by Karen Rivers
“I know, Dad,” she said.
She thought about going upstairs and smearing the note with, say, rose geranium, which was for courage. That’s what Samara’s list said. The list was printed out and laminated and glued to the tiles in the shower. It would be there forever, even if they stopped believing that lemongrass could clear your mind, even after she went to college and her mom moved to Paris, which had always been her dream before she got too scared to even go as far as, say, Manhattan.
Kit made herself stand up. She opened the salon door, which was super heavy. She felt like she could barely keep hold of it.
She called inside, “Mom? I’m going to the shelter.” She tried to make her voice sound as normal as possible.
“Okay, honey,” kit’s mom said, like nothing was wrong. Her voice sounded squashed but that’s because there were hairpins between her lips.
“Mom?”
Kit’s mom met kit’s eyes in the mirror and made a face, which kit knew meant, “I can’t talk now because there are pins in my mouth and/or because this is a very important client.” The client was a woman who had very long, shiny silver hair.
“If you’re skating, be careful crossing the road!” her mom said, taking the pins out of her mouth. “Go slow!” She leaned toward her client and said, “I worry about her when she roller skates, but at least she can outskate the bad guys!”
Kit immediately pictured herself skating, fast, away from the guy with a Batman mask. “Mom,” she said, weakly.
The lady winked.
“Oh Cyn,” said Samara. “Don’t freak her out! It’s only a few blocks.”
Samara swooped in for a hug. Kit wanted to stay in the hug forever, breathing in whatever oils Samara was using to ward off bad luck today, but Samara released her, holding her at arm’s length. “You’re looking taller!”
“Thanks,” said kit. “Since this morning?”
“You have to grow sometime!” Samara said. “Maybe you had a growth spurt at noon!”
“Maybe.” Kit smiled. “Probably.”
“I have a new one for you,” said Samara. “Ready?”
“Ready,” said kit.
“What did the math book say to the calculator?”
“Ummmmm, I don’t know.” Kit looked at the door.
“I have a lot of problems!” Samara grinned.
“Me too,” said kit.
“That’s the answer to the riddle!”
Kit mustered up a laugh. “I get it. That’s a good one. I have a lot of problems,” she repeated. She did have a lot of problems.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m good,” kit lied. “I’m fine. Just, you know, growing. Growing is tiring.”
“You’re almost a teenager. A teenager!” said Samara.
Kit rolled her eyes and Samara went back to rinsing the customer who was at the sinks, and her mom kept snipping. “I saw that eye roll, that’s a teenager thing!” she said.
The silver-haired lady met kit’s eye and she gave a small nod. The nod said, “I see you.”
At least, that’s how it felt.
Kit put on her helmet and skated into the bathroom. There was a tiny bottle of clove oil, labeled Bravery, beside the sink. She put a tiny dab of it on the inside of her wrist. It completely obliterated the smell of Truth. She looked in the mirror. Her glasses looked like gray circles over her face. Like a mask.
Almost.
Kit left the salon, sidestepping down the front steps.
She glided around a group of women pushing strollers. She dodged an elderly man dragging a wagon full of groceries. She wove in between two girls who were taking a selfie. “Photobomb,” she said.
Chandra, who was seventeen and worked officially at the shelter, was literally the least likely person kit knew who might get some of what was happening, who might have an answer, or even know what the question was. But she was also the only person kit had left to tell.
Clem
It was the first time Clem had gone with Jorge to one of Abu’s shows since The Most Talented Family in America, and she felt funny about it. Jorge, of course, had never stopped going. He always wanted to help and Abu always asked for help even though they weren’t really helpful. Jorge was so Jorge sometimes that she wanted to scream.
Specifically, she wanted to scream, “STOP BEING SO HELPFUL!”
An off-Broadway musical wasn’t the same thing as a TV talent show, but it also was the same thing. It was a spectacle. There were the same lights and the same hustle and bustle and the same dusty smell that seemed to always hang around stages (even when they were clean) and the same rows and rows of empty seats in the audience waiting to be filled.
This particular show was taking place at a small theater off-off-off-Broadway. It was not Abu’s usual kind of job, which should have made it no big deal, but Clem was nervous, all the same. “It’s not like you’re in the show!” she told herself. “Keep it together!”
Keep It Together was a kit-thing, so right away, she felt bad all over again about kit. She dug her fingernails into her arm because for some reason, the pinch of them made her feel better.
“This show is a labor of love for me!” Abu said. “Which means I’m working for almost nothing, but I love this crazy, magnificent show. Sometimes you have to do things just for fun and I’m having a blast!” He high-fived the air.
His exuberance made Clem ache for the person she used to be and wasn’t anymore.
Had she ever been that happy about anything? Ever?
“Do you love it?” asked Abu. He held his arms out, like he was going to embrace the entire stage.
“It looks good,” said Clem. “I like it.”
“It’s amazing, Abu!” Jorge said. “It’s the best!” He whooped and then ran across the stage, jumped off, and hopped over the rows of seats until he was in the middle of where the audience would be. “IT’S SO GREAT FROM HERE, TOO!” he yelled. He did two thumbs up, which seemed like one too many, to Clem. She scowled. Too much unbridled enthusiasm made her prickly.
“Settle down,” she mumbled, but not loudly enough for anyone else to hear.
Sometimes, like now, it felt as though it was her job to keep everyone from getting too wildly enthusiastic, too crazily out of control and her job was exhausting. Unbearable, really.
Clem wandered over to the side of the stage, crouched in the wings and looked back at the set. It was definitely different. Everything was built to look as though it were being viewed through a twisty, distorted lens. Buildings and trees and huge fire hydrants painted crazy colors that glowed under black lights all hung at different angles, moving slightly like they were in a breeze. The movement made her eyes feel like they couldn’t focus, which made her a bit queasy. And, anyway, if she were to be critical, she’d say that the skyline was too tall and too bendy. The up-close buildings had windows with lumpy rivulets running down them that looked like melting wax. There were feathers and flowers and color everywhere, so much color.
Too much color.
Abu crouched down next to her. “How does it look from here?” he said, squinting. “Good, huh?”
“It’s making my eyes cross,” Clem said, honestly. “It’s great, it’s just a lot,” she added.
“It’s sort of like if a paint store threw up,” said Abu. “But in a good way, right?”
“It’s so awesome!” said Jorge, running back up onto the stage. “I think you blew my mind. Where is my mind?” He felt around, like he was blindly looking for it.
“You are so weird,” said Clem, standing up. Crouching like that was hurting her hip. Abu stood up, too, and Jorge and Abu laughed, so she laughed, too, so she wouldn’t be left out.
The show was called Dogs, which was why Abu knew the twins would want to come. It was “an homage” to Cats, he explained, except it was also a spoof. A spoof was a joke.
&n
bsp; Clem wasn’t clear how something could honor something else while at the same time making fun of it.
Clem and Jorge were in charge of going next door to pick up a big order of food for the cast and crew, and then after that, they were going to “make themselves scarce” and then, finally, they’d get to watch the show from the wings. Clem had seen so many shows from the side, she had lost count, but only one show from the audience. That show was Hamilton. It was the best show she had ever seen in her life but Abu hadn’t worked on that one, so they’d had to get regular tickets, which they got to celebrate being chosen to perform on TMTFIA. It felt like a lifetime ago, but it was also the last time Clem could remember being even close to one hundred percent happy.
Now she knew that they’d been dumb to be so happy about being chosen for the show. Maybe being happy about anything is dumb. Anything could go wrong, she thought, at any time.
She kicked the leg of a folding chair and it tipped over.
“Hey!” said Jorge. “What did you do that for?” He picked the chair up.
“I didn’t. It fell.”
“You did so, I saw you.”
“You don’t know everything that you think you know.” The dark, buzzing feeling was swarming all over her again, like black flies. She wanted to yell, “HELP!” but she also wanted to cry. She wanted Jorge to notice but she also wanted him to go away. “Go away,” she said, finally.
“Fine, weirdo.”
“Takes one to know one,” she said back, which was stupid because what she’d meant was, “I’m not okay. Can you help me?”
But she didn’t say that.
Kit had always said that the three of them made a constellation, but now they were all three just completely separate stars, disconnected, but banging into each other every once in a while, making black holes in the universe that made everything good disappear.
The theater hummed with the usual last-minute preparations.
The actors were warming up, the set was being adjusted, hammers were banging in nails, and the lights were going on and off. The engineer was testing the sound. Clem had to admit that it was a teeny bit less organized than the big Broadway shows. Those were so polished, there would never be any of this kind of scrambling. Although the scrambling did make it pretty exciting. There was a sense of urgency that she kind of liked.
Clem was wearing a lot of makeup. Under the lights, it felt kind of like her face was melting. While Abu climbed a ladder to adjust a hanging moon, she went backstage. She sat down at one of the empty makeup mirrors and inspected her face. The actors didn’t seem to notice her. Their chatter rose and fell around her. By the light of the mirrors, her makeup looked really bad, like a kid had done it. “Embarrassing,” she said, and stuck out her tongue at herself, even though she was a kid.
She’d followed a YouTube tutorial and she’d thought she looked really pretty when she first finished it. But looking pretty was such a mismatch with how she felt, so she’d added more and more and more black eyeliner until her face matched her insides, and then she’d just looked messy, like she’d colored outside the lines by mistake. She’d put the eyeliner in her pocket, just in case some smudged off. She took it out now and looked at it.
The eyeliner had come from One Buck Chuck. The rule was that they could take things from the store, they just had to write it in the book. She’d never really wanted anything before, but last week the eyeliner called her name.
Before Abu picked them up for Dogs, she could see her mom pretending not to notice what she had done to her face.
She could also see that Jorge and her dad genuinely didn’t notice. It made her want to add more and more and more black until maybe she was completely obscured by eyeliner, like a sketch of herself that had been angrily scribbled out.
“Notice me!” she wanted to scream, at the same time as she wanted to shout, “Leave me alone!”
Abu had raised his eyebrows when he had seen her and said, “You’ve got your stage makeup on!” and she had finally felt seen, just for a second.
She uncapped the eyeliner and drew a tear on her cheek. It was really small. From a distance, it probably would just look like a freckle. She could pretty much guarantee that no one would see it for what it really was.
Clem walked out onto the stage. Her shoes squeaked a little on the wood, making her think of gym floors and Mr. Banks and his weird smells and barked orders. There was one other woman on the set adjusting some cables, but otherwise, it was the quietest place in the whole theater. Everyone else obviously had somewhere to be, some important something must have been happening elsewhere. The stage seemed to be holding itself as still as the unrippled surface of a pool, waiting for a diver to break through.
Clem took a deep breath and sat down at center stage, criss-cross applesauce. She made her spine as straight as she could and then she closed her eyes against all the colors and too-bright lights. The stage was as smooth as the tight skin of a drum, just like the stage at TMTFIA. She leaned forward until her forehead touched it and she bonked it gently.
She remembered.
She remembered how solid the TMTFIA stage was, how it didn’t give even a little. She remembered how it felt like her bones crumpled under her skin, like the metal body of a car collapsing against a brick wall.
“Member,” she said and frowned. She hadn’t remembered to tell kit about that: Member. Remember. Demember.
Oh, there was so much she wanted to demember, like how that landing was a sound that was a feeling that was a sound, how hitting the stage had felt like it was coming from the inside of her, not the outside. How it had felt like her lungs were overblown balloons that had burst.
Why had she patted that dog?
She should have run when it came toward her. She should have let Jorge push it away. She knew better than to touch it.
She was so stupid.
“There’s a kid on the stage!” someone called out from the darkness of the orchestra pit, and Clem felt insulted. Then Abu yelled back from somewhere behind Clem, “It’s okay, she’s mine!”
Clem knew she should get up and go help Jorge with the food, but she didn’t. She pressed her hands flat against the stage. It must have looked like she was doing some form of praying, leaning forward like that, palms outstretched. Maybe I should pray, she thought.
Please, she tried.
But she wasn’t sure what else to say. She didn’t really know how to pray.
Please.
She held her breath. She could feel her heartbeat getting louder and louder and louder until it was drumming in her ears.
She felt like she was floating.
Or maybe like she should be able to stretch out her wings and fly.
She took a deep breath in and exhaled. Then she sat up. A bank of spotlights lit up, startling her for a second. It flashed through a series of blinding colors, and then shut off again.
A man came out from the wings and handed her a microphone. “If you’re going to sit out here, you can help us test the sound, please. Something isn’t connecting right with those back speakers. Opening night! Wouldn’t you know it?”
“Yeah, okay. Fine,” she said, trying to sound like she didn’t care. She imagined how she looked to him with her makeup and her stomping boots, sitting there.
He grinned.
“You a theater kid?” He kept smiling at her, like she wasn’t a terrifying black hole of a person who caused bad things to happen. “You’ve got the look down pat.”
“Thanks,” she said.
Clem stood up. The microphone felt heavy. She put it in one hand and then back into the other. She squinted at the empty seats in the audience. She imagined kit sitting there. “Be a turtle!” she’d be saying.
“Too turtle-y,” she told kit, in her head.
“Be a non-turtle-y turtle!” kit would have said.
S
o predictable, she thought at the same time as she thought, I miss kit.
She didn’t deserve kit. She was too mean. “Naked mole rat,” she whispered. Even saying it made her stomach hurt.
There was a rush of static from the speaker. Clem straightened up and pushed her hair behind her ears.
“What are you doing?” Jorge wandered over. “Why are you holding that?”
“Shhh,” said Clem, more bravely than she felt and more loudly than she meant to. “Go away. I’m testing.”
Jorge raised his eyebrows. “Okaaaay,” he said. “But we have to go pick up the food.” He waved the list at her. She saw the words “NO DRESSING” written in all-caps.
“I’m busy. This is, like, important.” She flicked the microphone on and feedback screeched out of every corner of the place.
Jorge covered his ears. “Ouch, hey.” His voice echoed around the stage.
“Not yet! Not yet!” the man yelled. “Turn it off, please!”
She turned it off. The spotlights flicked on for a second, then went to black light, which made Jorge’s white shirt glow, then went off, too. Then the center lights pointed toward her and shone so brightly, she couldn’t see anything at all.
The empty chairs disappeared.
Imaginary kit disappeared.
Jorge disappeared.
Clem was totally alone. She stretched out her arms.
“I’m going, then, I guess,” Jorge said. “By myself. Or maybe I’ll see if Abu can help me. It’s a lot of stuff to carry.”
Clem didn’t answer. Her nose was itchy.
“Okay,” a disembodied voice boomed. “Try saying testing testing testing.”
Clem turned the microphone back on. “Testing testing testing,” she repeated. Her voice was huge. It bounced around the empty space like thunder.
“Hang on,” said the voice.
Three people dressed as dogs stepped out of the wings. They were wearing bodysuits that were black and brown and white, painted to look like fur, but not fluffy. Their makeup was super-detailed, with whiskers and glowing eyes, making their faces creepily and wonderfully doglike. They were very involved in an elaborate fist-bump routine, standing in a semicircle, eyes closed.