by J. C. Lillis
I need an enabler.
***
Me: Are you there, Ma?
Ma: Yeah. Unless you need money, in which case I died last Thursday.
Me: I want to talk.
Ma: About what?
Me: I got my heart broken.
Ma: That’s shit luck, daughter. Sorry. (PLEASE DO NOT ASK FOR ADVICE.)
Me: I don’t want advice.
Ma: Then what?
Me: I want you to tell me about when Dad broke your heart.
I wait, cross-legged in a scatter of yellow-blue-green light from the Church of Abandon’s stained glass window. The phone rings in my hand.
“You never wanted to hear it before,” she says.
“I want to hear it now.”
“The whole truth?”
“Unvarnished.”
“Hold on. This calls for Cracker Jack.” A bag rips open and I hear her shuffle candied popcorn into her hand, trying to sidestep the peanuts. She starts her memory mid-munch: “Okay, so it’s like this. It’s Tuesday night and we’re in the writers’ room, reading off our pitches to Jack fucking Harrow while he eats a fish taco…” My hand grips the phone as Ma spins the story of her last day on the Sunday School set. The blowup she and Dad had when he fought for his sketch and cut down hers. The fight that spilled from the writers’ room to the dressing room to the parking lot, which culminated in mutual insults and Ma punching Dad in the stomach and Dad breaking it off with “from now on, I don’t know you.” Her long bus ride home after they canned her, hugging her red backpack in her lap, knowing she’d lost the best opportunity she’d ever have. Her bitterness flows into me. I relate to it all, though I think she’s being unfair to Dad on at least one count, because his prehistoric-boyband skit did sound funnier than her vampire bake sale idea.
Still, though. This is the closest we’ve ever felt.
“That bake sale skit was gold,” she grumbles.
“I’m sure it was.”
“It had smarts. It was subtle. All he ever had to do was whip out that guitar and crank out a funny rhyme and—”
“Everyone fell in love.”
“Exactly.”
“At least you didn’t get famous wrestling a raccoon puppet.”
“Yeah. There’s that.” She barks out a laugh. “Aaaaaand my Cracker Jack prize is a QR code. What the frig?”
Oh my gosh. Are we bonding? I think we are. My mouth can never leave a tender moment alone because straightaway it blurts out: “Come to LA!”
“What?”
“Ma, you should come out here.” I know it’s sudden, but I don’t care. “We’ll get a place together—I can’t stay with Abel much longer. You can do the show with me.”
“Um…”
“Put together a fifteen-minute set. You practically just did. You’re still a storyteller.”
I get this grand vision of us: a mother-daughter Sour Grapes act, sharing one stage for the first time ever. Our bitterness will bring us together. We’ll share a beer and a bag of vinegar chips in the parking lot after the shows. I may not have a girlfriend, but at least I’ll have a mom.
“You have to stop this,” she says.
“Stop what?”
“Trying to cook up happy endings. Jesus, I’m thirty-eight years old! I’m not gonna start prancing around some dumpy little stage spilling my guts to a bunch of other losers. You like it, great. But leave me out of it.”
“Ma—”
“Listen to me, daughter. Okay? I want you to stop sending me links to comedy clubs, writing workshops, all these stories about people who ‘blossomed after forty.’ I don’t want to blossom. I don’t want to be saved. I want my TV and my takeout and some good weed and some fucking peace, finally, for the rest of my life.” Her voice softens. “All right?”
I try to keep the wobble out of my voice. “All right.”
I study the stained-glass window, trace the black veins that enclose the panes of color.
“Are you waiting for me to say something else?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper.
“Stop looking for my zipper.”
“Your what?”
“There’s not another person under here if you unzip my Shitty Mom Suit.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because let me tell you, the longer you’re gone, the lighter I feel, and you know why? I don’t have to deal with your hopeful face. You trying to change me all the time.”
“I only tried to—”
“You’re the one who changed. You know? When you were little I thought you were like me. I thought we were pals. And then you joined your happy Tera cult and started skipping around plinking your keyboard and thinking you were something special, and goddammit. I couldn’t look at you anymore. Because now you not only had his same exact face, you had his smile and his ambition and his fucking voice, too, and I couldn’t stand…” She cuts herself off when her voice breaks. “A better person wouldn’t have hated you for that. But I’m…not a better person.”
I flick my eyes back and forth because did my mother just admit she kind of hated me? Is that a thing that happens, like casually on the phone?
“I…should go,” I say.
“You wanted the truth. Unvarnished.”
“I did.”
“I’m glad you found your thing. I am.” She sucks in a breath and whooshes it out. “But we’re both better off when we’re out of each other’s way. Don’t you think?”
“Sure,” I say, because there are no other words available to me, and then I hang up.
Oh wow. I should have understood this sooner, all the different ways I reminded her of Dad and how that brought her back, over and over, to the hardest days of her life. Sorrow floods in and I think about her on that bus, chin on her backpack, knowing she’d destroyed herself but feeling there was nothing she could have done differently, because of the way her heart was built. But then I stop.
Because sadness isn’t useful, not to me.
Anger is.
Bitterness is.
USE IT, says Evil Barrie.
I take one more swig of the vodka-and-Whoosh, my heart throbbing like a wound. I think of all my classmates with super-supportive parents, all the TV shows with deeply flawed moms who still manage to be loving and present. I pump the memories through my veins.
Then I open my songwriting journal, uncap my pen, and bleed green.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I wake with my cheek on cold tile.
I’m on a floor. The bathroom floor at St. C’s. Brandon’s plaid shirt is draped over me.
What time is it? What day is it?
My tongue is coated with fuzz and my guts are raw and sore. I try to think but a headache gnaws my thoughts away.
Something bad’s happened. I don’t remember.
I don’t want to remember.
My phone’s on the floor beside me. I fumble it on and check: Wednesday, 9:04 a.m. Less than an hour before the restaurant opens. I rinse my mouth in the sink, splash my face with cold water. My arm is hot; I push up my sleeve to check the damage. Red splotches spread beyond the bracelet now. They’re creeping up my arm, like they won’t be happy until my whole body is a skin-suit of hurt.
Light flares in my memory. A flash of a bat. A whizz-crack. A shatter.
I emerge from the bathroom gingerly and HOLY LORD who roped the sun and brought it here to blast St. C’s? I shield my eyes. My head throbs.
“You’ll want to drink this.” Abel’s voice. I slit my eyes open and he’s holding out a glass of thick reddish sludge. My stomach revolts, but I take it, because his face is not a happy face.
“What’s happening?”
“Number one: A nice little hangover. Number two: an intervention.”
I take a sip and nearly barf because this drink is a putrescence of evil tomatoes. “What do you mean?”
“Follow me, please.”<
br />
He beckons me up the stairs. When my foot hits the first step, it starts coming back to me. Prepping for a late-night private Smash Session with a Whoosh and a few shots of vodka from Abel’s bar. The session with Nadine, a makeup artist who looked like a glam version of Ma and had fifteen years of bitterness to celebrate and purge. We toasted our heartbreaks, tossed our glasses against the wall. We sang “Hate U More” in a drunken furor, jabbing our fingers in each other’s faces. We smashed—
Oh no.
I take the rest of the stairs fast, my legs trembling. We didn’t. Tell me we didn’t.
The destruction in the Church of Abandon is nearly comprehensive. My cabaret screen is mangled, lying in a heap like a collapsed tent. My sign dangles from one chain, all its light bulbs smashed. Green glass from shattered table vases litters the floor, along with bits of wood from the folding chairs we used for—
I see a disembodied foot. A hand with three fingers snapped off. Pieces of faces scattered all across my stage: a staring eye, half an ear, a fragment of red lip.
Zara. Bob. Augie. The Good Barrie mannequin I sing to in “Bitter Duet.” They’re all dead, broken beyond hope. We killed them. I remember it now: whooping with the bat and the chairs, goading each other on with heartless abandon, until Abel finally heard us and ran upstairs to stop it.
I put the drink on a table and crouch down. I pick up the piece with Bob’s eye, brush my finger over the smooth green iris. The eye peers to the left, like it’s wondering where its mate went.
“Come on over here,” says Abel. I turn my head. Off to the side, four chairs are set up in a semicircle, with a fifth chair facing them. The four chairs hold Abel, Brandon, Don, and Kira. The fifth is for me.
I’ve reached peak Evil B. And now I’m in trouble.
I go to the chair, but I don’t sit down. I stand behind it and grip the backrest.
“Exhibit A.” Abel’s voice is creepy-calm. “General destruction. Woman-on-mannequin violence.”
“Don’t joke. You were really upset,” Brandon murmurs.
“They deserved better,” says Don. “They’ve been with us since the beginning.”
“Guys, I’m so—”
“Exhibit B.” Don rubs her palms on her polka-dot tights. “You’re barely eating. Barely sleeping. You space out on the job—I found an order of Sour and Sour Chicken on the radiator yesterday.”
My face heats up. I look at my feet.
“Exhibit C.” Brandon holds up a vodka bottle. “Taking this from the bar.”
“That’s a big deal,” says Abel.
“I know,” I whisper.
“Look, whatever. I drank when I was eighteen too,” says Abel. “But you do it here, I could get in a shitload of trouble.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t be sorry. Be smarter,” says Abel.
Shame spreads through my whole body. I want to liquefy, seep through the floorboards.
“Exhibit D,” says Kira.
“Please, I get it—”
“You don’t,” she snaps. “I have something to say. And you need to have a seat and listen.”
I pull the chair back and perch on the edge. Outside the stained glass window, a couple of morning birds improvise a song, a call and response of sweet twitters.
“A few years ago I needed…help,” Kira says. “And I almost didn’t get it, because art was so important to me, and I thought getting help would numb the part of my brain that made me creative. Which is a total fucking lie, but I didn’t see that at the time.”
“I—”
“Uh-uh. I speak now. Not you.” She toys with the hem of her paint-streaked linen dress, which looks like she wiped off a million brushes on it. “Art doesn’t depend on suffering. That’s a crock. It’s about discipline. Showing up to do the thing you do. It’s about watching and listening to the world and telling the truth with your own voice. It’s about learning from what other people make, whether it’s good or bad. And the most important thing?” She waits until I look at her. “It’s about taking care of yourself. So you can keep making and finishing your shit, for as long as you can.”
Kira unpacking her heart for me makes me equal parts touched and uncomfortable. I rise to my feet because I feel like a butterfly on a corkboard, two seconds before the pins go in.
“I’ll do that,” I say. “I promise. I will. And I’ll clean up everything right now, and—”
“We’re not done here,” says Abel.
He lifts a hand. I sink back down in my seat.
“I’m sorry, Barrie. We don’t want to do this…” He trails off, looks at Brandon for support. Brandon puts a hand on his forearm.
“We’re shutting you down,” The Smaller Boy tells me.
“What?”
“For a while, at least,” says Abel. “It’s becoming a liability. Your last two shows—you pumped up that crowd so hard things got scary. You’re taking it too far—”
“I’ll dial it back, then! I swear.” Panic tightens my chest. My stomach roils. “Please—they need me.”
“Not as much as you need to chill. Recalibrate,” says Kira.
My phone BING BINGs in my pocket.
“Next week’s sold out,” I say. “You’ll lose so much money.”
“That’s not a concern,” says Abel.
BING BING
“You can’t—” I sound pathetic, like a desperate kid. I don’t even care. “Please, you can’t do this. The show’s all I have.”
“That worries us, too,” says Brandon.
Everyone goes quiet. I look up, blinking fast. My broken sign sways gently from its chain.
“I’ll have to relocate, then,” I say quietly. I start a to-do list in my head. “I’ll find somewhere else—”
BING BING
My hand closes around my phone. I want to find a dark corner, start researching potential venues, but right now someone might need me. The last time I texted Sour Ranger Tim, he’d read twenty-six glowing Yelp reviews of his former partner’s new falafel stand, and he was teetering on the edge of a breakdown.
“I need to take this,” I say.
I stand up and turn away from my intervention-in-progress. I peek at my phone. And I almost faint dead away.
The texts are not from Tim.
They’re not from any Sour Ranger. Or Ma. Or Ava.
They’re from Tera.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Hey Barrie, it’s Tera Rivera. I saw some videos of your awesome Sour Grapes Cabaret, and I wanted to touch base.
My friends, bless them to the ends of the earth, put the intervention on hold for one afternoon.
I’d love to see you play in person today. I have a proposal for you.
I spend the next six hours in frantic preparation. I take a hot shower at Abel’s. I make a setlist and revise it till it sings. I apply my wine-dark Evil B lipstick and comb and re-comb my wig and brush my teeth six times. I start to clean up the mess in the Church of Abandon, but then I’m like no, this looks cool. I will play for Tera in the ruins. And she will fall in love.
Maybe she already has.
I thought I could swing by your turf. I have interviews and meetings today but I can be at St. Castaways by 4 p.m. sharp, if you’re willing to play me a short private set. Does that work for you?
At 3:45 p.m., a temporary CLOSED sign goes up on the St. C’s door and I count down the seconds to my imminent death from ecstasy and nerves.
“You should eat something,” Abel says, adjusting the feathers on my Evil B jacket.
“I can’t.” I sip a Whoosh and coke. My heart’s thudding so hard it hurts.
“You look better. You feel good?”
“Superheroic.”
“Hangover gone?”
“Almost.”
He gives me a complicated smile and sighs.
“I’ll replace all the mannequins,” I say. “And pay for the screen and ch
airs. And I won’t drink your vodka ever again and I’ll take better care of myself, I promise.”
“I know you will.” He smooths my wig into sleek brackets. “But, like…”
He doesn’t have to say, because I know. This feels like a breakup. I feel in my bones that the Sour Grapes Cabaret is about to find its new home. That my life is about to change, to shoot off in this wild new direction.
“Good luck, Barbarella.” He kisses my cheek and tugs at my bob—to be cute, but also to check the adhesive. “Knock her dead.”
***
On my way upstairs, I check the Pop U site on my phone. Out of habit, you know? Every season before finale night I’m glued to it all day.
There’s a livestream from campus. The Top 3 is prepping for seclusion.
“Hey, devoted Popheads!” says Jaz Prentiss. I sit down at one of the café tables in the Church of Abandon. “If you’re tuning in now, we’re here with our final three contestants. At six p.m. today, they’ll enter three separate soundproofed locations on the Pop University campus. They’ll have exactly six hours to complete their songs in solitude for tomorrow’s finale: no phones, no media allowed. Then at the stroke of midnight, our Cinderella and two Cinderfellas will be asked to preview their songs for the judges.”
The camera switches over to the Top 3. Ava sits on a white leather couch in Tera’s mansion with Johnny and Caleb. Her hands are folded. She stares straight ahead.
“Who’ll be the winner?” Jaz says. “That’s in your hands, America.”
The camera pans over the contestants and lingers on Ava. I make my eyes linger back.
The first thing I notice is she’s not wearing the letter-A pin in her hair, or around her wrist. The second thing I notice is her necklace. She hasn’t worn much jewelry on the show, so it stands out: the thin gold chain with the twist of wire dangling from it. It doesn’t match her midnight-blue V-neck. It’s green.
Twist-tie green.
Because that’s exactly what it is. A twist-tie, shaped like a slightly dented heart.