Diva

by Alex Flinn

  So I don’t kid myself about Dad. Even if Mom hasn’t exactly been supportive—even if she’s sort of a witch—she is, as she constantly reminds me, my only parent. I know that. That’s why it’s unfair of me to think about asking Dad to move in with him, just for a few months, until Mom realizes that Miami High School of the Arts is a good idea.

  It’s also completely stupid, because I know he’d never take me.

  CHAPTER 5

  All weekend, the letter sits on my bed. I pick it up every few hours, just to look at it, like I used to do with the ring Nick gave me, before I gave it back.

  I avoid Mom. I stay in my room, watch television, and eat there too. She thinks she won our argument, but I’m not giving in that quickly. And I listen to music, loud music, opera music I know she hates, like the Queen of the Night’s Vengeance Aria, which has four high Fs in about two minutes. I listen to that over and over. But Mom’s working most of the weekend, so she’s out. It’s no fun not speaking to someone if they don’t even know you’re not speaking to them.

  But Sunday morning, we collide in the kitchen.

  My mother sells real estate, or she tries to. She also sells Emma Leigh cosmetics—that company that awards its top sellers a purple Mustang convertible. Mom got one of those a few years ago—the high point of her existence (we had a party with purple streamers and purple foods, even the meat). Mom didn’t work right after Dad left. She just sat in this house, doing her nails, waiting for Dad’s monthly alimony checks. Then I guess Dad wised up, so she had to get a job. Or rather, she got her real estate license and started selling Emma Leigh. She’s out of the house a lot now, which is great, but she must not sell much, considering she’s still completely on the dole from Dad. Once, years ago, I opened one of his monthly checks, and I almost fell over at the amount. Dad might as well be one of those guys in Utah with two wives.

  Anyway, the kitchen. Today’s Sunday. Mom has open houses most Sundays, so after I hear the garage door go down, I head for the kitchen, planning to sit there for the approximately nineteen seconds it takes to consume my lunchbox-sized, fat-, sugar-, and taste-free key lime yogurt (90 calories). I open the fridge.

  When I close it, she’s there.

  “Oh!” I say, forgetting I’m not speaking to her. “Thought you left.”

  She’s carrying a pink plastic lawn flamingo she named Harold and dresses in little costumes: a ghost on Halloween, a leprechaun on St. Patrick’s Day, which is how it’s dressed right now. “I went to change Harold into his Easter bonnet. Want to help?”

  For this chore, she has on a blue crop top that manages to show off both her boobs and her (pierced) belly button, denim butt shorts, and cherry red platforms. Mom is thirty-seven, but she looks twenty-five and dresses like thirteen. She tried to get me to call her Val in public, so people wouldn’t know she was my mother. But I said that would just be too alternative universe.

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “You always used to help me with Harold.”

  Yeah, I thought it was cute when I was, like, seven. I remember I’m not speaking to her and turn and head for the table, so she’ll remember too.

  But she puts Harold down and follows me. I sit, and she’s behind me, touching my hair, acting like Friday never happened. “Time for a little trim!”

  “I got my hair cut last month.” Then I add, “The day before auditions.” You know, just to remind her.

  She ignores that, running her hands through my hair. I know her nails are blue without even looking.

  Sheesh—why’d I have to look?

  “I know,” she says, “but how about something different this time. Like layers.”

  Something different being secret code for, I really hate the way it looks now.

  When Mom and I can’t talk about anything else, we talk about beauty products. Beauty products mean something to Mom. She thinks if I’d just take her advice on beauty and fashion, my life would be better. I used to think so too, but now I think it would be better if she left me alone.

  “I don’t want layers,” I say. “You talked me into layers once, and they made me look like a marigold.”

  “Long layers. And we can go together and get our nails done. It’ll be fun.”

  Fun for her because whenever we go out together, all the salespeople and hairdressers crowd around, talking about how we look like sisters. “No, thanks.”

  Mom was a great beauty in college. She was homecoming princess her freshman year, and rode down the street on a float, waving. I’m sure Mom would have come back the next year and been queen.

  But by the next year, she’d managed to hook Dad, and she dropped out of college, anyway, so she never made it to queen.

  When I was a homecoming princess last year at school, she said, “Maybe you’ll be queen next year,” even though the best you can be is a princess, unless you’re a senior. She couldn’t just be happy about that.

  “I like my hair the way it is now,” I say.

  “Sometimes a person needs a change.”

  “I know. That’s why I want to go to Miami High School of the Arts.”

  “Caitlin, that school is in a bad neighborhood in downtown Miami.”

  Translation: She’s afraid there’ll be black kids there.

  “I’m trying to protect you. I wouldn’t feel right sending a sixteen-year-old there.”

  Translation: It will inconvenience her.

  “The other kids are sixteen too. Some are fifteen.”

  I wait for her to say I’m a young sixteen, which translates to, If I’m pretending to be twenty-five, you can’t possibly be sixteen. Wait for it.

  “Yes, but you’re a young sixteen, Caitlin. You’ve been sheltered and haven’t always had the best judgment.”

  “Sheltered?” But I know the translation for that too.

  “You’re going to throw Nick in my face forever, aren’t you?” I say.

  “I’m not throwing anything in your face. I haven’t said anything about that … boy for months. But I do wish we could talk about it. You’re always so secretive. I didn’t even know you were dating someone else.”

  “Who said I am?”

  “Shelley Silverberg said she saw you in a car with some boy in a football jersey.”

  Why do grown-ups always call guys “boys”? “It wasn’t Nick. God, why do you always have to assume—?”

  “Because we don’t talk. That’s why I thought it would be fun to spend a day together, catch up on things. I don’t know anything about your life, Caitlin.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you about guys. The only thing in my life that’s important is the only thing you don’t want to talk about—singing. That’s my life.”

  “You’re in chorus at school. But I don’t see why you should put yourself at risk, going downtown.”

  “Because I’m serious about singing. I want to do it for a living.”

  She sighs. “Singing isn’t a practical career choice, Caitlin. How will you support yourself?”

  “By singing. It’s what I’m good at.”

  “Maybe it’s time to forget chorus and concentrate on your studies.”

  I want to ask her why? Why? So I’ll end up in my thirties, collecting child support like her? No thanks. I want to do something with my life.

  “I guess if it doesn’t work out, I can always sell makeup,” is what I manage.

  I turn and scrape my yogurt cup. It takes everything I have not to turn around, not to do the usual Caitlin thing and try to smooth things over, say I didn’t mean it.

  I did mean it, and some things shouldn’t be smoothed over.

  We stand there a full minute, and I wait for her to leave. But instead, she strokes my hair. “Long layers, Caitlin. Think how pretty it could be.”

  * * *

  Opera_Grrrl’s Online Journal

  * * *

  Subject: Ryan Seacrest is my life raft!

  Date: April 19

  Time: 7:40 a.m.

  Listening 2: A
merican Top 40

  Feeling: Determined

  I am sitting, listening 2 AT40. None of my friends know I do this, but every Sunday morning, I sit for 4 WHOLE HOURS and cram so I can know which songs are popular (inc. the artists’ names) ............... instead of which songs were popular in 1850!

  Problem: I *hate* the Top 40. I don’t even know how they got 2 *be* the Top 40. Even the type of music they play on the University of Miami station would be better, but that’s not what average kids listen 2. And I want 2 be average.

  I just *know* if I went 2 Miami HS of the Arts, I wouldn’t have 2 do this anymore! I could actually *admit* 2 liking opera. I could admit 2 not being average.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 6

  Dude!” Ashley stares at my Wendy’s taco salad as if it just sprouted legs and started to walk off its Styrofoam bed. “You’re not actually going to eat that?”

  It’s Sunday, a week after I got my letter. I still haven’t told anyone but Mom (since that went so well). Dealing with her parentnoia is more than enough without having to endure the Seven Stages of Grief from my friends.

  “Um, I was thinking about it,” I say. Seems like a strange question, considering I ordered and now own said taco salad. “I mean, why not? It’s a salad.”

  “It’s a taco salad,” Peyton says, like that explains everything.

  “So?” I’m missing something here, some Rosetta Stone that will translate what they’re saying into English. I’m guessing I ordered the wrong thing.

  When I used to see Peyton and Ashley around school, I couldn’t tell them apart. Now that we’ve been friends almost a year, it’s still hard—identical flat stomachs in crop tops (but Ashley’s top is plain, while Peyton’s says CHEERLEADERS ARE ATHLETES TOO!), identical noses (though I now know that Peyton’s is real, while Ashley brought a photo of Peyton to the plastic surgeon who corrected her deviated septum), wardrobes, fake Southern accents, and not-quite-identical streaked hair (Ashley’s is redder). Only by spending an insane amount of time with them do you see a difference: Peyton’s mostly harmless. Ashley’s potentially lethal.

  But they’re my friends. When the whole ugly Nick thing happened, I thought they’d take his side since they were really his friends to begin with, and leave me with no one. So when Peyton and Ashley stuck by me, I was grateful. Confused, but grateful.

  “So it’s … never mind, Cat. It looks yummy.” Ashley hands me a packet of sour cream that came with the salad. “Wouldn’t want to forget this.”

  I lift my plastic fork, and Peyton yelps, like she might throw herself on the salad to save me from it. “She means it’s a salad with six hundred seventy calories—two hundred ninety from fat—thirty-two fat grams and eighty-five carbohydrate grams with the sour cream. Without it…”

  She keeps going. I tune out, listening to the elevator music version of a Kelly Clarkson song and trying to remember if Peyton was the one who failed business math.

  “If you eat that,” she finishes, “you can’t eat anything else the rest of the day!”

  I think about the bagel and cream cheese I had only two hours ago and wave off the sour cream Ashley’s holding out. “Too fattening.”

  “You only lose fifty calories and three and a half fat grams by not having sour cream,” Peyton says. “But you lose two hundred and ten calories, nine fat grams, and twenty-nine carb grams if you leave off the chips.”

  But then what would be the point of having a taco salad?

  Ashley squeezes half of her packet of fat-free French dressing onto her spring mix salad (I bet Peyton knows the numbers on that one too), and says, “Oh, leave her alone, Pey. Let her eat whatever she wants.” She glances at my thighs, then her own skeletal ones. “I need to lose ten pounds. I’m so fat.”

  “You’re so not,” I say. She knows she isn’t, but smiles. It’s a game they play, the I’m so fat game, which you can only play it if you’ve never been a fatgirl in your life. I leave the chips and pick at the lettuce. I lift my legs so my thighs won’t sploosh out on the plastic seat. “I wish I had your thighs,” I add, and Ashley nods, all happy.

  “I went shopping yesterday…” Peyton rolls her eyes. “With my mom.”

  “Mallicide!” Ashley clutches Peyton’s arm.

  “Did she at least buy you anything good?” I ask, knowing how her brain works.

  “Negatory. It’s really hard for me to find anything, what with my size and all. I wear a zero, and hardly anything comes in that, only Rampage and a few others.”

  “Rampage is nice,” I say.

  Peyton and Ashley exchange looks.

  I’ve said the wrong thing. I try again. “How about Express?”

  “Too big.”

  “Wet Seal?”

  “Huge.”

  “The Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy?” I’ve bought clothes at all these stores since I got thin. But I’ve never been as thin as Peyton and Ashley.

  “Too big, too big, too big and too cheap. Hell-o? Old Navy’s, like, the cheap version of the Gap.”

  I look at Ashley, who nods, confirming that this is, indeed, the sad case, and adjusts her top. I just read an article that said the crop top is out. Obviously, that was written by some hopeful fatgirl because all my friends are still wearing them.

  “So, what are you wearing to cheerleader tryouts next week?” Peyton asks.

  “Um, I’m not sure I can go,” I say, bracing for the nuclear reaction this will cause.

  Total shocksville.

  “But why?” Ashley asks.

  “I don’t know.” I toy with my salad fork and think. “I’m just not athletic like you guys. I’ll look stupid. And I’m not sure I want to be a cheerleader.”

  “But it’s cheerleading! Everyone wants to be a cheerleader.”

  “Caitlin doesn’t want what everyone wants,” Peyton says, pushing aside her half-eaten salad.

  “Well, what do you want?”

  I have a flash of memory, like a digital photo the second after the snap, of Sean Griffin’s face. I wonder what it would be like to have friends—or even a boyfriend—who actually get me, people who don’t think opera and Oprah are the same thing. I squeeze the sour cream packet onto my salad, trying to figure out how to explain it to them without seeming snobby.

  I can’t. I change the subject. “Did you hear about Brianna Owens and Josh Eisenberg in the luggage compartment of the bus, coming back from the chorus trip?”

  “No!” Ashley says. “That skank!”

  And the subject is changed. I pour out all the details I remember, considering I wasn’t paying attention, and they jabber about how could anyone want Josh Eisenberg’s anything in her mouth, and I relax. They’re happy if they’re trashing someone … Do they trash me if I’m not there? Probably. Doesn’t matter. While they’re doing that, I’m free to think about other things. It’s been happening more and more lately.

  I pick at my taco salad and think Maria Callas, a diva who—this is probably urban legend—sometimes went on a raw-meat diet, because it gave her tapeworms, parasites that helped her lose weight. Yuck. But I understand.

  I’m in the middle of that thought when I hear a voice across the restaurant.

  “Caitlin!”

  I ignore it, thinking it must be some other Caitlin, but it comes closer.

  “Caitlin!” I turn then and see Sean Griffin walking toward us holding a taco salad identical to my own and a cup of water. “I’m right, right? It’s Caitlin?”

  I’ve lost the ability to speak. I nod. Are my friends staring?

  “Mind if I sit?” He does so, in the empty seat by mine. He opens his salad and starts squeezing sour cream onto it. I watch him. He’s wearing loose khakis and a yellow-and-white-striped button-down, which look like they’ve been washed a hundred times. The shirt has a tiny hole under the collar, but the pants are ironed to a crease. He’s poor, I think, trying the thought on for size. I’ve never known anyone poor. Actually, I’ve always been the poorest of my friends, with t
heir massive allowances, houses straight out of MTV Cribs, and vacation places in Marco Island and the Keys.

  I can see his skin through that little hole, and I lean closer, fixated on it, almost wanting to reach out with the tip of my finger and touch it … him.

  I draw back, realizing he’s watching me. In his loose clothes, he looks skinnier than in the unitard. Maybe I’m just seeing him through Peyton and Ashley’s eyes.

  Introduce him to your friends before he thinks you’re stupid.

  Probably too late.

  “Peyton Berounski and Ashley Pettigrew, this is Sean. Sean Griffin.”

  He takes them in, top to bottom. I can actually see his thoughts, like subtitles on televised operas—Sheesh, cheerleaders! I almost laugh. But then he smiles. “Hey, great to meet you.” He turns back to me. “So? You got in, right?”

  I force a smile. “Um, yeah. I mean, sort of. Not really. I mean, yeah, I got in, but I didn’t. I mean, I’m not going.”

  Sean yells, “Not going?” at the same time Peyton and Ashley start in with, “Got in where? Not going where?”

  “Nothing. It’s not important. I mean, I tried out for Miami High School of the Arts, just to see if I’d get in, and I decided I’d rather stay at Key with all my friends than transfer junior year.” I can’t look at Sean. “So you live around here?”