Everything You Want Me to Be

by Mindy Mejia

  When we got back home I stayed out in the garage with Dad, handing him tools and pointing the light. I loved my father. I loved how he said everything with a joke lurking right behind the words, how he liked to be argued with, how he seemed so solid and good. He would stick out like a sore thumb in New York City, but maybe I could bring a piece of him with me. Maybe I would be half him after all.

  As March turned into April, school became harder. That conquer-the-world feeling wore off after a few days and I had to work not to slip into old habits. Portia gradually started talking to me again, although she still acted put out every time I didn’t instantly agree with her about something. I admitted to my teachers when I hadn’t done the assigned readings and even got a detention when I freely confessed to skipping class because I thought math was not worth my time.

  When I got pulled into the guidance counselor’s office, her desperate last attempt to get me to consider college, I told her I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, that I was almost as scared as I was excited to move to New York, and that I was going to give myself a year to figure it out or start thinking about East Coast schools. She looked at me, sighed, and said, “That’s the most sensible thing you’ve ever said.”

  At night I recorded everything on Gerald’s camcorder. I told it the story of my life, pathetic as it was, every stupid, crazy, awful thing I had done and it felt good—being honest at last—even if it was only with myself.

  But the worst part of my new life was forcing myself to sit in Peter’s class every day, trying not to cry every time he glanced in my direction. I couldn’t help noticing, though, that he looked terrible. His color was pale. His usually clean-shaven jaw carried a shadow of beard most days, and then razor marks where he’d been careless when he did shave. His clothes looked wrinkled and his lectures were fumbling and depressed.

  Portia noticed my bleak stare and mistook it for boredom.

  “He’s really off his game,” she commented as we left class on the day of the dress rehearsal. “It’s the curse. It’s catching up with him.”

  I glanced back to see Peter staring sadly out the window. “You know what, Porsche? You’re probably right.”

  We sat together in physics, neither of us bothering to take notes. Portia doodled a series of drunk cows on her notebook—her witty nod to her parents’ customers at the liquor store. I looked at my own blank notebook page for half an hour, wondering stupid things like why they punched three holes in it and not four, what Peter’s kid would be like, and if they’d still use notebooks by the time he or she went to school.

  Every time Peter looked at this kid, he was going to see a prison, the thing that had made him give up any chance of happiness with me. God, was this how people were made? Was the whole planet full of cheaters and assholes running around making new cheaters and assholes? I had been one of them, too, the worst one of all. Mom warned me that I had a lot to learn about the world. I wished she would’ve mentioned how much the learning was going to hurt.

  “I hope you’re going to have some respect for the curse tonight,” Portia said as we walked into the cafeteria for lunch. “This is our last run before opening night. We can’t have any slip-ups.”

  “Whatever.” I headed for the football players’ table, not even bothering to get food. Some of the guys on the far end were telling a story that involved milk cartons for props, but Tommy let his attention lapse long enough to pat me on the leg and smile when I sat down next to him. I’d stopped seeing him outside of school, trying to gradually distance myself until it would feel natural to break up. I didn’t want to hurt him more than I had to.

  I watched Portia get her lunch and pause at a table to talk to one of the guys from the lighting crew. For the last few weeks Peter had been completely phoning it in at rehearsals. He didn’t act openly miserable, but the depression was just under the surface and everyone noticed it. Portia started taking over for him on stuff like costumes and the set construction. She’d become the unofficial director at this point and we all knew it, even Peter, because he’d started asking her opinion on certain scenes in our last few rehearsals.

  When she finally sat down at the table, she started right in on famous female directors—which ones she liked and how underrepresented women were in the profession.

  “It’s not like a complete boy’s club,” she said between bites of bread stick. “There’re plenty of female role models. Penny Marshall is the box office queen, but I think Sofia Coppola really sets the style for the next generation of filmmakers.”

  Even though I wanted to roll my eyes about her sudden career obsession, it was actually a good fit for her. Portia’d successfully directed the rumor mill for years. Maybe that’s why we’d been such good friends: she’d been my director and I’d been her actor.

  “You gonna make movies, Portia?” Tommy asked.

  “Yeah. The U doesn’t have a great film program, but it’s not a bad place to start.” Portia talked to the table near Tommy’s hands. She never looked directly at him.

  “You should put Hattie in your movies. She can be your star.” He flung an arm around my waist and drew me closer on the bench.

  Portia smirked at me. “She’s welcome to audition.”

  “Hey, let’s get together tonight, since you’re going to be busy this weekend with the play.” Tommy’s fingers clung to my ribs, like he was scared to lose his grip on me. He’d definitely noticed my avoidance of him outside school and was in denial.

  “I’m busy tonight with the play, too.”

  “It’s the dress rehearsal,” Portia added.

  “That’s not going to take all night, is it? I’ll pick you up afterwards. Some of the guys are getting together at Derek’s. We’re going to figure out plans for the cabin this summer.”

  He’d been bringing this up a lot lately—some annual trip to a cabin up north where kegs, bonfires, drunken streaking, and loose girlfriends were the norm.

  “I told you I don’t know if I can get off work for that.”

  I tried to put some space between us, automatically glancing toward the corner table where Peter sat with Mr. Jacobs. He had a book open where his lunch should have been and his head in his hand, but he wasn’t reading the book. He was staring at me. As soon as our eyes met, he dropped his gaze and turned a page.

  Oh, God, I still loved him. Despite everything, despite his pregnant wife, despite the fact that in a few weeks I might leave and never see him again, I still loved him with everything I was. Even the pain was all mixed up with love inside me.

  For the first time, I didn’t want to use Tommy to make Peter jealous. And I didn’t think I could use Tommy to make me feel better, either, even though he had grown on me over the last months. He was sweet and simple, trying to plan these high school trips for us, always talking about going to the U and how much I would like it there. In his eyes, the future was all mapped out. I always knew what he was thinking and what he would say next, and he loved everything about me. He reminded me of a dog again, one that kept following me around and wagging its tail no matter what I did. But you can’t have a relationship with a dog.

  “Well, you’re not working after the rehearsal tonight, right?” Tommy asked, still hopeful. “Come to Derek’s and you’ll see how awesome the cabin is going to be.”

  “I don’t know how late it’s going to go.”

  He looked so disappointed that I couldn’t help adding, “You can come see me tomorrow on opening night.”

  He groaned. “Boring.”

  “You’ll love it. There’s witches and sword fights and severed heads. Blood everywhere.” I was being totally honest. Tommy seriously loved horror movies.

  “Are you the innocent, screaming girl?” He laughed, completely forgetting he’d run lines with me only a few weeks ago.

  “No.” I patted his hand and moved it off my waist. “I make the blood run.”

  After school I put on my costume, which was just a simple white sheath. I thought it looked to
o Greek, but Christy Sorenson was in charge of costumes and she didn’t want to hear it. They’d made them in Family and Consumer Science and had to sew four sets each, one for each performance and an extra for the dress rehearsal, because we were basically going to ruin them each night. After Macbeth murdered the king, he and I put our crowns on, but then before every scene we had to drizzle more and more red corn syrup on our shoulders, like the witches were making the crowns bleed. That was Peter’s idea. He told us, back when we were deciding set design and interpretation, that you had to make Shakespeare visual. Most people couldn’t follow iambic pentameter very well, but everyone knew what a knife meant when you pulled it out. So the whole play was heavy on stage direction and gestures. There was a lot of sword waving, which the guys loved. Obviously.

  Portia gathered everyone together in front of the stage after we dressed and then physically hauled Peter over by the elbow. She shoved him next to me, completely exasperated.

  “Um, okay everyone.” He looked around at all our faces except mine. I hoped I wasn’t as flushed as I felt with him standing so close.

  “Hold hands, everybody,” Portia directed from Peter’s other side, grabbing her neighbors’ hands. “We have to form the power circle.”

  Everyone thinned out into a big circle and connected up, until Peter and I were the last ones apart. He slipped my hand into his before it became awkward and held it gingerly.

  “You’ve all worked so hard,” he began slowly, clearing his throat. “Look at this set,” he said. Everyone turned and admired it.

  “It’s on par with anything I’ve seen at the smaller professional theaters in the cities. Great construction, guys. And the costumes. Christy, they’re exactly how I imagined them. Clean lines, timeless. Beautiful job. The lights and sound are all a go, mainly because Portia’s been riding the crew like Peter Jackson. Thanks, Porsche.”

  I started. I couldn’t help it, hearing him use my name for Portia like that. It rolled so easily off his tongue as he warmed up to the speech, and I remembered the times I’d rambled on about my best friend to him, all the things he knew about her that he had no right to know. How she craved drama. How she hid shirtless pictures of Ryan Gosling in her nightstand. How she hated that her parents made her speak Hmong during Sunday dinners. How she wanted so badly to fit in and stand out at the same time.

  No one else seemed to notice his slip. Everyone laughed and grinned at Portia, who beamed.

  Peter continued, using his full-on teacher voice now. “This isn’t a happy play, but it’s an important one. Here we see Shakespeare looking deep into one man’s soul after he murders his king. He’s not an evil man. Evil is simple. It’s a child’s explanation for why people do bad things. The truth is always more complicated and worth pursuing. Shakespeare pursued the truth in this play. Of course, he threw in the witches and the bloodbaths to boost ratings”—everyone laughed except me—“but at its heart, this is a psychological study. Why would a man commit a terrible crime, something he knew was wrong even before he did it?”

  My palm started to sweat. Gradually, so slowly that I didn’t even notice it at first, his hold on my hand grew tighter.

  “Ambition,” Portia answered.

  “The witches told him he’d be king,” added Emily, who played the Second Witch.

  “His wife made him do it,” said Adam, who played Macbeth. I stuck out my tongue at him, and he winked back.

  “You’re all correct,” Peter answered, “but the underlying theme is desire. What happens to him—what could happen to any of us?—if we pursue our darkest desires? What do we lose of ourselves when we cross that line? What does it cost those around us?”

  His fingers squeezed mine.

  “Macb—MacBee,” Peter amended, drawing a gleeful smile from Portia, “crossed that line anyway. He took what he wanted, regardless of the consequences, regardless of society’s conventions, of the mental anguish, or even of his own life. That’s what makes this play so timeless. He’s just an ordinary man who understands, I believe, at least in part, what his temptation will cost him, and he succumbs anyway.

  “This is what you’ll show our audience this weekend: the consequences of a man’s ugliest and most powerful desires. After all the work everyone has put in, I know you’re going to crush it. You’ll have no mercy on this poor bastard’s soul.”

  Everyone broke apart and clapped and cheered. I didn’t move. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there, not looking at Peter, while the rest of the cast and crew yelled. He gave my hand one last lingering squeeze and then walked away. I turned and slipped backstage, waiting numbly for Act 1, scene 5, when I would make my entrance.

  Even though it didn’t go perfectly, the dress rehearsal was pretty good. One of the thugs dropped his sword at one point, right when he was supposed to be killing Banquo. Banquo laughed, but then the thug pretended to snap his neck and Banquo obediently fell over dead.

  Adam had his lines down and worked up some pretty good emotion during the monologues. Some of the cast hadn’t liked that he looked so babyish, but I did, because it helped me appear like I was manipulating him to commit the murder in the first place. I was almost a foot taller than him in my heels and I really laid on the power in our first scene where we plan the murder. Harsh, high tones. Severe expressions.

  My best performance, though, was the sleepwalker scene, my last scene. The crown slipped sideways in my hair and my dress was almost completely red down the front. I looked more like the murder victim than the murderer now, which was the whole point. Our treachery was killing us. I paced upstage in agony, holding my hands in front of me like I couldn’t figure out how they were connected to the rest of my body. I stared blindly into the gymnasium walls and over the space where the heads of the audience would be, where Peter sat by himself in the dark. I didn’t even realize I was crying until the room blurred. I poured my heartache into the scene. In rehearsals I had played this act just as strong as the waking scenes, shouting sleeping instructions to myself to shake off the murder.

  “Wash your hands, put on your nightgown, look not so pale!”

  But now my lines hinted at desperation, like I knew I was heading over the abyss into madness and could not understand the fall. My voice trembled, threatened to break.

  “I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried. He cannot come out on’s grave.”

  If Lady Macbeth had been frightening in her cold, murderous calculations, now her unconscious confession was shocking. From the very first read, I’d seen her as a strong villain, a Cruella de Vil with no heart or conscience. The sleepwalking scene was just a hiccup, I thought. Now, though, I saw how it revealed everything. She was as tormented as Macbeth: her desire was her undoing. After my final exit, I went directly to the greenroom and sat in a daze for the rest of the play.

  I had to keep Peter in my life. I had to. New life or old life, it wouldn’t matter without him. My desire was my undoing—I knew it and I still couldn’t turn away. We wanted each other beyond all reason or caution, regardless of the consequences, just like he’d said in the power circle speech. I had to find a way to talk to him.

  After the last scene, I heard everyone applauding and walked back out to the gym, my mind racing.

  “Where did you go? I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Portia said, running up to me.

  I looked at her and suddenly smiled from ear to ear.

  “Macbeth!”

  I yelled it again and again, laughing at Portia’s horrified glare, at everyone who ran desperately to the doors. They all left the gymnasium and I could hear the trample of the crowd as they made the long circle around the halls outside. A single, abandoned spotlight lit the stage and Peter stood on the opposite side of it from me. Our eyes struggled through the light and we stepped forward to the edges of the shadows.

  “I still have your money.” I said the first thing that came to mind, even though it was a lie.

  “Hattie, please,” he whispered.

  �
��I want to give it back to you.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  The thunder of feet got louder. They were past the halfway point.

  “Tomorrow night. After the play. Meet me at the barn.”

  I could hardly see his face through the spotlight. He moved forward slightly, revealing only the curve of his head, the rising of his chest and the uncertainty of his stance. Mirroring him, I took a step closer, feeling the kiss of the light touch my lips. It connected us, heated us.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “You have to. You have to say goodbye.”

  “It’s impossible. Don’t ask me to.”

  The feet stopped outside the double doors and there was a muffled chant, a sonnet they’d all memorized to banish the evil I’d invoked.

  “I’ll wait all night, Peter. All night for you.” I couldn’t hide the longing in my voice. “Come get your money and say goodbye.”

  The doors burst open just as Peter turned away and the noise of everyone drowned out anything he might have said in reply.

  DEL / Thursday, April 17, 2008

  I CHARGED Peter Lund with the murder of Henrietta Sue Hoffman at 3:02 p.m. on the day of her funeral.

  It didn’t sit right with me, him confessing right after Mary Beth came to visit. She went in to see her husband, then calmly gave us a sworn deposition that she’d followed Peter to the rendezvous, seen Peter and Hattie together, dropped the knife, and left. She described the dimensions of the murder weapon perfectly.

  “Why did you keep this to yourself for six days?” I pressed. “Why didn’t you say anything when I was over at the farm?”

  Mary Beth smoothed one hand over her stomach. “I had a lot to come to terms with, Sheriff. I’d just found out my husband was cheating on me and our unborn child. I hadn’t thought him capable of that, let alone murder.”