"Dance, puppets, dance!"

I glanced over at Jonathan, who had been leaning over the edge of the catwalk and looking down at the people sitting in the house. "And you're sure you're feeling better?"

"Oh, lots!" he said gaily, which was more than a little frightening, because the Jonathan Crane I knew was never happy.

I'd paid one of the techies twenty bucks to let us up onto the catwalk and make sure that no one else was up there while we did our business. Now we were dressed as techies, waiting for the actual play to start.

It was a typical Crane plan: clever setup, but I'd probably balls up the actual execution. Although that was questionable, because I'd actually planned most of this one.

After a series of events which are too complicated to explain in one brief paragraph, Jonathan had been sent to a headshrink who'd put him on some drugs. Unlike him, I didn't know what they were or what they were for, but he seemed a lot less crazy after she'd put him on them, and things had largely calmed down around hacienda Crane.

For Christmas, I'd bought him a novelty name plaque for his door that read "Scarecrow". (I figured things had finally gone belly-up when they found it in his room after he got fired and left town. He'd never deliberately have left it behind. And, what do you know? I was right about things going belly-up.) Things, in other words, were eerily close to high-school normal. Which worried me.

Anyway, like I said, he did the idea, I did the planning. I had come to the conclusion that I sucked at planning, and had decided that the planning, in future, should probably be left up to Jonathan. As laughable as it sounded, I was the muscle, he was the brains.

Whoever was in charge of the music in prior to the show at our school had made a decidedly unwise choice tonight: Duran Duran playing softly over the speaker system, helpfully informing us that the singer was hungry like the wolf. And because of the way the speakers were mounted, we should have just rocked out, because damn it was loud.

"So, uh, how long do we have to get out?" I asked.

Normally he would have shot me a death glare, but instead he followed his therapist's advice to use his words, not chemicals and/or violence. "It's heavier than air," he replied. "We both have masks, so technically we can hang around as long as we want."

"Yeah, but I only paid that techie to let us up here to get our stuff set up," I pointed out, "and right now we're riding on pure luck, as far as getting caught up here. And if we get caught, we're screwed, because you're the kid that firebombed a Halloween party."

This time he did shoot me a death glare. "It wasn't firebombing," he said.

"We're also screwed because anyone who comes up here is eventually going to figure that a, we have no idea what we're doing up here, and b, we're not actually techies."

He cut me off. "Anyone who'd be coming up here to check us out would get caught by the gas first. And if they happen to find two kids hiding in the catwalk, well, who's going to guess they had anything to do with that tragic gassing?"

"Sneaking up to the catwalk to have sex isn't exactly the logical thing to do when we're getting gassed," I pointed out. "And besides, neither of us is a good rhetorician, so how the hell do we convince them that that's what we were doing?"

"Rhetorician," he said thoughtfully. "Is that a real word, or did you just make it up?"

"Oh, yeah, it's a real word," I said.

"I'll have to start using it, then," he said. "How long until the show starts?"

I checked my watch. "We have twenty minutes."

He groaned. "I should have brought a Coke." He'd been a caffeine fiend since the sixth grade. And a devout Coke drinker.

"Headache?"

He nodded. Apparently either the meds or the shrink were helping him get over his fear of admitting weakness, which I'd never really noticed before he'd started getting over it. And apparently the shrink didn't know about his caffeine thing.

I flipped him my backup Advil bottle; he caught it, unscrewed the cap, and took two. Then he passed it back to me, looking down into the house, which was filling up with people, and checking his watch.

"Thanks," he said.

"No problem." It wasn't, really. He was the sole reason I carried Advil at all. "Boy Scout motto."

"Be prepared?"

"Work will make you free," I quipped.

He stared down into the house, studying the people filing in, taking seats, and chatting with each other. They were just people... to me, anyway.

The lights began to dim, and he swore under his breath before turning to me.

"Go time," I said.

He nodded.

I'd mounted the gas canisters to the light fixtures hanging from the catwalk, being careful to secure them with duct tape so that they'd mist out over the audience, not back into our faces. And of course I'd worn gloves, so my fingerprints were nowhere on the duct tape, the lights, or the actual canisters, which he'd prepared specifically for tonight. So, logically, they were disposable, which meant no sneaking back up here to get them back.

The lights dimmed all the way down, and after my eyes adjusted I could see the audience just as well as I had while the lights were on. Teenagers, mostly, which was why he'd picked this showing.

There was a spotlight on down below, highlighting the theatre director, who was on the stage, talking about the play. I wasn't listening to him; I didn't care about the play.

Once he'd finished, the spotlight followed him off the stage and then shut off. The audience clapped, and then fell silent.

I leaned over the edge in sync with Jonathan, and together we flipped the switches on the canisters, which sprayed a gentle mist into the air. The catwalk wasn't very far up, and so the stage was still dark when the gas hit the audience and the proverbial shit hit the fan. Exactly as planned.

I lingered for a moment -- well, I lingered for exactly thirty seconds, waiting for the panic to crescendo. Once it had, I stood up and fitted my mask over my face; Jonathan followed suit. Instead of the simple gas mask I was wearing, he was wearing the mask he'd worn on Halloween, presumably fitted with a gas mask inside.

The ladder wasn't far from our hiding place along the front edge of the catwalk, and I practically flew down the ladder, only stopping briefly at the bottom to make sure that Jonathan wasn't going to miss a rung and fall.

Then I opened the door and stepped out.

No one else was backstage. Well, there were other people backstage, but they were also techies.

I made my exit quickly, through the door next to the one that went up to the catwalk. This door was the one that led outside, and outside I went.

It was dark outside, a chilly December night. There was no snow on the ground. Not here.

I wasn't wearing a jacket, though, so I made my escape to the car a quick one, sprinting to it, opening the door, and jumping inside. Jonathan was one step behind me.

Once he was in the car, I turned it on and cranked the heat up to full before whipping off my mask and running a hand through my hair. I was sweaty and gross, and I wanted very little more than a shower and a cup of coffee.

Jonathan tossed something at me -- it was a bad habit of his. I picked it up and looked at it -- it looked like a... hemp bracelet?

"I made you a friendship bracelet," he muttered, staring out into the parking lot. "My therapist made me."

"Sounds more like a hateship bracelet," I said, mostly out of the compulsion to respond to his comment, not out of any urge to snark at him. I was tired. I didn't have the energy to really snark back.

I dropped him off at his apartment and went back home. I fell asleep pretty much immediately after I got into bed, and if I dreamed, didn't remember it.

The next morning, as usually, I spotted him standing by his locker in the hallway, lost in thought. I'd put on the bracelet that morning, absentmindedly.

"Hey!" I said, waving to get his attention. "Hey, Jonathan!"

That did it. He looked at me, and I made a heart on my chest with my fingers.

"Best friends forever!" I called in my best sing-song Cheerleader Voice, and, predictable as always, he scowled at me, then slammed the locker door and stalked off.

I loved getting an opportunity to get at him like that. God knew he was good at driving me nuts.

Little did I know.