by Beth Turley
I never learned how to change,
Be a moon to a new phase,
A book to a new page.
I’m always the same.
That had been as far as I’d gotten before Whitney knocked on the door, saying she needed to switch shirts again.
“Yeah. It all goes straight to my college fund. Which is why if I don’t get a picture posted for them today, my mom will lose it,” Cailin answered.
I pictured her mom from the few scenes On the Mat showed of Cailin at home, in her kitchen, the two of them talking about how practice had gone. She looked like Cailin but stretched out, with long arms and a long chin. She chopped green peppers with a full face of makeup on. Their kitchen was painted gray, the dining table a small square just big enough for the two of them.
“That’s amazing,” Whitney said.
Cailin shrugged.
“Yeah, it’s something. Would be better if Sunny Days Gel Polish actually lasted. But look at that.” She held up her pinkie. The top corner had chipped off. “Five seconds later.”
Harlow took the pencil from behind her ear and pointed it at Cailin. The rest of her body tensed up like she was fighting something.
“So it’s kind of like you’re lying?”
Cailin squinted and dropped her hand back to the table. I felt the tension grow like a force field between the four of us, strong enough to fill the whole café. I hoped for Mindy to come back and rush us out of here, but she was still in the line to dispose of her dirty dishes.
“That seems harsh,” Whitney said. She spun the bracelets on her wrist.
“Harsh or true?” Harlow pressed the tip of her pencil into the paper napkin on the table. I spotted something like hurt in her eyes, shiny storm clouds staring down.
“It’s not my fault if the stuff doesn’t work. It’s up to other people to decide what they want to buy.” Cailin crossed her arms. I thought about the comments under her picture, how people could say such mean things when they were only seeing pieces of her. I thought about her two-person kitchen table.
“What if journalists had that mindset? Oh, I’m just going to put this out there, who cares if it’s fake, people can figure out the truth for themselves.” Harlow’s voice turned hard and sarcastic and it made me flinch. Whitney looked over at me with her mouth in a straight, worried line.
“I’m not a journalist,” Cailin said.
“You’re a public figure, Magnet.”
“Don’t call me that!” Cailin snapped.
Harlow balled up her pencil-streaked napkin.
“Sorry. That was… I’m sorry. Lying just really gets to me.”
She stayed quiet until Mindy came back to the table, shredding the wrinkled napkin into thin pieces and arranging them into a house shape on the table. Mindy handed each of us a paper card that said MetroCard. None of us looked at each other. I watched Cailin hold her card between her purple-painted fingers, and all I could think about was the bottle of Sunny Days Gel Polish on my dresser at home, the one Summer and I split the cost of last month. Because Cailin Carter told us it would last forever.
Chapter Thirteen
The Disney Adult
The subway ride to the photo shoot was bumpy and quiet. It was stuffy inside the car, and it smelled like the recycling center where Mom and I deposited cans. We found seats in one long row. I sat next to Mindy at the end. A map was posted to the wall, crisscrossed with blue and red and yellow lines. I remembered we took the red one to get to Times Square in December. There weren’t enough empty seats on the subway that day, so Summer and I had to stand. We’d let go of the metal pole and tried to balance while the ground shook under our feet.
I pulled out my phone to text her now.
On the subway. Remember when we both fell on our butts because we weren’t holding on?
I tried not to notice that she hadn’t responded to the picture of the itinerary. She was probably on a run. It wasn’t because she’d decided not to be happy for me about being a Flyer. It wasn’t because we’d been drifting further apart, maybe since Joey Demarco’s Halloween party. Or that since I was in New York and not right next door, it wasn’t because I’d been replaced.
“Do you live in the city, Mindy?” Harlow asked. She leaned forward in her seat.
“Sure do,” Mindy answered. “In the smallest studio apartment you’ve ever seen. With a roommate. And two cats. But it’s walking distance to my graduate classes at NYU.”
“Are you in school for journalism?”
Mindy shook her head. “Negative.”
“So then what do you want to be when you…” Harlow stopped herself. Mindy smiled and stood from her seat, then turned to face us. She gripped the metal pole.
“When I grow up,” she finished the question. The lightsabers on her shirt looked like the lines on the subway map.
“I worded it the wrong way. You’re clearly grown up,” Harlow explained.
Mindy tilted her head, her orange hair falling to the side.
“Really? I sure hope not,” she said.
Cailin and Whitney and I watched while Harlow and Mindy went back and forth with their questions and answers. I thought about how it was a therapist’s job to do that—to ask the right questions to lead someone to their breakthrough. Harlow made it look so easy. She didn’t stammer or blush until her whole face was red. The subway squealed to a stop a few times. A muffled announcer told passengers to mind the gap between the car and the platform.
“Have you all ever heard of Disney adults?” Mindy asked.
I shook my head and saw the rest of the Flyers do the same.
“They’re people my age or older who go to Disney by themselves, or with friends, but we’re not pushing strollers around. We’re not there with our families. We’re twenty-five-year-olds in sequined mouse ears and character T-shirts, getting our picture taken with the Little Mermaid. And people think we don’t belong there!”
My eyes shifted over to Cailin. I wondered what she thought of when Mindy mentioned Disney World; that’s where the world championships had been. Where an arena full of people had sucked in their breath when she fell. One giant, loud gasp. She stared down at her phone, her face not giving away what she was feeling, the dark tunnel zipping by in the window behind her.
“But what I would like to know is when does someone become too old for magic?” Mindy continued. “I don’t feel like an adult. I don’t think I ever will. And I don’t want to. Even when I have a house or a partner or grandkids.”
“Like a partner in crime?” Harlow asked.
Mindy’s feet shuffled a little when the subway heaved to another stop.
“More like a partner in life. A wife. Or a husband. Whoever they are, I hope they’re wearing those ears and eating Dole Whips right next to me forever.”
A wife or a husband?
I let those words roll around in my head. It sounded nice, Mindy and whoever she chose to love walking around the Magic Kingdom with tall swirls of pineapple and ice cream.
Mindy cleared her throat.
“To answer your original question, Harlow, I don’t want to be just one thing. I want to be all the things.”
Harlow nodded, and I felt like I’d just witnessed an interview that had gotten off track, but I felt like I knew more about Mindy now, which I guess is what interviews are supposed to do.
The subway stopped and Mindy told us this was where we needed to get off. This station was outside, not underground, and it was warm when we stepped onto the platform and down a long flight of stairs. The streets here were small and sunlit. I’d never seen New York like this before, without the giant billboards and neon lights and swarms of people. Here things felt cozier. Like even though it was still a big city, there was a place where things slowed down. Mindy said we were in Astoria, Queens.
“Studio’s up ahead! Second star to the right and straight on till morning,” Mindy shouted. She swung both her arms out to the side like she might take flight with Peter Pan. “Ha! Kidd
ing.”
A smile spread across my face. I snuck glances at Whitney, Harlow, and Cailin, and they were smiling too.
“It does kind of feel like we’re going to Neverland,” Whitney said. The gold headband in her hair matched her bracelets, and all of it sparkled.
The four of us laughed, and what happened at breakfast seemed to float away.
Chapter Fourteen
The Microphone
We stopped in front of a building with LOT 88 spelled out in shiny brass letters above the entrance. Scaffolding covered the studio. I watched Cailin snap a picture of the construction as we walked through.
The inside reminded me of a warehouse. The floor was cement and the walls showed their skeletons, all beams and bolts. A white backdrop hung down from a frame to the right where three cameras sat on tripods. Props were set up on a table—a beach ball, a teal guitar, a giant spatula. My eyes fell on the racks of clothes in the middle of the room.
“Welcome to the studio. The greats have all been shot here, so consider yourself one of them, and I’m not kidding,” Mindy said. She stepped over to the prop table and picked up the beach ball, then batted it toward us. “Your bio photo shoot is all about letting the readers know who you are through the lens of the camera. We have clothes and accessories for you to use, and Whitney, since we know how interested you are in fashion, we’re going to let you style everyone.”
Whitney’s bracelets slid up and down when she covered her mouth and jumped. When she landed, her glasses were crooked and her curls were slightly askew.
The outfits were organized by size and color. I sifted through the blue section in large, past knit cardigans and jumpsuits. I tried not to notice everyone else searching through the smaller sizes.
“What’s your style, Harlow?” Whitney asked.
Harlow tilted her head.
“I’d say a laid-back reporter but with a sporty flair,” she answered, motioning toward her denim and T-shirt combo. “Resporty!”
Whitney laughed and pulled a red plaid flannel from the rack. “White tank underneath. And some jeans. Dark wash and ripped.” She handed Harlow the shirt. Harlow slung it over her shoulder and looked through the folded ripped jeans. I shifted my gaze away from the pile.
In March, Summer and I took old pairs of jeans and cut them up with scissors, since the already-ripped pairs at the mall were so expensive. She’d taken the cheese grater from her house, and we sat on my bedroom floor destroying the denim.
When we were done, we put our pairs on, Summer changing in my room and me slipping into the bathroom. I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the door and stared at the holes, at my skin popping through. I tore the jeans off. They didn’t look the same on me as on the models in the store windows, or the other girls in my grade. And when I walked back into my room with the jeans draped over my arm, I noticed they didn’t look like they did on Summer, either. She did lunges by the Flyers wall, testing out the stretchiness of the fabric. She asked why I’d taken them off and I said I didn’t want to bother, since Mom would never let me wear ripped jeans anyway.
“What about you, Elena?” Whitney’s voice snapped me out of the memory.
I sifted through the rack, wishing I could just grab a dress and be good to go.
“I wear a lot of dresses,” I said.
“Try this.” Whitney handed me a bubblegum-pink sundress. I took it and went to the dressing room area set up behind a white wall in the back of the studio.
Fairy lights twined across the top of the dressing room mirror. There was a rack on the wall and a bench to sit on. I folded up the floral dress I was wearing and left it on the bench, then changed into the dress Whitney had chosen for me. The skirt was the kind that would fan out if I spun around; the material was soft on my skin. Diagnosis: feeling bad about your body. Treatment: this dress.
I stepped out. The curtain blocking the next dressing room slid open at the same time. Whitney came out in a gray shirt and striped shorts with a big bow in the front. She wore sandals with ribbon that tied around her shins.
“That looks perfect on you,” she said.
“Thanks for picking it out,” I answered, my cheeks matching the color of the dress. Whitney darted to the mirrors at the end of the line of dressing rooms and ran a hand over her hair.
“Ouch!” she yelped.
I rushed over.
“What happened?” I asked.
“My hair is caught in the shirt zipper.” She yanked on a curl. “Ouch!”
“Let me help.”
I found the zipper under her hair and started easing the strands out in small sections.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Whitney said. I kept my fingers moving.
“Okay.”
“I probably don’t even need to—you seem so quiet and trustworthy and everything—but can you not tell anyone about what happened at the train station? Like, when you first found me.”
I thought about Whitney’s breath coming out too hard and the look in her eyes. The constellations on Grand Central’s ceiling.
“I won’t say anything,” I promised, trying to ignore that she’d called me quiet.
“It’s just I haven’t told anyone about how that happens to me—” she started.
I caught Whitney’s eye in the mirror. The lights glared against the lenses of her glasses.
“Not even your parents?”
“No.” Her voice was soft but serious. I pulled the last piece of hair from the sharp part of the zipper. “Whenever my family and I say our prayers, my parents add how much we have to be thankful for. Our house, our health, each other. Like, how can I tell them how anxious I feel when they don’t think there’s anything to be anxious about? Nothing I can point to and say, ‘Yeah, that’s what’s bothering me.’ ”
Her questions reminded me of the adults in my life telling me to speak up, saying it wasn’t as hard as I was making it out to be.
“I understand,” I said.
Whitney opened her mouth to say something but Cailin walked over, wearing a black tank top and red corduroy skirt that matched the highlights in her hair.
“Mindy said it’s time to start. Well, actually she said, ‘Get them out here or I’ll be a Flyer, ha, kidding,’ but you get it,” she said with a smirk.
“Coming!” Harlow stepped out of the dressing room closest to the mirror, directly next to where Whitney and I stood. Whitney’s eyes went wide.
“I didn’t know you were in there,” she said.
“I’m stealthy. All good journalists are.” Harlow looked at Whitney like she was apologizing. The flannel shirt was rolled up to her elbows. She walked out of the dressing room area with Cailin. I stared at the flimsy fabric that had separated Harlow from my conversation with Whitney, remembering how easy it had been to hear Summer talk about me through a curtain just like that one.
Whitney took a shaky breath. Before I could think about it, I reached out and grabbed her hand.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said.
I wished there had been someone to say that to me in the locker room. Maybe that’s why it came out of my mouth without me trying to stop myself. I wanted to be that person for someone else so badly it overrode the fear. Whitney smiled and nodded, squeezing my hand once before she let go.
“You’re right.” She shook her shoulders. “I’m just going to switch shirts. I’ll be right out.”
She disappeared into a dressing room. Outside, the photo shoot had started. Three photographers stood behind the cameras dressed in all black. Cailin was on the white tarp with her arms crossed while Mindy tried to hand her a pair of pom-poms.
“We figured you’d want to show your love of cheerleading,” Mindy explained. She raised the pom-poms in the air. “Go team.”
Cailin curled her hands into fists.
“I’m an all-star cheerleader. We don’t use pom-poms. And we don’t say ‘go team.’ We are the team.” She stalked over to the prop table and ran h
er hands over the electric keyboard, the paintbrushes, the chef’s hat and mixing bowl. She stopped at a turquoise Polaroid camera and picked it up. “I want to use the camera.”
Mindy made eye contact with the photographer, and then looked back at Cailin.
“You’re sure you don’t want to highlight your time on On the Mat?”
Cailin stood on the white tarp again with the camera in her hands. She looked shrunken in. Defeated. So tiny she might just disappear.
“I’m here because I like photography and want to learn more about it. Not because I was on a show. Right?” There was a fire in her eyes.
Mindy said nothing for a second too long.
“Of course not.” Mindy pulled the packet of paper out from under her lightsaber shirt. “We’re actually going to let you set up the shots for everyone else. How’s that?”
The lights shone on Cailin’s face and reminded me of her Miami picture, her head leaning up to the sun. But even though she looked the same, had the same pointed nose and red streaks in her hair, the Cailin on the tarp didn’t seem like the posed, glowing girl on the towel. She lifted the Polaroid camera and started to pretend to take pictures, crouching and bending like she was capturing different angles, like she did with the lifeguard ring at the pool.
When it was Harlow’s turn, Cailin and the assistants set up a black stool and tiny table with an old-fashioned typewriter on top. Harlow kept the pencil behind her ear while she pretended to type, smiling down at the keys. For Whitney they brought out a headless beige mannequin. She wrapped a tape measure around its middle and pressed pins into its fabric skin.