Goddamn it.
“Can we just, can we put whatever this is on hold, I just . . . I r-really need someone to talk to, I just completely zombied my way through a whole”—date—“conversation because someone asked me a totally normal-person question and I think I’m slipping hard and I need you, okay—” And goddamn if Kristina hears me I’m so completely screwed and she’s going to cry herself to sleep again, I need to be fine for her (I need to be a good role model, need to be perfectskinnyGodno), and I cannot call Bianca with this, I cannot call skinny little I-win-at-eating-disorders Bianca because Bianca never would have ordered FOOD what was I thinking shit shit shit.
“Rachel, please . . .”
Nothing.
I hang up. Call again. Nothing.
Okay. Okay. Okay.
I don’t know what else to do, so I call Bianca, and trust me, I hate myself for it, I really do, because she does not need this dumped on her, I haven’t seen her eat a damn bite since she had that salad over a week ago, and obviously she’s had something since then, everyone eats, I remember that finding out that even real anorexics have to eat something was this horrible epiphany when I was eleven, like finding out fairies weren’t real, so she must have eaten something but I don’t have any proof and I guess I’m believing in fairies again, whatever, but I can’t put this on her. I really just can’t. So why the hell am I calling her.
Stay classy, Etta.
“Hello?”
It’s not Bianca.
I cling to that, to the fact that somehow fate has saved Bianca from this shit, before I even process that this is not the person I wanted to call and now I’m about to cry on the phone to who knows who.
“Etta? Hey hey hey what’s wrong?” It’s enough words for me to recognize the voice.
“J-James?”
“Hey, yeah.”
“Where’s Bianca, is she okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, she’s fine. She’s stranded at the kitchen table right now, I’m waiting up here.”
“What?”
“My parents won’t let her get up until she finishes a hamburger. She’s been there a few hours.”
“God.”
“I was with her for a while but eventually she wanted me to leave. So . . . here I am.”
“My family doesn’t think I’m sick.” That’s not fair, really. I don’t know what Kristina thinks. We really, really don’t talk about it.
But I have to say something right now, and apparently that something is ascribing issues to myself like I just got mad at Mason for doing to me. God, I really do think too much. I didn’t disagree with that.
James says, “Yeah, ours didn’t think so for a long time either.”
“Can she eat it?”
He’s quiet for too long. It’s like the pause when one reporter switches to another and there’s that delay when you wait for the second one to realize that it’s their turn. Now back to you, James.
“No,” he says. “I don’t think she can.”
And . . . I know I don’t look like it. I’m really aware that I don’t look like it. And I know it’s not the case now, and that I’m doing, comparatively, really really well. But for some reason that’s making me think now that I was never mentally where she is, and I so was. In July the Dykes got me an ice cream cake for my birthday and they knew it would be hard for me, they weren’t stupid, but they cut me this tiny slice and put it in front of me and said it’s your birthday, Etta, you can give yourself a break on your birthday, right? and it was mint chocolate chip and it looked so good and I wanted it so much and that was the thing, I wanted it. It wasn’t a matter of not wanting to eat anymore. It wasn’t a matter of pretending I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t do it. I put a bit into my mouth and it melted and it tasted so good and I spit it out. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t swallow. I stared at that piece-minus-one-bite until it was brown and green sludge.
Just because I could eat it now, just because Bianca is still there, I feel like I never was.
It’s the opposite of when you’re there, when you’re entrenched in it, and you exaggerate to yourself how deep in it you are, how sick you are, when you tell yourself you have the best little eating disorder in the world because it’s the only thing that keeps you from ripping out your skin to pull out your bones and weigh them. And then you’re out of it and you think, I must have been imagining it, I couldn’t have been that bad, if I were really that bad then someone would have stopped me.
Someone would have sat me down and made me eat and worried about me. They wouldn’t have been pissed because I was wasting their damn ice cream cake.
And that’s it. I’m crying.
“Hey hey hey, all right.” James’s voice is deeper, suddenly, gentler. “All right, Etta. We’re all right.”
“I’m sorry. Please don’t tell her I called. Shit.”
“Slow down. Tell me what happened.”
“I was on a freaking . . . date, a dinner date, with Mason, and then he just . . . he mentioned the food and—”
“Did he say something?”
“He didn’t do anything wrong, it was so normal and stupid and . . .”
“And you’re upset.”
“I don’t know what I think gives me any right to be around normal people.”
“You’re not that weird, Etta.”
“No, I think I’m pretty weird.”
“Why?”
Why.
Huh.
“Because I’m gay. Sort of. Um. Not. Half of me is gay.”
“That’s really not going to win you any weird points with me.”
“Because I’m messed up about food.”
“Have you seen who I live with?”
“Because all my friends hate me?”
“You’re really grasping at straws, here.”
“Uh. Broken home? Racial minority? Short?” I’m obviously screwing around now (and calming down, this is working) but there is an answer here, there is something. There is something really fundamentally wrong with me, something that’s keeping me from connecting with people the way that I’m supposed to. It’s like all this stuff I try to fix about myself, all of these problems that I say I have, are just me trying to represent, trying to justify this weird broken part of me that nobody else is seeing. “There’s something bad in me,” I say. “There’s something about me that’s clearly just . . .”
“Why?” he says. “Why’s it clear?”
“Because if I were normal, I would feel bad about this shit that I do and the way that I hurt people and I would be actually upset about what people at school are doing to me but, but I’m not. I would feel bad about the fact that I lost all of my friends, but I don’t, I don’t feel anything. I don’t feel anything. And at least when I wasn’t eating I felt hungry. . . .”
“Until you didn’t,” James says. “Until you didn’t feel anything.”
“I don’t know.”
“Etta. Honey. This recovery thing, this is new still.”
“There’s something wrong with me.”
“Etta.”
“Normal people can’t put themselves through what I did and just be okay. I’m supposed to still be suffering. I’m not supposed to be able to get better because that means it was never that bad.”
“No, it doesn’t. It means that you’re the most self-motivated, self-sufficient person I’ve ever even heard of. You’re a . . . well, you’re a really good influence for my little sister, I’ll tell you that.”
“I am?”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m pretty damn protective of her.”
“What? News to me.”
“Shut up.”
I flop onto my bed and squeeze my eyes shut. I am suddenly so, so tired.
“I just want to respond to something in a normal way,” I say. “Just one damn time. I want to relate to someone at the time I’m supposed to be relating to them.”
“You just wish that you’d jumped off your cliff at the same time as someone e
lse,” he says.
I nod. I feel like he can see it.
“You don’t have to feel guilty that you suffered alone,” he says. “That’s not how this works. You don’t have to apologize to us because you were unhappy.”
“Okay.”
“And you don’t have to apologize for being okay without us.”
“But . . .” I want to need someone.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m not hanging up.”
“Okay. Yeah. Okay.”
“Okay.”
• • •
I’m listening over and over to the first minute-thirty of “At the Ballet” when I click over to Facebook. I haven’t been on in a few days because it’s depressing to see the Dykes posting pictures of themselves going out, lip gloss, kissy faces, dark-circle-smudged mascara to prove it’s been a good night (at least Rachel doesn’t have Facebook, she’s pretty committed to the seventies thing). And it’s depressing to see Ben with his new girlfriend, even though I don’t technically care, and, even more depressing, Danielle smiling behind coffee cups and I’m wondering like a damn creeper who’s taking these pictures and if she’s really single like her page says and why we’re still friends. (Because we still like each other. Because we promised to stay friends. Which, obviously, explains why I haven’t texted her and I didn’t answer, a week after the breakup, when she texted me. I don’t know why. I protect myself and sabotage myself at the worst times.)
I have a hundred thousand notifications, and I click and see they’re all for the same thing—Etta Sinclair was tagged in a picture, twenty-six people liked a picture of you, eighteen comments on a picture of you . . . Natasha Metrovsky posted a picture of you.
I’m thinking it’s some ugly outtake of a Rachel’s bathroom photo shoot and how bad could it really be until I click and shit, that’s a Photoshopped picture of me with a dick in my mouth, and it was Photoshopped well because Natasha has no life outside of buying bell-bottoms and faking hookups and stealing my best friend (who doesn’t have Facebook, who hasn’t liked the picture, who hasn’t seen the picture, who had nothing to do with this, Rachel Rachel Rachel) and here are people from Saint Em’s that I’ve never talked to, goddamn seniors, goddamn freshmen, laughing at me for taking this picture and what a stupid whore and Natasha’s I know, right, what a slut, and who are these freaking guys going lol look at that fat bitch, guy must have been desperate and my baby sister commenting defending me and saying it’s not real when how the hell could she even be sure and oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
It’s hard to practice singing when you’re crying this hard but I do it anyway because I freaking have to get out of Nebraska and if this is a chance I will take it, I will take anything. I’m feeling it, okay? I’m feeling this shit, okay? Get me out.
11
OUR FIRST AUDITION IS IN Bellevue, where I haven’t been since the ballet company I was in before BN, a long time ago. I don’t want to drive that far, and James has never been there (who the hell has never been to Bellevue?) and it’s not like Mason can fit us all on his motorcycle so it’s public transportation for us! Bianca’s paranoid of being late so we’re on it crazy early, seven forty-five on a Saturday, which at least means it’s practically empty. Bianca yawns and folds up onto her seat and goes to sleep (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her sit, she stands or she perches like she’s about to jump up or she collapses into these helpless little heaps) and James nudges his backpack under her head and plays with her wrist, and Mason and I swing from the bars and sing “Santa Fe” and make Bianca smile in her sleep.
Please let me get through. Please let me get to a second audition.
Honestly, for a second I think I don’t want to get in as much as I want this to never stop.
There’s no one from my school on this bus. There’s just my little group of show-tuney people. Mason tugs me into his waist and sings the romantic part (so much as it is) of “Santa Fe” to me, and I laugh with my head tipped back and feel pretty. He picks me up like it’s nothing, my legs around his waist, and swings me around. “Ugh, so heavy,” he whispers, just to me, so obviously a joke, and I kick his back with my shoes and I like it, I like that joke, I like that he’s so much taller and stronger than me that it’s actually a joke, and I like myself so much for taking that joke. He just called me heavy and made me like myself. I didn’t overthink it! How about that.
I kiss him, and he whispers, “Beautiful.”
Other people start boarding eventually, but none of them are from my school so me and Mason don’t really give a shit, we keep singing and dancing (or whatever Mason calls what he’s doing. How the hell did these people get through fifteen years of musical theater training without learning how to do a fox-trot?) and Bianca’s awake now and embarrassed and blushing into her sleeves but that’s better than letting her worry herself sick about the audition, so I keep being loud and obnoxious and I get down on one knee and sing all of “Memory” to a twelve-year-old boy until Bianca’s switched from screeching “Ettaaaaaa!” in horror to just cringing and ducking into her collar, and then I go up and squish between her and James and wrap my arms around her. “I’m sorrrry.”
She leans against me. “You’re horrible.”
“This is how people get famous! Being horrible in public! How are you going to get famous sitting here all quiet, huh?”
“Who says I want to get famous?”
“These people, look at ’em, every single one of them knows I can do a kind of acceptable rendition of ‘Memory.’ They have no idea how good you are!”
“I don’t want them to!”
“Now that doesn’t make any sense,” Mason says, so I don’t have to, thanks, kid. “You always say all you want to do with your life is sing. Don’t sing on the bus if you don’t want to, but don’t give Etta any crap about not wanting to do this when you grow up either.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t, I don’t.”
But I have no time to comment on that because the bus pulls over at the next stop, and who should board but Isabel, Natasha, Titania, Rachel. All four of them.
“Dykes,” I whisper urgently, as they’re showing the bus driver their IDs with those practiced we are totally humoring you by showing you our IDs because we are so much better than you that you shouldn’t be allowed to ask us anything, hair flip expressions. I shift James’s backpack and shrink down behind it. “Dykes. Dykes. Dykes.”
“Did they see you?” Bianca whispers back.
“I don’t know. Probably. They have crazy gay X-ray vision.”
“X-gay vision,” James says, just to be a dick, but he makes me laugh and I hear them stop showing the bus driver their IDs, and yep, crazy gay high-frequency hearing. I’m screwed.
I don’t know what they’re going to do, but I know that I’m not expecting it when they go sit down a few rows ahead of us all innocuously and start groaning about how tired they are. I guess they were out all night and are too hungover to drive. They’re wrung out, wrinkled, sweaty, and Farrah-haired and white-sunglassed, limp and glamorous like tie-dye with the colors squeezed out.
“God, that girl Marie would not get off me last night,” Titania says, rolling her neck around until it cracks.
Natasha says, “She is so obsessed with you, I swear. But who could blame her, with those shoes.” That’s really weird, why is Natasha sucking up to Titania?
“Such cute shoes,” Rachel says, and yeah, all right, that’s messed up, because I know (a) shoes and (b) Rachel and those shoes are (c) hideous so she is (d) faking. So seriously, what ? Rachel’s not queen bee anymore?
Did I do that?
(I’m not stupid. A part of me—a big part of me—knew that a lot of this shove-Etta-out bullshit had nothing to do with my rogue heterosexual ways and was just Isabel, Natasha, and Titania being opportunistic about shoving me out. They were never my friends as much as we were all Rachel’s, no matter what little anecdotes I can pull out, and it was so obvious that they wanted me out, that I was the thing b
etween them and moving up a rank in our whatever, because I don’t know, they were planning to put Disco Dykes on their transcripts, or because maybe they’re the same status-obsessed female-stomping wannabes they always say are a symptom of the heterosexual patriarchy. I’m just saying, it’s funny that Natasha did this whole paper last semester on how all subjugation of women at the hands of women is all actually because of guys and here they are using me sleeping with a guy as a nice convenient medium through which they can be dicks to me. Who’s driving who, here, Miss Daisy?)
Anyway the Dykes keep chattering away—though not so much Rachel—about who they hooked up with (lying) and who they wish they’d hooked up with (understating) and who was there and who wasn’t and what they’re going to do tonight and oh my God drinkiiing! Tina Turnerrrrr! and I can’t figure out why the hell they’re not being mean to me until it hits me like a damn brick. They think they’re making me jealous.
They think I’m sitting here wishing I were with them. They think I’m kicking myself for heading to an audition instead of creeping onto a bus at eight thirty after what I know from experience, lately, was a really disappointing club crawl.
The fact that I used to want to do this—that I used to really, genuinely love these girls, because they didn’t have to be my friends, I didn’t even have to like them, because they were my family—makes something still feel a little uneasy in me, but I say go away uneasiness and I lean my head back and smile and rest my cheek on Bianca’s shoulder. “Brave,” she whispers to me.
When I open my eyes, Rachel—just Rachel—is watching me. I smile at her a little.
She smiles back.
• • •
On the way into the high school where the auditions are, this boy I don’t know, this boy from Bellevue, says, “Hey, Etta Sinclair! Want a hand?”
Bianca whispers, “What’s he talking about?”
I rush her forward. “Never mind, sweetpea. Keep walking. Everything’s fine.”
12
WE WALK THROUGH THE FRONT doors of the high school—marked with just this one poster, BRENTWOOD AUDITIONS, OPEN, 10 A.M.–2 P.M.—and it’s like Dorothy stepping into Oz. All of a sudden we’re not in brown little Bellevue anymore with its awful guys. (I have chosen to believe that all Bellevue boys are as terrible as that one because I am mad, and if the Dykes at their all-girls school can decide that they’ll never be attracted to a guy, I can make sweeping generalizations too, damn it.) We’re in this mess of hallways that probably looks way more normal in its real life (though public school buildings will always be just so eighties’ movies to me) but are now crawling with glitter and music and girls melting down by the bathrooms. There are roughly five hundred million times more people here than I was expecting. Which I guess isn’t saying all that much given that I’m obviously exaggerating but also given that for some reason I’d narrowed the auditionees down in my head to just me, Mason, James, and Bianca. Never mind the thirty other people we’ve been meeting with a couple times a week. Never mind that all of eastern Nebraska is here and not just tiny little Schuyler. I guess in my head I hadn’t pictured central Nebraska high school high-powered theater geeks as so bountiful but man, if I were shopping for the precious few Midwestern gay boys I would be all over this shit. The ones inside here are all okay. The ones inside can stay.