And then of course a bunch of the girls have to go and jump on her and wow, guys, this is not what she needs right now.
I say, “Hey. I’m the queer one here and I’m saying leave her alone. She’s fucking fourteen. She doesn’t hate anyone. She isn’t running around telling people they’re going to Hell. She’s struggling because her damn God told her something she’s questioning and that’s really scary for her and she’s fourteen. Leave her alone.”
Leave her alone.
God, what am I doing.
There’s this weight on my shoulder, then, this featherweight of her leaning into me, hiding in me.
“Shh shh shh,” I say. “It’s okay. We love you so much.”
“I don’t want to be like this,” she says. “I want to be there for him.”
“You are.”
“He won’t even talk to me, he . . . he chose him instead.”
“It’s not like that.”
“I know it doesn’t have to be,” she says. “But he’s acting like it does.”
Angela’s going on and on about how Bianca needs to be open about what she needs, but I’m getting the feeling Angela doesn’t really understand what it means to grow up in a family that won’t talk about anything real and how hard it is to get away from that, and I’m beginning to think Angela is maybe not the right person to counsel a group of girls who are starving themselves instead of trying to fix what’s really wrong.
Something is really wrong with us.
I kiss Bianca’s forehead and rub her back through the rest of the meeting.
• • •
She’s better after group, when we’re back in one of the practice rooms, her boom box, a piano, me. Our audition prep group has kind of fallen apart, now that Bee and James and me and this girl Lisa we don’t really like are the only ones from our original group to get to second round. I guess we’ll start meeting up and practicing again like we did, but I haven’t seen James since the original audition—all I’ve seen is Bianca’s phone pressed to her ear twice now, when she says Jamie and whisper-cries—so I’m wondering if Bianca maybe wasn’t at least a little right about him disappearing.
But it doesn’t seem right. He loves her so much.
It’s just that I think Bianca’s lost more weight, and I’m having a hard time not having issues with James about it.
There’s a ballet barre in this room. “Show me something,” Bianca says.
So I go to the barre and go through the different positions, and she tries to copy. This girl is not a good dancer. I laugh and go to her and hold her waist and say, “Here. Gently.”
She’s all floppy doll, like her bones are broken.
“Follow me,” I say, and I stand in front of her on the barre and lead her through some stretches, pulling my toe up toward my head and bending into low pliés. I take my sneakers off and do some pas de bourrées across the floor and throw in some entrechats—basically these little jumps where you point your toes while you’re in the air—because those are easy but look impressive. She sings parts of The Nutcracker under her breath, the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” that everyone knows, and I turn pirouettes because everyone knows pirouettes.
“You’ve got to start dancing again, Etta.”
I flop down onto the floor. “That was more ballet than I’ve done in ages.”
“And you’re happy, look at you.”
“Just tired,” I say, but I am. I’m lying on my back so happy because of a few pirouettes. How did I ever get through ballet classes without smiling my damn face off from the fact that I was here, dancing, good at something? Right, I was too busy being self-conscious for being the biggest girl there, but it’s not like I was overexaggerating five pounds or something, you know? I was significantly bigger than the other girls, and I definitely would be now.
“Girls who look like me don’t do ballet,” I say.
She shrugs and tucks her legs underneath her. “Girls who look like me do, but that doesn’t mean I can, y’know?”
“Conclusion: neither of us can do ballet.”
“If this were a test I would give you an F minus.”
I get up and do more stretches in front of the mirror, focusing on the way my leg muscles hold taut. “I do miss it,” I say. “It scares me how much.”
“Because you’re afraid you don’t remember how?”
I shake my head. “I’m afraid that I might be really happy.”
“Why is that so scary?” she says, not like she’s judging me, but like this is driving her crazy, like she just doesn’t understand why we can’t let ourselves have everything and Bianca, honey, come on.
“Because that means we exist.”
• • •
I’m pouring my measured glass of whole milk with breakfast when my mom startles me with this sharp little “Etta” that makes me jump and spill my milk everywhere and awesome, Mom, thank you, this is my only uniform shirt that fits me right now. I’m going to smell like old cheese all day. Whatever. They already hate me.
I mop myself up in front of the sink and she says, “When were you going to tell me about this audition?”
“Oh. Ha! I honestly kind of thought I had.”
“You kind of thought you had?”
“I’m trying to be honest, okay? I wasn’t, like, intentionally hiding this from you. I figured you knew for some reason and it never came up.”
Kristina looks up from her eggs. “Auditioning for what?”
“Brentwood.”
“You got an audition?”
“It’s a different process,” I say. “Cattle call. Moooo.” Get it, ’cause I’m chubby and covered in milk. Now I can’t stop laughing to myself a little—seriously, the covered in milk part—and I can tell by Mom’s face that she will be having none of my levity right now, thanks.
“What’s a cattle call?” Kristina says.
“It just means like open audition. You could have tried out! We’re on second round now.”
“Boarding school with theater kids? My spot would probably be better used for someone who wouldn’t want to run for the hills after twenty-four hours.”
“Aw, but then who’s gonna visit me once I get in?” I feel my mom staring at me, so I say, “I’m not going to get in, will you relax? I’m sure there’s like thousands of people auditioning.”
“I still wish you’d asked me before—”
“You let me apply every year and never put on this kind of . . . performance about it.”
“Etta, you know why it’s different now.”
“I . . . have completely no idea why it’s different now.”
She waves her hand at me, at my refilled glass of milk, at my . . . what?
“What are you talking about?”
She says, “Are you sure that you’re really . . . healthy enough to leave home?”
You’re kidding me.
You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.
For three years I starved myself and she never noticed and she took those calls from the worried school counselor and told him I was fine, just fine, you know how teenagers go through these phases, probably for attention, I’ll talk to her about her body image, like a five-minute talk about loving yourself for who you are and choosing food that makes you feel good! was going to fix me, for three years we did that shit—no, I did that shit without her, and now that I have stepped up and I’m getting help on my own—and yeah, so what if I’m a little self-righteous about it, this is a big deal and I get to act like it is—now I’m too screwed-up to go away?
I repeat that in my head over and over until all the air’s let out of it, until I don’t need to say it anymore. I just say something else, something that’s also true, something that’s not going to hurt her.
“I mean it,” I say. “I’m not going to get in. I’m just doing it with some friends.”
And then she smiles, this real little smile, and says, “You made new friends?”
So I tell her all about them—watered-
down, beefed-up—and I watch her keep smiling and nodding and approving and I pretend it’s for me.
• • •
I’m washing my hands in the second-floor bathroom that morning when I hear something click, that screechy noise of a chair being pushed around on the floor. Giggling.
I try to push the door open to see what the hell is going on, but it won’t budge.
They locked me in here.
I’m going to be late for calculus. I’m going to be late for the only good part of my school day, and what’s infuriating the hell out of me is that I can’t see who’s out there, and I can’t see who is doing this to me, I don’t even know if it’s the Dykes, and any hope of it being some random prank is dashed by muffled voices I can’t recognize going what are you gonna do now, Etta? and God, what are they gaining from this?
Rachel Rachel Rachel come on, come stop them—
But she doesn’t, because classes have started and the voices have stopped, it’s just me and this door and whatever the hell they shoved against it to keep it from opening, godDAMN it, how is it that I don’t weigh enough to get this door open.
It hurts my shoulder. “Goddamn it!”
I’m about to text my little sister, my baby damn sister who shouldn’t be at all involved in this, and then I hear some teacher, either Mrs. Mackey or Mrs. Patrone—they’re practically identical even when you’re looking right at them—say, “Hello? Is there anyone in there? Is someone locked in there?”
I close my eyes. “Yeah.” My voice cracks.
The chair screeches away and the door swings open. “Etta. Everything all right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Etta.”
“We were just playing a game. I have to go.”
I don’t go to calculus. I go to the parking lot and curl up in my backseat and later I get written up for skipping.
14
THERE’S A LECTURE AT SCHOOL and they talk about these zero-tolerance-for-bullying things and for a few days no one really bothers me, and I don’t think I noticed how much it actually was bothering me, on this quiet, everyday kind of level, until it stopped. Now the other girls at school seem to have lost interest (if only the boys texting me asking me out would do the same, whatever) and when I walk into the room the Dykes just roll their eyes and whisper to each other with all this fake animation because yeah, it’s really so exciting to see me the fourth time today, come on, you don’t have anything new to say about me because you’ve been saying the same shit for like four months now and I haven’t given you any new material. Rachel comes to school sporadically. She’s going to get in trouble if she keeps that up, and it’s hard to not feel guilty about that.
I keep to myself, hold my head down, get good grades, sneak into the music room and practice singing “At the Ballet” during my study periods. It’s fine.
But I guess the Dykes get bored of being relatively civil the same way the other girls got bored of me (and why does that bother me, that I don’t get that attention anymore, Jesus, I am seriously deranged—that thing I said to James about there being something wrong with me?) because about a week after the first audition Natasha corners me at my locker and says, “We had a question for you.”
Except the rest of them aren’t around, which somehow makes this actually kind of scary. There’s something about Tasha—she’s tall, dark hair, not naturally pretty but knows how to do her makeup well enough that people think she is—that’s always been kind of terrifying. Maybe it was that I always knew she wanted to be where I was.
But right now, maybe it’s that I’m all out of the way, Natasha, okay, I’m not even bothering you at all, so why are you breaking this ugly little truce we’ve had now?
“We heard you’re trying out for Brentwood,” she says.
Wow, Natasha, what lovely detective work, I try out every year. She doesn’t need to know this year is different. It’s not like she’s studied their audition process. Or maybe she has. God, that would be weird and not totally out of character. Natasha’s so creepy. How did we even find her? (She was listening to the Indigo Girls on her iPod so loudly we could hear it a few lockers away in our first week of freshman year, that’s how. Natasha puts the “Dyke” in Dyke).
“Yeah, because you’re so concerned with what I do.”
“We just saw you on the bus and then did a little investigating,” she says, with this voice like “investigating” is the most disgusting thing she could say, when it’s about me. You’d think she was saying “blow jobs” by the way she says each syllable like she can’t stand to have it in her mouth any longer.
“Well, mission accomplished, then.” I root around my locker for my books. It still smells like dead chickens in here.
“So we have that figured out,” she says. “Now we’re just wondering about that girl you were with.”
I close the door and spin my lock. “What girl?”
“Come on, you fucking know what girl.”
“Why do you care?”
“Are you fucking her?”
“Like I would tell you if I was.”
“It would be in your best interests to.”
“Oh yeah? And why’s that?”
“Because,” she says. “Because Rachel’s the one who wanted to know.”
I stick my tongue into my cheek. “So you’re Rachel’s little errand girl, huh? Ouch.”
It happens before I have time to react, because I wasn’t expecting it, Natasha’s arm coming down hard on my collarbone and slamming me back into the lockers. She holds me there, forearm right under my neck, her nails digging into my shoulder.
Ouch.
“That’s better than what you are,” Natasha says. “She doesn’t even love you anymore.”
“That’s not true,” I say, before I realize that I should have said I don’t care.
Natasha rolls her eyes and lets me go. “She probably just wanted you to find some new girl so she could stop worrying that you’d die alone. Not like you can keep a boy, right?”
“How’s that virginity treating you, Tasha?” It’s a low blow, and it’s not like I actually think being a virgin is a problem. I just think being Tasha is a problem, and her virginity happens to be topical.
Plus it never, ever fails to rile her up. “Bite me,” she says.
“You’d love if I did.”
She spits in my hair—stay classy, Tasha—and saunters away. Yeah, whatever, because it’s hard to get that nonchalant thing back when everyone here just saw you shove the pariah into a locker.
I rub my collarbone a little and check my watch. It’s one thirty. Rachel has study period next, and she always spends the first five minutes of it in the third-floor bathroom brushing her hair and doing her insulin shot. I don’t even know for sure if she’s here today, though.
Can’t hurt to check.
• • •
“Did you send Natasha to interrogate me?”
Rachel barely looks up. She pushes the plunger down on the needle, pulls the needle out, rubs the spot on her stomach. When I was ten I learned how to give her shots just in case, but I’ve never had to. For some reason I’m right now obsessed with the idea that maybe Natasha has at some point. I’m so weird.
“I didn’t send her to interrogate you,” she says eventually. “I sent her because I was worried about you.”
“You don’t have to be worried about me. I’m fine. I got a second audition.”
She looks away from the mirror, where she was examining her teeth. “That’s great, Etta.”
She still does it to me. “Thanks.”
“Did that girl you were with get one too?”
Here we go. “Her name’s Bianca. And yeah.”
“Are you guys . . .”
“Why do you care, Ray?”
And why don’t I just say no? Is it because I wish that I were? Is it because I think on some level we are?
No, I think it’s because if Rachel knew I wasn’t, she wouldn’t have any interest in talk
ing to me. I think it’s because standing in a bathroom arguing with her is the closest I’ve felt to her in months.
“She looked . . . young.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“And she looked sick.”
“Sick” is coded here. I’m not an idiot.
Rachel says, “Listen, obviously it’s your life or whatever and you know what you’re doing, and if she makes you happy, that’s all that matters.”
Pause to consider the fact that me dating a fourteen-year-old anorexic is okay but me dating a guy is not.
Rachel. What are you even doing? You can’t really care this much about this shit. You just can’t. I don’t think the Dykes are even thinking about it anymore as much as they’re just following through with what they started. Isabel insulting my shoes is not really topical to me sleeping with a guy.
“You’ve just been doing really well, and I just want you to think about if this is healthy for you,” Rachel says, and like, how the hell would she know if I’m doing well? Is she just judging by the fact that I haven’t lost any weight? But I can’t be too mad about it because the truth is, yeah, I am doing really well. It’s screwed up and horrible sometimes and some days it’s a million times harder than just starving would be but I’m doing it, and the most ridiculous part of this entire intervention is that one of the biggest reasons I’m being so good about recovery is for Bianca. I mean, Jesus, fourteen. She needs a good influence. And I’ve already messed up pretty bad with Kristina—hey, little sis, cover for me while I puke in our childhood bathroom—so yeah, maybe this is my second chance.
Rachel climbs up onto the sinks and sits there. We’re ten years old again, all of a sudden. “I don’t want you slipping again,” she says. “I think it’s important that you keep your eye on what’s important, you know? But if she makes you happy, that’s really good, Etta. You should be with a girl who makes you happy.”
You should be with a girl who makes you happy.
“We’re not ten,” I say.
“What?”
“You and me. We’re not ten. I’m not ten. I could fall back in love with Sherrie whatever her last name was—”