“No. And come on, who would know better than me.”
I sniffle and hide in the collar of her expensive coat and God, it’s so familiar, this is so safe, why did I ever want to go to New York when this girl was right here, I need to call and convince them to switch Bianca in for me, I need to make all of this right, I can fix this, I can fix this. If Rachel’s holding me I can fix anything.
“Is this about Cupcake?” she says.
“What?”
“You didn’t hear.”
“Rachel, what?”
“Come on,” she says. “Screw Spanish. You need something chocolate.”
• • •
We’re at the retro coffee shop. She buys me hot chocolate and gets just tea for herself. They’re out of caramel apple lattes. Being best friends with a diabetic was always such a mindfuck for a wannabe anorexic, but it’s not like diabetics can’t eat sugar, they just have to shoot up extra for it, so she’d use it as a card to play sometimes, look, if I can eat a cookie so can you.
“So tell me what happened,” she says.
“We went to the audition and we’d prepared so hard, all three of us. I didn’t hear the boys audition and I’ve never heard Ian sing so I don’t know, maybe he wasn’t that good, but he got through to the second round so he couldn’t have been awful but then again so did I and how did I make it to third—”
“Slow down. Who’s Ian?”
“James’s boyfriend.”
“And James is . . .”
“Bianca’s brother. He’s my friend.”
Old Rachel would have teased me, you’re friends with a boy? Do you know where their hands have been? Especially a gay boy. All that Queer as Folk bullshit about lesbians and gay boys being friends is, yeah, bullshit. We dance at the same clubs and that’s about it.
Except apparently not even that, because Cupcake’s closing down. They’re shutting down the whole strip. Health code violations, noise complaints, crime, gay gay gay gay gay.
I pause and say, “I can’t believe that. Cupcake was the only decent thing around here.”
“Right? I don’t even know what’s going to happen now. We’ll have to found our own club. One with an actual liquor bar.” She’s coughing out this laugh, but she’s red under the eyes and I think maybe she’s been crying about Cupcake, and that makes me wonder, comparatively, how much she’s cried about me.
“Hey,” Rachel says. “Keep talking.”
“About Bianca?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She’s amazing, and she wasn’t even bad, not even sort of, she just wasn’t good enough. She just wasn’t fucking perfect and like what do I do with that, we’re trying to convince this girl that she can eat, that she doesn’t have to be this delicate little thing, that she doesn’t have to be perfect, and then here she is and she blew everything because she had one off day, how am I supposed to expect her to eat a freaking sandwich now?”
“You really love her, huh?” Rachel says, and I really don’t care that she doesn’t mean it the way I do because it doesn’t matter.
“I really, really do.”
“And you don’t want to do this, do you? Brentwood. Not really.”
I didn’t say that part, but maybe she’s right.
“Come on,” she says. “Theater school? What happened to math?”
“I know.”
“I thought you wanted to be a teacher.” It’s that voice again, that I thought I knew you.
I wanted to be a dance teacher. “I do, I just . . .”
“You want to do this first?”
I nod a little.
She says, “You’ll get in. I know you will.”
“I don’t know how I’ve gotten through this far. It doesn’t make sense.”
“They see something in you. Come on, don’t look so surprised. So maybe you’re not the best of all of them, but you’re a star, Etta. You’ve got a drive in you other people just don’t.”
“I don’t know.”
“If you could spend a day as someone else, you would. Nobody else cares about things like you do. Nobody sets their mind to stuff and just gets it done. You’re the only person I know who can get an A on a test just because she decides she’s going to.”
I mean, I decide I’m going to and then decide to study for three hours a night the week before the test—there’s no magic going on here, you know?—but I know what she means. And I like it, even if I don’t know if I believe her. I’m just Etta.
I was just named after a damn musical goddess, I know, I know, and I really need to go call my other half.
She says, “I just . . . you know.”
I don’t know. “What?”
“Don’t want you to go.”
“Oh . . .”
“No, I know it’s stupid and selfish, it’s just . . . I don’t know. I feel like we’re fixing us, you know?”
I nod, even though I’m not sure, because this feels too much like I’m making a new friend and not enough like I’m falling back into what we had. Right now I can’t imagine going home with Rachel and baking cookies for her sisters and falling asleep watching Paris Is Burning. I feel like those things happened in another life.
“I started ballet again,” I say, even though it’s (maybe) not technically true, just as a test of some kind, I guess.
Her face is neutral. “Yeah?” she says. “Why?”
“Because I felt like if I didn’t I would die, or something,” I say, which is a quote from My So-Called Life, which we devoured when we were in fourth grade. We thought we would be Angela and Rayanne. We thought we would have them make up in the finale and grow old together. We would have so much more than one season.
She cracks a smile.
Maybe this means something. Maybe this means I can really do ballet again. God, I shouldn’t need her approval for it. I don’t know.
“You should come out with us tonight,” she says. “Cupcake’s open another week. We’re doing this big push-the-boat-out party.”
“We?”
She crosses her ankles with a shrug. She never looks at home in this uniform. She should be in her flare-leg jeans, her hippy-dippy headbands, her white eyeliner. No, she should be in her T-shirt and yoga pants like she was in middle school, before we knew the Disco Dykes existed. She should be in the crap I wear now because it’s all that fits.
If it were a movie, I’d dump Rachel like she dumped me and find a hot guy and make out on her car. I mean, I would get Mason to make out on her car with me. It’s kind of weird that my mind didn’t immediately go to him, I guess.
I was supposed to have dinner with him tonight. And I know I’m supposed to see Bianca.
“I’ll talk to them,” she says. “If I tell them to be cool, they’ll be cool. Or I’ll just get them really drunk first, whatever.”
“Can we get really drunk first? Like, now?”
She checks her watch. “It’s Tuesday?”
“Uh-huh. Your mom works late. Twins have gymnastics.”
“Yep. Yes. We can get really drunk first like now.”
20
RACHEL BARELY DRINKS BECAUSE HER blood sugar tanks, so pretty much we’re just cashed out on her bathroom floor with some bottle of wine she produces from her parents’ cellar and she’s had two sips and I’ve had a zillion and she’s giggly because I’m giggly or I’m giggly because she’s giggly and we are lying on the rug where she taught me how to play Jenga when I was five and taught me how to have an orgasm when I was fifteen and I just love her. I fell in love and fell inside of this girl, forever, and maybe this is what I wanted this whole time. Not Danielle. Not Brentwood. Not New York, not Bianca, not skinny or happy or ballet or healthy, just home. This rug, and a lot of wine, and Rachel.
“Rachel,” I say. “Rachel, we’ve gotta . . . be us.”
“Aw, we are, sweetie,” she says. That doesn’t sound right. “We will be.”
“You got it. You got it.” I curl up with my head on her knee and she braids some of my dreadlocks.
“What if I go to New York?”
She laughs a little. “Remember when we used to make plans?” In our PSAT prep class—we have the exact same type of mother, I swear—we would sit in the back in our hip-huggers and platforms that were somehow so sad when we were in that community center and look at the printouts from the practice tests they gave us and the scores that never got higher and never got lower no matter what we did, whether we studied or cried or took them flat-out stoned, and we memorized bus schedules and wrote them in the front of each other’s study books, and she wanted to go to Chicago but I wanted to go to New York and for the first time in our entire lives she gave in and let me win because I wanted it so much (God, that was the first time, that was the only time, this is my best friend) and we wrote maps to bus stations and maps for Manhattan subways and maps to where our parents hid their credit cards, and we knew we were never going to do it and that made us want to do it so much more, and shit, we’re not fifteen anymore, I might be actually going, I could drop out of this audition and go to New York with Rachel and I wouldn’t be stealing Bianca’s dream and maybe we’d bring Bianca with us because Rachel would love her and we could work in coffeehouses and Bianca could sing in subway stations and we’d save up and send her to Brentwood and I would find Danielle or I would marry Rachel because she is beautiful and she gives me wine and everything would be beautiful and perfect forever.
“I remember,” I say.
“We were so crazy.”
“We should do it.”
She laughs, kisses my forehead. She’s so warm. “Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. You and me. I’m not gonna get into the school. Someone else should get into the school.”
“You could look at ballet schools.”
I sit up so fast I almost hit her in the chin. Rachel told me to go to ballet school. Rachel thinks I should do ballet. Rachel sees me and a bun and leotard and sees me being a real ballerina with white girls six inches taller and thirty pounds less than me and Rachel thinks I wouldn’t be caving to the masculine hierarchy and Rachel understands me and Rachel loves me so much and I should go to ballet school. I should go to ballet school and Rachel will love me and I will be dancing and Brentwood has its generic and sad little dance program and there are ballet schools and somebody—Rachel—thinks that I could do it.
I am beautiful at the ballet.
“Please, Ray.”
“What about school for me?”
“Rachel, you can go to a magnet program and you can go to med school and you can be a doctor and we can be Bohemians and you can be a Bohemian doctor.”
She’s laughing still, head tipped back, beautiful. “That does sound pretty perfect.”
“Let’s do it. Let’s do it.”
“What was the plan? Greyhound?”
“Yes, Rachel, but the Omaha Greyhound station closed down—I know right—but there is a Burlington Trailways stop there and all we have to do is get to like Omaha and then it’s like a hundred and eighty dollars apiece! And then we get to New York and we can live in Washington Heights which is scary but I’m black so I can pretend I’m all hardcore and shit! And then go to ballet school, haha fooled them!”
“When would we leave?”
“Right now!”
“What about the big farewell to Cupcake!”
“New York will be our farewell to Cupcake! Farewell to damn NEBRASKA!” My phone’s ringing. “Hang on.”
“Come pick me up,” Bianca says, no introduction. I’m beginning to think this is how she says hello. I get off Rachel’s lap and sober up a little, but so not enough to drive.
“Are you okay?”
“Pick me up.”
I lower the phone and say, “Can you drive me somewhere?”
She finds her keys. “Where?”
“Get Bianca.”
“Is she coming out with us?”
“Um. Probably not.”
“Then what are we gonna do with her?”
“I have no idea. But she needs me.”
Rachel blows air out of her mouth. “All right, babe. Let’s do this.”
In the car I dodge another call from Mason—seriously, take a hint, you’re not my boyfriend in general and you definitely are not tonight—and drive to Bianca’s house. She’s out the door before we’ve even turned off the car.
I say, “Bianca, this is Rachel.”
“She’s the nice one?”
“Yeah.”
“Hi, Rachel.”
“Hey there, Bianca.”
I say, “Want to go back to my house? We can make cookie dough and watch Cabaret.”
Rachel whines, and Bianca shakes her head.
“Just Cabaret, no cookie dough?”
Another head shake.
“Coffee? Irish pub? Want to see what Mason’s up to?”
“Who’s Mason?” Rachel says.
“Friend of hers. Shh.” But Bianca’s still shaking her head, and shit, what else can we do that has nothing to do with these auditions? Can I drink more? I want to drink more. “Want to go to the park and sit on the swings? I’ll push you.”
“No. I want to go out.”
“Technically all of those were . . . are you drunk?”
I expect her to laugh at me, tell me she’s just tired, just happy, just fourteen.
“I’m not drunk,” she says, but she’s not laughing. “I just have been drinking.”
“Holy shit, Bee.”
“How come in books and stuff parents always lock the liquor cabinet? Who locks a liquor cabinet?”
“Whoa. Okay. Yeah, we’re going back to my house.” I can’t bring her back to her house like this. It’s a miracle her parents hadn’t noticed already. We’re not going to push our luck.
Rachel says, “What about Cupcake?”
“Rachel . . .”
“Fine,” Bianca says. “Might as well go home,” she says, though. “Like my parents give a shit around telling Jamie ‘no way you’ll go to New York, New York is full of faggots.’ ”
“I don’t think I like your parents,” Rachel says.
“I don’t think I like fucking anything.”
“Bianca.”
“I want to go ouuuut! Take me somewhere. Take me anywhere.” She rests her head on my shoulder. “Let’s go ooooout.”
“There is no way I’m taking you anywhere,” I say.
Rachel says, “Ettaaaa?”
“What.”
“If she’s gonna go out anyway, might as well be where she won’t be alone, right? Might as well be full of fags to piss her parents off?”
“No way.”
But Bianca’s sitting up all straight in the backseat. “Yes! Take me out. I like Rachel.”
The stupid thing is that I know this is a bad idea. I just can’t think of a better one.
And maybe a night with some lesbians will be enough to steer her back toward the straight (pun not intended, or, you know, maybe, she is drunk and with a drunk bisexual right now) and narrow.
But still. “I’m going to call James, okay?”
She says, “James isn’t at home.”
“What? Where is he?”
“Counseling.”
“Jesus, your parents are big on counseling.”
“Yes.”
“My mom’s with him. Crying the gay away.’ ”
“Shit. All right.” So she’s mine tonight. Okay. Rachel’s all animated, telling Bianca how much fun we’re gonna have, and it’s about time she meets some of her own kind. God, Rachel thinks they’re a two-gay family, shit shit shit, this is going to end so poorly and I can’t even see how because there are just way too many fucking ways this could be a disaster and I don’t even know which ones are the most likely because I’m half-drunk and I really wish I were full-drunk right this damn minute.
I actually end up texting James as soon as we pull up to Rachel’s house. ive got her tonight
thank you
Okay.
• • •
We s
it in Rachel’s bathroom and put on makeup, and Rachel’s dressing up Bianca like she’s a little doll, pinning miniskirts and tying up T-shirts so they fit her tiny body. She mother-hens all over her while she does it.
“You don’t need to be this skinny to be beautiful,” she says, as if being beautiful is the point. There’s a part of this that laypeople are just never, ever going to get.
I snatch a water bottle of totally not-water away from Bianca when I see her taking a sip. “No. You’ve had more than enough.” I shrug and drink it myself, whatever, I’m not driving, and if I’m facing the Dykes tonight I’m going to need it. I can’t believe this is the way it’s going full circle from the night three months ago when I tried to corner them. I’m going back to Cupcake with Rachel and Bianca flanking me. How did this happen?
Rachel’s putting up Bianca’s hair and talking all softly into her ear, and Bianca’s giggling and squirming because she’s drunk and has no idea she’s being flirted with. I don’t know why it’s bothering me. Rachel’s always done this with girls I’m with, and I’ve always done it with girls she’s with. It doesn’t mean anything, not about them, anyway. I guess it’s just a way of asserting our ownership—I can do whatever I want to you because at the end of the night I’m the one going home with her. At the end of the whole world, I’m the one going home with her.
I don’t know what I was thinking, really, having Bianca and Rachel in the same room. I just want to go to Cupcake and get wasted like the old days or wrap Bianca up in her coat and take her home like the new days, and why why why is my brain defaulting to those options and not movie nights with Rachel, motorcycle rides with James and Bianca and Mason and—God, Ian, why the hell not? Why don’t I ever think of the parts of both of my lives that I’ve actually liked?
Because I don’t like babying Bianca. I don’t.
I like singing with Bianca.
I like laughing with Bianca.
I like getting better with Bianca.
I thought this wouldn’t wear me down. I thought I could keep taking care of her forever and that I was strong and it wouldn’t drag me down.
I think maybe I was an idiot.
I know that I’m a terrible damn friend.
“Etta should sing for us,” Bianca says. She’s on the floor now, leaning her head against Rachel’s laundry hamper.