“Mom?” Lauren asked.
“In a minute, honey,” Mom’s silhouette said as she closed the bedroom door behind her.
“Mama,” Mirela said from the living room.
“Mom,” Lauren said, more insistently, to no one.
“Mama mama mama,” Mirela called. The syllables were sticky, like she was dreaming and trying to talk herself into waking up.
Now that Paula had quit the show and was refusing to spend study hall in Tedquarters, it meant that twice a week, from 2:10 p.m., when Mr. Smith usually walked in after his post-lunch staff meeting, until about 2:30 p.m., when Stitch and Rajiv came somersaulting or skateboarding in after Phys Ed, Mr. Smith was usually alone in Tedquarters. Lauren wondered why he was always in there, why he never spent any downtime with his colleagues in the English department office, picking up some gardening tips from Mrs. Bristol or catching up on back issues of the New York Review of Books that Mr. Treadwell stacked in his carrel.
“It’s so cute how you can get all that alone time with Ted,” Paula said. “I bet he always sits down right next to you.”
“Whatever,” Lauren said.
“You two are so close,” Paula said. “It’s crazy that you could get a lead role without really even trying out. I guess it’s just that he knows you so well.”
Depending on the day, if Mr. Smith had seemed moody in English class, if he’d waved Lauren off when she raised her hand, she then had twenty minutes in Tedquarters to try to fix it, to convince him with a perfect offhand comment that she really had done the assigned reading, no matter what he thought or assumed. And if English class had gone well, in Tedquarters she could, as Dad would say, “capitalize on the win.”
“I had an idea,” Lauren told him. It was a bit awkward to have conversations at the big table, facing their books and paperwork and not each other. “I was thinking that Paula and I could switch places, and she could play Rizzo and I could be the property mistress.”
“Paula quit,” Mr. Smith said.
“No, I know, but she could come back, couldn’t she?”
Mr. Smith continued marking papers like he hadn’t heard her, like their elbows weren’t touching.
“I think that would make her happy,” Lauren said. “And I wouldn’t mind at all.”
“No, I’m sure that’s an issue of utmost prominence in your life right now, Lauren—just how ecstatically happy you can make your good friend Paula,” Mr. Smith said. “You’d give it all up for her, wouldn’t you?”
“Paula is a good singer. I’ve heard her,” Lauren said.
Lauren hated Rizzo like she was a person. She had a dream that she was suspended from school after arguing with Rizzo in the cafeteria—Lauren shoved her across a table, sending Stitch’s brown-bag lunch spinning onto the linoleum, and Mr. Smith had to intervene. In another dream Lauren surrendered Midnight to an animal shelter because Mirela wouldn’t stop pulling her tail, and when the door shut on the cage, Lauren realized that Midnight had Rizzo’s face.
Mr. Smith flicked his pen onto the table and rubbed his eyes. “You wear me out, Lauren,” he said. “You keep trying out for my plays and you keep trying to weasel out of them and it’s just a lot of drama for one Drama Club.”
Lauren hated Rizzo for her curdled crudeness, her spiteful pride in being the unpretty slut. These traits came through even in the sanitized school version of Grease, although it got rid of the sex jokes and jeering puns and Rizzo’s pregnancy scare. “I can’t sing,” Lauren said quietly. “And I can’t dance. And I definitely can’t do them at the same time.”
“I doubt that.”
“You didn’t come to the first rehearsal,” Lauren said. There would be weeks and weeks of rehearsals. “And you barely let me try out. That’s why you don’t know that I suck.”
Mr. Smith sighed, and put his hand on Lauren’s back. In the usual places, rubbing up and down in the usual rhythms, covering the usual distances. His hand on her back was apologizing for being so tough on her, but also it was underlining, with feathering fingers and knuckle-presses, that he was so tough on her in class and in rehearsals because she was different, she was special, he had higher standards for her, and anyway they had an understanding. His head was low and leaning into hers.
“Sing for me,” he said. He took her hand with his free one.
She looked at his hand on hers and did not say anything.
“Come on, try me, sing.” A cooing whisper. His coffee breath. “What’s the song? I know you know it. Everybody knows it. It was a big hit when you were a baby.”
Lauren laughed and shook her head, and her hair brushed against his cheek.
“You’re the one that I want, doo, doo, doo, honey,” he whisper-sang.
Lauren laughed again. Her whole body laughed like a seizure, like his tuneless croon was tickling her sides.
“You’re the one that I want, doo, doo, doo, honey.”
A knot in her side tightened as if it were about to pop open. She forced herself to stop laughing and pulled her hand away. “I’m gonna go now.”
As she stood up, his hand on her back held its position in space, caressing down her spine and landing on her ass. “Excuse you,” he said as she maneuvered past her chair and then his.
“Oops, sorry,” Lauren said, her hair falling in her eyes as she shambled to the door. Stitch and Rajiv were in the hallway trying to do the splits, and she was relieved that they hadn’t seen her in there and she was hopeful that they wondered why she was in such a hurry, why she was so flushed and happy.
The Bethune auditorium. Another rehearsal. Lauren sang a line of her solo, “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” raised a hand, then she was supposed to go to the next line and the next hand motion, but she saw her hand still suspended in air, a beat too late, and tried to move it to where it was supposed to be, and as she did that she forgot the next line of the song. “Ugh!” she exclaimed, stamping her feet in frustration. The girls looked away. The boys licked their lips and stared. Her shame and embarrassment were a confession to Rizzo’s shame and embarrassment. Rizzo was messy, and Lauren made a mess of playing her. She was stumbling through the worst version of her real life while a smooth fictional production swirled around her, elegant and vigorous as a ballet. She was an isolated lyric. Rizzo’s song was about pretending to hate a perfect girl, but the whole thing was a front for hating herself. Eye-rolling and jealous and so ugly. Negative energy. Sour and stinking.
Mindy said, “You know what, Lauren, let’s not worry about the dance steps for now. Okay? You can just stand still and concentrate on this important song—let the others worry about the dancing.” Lauren hated Mindy, too, for trying to be kind, for letting the effort show.
“Lauren is a Method actress,” Andy Figueroa said. “You run lines with her and you catch an STD.”
“I hear herpes gives you two left feet,” said Brendan Dougherty, in a strangulated duh voice, like Lauren wasn’t worth the effort of a proper joke. Scattered laughter.
“Jesus, Brendan,” said Claire, shielding her eyes with one hand. She wasn’t defending Lauren so much as protesting her own discomfort. Before Grease, Lauren had seen Brendan as a pretty void, flat as a poster of a boy-band heartthrob on Danielle Sheridan’s bedroom wall. It turned out that he was a person, too.
“Guys,” Mindy said in an admonishing tone, but she wasn’t a teacher at Bethune, so she had little authority, especially when Mr. Smith wasn’t around. Or what authority she did have derived from how likable she was. The boys would think Mindy was likable so long as they also thought she was fuckable, but that could go wrong if the boys started to get an inkling that Mindy herself also thought that she was fuckable.
Lauren was too incompetent to be fuckable. Mingling with the sour and the stink was a scent of pity, the close air of a funeral. Something had died. Lauren stared at her sneakers, which were bolted to the stage. She watched herself wielding a chain saw, slicing at the section of stage her feet were bolted to, carving out two snowsho
e-sized wooden blocks, clomping out of the auditorium atop her great big stage clogs, and throwing herself into Lake Erie. Except wood floats, she thought. Even her fantasies of erasing herself were incompetent.
“Lauren dances like she just shat her pants,” Brendan said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Andy said, revving up, “and she’s moving around real careful so—”
“—so it doesn’t run down her leg!” Andy and Brendan yelled together, and they fell all over themselves laughing.
“You guys are fucking assholes,” Julie fumed at the two boys, and this was what brought tears to Lauren’s eyes. Of all of them, she was maddest at Julie, with her rich pirouetting voice. Julie’s pity gave the taunts their meaning. Inside herself, Lauren ripped a chunk of the stage off her feet and dashed her head against it.
After rehearsal she locked herself in a stall in the bathroom farthest from the auditorium, behind the studio art workshop. She sat on the edge of the toilet hugging herself, eyes closed, humming to cross out Brendan’s voice, Andy’s voice.
Nevermind was about the length of a class period, if you didn’t count the long silence and then the secret thrashing song that came after it. The song woke Lauren up if she didn’t remember to switch off the CD player at night. If she ran each song through her head before she allowed herself to unlock the stall, that would buy her forty minutes. She would sing every word, hum every guitar line, tap out every beat, but quietly, quietly, she’d have to listen out in case someone came in and heard her, and by the time she got to the end everyone would have gone home. Rehearsal had run late as it was, she wouldn’t have to face them again until tomorrow. She pressed her fingers against her eyelids and watched the bluish-reddish shapes pump and drift, an amoebic wash of strange living things buoyed and eddied by the submerged guitar lines.
“Memoria,” she whispered to herself. “Memoria.” The chorus of the second single, the one that sounded like it was recorded underwater. She didn’t know what it meant. Memory-ah. She made up what it meant, to help pass the time: the memory of Maria, the phantom of an Italian mob widow who lived long ago, who only wore black mourning garb, black lace and veil, after her husband was killed with a pistol—by her own hand, people whispered, but she always denied it, blaming the local Black Hand, as anyone would. Memoria was the word you used, three times fast, to ward against her vengeful ghost. Maria dropped the gun in the ocean, off the coast of Sicily. Lauren would recite this story to Paula, tell her it was the origin of the song, that she’d read about it in one of the music magazines.
Lauren had gotten to the second-to-last song—I’m on a plain, I can’t complain—when Carl, the school custodian, called out from the doorway to the bathroom and said whoever was in there had to leave. He sounded apologetic; he probably thought she was having woman problems.
Lauren could hear Stitch’s skateboard before she pushed open the side doors to the Bethune parking lot. She saw he was alone and exhaled. It was cold and wet and the light was thinning out, down to a bruisish purple.
“Hey,” he said, looking down as he flipped his skateboard. It spun twice, spiked the ground on one corner. He watched it roll out of his reach, not moving after it. “I was wondering where you went. I was waiting.”
“I didn’t ask you to wait for me,” she said.
“I wanted to ask if you liked the last tape I made you,” he said, his hands in the pockets of the red buffalo-plaid jacket he wore every day.
Lauren stared at him. “Are you kidding me?” she asked.
“No. The Replacements. Did you like it?”
He watched her patiently. His eyes always seemed faintly rheumy, as if he used special drops that unlocked a blurry fourth dimension, visible just over her shoulder.
“You waited an hour in the parking lot to ask me if I like the Replacements?”
“It hasn’t been an hour,” he said. He shrugged and skip-hopped toward his skateboard. “I’m just practicing,” he said, rolling back toward her.
“You aren’t—you’re making fun of me, right? I don’t get it.”
“What?” asked Stitch. He stopped pushing the wheels forward and back with one foot and squinted at her. Mouth open like no one was watching, like he was alone with himself. “I’m not making fun of you. If you get a chance to listen to it, let me know what you think.”
“Okay. I’m sorry,” Lauren said. Her tongue and lips were numb and slow, like she’d been out in the cold for too long. “I did listen to it.”
“What did you think?”
“I liked it. It feels very—close. Like they’re playing live.”
“Like you mean the production?”
“They leave in the mistakes, the missed notes. But in a good way, like they’re excited to be playing for a crowd. Like they practiced, but they’re nervous.”
Stitch nodded. Both of them were looking at the ground. “The drums speed up and slow down sometimes.”
“I like the singer’s voice.”
“Paul Westerberg,” Stitch said.
“Yes—and I liked—I liked how I feel like I’m in the room with them. And the singer is talking to someone he knows very well. Like, sometimes the other person is there, and sometimes he’s pretending they’re there, like he’s getting up his nerve to talk to them later. And sometimes he’s mad at them, and sometimes he’s mad at himself and taking it out on the other person.”
“Why are you crying?” Stitch asked.
Lauren wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her coat. “Why are you asking me that?! You were there! At rehearsal! You know—you saw what happened.”
Stitch shrugged and said nothing.
“God, it was so embarrassing,” she said.
“Don’t pay attention to them,” Stitch said.
“How can I not pay attention to them?”
“I don’t. It’s a waste of time.”
“They’re your friends.”
“Just because I’m around them doesn’t mean they’re my friends.”
“What do they say about me when I’m not around?”
“Probably nothing, because they can’t hurt you when you can’t hear what they’re saying.”
Lauren laughed and wiped her nose with her other sleeve. “That’s clever.”
“I didn’t say it to be clever.”
“Please don’t feel sorry for me.”
“I do a little bit. I’ll try not to. Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you home?”
Lauren nodded at the ground.
“Suit yourself. I hope you feel better. See you, Lauren.” He began to turn away.
“Hey—why did you—that one time, why did you call me and act like you didn’t?” Lauren asked. Her sadness had given her permission to be a brat, a middle schooler.
Stitch stopped and looked back. “I didn’t call you,” he said. “Do you want me to call you?”
Lauren shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, do what you want.”
“Okay. I’ll call you later.”
The skateboard faded out, and Lauren was alone, still staring at the ground. Her body rotating like a drill, pounding like a jackhammer through the top line of tar into the roadbed, into the stones, down to the earth, until she hit water, until she could hear the submerged guitar from the memoria song again and she could know she was alone. Not alone in this parking lot, in this place that she knew, where the people who knew her would return tomorrow, but alone in a place where she could not be found or known or remembered, the songs looping in her head for company.
Stitch just felt sorry for her. He wasn’t going to call her later. She didn’t want him to. He would call her and whatever they said he would just go and tell his friends.
She went through the gap in the chain-link fence, over the shallow line of trees, crossed Fox Hollow Lane, cut through the Reillys’ yard and then the Rosens’, waved at Dr. Rosen through his kitchen window. Across Sycamore, then the overground pool, across Northridge, then the O’Tooles’ yard—careful to keep an eye out for their anxious sh
epherd, Ireland—and into her own. The late afternoon light had almost completely leaked away, like the light had liquefied and was puddling into the part-crunchy, part-soggy ground. Lauren stopped short at what was more or less her family’s property line, placing one hand on the trunk of the old beech. She could hear Mom yelling, “No, no,” then a clattering explosion. Lauren could picture it: Mirela had figured out how to climb up on the kitchen counters, and now she was emptying the high cabinets of their bowls, casserole dishes, tumblers. Crash after crash. Dad was home, bellowing. Knives in his voice, ricocheting off the walls with Mirela’s screams. A pause, the crashing stopped, and now Mirela was laughing. Someone was crying. Lauren didn’t wait to listen out for whether it was Mom or one of the boys. She turned back, cut through the O’Tooles’ yard again, ignoring Mrs. O’Toole’s wave and taut disapproving smile from her back porch. Northridge, overground pool, Sycamore, the Rosens’, the Reillys’, Mr. Smith’s.
She was in Mr. Smith’s backyard, under the canopy of maples and pines. It was odd that she had never done this before. She turned around in the center of the yard, a full 360 degrees. Juddering in her throat, in her ears. Yet she felt hyper-calm, her surroundings supersaturated despite the darkness and tree shadow, intensely clear, outside of time. She took a pedantic interest in how marooned his little red house looked from behind, no patio or deck, just two steps to a back door and a rusty wheelbarrow slumped beside it. The little red house a crouched and thinking thing beneath the sighing trees, untethered to its neighborhood, poised to stand up on its legs and collapse again atop her. Her reflection scattering yellow on a back window.
The grass inhaled and exhaled, breathing her feet off the ground. The darkness was milky and changeable, like you could move your finger through the air and write a story.
She walked around to the front of his house. A curving path, pachysandra and stunted hedges in front of his windows. She knocked softly on his door. Her breath came shivering. The door opened.
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