TWO - Think

She felt at the holster on her belt, but the gun wasn't there.

Despite the danger this suggested, it was almost a relief. Her pesky daily anxieties could find no mental real estate when faced with impending murder.

The criminal across from her stood tall (wanted on four counts of homicide, needed for a line-up on some other case entirely) and flipped her knife around in the dreaded, deadly, downward position.

"What's the matter?" the woman said, referring to Think's searching fingers near her holster. "Didn't bring a tampon?"

Oh ha ha! What a card, this woman. But the truth was, Think didn't know how she'd misplaced her service weapon, or how she'd ended up here, alone, without back-up, with the odds stacked against her. The truth was Think was boned.

The criminal dug into her jeans' pocket with her free hand before unsheathing again, her hand still technically empty, and yet.

"Here," said the criminal. "One bad kitty to another." She pretended to throw something to Think, underhanded.

As soon as Think "caught" it, she immediately identified this invisible item: a tampon.

"Lifesaver!" cried Think. She 'unwrapped' it and channeled the mind of her 'closer' probationer, Pierce London, and all the hard-learned Stanislavski philosophies therein. Put another way, she acted. She mixed those lessons with the euphoria she'd sampled from probationers past. Stirred it with the urgency she remembered so well from Clay Thomas. Count time count time. Spiked it with a sudden physical reflex, hands held high again, a karate formation she couldn't name, to suggest she was not yet out of her criminal tete-a-tete. She made damn sure it was written on her mug, externalized, dramatic, obvious, and she knew she'd been successful, because the audience busted into laughter, and not the forced-guffaw kind, either.

Think was on stage, and she was killing it.

The Always Improv theatre usually penciled in the student troupe, And the Town was Saved, to a brief ten minutes to close the show. Tonight? They were riding high at a minute eighteen easy, with no hurry-it-up laser light in sight.

The cop-and-robber routine was scuttled at the proper moment, too: she and her improv classmate Delilah (the 'criminal') were cued away by another classmate who took over the stage and segued into a scene about a tampon restaurant. They were on fire. There was rumor of a flesh-and-blood celebrity in the back row: Emmett Highsmith, Hollywood bigwig, too many classics to count (including that series about fictitious Transference officers. What was it called? Hollywood Minds). Was he watching? Was he impressed? Did he still have a hate-on for Transference and Quorumets and surveillance for some limousine-liberal reason?

She mimicked his put-upon, trans-Atlantic, faux-Kennedy accent in her mind: "This government force is an outrageous, insidious, illegal, unconstitutional encroachment upon the rights of Americans and humans aforth!" Cue the image of tux-clad Emmett on his red-carpet soap-box a month earlier outside a movie premiere. The star had shaved his head for his 'Big Moment,' as a visual protest against Transference and government-mandated brain surgeries in general. He looked better with hair. The accent was stupid-fake yet frustratingly sexy: "We, as guardians of thought, must not normalize neurological impropriety!"

Here she was, under stage lights, a mile and a half away from where the red carpet once lay. The impropriety was afoot. The adrenaline real. The improv comedy hurtled in fast, fun, and messy, like the Christmas cards at the end of Miracle on 34th Street. (Think shelved the simile and made a point to later plant it in-scene.)

And as the next bit reached its zenith, Think sprinted downstage, hands wailing for the others to beat it, her jokes and her charm at the tip of her tongue, ready to become someone new again, some interesting, dynamic character.

But she felt a buzz at her thigh. Two vhirrs. Her phone.

Think stood there, in position, mouth agape, total silence.

Was this the joke? seemed to be the initial takeaway of the crowd. They helpfully chuckled, but even that dried up. The hurry-it-up laser light blasted Think in the eye, as if that might unfreeze her.

Delilah returned downstage next. She playfully pulled at Think's arm, trying to maintain the momentum, a pleading smile on her face.

"Medic!" cried Delilah. "It's a seizure! And, my God, it's contagious!"

Delilah tensed up with a comic's charm, a callback to a joke earlier in the night, and a physical gag she relied on a lot for laughs in general. Also, Think was pretty sure it looked nothing like a real seizure. But the bulk of Think didn't stir, or couldn't. HOLYCRAP, SAYSOMETHING, echoed the memory of Pierce London. Her phone vhirred again, still unanswered, spiritually pulling at Think's other paralyzed arm.

"Hey, I translate mime," said Delilah, taking a new tack as she stepped in front of Think and addressed the audience: "She says, 'that's our show, thank you all for coming, now SCRAM!'"

Cue the music. Cue Delilah and the others waving to the crowd. Cue the applause. Cue the lights. Cue again the vibrating pulses in Think's pocket, and that wasn't a reminder; it was another new text. She snapped out of her paralysis and procured the device to check the texter, though she might've guessed it soon as the buzz began. It was UGH.

Hack, read the first text, the one which ushered the dead air.

The second one read: Mime. Was she here?

Think surveyed the crowd bottlenecking the exitway, but the backs of generic heads proved nothing. No. Wrong. Correction. It proved one thing: UGH still knew how to get into Think's head.

"Waffler!" Delilah spat when Think retreated to the green room and its permanent cloud of cigarette smoke and disappointment. To 'waffle' was to fail to make use of a set-up on stage, which wasn't quite accurate to what Think did (or didn't do), but now was not the time for terminology corrections. Think was getting it from all sides.

"You nearly killed us," said another.

"We could've gone another five, maybe ten, maybe all night, who knows," said a third.

"Why am I not surprised?" said the fourth and final member of her all-woman troupe. "It's the Speak-and-Spell in her pretty little skull. She's woefully handicapped. I knew it was a bad idea to let in one of those 'Trans' people."

The criticisms and self-righteous pitter-patter continued as Think gathered her things. She didn't take it too personally. They'd all been guilty of waffling, or wanking, or driving a scene, or a flat joke, or a bad set-up, or a lost pay-off. They were students of the craft. Mistakes were part of the creative tapestry, weren't they?

"What time again, Delilah?" asked Faith later, the dimmest of the lot. She, Delilah, and Think were the only ones left in the green room. Delilah had decided to stick around and watch tape of their performance like she was a football player. Faith was waiting for a friend to pick her up, because she'd had bad experiences with rideshares. Think could've left whenever, but she dreaded the lingering audience outside, or one audience member in particular. Ugh.

"The invite says seven, but like, nine would be choice, right?" said Faith.

Delilah cued the night's performance on her laptop as she settled into the couch. "What are you puttering on about, Faith?"

"Your party tomorrow."

Delilah had a party tomorrow? Shoot, Think must have forgotten all about it. But before she could weigh in herself, Delilah grabbed a worn, stained pillow off the couch and threw it at Faith, then glared at Faith like she'd dropped her phone in the toilet. It was official: Delilah had gone Full Bitch. Like a werewolf in a full moon, the rest of her night would be arbitrary growls at anyone who so much as flashed her a smile. So, screw her.

Screw 'em all.

They weren't her friends, not really. She'd only been brought on board two weeks earlier, after a star-turning performance during a trial improv class. (Admittedly, she'd been pulling from Pierce London's mind the entire time, who had simultaneously performed in a separate improv class on the west side of Los Angeles. But it wasn't like anybody was aware.) She barely knew the troupe, or the girls, and maybe she didn't want to, she told herself, as she read the drink list at the bar. What was the name of this place again? The Oven. She'd never been here before, but then, she didn't often venture for libations along touristy Hollywood Boulevard, where the people trampled all over the stars on the sidewalks, instead of the other way around. The weekend clientele reeked of college kids in tight dresses and USC hats. Who would Think be tonight? Could she still pass as a 'fellow kid'? She'd been carded at the door. What would a twenty-one-year-old order anyway? A Long Island. If anyone asked, she'd need to devise a major. Or perhaps she'd say she was still undecided. What did kids do these days? Who did they follow? There was that YouTube star, McKenzie X, an eighteen-year-old firecracker, the one with the private Quorumet. She'd started hawking out advertisements for McDonalds and Starbucks through her stream-of-consciousness, which Think had to admit was both impressive and...