“Why did you take her out?”
“She wanted to.”
“She’s fourteen, you should have told her no. What were you thinking?”
“She’s my friend. I shouldn’t have to be her mom, too.” I don’t know if I really have these feelings in me or if they’ve just sounded all night like something I should logically have, but now these words are coming out of me and they feel so true that they scare me.
And James is here, being the other half of me. “I don’t care if you shouldn’t have to do it, you told me that you had her tonight—”
But no. No. I can’t fucking talk myself into this anymore. I can’t freaking talk to myself anymore. I need to hash this out. I need to yell at somebody besides my own damn self. “She’s old enough to make her own fucking decisions! And she wanted to go out and she wants to starve herself to death so who the hell am I to get in the way of that, how the hell much power do you think I have?” I’m on my feet now, and he grabs me by the wrist and pulls me outside. “Why does anyone think I’m a good influence? I stopped eating and I gave up on my friends just because they were mad at me and I’m still in love with my ex-girlfriend and I slut around to try to get rid of that and I’m using your best friend and here I am with your sister in the ER and you know what? If taking care of her is my responsibility, if I have to stand here and listen to your codependent bullshit, then maybe you should have been the one doing this instead of yelling at me because I didn’t pick up the slack well enough!”
“Goddamn it, Etta.”
“You’ve been doing this for years, I’ve been her friend for three months, and you expect me to come in here so you can take a fucking break—”
“Yes, okay? I want a fucking break! My baby sister’s killing herself and there’s nothing I can do and my parents are telling me there’s something wrong with me and my boyfriend lives an hour away and yes, okay, yes, I want a fucking break.”
“Well I’m not you, okay? I can’t just be assistant you just because she wants me to be—”
“Why not? Why the hell not? That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
I’m cold. “What are you talking about?”
“You hitch yourself to somebody else and chase after that same goddamn dream, right? Being a lesbian? Going to Brentwood? Yeah, taking care of Bianca? Are the only two original things you’ve ever done starving yourself and going home with a guy from a club?”
“Fuck you!”
“Goddamn it, Etta, fight back! Stick up for yourself! What the hell good is that spark if you’ve got nothing to do with it?”
“I don’t know!”
I don’t know.
I start walking away and I don’t even know where I’m going.
“Etta!” he shouts.
No. No.
• • •
Everything’s blurry at the bus stop, and then a hand closes around my arm. I jump.
It’s just Rachel. “Etta. C’mon, sweetie.”
“Where are we going?” I’m already walking beside her.
“I’m gonna take you home.”
“Okay . . .”
I shouldn’t do this. I should go back. I should be with Bianca. I should be with James.
She pulls the seat belt over me and tucks a few loose dreads behind my ear. “Okay. Okay.”
“I’m so tired . . .”
“Rest, baby girl.”
I rest my head against the window. It’s raining. When did it start raining? Was it raining when I was with James? Why don’t I remember.
Drunk, still.
“Did you hate me?” I say.
“Etta. I never hated you. The Dykes got all caught up in this thing and I was sick, and then I was so busy with AP Chem, I didn’t even see it. . . .”
Lying. She’s lying.
She knew what was going on.
I just want her to be good or bad and this is so frustrating.
“We’re not going to go to New York, are we,” I say.
“That was just pretend.”
It was just pretend.
It was all just pretend, maybe.
“Did you hate me?” When did I start crying? Maybe it’s not raining.
“What are you talking about?”
“When I wasn’t eating. Did you hate me?” I can’t catch my breath. “You stopped talking to me, you didn’t even, you didn’t know I was getting better, is that why, was it too much, how could I have done that to you, and with Ben, why do I hurt you . . .”
The car isn’t moving anymore, and I’m pulled into her.
“I could never, ever hate you,” she says. “You’re my whole world.”
The thing is, that’s terrifying.
I say, “You should hate me. You should fucking hate me,” and it’s true, and it’s not true, and I know them both as much as I know that I am going to go home and shove my fingers down my throat.
22
FOR A WEEK I DON’T talk to anyone.
I tell my mom I have the flu, and throw up without hiding it a few times for good measure. My stomach’s too queasy to hold things down, Mom, which doesn’t exactly explain why after she and Kristina are asleep I sneak downstairs and eat all the ice cream and five bags of chips and the whole box of chocolates Mom’s ex-boyfriend got her that she never threw away. I throw up in trash bags in my room because I know these tricks by now, and I can’t keep myself from thinking I bet Bianca doesn’t binge, I bet Bianca isn’t eating anything at all right now and that leads right into Bianca doesn’t want you and that leads into you chickenshit piece of crap, she might still be in the hospital and you haven’t called her.
She doesn’t call. Neither does James. Mason does, a few times, but I don’t answer. Ian calls too, once. For some reason I feel the most bad about avoiding him. The thought that he’s innocent implies that the rest of them aren’t, and that’s messed up. I’ve already made them feel guilty for everything that’s wrong with me. I should stop now.
I know I’ve gained weight. I don’t think my toe shoes would even support me.
The details are so boring. The actual time it takes is so boring. I don’t do anything new. I don’t do anything I haven’t done before. There is everything that was wrong with me swirled at the bottom of the toilet bowl. There is my exhaustion from it all. Here’s the hunger and ache and damn sadness of it not being fun anymore.
It’s so stupid, what pulls me, suddenly, out of it.
If I keep throwing up, I’m going to ruin my voice.
I didn’t think I cared, so it doesn’t make sense that I do.
It’s only been a few days. I pull myself up. I eat normally and it’s awful, but it’s really surprising what you can learn to live with.
My little sister—my little sister who dressed up as me for Halloween—slips “Get Well” cards under my door.
When I was her age, I was worse than I am now. And here’s Kristina being my role model, laughing at me in her bathrobe after I sneak a boy out, giving a shit when people don’t like her.
Of course I’ll try again for you, Kristina.
Of course.
• • •
My first day back at school after I decide to be a human again, Rachel’s out “sick” again. I call her at lunch to make sure she’s all right, and she is, but she sounds pissed at me for not returning her calls for a week and I can’t exactly blame her, but at the same time it feels really far away from me. Everything does. Maybe I’m not doing so well at being a human, really.
I want to eat but I can’t bring myself to do it in front of everyone, so I buy lunch at the cafeteria—salad, half sandwich, apple, water, cookie—and shove it into my school bag and head outside. The Dykes are out there holding unlit cigarettes, leaning against some boy’s car because it’s okay when they do it. Unless they all took up smoking in the last three months, they’re all just holding them as props.
“Where you goin’, Etta?” Isabel calls after me. Not friendly. “Don’t you want to come hang out with us some more?” I gue
ss the truce was only in play when they were drunk and Rachel was around.
I keep walking.
“Getting a little big for that skirt, Etta, aren’t you?”
Natasha.
I turn around. She’s pretending to blow a smoke ring with that cigarette that isn’t even lit.
How was I ever scared of these girls?
These girls are so small.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I’m getting too big for you.”
She kicks me in the back and I scrape my palms up.
• • •
It’s Wednesday afternoon, and Mom’s at work and Kristina’s at flute practice and I’m home alone because I skipped chorus and group and just came straight home like a loser. Last semester I would have been at Pride Alliance right now and that usually eats at me. Rachel was right. When you start dating guys, you don’t just lose girls. You lose a whole sector of your life. If I end up marrying a guy, what the hell queer community is ever going to want me?
And there’s just no answer to that. There isn’t going to be some happy surprise ending. Rainbow kids are going to yell “breeder” at me when I’m out with a boy and they’re never going to know I’ve done all the shit that they have. They’re not going to know that I know what it’s like to be gay in goddamn Nebraska.
I should just go back to dating girls. There’s like fifteen lesbians in Nebraska and they were all at Cupcake that night and I’ll just pick one, whatever.
But in the middle of feeling all sorry for myself, there’s a knock on the door. And I can ignore a dozen phone calls but apparently I can’t ignore this.
I open the door, and there she is, all seventy-eight (they weighed her at the hospital. I didn’t want to know) pounds of her. She gives me this smile I’ve never seen on her. It’s warm. It’s like Rachel, in such a good way.
I’m still in my damn uniform, I realize. Pleated skirt biting me in the waistband, white button-down, tie.
“Come on, Etta,” she says. “Let’s go for a ride.”
23
IT’S ALL OF THEM. MASON driving, James in the passenger seat, Ian and Bianca back here with me. Bianca looks a little better, maybe, definitely better than the last time I saw her. Ian gives my leg a rub over my kneesocks and Bianca, after a few miles, leans her head on my shoulder.
I guess on some level I thought they were taking me out to kill me and bury me in the woods.
“You’re not mad?” I say.
Bianca kisses my shoulder. “We love you.”
It’s enough. Finally, it’s enough.
• • •
“So I’m dropping out,” James says. We’re leaning against the pickup, watching Ian and Mason do rounds on the motorcycle. Bianca’s maybe twenty feet away from us, turning slow circles with her arms in the air, tracing her toe on the soft ground.
“Of school?” Jealous.
He shakes his head. “The auditions.”
“What? No.”
He nods. “It’s not right for me. I’m happy to stay here.”
“No you’re not.” This is wrong.
He laughs a little. “Not everyone hates Nebraska.”
This feels like completely new information.
“She really wants to stay,” I realize.
“Yeah. She likes it here. She likes the weather. She likes knowing everybody. I’m thinking when I turn eighteen next month maybe I’ll get us our own place.”
“You can’t stay for her,” I say.
He laughs. It sounds more real this time. “Of course I can.”
God, I feel like an idiot.
Of course he can. Of course he can. If I don’t have any damn qualms about leaving my mom and my sister, how can I blame him for feeling the opposite? We need each other, James and I. We need these two sides of the same person. We need people who stay and people who go and this whole time I’ve been loving him and butting heads with him and trying to understand him and this whole time I couldn’t figure out that he’s the same as me, he is the exact damn opposite of me. Soul mates.
I spread my hand out like his.
“Besides,” he says. “It’s not just for her.” He’s watching the motorcycle. “For Mason. For . . . yeah, for Ian.” He’s blushing now, ducking his head. James. “We only have a year left before we’re off who-knows-where. I want to have a nice last year and for me that means here.”
“I thought you wanted a break from her sometimes?”
He laughs. “Then I’ll go see a movie. And I’d miss her before it’s over, probably.”
I say, “You know, odds are I’m going to be stuck here, same as you.”
“Nah. Even if you don’t get in you won’t be here.” He tugs on my skirt playfully. “You’re always going to be somewhere else.”
“I’m one of the ones who’s going.”
“Yeah, like Mason. Though I’m guessing not together.”
“I guess not.” It’s okay. “Listen . . . what you said at the hospital.”
“Makes me a jackass.”
“Yeah, but not an incorrect jackass.”
He lights a cigarette and watches me.
I steal it and take a drag. “I’ve been thinking about it. What choices I made that were really mine. What it is that I’m actually wanting, here. Beyond this, you know. This vague thing about leaving.”
“Wait, Etta, I can’t remember, tell me again if you want to get out of Nebraska?”
I shove him. “It’s more than that, though. That’s not what I’ve been . . . well, dying for, I guess.”
“All right, punch line, hit me.”
“I’m thinking mainly I’m going to use this Brentwood audition as a free trip to New York. And once I’m there . . . I’m going to be there to look at ballet schools.”
He smiles at me. “Yeah?”
“You know my whole life this was what I wanted. Prima ballerina.”
“And you gave it up for Rachel.”
I shake my head. “It’s not that simple. I gave it up because I . . . didn’t fit.”
“Don’t tell me you’re talking about starving yourself again, because I’m kind of up to my ears in that.” He kisses my cheek.
“No, I just . . . I can be chubby and still be poised, you know? I was stupid for thinking it’s one or the other.” I can rein my Etta-ness in while I’m onstage. I can do that. If ballet wants that, I’ll give it that.
It’s my best friend. If it wants me to give something up, I will.
That’s how this works with me.
Something Bianca told me once is clawing at the back of my brain, though, but I can’t remember what it was, so calm down, brain. Everything’s fine.
I say, “So that’s it, I guess. I’ll see if there’s somewhere I can abscond to next year, somewhere my mom might sign off on, or I’ll talk to people at colleges if that’s all she’ll let me do.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“You’ll really be okay here?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I like Nebraska.” He smiles out at Bianca. “I like the weather.”
• • •
I meet Mason and Ian when they get off the motorcycle. Mason watches me while he fiddles with the strap of his helmet. He can’t figure out if he’s keeping it on or taking it off.
I don’t know what to say to him, just because I feel like everything has already been said. I didn’t answer his calls. He stopped calling. There isn’t anything complicated about this. There never was.
The only thing that maybe makes it harder is that I really, truly liked him, and I hope he liked me too.
I really think he did.
Does.
He stops playing with the strap on his helmet. He keeps it on. “This was fun,” he said.
I’m smiling. “Yeah. It was really fun.”
He holds out the other helmet. “Want to go for a ride?”
Yeah. I do.
• • •
“Are you gonna buy me something?” Bianca asks. She’s balancing,
toe-heel, toe-heel on the dirty ridge that separates the road from the cornfield. The corn is green now, starting to grow.
“Like what?”
“Like when my aunt went to France she brought me an Eiffel Tower snow globe.”
“I don’t think they’ll have any of those.”
She shoves me and loses her balance, wavers a little.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Uh-huh.” She keeps going. We haven’t talked about what happened at the club, and I keep thinking we’re going to, and then I realize there really isn’t anything to say. We did all these things and felt all these things and those things exist and we are still okay. It was like cutting open a blister, and the thing is that this happened and we’re still okay.
It’s so weird, to really be friends with someone.
“C’mere.” I pull her up onto my back and we walk a little ways like this. This is such a stupid thing to think, and there’s no way I’m saying it out loud, but she’s a little heavier than I would have expected. Maybe this is the first time I’ve thought of her as an actual person with the weight of bones and organs and blood. When I carried her out of Cupcake she didn’t weigh anything.
“Do you think you’ll get in?” she says.
“Nah.” I don’t tell her about ballet schools right now. I don’t need to.
“What if you do? Will you go?”
“Do you think I should?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t want me around anymore?”
She kicks at my hands with the toes of her shoes. “You’ll still come home. Your family lives here.”
“I’d visit you.”
“Who says I’ll be here?”
I’m cold, suddenly. I put her down. Gently.
“What does that mean?” I say.
She looks at the sky all fake-casual, like there’s something up there she’s more interested in than me. She squints some. I almost believe it.
She says, “I’ve been talking about inpatient?” like it’s a question. (Like this should have ever been a question.)
“Yeah?” I try not to sound too eager. “Talking with who?”
She laughs. “Guess.”
“James?”
“No. He’d try to talk me out of it.”
It’s sick that I believe that. Not sick. Just sad. That I know that however messed up Bianca is, James still thinks that just loving her enough will fix it, that there’s no way they could be better apart, just for a little, than they would be together. I don’t think he’s wrong not to try for the audition. The chances he’d get in are tiny, anyway. He’s not as good as she is. And he doesn’t want her to think that there’s even the smallest chance he would leave.