by Sharpe, Elle
I realized I was gripping my fork very tightly.
Then I noticed Chris’s head, hovering just above my shoulder. I nearly jumped, but managed to keep myself composed.
“Hey bro,” he said, wearing that smile he had that stretched out his whole face.
“Hi, Chris.”
“So, originally Jen put your name-card-thingy on the seat next to my name-card-thingy, but I see that you’re sitting over here now.”
“Jen doesn’t seem like the type to get that anal about the seating chart.” I said.
“She’s not. But I was wondering if maybe you decided to switch...because of Norah?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It’s just...you guys were sardines together for a really long time.”
“And?”
“And ever since you finally came back, you’ve been wearing your murder face.”
“That’s just my face.”
He put a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“You’ve been looking at her a lot.”
I was actually still looking at her. She laughed so hard at something Jen said that she threw her head back, showing off the full length of her soft, creamy neck.
“Norah is very...provoking.”
“Jen thinks you like her or something. Or that she likes you.”
“She definitely does not like me. And I definitely don’t like her. We hate each other, actually.”
Chris frowned in confusion.
“Oh, wow. I guess Jen was wrong then. Weird. She’s usually right about this sort of thing. Well, I hope you guys can at least get along during the wedding. Otherwise her being maid of honor and you being best man is going to be a liiiittle aaaawk-ward.”
Norah finally saw me scowling at her from across the table. The big, bright smile fell off her face. She furrowed her brow at me like, “What the hell is your problem?”
She knew very well what my problem was.
“Don’t worry, it won’t be any problem for me. I can’t speak for her, but I am a mature adult.”
An idea came into my mind as I watched Norah turn away, pretending like she hadn’t even seen me.
Admittedly, this idea was not especially mature.
“In fact, I plan to start being an exemplary best man right this second.”
I stood up and tapped the side of my water glass.
“Hello everyone,” I said, clapping Chris on the shoulder. “I just wanted to say a little thank you to Chris and Jen for hosting such a fantastic party. It’s an honor to be the future best man to the best couple I know. I feel like this moment deserves a toast. I’ll make it quick: I just want to say that I love watching you two together. You really know how to have fun with each other, and you clearly have such a sweet, healthy, mutually respectful relationship. Something we should all aspire to.”
I was mostly able to keep my eyes off of Norah as I spoke, but I was pretty sure I caught her rolling her eyes out of the corners of mine.
“Well, I won’t blab on. Got to save something for the real best man speech. To Chris and Jen. Happy engagement!”
I raised my glass, and the rest of the guests followed suit, echoing my words. I waited for everyone to drink before I continued.
“And now I’m going to hand it over to the very talented maid of honor, who has agreed to sing a song in honor of the happy couple.”
Well, that certainly got Norah’s attention. She paused mid-eye-roll and turned directly towards me. The corner of her mouth twitched, and her eyes burned with that old, deadly rage that I remembered.
I was aware that I was putting her in a very awkward position. Backing out would look strange and ungracious. Performing would make her very unhappy. I remembered how shy she’d been just being asked to sing at karaoke. Being put on the spot at a formal party would not be her cup of tea at all.
She started twisting her napkin in her lap.
“Oh Norah, are you going to sing for us, really?” Jen sounded surprised, and incredibly touched.
Ha, I thought vindictively to myself. Checkmate.
Norah stood up.
“Yes. Yes I am.”
“I asked you so many times, and you just kept saying no. Were you planning to surprise me the whole time?”
“Yup. That is completely right. And I have been practicing so, so hard on this very special song for you. To sing now. In front of all these people.”
She turned to look at me. At first I thought she was expecting me to say something to save her. Tough luck, that was not going to happen. If she wanted an enemy, she was going to get an enemy.
But then I noticed the way she was looking at me. Like she was making a mental list of every reason to despise me. Like she was gathering strength from her hatred of me.
“So,” she said. “Here we go.”
She opened her mouth. And an astonishingly beautiful song came out.
Yes, I’d known she could sing. I’d heard her sing before, on that one comically memorable occasion. She’d sounded pretty good then—decent enough for a silly karaoke takedown of me, anyway. But she clearly hadn’t been bringing all her skills to the table. From the way she was acting tonight, I’d assumed there was some reason she might not want to sing in public, but for the life of me I couldn’t imagine what it might be. She was singing an operatic aria like a professional.
I recognized the song, from my limited exposure to opera. I didn’t know what all the words meant, but I knew it was a song about love and longing. She brought those emotions into every note, holding her own without any accompaniment, or any microphone.
The space wasn’t ideal, acoustically. But even though her voice didn’t carry as much as it might have, everyone hung on her every note.
I had never been much of a fan of opera myself. I found all those high notes much too shrill. But hers floated sweetly up out of her throat. There was no way to deny it—I was impressed. It was impressive that any human being could produce sounds like that.
She finished with one of those show-offy flourishes that made her voice climb up higher and higher until you were sure it had to crack. But it never did. It just rang through the air, clear as a bell. When the last note had faded, the guests all sat stunned and quiet. Then they burst into applause.
Norah’s face turned rosy pink and she quickly sat down. Jen looked as happy as a kid on Christmas, and wrapped her into a big hug. I could almost read her lips from across the table—something like, “See, I told you.” Norah gave a mild smile and nodded.
After dinner there was dancing. The beats—as the kids would say—were bumping. This was more the sort of music I’d expected to hear at a party thrown by Jen.
The lawn was a mess, full of bouncing, dancing lunatics. I had to hand it to Jen: who else could get people to act this idiotic without any alcohol involved? I tried not to think about how badly they were trampling my grass.
Norah sat off to the side. Not participating, looking sad. Which was not my problem. Not even when she took that stupid crown of her head, and started turning it in her hands in a strange, wistful way.
I had no reason to feel bad about what I’d done. She was the one who kept playing games with me. Coming on to me, getting me all riled up, then reminding me what a “terrible person” I was, and how ashamed she’d be if anyone knew we’d been together.
Plus, even if she might have a right to be angry at me for trying to catch her out, it hadn’t even worked. She had been magnificent. She’d outmaneuvered me. She had won.
So why did she look so upset?
I groaned inwardly. I started walking towards her, knowing I was going to regret it.
When she looked up and saw me she huffed and flopped forward, like this was the last straw, and she just couldn’t cope with life anymore.
“Nice to see you too,” I said.
“Go away.”
“Norah-”
She raised her head, surprised to hear me speaking so softly.
“I just wanted to say, yo
ur voice is beautiful.”
She jerked, like she was taken aback.
“I know,” she said. She sounded defensive for some reason, like this was something we had argued about a thousand times.
“No need to sound snappy. I’m trying to give you a compliment.”
“Sorry. I mean, thank you,” she said, dismissively. And then she searched my face for a second, and seemed to realize that I wasn’t mocking her, or teasing her, or trying to get under her skin in some weird way.
“Thank you,” she said again, sounding more like she meant it this time.
“You know, you still owe me one of those,” I reminded her.
“One of what?”
“A compliment. We won the game. Remember our deal?”
She shook her head in disbelief.
“Yeah, okay. Here’s a compliment: you’ve got a really great memory, Ronan. You remembered that I hate being put on the spot to perform. And yet, you put me on the spot anyway, thus proving what a cruel bastard you truly are.”
“You are a singer, aren’t you? Is it really that big a deal for you to sing?”
She turned her head away, and shuffled uncomfortably.
“It’s not that easy to just stand up and sing something without any preparation.”
“Hmm. Could have fooled me.”
She turned back to me. That tantalizing shimmer of something-like-fear had come back into her eyes. Apparently she was unnerved by the idea of me being genuinely nice to her.
I could work with that.
“I’m sorry I put you on the spot,” I told her. “Can we call a truce?”
She narrowed her eyes in suspicion at me. I thought of something that might help tip the scales.
“Not convinced, huh? What if I threw a gig into the bargain? You said you do events, right?”
“I mean, yeah, sometimes, but not-”
“Do you have a card in that tiny little purse there?” I pointed to the small clutch that was sitting by her side.
“Card? Like a business card? I...do not have one of those. Because I am unprofessional.”
“Well, I do have a card, because I am professional. Write your info on the back of mine.”
“I don’t have a pen. Also people use their phones for this sort of thing nowadays.”
“Fine, put your number in my phone.”
I reached into my pocket to give it to her.
“Ronan,” she said, with a sly smile on her mouth, “Is this you asking for my number right now? Because that would be a pretty bold move, under the circumstances.”
“For business purposes only. My mother’s foundation has an event happening next week, and her talent just had to cancel. She’s been freaking out about finding a replacement. You’d be perfect. Come, sing a few songs, and then enjoy the food for the rest of the night. Probably an easier gig than a bar mitzvah. And the pay would be decent.”
She gave me a long, appraising look.
“Ronan, I really don’t think you want me to do this.”
“And I think you have no idea what I want.”
She hesitated for a moment, then took the phone from my hand and typed in her number.
“Well,” she said. “I guess we’ll find out.”
PART(Y) III
RONAN’S MOM’S FANCY GALA PARTY
Norah
“Are you kidding me?” Jen asked. “You should definitely do it. It’s a gig Norah. A well-paying gig. What’s the problem? One-hundred-and-one. ”
It was Sunday night, the weekend after the engagement party. Jen and I were sitting together on her couch, performing our usual pre-movie ritual: competing to see who could fit the most popcorn kernels into a full glass of milk before it overflowed.
Yes, it was childish. And yes, it was a huge waste of popcorn. But we’d been doing it ever since we’d discovered popcorn’s amazing absorption powers, back in the third grade. We used to annoy our parents a lot by putting popcorn in our movie-theater sodas, which was even more wasteful, and had resulted in more than a few sticky floors.
“One-hundred-and-two,” I said, as I placed my one-hundred-and-second piece of popcorn into the milk glass. “Well, for one thing, Ronan Baylor is a problem. A huge problem.”
“Oh, huge is he?” I could practically hear her eyebrows waggling. “One-hundred-and-three.”
“For another thing,” I said, cutting her off, “I’m sure he expects me to do a normal performance. And that is still not something I can do.”
I was ashamed to admit it, but it was true. Four years on, and I still had powerful stage fright that almost entirely prevented me from performing. The only exception was when I was doing my “shtick.” I was lucky that the “shtick” made me some money, but I was pretty sure that couldn’t last forever.
I’d tried an experiment a few months back with my voice teacher. We’d arranged a very small show—literally just her and a few of her other students and voice teacher-friends. But we’d called it a “concert,” and sat everyone in rows, and...it was so stupid but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get any sound to come out. It was like my jaw was stuck, and my throat had forgotten how to open.
I’d stepped out of the room and sung to myself in the bathroom for a second, and that had been fine. But when I came back into the room—the “concert hall,” at least in my mind—the same thing happened all over again. I’d felt as mortified as if it had happened at Carnegie Hall.
“You’re really that in your head about it? Still?” Jen sounded like she pitied me. When I said nothing in reply, she said, “Well, can’t you just do your whole...thing...at the event? One-hundred-and-four.”
“My ‘whole thing’...I don’t know Jen. This is a formal fundraiser. I don’t know if fancy people are into gimmicks.”
“It’s not that gimmicky,” she insisted. “One-hundred-and-five. Besides, if you’re worried about it, just ask Ronan.”
Oh yeah, sure, just casually call up Ronan Baylor, multi-millionaire. Or maybe he was a billionaire by now. Whatever.
I did have his number now. I’d saved it into my phone as “blaaaaaaarg I hate you” after he’d texted to follow up on his offer. But I wasn’t about to call him up, have a friendly chat, and explain all about my debilitating stage fright. Just thinking about having such a personal, vulnerable conversation with him made my stomach feel heavy. Like it was full of clumpy, soggy popcorn kernels.
“Hey!” Jen snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Focus up, you’re behind.”
“Oh, right.”
I dropped a few more kernels into my glass. “One-hundred-and-three. One-hundred-and-four. One-hundred-and-five. We really need to use smaller glasses next time.”
Jen furrowed her eyebrows. Something had just occurred to her.
“Hey, how come you were able to sing at my party? You sound great then.”
I shrugged.
“Don’t know.”
“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” Jen hummed, like she was puzzling out some great mystery.
“What?” I demanded.
“Well,” she said at last, “I’ve noticed something. Two times now I’ve seen you act like you wouldn’t be able to sing, but then you did. And do you know what both of these incidents had in common? Ronan Baylor, that’s what. Now, why exactly do you think that is?”
“Let me guess: it’s the power of our secret love.” I made sure she could hear the sarcasm dripping off my voice.
But then I took a second to think about what she’d said. My stage fright usually only disappeared under certain conditions—like when I was doing my “shtick,” for example. But those rules didn’t seem to hold when Ronan was around. Twice now he’d put me on the spot, which had been infuriating. But somehow I’d been able to channel my rage into song.
“Actually, I think it’s because he makes me so angry.”
“Great. So get angry at him again. Problem solved. That was one-hundred-and-seven.”
“Ha. That would be an interesting strategy. Drag a r
ich guy around to all my gigs as my personal rage generator? I’m sure he’d totally be down for that. One-hundred-and-six. One-hundred-and-seven. One-hundred-and-eight.”
“It’s not a strategy that applies to all gigs,” she said. “Just this one. He’ll be there, right?”
“I mean, yeah, but I wasn’t planning to actually interact with him. And if we lived in the crazy alternate reality in which I wanted to, I’m sure he’d be way too busy, and aloof, and superior to want to hang out with the hired talent at his fancy-person party.”
“Hmmmmmm, I don’t know about that,” Jen said, with a knowing little smile lifting the corners of her lips.
“One-hundred-and-nine,” I said in reply.
“Hey, forget the popcorn for a sec. I have an idea. Do you trust me?”
I cast a sidelong glance at her mischievous face.
“Oh Jen, that question from you never leads to good things-”
“I’m going to call Ronan.”
The popcorn-lump feeling in my stomach turned into a ton-of-rocks feeling.
“No. What? No. Why? No.”
“For the sake of science, Norah. We need to confirm the following hypothesis: that you plus Ronan equals the secret variable that defeats your stage fright. Come on, this could be a major breakthrough! Therefore, you need to spend time together at this party.”
I hated to admit it, but I sort of followed her logic. Though I sensed she also had some ulterior motives.
“Trust me, Norah, just...watch this.”
She pulled out her phone and scrolled through to find Ronan’s number.
I found myself clinging to the toothbrush pillow on Jen’s couch for comfort. She still had it, all these years later, even though she’d upgraded the rest of her surroundings quite a bit.
Her apartment was bright and modern and full of expensive things, but in a homey, approachable, pop-arty kind of a way. Weirdly the novelty pillows still fit right in. They were among several perfectly-placed wacky accents. The magic Jen touch brought it all together, just like with everything else in her life.