Tell Me How You Really Feel

by Aminah Mae Safi

  “Don’t you have school?” Farrah walked into the room; she was adjusting her belt and doing her check for phone, keys, wallet before she had to jam out the door.

  “Probably,” said Sana. Lloyd Dobler was driving around the streets of Seattle with Diane Court. It was the beginning. New love, fresh love. The kind that inspired Sonnet 130. Maybe even 116.

  It was doomed.

  “Are you going to go to school?” asked Farrah.

  “Nope.” Sana’s pajamas were comfy and the couch was cozy and this movie really was just getting good.

  “Are you sick?” asked Farrah.

  “Sure.” Couldn’t Mom leave her alone? Let her sit here by herself in silence. No words. Words were awful; words could hurt. She wanted to watch a nice, doomed, straight romance where everything turned out okay in the end because it was so the opposite of her life. She needed the opposite of her life right now. She needed a reminder that everything with Rachel had ended and Rachel had ended it and Sana had made it final.

  Why had she made it final?

  Why had Rachel changed the movie? Why had she reverted to the old Helen of Troy?

  Why had Sana even bothered?

  Maybe Sana ought to have softened her anger. Made it sound more palatable. Made it more pleasing. Less jarring of a sentiment. Girly cheerleader expresses actual displeasure that has nothing to do with her looks. Bring out the tar and feathers, everyone. Not that she was really a cheerleader anymore either. Only in title.

  Sana looked up. Farrah was still giving Sana a long hard stare. Sana went back to looking at the TV.

  Oh look, Diane Court, perfect genius, worried she’d done something wrong with Lloyd.

  Diane Court would never do anything wrong. She was practically perfect in every particular. Like a Mary Poppins built for young straight male masturbatory fantasies. Fine, her own occasional masturbatory fantasies as well, but she was definitively not who executives had thought about when casting Ione Skye in films.

  “Okay. You don’t look great. I’m going to call the office and say you’re sick.”

  “Great.” Lock the door on your way out and never come back.

  Sana looked up. Farrah was still standing there, worry coating her face.

  “Go.” Sana mustered a pathetic cough. “I’ll be fine by evening.”

  But when evening rolled around and Farrah returned home from a day of day shooting—she’d been off night shoots since that fateful evening she’d caught Sana coming back home at one in the morning—Sana was in the exact same position.

  “Have you moved?” asked Farrah.

  “Sure,” said Sana. “I’ve had to get up and pee.”

  “Did you eat?”

  Sana tilted her head. “Possibly.”

  She wasn’t hungry in any case. Who needed food when you had Lloyd Dobler, driving around, trying to find himself after the loss of Diane Court. Turned out, Diane Court could make a mistake. It was listening to her dirtbag dad. Sana really connected with Diane in that moment.

  “You wanna talk about it?”

  “Nope.” Sana got out her phone to double reinforce her point.

  That’s when she saw the email notification. Maybe it was Rachel, apologizing. Begging to have Sana come back. Sana wouldn’t respond to begging. She didn’t want to be begged back.

  Not one bit.

  But the email wasn’t from Rachel at all. It was an application status update from Princeton. Sana clicked on it, her fingers moving beyond her will at the moment. Now was not the time to check this kind of life-altering status update, but Sana couldn’t help herself. She was logging in before she’d realized she’d done it. Her password was more muscle memory than thought.

  Four days left.

  All she had to do was turn in a deposit. The money wasn’t even hers, as Rachel had so wonderfully reminded her.

  So why did Sana feel a cold pit in the depths of her stomach? Why did the hole that had formed the night before when Rachel told her to get out feel like it was growing larger and larger, threatening to swallow Sana whole?

  Sana burrowed deeper under the blankets. Just one more rewatch. She needed one more rewatch of Say Anything and she’d finally feel okay again.

  26

  Like Everybody Else

  Sana

  Sana hadn’t meant to start crying. She’d reached the end of But I’m a Cheerleader and Natasha Lyonne had started cheering and then Clea DuVall decided to stand up to her parents and run away from their horrible nonsense. It was so unreal, so untrue. Nobody stood up like that in real life. They were too scared, too afraid of what the world would think of them. Too busy conforming so they could climb their way to the top. Dadu wasn’t going to stand up for her. Mamani wouldn’t either. Mom had sold her out, then stood back up for her, but Sana was still upset from the selling out part. And Rachel certainly hadn’t stood up with her like that and Rachel was so fearless and bold and mouthy and didn’t take crap from anyone but even she was too afraid to be in love.

  In love.

  That’s what Sana was. She was in love and heartbroken and crying over an unrealistically happy ending in a movie. She felt like Elle Woods shouting “liar” at the soap opera in the middle of Legally Blonde. If only she had a bunch of chocolate to throw at the screen.

  Stupid girls with their stupid artistic vulnerability and their big eyes and crunchy curls and their witty thoughts and brilliant movies. Sana kept crying; it was easier than getting up. She let the movie roll to credits until it rolled into the main menu and Sana selected enter again on the play movie button.

  Why not? It was way simpler than finding another movie. This one spoke to her. This one knew her. It was a good friend and old friend and even if it was lying at the end, everything else it told was the truth.

  Sana checked her phone. It was afternoon again. She had several message notifications from Diesel. And four missed calls. At some point last night she must have fallen asleep. Maybe she’d fallen asleep this morning. She hadn’t seen her mom head out. She’d woken up to the sound of the Say Anything menu playing on a loop. She got up, peed, changed the movie over, then flopped back down on the couch. She was basically functioning fine at this point. Sure, she wasn’t sure when she had last showered and she had been in the same pajamas for over thirty-six hours. They were comfy pajamas. They had polar bears on them. Who would want to take off flannel polar bear pajamas?

  Not Sana, that was for sure.

  Sana flipped and scrolled through her phone, seeing if she had any messages anywhere. None. Not really. Rachel hadn’t suddenly changed her mind. That email still sat in her inbox.

  Update: Your Deposit to Princeton

  There it was. That bright and shining future she had planned so much for, sacrificed so much for. It was there and waiting and available to her. It was fading away from her. In four days it would be gone.

  Sana might have to get up and vomit.

  She had spent so much time wanting a thing she ought to, worried that she would never get it, nearly not getting it, that she hadn’t thought about what it would mean to have the thing itself. She was the hardworking granddaughter of an immigrant finally allowed into the sacred spaces that lead to big, bright shining opportunities. She was the daughter of a woman who had gotten pregnant accidentally and also too young in the eyes of the world. A woman who was meant to fail and was set up to fail from the very beginning. But Farrah hadn’t failed and Dadu hadn’t failed and neither had Sana.

  Why didn’t it feel better?

  Why didn’t she get the soothing balm of acceptance the way she had always thought she would, the way everyone else seemed to? Sana tossed her phone away. It landed with a moderate-enough-sounding thud that she didn’t need to worry about it potentially breaking or cracking.

  That’s when Farrah walked into the living room, concern in her voice. “Is everything okay?”

  “I thought you were at work.” Sana didn’t look up from the TV.

  “I heard a loud nois
e, is everything okay?” Farrah put her hand on her hips, assessing.

  “Yeah, it’s fine.”

  “What was the noise?”

  “Probably my phone.”

  Farrah stared at Sana. Sana didn’t look up, but she could feel her mother’s gaze through the back of her head. Sana heard steps, then she felt her phone being dropped back into her lap. Farrah had a grim look on her face, but she didn’t say anything. She got out her phone and began dialing. Sana couldn’t really hear either call she made. Probably for work. During the first one Farrah left a message about call times, and the second one was a tense, short conversation that Sana couldn’t make out at all.

  Farrah came back into the room. “It’s two o’clock now. I’m going into work. I need you to try and get into the shower while I’m gone. Can you do that for me?”

  “Sure,” said Sana.

  Farrah clearly didn’t believe her. She perched on the edge of the couch. “What’s wrong?”

  “I got into Princeton.” Sana could hear the monotone quality to her voice.

  “Honey. I know about that.” The concern in Farrah’s was also evident. “I don’t understand why you won’t put down the deposit. You’ve been working for that your whole life.”

  “I have. It’s great.” Sana paused the movie for a moment, looking over to get Farrah to believe her.

  “You sound like you’re going to a funeral.”

  “Mom. Just leave me alone.” Sana hit play again.

  “I have to go to work,” said Farrah regretfully. “But you won’t be alone for long, okay?”

  “Sure.” What did it matter. What did anything matter. She was going to sit here and watch TV until the end of days.

  Reluctantly, Farrah got up off the couch. She smoothed her clothes and went out the door. It was about five minutes later when keys jangled in the door and it opened again.

  “Mom, seriously, what did you forget?” said Sana from the couch. She looked up for a moment. “Oh, it’s you.”

  Massoud raised an eyebrow. “You been watching this all day?”

  “I’ve interspersed it with Pakeezah.” That was a lie.

  “You and that movie, I’ve never understood.”

  “Wouldn’t expect you to.” Sana sniffed.

  Massoud reached down and plucked the remote off of the blanket. He turned the TV off.

  “I was watching that!”

  “I’m sure you were,” he said.

  “You gonna say why you’re here?”

  “Your mom called me. Told me she was worried about you. Now I can see why.”

  “Oh great, now you’re worried about me. After all this time I’m supposed to believe you care so much.”

  “I know you hate to hear this, kid, but you’ve got me in you whether you want it or not.”

  “Don’t remind me.” Sana turned away from him and gave him a great view of her back.

  “Spit it out.”

  “I don’t spit. Gross.”

  “Come on, what’s up?”

  “I told Mom. Everything is great.” Sana was hoping that would be the end of it. That would be the final thing and he would say some platitude about hard work and ambition and then she would be free to watch the movie on her new favorite torture loop. But then she went and betrayed herself. “Still haven’t put down my deposit for Princeton. Still don’t know if I’ve gotten into my fellowship in India. I’m in a movie where I play a dumb, beautiful airhead. Oh, and I got dumped.”

  “Ah.” Massoud took a seat on the edge of the couch.

  Sana’s eye snapped toward him. “You know all about being dumped, then?”

  “You don’t want what you thought you did, do you?”

  Sana gasped. “I hate you.”

  Massoud raised an eyebrow and said nothing for a long moment. Sana wanted to fight. Wanted to fight him. But the look on Massoud’s face—like he understood. Like he knew what she was going through. Knew it exactly, knew it intimately.

  Sana gave in. She didn’t want to. But she needed to. “It was my dream. My dream for so long. For as long as I can remember it’s always been right in front of me. I don’t understand why I’m not happy.”

  “Well, being dumped is always shitty,” said Massoud, like he was the wisest of the wise men. “And dreams can change, Sana. Even if ambitions don’t.”

  Sana snorted.

  “Look. I gave up on me and your mom. I had to prove I had my life together, prove I could live up to the sacrifices my parents had made. The sacrifices your mother made.”

  Sana couldn’t look away from him now.

  “But I lost your mom. I lost you. And I don’t blame you for it. I couldn’t. I would be twice, maybe even three times as angry at me as you are, if my dad did what I had done. But I threw myself into the one thing I knew I could do, the one path I knew I could follow. I couldn’t ask myself any hard questions because I already felt like I was drowning in hard problems. I focused on what I knew I would look good to everyone else. I focused on being impressive.” Massoud paused. “But I lost you. I lost something that was so precious. I took it for granted that if I put it down, it would be right back there again when I was ready to pick it up. And it wasn’t.”

  “So.” Sana crossed her arms. She didn’t want to hear this, wasn’t willing to hear this.

  “So, I’m here now, kid. I’m showing up and I’m gonna keep showing up even if you never forgive me. I knew you hadn’t put down the deposit and I didn’t want you to be alone with that. But don’t follow in my footsteps on this one. You can listen to that voice inside you. You don’t have to keep going because you think you locked yourself into a decision so long ago and now you can’t change your mind.”

  “But I’m not like you. I still want to go to Princeton,” Sana said stubbornly. “I still want to be a surgeon.”

  “Okay. But is there anything else you want more?”

  And for once, Sana had been asked a question she honestly didn’t know the answer to.

  Rachel

  Rachel stared at the loop she was editing. She wasn’t sure what she was seeing. It went over and over again. Sana, saying her line. It just sounded like garbage at this point. Could have been Latvian or Afrikaans. Didn’t matter. Sana’s sorrow was evident on her face. It was in her expression, in her eyes, in the slant of her mouth.

  Just like Sana’s face when she’d seen the movie. When Rachel had dumped her.

  Was it dumping if you were never going out in the first place?

  During filming, Rachel thought Helen of Troy was an act. Sana, the excellent actress. But it looked the same as Sana’s punched-in-the-gut face. Like Sana was a girl who knew bone-deep sadness and wasn’t just acting. She was channeling it out. Telling the world in art what she couldn’t tell anyone with words.

  What was she hiding from?

  The easy answer, the obvious answer, was her sexuality. But it wasn’t that. Rachel knew Sana well enough. It wasn’t anything so simple. Anything so neat and clean that belonged in a movie designed to make straight people cry on behalf of a gay girl. It was beyond any one thing. Sana was hiding because she was a girl. Because she was ambitious. Because there was power and fire inside of her and it only came out through the cracks.

  Cracks that Rachel had decided to seal up rather than see.

  Note to self: Break up with lead actor after editing a film rather than before.

  Death by Sana’s perfect face. That’s when Rachel’s phone had the decency to ring. Hopefully it was Papa, with a story about his latest client.

  If only. She didn’t recognize the number.

  Rachel turned her phone over, clicked the button to make the ringing stop, without actually declining the call. She was going to get back to editing. She was going to figure out how to sculpt this scene—because it was the last one left—without thinking about Sana too much, even though all of the shots revolved around Sana in one way or another. Every shot reminding Rachel of the direction she’d decided to go with her film.r />
  There was so much drama, all across Sana’s face. She’d taken a side character and made her tragic, full of depth. She wasn’t only the first nonwhite Helen of Troy that Rachel had seen. She was the first empathetic one.

  And Rachel had destroyed it. Sacrificed something good, something profound on the altar of getting ahead in her career.

  Rachel’s phone dinged. A message. No, a voice message. Leave it to an old person to leave a message on her answering machine.

  Rachel ignored it.

  She wouldn’t think about the message. She wouldn’t think about Sana and her emotional depths. This was a two-dimensional space that Sana had been confined to. It was a flat square of screen. Rachel could sculpt and edit it into the shape she wanted. Rachel was in charge here. She was the god of this world. She wasn’t going to be distracted.

  She checked her phone again. The message wouldn’t properly transcribe. It was every other word, and some of them didn’t quite make sense. Set was a word. So was parking structure and rhinoceros. The rhinoceros was clearly a mistranslation. Also, there was a hey, is Sarah but Rachel didn’t know a Sarah who would currently be calling her. Sarah, in the message transcription, was a girl named Tina’s mom. Rachel was filling in the blanks, trying to chart a course through the language, figure out without listening what probably-not-Sarah had been trying to say.

  Dammit.

  Might as well listen to the message, having wasted so much time trying to decipher the inaccurate transliteration.

  Hey. This is Farrah, Sana’s mom. I’ve been working with Ida Begum and I thought you’d be interested in seeing some shoots. Today would be a good day to go onto set. Only four hours of shoots. Call time is four. Don’t park on the studio’s parking structure; go to the lot on the west end, I can validate the parking there. We’re not doing too much green screen today, just a lot of practical shots and some stunts, which I thought you might enjoy watching the process for. I assume you haven’t gotten too much experience with practical stunts. See you at four. Call if you have an issues parking.

  A pit welled up in Rachel’s stomach. She did her best to ignore it. She had to finish editing. Had to get this project over the line. But her eyes became unfocused, fuzzy, and she couldn’t see what she was looking at anymore. Not her project, not Sana’s face. Not even the phone in her hand.