“It’d be lovely if you could,” Mrs. McAvoy chirps. She’s a round, rosy-cheeked woman with an apparently endless supply of enthusiasm and giant earrings. I’m pretty sure she’s only been teaching at Hamilton for a couple years, which would explain her currently unconditional love for her job. Give her a few more years and all that passion will be gone, replaced by bitter cynicism and generalized animosity toward all young people. She’ll be just another misanthrope slouching her way through the halls, waiting for students to do something stupid so she can yell at them.
“The thing is, I’m really busy right now—” I lie.
“It would only be a few afternoons a week. You could even do it on weekends. And I’d make sure you got extra credit in English.”
She blinks up at me expectantly, still smiling.
“I don’t know, it’s . . .”
I hear my mom say: You never let them in, Melly.
“Come by after four today and I’ll show you what it would involve, and you can decide then,” she says. “It’s so much fun! You’ll love it.”
She bustles off down the hall, leaving me standing there, slack-jawed and confused.
Goddammit. What the hell just happened?
• • •
“I hate you,” I inform Tristan at lunch.
He blinks at me.
“Ah,” he says. “So you talked with Mrs. McAvoy then.”
“Yeah, I did,” I say. “She’s pushy as hell. As are you, by the way. I said I’d think about it!”
“You did say that,” Tristan says, “but sometimes you need to be . . . gently encouraged to do something.”
“More like coerced,” I say.
“Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe,” Tristan says, and wiggles his eyebrows.
I sigh, but before I can get more irate he begins to fill me in about his weekend away with Bryan.
“Seriously, though, Rehoboth Beach, when nobody’s around and you don’t have to deal with all the whiny children eating snow cones? Is beautiful.”
“Like you were even registering your surroundings,” I tease. “You know you and Bryan never left the house.”
“We did so leave the house!” Tristan insists. “We had dinner out. Twice.”
I snort and push peas around on my plate. They’re squishy and gross and I can’t bring myself to eat them, even if they are the only part of my lunch that might actually contain nutrients.
“So did you have sex?” I ask.
“Define ‘sex.’” Tristan sounds pissy, and has flushed to the color of a carnation.
“Were parts of your body inserted into parts of his body? Or vice versa?”
“If I stuck my finger in his ear that would be true,” Tristan retorts. “Is that . . . finger sex?”
“Finger sex, I believe, is different,” I say, winking.
“Oh, you’re so gross,” Tristan says.
“And you are so avoiding the question. I say—no, you did not have sex. This is my assessment.”
“We sort of had sex.”
“How did you ‘sort of’ have sex?” I ask. “I want to know what ‘sort of’ happened, especially since I was your alibi for the weekend.”
“We didn’t have, like, the all-the-way kind of sex. We had—there were hands involved.”
Tristan is so red now. It’s kind of hilarious.
“Oh my God, you’re a nun!” I says. “I’m surprised you did anything other than soulfully stare into each other’s eyes all weekend, you weirdo.”
Tristan stares morosely at his half-eaten meat loaf. “I hate you a lot.”
He reaches out to take one of my fries, but I swat his hand away. “No way, buddy! Not now that I know where your hands have been!”
• • •
That afternoon I make my way to play rehearsal, feeling a little anxious. The auditorium smells like dust and old sweat. The only lights come from the stage; they’re big bright ones suspended from the ceiling, perched at angles. By the time I get there at 4:15 p.m. a bunch of kids are already milling around with scripts in their hands, giggling and roughhousing and being silly.
I spot Damon standing on a corner of the stage with Tristan. They’re talking intently, heads bowed together, and Tristan places one hand on Damon’s arm. Damon laughs, and it’s lovely: the way his shoulders move, the slow curve of his smile. Tristan says something and Damon turns to look right at me, lifting his hand to wave. I wave back.
“Oh, splendid, you came!” Mrs. McAvoy is suddenly at my elbow, smiling so widely, I can practically see her molars. “Melanie, I’ll take you backstage and let Calvin show you the ropes.”
So much for giving me a chance to decide. Also, Calvin? Nobody mentioned there would be a Calvin. I’m suspicious of anyone named Calvin who does not have a stuffed tiger named Hobbes. It’s probably because I knew this kid in third grade named Calvin who ate his own boogers. Entirely traumatic and gross, that kid.
Mrs. McAvoy leads me down the aisle and around the side of the stage, pulling back the curtains so I can see backstage. It looks like a place that old wood goes to retire, like Boca Raton for cedar and pine. I guess this is all going to resemble sets at some point, but right now it looks like the remnants of a salvage mission on some strange all-forest planet.
“Calvin will make you right at home,” Mrs. McAvoy says, and just like that, poof, she’s gone.
“Who are you?” a voice comes out of the darkness. I jump.
“I’m Melanie,” I say. “Are you Calvin?”
A boy steps out of the shadows. He’s tall and thin, with a narrow face and long, stringy hair dyed jet black. He’s wearing a long-sleeve black shirt under a green T-shirt that reads Fly, my pretties, fly and ripped blue jeans.
“That is my earth name, yes,” Calvin says.
Oh, Jesus.
“Mrs. McAvoy wants me to help with the sets,” I say.
Calvin stares at me. His eyes are dark gray and flat, like he’s never seen anything that impressed him, ever.
“Have you painted sets before?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “It was for this elementary school—”
“But not for a Hamilton High production,” he says, in the same tone of voice that someone might say Tony Award–winning Broadway play.
“Um,” I say. “No.”
“So why did you decide to start now?”
I guess the answer because my best friend is a conniving little bastard and there’s a boy in the play who’s really hot would not endear me any further to Calvin.
I shrug. “Could use the extra credit.”
Calvin appears to be considering this.
“There are easier ways to get extra credit,” he says.
Calvin seems to think we are embarking on a top-secret operation into the jungles of Cambodia with the Green Berets, not putting some shellac on a bunch of old lumber vaguely shaped to look like a castle.
“Well, tell me what I’d have to do,” I say, “and then I’ll decide if I’m up for it.”
Calvin narrows his eyes as if to say you will never be up for what I have to teach you, but he hands me a brush.
We’re doing basic undercoat stuff, but it’s amazing how much it shakes me to be holding a paintbrush again. In my mind I keep seeing the canvases in the basement, the piles of them, wondering: Where will they all go now? I wouldn’t even know how to ask my dad about that. Where would my mom want them to go? I think about the way she looked toward the end when I would bring her paper and pencil. She would stare at it for minutes that felt like they lasted hours, then say: I can’t, Melly. Not today.
About an hour has passed when Calvin sidles up behind me, cocks his head to one side and says, “You may take a break.”
I swallow a nasty retort and wander out into the theater.
Rehearsal is in full swing, and D
amon is up onstage along with a couple other guys. He stands tall and regal.
She swore, in faith, ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange,
’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful.
She wished she had not heard it, yet she wished
That heaven had made her such a man.
Oh, vomit. I remember this now: the gorgeous fragile flower Desdemona, wilting in Othello’s arms. I always hated Desdemona, how ditzy and useless she seemed to be.
But then Damon’s voice drops, and he looks up and out at the audience, and—
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake.
She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used.
Here comes the lady. Let her witness it.
Before he turns toward the wings where Desdemona is emerging, I could swear that Damon catches my eye. The moment lasts only a split second, but in that second I think: I want, I want, I want you to tell me your story.
I want to know the story behind the photograph of this boy with laughing eyes that sits propped up on my dresser beside my jewelry box. I want to know the story of the boy who took the photograph. Who bore witness.
I want to know what he saw, know what he knows.
But do I want him to know my story? The story of Melanie Ellis, who for years used to wear boring clothes and her hair flat and brown so she could disappear? Who used to draw in secret because she knew she’d never be as good as her rock star of a mother, her mother who is—
I stop. I make myself stop.
I am not going to cry here.
I have to stop.
I put down my shades. I close all my doors.
After rehearsal I’m gathering up my stuff when I see Damon approach, bag already slung over his shoulder. He lifts his camera and snaps a picture of the empty stage, then tucks it into his bag.
He looks up at me.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” I reply.
“I didn’t mean to freak you out,” he says. “At the restaurant. I didn’t mean—”
“You didn’t freak me out,” I say. “You ditched me. I could take it personally, but I’m choosing to think it’s just because you’re weird.”
Damon flushes, and dammit if he isn’t especially cute when he’s embarrassed.
“It wasn’t personal,” he says. “I’m just weird.”
“Now that I know that you’re a theater geek, your weirdness makes so much more sense.”
He gives me a wry look.
“I guess you can’t be that freaked out. You’re here too, after all.”
“I’m here under extreme duress,” I say. “Tristan’s a punk and he’s forcing me to paint sets.”
“Tristan wears a lot of Abercrombie for a punk,” Damon says, lifting an eyebrow.
“He’s an asshole,” I say stubbornly.
Damon’s mouth quirks.
“I think he’s all right,” Damon says. “And I’m guessing that if he’s forcing you to paint sets, it’s because he thinks you’d be good at it.”
“I guess,” I say.
I can’t go there now. Not with him. Not like this.
We stand awkwardly for a moment, and Damon runs a hand through his hair.
“I do think we should hang out,” Damon says. “I mean, outside of the restaurant. Outside of school. With me seeming less like a stalker.”
“Can you promise me you won’t run away this time?” I ask.
Damon’s digging into his pocket for his phone. He hands it to me and I type in my number, then hand it back to him. He swipes open the camera app and snaps my picture.
That camera’s on me for sure now.
“I promise,” he says.
• • •
At the restaurant that afternoon I drift off in the middle of putting in an order while thinking about Damon, so intense up there on that stage, his body shaping itself around words hundreds of years old. He’d been so right in that moment, so perfect in that scene. So real.
“Mel.” An elbow digs into my side. I blink and turn to see Macho standing there, a smirk turning up the corners of his mouth.
“You been—” he says, pinching his fingers together and lifting them to his mouth.
I shove him, hard.
“No, you ass,” I say, but to be honest I do feel drugged, brain fogged over and mushy.
I remember going to a party at Alyssa Franco’s house with Tristan last year (I only ever go to parties when Tristan “gently encourages” me) and a dude named Graham offered me a joint before we even got in the door.
You smoke, Ellis? he said.
I was surprised he knew my last name.
No thank you, I said.
No thank you, Graham mimicked, except he made his voice all high and prim, like I was some kind of uptight librarian.
I don’t want any, okay? I said.
It’s too bad, he said. ’Cause you need to relax, lady.
I just stared at him and then turned and walked away. I went to find Tristan, and then I made him take me home.
The first time I actually got high was with my mom this summer. We smoked together after she got some doctor to prescribe her weed for the nausea.
You want some? she asked me after she lit up, and I looked at her like she was crazy.
Really? I said.
Really, she said. It won’t hurt you, Melly.
So I did it. It didn’t seem so strange in those moments, somehow, because everything was strange. I was getting high with my mom, yes, but my mom was also dying. It’s hard to be concerned about societal conventions when your mother is fading from this world like a bruise.
The weed didn’t hurt me. She was right about that. It made me cough and I felt kind of dizzy, but then it was nice. It was so nice not worrying about anything for a while. I would sit next to my mom and watch her sleep, and sometimes I’d take out my sketch pad and draw her. It was easier to draw like that, when I wasn’t worrying about what somebody would think, whether it was good enough.
The weird thing about art, Melly, my mom told me once, is that you make it for the world, but when you’re making it, you have to stop thinking about that. You have to stop caring about what people might say about it, or who might buy it. Because if you think about it too much, you can’t create. You’re paralyzed.
So how do you stop caring, then? I said.
My mom shrugged.
I don’t know, she said. You just do.
“Well, wake up then, girl,” Macho says, and pats me affectionately on the cheek, pulling me back into the present. “Order up on table three.”
• • •
That night I lie in bed, feeling restless and annoyed. I shift against my pillow, staring up at the ceiling.
“This sucks,” I address the ceiling. “And I know what you’d say. You’d say, ‘Oh, you’re being silly, Damon’s just a boy. He may be cute, but he’s just as confused as you are, and you’re probably smarter than he is anyway.’ But.” I sigh. “I like him a lot, and I don’t even know him, which is so dumb! He could be a serial killer. He could! Shut up, I know you’re laughing, Mom.”
I rub at my eyes. It’s 3:00 a.m. I need to sleep, but I want my mom to know about this, and I’m pretty sure she’s only around late at night. More times than I can count I’d wake up to the sound of a clatter downstairs, get freaked out and inch down the stairs with a baseball bat in hand only to find Mom standing in front of a canvas, examining it thoughtfully, paint in her hair. My mother would look at me like I was the crazy one, her head cocked to one side.
Looking for something? she’d ask, and I would huff out, Yeah, I thought we were being
robbed.
I look down at my tank top. It’s nearly see-through, and the dark pink of my areolas is visible through the ribbed fabric. When I first got boobs in fifth grade, I thought they were sort of awesome. Now I kind of hate them. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve changed or because the boys haven’t.
Mom was so unafraid of her own body and of anybody else’s. I know there are canvases in her studio of her, naked, painted when she was in art school. Everybody did it, honey, she told me as I stared in horror, partly because it was my mom! Naked! But also because I couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t imagine being like her—so bold, not caring what anyone else thinks.
Once, we were out shopping for jeans, an exercise in humiliation and self-abuse if there ever was one, and we’d suspended the disastrous quest in favor of smoothies at Jamba Juice: Strawberry Whirl for my mom, Mega Mango for me. I’d asked my mom to tell me the story of how she’d met my dad in college. I’d heard it before, but I wanted to hear her tell it again. My mom stirred the thick liquid of her drink, lips curving into a small smile.
It was an art class, she’d said. Can you believe your dad took an art class?
That part always cracked me up. It was funny to think about my dad as a junior Rembrandt.
He came up to me and said what I was painting was good, Mom had continued. I told him I liked it a lot myself, that I wanted to be a painter. He said he needed the art credit.
“Oh, really?” I said. “Well, that’s honest.”
He said, “I’m an honest kind of guy.” He looked really cute when he said it too, very earnest. You know, like he meant it. And he did. That’s your daddy in a nutshell, Melanie. He means it. When it matters, he does. But you know what, Mel? It wasn’t like I knew, then—like I knew in some crazy cosmic way that we belonged together or anything like that. Just—when I met him, I knew something was different. That my world had changed.
I think of that moment in the woods, with Damon. Had my world changed in that moment, without me even realizing it?
I wish so much that I could ask my mom about this. How do I even explain this to anyone, the frustration I feel when I want to ask her questions and she’s not here?
The rest of my life I’m going to wonder what she would have thought, and I will never know.
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