Maura
“Tonight, I want to talk about secrets,” Sean said, opening the evening’s discussion.
“Oh good, we haven’t had a theme in a while,” Maura whispered to Ben.
“And it sounds like a juicy one,” he added.
Ben and Maura’s proximity on their first night had led to a regular habit of sitting together. Maura appreciated Ben’s receptiveness to her sideline commentary, and Ben seemed grateful that Maura never took the sessions too seriously. Each of her lighthearted remarks poked a hole in the shell of doom and gloom that might otherwise have proven suffocating.
“I’m sure many of us spend a lot of emotional energy keeping things bottled up,” said Sean. “But when you’re already dealing with something so . . . significant, like your string, maybe it would help to lighten the rest of your load. If you’re comfortable, of course.”
“This ain’t fucking confession,” Carl grunted.
Maura’s thoughts briefly turned to her fight with Nina, the online obsession she’d been harboring for weeks. But hadn’t Maura been hiding something, too? She never did tell Nina about the pangs in the night, the little boy with the backpack and his mom.
“Well, I have something I’d like to get off my chest,” said Terrell.
Clearly pleased, Sean motioned for him to continue.
“It’s the whole Ted affair,” said Terrell.
“Who’s Ted?” asked Nihal.
“My ex-boyfriend,” Terrell said. “I stole an eight-hundred-dollar watch from him.”
Everyone waited for an explanation.
“Well, let me first say that I consider myself a very respectable person,” Terrell said, “and this is my only shameful deviation, like spending your whole life eating salads and then one day inhaling an entire chocolate cake. But, to make a long story short, Ted and I had been dating for almost a year when he decided to cheat on me in the most uninspired manner.”
“With your best friend?” Chelsea guessed.
“With a coworker during a late night at work. Like an idiot, he came home from the office with the wrong belt on, because apparently it was dark and every man in finance wears similar ugly black belts. So obviously I found out, and we broke up, and I decided to exact my revenge by taking something he cared about.”
“The watch was really important to him?” Ben asked.
“It wasn’t a family heirloom or anything like that. It was just a really fucking expensive watch. And the bastard owed it to me. I had to get back at him for wasting the past ten months of my life. He stole all of that time from me, so I couldn’t think of anything more apropos than stealing his watch.”
Terrell rolled up his sleeve and wriggled his wrist with a sheepish grin, the gold wristwatch gleaming in the fluorescent light of the classroom. Even Sean couldn’t help but smile.
“Oh man, I wish I had thought of that,” said Chelsea. “When my ex had the nerve to dump me by text, I just took a baseball bat to his rearview mirror.”
“Why did you break up?” Nihal asked.
“Well . . . he found out,” Chelsea said, and each member of the group could fill in the gaps.
He’d found out about her string.
“But it’s not all bad news,” Terrell said, deftly rescuing the group from further despair. “Technically, this is also a secret, but I happen to know that a new Broadway show is currently in development with an entire cast and crew of short-stringers. Writing, directing, lighting, choreography . . . the whole shebang! All short-stringers. People are flying in from all over the country to work on it. And, best of all, yours truly will be on the producing team.”
“That’s incredible,” said Ben.
Maura wasn’t surprised. “You can always count on the artists to step up,” she said, “especially during a crisis.”
“And to do it in song.” Terrell smiled.
“That reminds me, some of my old college buddies are launching this home exchange program exclusively for short-stringers,” added Nihal. “You can match with someone in another state, or even another country, and swap homes with them for a period of time. It’s supposed to make it easier for short-stringers to travel and see the world.”
“You have to let us all be beta testers!” Chelsea squealed.
“I actually have a pretty big secret, too,” said Lea, buoyed by the change in mood. “But you all have to promise not to tell anyone . . . yet.”
A few of the group members actually leaned forward in their chairs.