I say, “Etta’s making this group slightly less white.”
“Nah, come on, you know why I say that,” Ian says.
I say, “No, we really do not.”
“Come on! Etta James!”
“Ha!” James says, and then he and I burst into “At Last” together, obviously. Bianca joins in, sinking into the low notes, and Mason’s immediately playing it on the piano, and I see Bianca smile at Ian and then James, and maybe it’s not as good as smiling at Ian and James together, but this girl is trying so hard. And I can tell she really does like Ian, and that this would be a different issue if she didn’t. But she does, and she wants to like them together, and maybe that’s all that this takes. I look at Mason. Maybe we really don’t have to think this much. After all, Bianca obviously hasn’t touched the beer (not that we’d let her, eating disorder aside, come on! Fourteen!) and she still looks loose, happy.
“Brave girl,” I say into her hair, and she smiles.
“So!” Ian says. “Audition! What are we doing?”
“ ‘At the Ballet.’ ”
“Sheila?”
“Yep. I’ve got the disenchanted overqualified dancer thing down. Maybe I can convince them it’s true!”
James says, “You are totally overqualified where dancing’s concerned.”
“But I am not disenchanted.”
Bianca says, “ ‘Let’s Hear It For the Boy.’ Like always.”
“I’m out,” Mason says. “But it’s all right.”
“Okay, but I knew all of those already, I’m bored,” I say. “What about you two?”
James groans. “I don’t knooow.”
“He does something different every time,” Bianca says. “It’s dumb.”
“You’re not afraid they’ll get sick of you?” James says. “Like, every year this girl shows up and sings ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy.’ ”
“No. I know I’m good at it.”
James says, “Yeah, I guess it did get you in.”
I say, “What?”
“I didn’t tell her that,” Bianca says, narrowing her eyes at him.
He says, “Sorry, sorry,” but obviously doesn’t think it’s a big deal.
She rips at her napkin a little. “Yeah, well. I got in last year.”
“Did you go to New York?” I say, like that’s the important part, God, Etta.
She shakes her head. “Chicago for the final audition and then I got in.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“That wasn’t a scholarship.”
Oh.
“She was too sick, anyway,” James says, tucking her head against his shoulder. “We might not have even let her.”
She just shrugs.
God.
“That’s so shitty,” I say. “That sucks.”
“You’ll get in this year, Bee,” Mason says. James nods, and I think, she was sicker than this last year. She has been sicker than this.
Or at least that’s what they’re telling themselves.
“I just wish it were in Nebraska,” Bianca says.
I don’t get that. I just don’t get that so much. I’m going for this audition full speed ahead now, I guess, but I still feel pretty crappy sitting here and knowing that what these guys want so much is to be singers and to go to that school and soak it all up and what I want is just to be in New York. Like, come on, Etta, this is their dream and you’re using it as your Get-out-of-Nebraska-free card. I guess I can at least take solace in the fact that there is no way I’m going to get in over them. No harm, no foul, right?
“So what are you going to sing?” I ask James.
“Right now I’m leaning toward ‘Santa Fe.’ You and Mason inspired me.”
Mason and I start singing it again and I say, “Ooooh. Can you do the octave jump at the beginning?” to James.
“What? Of course.”
“I saw someone on Broadway who couldn’t do the octave jump.” The first time Collins sings the chorus, he’s supposed to do it an octave down, and then immediately he’s whoosh up into the octave where he stays for the rest of the song. It sounds so cool and I don’t know why anyone gets away with not doing it. Probably because it’s really damn hard.
“Sing for us, James!” I say, and he laughs and sings the first part of it, all soft, but hell if he doesn’t get that octave. We cheer and pound on the table and I think the people around us aren’t as tolerant anymore, so good thing he sang quietly!
“What about you?” Bianca asks Ian. You go, Bianca.
He says, “I’m thinking ‘Springtime for Hitler.’ How bizarre is that?
“From The Producers?” Mason says.
“Yep.”
“The song about it being . . .”
“Springtime for Hitler. Yep. I’m hoping the judges have a sense of humor. I can’t sing as well as most of the people auditioning. I have to get by on novelty.”
“Like me!” I say.
James rolls his eyes. “You’re both good.”
I say, “Yeah, and if ‘good’ were enough we’d all be in no question.”
Mason, back at the table with us now, fake-pouts, and I kick him.
“You’re lovely,” I whisper to him, and then I kiss him, just because I can, just because it feels right.
He kisses me back, a little too long, and then says, “You want to get out of here?”
It’s a more complicated question than I would have expected, because being here has been this amazing thing I haven’t had since the heyday of me and the Dykes, back when we just had fun together. We’d sit around Titania’s house on her big rug and do our nails and giggle or we’d go to Cupcake and dance in slutty circles or we’d sit on Rachel’s roof and look up at the stars. Maybe it’s just the recent stuff poisoning my memories of them, but really I’m not sure it was ever quite as perfect as this. Because the only thing that made me the same as any of them besides Rachel was that we all liked to sleep with girls, and then here I am with a bunch of people who I actually have more than one thing in common with, who are actually interested in the same things as me (musical theater! Being queer! Not eating!) and what do I care really if they’re all doing them better? They still like me. We’re auditioning for the same however-many-spaces but we’re not competitive. We’re just being together. We’re just being happy that the other ones exist.
So that’s amazing, but at the same time there’s this boy smiling at me and everything makes sense, just for this minute, and I make a choice not to overthink it. Be an example to Bianca, get myself some action, but I really don’t think it’s because I want to show this stupid damn boy that I can think less. I think I really just am doing this for me.
“Yeah,” I say. “I want to get out of here.”
• • •
He’s good at sex. I’ve slept with a decent handful of people—only him and Ben for guys, though—and had a great time with a bunch of them but I’m not sure any of them have been as objectively good at sex as Mason is. Maybe Rachel, after a while, but all we knew was stuff the other one taught us, so there was a weird sense of déjà vu and self-consciousness about it all the time, like, does that feel as good to her when I do it? Why is she doing that thing with her tongue that only feels kind of okay? Wait, do I do that thing with my tongue that only feels kind of okay?
But Mason. Mason is good. He cradles me, in this way I’ve never felt and never thought that I’d like, and he pushes boundaries without asking but in a good way, in this patient way, this slow way, but I fall into it, I let him explore, I just trust him. I don’t love him, but there is something about being with him that just works, that is just so right now, and the truth is that I am kind of in love with right now. I am just so goddamn happy with where my life is, and I am so happy with where I am, and being here in this bed with this boy and feeling high and low and beautiful . . . It is just not hard to love where I am when where I am is here.
After, he kisses my neck and holds me, my head tucked under his chin. He twists my dreads
between his fingers.
“Feels nice,” I say.
“So does this. You on me.”
“Mmm-hmm.” I snuggle closer, push my face into his chest. I don’t feel fat. It helps that he isn’t so skinny either, now that he’s undressed, and he’s just okay with it, and that he held on to every bit of me like he would miss it if it weren’t there, like sex with me wouldn’t work as well if there were not as much of me.
I just like this.
“I like your house,” he says, which is funny because all he’s seen is this room. We climbed up through the window because my mom is asleep (she goes to bed at like ten) and we didn’t want to deal with sneaking in the front door with Kristina around. It was easy but added to the whole feeling that we’re doing something secret and wrong when whatever, as if my mom would really care all that much. Better him than a girl!
“It’s too big,” I say. “For three of us.”
“Just you and your mom and your sister?” he says, with that where’s your dad so implied.
“He left when I was really little,” I say. “It’s fine. He lives a few blocks over but I never see him. It’s pretty stupid.”
“My dad died when I was nine,” he says.
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. It’s okay. Our house is too big too. And he had all this money put away that I don’t think my mom even knew about until he died, and if that’s not sketchy as hell I don’t know what is—”
“Ha. Yeah.”
“But now it’s all really, like, gratuitous.”
I have a feeling I know why he’s talking about this.
“I had no idea she got in,” I say.
“I didn’t either.”
“Seriously?”
“No. They never told me.”
“It’s messed up. That she didn’t get to go.”
“Yeah.” He stretches his legs a little, kicks his knees into my feet. “I get why they didn’t tell me, you know?”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“There’s a part of this we’re never going to understand. I mean, poor us, but still. I do feel like shit about it sometimes. Have you seen their house?”
“Uh-uh.”
“I mean it’s . . . you know. Fine.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not something I ever think about,” he says. “And I think maybe that’s kind of awful of me.”
“How come you go to public school?” I say.
He laughs. “It’s not a bad school.”
“I’m trained to think that public schools are evil decrepit places where people will stab you if you don’t buy their drugs.”
“Oh, well then yeah, if you think that counts as bad.”
I kick back.
“I guess you’re used to being surrounded by rich people,” he says. “At your school.”
“I think it’s the black thing, honestly. If you’re not in your prep school uniform, like wearing it at that exact moment, no one would guess that you could afford it. Can I tell you something?”
“Course.”
“I get kind of pissed about it with James sometimes, or with the Dykes, even, to this extent, because . . . I mean, James goes on these it’s so hard to be gay monologues, and like, obviously I get it, it’s hard, but at the end of the day he can walk into a store and act straight and he’s a white male again who’s going to get treated like a white male, and there is nothing I can do to walk into a store and not be a black girl.”
“Okay, but like, at least then everything’s out in the open. You don’t have to do that moment when you slip up and say something and see ‘shit, I didn’t know you were black’ across their faces.”
“Yeah, but—”
“And like your family is black, right? Your mom’s family?”
“What’s your point?”
“Easy, all right?”
I’m not a freaking horse, but I nod. And try not to breathe like one.
He says, “It’s not like James has a whole family of gay people. He’s got this thing that makes him different from all these people who are close to him.”
“ ‘This thing.’ You make it sound like some disease.”
“Oh, come on. So now you’re indignant bisexual at me? You really can’t play this from both sides.”
“Yeah, I can. I have to. This is my damn life.”
He gives me this sympathetic pout and yeah, okay, rein it in, Ett. This is not debate team. (I was strongly discouraged from joining debate team in middle school because they guessed—correctly—that I was too scary for other twelve-year-olds.)
So I say, “But you’re right. The money thing.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to look around every day and be like gee, I’m so thankful! It doesn’t mean we forget we’re lucky, it just means we’re not annoying about it.”
“Yeah, except I bet Bianca and James think we’re annoying for not doing that.”
“Bianca and James don’t give a shit what anyone else does,” he says. “Bianca and James are Bianca and James. All they care about is each other.”
“Sounding a little bitter, there.”
“Yeah, well, you’re friends with them. You know.”
“What about Ian, though?”
“I don’t know.” He rolls over onto his side, brings me with him. “Could be a game changer. As could Brentwood, obviously.”
“This is kind of their only chance, right?”
“There’s always scholarships you can apply for. And maybe they’ll do a cattle call again next year.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“What, you gonna drop out to give them a better shot?”
“Maybe.”
“If you can convince the other hundreds of people who got through to do the same, then you’ve got a real plan going!”
“Yeah, shut it.”
“You can’t base your decisions on them. Then you’re no better than they are.”
“Who says I want to be?”
He kisses my forehead and looks at me. “You have to be,” he says. “They’re great, but we both know they’re going down together.”
“Maybe not anymore,” I say.
“Yeah,” Mason says. “Yeah, he could be a game changer.”
Later I’m sneaking him out the window and I turn around and there’s Kristina leaning against my door in her robe, managing to yawn and look judgmental at the same time.
“I’m dating him,” I say. “Kind of.”
“Did I say anything?”
“Stood there looking at me like I’m a slut.”
“Etta, if you’re going to make such a big deal out of not being ashamed that you’re a slut, you should probably stop getting mad when people think you’re a slut.”
Huh. “Get out of here with your logic, it’s past your bedtime.”
“I’m fifteen, not five, and I was asleep.”
“Scoot.”
“Someone woke me up with all that ‘uhhh uhhh oh my God yeeees.’ ”
“That mother of ours. What a hussy.”
Kristina laughs. “Sleep well, Ett.”
“You too.”
I go to bed happy.
17
BIANCA CALLS ME BETWEEN FIFTH and sixth period. “Can you come get me?” She’s crying. Hard.
“Bee. Are you sick? Where are you?”
“School. Come get me?”
“Where’s James?”
“My parents came and got him.”
That really does not sound good.
“Please, Etta.”
It’s a good thing I’m (half-seriously) planning to run away to New York in the next few months no matter what happens because there is no way I’m going to get into college with all this school I’m skipping.
“Of course, baby. I’m coming.”
“No phones during school hours, Etta,” Natasha says, and she shoves me into the stone wall so hard I feel dizzy, and then she grabs me by the back of the shirt and throws me down to the floor. My
kneecap makes this snapping sound, but when she walks away (she’s alone) I try to stand up and I can. So it’s okay.
And Bianca needs me, so it’s okay. It’s okay.
• • •
So I’m pretty sure what Mason meant by “game changer” wasn’t James’s parents finding out about Ian and threatening to send him away to military school (and hello there, empty threats, because where’s that money coming from, exactly?) but, you know, surprise.
I don’t get the full story out of Bianca of how it happened. Maybe James wasn’t quiet enough on the phone. Maybe his parents checked his texts. All I know, absolutely, unequivocally, is that Bianca didn’t tell them, and that on some level she’s furious at James and she doesn’t know why and it’s because he shattered your damn world, sweetheart. He didn’t do anything wrong but neither did you and you are fourteen.
Bianca is crying in my car that this is the worst thing that could ever happen to them, that James is a mess, that how dare her parents be such bigoted assholes (she says “assholes”) and how could James be so stupid and how could she be so stupid and she is sobbing herself hoarse. And Bee, God, and I know, of all the things to care about, shut up, Etta, but she’s screwing up her throat and our audition is in two days.
I drop her off at her house and her parents’ car is gone, but James comes and meets us at the car. He’s scuffing his feet, barely says hi to me. He looks more like Bianca than he ever has.
I hug her and him and leave them there, and when I look back as I’m pulling away, they are sobbing and screaming at each other.
• • •
The second round of auditions is for a whole bunch of Midwesterners, and it’s in Kansas City. Mason said anyone even a little east of us is probably going to Chicago, but I’m just glad we don’t have to drive that far for a low-rent New York, sorry I’m not sorry.
Still, it’s a four-hour drive, so Bianca decides to sleep over the night before so we can get an early start on it and so she can just get away from everything. She’s a mess still, shaky, and having her in my house is this stressful balancing act. I told my mom not to bother her about food, that yeah, we get it, she’s really skinny, it’s a problem, we get her to eat when we can, just please, please don’t get involved. My mom hugged me, really tight, which I wasn’t expecting, and she let me and Bianca have dinner in the dining room, where she and Kristina couldn’t watch us. Bianca didn’t eat.