Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  Showing her anguish.

  “I don’t think this scene is about your anguish,” Juno said, glaring at her.

  “Let’s talk about this during a rehearsal you’re actually called for, Autumn,” Rhea suggested diplomatically.

  I was, with great effort, refraining from sarcastic commentary when my eyes met Isaac’s.

  He smirked.

  My lips twitched, and I had to look away to keep from laughing.

  Later, when Juno had taken off to hang out with the Tin Man and the Lion (Toff was going to be jealous), Isaac found me backstage near the props table.

  “I have it,” he said, coming up beside me. “Forget the play that’s written; we need a duel. A Glinda–Wicked Witch of the West duel. In the sky above the Emerald City.”

  I covered my mouth, trying not to laugh.

  “Or they could do it in a mud-wrestling pit,” he added, grinning.

  I snorted. “Perv.”

  “Exactly. They’ll be lining up to ref,” he said. “We’ll sell a ton of tickets. But seriously, Autumn—”

  “Shh.”

  “Don’t worry; she’s gone and Rhea’s packing up. And Rhea told me she’s going to ask her to stop coming to rehearsals she’s not called for.”

  “Well, it is getting irritating, the way she tells everyone else when they’ve missed their cue or screwed up their blocking,” I grumbled. She was hovering around Isaac nonstop, looking over his shoulder at his notes, and acting like she owned him. I could tell he felt awkward about it too. “That stuff is supposed to be your job.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  “Why should you be sorry? She’s the one doing it.”

  “I just . . . I guess you’re right. But I should probably tell her to . . . tell her not to . . .” He looked down, shrugged. “I’m not great at . . . I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

  I picked up Glinda’s wand (a fancy one covered in glitter— Autumn was so method, she’d made it herself) and twirled it around. “She just needs to put her energy into something else. She should get to work on the companion play: Glinda’s Anguish.”

  Isaac snorted with laughter. “Or we could just change it so that she plays all the other parts—Oz, Wicked Witch of the West, everything.”

  I spun the wand like a baton and chuckled, then stopped abruptly and looked at him.

  “Are you two still friends?”

  “Oh. Um.” His own amusement disappeared as fast as mine had, and he actually blushed. “Yeah, I . . . We are. But, um, not hanging out so much lately . . .”

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be.”

  “I’m a jerk for talking about her like this, though. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “Look, she’s being a legitimate pain in the ass, Isaac. And I have to admit, she’s always rubbed me the wrong way without even trying. Her perfection is irritating. Her earnestness is irritating. And now, in these rehearsals, she’s making me crazy. At the same time, it’s not like she’s evil. And I just . . .”

  “Don’t want either of us to turn into someone who’d lock somebody in a closet during lunchtime?” he said.

  I gaped at how close he’d come to what I’d been thinking.

  “It’s a fine line,” he said. “Right?”

  “Hey, we’re just talking. Venting our frustrations. And I’m an equal participant here, so, you know, don’t take me too seriously.”

  “I always take you seriously, Ingrid.”

  “Well, complaining about Autumn comes naturally to me. But also? In no way could you become that.”

  “You say that,” he said, gazing steadily at me. “But it’s human nature, Ingrid. Lord of the Flies, The Road, any dystopian novel you pick up, survival of the fittest. People get out of civilization, they’re not so nice. They turn into animals.”

  “Or they find friends, band together,” I said. “Like Dorothy.”

  “Oz is a fairy tale.”

  “Maybe we need more fairy tales.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But how about we not talk about Autumn,” I suggested.

  “Yes,” he said, and exhaled forcefully. “Let’s not.”

  “We’ll talk about something else.”

  “Agreed.”

  And then there was a pause in which we both tried to figure out what to say next.

  “Listen, actually . . .” he said, finally. “I know we’re past it, but . . . I keep wanting to say I’m sorry about how things . . . went . . . between us. You know, when I first got here.”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “It’s fine. I’m sorry too.”

  “Regardless, I just wanted to officially say it,” he said, drawing himself up as if for a formal speech of some kind. “I am truly remorseful.”

  I was struck in that moment, with the formality and the mussed hair and the sincerity in those big eyes of his, by the fact that he was adorable. And because there was apparently zero filter between my brain and my mouth right then, I burst out with, “Remorseful? Isaac, you are the cutest,” and then I stood on my tiptoes and hugged him.

  To my surprise, Isaac proceeded to turn a shade of pink that made him even cuter. Then he cleared his throat, cleared it again, coughed, muttered something about making sure I was on time for rehearsals—I had never been late so far—and bolted.

  “Do boys not like being told they’re cute?” I said to Juno on the way to rehearsal a couple of days later.

  She turned to study me, surprised. “You told someone he was cute?”

  “Yeah. Just. Not cute-cute, just cute.”

  “Like stuffed-animal cute? Is that how you said it?”

  “I dunno. Kind of. And now he seems, like, offended.”

  “Who’d you say it to?”

  I looked around, lowered my voice. “Isaac.”

  “Ahhh,” she said.

  “What?”

  “He is cute.”

  “Not like that.”

  “Really. Well, what makes you think he didn’t like it?”

  “He stopped talking to me.”

  “I didn’t know he’d actually started talking to you. You know, more than normal. I didn’t know you were even friends, particularly.”

  “Yeah. I think we were. Are. I don’t know.”

  “Okay, you better give me the context. I am the boy expert of the two of us, as you know.”

  I told her. Not the whole story, of course, just the part where he was being sweet and it occurred to me that he was adorable and I called him cute.

  “And then you hugged him like a teddy bear?” she asked, studying me closely.

  I nodded.

  “Well, see, teddy bears don’t have penises,” Juno said.

  “Juno!”

  “No, listen: maybe he found it emasculating.”

  “Shhh. No.”

  “That, or he just liked it too much.”

  “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “Really . . . ? Because you? Are thinking about it way too much for it to be nothing.”

  “Crap. You have a point.”

  “Trust me, it all comes down to the penis. He has one. You don’t. You either acknowledge that or you don’t. You’re not friends, you’re just friends, or you’re something else. Which is pretty interesting to me, considering I’ve never seen you with a crush on anyone.”

  “I didn’t say I—”

  She bulldozed right over me. “The only one of those options that doesn’t involve a decision about you both being heterosexual—I assume—and having different body parts . . . is the not-friends option. You wanna not be friends?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then. Deal with the penis.”

  “Oh my God.”

  I was half an hour early for the stumble-through, which is exa
ctly what it sounds like—the first attempt to get all the way through (even if stumbling) the play. I had claimed a sort of walkway in the wings backstage; it was stage right, away from the props table, and long enough for me to be able to pace back and forth in either direction.

  With opening night approaching fast, tension at home, and Isaac avoiding me as much as possible, I was finding the need to pace often.

  “Hey.”

  I half shrieked, stopping once I realized it was Isaac.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’m just jumpy. Uh, so . . . what’s up?”

  “I . . . have some notes for you,” he said. “Blocking notes.”

  “Oh, okay.” I stood up, grabbed my script and a pencil from the floor, and stood waiting.

  Isaac had the script with him at all times, in a big book. It had the schedule, the cast and crew contact info, all the blocking and lighting calls and so on, and it was where he wrote his notes for the actors. He looked down at his arms, as if noticing for the first time that he didn’t have it.

  “Oh . . . um . . .” he fumbled, then looked up at me, meeting my gaze for the first time since the hugging incident. “Guess what. I lied. I don’t have any notes. You’re fine. Exceptional, in fact.”

  “Ah . . . thanks,” I said, closing my script and hugging it to my chest. “But . . .”

  “But what am I doing here pretending to have notes for you and then saying I don’t?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “It could be the wrong thing,” he said, then took a deep breath and blew it out. “And if it’s the wrong thing, then definitely I should wait until the show is over. And considering our history, it might really be the wrong thing or feel too complicated and in that case, before or after or during the show, maybe I’ll regret it. At the same time, I want to erase the thing that happened before, or at least replace it with something better, and really almost anything would be better, in which case maybe it would be good even if it wasn’t good, per se, because it would be better than terrible, and then we could laugh about it . . . .”

  “Isaac, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “Ingrid . . . I can’t stop thinking about—and maybe I’ll regret it, but I think I’d regret it more if I didn’t try, so . . .”

  At this point, based on the high level of awkwardness and my frenzied heart rate and my own confusion, I figured I had some idea of where he was going with this, and I would have loved to help him out, but I was paralyzed, and hearing Juno’s voice saying, Penis, penis, penisssss.

  “Ingrid . . .”

  “Yes?” I croaked.

  “What I’m trying to say is that it’s gotten awkward between us—and I think that this is because of . . . an unanswered question that’s arisen. . . .”

  Penis . . .

  “Uh, so to speak—”

  “Oh my God, Isaac—”

  “—between us.”

  Penis, penis . . .

  Oh my God.

  At this point my entire body must have been blushing, and I felt I might, at any moment, break into totally inappropriate and hysterical laughter. Or possibly tears. And then I would die on the spot.

  “I thought it might help, um, resolve the situation . . .” Isaac said, looking none too comfortable himself, “if I, ahem . . .”

  “Yes . . . ?”

  “If I kissed you.”

  “You think that would resolve the situation . . . ?” I parroted, incapable of anything else.

  “If I kissed you. Yes,” he said, dead serious. “How do you feel about that? What do you think?”

  “How I feel is . . . like I’m going to pass out from embarrassment, Isaac.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And what I think is,” I said, recovering somewhat now that it was out in the open. “Two things. One: you talk too much sometimes.”

  “That’s definitely true. I’m so sorry; it’s just that I—wait, what’s the second thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s what I said,” I said, holding his gaze. “The second thing is, yes, I think you should kiss me.”

  “Okay, good,” he said, nodding vigorously.

  “And third: thank God that’s what you said—I was afraid you were going to say we should have sex,” I blurted out.

  “Sex?”

  “I mean, not that that’s . . . uh, permanently out of the question, but ah, it would be a rather big . . . Oh, I should just not talk at all. Forget I said it.”

  At this he threw his head back and laughed.

  Meanwhile, I was one huge head-to-toe body of steaming mortification.

  “How about we save sex for future awkward conversations?” he said.

  “Agreed!”

  “Phew.”

  “So . . . did you mean now?” I finally asked when he didn’t move.

  “Sure. Now-ish,” he said.

  “In that case we need, um . . .”

  “Closer proximity?” he said, and took a step.

  “Yeah, that,” I said. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  There was still a significant gap between us.

  “All right then,” he said, “because—”

  “Isaac! Seriously? Shut up.”

  “I’m not the only who keeps stalling us by talking,” he said, then came forward, took my script away from me and placed it gently on the floor, and then put his hands on my shoulders.

  “Maybe we should . . . count to three?” I suggested.

  “Good idea. You start.”

  “Why do I have to start?”

  “Why do you have to argue about it? It was your idea!” he said. “Now you’re stalling again. You count, I’ll kiss.”

  “Okay, fine. One . . .”

  I looked up at him, saw his Adam’s apple bob down and then back up as he swallowed.

  “Two . . .”

  Fighting nerve-induced paralysis, I took a half step forward.

  “Th—”

  I didn’t get through three.

  And our lack of collective experience wasn’t a problem.

  But I am not sure anyone has ever stumbled through a stumble-through like I did after that.

  KILLER

  (Peak Wilderness, Day Twelve)

  Day Twelve I wake with my shin aching, and all my muscles so sore, I can barely move.

  “Well, it’s easy to forget,” Bonnie points out when I groan about it, “that in addition to everything that happened last night, we walked through a mud pit yesterday. That uses different muscles.”

  I nod in agreement with her, but what’s hard to explain is how my insides, my emotions, feel the same—overused, sore, sluggish. Every day out here is like a lifetime, in terms of what we’re going through, and it’s all a bit much.

  I don’t feel like crying; I feel like sleeping.

  But I’m leader again, so there’s no chance of that happening. And hey, maybe today is the magical day I get us to camp early and nothing messes up our free time.

  Tavik is directly behind me again on the trail, and twenty minutes in, when everyone has spread out a bit, he starts asking me questions, starting with, “So, you were suicidal? Is that what’s wrong with you?”

  “What?” I whirl around to stare at him, and almost shout, “No!”

  “Don’t get mad. You’re the one who said it last night—that you were thinking about death, and all that.”

  “I would never,” I snap. “Thinking about death and pondering the meaning and potential ease of it . . . are not the same as being suicidal. I thought about it for a minute, about what it would be like, but I wasn’t going to do it. God. And everyone wo
nders why I don’t want to talk.”

  “Hey, I believe you,” he says. “I mean, you don’t seem the type. But on the other hand, you’ve spent a lotta days out here bawling your eyes out.”

  “Crying a bit,” I correct him, and then turn and start walking again.

  “All right, crying a bit, all the time.”

  “I’m not in the mood for this, Tavik,” I say. “Can we change the subject?”

  “Sure,” he says, and goes on to ask more questions.

  Lots of questions.

  They’re just the usual questions now, the kind people ask when they don’t know each other well. But for Tavik I suspect this isn’t “usual.” He fires questions, listens with an almost palpable hunger, follows up with more questions that show he’s been paying close attention to my responses, all of it giving the impression of his being truly and avidly curious.

  I’m not in the habit of divulging swaths of information about myself, but I somehow end up launching into the story of my life, from the beginning . . . which alarms me enough that after the first break, when he shows no sign of getting bored with talking to me, I try to shift the focus to him.

  I haven’t asked Tavik a lot of questions. Neither has anyone else, aside from Bonnie and Pat, who’ve gotten almost nowhere. To me, “Gee, how did you end up in jail?” seems like an awkward place to start, and “Where did you grow up?” seems like just a cloaked way of asking, “How did you end up in jail?” Also there is his abrasiveness—still present—and the feeling that he’s always mocking me, which has admittedly lessened.

  “So . . . you seem to have really calmed down,” I say as an opening gambit.

  “You didn’t think I was calm?” he asks.

  “Maybe you finally got enough sky?”

  “Head out of my ass.”

  “Same thing, maybe.”

  He chuckles.

  “What, ah, what did you do before? Before your . . . incarceration, I mean.”

  “I was running tables at the casino. And in my basement. Illegal ones.”

  “Ah. Is that . . .” Crap, here I am at the question, and I can just feel it, that he knows I’ve been trying not to ask, and knows I’ve been wondering.