Starry-Eyed by Ted Michael Page A

name is, and she looks at him adoringly and they kiss with beery lips while I sing. Can’t refuse a fellow on his birthday, right? Poor Terry. Her song of love is just beginning, and it’ll be over before the second verse.
    . . . . .
    I sing until the wee hours, you might say, meaning I sing until I have to wee. Only my bladder gets me offstage. I’m underage, of course, but no one tosses Niall Kilcommons’s daughter out of the private party room at Kelly Ryan’s pub on the man’s own birthday. Or looks askance when she pours herself a drink from the beer pitcher, either.
    I sing everything everyone asks for, and more. “Danny Boy,” oh boy, did they hear “Danny Boy.” Four or five times, at least. Me and songs is like my uncle Frank and a pint. Should’ve stopped at two, but I didn’t.
    Niall keeps up the jolly act for the first song, and the second. On thethird his face locks up into a mask. The smile is frozen in place, but his mind has gone elsewhere. And why isn’t it him with the microphone, anyway? Him in the spotlight, instead of me? That’s his natural position in life. Just ask him, he’ll tell you.
    . . . . .
    By the time Evie drags me home, my hair stinks of pub and my voice is a rasp. I sleep in my makeup, too lazy to wash up. In the morning, I scrub my raccoon face in the shower and emerge in a girlish cloud of Herbal Essences. I didn’t dare try to make a sound, even in the soothing steam of the shower. I knew I’d done myself in.
    I get to school a bit late, just in time to hear the bells of doom tolling. My best friend, Lily, looks at me with big wild eyes as I slip into my seat. She’s the type who’d show up to vocal technique class twenty minutes early on the day the great Sabrina Krause was coming. She’s the type who’d have risen at 6 a.m. to warm up at home, in case she got picked by the great, famous Sabrina Krause to do a demonstration. She’s the type to be punctual, prepared, and in good voice, on the day the great, famous, world-renowned soprano Sabrina Krause was coming to our snooty, private, hard-to-get-into performing arts high school to give the voice majors a master class, which is all we’d heard about, over and over and over again, for three Sabrina Krause—obsessed weeks.
    Me, I am not the same type that Lily is. Obviously. And I don’t just mean that her family pays and I’m on scholarship, although knowing this fact makes the epic scale of my stupidity all the more clear.
    â€œDammit, Fee!” Her whisper’s so sharp, it’s like a poke in the ribs. “How could you forget?”
    I give her my best “hey, I’m a jerk” shrug. Still daren’t speak. Anyway, Mr. Scharf, head of the vocal studies department, is about to introduce the woman of the hour. Doubtless his knees are trembling in his trousers (well, something in his trousers is trembling, I bet) to stand so close to thetwinkling aura of greatness.
    â€œ. . . made her debut at La Scala . . . starred at the Metropolitan Opera . . . recordings . . . concerts . . . Grammy Awards . . .” Blah blah blah, she’s famous and we’re not, we get it. And then: “It is an astounding privilege for us here at the Professional Academy for the Performing Arts to welcome the one and only, the legendary Sabrina Krause.”
    â€œLegendary? I thought she was mythical,” I wisecrack to Lily, or try to, but my voice is a small dry pea stuck to the back of my throat. I’m left making jokes in my own head. The manticore , Sabrina Krause. The griffin , Sabrina Krause! Mythical creatures, see? I think it’s hilarious. Poor Lily doesn’t know what she’s missing.
    Everybody claps, and the unicorn Sabrina Krause herself takes the stage. Tall, straight as a ladder-back chair, with about as much meat on her bones. Carries a cane but doesn’t seem to lean on it much. Probably uses it