutes to shake the guy and to warn him that Gee would fire him in a heartbeat for sleeping through a performance. In the middle of Act Three, I ran by the paramedics, a dressed for opening night Paul, and the gurney with the new guy on it. No time to stop, no time for gossip, no time for curiosity. No one ever entered Gee’s stage late- not if you wanted to ever enter it again. Regaining my breath and composure, I entered the stage right on time. By the time I left it, Paul was back in his seat, the new man and the paramedics were gone, and the audience was exploding, unaware that the real drama was below their feet.

We made the paper twice that night. Our Opening Night performance made the front page and the death of the newest crew member was in a two inch sidebar buried in the back. Paul cut out the raving review of the evening and pasted it in the huge scrapbook where he kept proof of our newspaper exposure, but he threw away the rest of the paper.

David, Rose, and I met on the third floor the next afternoon. David had some time between rehearsals and I was back sewing costumes with Rose for our next play.

“I didn’t even know his name,” I moaned, feeling guilty for not stopping earlier.

Rose knew his name. She knew everyone.

David read the two inch news item aloud. “I must have run past him ten times before I said something to Charlie,” David growled, angry at himself too.

Rose sighed. “He had a problem when he came, and he left in peace. It's not either of yours fault.”

David threw the paper down and paced. “I can’t stay here,” he complained. “Gee is sapping the humanity outta me.”

Rose smoothed out the cumpled paper and clipped the tiny article out with her good fabric scissors. Her fingers pressed out the wrinkles and she stashed it in her wallet, underneath the fading picture of her parents. She said his name aloud three times, as if envoking the dead man's spirit among us. David shoved the fabric aside and sat on the table, swinging his long legs. He took Rose's wallet from her hands and stared at the ancient wedding picture. He snapped it closed.

"We gotta get outta here," he said decisively, shoving his blond curls off his forehead.

Rose nodded. "Hot dogs are 2 for a dollar at Walgreens. Let's get some for lunch and eat on the square."

David jumped down and smiled, a glint in his eyes. "You like Mexican?" I nodded. "We're going out for lunch! My treat!" Rose objected but he insisted, pulling her up from her sewing machine. "We're gonna' go to a place where the hot sauce is too hot for the cockroaches!"

Rose laughed and motioned for me to join them. "You ever been to a seedy, run-down gay bar?" she asked me. I confessed no. David pulled me to standing.

"Vexed I am
Of late with passions of some difference,
Conceptions only proper to myself,
Which give some soil perhaps to my behaviors;
But let not therefore my good friends be grieved--
Among which number, Cassius, be you one--
Nor construe any further my neglect,
Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war,
Forgets the shows of love to other men." he recited.

"Let us not be grieved, nor forget," he repeated, pulling me towards the stairwell.