Why must the show go on?
It can't be all that indispensable.
To me, it really isn't sensible on the whole
To play a leading role,
While fighting those tears you can't control.

-Noel Coward

Naturally, it was not possible to remain sequestered in the hotel gym until the end of the trip, though Christine was seriously considering it. Typically of her luck, some middle aged creepazoid turned up around four am, ostensibly to use the elliptical machine, but his main objective seemed to be staring at her until she felt uncomfortable enough to leave. Raoul seemed grateful for their departure, he'd been falling asleep on and off for the last hour and would prefer to do so in a bed, she was sure. Christine steeled herself upon returning to her room, but she needn't have bothered; no one was there. The room was totally deserted and she was too pissed and tired to care.

Christine fell into a dead sleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow, but the buzzing on her phone woke her only a few precious hours later. Groggily, she flipped her phone open and read the text from Meg four times before she understood what it said:

hey u ok? we didnt want 2 wake u up but were rehearsing 10, meet me in the lobby for bfast? im here already, just cum down when yr dressed.

It was 8:45. That meant Christine had just enough time to shower and put on clean clothes if she didn't want to stand Meg up – she wasn't even sure she wanted to see Meg, but given that she had to see everyone at rehearsal, it seemed stupid to blow her off. Meg hadn't done anything wrong anyway, aside from having crappy taste in friends. And choosing to spend time with them when Christine kind of needed some TLC thrown her way. Well, that was fine, Raoul stepped up, he was such a great guy, she would just have to spend the rest of the trip with him to avoid any additional angst.

Her hair was still damp when she entered the lobby, relaxing infinitesimally when she saw that Meg was by herself, sitting in an armchair by one of the big picture windows. There was an empty chair next to her and assorted pastries on a little glass coffee table between the chairs. Christine sank into the empty chair and didn't say anything as Meg pushed a strawberry Danish and a hot cup of coffee toward her.

"Hey, I wasn't sure if you drank coffee, so I added lots of milk and sugar," she informed Christine. "I figured you might want some."

"I'm kind of mad at you, but thanks," Christine said, taking a sip of the coffee that wasn't so much coffee as it was sweet lukewarm milk.

Meg nodded, "Yeah, I figured you were, but I'm not sure why."

"I'm not sure why either," Christine said honestly, pushing a damp lock of wavy hair behind her ears. "I just kind of hate everyone right now."

Grimacing, Meg shook her head in a disappointed way. "Dammit, we ruined another one. I'm sorry, we tend to draw people into our network of mutual loathing after a while. It's a problem."

Christine just rolled her eyes and ate her Danish in silence. No, Meg didn't get it. Their group sort of hated the rest of the world. Christine had no quarrel with the rest of the world, she just hated that group, it was like a hive mind of bitchiness and somehow she'd been drawn into it. And not entirely against her will, which amped the self-loathing component up a notch or two. Awesome, in the span of twenty-four hours, she'd gone from being a moderately socially successful college freshman to hating most of her friends and herself. Talk about teen angst.

"You're weird," Christine said after a minute, lack of sleep making her unusually honest and cranky. "You guys…I know you say you're weird, but you're all so beyond…like…"

"So, you saw what Erik really looks like, huh?" Meg interrupted. She didn't sound angry or accusative, she was just stating a fact. She'd not slept either, but unlike Christine, it didn't make her cranky, just lowered her tolerance for bullshit. "Sorry no one warned you."

Christine took another bit of Danish, though the flaky pastry tasted remarkably like sawdust at the moment. She wasn't sure whether it was an effect of crappy hotel food or her state of mind, but it was unpleasant either way. She chewed. She swallowed. She sighed. "It's…you know, it's – that's not why I'm mad."

"Really?"

"Really!"

"He said you screamed – well, he didn't say, Ahmed said, but he's usually pretty accurate when he's reporting back from Camp Erik." This time Meg's tone was a little sharp and her dark eyes narrowed as she spoke.

"Oh my God, yeah, okay, I did, but – did he tell you the whole story? Did Erik tell you the whole story because I'll bet he didn't," Christine said and plowed on through, not waiting for Meg to get a word in. "Here's what happened. We went outside because those assholes broke Ahmed's windshield and Erik got in a fight, duh, because he has to get one fight in a week or something to make life interesting and the other kid punched him in the face and I asked if he was okay and he freaked out. And yeah, he showed me his face and I screamed because I was surprised and I thought he was really, really hurt, but he wasn't, he was just…being Erik. And you know what, I don't think I like Erik anymore."

Unlike many people in her position, forced to reconcile one version of a story with another's perspective, Meg did not sit there as Christine spoke, half-listening and planning her rebuttal. She genuinely sat there, took in what Christine had to say and reformed her opinion accordingly. It was a rare thing to find in humanity in general, a rarer thing to find among friends. "I get that," she said, after a pause.

That threw Christine for a loop. "You get that? You…wait, what do you mean?"

Meg shrugged, "I get that. Erik can be a major, major shithead about things. Sometimes I figure it's his bi-polar and sometimes I figure it's just him and what happened last night sounds like it was just him. Sometimes he's a huge asshole, he doesn't think before he talks or does things and then gets all emo when the shit hits the fan."

"So why are you still friends with him?" Christine asked, stunned. "I mean…he's a dick, he can be violent, he treats people like crap…why do you put up with him? Why should I?"

Meg sighed and glanced around to make sure no one was really paying attention to them and leaned closer to Christine, beckoning her forward. "Because I like him," she said simply. "I don't like him because he's a violent asshole and a shitty friend sometimes, I like him in spite of that stuff. I like him because he's funny and insanely smart and he writes music inspired by Doctor Who and he's actually a good friend when he tries. You've kind of seen him at his worst, so I'm not saying you should have lots of warm squishy feelings about him or you should stay friends with him, but I'm just saying, that's why I stay friends with him."

Honestly, Christine didn't know if those were good enough reasons. It was the kind of thing they talked about on Tyra and Dr. Phil, the 'toxic relationship.' Or whatever. On shows like that, it always led to badness, staying friends with someone who treats people badly, but has some nice qualities that make up for the bad ones. Wasn't it unhealthy? Christine never had these problems with her high school friends, none of them were basketcases. It was like living in one of those cautionary tales books, like Go Ask Alice or an after school special. What was going to happen next, they all dropped acid together and someone jumped out a window? Alright, maybe that was extreme, but being friends with this group made it hard for her to catch her and Christine wasn't sure this school was right for her. Maybe it would have been better to go to a big school in a large city where she didn't know anyone and none of the other students came into school with all of this interpersonal baggage. Sometimes she felt like she'd been dropped into a play in the middle of Act 2 and didn't know her lines.

"I think I might transfer," Christine said abruptly, surprising herself when she actually spoke the words aloud. "I don't know if this whole Rhode Island thing is a good fit. I might want to get out of New England."

Obviously Meg hadn't been expecting that either. Her mouth dropped open and the attitude of cool composure that she'd been affecting the entire conversation fell away completely. "Oh, no, Christine, you can't – because of Erik? Is this all because of Erik? Because he'll get over himself, he feels really bad about what happened, he was going to apologize when he saw you, I just wanted to make sure you – "

Christine held up a hand and cut the other girl off. "No, no, it's not Erik," not all Erik, "I just…I think I want to go to another kind of school. Something with a bigger program, I don't…I don't think I like the idea of repertory theatre as much as I did. I think I need to be somewhere with more people." So she could go back to being just another headshot in the lineup, not stuck in the middle of everything, driving Sorelli to CVS to pick up Plan B, not dealing with Erik's meltdowns or stupid field trips to dress up statues. Maybe being a face in the crowd was good for her, trying to take the reigns and become a protagonist in her own life just led to a lot of crying and stress.

Meg looked at her like she didn't believe her, but Christine was kind of sick of analyzing her actions and her thoughts and everyone's opinions. She'd decided she wanted to transfer, her dream school was turning out to be kind of a nightmare and that was that. Christine got up to throw her cup and napkin away and stood behind her chair with her cellphone in her hand, flashing the hour at Meg. "Come on, we'll be late if we don't leave now."

Meg and Christine only barely got to the theatre on time, so Erik didn't get the chance to make a beeline for Christine as he'd planned to. To be fair, he and Ahmed had only just arrived five minutes before them and had only just caught their breath when the girls turned up and everyone had to go through a vocal warm-up. A bit unfair, Erik planned for a lot of things, he wanted to get out and buy Christine an apology gift, like ice cream or flowers or something, but he was stuck waiting in a nasty service station while Ahmed got his windshield replaced. It would figure that in the middle of East Jabumfuck, New Hampshire they'd have the right size window for a forty year old van.

Maybe it was all the rubber cement fumes he was inhaling, but Erik felt like total shit. Everyone fell asleep watching a Man v. Food marathon on the Travel Channel, but he stayed up most of the night with Ahmed snoring in his ear, trying to figure out how he'd fucked everything up so much. It wasn't hard. He was an impulsive, arrogant prick and he had no right to be. Maybe if he was hot, if he was hot and talented then, yeah, humility might not be on the agenda, but he was ugly, talented and crazy besides. He had no right to think as highly of himself as he did. Sure, sure, he'd only internalized society's standards of beauty and society's stigma against people with mental health problems, but just because something was wrong didn't mean it wasn't true. Okay, that might have been the fumes talking, but Erik needed to cool it with the dickhead attitude.

It all seemed clear as day now, when he had time to think about it. He shouldn't have jumped that guy in the parking lot, he definitely shouldn't have gotten Christine involved, he shouldn't have screamed at her like a maniac, shouldn't, shouldn't, shouldn't. But he had. And now he wasn't even getting the chance to man up and apologize for being an asshole because he had a job to do and the job had to trump his personal problems.

Finally they got a ten during the act break and Erik was able to corner Christine by a bubbler – sorry, water fountain, they weren't in Rhode Island at the moment. He hadn't meant to 'corner' her, but he was tall, he had a tendency to loom. One of his many faults.

"Hey, can I talk to you?" he asked her awkwardly. She didn't look happy to see him, but she wasn't really looking at him, she was looking at his nose. Probably seemed really obvious now, the place where the seam met his actual skin, she was probably wondering how she hadn't noticed it before.

"Sure," she said after a beat, sitting down on top of a rolled up dance floor. Erik sat on the ground, so that he was looking up at her for a change.

"Listen, I want to say I'm really sorry for how I acted last night. I was an asshole and you didn't deserve it." Christine's face softened just a bit, but it was clear she was far from appeased. He should have made Ahmed stop the car and grabbed her something sugary and delicious. Tollhouse Ice Cream Sandwiches cured all unhappiness.

"Okay," Christine said, scuffing her toes on the floor. She looked at him with reproachful blue eyes. "I…I don't know what to say. I'm still mad at you and saying you're sorry doesn't make what you did alright."

Erik nodded immediately. "I know, I'm not expecting you to forgive me or anything, I just wanted to apologize because you deserve it."

Uncharacteristically, Christine rolled her eyes. "Oh, god, Erik, come on. It's crazy, you seem to love pissing people off, but you can't deal with having anyone mad at you."

Actually, she was right. Erik liked pushing people's buttons, but the second he got the silent treatment or really upset someone, he usually tried to make it up to them someway. Usually not by an outright apology, since that was embarrassing, but he'd buy them something or write them a song – he wrote Sorelli a good one after he lost her debit card (long story). But he didn't think Christine would respond well to serenading on a ukulele at the moment.

"Why didn't you just say something?" she asked him after a minute of silence. "If everyone knows…why not just tell me? "

That was a very good question; why not tell her? Since, as she said, everyone knew anyway. Well, mostly everyone. Not Raoul, obviously. "I don't know," he said, shrugging awkwardly. It was the last thing he said to her before they broke for lunch around 2:00 since Chester told them to break up the powwow and get back to rehearsing.