Okay. All right.
“Say your name and age, please?” one of them says. A black woman. Of course. Deep breath. “Etta Sinclair. Seventeen.”
“What are you singing for us, Etta?”
“ ‘At the Ballet.’ Sheila’s part.”
She smiles a little and sits back. “Whenever you’re ready.”
I start immediately because I know I’m never going to be ready. The first part is talky. I’ll ease myself into it. I barely have to do anything. It’s just brassy Sheila. Okay. I start.
And—
Oh shit.
This is Maggie’s part.
Motherfuck.
They’re staring at me like I’m confused. I’m this close to apologizing, starting over, but then I’m just still talking, oh God, I’m still going.
Anyway, I did have a fantastic fantasy life. I used to dance around the living room with my arms up like this
I don’t do the ballerina pose. I saw Kay Cole on YouTube just hold her arms out like she’s ready to catch someone. She didn’t look like a dancer. She looked like a girl.
I do that.
I get through her monologue, and now, presumably, they’re going to want me to actually sing, but Maggie’s singing part doesn’t come immediately after, so I kind of fake my way through the next section, working myself through three-part harmonies and they’re smiling at me, not mean, and I guess this is the part where I show off that goofy damn personality of mine except it’s an accident, but whatever, I try to smile but if I keep looking I’m going to crack and laugh and not try so I close my eyes and then I have to do it. I can’t back out now.
Everything was beautiful at the ballet
Raise your arms, and someone’s always there
Oh yes, Etta, cry. That will help your voice.
I take a pause that’s a little too long because this is it. This is the moment, and here I am and I didn’t know that I wanted to be here, I had no damn clue, and here I am. Singing this part I’ve never been able to sing. Being this vulnerable dreamy girl instead of that brassy jaded dancer and here I am. Here I just . . . am.
I’m Etta Sinclair and I am a ballerina.
Yes, everything was beautiful at the ballet
This is where Sheila and Bebe slide up gently to a higher note. Maggie doesn’t do that. Maggie climbs higher.
At the ballet!
That part went okay. That was okay.
She just shouts it out, is the thing. She’s not singing, really, she’s . . . exclaiming. It’s not pretty and vibratoed. Maggie isn’t trying to be pretty. She’s just trying to feel something.
So. What the hell, right?
At the ballet!
Holy shit.
I hit it.
I hit it and I just stick there, because nope I flat-out refuse to break this off now, I am the girl who aces tests because I decide I will, damnit, and I hold it long and hard and I shake with it and then I finally drop off and I just stand there and I’m just ragged with the Maggie-ness, I’m standing there panting and crying and God, this is so embarrassing, a real singer could do that in her sleep.
They don’t clap. It’s okay. I don’t think that’s what this is.
“Sheila, huh?” the black woman says, with this side-leaning smile.
“Heh. Didn’t work out how I planned.”
“Why don’t you tell us why you think Brentwood would be a good place for you?”
I should have prepared something. Shit. Who the hell would be surprised by this question?
But the thing is, I know why I think I belong here.
Because of one little girl.
I say, “I have this friend . . . my best friend. She’s really into God. I don’t know if I . . . but anyway, she told me this story and it’s about this really religious guy like on his deathbed, uh, let’s call him Bob, and he’s so scared, and everyone who loves him is like . . . ‘why are you scared? You’ve lived this fucking perfect life—sorry—and you are like as close to Moses and Jesus and stuff as anyone ever asked,’ and he’s like . . . ‘I’m not scared God’s going to ask me why wasn’t I more like Moses and Jesus, he’s going to ask me why wasn’t I more Bob-ish. Why wasn’t I as Bob-ish as I could possibly be?’ And I’m like . . . not saying that I’m anything like Moses or Jesus because I curse and drink and sleep with girls, and I don’t even think I believe in God or anything, but I think that if I went here and I tried to sing and I didn’t back down and I met people who think being different is okay and who let me do ballet in the halls and stuff, and I listened and I grew up, then I wouldn’t ever have to worry that I’m shrinking . . . sh-shrinking myself down, and no one could ever think that I . . . I think that I could be the most Etta-ish I could be. And I think that would be really good.”
I think I’d be finally running to something instead of just away.
I wouldn’t be trying to disappear.
She nods and writes this all down like I said something rational and clear and then says, “Do you want to tell us a little about yourself, Etta?”
“I . . . okay. Yeah. Of course.”
I don’t know a little about me. I don’t think there’s any sort of “little” of me. I don’t know how to tell them that. I don’t know how much I can take with me and bring with me. I don’t know how much of this I want to keep. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Bianca, or if Rachel and I are going to be friends again. I don’t even know what I’m going to do when I have to go back to Nebraska now that I know that this is here, that I could have had it, if maybe I’d sung the right part or been a different person.
So I just say it. The only thing I know for sure is true about me at this point, because this is the thing I want to say “fuck you” to everyone about. That’s how I know. I’m so going to hell.
“I’m Etta Sinclair. And I’m a ballerina.”
• • •
The list is posted on the bulletin board by the audition room at eight p.m. I heard a rumor they were admitting four people. But there are only three.
Garrett Meyers
Stephanie Brown
Me.
26
I CAN’T TALK TO ANYONE because I can’t breathe, so the celebration comes in this blur of hugs from Stephanie, shattered people standing around me who didn’t get in, oh God, and a flurry of text messages to my mom, Kristina, Bianca, James, Mason, Ian. After a lot of hemming and hawing that I decide is way too much hemming and hawing, someone else, one last person.
Everyone’s congratulating me, everyone’s so proud—Mason says he always knew I could do it, James says he knew it from the first second he met me, Mom says oh my God baby I am SO PROUD, YES YOU CAN GO, and Ian gives me just congratulations!! because he only knows me through James and the leg of my school skirt, it’s fine.
But I don’t hear from Kristina or Bianca, and that scares the shit out of me.
Fifteen minutes later my phone finally buzzes with a new message. It’s from Bianca, and it’s just a picture of her on a big medical scale. Her face is all red and swollen around her nose and eyes, baby, but she’s smiling in the picture anyway, giving the finger to the camera that’s pointed at an angle so I can see ninety-three on her scale.
Fuck yes, Bianca. YES.
I put my phone back into my pocket and my fingers brush that emergency hundred-dollar bill and yep, in that moment it’s settled.
• • •
Before we go to the airport, me and Stephanie and this girl Lena who wants souvenirs (who says she’s happy for me with this look on her face like she totally isn’t, but I don’t really blame her for it) duck into a couple of bodegas and they buy their I NY shirts and their MANHATTAN MANHATTAN MANHATTAN bags and let’s not even pretend that I wouldn’t love one, getting in hasn’t suddenly made me classy, but I’m here for something else, and it doesn’t take me long before I find a place selling ugly, absolutely tiny plastic snow globes with the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building or mini Times Squares in them.
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Eighty-five cents each.
“How many of these do you have?”
And with the extra money I buy a fucking hot dog from a stand and I eat every last bite.
• • •
Rachel picks me up from the airport. While I was gone, spring break started. She went to Cabo for a few days and is tan and gorgeous now, like she wasn’t already, but whatever.
I think she’s pissed I didn’t text her until the morning after, but I just forgot, it wasn’t some big thing. (Or maybe the fact that I forgot is a big thing.)
“So are you going to go?” she says, and maybe it’s weird that I never considered not going, but I really didn’t. Jesus, it must have broken Bianca’s heart to turn this down.
But for some reason I only say, “I think so.” God, why am I still scared of this girl?
Or maybe I’m not scared. Maybe I just know she doesn’t want me to go.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, it’s great that you got in, but isn’t that a lot of pressure? And you’d be getting out of here in a year for college anyway.”
“Rachel, what are you doing?”
She says, “I just think you should really think about whether this is the best thing for you. Dancing made you miserable, and it’s not like you were ever really into musical theater except as something to watch, right?” She adjusts her grip on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. “I mean, you never auditioned for that kind of thing here. Weren’t you just trying out because Bianca was?”
The thing is that the way she says this, she’s not devaluing why I auditioned, not really.
She’s saying that doing that doesn’t make sense now that she knows Bianca and I aren’t a couple. She’s devaluing Bianca.
The funny part is, it would have made perfect sense to her if I’d followed her somewhere.
“I’m going to go,” I say. I don’t say, you’re a good person, Rachel, but you don’t want to be friends with me unless you can control me. There’s no point in saying it. I know it. And once I’m gone, she will too.
Still, I hope she comes and visits me sometimes. I’d like to get coffee with her.
“So how are the Dykes?” I say, and that’s when I notice she’s in flip-flops that show off her pedicure. Cropped, straight-leg jeans. Expensive sunglasses that are definitely not seventies.
“I don’t know,” she says. She shrugs a little. “They got boring.”
“You’re gonna be okay, Ray.”
• • •
Bianca’s in inpatient, James says. She started a few days ago. The picture she sent me was from her intake.
“I’ve visited her a few times,” he says. “They’ve got her on a feeding tube, the kind down her nose, not in her stomach. Which I think is less serious or something. I guess that’s a good sign.”
We’re sitting in my car, which is weird after so much time spent in his pickup truck. He looks too small here, crammed in.
“So when do you leave?” he says.
“Not for ages. August.”
“Still have to finish out this school year, I guess.”
“Unfortunately.”
“We’re going to miss you.”
“Hey, don’t. I’ll be back for Thanksgiving and Christmas, you’ll hardly know I was gone.”
“You should get a New York accent so we don’t forget.”
“I’ll work on that. Know what I’m doing this summer?”
“What?”
“Taking some goddamn singing lessons.”
He laughs. “Fair enough.”
“Will Bianca be out by then?”
“Oh, yeah, definitely. They’re saying just a month probably, then intensive outpatient, half days and stuff, a meal. They keep saying it could have been a lot worse and like, great, that’s exactly what she needs to hear.”
“Ugh.”
“But I’ve been looking at apartments for us. There are ones close to home, y’know, so it will feel less like we’re running away, and that means close to the hospital too. They’re pretty shitty, but I think she’ll like fixing it up.”
“I have decorations for you guys!”
“What?”
“Stuff I bought in New York.”
“You should put them around her hospital room.”
“They’ll let me do that?”
“What? Yeah. It’s not prison.”
“I can visit her?”
“That thing I just said about it not being prison . . .”
I hug him and say, “Want to know something sick?”
“Only always.”
“You guys almost made me want to stay here.”
“Don’t insult me like that.”
“I love you, you know.”
“You. You’re our success story,” he says.
“Yeah, well. You’re mine.”
He rests his head on my shoulder.
• • •
When I get to the treatment center, though, they tell me Bianca’s sleeping. “She does a lot of that,” one of the nurses says. “You can wake her up.”
The stupid thing is that I used to dream of being somewhere like this. White walls and concerned doctors who understand what you’re going through and mutter about how much weight you’ve lost and put tubes in you because they don’t trust you to physically eat on your own. I read stories about girls in treatment and watched documentaries about how they’d smear their mashed potatoes in their hair whenever a nurse turned her head rather than eat them. They were these superheroes of tragedy. This was my goal.
I don’t think Bianca’s hiding her mashed potatoes anywhere. I think that at some point in this she probably will, and that sucks, but right now she’s being so tough and I can’t shake the feeling she’s doing it for me.
It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, is the thing. Better than sex. Better than Brentwood.
“I don’t need to wake her up,” I say. “Just need to put some things up in her room.”
The nurse nods and lets me in.
Bianca’s face is kind of puffy because weight gain goes to your face first. She’s curled up with her arms far away from her body, I think so she won’t accidentally feel herself and the weight she’s gained. I know that feeling. I might still sleep like that. I’m not sure.
I set my enormous paper bag on the floor and take out each snow globe, one by one, and find places to set and stack and balance them in her room. After the first forty or so it turns into a real challenge. I carefully pull her nightstand drawer open and arrange a bunch around her Bible. I trace some up her body like an outline, carefully not touching. I put four on her pillow. I put two in each of her slippers sitting by the door. They’re knocking over and falling off all the time, but the nice thing about them being made out of cheap plastic is, they kind of just bounce. The other nice thing is that I could afford ninety-three of them.
Ninety-three snow globes for my ninety-three-pound girl.
I write BE BEE on her whiteboard before I go.
• • •
So I’m feeling pretty great about everything until I walk into my room and there’s Kristina crying on my bed.
“Hey hey hey whoa. What’s wrong?”
“Were you even going to tell me you were leaving?”
“I texted you. . . .”
“Texted me?”
“I know. Shit. Okay, c’mere.” I sit on my bed and wrap my arms around her. “I haven’t even seen you since I got home.”
“You didn’t look for me.”
“Where were you?”
“Backyard. In our tree.” When Kristina and I were little we had a tree we decided was a castle and we stole branches from other trees to make walls and really bad turrets. We made veils out of leaves and helmets out of sticks and we were warriors and princesses.
“Baby.”
“You were just gonna leave?”
“Hey, I’m not leaving until August.”
She sniffles and rests her head on my
shoulder and says, “I never see you anymore,” and God Christ she’s right. I never see her anymore.
But this girl is so important. This girl loved me all the time that nobody else did while I moped around saying I had no friends. This girl let me date boys and girls and teased me and never judged me. This girl wants to be a librarian and to rest her head in my lap while I read her books. This girl is my little sister and I should not be teaching her that people who love her can ignore her. That is not okay.
This girl was me for Halloween and that should never, will never, stop being amazing.
I pull her up and hug her. “Want to go shopping? And you can tell me what’s going on with school.”
“Girls suck.”
“Yep. Come on, shopping fixes everything.”
It’s so stupid.
She smiles.
“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s go shopping.”
• • •
She buys earrings and a dress and a pair of sunglasses and I buy her a whole outfit in case she wants to dress up as me and not have “BITCH” across her tits. And I buy a whole bunch of shit that fits my new body.
My phone buzzes and I take it out of my purse and holy shit, it’s a reply to that last text I sent after I got in, the one that never got answered.
so psyched you’re going to be here. dinner & a shitty movie when you move in, ok? we’ve got talking to do —danielle
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this book has been a long and unbelievable experience. I wrote my very first story about Etta when I was still in high school. The number of people who have helped me develop her and her world since then is truly uncountable, but here’s the part where I do my best.
So I give infinite, enormous thank-yous to Leah Goodreau, who draws me beautiful pictures; to Seth Keating, my rock; and Abby, Kim, and Saul, my beautiful family. I know reading this one might not have been the easiest for you, and your support and bravery mean the world to me.
My agent, John Cusick, continues to be everything I need and more, and Liesa Abrams, Michael Strother, the immortal Bethany Buck, and the entire Pulse team sparkles with their enthusiasm and their indulgence of my wild stubbornness. A special shout-out to Karina Granda, the magician behind what might be my favorite of all of my book covers.