Then Emily Barnes herself stepped onto the temporary stage. Hands clapped in every row ahead of us, all the way up to the stage. Emily Barnes bowed a little, and smiled, then accepted the microphone from the manager's outstretched arm.
"Hello." She said from behind me, from the speakers. After a pause she smiled apologetically and said, "I never really liked these things."
And then she put the microphone down on the floor of the stage. She straightened up, and her lips started moving. I didn't notice this at first, or if I did, my brain didn't process the first few seconds of it. I was caught by surprise.
A second later, when it occurred to me to start reading Emily Barnes' lips, I felt Colin's eyes on me. I looked up and caught his eye, and he started to raise his arm.
"No!" I hissed and grabbed the arm.
Colin gestured towards Emily Barnes angrily. Seeing his forehead in creases, his eyebrows in frowns, I suddenly had a very clear mental video of him at the Rammstein concert. How excited he was. His jumping up and down, his whoops, his huge grin, and his sweat glistening in the colored lights that traveled as if they were alive.
"No." I told him. Sitting in my plastic chair with the video of his birthday running in my head, I suddenly had the most ferocious desire to be happy, to be excited, to jump up and down and whoop and grin. I was determined to be happy, here and now, with my birthday present.
"Why not?" Colin asked.
"I can read the tone of expression from her lips," I told him.
"What?"
"Shhh."
I stood up, inched my way past knees and walked until I took up a spot near the stage where I could stand without occluding anyone's view. Colin remained in his plastic chair for a while, but he eventually came up from behind and slipped his arms around me. I twisted around to smile up at him, a smile as bright as I felt inside.
For the record, Emily Barnes' reading was exceptional. She breathed life into her own words. Made them alive in ways I had not been able to imagine. Her lips moved, parted, close, moved, and I heard the subtle sadness, the cautious joy, the gentle regret - all of it contained in her prose all along, never fully discovered until then.