by Erin Stewart
She gives us a three-point method for responding to invasive questions:
Briefly say what happened.
Say how you are doing now.
Close the conversation politely.
Layne makes a note on her clipboard, and I swear she keeps her eye on me the whole time we practice our responses.
“I’m Piper. I was burned in a car accident caused by my sadistic ex–best friend. I’m probably never going to walk again, and thank you so much for sticking your big, fat nose in my personal business.”
When the hour is up, Dr. Layne snags me before I leave, to give me a pamphlet with a burned boy swimming in a lake on the front.
“I already told Cora,” I say, pushing the paper back toward her. “I’m not interested.”
Instead of taking it back, Dr. Layne regales me with how burn camp is for survivors like me. A place where we can talk and bond and sing “Kumbaya” about our scars.
“All I’m asking is you think about it, and whether you’re getting all the support you need.” She looks at me earnestly for a minute. “Telling a little boy your scars are from vegetables doesn’t sound like the Ava I know.”
I toss the pamphlet in the trash on the way out.
* * *
At our postgroup study date, Piper shoves her phone between me and my math textbook.
“More anonymous cruelty from the queen of drama,” she says.
Three texts fill the screen:
You know it was your fault.
How do you even get up in the morning?
Everyone would be better off without you.
Piper rolls back and forth in swift, jerky movements.
“Just want to show you that Kenzie King is more likely to burst into flames than be anyone’s friend.”
“Are you sure they’re from her?”
Piper nods and takes the phone back.
“Anonymous text bullying? Sounds like Kenzie’s style to me. Probably got one of those untraceable numbers to route through her phone like with that picture of you. Guess it wasn’t enough to just cut me out of her life.”
Piper clicks off the screen, but I can’t help asking the question that’s been bothering me since Color Day.
“Sage told me you cut Kenzie out first,” I say. “That they tried to visit you in the hospital.”
Piper stops rocking her chair as her eyes flash toward mine and then away just as quickly.
“The friendship was over. Who cares who made the first strike? We’re not friends now, and that’s all that matters, okay? The past is the past.”
“But—”
Piper throws her head back, heaving an exasperated sigh.
“I’d think you’d be the last person to lecture me on facing the past.” She picks her phone back up, taps it, and when she flips it around, my Ava Before the Fire photo wall stares at me. “That’s right, I found your abandoned account growing weeds out in cyberspace. But you don’t see me interrogating you about it, because clearly you want to forget it. So could you please do me the same favor?”
Piper plops the phone back in her lap.
“Now can we stop talking about this, because I have something way more important than Kenzie King to show you.”
Piper insists I wheel her out to the trampoline and help her hoist out of her chair. I put my arm out like a ballet barre so she can grab on to me as she plants her feet on the ground and rises, shakily. I steady her until she’s almost completely upright.
“Piper! You’re doing it!” I can hardly keep from screaming.
She wobbles, her body half leaning on me, until she teeters slightly and lets herself collapse onto the trampoline with an “oomph.”
Her forehead glistens with sweat. I flop down beside her, pretending not to notice when she takes a pill from her pocket and swallows it whole. She’s been popping pain meds like candy since the cast came off.
“Well,” she says. “I may have that standing ovation in time for your play, but definitely not in time for Wicked. What day is it again?”
I turn my face away from Piper, toward the sky, bathed in fading pink light. The setting sun illuminates the eastern mountains in coral hues.
“Well, actually, I was thinking of taking Asad,” I say.
“That’s cool. I can put up with him for an evening for free Broadway.”
“Well, there’s only two tickets.” I pick at the sleeve of my compression garments as I spell it out for her. “So I mean just Asad.”
Piper sits up abruptly, sending the trampoline rolling.
“Like a date?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe?”
Piper’s eyes light with realization. “Wait. Is Asad the boy?”
I try not to smile like a middle school girl at a sleepover. Piper throws her hands in the air.
“Are you for real? Asad. Dorky, jazz-fingers, lighting-nerd Asad? He’s the boy you’ve been crushing on this whole time? Does he like you?”
“Sometimes I think he could.” My mind shoots back to his fingers wrapped around mine. The way he talked about my star scar. The way he does everything.
Piper clucks her tongue as she shakes her head. “I don’t know. Asad seems like a prime candidate for the friend zone.”
“You don’t think he could like me?”
“No, that’s not what I’m—”
“ ’Cause who could possibly be into me, right?”
A lump forms in my throat. Piper holds up her hands to me. “Whoa, chill out. Date whoever you want. Doesn’t matter to me. I’m just trying to protect you.”
I turn away from her, back to the stars starting to punch through the sky as teary pinpricks threaten to dribble out of my busted eyes. I shouldn’t have told her.
“Your protection feels a lot like a hostage situation. Don’t be friends with Kenzie. Don’t like Asad. You have a lot of rules for my life lately.”
Even without looking, I can feel her staring at me.
“I didn’t know this friendship was such a burden,” she says, a sharp edge to her words.
The silence between us thickens with each second that I don’t dispute her. The trampoline rocks us slowly as we look away from each other. Finally, her mom blares her car horn when she pulls into the driveway.
Piper inches herself to the edge of the trampoline. I balance myself on the waving net and try to help her up, but she brushes away my hand.
“Don’t want to be a burden.”
I stand there like a useless moron as Piper struggles to flop herself into her chair, which she finally does with a lot of contorting. She pushes herself through my house with me walking behind her, bounces down the front step without my help and almost spills herself onto the concrete.
“It’s just one night,” I say as she wheels toward her mom’s car, her inky wings flapping wildly.
She doesn’t look back, so I shut the door.
34
Piper wheels beside me in the hall the next day as usual, but we travel in near silence. The only thing I say to her all day is that I like her haircut, which I do just to be nice, because, in truth, it looks like she took a weed whacker to her head.
The ragged bob makes her tattoo and scars even more visible, not that her barely there tank tops weren’t already handling that task.
She says she needed a change.
I don’t invite her over Friday night to help me get ready for Wicked. Cora does her darnedest as girlfriend stand-in while I try on my fifth outfit. She tells me I look “charming” in a pencil skirt and pumps. I take it off and start over.
I settle on a pair of black pants and a silvery blouse, mostly because it covers a good chunk of me. Piper would probably say I look like a sixteen-year-old cougar who belongs in the friend zone for life.
Asad probably isn’t giving two seconds to his attire.
I tighten a green bandana around my head that completely clashes with my outfit, but it’s the same daffodil-shoot green as the Wicked Witch of the West, and if I know Asad at all, a subtle Broadway reference is right up his alley.
I pull up the corner of my eyes in the mirror.
“Three more days.”
Cora answers the door and interrogates Asad about how long he’s had his license and what his cell number is and when he’ll have me home.
When I walk into the room, there’s an awkward silence when a boy would normally say, “You look beautiful.” But since this isn’t actually a date, and since I am me and Asad isn’t the shoveling-BS type, he just says, “Wicked bandana.”
After Asad signs in blood to have me home no later than 11:00 p.m., Cora allows us to leave. Asad talks about Wicked the whole way to the theater. How he was twelve when he first saw it. How it was the reason he got into drama.
“It was one of those pivotal moments, you know?”
I nod along, letting him talk, relishing that we’re talking about anything other than my scars or Kenzie or Piper. Tonight is about us—two normal high school kids on a date, or an outing, or whatever this is.
When we pull up to the new downtown theater, I crane my neck to see the orblike chandeliers blinking behind tall glass windows.
“First time?” Asad asks.
“Yeah. My parents used to take me to the old theater across town.”
Asad parks the car, hops out, and opens my door. I place my right hand in his, not even caring that my compression garments and overcooked fingers don’t fit into this normal teenage story line.
“New theater. New play. You are going to remember tonight.”
The rainbow reflections from the chandelier scatter across his face when we enter the lobby, and I know—without a doubt—he’s right.
* * *
Inside the theater, the ceiling stretches away from us, making the massive room even more grand. Men and women in suits and satin dresses speckle the seats, and it’s like I’m eight years old again, walking into my first Broadway theater with my mom to see Jersey Boys.
Asad and I settle into velvety seats behind a girl who can’t be more than ten, with her hair pinned up like she’s going to prom. Every few minutes, she turns around like she’s looking for someone, but it’s clear she’s sneaking peeks at me. Her mother leans down and whispers, and the girl whispers back, one eye on me.
“Go ahead, then,” the woman says. The girl turns around in her chair so she’s sitting on her knees, looking at me straight on.
“What happened to your face?” she says quietly.
“I was burned,” I say, trying to recall Dr. Layne’s steps. Say what happened. Say how I’m doing. Close the conversation.
“How?” she says.
“In a house fire,” I say. “But I’m doing much better now, even though I know it looks a little scary.”
Hey eyes wander around my face. “Does it hurt?”
“It did. A lot. But not as much anymore.”
“Can I touch it?”
“Joslyn!” her mother scolds.
“It’s okay,” I say. I reach out my hand to her, and she strokes her pointer finger along mine.
“It’s bumpy.”
“Weird, huh?”
“But it feels like skin.”
“Did you expect reptile scales?”
She laughs and shakes her head.
“Show her the other one,” Asad says. “Wait until you see this!”
I pull up my left hand and the girl gasps a little at the misshapen fingers and enormous thumb.
“That looks really weird,” she says.
“Yeah, but who else do you know that can scratch their head with their toe!” Asad says.
The girl laughs again when I scratch my scalp.
“And pick your nose with your toe!” she says.
“Yeah, I’m not doing that one,” I say. “But thank you for asking me about my scars. That was brave of you.”
She beams and flips back around in her seat, smiling up at her mom. Her mom smiles back, and for a second I feel another twinge of a memory: a velvet dress with a taffeta skirt that made me feel so fancy that I had to twirl in it at least every thirty seconds. Mom bought Junior Mints at intermission for ten dollars a box, which seemed extravagantly wonderful.
“Do you get sick of it?” Asad whispers to me as the lights dim in the theater and the orchestra crescendos a warm-up note, releasing the butterflies in my stomach that I get every time a performance begins.
“What?”
Asad nods toward the girl.
“That.”
“Nah. Questions aren’t bad. It’s the silent starers that get old. Like my skin somehow makes me unapproachably subhuman,” I say. “It’s just skin, people; it’s not me.”
Asad smiles, his teeth white against his skin and the darkened room.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
“Nothing. I was just thinking how much you’re going to love this.”
35
The gist of the play is this: shunned from society for her green skin, Elphaba becomes best frenemies with her roommate, Glinda.
Elphaba becomes the infamous Wicked Witch because she fights cruel discrimination, and Glinda becomes the Good Witch because she lacks the courage to defy the all-powerful Wizard.
But it’s not the plot that keeps Asad on the edge of his seat, mouthing along with the words, and me entranced beside him.
It’s the music, thick with life.
I lose myself in each song.
My heart aches when Elphaba sings about how she’s not the kind of girl boys love. I’m glad Asad doesn’t look at me during that one.
Then Elphaba flies on a broomstick, soaring higher and higher, her black cloak floating behind her as she tries “Defying Gravity.”
The notes reverberate through the theater, her voice rising along with the orchestra, the pulsing beat rushing through me. I’m that eight-year-old girl again sitting by my mother, wrapped up tight in the music.
When Asad turns to me, I realize I’ve been death-gripping the armrest between us.
“Right?” he says.
When Glinda and Elphaba reconcile toward the end, thoughts of Piper and our fight needle me. I touch the phoenix around my neck as Glinda sings of how their friendship has changed her for good.
When the stage lights fall, the reality of the houselights hits me hard. I stand to leave with the rest of the row, but Asad puts his hand on my arm.
“I always stay until they kick me out.” He jerks his head toward the exit sign. “Once we go through those doors, the magic ends.”
The ringleted girl in front of us waves as she files out of her row.
“Toes-up!” I say, sticking up my thumb. She laughs and gives me a thumbs-up before she disappears into the aisle.
“You liked it, right?” Asad says.
“For lack of a more sophisticated term, it was amazeballs,” I say.
Asad laughs lightly and kicks his feet up on the chair in front of him like he has no intention of ever leaving.
“I knew it. Of all people, I knew you especially would get it.”
“Especially me?”
“Yeah, especially you,” Asad says unapologetically. “Because you’re different, and that’s the point of the whole thing. The world casts us into roles based on snap judgments. We look at people, but we don’t see them.”
The stragglers dotting the nearly empty theater are getting up now, putting on spring jackets and shoulder shawls. Asad makes no move to leave, even when it’s just us and a few men in white blouses and black vests sweeping up ten-dollar Junior Mints boxes.
“So when y
ou look at me, what do you see?” I ask.
“Oh, you’re a tough one. Closed up like the final curtain,” he says. “But the thing I see most is how you’ve changed everything since you got here.”
I laugh, and the towering room swallows up my voice.
“Me? How could I possibly change anything?”
“It’s like the song in the play—people change us,” he says. “Like we’re all just pool balls, bouncing around a table. Some balls are random, but some balls find a pattern in the chaos, and when they hit us, they change our trajectory. And you, Ava Lee, are a big fat eight ball. You slammed into me and into that school and you’ve inspir—”
I hold out my hand to still Asad’s, which he waves around as he talks.
“Don’t say it,” I say. “Don’t you dare say it.”
Asad frowns and his hands fall. “What’s so wrong with being an inspiration?”
“Because real inspiration is Elphaba, fighting corruption and evil. Not me.”
“Hello? We’re in high school. Our demons may be smaller, but that doesn’t make the fight—or the bravery—any less real.”
A man in a vest tells us we need to go. Asad stands up reluctantly and stretches before hooking his arm through mine to escort me down the long aisle. At the end of the red carpet, he turns and looks back at the theater, rows and rows of empty seats, now somehow a little less magical with the lights on and a woman with a jet-pack vacuum sucking up stray Junior Mints.
“All I’m saying is I’m braver just from knowing you. I got into a fight, for crying out loud. I dropped a curtain on Kenzie’s head and threatened the principal. I don’t do things like that,” he says. “At least, I didn’t. Until you. So I’m glad I could be here with you tonight, and I’m glad your ball hit my ball.”
I try not to laugh at his quasi-sexual metaphor. His cheeks burn red in a way that makes me want to both pinch and kiss them.