Page 28 of Intermission

“Oh? How does your family pray?”

“Bless this food for our good, help us do as we should, may we know you today in our work and our play. Amen.” As I finish reciting my family’s usual meal prayer, my cheeks heat. I break eye contact and let my gaze trail down the narrow creek which flows out of thepool below us. “It’s kind of embarrassing. I’m pretty sure it came out of a book of nursery rhymes or something. Your prayer seems... more real.”

“That doesn’t mean it was.” He sighs. “It can be pretty weird to pray aloud. Whenever I pray with other people, I have to fight the temptation to try and sound churchier than I am.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a pride thing, I guess.” Noah gives me a lopsided grin. “I’m a performer, right? So I should be eloquent. And I was raised by missionaries, so I should know all the proper, church-approved lingo, you know?”

“Um, not really. I was raised by an accountant and a cardiologist.”

“Right. So... in your case, people who know your parents probably assume you’re good at math, right?”

“Iamgood at math. But yeah. I guess it’s a fair assumption.”

“My parents are missionaries. God is their business, their life.”

“So people expect you to have a direct line to Heaven.”

“Something like that.” He nods. “And when I know people are listening, my prayers sometimes lose their authenticity. They become like... a kind of performance, I guess. More about what other people are thinking about me and my mad prayer skills than about me connecting with—talking to—God. It’s like they’re not really prayers, but... soliloquies.”

“To pray or not to pray,” I quip in my best Shakespearean accent, “thatis the question.”

“Now who’s the hack?” Noah picks up a little stick and traces a design in a small patch of sandy mud in the cleft between our rock and the next. “But enough about me and my pride.” He sets the stick down. “What’s new in your world?”

“Not much. Oh! Well, I’m playing Liesl inThe Sound of Music. That’s new.”

He chuckles. “Have you been accepted at any of the colleges you’ve applied to yet?”

“I haven’tappliedto any colleges.”

Noah tilts his head. “Why not?”

Oh.My breath catches as I remember the conversation that was interrupted at our first audition.Noah probably thinks I’m a senior.That I’ll be going to college next year.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said I was sixteen going on seventeen. Iamsixteen.”

He blinks. Squints. His eyes round. “You’re...what?”

“I’m a sophomore. Next fall—and the fall after that, when I actuallydoapply to colleges—I’ll still be at Kanton High.”

This fact falls between us like cymbals dropped on the floor of the orchestra pit.

“You’re a—” He stares at me. “You’resixteen?Years old?”

“Mm-hmm.” The warmth that so recently moved within me dissipates like the fog of my breath on the wintry air. “I turned sixteen on October sixth.”

Noah is silent. “That’swhy I don’t remember you from high school,” he says at last. “Because you weren’t eveninhigh school with me. You were in, what,eighth gradewhen I was a senior?”

He graduated with Gretchen, so . . . “Yes.”

“Wow. That’s just . . .super.”

The sarcasm stings. I look away.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that I thought—never mind. It’s not like you can help it.” Noah rakes his fingers through his hair and lets out a long breath. “Sixteen. Wow. I’ll be twenty in September.”

“You must have been the baby of your class.”