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Jason hadn’t planned on spending his Saturday afternoon hauling folding chairs into a dusty auditorium. He definitely hadn’t planned on agreeing to stay, either.
But his landlady had asked—Mrs. Hernandez, the sweet old lady with too many plants in the stairwell and an unshakable belief in feeding strays, human or otherwise—and Jason owed her. She’d let him slide a week late on rent without batting an eye. So when she’d knocked on his door with a plastic-wrapped tray of lasagna and an address scribbled on a post-it note, he hadn’t slammed it shut.
Her niece, apparently, was doing tech work for some community theater play in the East End. They were short on help. She needed “a strong back and someone who won’t steal the props,” which Jason supposed was a compliment, maybe.
“It’s just a few boxes,” Mrs. Hernandez had said, beaming at him with that look—the one that meant he’d feel like an asshole for a week if he said no. “Nothing too heavy. You’ve got strong arms, don’t you?”
Jason had grunted, accepted the lasagna, and figured he could be in and out in twenty minutes. No big deal.
Now he stood at the foot of a stage that smelled like old varnish and sweat, looking up at the small crew wrestling an oversized wooden table into place. A guy around his age—maybe older, rail-thin with curly hair tied back in a scrunchie and a deeply harried expression—was trying to explain sightlines by flailing his arms like a malfunctioning windmill. Someone in the corner was adjusting lights. There were scuffed knee pads on the floor, someone’s sandwich on the prop table, and a too-loud playlist cutting in and out from a speaker rigged to a milk crate.
At least six people were arguing at once.
“You moved my spike tape!”
“Your spike tape was in my spike tape’s way!”
“I don’t care, we don’t need the water pitcher if it’s gonna squeak that loud—”
“Don’t insult the pitcher!”
Jason dropped the last of the chairs with a loud clatter. Heads turned. One of them, a silver-haired woman with pens tucked into her bun and an expression that could curdle milk, narrowed her eyes at him.
“You’re not Dave,” she said.
“No,” Jason said, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Mrs. Hernandez sent me? She said you needed muscle.”
“Can you read?”
“I—what?”
“Can you read. Words. Off a page. In English.”
Jason squinted at her. “That’s a hell of a non-sequitur.”
Pen Bun Lady ignored that. “We need a body for Juror Eight. Dave just bailed. Food poisoning. Apparently, gas station sushi isn’t immune to consequences.”
A younger woman in a paint-splattered hoodie groaned from the corner. “I told him that sashimi wasn’t refrigerated properly. I told him.”
Jason cleared his throat. “I’m just here to move props. I don’t act.”
“You’re standing upright and you can read,” Pen Bun Lady said. “That makes you qualified.”
Before Jason could protest, the woman in the hoodie—Alex, Mrs. Hernandez’s niece—marched over to him and slapped a packet of paper into his chest.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You’ve been drafted.”
Jason blinked at the script in his hands, bewildered. Twelve Angry Jurors. The cover page was smeared with highlighter and what might have been coffee.
“I didn’t say yes,” he said.
She looked him up and down. “But you didn’t say no. Come on.”
“I was actually just about to—”
“Five minutes,” Alex said, grabbing his arm like she knew him. “You’d be saving us from a cast-wide nervous breakdown.”
“I don’t think—”
She was already herding him toward the stage.
Somewhere behind Jason, a chair scraped across the tile. Another voice piped up, older and amused. “Mags, you can’t keep conscripting strangers off the street.”
“Says who?” Pen Bun Lady—Mags, apparently—shot back. “He’s got a face. He’s got a mouth. That’s more than Dave had on his best day.”
“I don’t act,” Jason tried again.
“Neither did our last guy,” Alex said, still trying to drag him by the arm. “He just had great cheekbones.”
Jason glanced toward the group now gathering onstage. “Look, I’m not—”
Alex clapped him on the back. “It’s a read-through. Just sit, hold the script. Read the words so Keira doesn’t murder a chair again. You’ll be fine.”
Jason sighed, feeling the familiar weight of reluctant obligation settle between his shoulders. He flipped through the pages of the script, catching chunks of dialogue here and there.
Juror Eight. The guy had a lot to say, it looked like. Righteous. Measured. Thoughtful.
Jason let out a breath. “Fine. Five minutes, then I’m gone.”
Jason didn’t leave.
He told himself it was because they were short a person. That one of the people in the cast—Keira, it turned out—had thrown him a glare that could cut glass when he tried to return the script after the five minute mark. That the older man, Finch or something, had offered him a dusty butterscotch and called him “young man” in a tone that made Jason’s throat tighten, which was frankly unacceptable.
But really—it was that he’d read the lines and no one had laughed.
It wasn’t that he was trying to act or anything. The first few lines, he’d read in a flat, dry monotone. Gave them little more than a passing glance.
But then the words started to come easier. He didn’t stumble over the phrasing. His voice stopped sounding like he was reading off a DMV form. There was a rhythm to it—a cadence. The character was frustrating, idealistic. Annoyingly earnest. But he had conviction. He had presence. He made people listen.
“Look, this boy’s been kicked around all his life,” Jason read aloud. “You know, living in a slum, his mother dead since he was nine. That’s not a very good head start.”
He knew this scene. He didn’t know he knew it, but something in his ribs stirred. Some flicker of recognition.
His neighborhood had been his whole world. That tiny slice of Gotham with rusted stairs and broken streetlights and the bodega guy who sold him milk for a buck less if he thought Jason looked hungry.
Memories rose unbidden. Of staying up late with a battered book and a flashlight under the covers, waiting for his father to come home. Of watching his mom turn paler and thinner by the day, helpless and terrified and utterly useless. Of coming back from school to find her sprawled on the floor, already cold to the touch.
Of sitting on the fire escape of whatever building he’d been squatting in, shivering in the cold. Holding a busted Walkman and wondering if he’d be dead before twenty.
“He’s a tough, angry kid. You know why slum kids get that way? Because we knock ‘em on the head once a day, every day. I think maybe we owe him a few words. That’s all.”
The room shifted.
Not dramatically—there were no gasps, no sudden spotlight—but something in the air flattened, stilled. Keira blinked once and stared harder. Finch stopped fiddling with his pen. The guy in wire-rimmed glasses leaned forward slightly. Even Alex had frozen mid-gum chew.
Jason kept reading.
The next few lines rolled out slower. He didn’t change his voice, didn’t dramatize it, but he let the pauses breathe. Let the hesitations hang in the air. The words kept coming. Even, but not cold. Steady, but not wooden.
“If there are still eleven votes for guilty, I won’t stand alone. We’ll take in a guilty verdict right now.”
Another line. Another pause.
Jason didn’t realize how tight his grip had gotten until the paper crinkled in his fingers.
They finished the scene in silence.
Then someone in the wings said, “Holy shit.”
Finch offered a polite little clap. The rest of the cast—eleven assorted folks ranging from college undergrads to retirees to one guy who looked suspiciously like the barista from the café down the street—was looking at Jason like they didn’t know what planet he’d come from.
Jason adjusted the script on his lap, resisting the urge to slouch. His palms were damp.
He didn’t look up until he heard slow footsteps approaching. Mags stood at the edge of the stage, watching him with her arms folded and an eyebrow arched so high it threatened to disappear into her hairline.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Jason.”
“Jason what?”
“Jason No-I’m-Not-Dave.”
That earned him a few snickers from the cast. Mags arched her eyebrow higher. She didn’t look amused. Or surprised. Just . . . assessing.
Jason half-expected a reprimand, but when Mags glanced away to write something on her clipboard, she just said, “Are you available on Monday and Thursday nights?”
He blinked at her. “What?”
“Also Saturdays?”
Jason frowned. “Hang on—”
“Tech week is the last week of next month,” Mags went on like he hadn’t spoken. Like this was a perfectly normal thing to ask someone who just wandered in to move some boxes. “We open in six weeks. You’ll need to be off book by the second week of rehearsal, but you already have a strong grasp of the character—”
“I don’t know who the character is,” he protested.
“You are the character,” said a woman in a denim jacket—Juror Five, he was pretty sure—as she exchanged glances with the cast. “It’s scary. No offense.”
“What the—I’m not—” Jason sputtered. “I don’t know what this is. I didn’t even audition!”
“You just did,” Mags said.
“No, I—”
“You sat. You read. You changed the temperature in the room. That’s better than half the people who actually auditioned.”
Jason gaped. “I read one scene—”
“Beautifully,” Finch said. “With conviction.”
Jason rubbed his face. A rush of heat crept up his neck and into his cheeks. “I don’t—I’m not an actor. That Dave guy—”
“I’ll handle Dave,” Mags said dismissively, already walking off the stage.
“Welcome to the cast!” someone shouted from the back.
The lights dimmed. Someone switched on the overhead fluorescents. The rehearsal broke into a hum of voices and shuffling feet as Mags barked blocking notes from the front row.
Jason sat frozen, half-stunned and still holding the script.
It wasn’t until Alex patted his shoulder and shoved a rehearsal schedule in his hands that he realized he’d been cast.
Jason tossed the script onto the kitchen table when he got back to his apartment. It was a photocopy of a photocopy, the pages already creased and dog-eared, scrawled with someone else’s notes in blue pen. Loops and arrows and things like raise stakes here or pause—breath—don’t yell yet.
Juror Eight’s dialogue was long. Philosophical. Kind of annoying, if Jason was being honest.
Still . . .
The steady tick of a clock he hadn’t set in weeks filled the quiet. The fridge hummed behind him, full of nothing but a single sad yogurt and a suspicious carton of eggs. His phone buzzed in his pocket—probably a ping from Dick or Babs asking if he was coming to patrol.
Jason didn’t answer. He just slumped into the chair and stared at the cover page again.
He’d wanted this once. Theater. Drama club. Back in junior high, that one semester he’d seen the sign-up sheets and circled it half-heartedly. He never turned it in. He’d thought about it. He’d had the form in his backpack for a week.
But there was always a mission. Always someone else to save. Patrol had gotten longer, and asking Bruce if he could cut his training two nights a week to go play pretend in the school auditorium hadn’t felt worth the breath.
Jason hadn’t regretted it. Being Robin had mattered more, had meant something. He’d believed that then. He still did.
But that little flicker—that passing what-if—had stayed with him longer than he liked to admit.
He remembered sitting in the rafters of the auditorium that winter, watching other kids trip over their lines and get applause anyway. There had been a moment when he’d thought, I could’ve done that. I think I would’ve liked it.
Jason picked up the script and thumbed through the pages absently. Thought about nothing, and then everything, all at once.
What would it have been like? If he’d been a little more normal and had just . . . done this? Been a kid who joined clubs and got up on stage and played someone else in front of bored parents?
Would it have changed anything? Would it have mattered at all?
He didn’t know.
Jason stopped at a page and read the first line under his breath.
“It’s not so easy for me to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.”
Stupid, he thought.
But he didn’t stop reading.