The Art of Escaping

by Erin Callahan

Stella and I fell silent as Will returned from the bathroom and slid into the seat next to me. “Were you guys gabbing about me?” he asked.

  Stella took a sip of her water to avoid answering, and Frankie’s olive skin flushed beet red.

  Will fixed his eyes on Frankie. “Out with it, kid. Were they talking about me?”

  Frankie’s lips quivered for just a moment. “Do I have to answer? This just got really awkward. Even more awkward than the car ride over here.”

  Stella snorted and buried her face in her napkin. Will chuckled, and I tried to hold it together but couldn’t.

  Frankie crossed his arms. “I know awkward comedy is popular these days, but personally, I don’t find it all that funny.”

  We couldn’t contain ourselves as the waiter set our plates in front of us. The poor guy just shook his head as he walked away.

  Will turned to Stella as he unwrapped his chopsticks. “In all seriousness, I hope you don’t think I’m trying to replace you or encroach on your territory or anything like that. Mattie’s the bee’s knees, but you guys have history I can’t possibly compete with.”

  Stella nodded. “Noted. Thank you, Will.”

  Frankie shot me a knowing glance. “It’s like when a new Star Trek series starts. Just because the new captain has a mind-blowingly awesome back story doesn’t mean he or she tops Kirk or Picard.”

  “I told you,” Stella said.

  “Goddammit,” I said as I shook my head.

  That increasingly familiar feeling, like distilled lightning, pulsed through my limbs. For a fleeting moment, I had hope that my night might actually work out as planned.

  ***

  I pulled Stella through a crowd of smokers standing on the sidewalk outside the bar above Salone Postale. Frankie and Will followed us through the bar and down the staircase to the cough-syrup-colored door.

  “Rule number one,” I reminded Stella and Frankie before I opened the door.

  “How did you find this place?” Stella whispered over the clink-and-chatter of bar noise.

  “Naveen from Bollywood Palace told me about it.”

  She smirked. “I’m impressed, Ginge. You’ve definitely branched out over the summer. Though I don’t know why you’d need to keep this place a secret.”

  It’s not too late to back out. I swallowed a lump in my throat and pulled a chair out for Stella at a reserved table by the stage.

  “Reserved seats,” Stella squealed when she picked up her place card. “This is so cool.”

  “I feel so privileged,” Frankie said. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.

  The hecklers greeted me with a cheery chorus of heys. One of them winked toward Stella. “Who’s your friend?”

  “She’s underage, you creep.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of her,” he shot back.

  The fiery-haired, tattooed bartender popped over to our table with two glasses on a tray. “Midori Sours, on the house,” she said as the placed them in front of Stella and Frankie.

  “Oh, we don’t really drink.” Stella waved the glass away.

  “It tastes like candy. You’ll like it,” the bartender said before trotting back to the bar.

  “Um . . . okay.” Stella pouted as she gingerly picked up her drink like it might explode in her face.

  Frankie immediately began sucking down his Midori Sour. “Mmm. Melon-y.”

  I pointed at him. “Rule number three.”

  “You guys aren’t sitting with us?” Stella asked.

  “Will and I are needed backstage. I promise that will make more sense soon.”

  She pulled her lips into the corner of her mouth. “I haven’t seen you in two months. I thought we were going to actually hang out tonight.”

  “We will, we will. I promise. Will and I have to go take care of something first, then we’re all yours for the rest of the night. Okay?”

  “I guess,” she sighed.

  “Frankie, keep her entertained while we’re gone.”

  He nodded as he slurped down the last of his drink.

  Will and I ducked backstage and found Miyu and Monty waiting for us.

  “Finally,” Miyu barked. “I thought Monty was going to have to tell the crowd you choked to death on a cheeseburger.”

  “It’s the only way I could ensure they didn’t riot in the event you were a no-show,” he explained. “Pleasure to see you again, Will.”

  “You too, Monty. What’s the skinny, Miyu?”

  “I had to prepare the tank by myself. And I’m constipated. Thanks for asking, Jehovah.”

  “Are you ready to go?” Monty asked.

  I was already stripping down to my swimsuit and slipping into my robe. “Yes,” I said with a nod. Deep breaths.

  Miyu and Will rolled the koi-stocked aquarium onto the stage. I could hear the wheels clacking against the floorboards as I swept my hair into a low ponytail and shoved a few bobby pins into place. The crowd hushed as the stage lights came up and Monty emerged from behind the closed curtain.

  “Good evening, ladies, gents, denizens of the night.”

  “Tell the barmaid to get these kids some more booze,” one of the hecklers shouted. I could only assume he was talking about Stella and Frankie.

  “You’re not going to win any points by referring to her as a barmaid, darling,” Monty cooed. “We have a splendiferous, phantasmic, far-out evening planned for you, sinners and saints. Guaranteed to amaze. And we’re going to start things off right.”

  “With plate-spinning!” one of the hecklers shouted.

  “We can do better than that,” Monty replied. “First up, we have the young orphan you’ve all come to know and love.”

  The crowd whooped, sending a surge of confidence through my guts and bringing a smile to my face.

  “The girl who forces you to stare into the face of death and love it,” Monty bellowed. “Salone Postale’s poster girl for the ages . . . the incomparable Ginger!”

  Will linked arms with me as the curtain opened. “Go get ’em, doll,” he whispered.

  Monty handed me the mic. I gazed out into the crowd for a moment before saying, “Hello.” The timbre of my own voice echoed in my ears. It sounded almost disembodied, like my mind couldn’t believe that word, spoken to a room filled mostly with strangers, had come from me.

  “She speaks!” one of the hecklers shouted.

  “It’s shocking, I know,” I said with a grin. “I wanted to take a moment to let you all know that The Hummingbird has retired. This tall drink of water, known as Will With Two Ls, will be my assistant for the evening.”

  Will waved to the crowd, and one of the hecklers screamed, “L is my favorite letter!”

  He picked up the rusty antique handcuffs and showed them off to the crowd. “Tonight, I’m going to escape from these,” I said. “But first, I need a volunteer.”

  The hecklers chanted a chorus of, “Pick me! Pick me!”

  I pointed to one of them, a thirty-something wearing skinny jeans and glasses, and he hopped onto the stage.

  “Not that I think anyone in the crowd would dare question my legitimacy, but I want you all to know I’m the real deal. Will With Two Ls, if you would be so kind as to cuff our volunteer.” The crowd cackled, whooped and whistled as Will clamped the handcuffs on the heckler, swaddling his pale wrists in rusty iron. “Now, sir, give us your honest impression of this evening’s restraints.”

  The bespeckled heckler made a show of struggling, but it didn’t take long until he was sweating with genuine anxiety under the stage lights. I held the mic to his lips. “Yeah, these cuffs are serious business.”

  The crowd cheered. “There you have it, ladies and gents,” I said. “Serious business.”

  Once Will had freed the heckler with an antique skeleton key, I returned the mic to Monty. �
��You’d make a decent MC,” he whispered. “Should I be worried?”

  I shook my head. “You’ve got your gig, I’ve got mine.” While Will climbed the ladder to the platform at the top of the aquarium, I pulled an Annette Hanshaw record from its sleeve and placed it lovingly on the gramophone. The audience clapped in a rare expression of reverence when “My Inspiration Is You” came crackling out of the brass horn.

  I joined Will on the platform, where he placed the handcuffs on my wrists and shackled my ankles with an identical pair. I’d been avoiding direct eye contact with Stella, but I glanced over just before Will blindfolded me with a swatch of black silk. Her eyes blinked at me ,and her jaw hung open. Frankie looked no worse for the wear as he downed his second Midori Sour.

  Will tapped me on the shoulder, giving me the a-okay to drop into the tank. The cool water shocked my skin, sending my heartbeat into overdrive. I’d run through this routine so many times, I was counting on my muscle memory to take charge without a second’s hesitation. But it didn’t happen. The water pulled the loosely tied blindfold off my face, leaving me with a perfect view of the crowd and turning my fingers into trembling amnesiacs.

  Stella and I stared at each other. She’d covered her gaping mouth with her pale hands and the sight of her shocked eyes filled me with dread. My heart pounded in my chest, and I almost inhaled a mouthful of koi-flavored water. With the seconds ticking away, I hardly had time for a moment of clarity, but it became abundantly apparent that practice and performance were entirely different beasts, especially with my best friend in the crowd. In my panicked mind, I heard that kernel of paralyzing fear chime in. What if they let your secret slip? How can you trust Frankie with this? You don’t even know him!

  I shut my eyes to block out the crowd and pictured Ginger the intrepid orphan, manacled with the antique handcuffs and chained to the floor in the cabin of a rapidly sinking ship. Seawater filled with happily flapping koi poured in through the portholes, soaking her tattered Victorian clothing and splashing against her face.

  The octopus in the top hat floated by, his monocle glinting in the cabin’s dim lantern light. Do you plan to die today, child?

  Fuck no.

  I clawed my way through the paralysis and yanked a bobby pin from my hair.

  As my burning lungs screamed for air, my oxygen-starved brain realized my fear had never truly been rooted in the possibility that Stella and Frankie would spill my secret. I mean, Frankie didn’t even have any friends. Who would he tell? The truth was I didn’t know if I could stomach my best friend seeing me at that tricky point where all my strengths and vulnerabilities converged like the contents of a potent emotional reactor. For those two minutes under water, I condensed every fiber of my being, exposing the strangeness at my core. What if the person who was supposed to know me better than anyone didn’t like what she saw? I wondered if my partner in mutually assured destruction felt the same kind of icy-hot panic course through his veins when he thought about telling Betsy Appleton the truth.

  My pruned fingers shook as I picked at lock number one. In practice, I’d adjusted to picking locks while restricted by the handcuffs. But even in the near-weightlessness of the water, the cuffs seemed so heavy. The iron wrapped around my wrists felt like it was squeezing the life out of my whole body. My heart rate picked up, threatening to fly off the rails.

  A brief jolt of relief shot through me when the first handcuff sprang open. Only one handcuff to go and then the padlock on the lid.

  By all means, take your time, the octopus deadpanned in my mind. It’s not as if your very life is on the line.

  Once the second handcuff sprang open, I thrashed my way to the top of the aquarium. I was so dizzy from oxygen deprivation I could barely see, but I caught flashes of white and orange fins flicking through my peripheral vision. I thrust my fists through the holes in the lid and commanded my shaky, shriveled fingers to focus. I pictured Ginger kicking her way through the seawater, beating down the locked door of the sinking ship’s cabin and scrambling to a lifeboat. Through the water, I heard the padlock pop open with a muffled ping!

  The second I surfaced and pushed myself out of the tank, the roar of the crowd filled my ears. “My Inspiration Is You” came to a perfect denouement and crackled to a close. Will grasped my arm and dragged me onto the platform as I gasped for air. He looked like a ghost ready to toss his cookies.

  “Jeezus, Mattie-O. No wonder Miyu didn’t want this job. I thought I was going to have a heart attack and then have to dive in there mid-v-fib and fish out your drowned corpse.”

  “Not today, Will With Two Ls,” I sputtered before launching into a coughing fit.

  “Let’s hear it, ladies and gentlemen,” Monty said into the mic, “for the incomparable Ginger and her new assistant, Will With Two Ls!”

  Will helped me down the ladder, and we took brief bows and waved to our audience of mostly-strangers before slipping backstage. Before I had a chance to dry off, Stella’s spidery arms were trapping me in another hug.

  “Ginge, I don’t even know what to say,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared.”

  I didn’t have a response so I just whimpered and hugged her back.

  “That was hard for you, wasn’t it?” she whispered. “To share that with me?”

  “If you’re totally freaked out, or mad I didn’t tell you right away, I get it. But we’re still friends, right?”

  “Oh, Ginge. Of course we’re still friends. There’s nothing you could do to make me not want to be friends with you, except maybe kill someone or, you know, kick a puppy really hard.”

  That warm, spiky feeling flooded through me again, like tiny tendrils from the core of my being pushing their way to the surface of my skin, reaching out into the void for someone else’s tendrils. But this time that joy and fear was mixed with relief. I felt weightless, like all the bricks of dread I’d been collecting had imploded in a single, dusty burst.

  I nodded, and Stella wrapped me in a towel.

  ***

  It’s probably fitting that after I disclosed my secret to Stella in the most dramatic way possible, I found myself alone with her in a sort of confessional booth—the downstairs bathroom at Will’s house—pulling her hair back into a sloppy ponytail right before she retched and puked.

  “No more tequila,” she moaned with her head clutched in her hands. “Ever.”

  The two Midori sours she’d sipped before I went on must’ve loosened her up because the hecklers somehow talked her into doing shots with them. She downed a shot of mid-shelf Kentucky bourbon with a squinty pout. Then she slurped up a shot of Jäger. Then, like she’d been doing it for years, she topped that off with a shot of cheap tequila and a grin.

  To my horror, she got up to dance with the hecklers when Mollusk Brigade went on and planted a fat, wet kiss square on Naveen’s lips.

  “She broke rule number three,” Frankie said.

  “Yep. She totally did.”

  And now she was curled up in front of the toilet, pulling off her cardigan and wrapping it around herself like a sad little blanket. She squinted up at me, her typically-sunny face now a bleary-eyed mask of drunken misery.

  “Ginge, I have something to confess. I wasn’t going to tell you about my summer fling because it didn’t exactly end on a high note. But I want every last detail on how you turned yourself into badass with Will Kane as your Vanna White, and I’m almost certain that telling you this next thing is the only way I’m going to get it out of you.”

  “Um . . . okay.”

  “So here goes. I hooked up with a guy at St. Joe’s. More than once. And . . .” She retched again but didn’t puke. “You know him.”

  I blinked at her a few times. “It’s not Frankie, is it?”

  “Oh my god, Ginge, no. No! He’s adorable and funny, but he’s much too young for me. And for you. I hope you’re not thinking
about corrupting such an . . .”

  “No. Got enough on my plate, thanks. So if it’s not Frankie . . .”

  “Marlon Blando,” she whimpered. “I still can’t believe you call him that.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Go ahead. Judge me. Get it over with.”

  “Stell, I’m not going to judge you. I’m not like that. Am I?”

  She just laughed. “Maybe all that oxygen deprivation’s changed you.”

  “So how was it?”

  She gave me a shrug. “Okay? Certainly nothing like some of the horror stories I’ve overheard in the bathrooms at school. But Marlon . . . ahem . . . Evan and I are not meant to be.”

  “What went wrong?”

  She shook her head and moaned into the floor. “Nothing! Well, we did actually get into a fight over Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because he refuses to acknowledge its literary significance. But that fight was sort of fun. Most of the time he would just talk and talk and talk and, oh my god, Ginge. I was so bored.”

  “Imagine that,” I said with a snicker.

  Her nostrils flared. “See? There it is.”

  “What?”

  “You’re getting judgy.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  She sat up and sighed. “It’s fine. Anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about how he would go on and on and not really say anything and I thought, ‘Do I sound like that? Am I just as boring and too caught up in good grades and college apps to even realize it?’”

  I laughed as I leaned back against the sink. “Is that why you went overboard tonight?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Stella, can you just take stock of where you are for a sec?”

  “Will Kane’s bathroom?”

  “No. Well, kinda. Think about the night we just had. If you were boring, would you have had that kind of night? If you were so consumed with grades and college to the point where you talked about nothing, would you even be friends with a kid who quotes Star Trek and a girl who escapes from a fish tank in front of strangers?”

  “No?”

  “No. So there you go.”

  She giggled and kicked her flip-flops off while she gave me this weird, knowing look.