by Katie Henry
I spent so much time wanting people to like me, I never stopped to consider if I liked myself. As if I didn’t matter at all, the actual me. Only the version of me someone else could see. Or not see, in the case of the front office receptionist, who doesn’t even look up from lunch as I breeze past her window and to the front door.
I’ve never ditched school before. My heart is pounding and my thoughts are lurching back and forth, because I can’t believe I’m about to just walk out, I can’t believe I said all those things to Jack, I can’t believe I told Alex I was done, I can’t, I can’t—
I can’t name what I feel, because I’m feeling absolutely everything, all at once. I’m furious and anxious and victorious and searching so hard for a word that can include them all. The way a body can. And when I push open the front door and blink into a high noon, bright and warm, I think I’ve found it.
When I step into the light, I feel like new.
Chapter 22
THE WALK HOME does nothing to calm me down, despite how long it is. With every step, I try to shake out all the adrenaline coursing through my body, shake off the knots in my shoulders, the pounding in my chest, and the indescribable lightness in my brain. Like I could take on the entire world. Or pass out in the middle of Michigan Ave. It’s a toss-up.
When I get back to my building, I go straight up to the apartment, ignoring Norman the Doorman’s raised eyebrows. I’m not worried. He’s not going to tell my parents I skipped. There’s a doorman code of silence.
When I get into my quiet, empty apartment, I go straight to my room, green and brimming with life and exactly how I want it. I sit on my bed, facing away from the door and where I came. Then I pull out the yellow notebook, open to the next blank page, and start writing a brand-new set. One I’m going to come up with by myself and speak into a mic, without worrying if anyone will like it. New words, all my own.
I write until my hands cramp, barely noticing the sun dipping in the sky outside my window. I should be getting dressed for the audition tonight. I should be practicing the set I have, not writing an entirely new one I won’t even perform today. But that doesn’t matter, nothing matters except these new sentences, messy and weird and half crossed out, but all mine.
It seems like hours later—it is hours later—when the door flings open behind me. I scramble to my feet, racking my brain for some lie to tell Dad about where I’m going tonight, but when I turn around, it’s not my dad. Or my mom.
It’s Alex.
He’s standing there, one hand on my doorknob, halfway into my room, and all the way furious.
“Who let you up here?” I ask, keeping the backs of my knees pressed into the side of the bed, shielding my notebook.
“Who do you think?” he asks, barreling all the way into the room now. “The doorman.”
“He should have buzzed the apartment first.”
“Why? He knows I’m your boyfriend.”
I hate the way he says that word. Boyfriend. I used to love the way it sounded, especially when he said it. It felt like a real-life kind of word, an adult kind of word, like “promotion” or “home decor” or “investment banking.” But now it feels like a threatening flood, or slowly tightening vines, or a Venus flytrap. The way he says it, it feels like a noose.
“Are you still?” I fold my arms across my chest. “You change your mind a lot lately.”
He clenches his jaw. “I knew it. I knew that’s what this was all about.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What am I—” He looks around the room, as if searching for an audience to agree with him. “Today at lunch! Jack!”
I’d almost forgotten Alex was even there. “Oh.”
“Oh,” he repeats. “Yeah. What, did you do something else to embarrass me today?”
“That wasn’t about you. He was making fun of Naomi.”
“So? Everyone makes fun of Naomi.”
“I don’t think Jack will anymore.”
“You’ve lost it,” Alex declares. “You have lost your fucking mind.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “I thought so, too, but all the other cult members said I’m fine.”
“What?”
“It’s a joke.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not really looking for notes at this stage.”
Alex shakes his head. “Do you get it at all?” he asks. “Do you get how that makes me look?”
“I don’t know, Alex,” I say. “You look about the same to me.”
“Huh?”
“Again. It’s a joke.”
“Stop making jokes!” he shouts. “This is serious. Everyone heard you. Everyone’s going to think I can’t—”
“What?” I ask. “Control me?”
He doesn’t say anything, but his expression answers for me. He turns away.
“Good,” I say. “I hope that’s exactly what they think. Because it’s true. You can’t.”
That makes him spin around on me.
“We’re going to find Jack,” he declares. “And you’re apologizing.” He makes a grab for my arm, but I take a step back.
“Oh, fuck that.”
“Excuse me?”
“Fuck that,” I say again. “Two syllables. Pretty simple.”
Alex stares at me.
“We’re going,” he says.
“You can go wherever the hell you want.”
“Isabel.”
“Including actual literal hell, if you’re feeling that.”
“Isabel!”
“Lots of cool people to hang out with there, like Hitler and Stalin and, in about sixty years, Jack—”
Then he really does grab me. “Come on.”
“Let go,” I order him. He doesn’t. He pulls but with only half his strength, like he actually thinks I’ll give in. I yank back, as hard as I can. “Alex. Let. Go.”
“Fine!” He releases my arm and swings his own arms wide, palms out, an exaggerated demonstration of not touching me. “You’re being so ridiculous!” Another wide, heavy swing of his arms, and his right hand sweeps across my dresser, knocking to the floor makeup and earrings and—
My orchid.
It’s like I watch it in slow motion as the whole thing, pot and flower, topples off the dresser and crashes to pieces on the hardwood. Forgetting all about Alex, and our fight, and the fact he just grabbed me like that, I rush right past him, over to the smashed pot and drop down to my knees. I can hear him, behind me, taking a few steps back.
“What’s wrong with you?” I throw over my shoulder at him.
“It was an accident,” he says. “God.”
For a split second, I accept that. It was an accident, of course it was, he never pays attention to his surroundings when he’s mad. He’s broken things before, or almost has. Except—it’s weird. The things he breaks and the things he doesn’t. He threw my bag that day in his room, and he didn’t care if anything in there was breakable. He tried to grab my phone, the night on the train platform, and he didn’t care if he broke that, either. But then I think about how careful he is with his own things. The heavy-duty screen protector on his phone. All his favorite movies stored carefully in a leather DVD case.
He only ever broke the things that were mine.
“Look at what you did!” I gesture to the mess splayed out on the floor. “You ruined it. You ruin everything.”
“It’s just a stupid plant!”
“You’re just a stupid plant!” I shout back, not caring it makes absolutely no sense.
He has the audacity to roll his eyes. “Isabel.”
“We’re done,” I say, loud and solid, like I can make each word crash to the floor, the thud reverberating into his body. Something he can’t ignore. Something he can’t talk over. “I can’t do this to myself anymore. I can’t let you do this to me anymore. Get out.”
“Because you knocked over a plant and had a meltdown?”
I think: You knocked over the plant!
&n
bsp; I think: Even now, even with the smallest thing, you’re trying to make me doubt myself.
He lied to me all the time. And that’s the thing about a lie: the more times you hear it, the realer it seems. He lied to me about who I was, and he did it so often I thought it must be the truth. That’s not something I did. That’s something he did. I’m not responsible for someone else’s lies. I’m only responsible for believing him. And I think I can forgive myself for that.
“Not because of the plant,” I tell him. “Because you’ve tried to make my life smaller and smaller, until you were the only thing in it. Too bad. It didn’t work. The world is giant and scary and amazing and—I don’t want you in mine, anymore.”
“You’ll change your mind,” he says. “Three days and you’ll come crawling back—”
“I’m not you. When I say something, I actually mean it.”
“Isabel—”
I push past him and stalk to the entryway. He follows on my heels, and when I stop right outside the door, he stops, too. I point to it.
“Get out,” I order him. “Get out of my room, get out of my building, get out of my fucking life.”
It sounds odd coming out of my mouth. Not quite real. Like something from a movie, though they never make this kind of movie. They skip all the messy parts in between, all the doubt and the mistakes and the return, another return, every terrible return. They sail right over it to the inevitable showdown, then skip ahead to show her happy and safe. As if that is the end.
“Or what?” He takes a step toward me. “Or what, Isabel?”
I don’t move back. Don’t concede ground. Instead, I reach my hand to my left, to the intercom, and hover a finger over one of the buttons. “Then I press the emergency call button and the security guy carries you out.”
We don’t have an emergency call button. Or a security guard. But from the way Alex blinks and stops in his tracks, he believes the bluff. Does it make me weak, needing the lie of someone stronger than I am to save me? Maybe it does. I don’t think I care. I’ve spent so much time worrying about being weak. About people seeing that weakness. Well, what if it’s true? What if it’s true and so what if it’s true?
No matter what choices I made, or didn’t make, I never deserved what Alex put me through.
I wish I’d left earlier. I’m leaving now.
I might not be strong like my mom, or brave like Mo. But maybe there’s more than one way to be strong. And maybe I’m brave like me.
I get to be brave and scared and wrong and right and a million other things, in a million different moments, because this is not a movie, so the story gets to go on. Complicated and messy and limitless as it is. As I am.
For a long and terrifying moment, Alex just stands there, and I have no idea what he’ll do. But finally, self-preservation wins against pride. He spins on his heel and leaves, slamming the front door behind him. For once, I don’t wince at the sound. I take a breath in, three seconds. I let it out, three seconds. Just like Mo taught me. Then I walk back to my room, sink down onto the carpet, and prepare myself for a mutilated plant.
My carefully chosen planting pot is broken and dirt is smeared deep into my pink rug from Alex’s large, heavy footprints, which track all the way out the door. But now that I look closer, it doesn’t look like the stems got snapped or the roots unlaced themselves.
I run into the kitchen and find the next closest thing in size, a green ceramic bowl my mom would usually use for cut watermelon in the summer. I scoop the whole mess into my arms—flower, pot, dirt, and all—and carefully deposit it in the bowl.
It’s 4:15. I’m supposed to meet everyone at the Loyola campus to sign up for audition slots, but maybe I shouldn’t go. There are endless gardening and horticulture blogs I could consult, message boards and internet groups I could lurk in, to make sure the orchid lives. Do I even want it to live? If it does, will it always remind me of the person who bought it, and broke it, and nearly broke me?
Maybe it isn’t up to me, whether it lives or dies. The only life I’m in control of is mine. Right now, even as I’m covered in dirt, hot adrenaline still coursing through my arms and legs, I feel like it’s true, finally. I have a life. A real one. And I’m allowed to live it. Just the way I want to.
This orchid will bloom, or it won’t. It will live, or it won’t. It might curl up and die. Or it might thrive.
I kick off my dirt-covered shoes for a cleaner pair, but I don’t have time to change my outfit. It’s fine. That stage has seen bigger disasters than me, by far. My coat on my back, my gloves in my pocket, and my hand on the door, I take one last look at the orchid on my desk. From a distance, it doesn’t look like much.
But it seems like a survivor.
“Are there still slots?” I ask the girl at the audition check-in table. She raises her eyebrows, and I can imagine what I must look like. I tried the bus first, but traffic was so bad I got out halfway and ran the rest of the way here. I might have burst a lung, but I made it before the start time.
“A couple,” she says, pushing the clipboard toward me.
I scribble down my name in the only blank slot I see.
“Um, you know we’re starting in like two minutes—”
“Yeah, I know, thanks!” I wave to her and rush away before she can remember she was supposed to ask for my school ID.
“Wow, you cut it close,” Will says when I find him in the mass of waiting auditionees. Jonah’s next to him, flipping through his flash cards. Just seeing the two of them makes me relax, for the first time in an hour. I’m here; I’m signed up. I’m also panting, adrenaline-shocked, and sweating in places I did not know I could sweat.
“If they haven’t started,” I reply, “I’m not late.”
“No, actually, both those things can be true,” Jonah tells me as I strip off my coat and sweater. “Maybe save the striptease for the judges?”
I flash him a smile, then bend down to retie my unlaced boot. “Don’t worry, Jonah, I’d never steal your act.”
“Ha.”
“Where’s Mo?” I ask, but when I straighten back up, she’s right in front of me. And my mouth drops open before I can stop myself, because she looks . . . terrible. Her eyes are red, her hair’s a mess—even her bow tie is a little askew. She’s clutching a tissue to her nose like it’s the only thing keeping her brain from leaking out through her nostrils.
“Oh my God,” I say to her. “Are you okay?”
“I hab a code,” Mo says, still with the tissue to her nose.
“What?”
“She has a cold,” Will translates. “A bad one.”
I wince. “Oh, Mo, really?”
She removes the tissue. “No, I’m talking like this for fun.”
“You sound like you’re underwater,” Jonah says. “Did you take anything for it?”
“I took the whole fucking pharmacy,” she says. Then sneezes. Twice.
God, this just isn’t fair. I can’t believe this is happening to Mo right before the showcase auditions. Mom always told me there’s no such thing as luck; you win when you work for it. But in stand-up, so much depends on chance. You could get a crowd that isn’t on your side. You could tell the wrong joke to the wrong person. Or you could get horribly sick on the most important day of the year.
Jonah nudges me. “Izzy.”
“What?”
“She’s saying your name.”
I turn in the direction he’s looking and see the check-in girl walking through the crowd. “Izzy V.?” She catches my eye. “That’s you, right?”
“Yeah,” I say, my brain already spinning through fifteen different excuses for why I don’t have a student ID.
But then all she says is: “Okay, come on. You’re up.”
I balk. “Wait. First?”
“Uh.” She turns the clipboard around so I can see my name at the very top. “Yes?”
I whirl back around to Jonah and Will. “Switch with me,” I whisper desperately. “Someone switch with m
e. I didn’t mean to choose first, it was the only slot—”
“Hell”—Mo blows her nose—“no.”
“But I didn’t mean to choose first. It just was the last slot—”
Jonah grabs my shoulders and spins me back around. “Well then, the last shall be the first, Izzy. Break a leg.”
The door is heavy, and it slams behind me when I enter the room. It’s tiny—just a meeting room, or maybe someplace you can reserve for your study group. The whole thing is a nightmare of beige, from the carpet to the walls to the long table the three judges are sitting behind. Staring at me. Waiting.
“Hi,” I say, looking from male face to male face and wondering if they chose men who looked so much alike on purpose. Like they pumped them out of a Middle-Aged Comedy Man factory with brown hair, glasses, and plaid button-downs so I wouldn’t get distracted.
“Hey,” the guy in the center chair says. “First up. Welcome. So, what’s your name?”
I take another couple steps into the room. “Izzy V.”
Two of them write that down in the notebooks in front of them, but the one on the end quips, “Just the initial? Did they give you that in kindergarten and you stuck with it?”
I don’t know if this is part of the audition, but if it’s a challenge, I’ll take it. “No, actually, the US Marshals did. Witness protection. Can’t be too careful.”
No one laughs, but the one in the center smiles. He gestures to the empty space right in front of him, and I go to stand in it.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he says.
So I start. And it’s weird. This room is so bright and quiet, completely different from the noisy bars and dark clubs I’m used to. But then, I think, maybe that’s the beauty of this. No matter how many times I get up with this set, every time will be different. Same words. Half the time, on the same stage. But it will never be exactly the same, not once.