The Me You See

by Stevens, Shay Ray

  I felt him at my center, cutting through the mess of everything that had tangled us together. His face was completely emotionless and hard as he deflected any blame that was his to take. He plucked his hat from where he’d thrown it and pulled it down over his ears. He adjusted his coat, pushing the collar up around his neck.

  “You were not supposed to get attached. This is theater, Stefia.”

  He turned away from me to walk up the aisle.

  “Niles, you’re wrong,” I called to him.

  “About what?” He didn’t even turn around.

  “This isn’t theater,” I said. “This is real life.”

  **

  That night, I didn’t go home. I drove to the lot at Pine Tree Park and crunched my way through the snow to sit on a swing. Phone in hand, I started and erased eight texts to Elliot because he was the only person who came to mind when I realized I needed real help. But I didn’t know how to ask for help from someone I’d spent the last four years pushing away. I didn’t know if I even had the right to ask. After our blow-up in the theater parking lot in the fall, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d never talk to me again.

  Could use a friend. Know where I could find one?

  I pressed send.

  The sky was clear and the stars dotted the blackness I stared up at. They shone like minuscule spotlights onto the stage of the world, illuminating our performances, our dramas and tragedies and comedies.

  Our mistakes.

  Our failures.

  With the swing cradling the backs of my thighs, I pumped my legs. The icy cold metal of the chains squeaked into the silence of early morning as I reached higher and higher with every forward thrust of my feet. If I could grab those stars, if I could pull them down and keep them in my pocket, I would have my own spotlight for whenever I needed it.

  For whenever I decided to write the script.

  My phone buzzed in my coat signaling a text message, and I stopped pumping, dragging my boots through the snow under the swing to stop. My head tingled with nervous anticipation as I fumbled for my phone to check what Elliot had written back.

  Message unable to send.

  I stared in disbelief at my phone, its low battery light flashing, and realized my fingers were too cold and numb to even press the button to shut it down. As I mindlessly shoved the phone back in my pocket, one thought passed through my mind: this is what it’s like to feel completely alone.

  The irony made me want to puke. To always feel watched but abandoned. To have everyone’s eyes on you but feel as though there is no one to talk to. To sense that you’re being followed, hounded, celebrated, and realize you’re actually isolated.

  This was the sardonic twist—that you could be completely solitary and not even know it.

  The reality was that it was just me, myself, and I.

  Well, and a baby.

  And something told me it was time to write the script.

  **

  I took center stage. I knew the eyes of every man in the audience were soaking up the sight of my long legs in red stilettos, but I paid no attention. I was simply soaking up the warmth of the spotlight. It was an odd sort of logic to be comfortable in a bright light; you can’t hide anything when it shines on you. But I wanted to be in that light forever. I wanted the hot, blinding magic to sizzle on my skin, like stars blazing from inside my pocket.

  The spotlight turns you into a brilliant show of fireworks that begs others to watch. Look at who I am, you want to scream. I can’t hide. I’m right here.

  Dust floated in the spotlight beam, illuminating a pathway of glitter that led beyond where I could see. Was that like the bright light they always spoke of in near-death experiences?

  Look at me.

  Would I see a bright light?

  People paid money to watch me on stage but they had always watched me, everywhere. They’d watched from the coffee counter or their lockers or from the street or spying in windows like they had bought a ticket to watch my life unfold, busting into corners they didn’t belong in. Boundaries were drawn, erased, and scribbled over again, like a new set built for every performance I did.

  Once you hit the stage, you never left it, even if you walked right off the edge.

  Watching a show isn’t the same. Once you’ve been on stage, you can’t just warm a chair in the audience. That’s a betrayal to your soul.

  I get that now, Mother.

  **

  Four scenes later, we all tossed lines back and forth and I was glad to be in a more comfortable costume. My bag, slung across my body from one shoulder and resting on the opposite hip, was weighty. The handgun I’d snuck from Niles’ collection and slipped inside was heavy but strikingly similar to the prop gun I was supposed to use at the end of the first act.

  I was writing the script.

  And since I was writing the script, I got to decide what people said. And the most important thing that I wanted everyone to say was that this was not a love story gone sour.

  Repeat after me.

  Read the lines.

  This was not a love story gone sour. The way this all played out had nothing to do with Niles. Nothing at all. You see, this was—always was—about my mother. This was about not becoming her.

  The thing is, as I had walked away from Niles’ house that night with five hundred dollars shoved in the pocket of my jeans, I pondered my two options. The first was to have an abortion. I could take the money and drive to some city where they didn’t know who I was. I could pay them to rid myself of the baggage, because there’s no place for that in the theater.

  Although Niles was the one who had said that, it was my mother who had proven it to me. There’s no place for baggage in the theater.

  Right, Mother? Leaving a kid in order to be on stage—that’s what we need to do.

  But abandoning the baby would make me just like my mother. And I would not be my mother.

  So the other option was to have the baby, deal with the baggage, and live life without the theater. I thought on that one for a long time. I swirled it around in my head, feeling it sink like a brick to the center of who I was. And you know what I realized?

  Genes run deep.

  I know why my mom had to leave. I now knew what she meant in her letter under the tree that said If ever you find something that makes you feel alive, chase after it and never give up. Because now I know what it’s like to look at the stage and feel like your life is slipping past if you’re not on it. I know the addiction. I know the magnetism.

  Which also made me like my mother.

  And then, creeping up my throat like bile I couldn’t swallow fast enough, came a third option. I didn’t want to know life without the theater. I couldn’t. But I wasn’t going to have an abortion.

  The third option—the only fair one—was to take us both out of the picture.

  This time, I was writing the script.

  **

  My skin glistened with sweat. The gun in my hand was heavier, colder than the prop gun.

  The first two shots were just for noise. The deafening pop and ring were infinitely different than the hollow short rap of the prop gun. Then the screaming began, rooting through my head like a worm burrowing into my ear. Shouts of individual names suffused with it’s a real gun and chaos rippled through the audience like waves of nausea.

  Carly was the first on stage to realize the gun was real. She turned to run and I shot, catching her through the ear. She spun and fell in a heap, like someone had dropped a giant sack of birdseed. She inhaled only twice more.

  Erick just stood there, so full of fear he’d lost color in his face. I shot him. Then I shot Tony.

  In rehearsal I’d watched them lay on the stage, trying to keep as still as possible without getting the giggles. But now they were motionless, growing pools of blood soaking through their costumes. I was horrified and mesmerized at the same time. Brownish, chocolately red puddles bloated from beneath their bodies; a color completely unlike the crayon a chil
d grabs for bloodied fangs of a coloring book vampire.

  If they’d followed the script I had in my head, Erick would have run at me. Tony would have got to me quicker. Someone would have stopped me.

  Did I have to spell it out for everyone? Did I have to connect the dots for them?

  I can’t hide.

  I’m right here.

  Come stop me.

  Don’t you see? There is no pedestal here. It’s just me. And I fucked up.

  Come stop me.

  Bobby had already been hit by the same bullet that took Tony, but the only thing that had been damaged was his arm. He slinked towards me, weak from the sight of the blood leaking down his arm.

  “Stop,” he pleaded with me. “You don’t mean to do this. You don’t want to…”

  He was wrong. I had a part to play. I’d written a script in my head.

  I pulled the trigger without flinching.

  So much blood. Spatters joined with splotches, swelling into pools underneath the four people whose bodies were in various states of shut down. Amazement washed over me as I realized there was blood everywhere—like I had given birth, not taken life.

  I almost missed it, but a glint of light revealed shiny white shoes hiding just off of stage right. Aubrey had hidden inside where the open curtain collected itself on the side of the stage. She wasn’t stopping me. She was only trying to save herself. I shot into the curtain three times.

  If my math was correct and I hadn’t lost count, I needed to reload. I pulled the clip from the gun, tossed it aside, and slammed my hand into my bag for another one. But my hand got tangled inside, so I glanced down.

  I heard three shots in quick succession before I felt them rip through my skin. The wind knocked out of me, I dropped my gun and fell sprawled out on stage. Instantly I was gurgling. Spitting. Gagging on blood.

  I couldn’t swallow.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  But for that millisecond before my heart stopped, in that minuscule fraction of a moment before I died, I smiled.

  Because someone had finally read my script.

  You see, in the end we are only the stories that people tell about us.

  So please tell the story about a girl who found herself in theater and pegged it to be her reason for living.

  And tell the story about the same girl who found herself pregnant and refused to become her mom.

  Please tell the story about a girl wouldn’t leave her baby and instead chose to leave with her baby.

  Because there is a difference.

  There’s always a difference between who we are and what they see.

  The Me You See is the third novel by Shay Ray Stevens.

  You can find out more about Shay Ray, her books,

  and the next project she has up her sleeve

  by visiting her website,

  shayraystevens.com.

  You can also connect with Shay Ray

  via Twitter (@shayraystevens)

  Facebook (facebook.com/shayraystevens)

  or Pinterest (pinterest.com/shayraystevens).

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