Tell Me How You Really Feel

by Aminah Mae Safi

  Sana pulled out her makeup bag and began swiping concealer under her eyes.

  “That’s not what I meant, either,” said Diesel. “I don’t even mean your arm. I meant the fact that you’ve got this, like, punched-in-the-gut look in your eyes. I mean, what is going on with you?”

  Sana blinked back tears. She didn’t know where they had come from, but she sure wasn’t letting them out now. “Everything.”

  “This isn’t just about your mom, is it?” Diesel looked over while he was driving.

  Sana looked away. Careful for him not to see the sadness pooling in her eyes. “I can’t be perfect anymore, Diesel.” It was the only thing Sana really knew anymore. The only true thing. She couldn’t be perfect anymore.

  “Nobody asked you to be perfect.”

  “Yes, they did. When I was a little girl they asked me to be good. Impossibly good. I know it helped my mother. My grandmother. ‘Look at our respectable granddaughter.’ ‘Look at the beautiful, good girl I made.’ I could see the relief in them. Maybe they didn’t ask with words. But they asked. All the time.”

  Diesel made a turn, winding up into the hills on the way to school. Up the bumpy roads that needed repaving. The concrete mixed with the quick fix of asphalt that hadn’t been enough to stop fault lines. “So fuck ’em.”

  Sana startled. “What?”

  “Tell ’em all to go to hell, Sana. Do what you want to do.”

  Sana shook her head. “It’s not so easy.”

  “It never is.” Diesel found a parking spot and they both gathered up their bags and books as quickly as they could in the misty, spitting weather. The day was gray and humid and still not raining enough to justify anything but a quickened pace and a hunched posture.

  As Sana walked to her locker, everyone stared. She couldn’t really blame them. Her foot still in a boot and her arm now in a pink cast. She hoped there was a way to frame the shot so her injury didn’t totally ruin the continuity in Rachel’s final shoots. That was the best that Sana could hope for on a day like today.

  Rachel

  Rachel got called into Douga’s office after her last class. She had been dreading this. The moment where Douga told her whether or not she was on track. Douga never emailed back her notes. She gave them in person. Probably because they were more intimidating that way.

  Rachel knocked on the glass.

  “Enter,” said Douga.

  “Hi.” Rachel’s voice was so much quieter than she would have liked.

  “Sit,” said Douga, not looking up from her laptop.

  Rachel sat.

  Douga did a few quick keystrokes, then finally pushed her laptop off to the side and looked up at Rachel. “I got your rough cut this weekend.”

  Rachel waited for the death knell to sound.

  “Good work.”

  Rachel blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Good work. You’ve saved this project from the brink of extinction. I’m looking forward to seeing it officially on May first.”

  Rachel felt relief on a cellular level. She closed her eyes briefly. “Thank you.”

  “I do have a couple notes, since you’re still working on your edits. I don’t get the Helen of Troy changes that you’ve made. Why does she suddenly have so many lines? Why is she talking so much? Go back to the original stuff. Keep Sana as Helen. She nails that ice princess thing so well. It’s a great visual. But go back to using Cassandra as your narrative through line for the piece. That’s so much more the style of film you should be making here.”

  The air vacated Rachel’s lungs so quickly it was nearly like the time she’d fallen with all of that camera equipment strapped to her. Rachel had just begun to understand, to see what Sana had been talking about. She’d finally gotten to the point where she saw where her project was going. She’d finally seen how she could make a film beyond anything she’d ever done before. New, different. A film built on the foundations of what she had learned in the past four years, but actually moving forward. A film that stretched her creatively. Now Douga was telling Rachel to go back to what was safe, what was comfortable, what was known.

  Rachel cleared her throat. “You know, you got me to work with Sana, and I think she had a lot of good points. About Helen of Troy. I’d really like to see how it develops as I edit. I was as skeptical as you are, but the more I watch, the more I understand the points Sana was making about the character. I understand the depth she was bringing to the role.”

  But Douga had switched over to her monitor and was clicking through something on her screen. “Look, I’m sure she’s smart. But she’s not a filmmaker. Make the edits, Rachel. This is not a suggestion. Do you understand?”

  Rachel did. She was being told what would help her pass. She was going to have to throw Sana under the bus. Throw all her suggestions out the window and act like they were still working as partners.

  Rachel nodded, a lump of guilt forming in her throat. “Understood.”

  “Excellent,” said Douga, typing again. “That’s all.”

  Rachel got up and exited the office. If she wanted to pass, if she wanted to make sure her scholarship wasn’t in jeopardy, she had to make Douga’s cuts. It was an easy choice, as far as life goals went.

  Then why did she feel so uneasy about it?

  When Rachel walked out of the Royce campus, the weather had shifted from a light sprinkling to a real storm. The rain splatted against the concrete. Large, unforgiving plops of rain. The kind that would soak through to the bone, never relenting.

  Rachel made it to her car just in time, having only gotten the tops of her thighs and the top of her shirt wet. The car steamed and fogged up immediately, from the humidity and the heat coming off of Rachel’s body. She turned on the ignition and set the wipers on. But the rain was so heavy now, the wipers barely cleared the view for more than half a second before the rain came pouring back down, sheeting the windshield and blurring the view so that Rachel was making out the general shapes of things more than the sight of them.

  As Rachel turned the corner, through the carpool driveway, the one always lined with luxury SUV after luxury SUV, she saw a blur of bright red. It could have been any of the cheerleaders. But it wasn’t. Rachel didn’t know what was worse, that she knew Sana by a cardinal blur or that Sana knew her car and waved Rachel down as she drove by.

  Rachel pulled up to the curb, the tires sloshing as she slowed. She drove the fine balance between flooding her car and splashing Sana’s pristine cheerleading uniform. Rachel leaned over and unlocked the passenger’s side door with her hand. Sana waited patiently until Rachel was halfway back to her seat before swinging the door open and sliding in.

  Rachel drove a Lincoln Continental that had been in production before a woman had ever been nominated for directing an Oscar. It was an old clunker. She’d never found it to be anything but serviceable before, but having Sana swing open the door and slide in drew attention to the age of the car. That it had seen better days in an entirely different century. Hell, in a different millennium. But Sana slid into the passenger’s seat as though there were nothing better in the world. And, given the weather outside, maybe that was true.

  And Sana, well. Her uniform was not pristine, but it was as close to it as a uniform could get while still being drenched all the way through. It stuck to her legs, and her ponytail was plastered straight to her neck. Her makeup had been mostly washed away. She ought to have looked like a drowned rat. But she didn’t. Rachel watched as a drop of rain slid down and dripped away from her face.

  Sana had been hiding.

  True, everyone was hiding something. But Rachel hadn’t thought that anyone would hide under the veneer of harmless, pretty girl. But there Sana was—perfection gone. She had dark circles under her eyes, cheekbones that were a little too sharp without the gloss of highlighter. No swishing ponytail to counteract the rigidity of her jawline. This was Sana, in essentials. Sana minus the glamour.

  “Oof,” said Sana. “Thanks for stopping.”
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  “Of course.” Rachel didn’t know what to say. She could only stare.

  Sana had blurred her power with softness—her cheerleading uniform covering up the clear muscles of her body. Her makeup blurring her cheekbones with soft highlights, her mascara coating her lashes to a doelike state. And Rachel had fallen for it. The softness was a game, a play, a trick of the light. Sana had greased the lens. She had softened everything that was a threat about her. She had hidden herself so perfectly, nobody had dared to look beyond it. Sana had completed the illusion so thoroughly that its exposure was so startling, so revelatory that Rachel laughed.

  Sana’s eyebrows snapped together at the sound of that laugh. “What?”

  There she was. Uncovered. Striking, spellbinding. Rachel couldn’t look away. “You’ve fooled everyone, haven’t you?”

  Sana sat up straighter. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  But that had only made Rachel believe herself even more. Sana’s reflex was to cover herself in more primness, to cloak herself in ladylike behavior. She was Cléo from 5 to 7. But now the wig was off and the baby doll dress was gone and what was left was a girl in a plain black dress and a hell of a lot of interior life.

  And then Sana shivered.

  Rachel did the only thing she could think of. She reached into the back and grabbed a hoodie. “Here.”

  Sana took the hoodie. She threw it on over her wet clothes. “Thank you.”

  Rachel began to drive, but as soon as she turned the corner, the visibility became the least of her problems. Pothole after pothole was covered by the water flooding the streets, and if she wasn’t careful she was going to either flood her car in half an instant or be waylaid in the road. Or both.

  “Shit,” said Rachel. “Double shit.”

  Sana sighed. “Use the median, up there.”

  Rachel’s eyes followed the direction of Sana’s fingers, where they pointed to.

  An extra four inches was an extra four inches. That could be the difference between no car the next day and continuing to keep this old thing running. Rachel changed lanes slowly, sloshing her car through, then hit the accelerator, slowly building power so her tires could climb over the curb to the median. She’d beached their car on a patch of curbed grass, between two trees. But at least they wouldn’t be flooded. Hopefully.

  Sana laughed. She was so small inside Rachel’s hoodie, she was practically swimming in it. And just when Rachel thought it shouldn’t get any worse, Sana tucked her arms in and the sweatshirt swallowed her whole. She wiggled and fidgeted, and then her head ducked in. Without any warning, Sana’s cheerleading top came sailing overhead onto the dashboard, quickly followed by her bra.

  Sana sighed her relief. “Oof, that feels better.”

  Rachel swallowed. Sana was naked in her hoodie. Her brain was short-circuiting with the thought. But she couldn’t let that show. She had to be normal. Only nothing about this was remotely normal.

  Sana’s lips curled upward without fully forming a smile. “Something wrong?”

  “Don’t block the heaters with those things,” said Rachel, more gruffly than she knew she could.

  “I wouldn’t dare,” said Sana, all propriety. But it was a lie, that propriety. She was naked underneath that sweatshirt. N a k e d.

  Cool cool cool cool cool. Totally fine.

  “I don’t have any sweatpants,” said Rachel.

  Sana shrugged. “My legs’ll dry much faster than my uniform.”

  “They can’t be that bad; aren’t they designed for athleticism?” Rachel was eager to talk about anything that distracted her from the fact that Sana was so dressed and undressed right now.

  Sana tilted her head and for once, her ponytail was too stuck to her neck to tilt along with her. The move looked more bold now without that nice swish to counterpoint the seriousness of her face.

  How had Rachel never noticed how serious Sana’s face was before this? She was all angles and pointed focus.

  “Har, har. Very funny. You’ve really showed me.”

  “No,” said Rachel. “Seriously, aren’t those designed to wick sweat?”

  Now it was Sana’s turn to laugh. “You are joking, right? Those are designed to keep their shape despite whatever position I take, including being thrown into the air. They’re supposed to be crisp and perfect and beautiful, even when I’m doing a backflip. They are definitively not designed to wick sweat. They’re designed for preservation. I bet when I’m thirty I could put it on and relive my glory days and it won’t have lost a single pleat.” Sana snorted.

  “You seem pretty sure that these aren’t your glory days,” said Rachel. “I mean, aren’t they supposed to be? The young and beautiful and talented cheerleader when she’s at the top of her game? The best of her looks, the leader of her pack?”

  Sana’s eyes went sad, then she turned and stared pointedly at the old heater. Sana held her fingers up to it, the tips of them having gained a slightly blue wash, even with her brown skin. “No,” she said quietly. “At least, I hope these aren’t my glory days. I hope these aren’t my best years.”

  And there it was, another secret. Another side to Sana that Rachel hadn’t seen before. No, that was wrong. Rachel had seen it, she’d just ignored it before. Assumed that the reason was something superficial. But here in this warming, humid car, trapped on a median in the middle of the road, Rachel knew that whatever it was that made Sana wistful and sad, whatever it was that made her hide behind soft makeup and feminine clothing was not anything superficial or minor at all.

  No, it was something terribly important that Rachel needed to understand right away. Especially before Sana found out that Rachel had cut the best parts of her work out of the film and left in only the hollow shell of an ice princess trope. “I hope they’re not your best years either.”

  Sana turned then, her intense, dark eyes looking straight into Rachel, piercing her with a gaze that Sana must have used all the time. But now, with her mascara dripping under her eyes, it was a ferocious look, a fervent one. This was not a simple glance, a surprised look, even a question. It was a demand, a probe. Rachel squirmed.

  “That’s the nicest thing, I think, that you’ve ever said to me.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “It was.”

  Sana wouldn’t look away and Rachel couldn’t. And to be honest, even if she could have looked away, she wouldn’t have wanted to. She wouldn’t have wanted to lose a moment of being able to look at this bright and shining Sana. This girl who pulled focus from herself so easily that the core of her was lost on them all.

  “Sorry,” said Rachel.

  “Sure,” said Sana.

  “No.” Rachel cleared her throat to be extra sure. “I am. Sorry. I’ve misjudged you. I can see that now. I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. And you don’t have to believe me. But I am sorry.”

  Sana didn’t take her eyes off of Rachel and she lifted herself off of the seat, unsticking her wet legs and wet clothing from the passenger’s seat, slid herself so she perched on the console. She swung one leg into Rachel’s side of the car, leaving the other on her own. Sana’s leg dripped lightly onto Rachel’s leggings. The water was warm from her skin.

  “Say it again.”

  Rachel sat transfixed for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.” Sana licked her lips.

  Rachel couldn’t breathe. “For what?”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer with my intentions.”

  Rachel just kept staring into Sana’s eyes. “Your intentions? What intentions?”

  “That day freshman year. When I asked you out. I didn’t fight back, I was too stunned.”

  A pit welled in Rachel’s stomach. Anxious. No, that wasn’t right. This wasn’t anxiety. This was another feeling. A humming, stomach-clenching anticipation. But it wasn’t anxiety. “It’s okay. It was a joke.”

  Sana shook her head, slowly and clearly. “It wasn’t a joke. It was never a joke.”<
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  Rachel opened her mouth, then closed it.

  Sana’s eyes dropped down to Rachel’s mouth. “I can’t believe I let you think it was a joke.”

  Rachel swallowed hard. She blinked. No. That wasn’t blinking. Her eyelashes. They were fluttering. For fuck’s sake. Rachel tried to think of every girl who could manage to keep it together in a moment like this so she could channel them. But her mind had gone completely and devastatingly blank.

  Sana was close enough now that Rachel could feel her as much as she could hear her speak. “So what’s it gonna be?”

  The car, which had already been humid from their rain-soaked clothes, suddenly felt like a sauna. The coziness of the atmosphere had evaporated, leaving behind a steamy mess.

  Rachel swallowed. “What are my options?”

  Sana held up a finger. “Option A is I go back to the passenger’s side, buckle myself in, and we wait out the rain. You drive me home, and when we shoot again come Tuesday, we pretend like none of this ever got aired out.”

  Rachel’s stomach dropped out from under her. She should take that one, she knew. They should go back to being enemies. Or at least, quasi-indifferent acquaintances. Work colleagues with a healthy level of disagreement. Instead she opened her mouth and said, “And Option B?”

  Sana batted her own eyelashes. She leaned in so there was a millimeter of space between her mouth and Rachel’s. She raised a second finger, right alongside the first. “Option B involves my kissing you and taking it from there.”

  “You’re usually more of a detailed planner,” said Rachel.

  Sana didn’t say anything at first. Her mouth just quirked into half a smile. “Your call.”

  Rachel’s mouth went dry. She should definitely go for the first option. The safe one. The one that didn’t end in horrible disaster and her film being unfinished because she had hooked up with her lead actress just like every idiot Hollywood director on the planet. Instead, her mouth let out the words, “Option B. Please.”

  Sana’s mouth hovered that millimeter above Rachel’s for an instant, then lightly, gently brushed against her own. For a moment Rachel was too stunned to return the kiss. Sana’s mouth was soft, full. She tasted like vanilla. That must have been the flavor of lip gloss she used. Like baked goods. The rain had intensified the salty-sweet scent of her skin, and that light scent of jasmine was wafting off of her hair as per usual.