This Is Just My Face

by Gabourey Sidibe

  Anyway, the three of us still shared one room, but now we were sleeping in a bunk bed. Mom and Ahmed shared the bottom bunk, and I slept on the top. Apart from the bunk bed, we had a couch, a dresser, and a table with our TV and VCR and Super Nintendo on it. We had one chair that I’d sit in to do my homework and look out at the skyline.

  There was no dinnertime. Ahmed and I mostly waited until my mom got home to eat. She’d either bring food or cook at around eight o’clock at night. We’d watch Jenny Jones at 11 p.m., and then we’d play Super Mario Kart. At midnight we’d watch the Empire State Building shut off its lights. (It doesn’t do that anymore. Now the lights stay on all night.) We lived like that for five long years. We didn’t have a bedtime; we didn’t even have a curfew. As long as my mom knew where we were, we could stay out all night if we wanted to, and we did. If we didn’t come home, it meant that whoever was home had more room to stretch out. We didn’t have rules or structure because we literally had no space for them. The only alone time we ever had was in the bathroom—and even that wasn’t completely private. We knew everything about one another. Ahmed and Alice knew when my period started (March 9, the day Notorious B.I.G. died. I don’t know why I needed to tell you that, but I did). They knew when I had my first kiss. And they knew when I had a horrible day at school and couldn’t stop crying in class. It was awful.

  When I was sixteen, a two-bedroom apartment opened up in our building, and we were next on the waiting list. Alice, no stranger to sacrifices, gave Ahmed and me each a room, and put a daybed in the living room for herself. She didn’t want to make either of us share a room ever again. She said that we were teenagers and needed our own space. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to do that if I was in her position, but then again, she’s a saint and I’m (still) not.

  We didn’t have any structure or curfews in the new apartment; it was too late for that. In two years I’d start helping with the rent. We didn’t have a table to eat at together, so we had no family meals, no traditions, no rituals. But there were walls between us now. Now we had doors. I shut mine and locked it until I was ready to leave. All of my secrets remained mine for the first time since I was nine years old.

  I moved out on my own at the age of twenty-five. If you think that’s old, keep in mind that this is New York City. Shit is expensive! My mom moved into my old room and finally had her own door to close for the first time in many years. A part of me wishes that life could’ve been different for Alice. She never dated after leaving Ibnou. Ahmed would’ve hated that, but I always wished she had. I wish she’d found a soul mate who could’ve provided a stable life for her. Undying love and devotion. Financial security. A retirement plan. Prettier children. But I know now that’s not what Alice wanted. All she’s ever wanted is to be happy, and because Alice gets what Alice wants, she is happy. I often think that my family is too small to be a family. There’s just three of us. We’re more like three people with the same DNA who all lived together once. Like roommates. But Alice and Ahmed are my entire world. I worry more about them than I worry about myself. I keep my ringer on at night in case they need me. I care about them so much that it infuriates me. I pay their rent before I pay my own. As much as I want to pretend that seeing the two of them for the holidays doesn’t really matter because we don’t have any traditions, it warms my heart to spend time with them. Ugh! I sound like an Olsen twins movie or something. But I mean it. I love visiting them. I love knowing that my mom misses me. I love crawling into bed with her and listening to her tell me how great she is and how much her fans love her.

  This year I went home to that two-bedroom apartment to have Thanksgiving with Alice and Ahmed, who lives there still. Since my mom moved into my old bedroom, the living-room furniture has changed. There’s a dining-room table with chairs, and there’s an armchair and a couch. I asked if we could all sit at that table and eat together. We’d never done that. We did. We all sat together, we held hands as Alice prayed over the food, and then we ate. It was nice even if it didn’t really make us a closer family. But we’re not as fractured as I sometimes think. We’re all we have, yes, but we’re enough.

  9

  Obituary

  The only truthful bit of this “article” is that my name is Gabourey Sidibe. Even that is debatable.

  —my Twitter

  AN OLD FRIEND FROM ELEMENTARY school texted me and asked if I had heard that I was dead. “Did you hear about your death?” is how she put it. I responded sarcastically, “No. Please, do tell.” “You had a fatal asthma attack.” “Oh, shit! Then what happened?” “You died. Are you okay? I saw it on Facebook. Want me to send the link to you?” “Oh, yes! Please!” And then she sent a link to an article about my death to my Facebook page. Did this bitch not know I was being sarcastic? I hate that sarcasm is hard to convey in a text. There should be a special font for sarcasm so people can tell when I’m being an asshole. Of course I’d heard!

  This is week five of my friends and family texting or calling me to find out if I’m dead. The report has been circulating throughout all the social media. I’ve seen it on both my Instagram and my Twitter, but Facebook is where it got started. Facebook! You know, that social-media site you use to spy on your ex and figure out at election time which of your family members are racist. Everything anyone has ever written on Facebook has to be 100 percent true. If not, Mark Zuckerberg has to punch a sloth in the face. He doesn’t want to, but those are the rules. (You can tell this is sarcasm, right?) At first, the Gabby-is-dead article was from a surely reputable online news site called Can’t Stop Hip-Hop Worldwide (I’m pretty sure I heard that Diane Sawyer once interned there). According to them, I was filming a scene for an upcoming movie in which I played a detective. The scene required me to run, and during a take, I stopped running and motioned for someone to help me. I was experiencing shortness of breath. I guess my big fat heart couldn’t take it. The ambulance was called but I “expired en route to the hospital” of a fatal asthma attack. My friends and family are devastated by the sudden loss. Such a shame. I was so young and so beloved. I should’ve known better than to be fat and run at the same time. I was so foolish to think that I could have it all. There’s no date or location in the article, so it’s unclear when and where I died. Even if I do something publicly to make it known that I’m still among the living, the article will spawn Gabby-is-dead conspiracy junkies unto eternity. If you read the news today, you assume it happened last night, so even if I tweeted something at 7 p.m. yesterday like “Hi! I’m alive! Stop asking!” you figure I probably died right afterward. If you read the news tomorrow, no tweet of mine will stop you from being sure I died right after posting it. I’d better be careful. Death’s a’comin’!

  While it was obviously jarring to see my name in a poorly written article about my death, I know that this is just one of those things that happen to celebrities. It comes with the territory. Famous people get free clothes, they get instant reservations and a good table at fancy restaurants, and they get false reports about their deaths. It’s happened to friends of mine. It didn’t bother me that much at first. Then it moved from Facebook to Twitter. Here and there, people would tweet me and ask if I was okay. They’d extend their condolences to my family. Some knew it was a hoax so they wanted me to “clear it up.” How? By being alive? I ignored these requests because I figured that even if I didn’t tweet my aliveness in the next week or so, folks would figure it out. None of my friends or the famous people I’ve worked with would be releasing a statement about how amazing a person I was, how desperately I’d be missed, and how they couldn’t go on living without me. People would see that, clearly, I wasn’t gone. I was on TV every week. I didn’t have to clear shit up. I just had to be alive. People were commenting “RIP” under all of my photos on Instagram, but I thought it would go away eventually. That it was kind of funny. That it was no big deal. Then my dad called me.

  At the time I hadn’t spoken to Dad in a little bit under a year. I was working on forgivin
g him for not being who I needed him to be, but I was in a stage of loving him from afar. He was loving me from afar as well, so when my younger brother Malick showed him what he’d read on Facebook—that I had died of an asthma attack—Dad called me. He said that he’d read something that hurt him very deeply because I was his daughter and he loved me. Somehow we still ended our conversation in a fight. Okay, so maybe I haven’t forgiven him completely. We’ll get there. It’s complicated. I called my mom after we hung up and told her about the article, the multiplying rumors of my death, and the call from Dad. She laughed and agreed that people will believe anything. We laughed and we laughed and then she must’ve forgotten all about it.

  A week later she called me at eight in the morning and left a message.

  “Hi, Gabby. This is Mom. Aunt Mildred just called me and said that she heard on the Internet that you had an asthma attack . . . either last night or this morning . . . and um . . . I’m calling to find out if you are okay. Give me a call as soon as you get this message and let me know. Or if anybody is on your phone, please call and let me know what’s going on . . . I’ll be waiting for your call. Talk to you later.”

  Aunt Mildred had fallen victim to the same hoax and now so had my mom. Both my parents had called worried that I had died of an asthma attack, and neither of them had considered the fact that I don’t actually have asthma. I had to call Mom back as soon as I was awake and remind her that there was a death rumor going around. It wasn’t funny anymore. Maybe now was a good time to release a statement.

  I went right back to where it all started. Social media. I tweeted again that I was alive. “So many people have tweeted me that I’m dead. Maybe I am. Perhaps my version of hell is people believing poorly written articles about me.” That tweet spawned other articles about how the Internet thought I had died but that I was actually alive. A story was created out of something that was never real in the first place. I think that’s how journalism works now.

  Fuck Twitter yo. I hate Twitter. I love Twitter. I need it to get through a day, but it is also systematically messing with my health and sanity. (At this point in the book, you know how little sanity I actually have left.) I’m constantly on Twitter. I hate the word twitter. It’s disgusting. It’s my best friend. Ugh, FUCK TWITTER! Here’s the thing. When Twitter started becoming popular, I refused to join. All of my friends were on it, tweeting away and following celebrity beefs. I thought it was weird that people were tweeting and getting into fights with one another that way. I knew I was missing out on entertaining stuff, but I still thought it was stupid. This one time, I was talking to a rapper (you wouldn’t know him) who wanted me to follow him on Twitter so he could follow me back. I said, “Oh, I don’t think I’d have anything interesting to say on Twitter. The public doesn’t need to know my every single thought. No one is that interesting.” The rapper felt insulted and walked away. Whatever. He doesn’t get me. Anyway, I just thought that it was kind of vain to think that people want to know everything you’re thinking all the time. I could think of maybe two people whose thoughts I’d be open to reading all the time. One guy was a dude I wanted to bone, for obvious reasons (maybe he’d tweet something that would give me clues to help me figure out how to bone him!), and the other guy was my ex-boyfriend, who I wanted to make sure was still terrible so I could constantly give myself a thumbs-up about my decision to break up with him. That’s it! Oh! Also Beyoncé. Duh! Other than those three people, I wasn’t really interested in Twitter. But lots of my friends thought Twitter was perfect for me. A director I’m close friends with said she was just waiting on me to come around and see that Twitter was the perfect place for my short and sharp wit that would fit nicely into 140 characters. I thought, True. I am amazing. But what about the people who don’t think I’m amazing? Wouldn’t they be mean to me on Twitter? I’m sensitive, and I can’t really take people being mean to me. I wasn’t convinced Twitter was something I needed in my life.

  On the set of American Horror Story, I got to work with some amazing actors and actresses. Emphasis on actresses. There were only two men in the cast full-time, so for the bulk of the season, I worked with women. We also hung out together quite a bit. We were constantly around one another. I loved and admired each of those women, but because we are, in fact, women, someone wasn’t buying the love. There was a rumor that I was feuding with one of my castmates, Emma Roberts. Reports said that Emma was being a brat on set. That she was rude to everyone and that the cast and crew hated her. The report went on to say that I wasn’t having any of that shit so I chewed Emma out in front of everyone and now the two of us were in a fight. But on the brighter side, Emma was being nicer to the crew. This is a story that is 100 percent made-up! First, Emma is lovely. She’s also a nerd. She reads books on set. She always has her nose in a book; I don’t see how she would find the time to be mean to anyone. Second, I wouldn’t yell at someone in front of people. I’ve been there and it’s embarrassing. Third, there were way more interesting things happening on that set than some dumb cat fight, and fourth, I’m super into minding my own damn business. I’m the last one who would say something to someone about the way they act. None of that mattered because the story was more interesting than the truth. It went viral, and people on set started thanking me for getting Emma together. I felt bad that people were thinking that this sweet girl was actually a brat and congratulating me for yelling at her. I decided that I had to do something about it. I had to dispel the rumor.

  My Twitter took some time to set up. Like an hour. By the time I was done, I already had two followers. Things were looking up already! But I thought it would be weird if I said to just those two people, “Hey, um . . . that thing about me and Emma Roberts is a lie. Just FYI.” So I had to gain followers somehow. I told my friends to follow me and they did and they retweeted me, and I had to follow them and then also some celebrities I didn’t think would be too annoying to hear from every few minutes. Then I had to post pictures to prove that it was really me, and then I had to read each comment and tweet I received. American Horror Story has a huge fan base so the fans were excited to get to talk to me. I still thought this was weird. If I had to be a celebrity in order to be an actor, I preferred to be the kind in a glass tower you couldn’t talk to. What was so bad about that? But it turned out that talking to fans was pretty cool. Quickly, Twitter was super fun. I got distracted. Before I knew it, days had gone by and I’d forgotten to dispel the Emma rumor. When I woke up, the first thing I did was check Twitter to see if anyone had been mean to me during the night. (I was always afraid that someone had said something nasty to me right after I fell asleep and that people would see it and agree for eight hours or so before I woke up and could block that person.) Then I checked for who had been nice to me. Then I’d either like that person’s tweet or just silently nod my head in agreement: Yes! I do have great skin. Then I’d check the verified tab to see if any celebrities had followed me during the night. (I wish the checking didn’t fill me with butterflies the way it does, but it does! Leave me alone!) Then I would get out of bed and go pee. I was hooked on Twitter.

  The best part of Twitter is live tweeting. I can live tweet anything! When American Horror Story was on every Wednesday night at 10 p.m., my phone was basically glued to my hands. I loved seeing what the fans of the show were saying about it. I couldn’t wait to see their tweets about the scariest death scenes or the shocking love scenes that then turned into scary death scenes. It was sort of like being on stage in a play with a rude audience yelling things every few words. Oh! I know! It was just like being a guest on The Jerry Springer Show! It was exciting and fascinating to see the audience react in real time.

  Eventually I did dispel the rumor that Emma Roberts and I were in a fight. I posted a picture of us together with the caption:

  Gabby SidiBae

  @GabbySidibe

  Emma and I are in a feud?! You sure? #ThatsMyHomeGirl #AintNobodyFuckinwitMyClique

  9:19 AM—4 Nov 2013

&
nbsp; See? All good. I wanted to post a caption like “You got beef, Emma? Meet me at the playground at three o’clock and we’ll settle this! P.S., Ya momma!” Emma and I would laugh about it, but our followers wouldn’t get it.

  Twitter is stupid. There are so many truly clever and smart people on Twitter who get the joke and make the joke. They know that Twitter is not to be taken seriously. I’m one of those people. I think Twitter is for saying dumb stuff as soon as it pops into your head. But a ton of my followers don’t share my sense of humor. Do you even know how funny I’d be if my followers weren’t so sensitive and unfunny? Whenever I post something that makes me laugh, I get a bunch of comments like “That’s horrible! You’re not better than anyone else! You need to start putting God first! You are so ungrateful!” and I’m all, like, “Chill! I just think it’d be funny if this dog had a mustache.” What’s equally annoying is when I tell a joke about how terrible a person I am and some of my followers think I really feel that way and tweet their support as if I’m about to jump off the ledge of a building: “Gabby, no! You are a QUEEN! You are seriously the reason I get up out of bed every day! You are so important to me! I love you so much! If I were there with you, I’d hold you in my arms!” That’s sweet . . . thanks . . . I was kidding. I realize I’m not really as bad as Hitler because I double-dipped a chip.