Again, I'm a little later than I wanted to be in posting, but much faster than I used to be. Thanks very much to all who reviewed last chapter. So many wonderful comments makes me regret that I could not post yesterday or the day before that, and push myself to post now before today slips away and it's suddenly tomorrow. (Crap! It happened again! It's now Monday night and this still isn't posted and I started trying to clean up the typos on SATURDAY. I'm so sorry it's late!

I tried to ignore the fact that he hadn't sounded particularly convincing about the lack of gunpowder. It doesn't matter if he's convincing or not, I told myself. You just can't get gunpowder these days. At least, not barrels and barrels of it. And even if you could, not if you were under eighteen. So no worries. "So, yeah, like, if no one's life was in danger, I guess I'd have to hear the choice first. But I'm pretty sure I'd turn the scorpion." I thought this over for a moment. "Wait. I'm not doing anything dangerous. And no gross like stuff you'd see on Fear Factor. I'm not eating anything weird, either, so forget that."

Alex turned further away. "Yes, forget it. I won't ask you to do anything gross, Christine."

"Yeah, you'd better not." Something in the back of my brain was screaming that I was missing something, something big. I tried to focus on it. It slipped away just after revealing that it was related to something some not-very-sympathetic teacher said about Alex. Who was that? When?

"Never mind, Christine."

"No, seriously, at least tell me what the choice is, Alex!" It was Ms. Trudell. What had she said exactly?

"You're free to go, of course."

He was setting me free? A day early, without the Raoul-character showing up, without a fight and without even telling me what the choice was? Either Alex was back to trying to do the opposite of the book or something was very, very wrong. He didn't seem to care how the story ended now. He didn't seem to care about anything.

And if he didn't care at all, that meant he wasn't holding me here. I considered just walking out. I wondered how long I'd been here. I was in costume, so I wasn't wearing a watch or carrying a cell phone. But I didn't walk out because I figured if I left without figuring out why Alex was down there in the first place, there was a pretty good chance something weird was going to happen the following night.

Whatever he was planning was most definitely for tomorrow night, so I had less than a day to figure it out. In the meantime, I certainly had no good guesses as to why he was hiding out below the stage during dress rehearsal, unless he was practicing something for opening night, too. Practicing and preparing. But what? I had a pretty good idea, and I didn't like it at all.

"Um… Alex?"

How do you ask such a question?

He rolled his eyes up to me without moving his head. It made him look a little spookier.

Why hadn't I listened when Ms. Harmon and Mr. Miller went over this shit with us?

"Nevermind."

But seriously. Could you just go home and forget about it? I just couldn't. I mean, how would I sleep? Now, I admit, it probably would have been a really good idea to get out of that creepy under stage storage area, first. I don't know if he would have gone with me if I'd invited him above because I didn't think of it until later, but getting out of that creepy place should have been a precursor to any question. Speaking of which: You ask it. Any way you can.

But I couldn't just drop it. I mean, there was the way he was acting, the way the book ended, his obviously not-that-great life... There were so many things piling up that I really probably ought to ask if I didn't want to be sitting in my bedroom regretting it later when it was too late. But how? A vague memory: there is a wrong way to ask it.

"So, let's say you're right."

He barely acknowledged me.

"Let's say you're right that we're supposed to completely relive the book. Didn't you say we repeat it until we get it right?"

He shrugged disinterestedly. "I might've said that."

"Okay. So let's say you're right. How do we get it right?"

He shrugged again. "All my ideas have proven useless, Christine."

"Well, in order to do it right, you have to ask yourself what went wrong in the book."

No response.

"I mean, we can argue whether what Christine did was right or not, but only Christine could change what Christine does. What about what Erik did wrong. What should Erik have done differently?"

Heavy sigh. What? Was I freaking boring him?

"Seriously, what do you think Erik would have regretted the most about what he did?"

Alex seemed to hunch into himself in a way that made me wonder if he was listening and reacting or maybe not listening at all.

"People got hurt, Alex. No one died, but people got hurt." (I didn't even remember until later that someone had died-Raoul's brother!) "Maybe to do it right, you should make an effort to make sure you don't hurt anyone."

I got a non-committal grunt for that one. After a moment he added, "Even when I don't hurt anyone, they never leave me alone."

I wondered if Erik felt the same way. From the book, it sure seemed like no one really bothered Erik. But I didn't have to ask Alex who his 'they' were because it was obvious. "But what does that have to do with me? And what does it have to do with why Erik abducted Christine? Really?"

He didn't answer.

I wished I had my notebook with me. I counted off on my fingers instead. "Okay, so the school is the Opera. It takes both the boiler room and this place to account for the cellars. The dance was the masquerade ball. The roof is the roof. Phantom is Faust. That makes tomorrow night the final scene of the book. I'm Christine and… you're Erik…." I trailed off.

It was really hard to go on with that train of thought, since I knew how Erik ended up, so I switched subjects. "When I told you I finished the book, you wanted to know my thoughts." He blinked at me. "Well, didn't you?"

He nodded.

"Okay, fine. I didn't like the way it ended. Something was all wrong. If he loved her—" (I absolutely refused to say names in the same sentence as that word if I could help it!) "—wouldn't he have treated her better? What's with all the yelling at her? And he knew from the last time she didn't want to be kept like a prisoner. So why try it again if he wanted her to love him? But then when he finally gets what he wants, he doesn't keep her. It doesn't make any damn sense!" It hit me then: "Unless he never expected to keep her in the first place. He just wanted an excuse to—" Oh my god! "—blow the whole place up! He was sure she'd turn the grasshopper and that would be the end of them both. And the whole place. And all those other people, too!" A very elaborate murder/suicide that he could rationalize left him without guilt. Not me. Christine blew up the Opera. It was Christine who caused her own death, and Erik's, and all the others. Oh, how twisted! At the same moment the thought I'd been trying so hard to remember surfaced—that just about anyone could download instructions to make something called a pipe bomb. Or at least, just about anyone could back in 1999. There were probably worse things that blow up even better—I mean worse—by now!

Alex had turned away from me. In the flickering candlelight I could see he faced toward the wall behind the chairs. He had his right hand up; it might have been over his mouth.

"Alex!" I crossed the small space we occupied together, turned him around by his shoulders, and gave him a small shove. "Alex, if we're them, tomorrow night's audience is all those people!"

His face was as still as stone.

"Alex, what's going to happen to all those people?" I shook him and shoved him again. Then I remembered the candles, the dangerously flammable stuff between us and the door, and the possible headlines. I forced myself to calm down. No, that's a lie. I couldn't calm down. I forced myself act like I was calm, to pretend it, to move slowly and deliberately all fake-y calm.

But I couldn't hold still. I paced, carefully, the area between the wall and the boxes—an area it appeared Alex had cleared especially for tomorrow night, a narrow strip of the room that used to contain boxes, which were now piled up on top of the boxes on the other side, which blocked the view of the chairs from the door. "You'd have to take me away in the middle of the show. I'd disappear during the first act if you followed it exactly. If everything else went exactly right there'd be Ryan and some other guy looking for me, but that probably wouldn't happen because no one would notice that I'm missing because I'm only in the ensemble. You knew that, right? That I'm not playing the lead tomorrow? You'd have to have known that if you were planning something…"

His expression revealed something disturbing.

"Unless you had some way of ensuring that I would be… just like the book! Some dirty trick against Sheila or something! So let's say I'm the lead. Everyone goes looking for me. They'd find us in a moment, I bet! You can't possibly believe that I would be missing until the next day! My parents would be worried sick!"

I paused in my pacing to glare at him from the far side of the room where I could almost peek around the boxes and see the door through which I'd come. "Did you even think about the people who care about me? Are you insane?" I could see the door. He was on the other side of a table with a candle. If I bolted, he would be slow to follow me. It was a short sprint through the next room, but clutter blocked my way. I was faster, but he was heavier. If I ran, I'd better make a clean get away, because if he caught me, he could overpower me easily with his weight, I bet. I'm pretty fast, but I doubted my footing in these shoes.

He shrugged. "Probably," he said. He was breathing heavily, I noticed. With a whistling sound on the exhale. Once I noticed it, my focus shifted completely to that. It was like I could only pay attention to one thing, and which thing I needed to worry about the most kept shifting. I noticed again that the little room we were in smelled of mold and mildew; it was dusty as hell, and due to my request, now included several lit candles, some of which gave off a little puff of smoke every now and then. I visualized headlines indicating Alex's tragic accidental death below the stage due to no one's noticing and running for medical attention—a death I would feel responsible for the rest of my life if I ran away and left him there. Erik is dead. Not a murder suicide, but a badly timed asthma attack and a panicky friend who read a creepy old book and overreacted. The thought of Alex dead softened me. I thought again of the little funeral, me there with his mother. Who else would go? Not the student body, that's for sure. I reassured myself with the fact that Erik never blew up the Opera house and told myself that Alex's untimely death was the end of the book I was trying to prevent. I stayed. Just like Christine.

So I went back to th plot where I'd left off. "So maybe Ryan would come looking for me. Maybe not." Did it matter? If he did, according to the book, he would fall into some contraption Alex had built to kill him. Missing only one on the PSAT aside, I doubted even Alex could pull off that off in a school. But it didn't matter, either, because in the book Raoul didn't die. He also didn't rescue Christine. He's irrelevant. If anyone came to look for me, it would probably be a teacher or a parent, and it would not be pretty when I got found.

But whether someone came or not, it didn't really matter, did it? Because in the end, Christine made her choice to save everyone, not just Raoul, didn't she? And Erik let her go. Then he died.

I apologize that this is not QUITE as long as it should be. The next part sort of has to all go together or it's disjointed, so I broke it here. Comments, please? (And for the record, I will be out of town Thursday and Friday, for my husband's job. That means while he's at a seminar all day long for two days, I will sitting in the hotel room. I COULD go explore the city we'll be in, but I don't want to. Any guesses what I'll be doing instead?