You in Five Acts

by Una LaMarche

  Valentine’s Day was a landmine. I didn’t see you all morning but couldn’t resist sending a text: Do you think Hallmark knows how gross-looking real hearts are? [wink]. Then, when I showed up at the fountain for lunch, you were holding a gigantic bouquet of roses and wearing a necklace Ethan had gotten you, a little heart pendant with cute penmanship spelling out the words FUCK OFF.

  “It’s what you’ve been telling me for years,” he said with a self-satisfied grin, but instead of rolling your eyes like you usually did, you actually hopped up and kissed him on the cheek. I felt like someone had sucker punched me; I hadn’t really believed you were dating him until that second, and suddenly it was right in my face. FUCK OFF.

  Dad says that when I was a kid and something didn’t go the way I wanted it to, I’d cross my arms defiantly and scream that the day was ruined. Of course it was bullshit, and the next second I’d be playing Legos and popping fruit snacks like it never happened. But that day, Valentine’s Day? That was ruined. I was a dick to everyone all afternoon. I took the message of the necklace literally. I blew off rehearsal, bought some weed from a guy in my English class, and went home to get baked. It felt great, not feeling anything. For once I didn’t wake up when your reply came at 3:46 A.M.: an animated gif of Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, sitting on the windowsill, one foot in her apartment and one on the fire escape, strumming her guitar. Wherever you’re going, the text on the photo said, I’m going your way.

  After that things went back to normal, normal being a total mindfuck. Our scene work was better than ever, off the charts.

  I felt bad that I was going to Staten Island because Ethan was so excited about it, and because I was basically just using it as a recon mission to see if I needed to feel bad about being infatuated with you and to find out if he had seen you naked. But apparently there was a guest bedroom, with a real mattress and (presumably) no old-man smell, so at least, I told myself, that was something.

  • • •

  I’d imagined that the boat ride might be kind of cool—the big city dwindling down to a speck in the distance, Lady Liberty looming large—but when we got there at 5:30 the ferry terminal was completely mobbed, so much so that I wondered briefly, as I filed onto the boat behind him, pressed so tight against his back by the crowd that some of his hair got in my mouth, if Ethan was giving me some kind of method lesson for the play about the immigrant experience.

  “At rush hour on a Friday, it’s worse than the subway!” Ethan shouted.

  We stumbled to the western side of the boat, where we stood shoulder to shoulder with businessmen in big-shouldered wool coats holding sloshing cups of foamy beer in their hands.

  “I can’t believe you do this every day, man,” I said.

  “I don’t,” Ethan said, rubbing his hands together. “I take a chartered bus.”

  “Then why the hell—”

  “The experience!” he said. “This is an experience. The bus is just a bus.”

  He was leaning out and grinning so aggressively that I was afraid he’d yell, “I’m the king of the world!” when we started to move, but instead he pointed to a tiered building on the east side of the skyline and told me that his mom used to work as a secretary there. “Just like in Working Girl,” he said proudly. I’d been a decade off on his movie reference.

  The ride was twenty-five minutes, but cold enough that we didn’t talk much. Ethan seemed genuinely psyched to have me over, which was kind of endearing, although some of the stuff he said (“My dad’s really old. Most people think he’s my grandfather, but he’s not!” or “I have the sickest Blu-Ray set-up. There’s a 90-inch HD TV, so you can watch Citizen Kane and see the outline of Orson Welles’s bald cap.”) still made me nervous. From the boat, Staten Island looked flat and desolate, kind of lonely. It was weird to think that New York City had this other big island in it that most people barely even noticed.

  • • •

  Ethan’s dad did look really old when he met us at the ferry terminal. He was wearing a plaid golf cap and had a transistor radio around his neck, like someone carrying a giant boombox but even less cool. He was short like Ethan but much thicker, with tan skin and white hair, and he squeezed my hand so hard when we shook that my knuckles cracked.

  “We’re so happy to meet one of Ethan’s Janus friends,” he said as we lobbed our bags into the trunk of his sweet Mercedes. Only instead of Ethan it sounded like Eh-tahn.

  “Ignore the Russkie accent,” Ethan said.

  “Ignore my impolite son, Dah-veed,” Mr. Entsky said. He motioned for me to get in the front seat.

  “This is a great car,” I said, running my fingers over the dash. I instantly missed my old Saab—well, Mom’s old Saab that had been mine for a brief but memorable period during which I completely underappreciated it, ignorant as I was to the coming vehicular famine.

  “Thank you,” he said, pulling out of the labyrinthine parking lot into traffic. “So, tell me, how is my son’s play?”

  “You . . . haven’t read it?” I asked, stalling.

  “I’ve read it, I just want to know what you think.” I saw him wink at Ethan in the rearview mirror.

  “Dad,” Ethan groaned.

  “I think it’s really strong,” I lied. “Really interesting and . . . layered.” Thanks to years of getting rejection phone calls from Daphne, I was a pro at using vague buzzwords that sounded good but actually meant nothing.

  “Well,” Ethan said, grinning down into his lap, “I mean, I wrote it, but you guys are bringing it to life. Everything’s coming together. I actually think with a few tweaks, I can take it all the way.”

  “All the way?” I asked.

  “Broadway!” Ethan said. “It’s nothing but revivals now, and the original stuff is hack work.”

  “He wants his name in lights,” Mr. Entsky said, smiling, and I just nodded and tried to look like I was really into the passing scenery. I wondered if he knew that Boroughed Trouble was a Frankenstein monster made of characters and scenes borrowed from other playwrights. There was even an Italian immigrant character named Rodolpho in A View from the Bridge. Ethan hadn’t even bothered to steal stealthily.

  “I sent the script to a few agents,” Ethan said. “And just so you know, dude, I’m inviting some VIPs to the performance. Stephen Karam, Tracy Letts, Lin-Manuel Miranda . . .” Ethan listed them casually, like they were old friends. But I let him have his fantasy. If anything, it gave me hope. If he was that deluded about the play, then maybe he was deluded about you, too. Maybe it really was all one-sided.

  “You know, it was your movie that inspired him to be an actor,” Mr. Entsky said as we turned onto a broad, tree-lined street.

  “Oh,” I said, gritting my teeth—my automatic nervous system response to anyone bringing up my one-hit wonder.

  “Dad, come on,” Ethan said, annoyed. “You know that’s not true. It was the regional tour of Newsies. And it doesn’t matter anyway, since I’m not an actor anymore.”

  “No, no, I remember it,” Mr. Entsky said. “We took you to see it and by the end, when the little boy died, you and your mother were both crying, and afterward you started begging us to take you on auditions.” He glanced over at me for a reaction and I tried to arrange my face in a way that I hoped would read as flattered. Inwardly, though, I was cringing. Why had I thought that going to Ethan’s would be anything other than horribly awkward? Why hadn’t I just said no like everyone else and spent the night lying in bed with my phone, waiting pathetically for you to text?

  As if on cue, my phone vibrated in my coat pocket.

  Regretting it yet? you’d written, with a grimacing emoji.

  You have no idea, I typed back, with a wink.

  • • •

  Ethan’s house was insane, not in the floor-to-ceiling photo shrine way of a secret serial killer, but in the columns-in-the-front, pool-in-the-back way of
a secret rich kid. It looked more like the houses I was used to seeing in L.A., set back from the street, with a sprawling lawn and a circular driveway. His mom, a New Yawk–accented redhead who looked tired but significantly younger than her husband, met us at the front door and immediately ushered us into the kitchen, where she’d laid out bowls of candy and chips alongside trays of cheese and salami and cut-up vegetables arranged in rainbows.

  “You can each have a beer if you want,” she said, leaning against the pristine counter with a smile. “And Dave, let me know what you like on your pizza.”

  “Can we take this stuff downstairs?” Ethan asked, grabbing a fistful of M&M’s. “I want to show Dave the basement.”

  I reached for the offered beer, figuring I’d need it to dull my jealousy. Ethan had you and his own wing of a mansion? It was like he was fucking Batman.

  “Come on,” Mrs. Entsky—“call me Audrey”—said, with a playful frown. “I put this stuff out as bait to keep you up in the sunlight with the rest of the humans for a few minutes. Humor me.”

  “Dad embarrassed me enough in the car,” Ethan said, shoveling some pretzels into his mouth.

  “Well, at least tell me what you talked about,” she said. “What’s the latest at school? How’s the play going?” Her eyes lit up and she turned to me. “Dave, do you know Liv?”

  “Mom!” Ethan said sharply.

  “I’ve been hearing about her since Day One,” Mrs. Entsky beamed. “Ethan’s been smitten with her from when he was—” she lowered her hand to waist height “—and now they’re together. I mean have you ever heard of a sweeter thing?”

  “Nope.” I hung my head, staring into my beer.

  “You know I’ve never met her,” Mrs. Entsky said. “I almost thought he made her up.”

  “Mom,” Ethan growled again. “This is exactly why I want to take Dave downstairs, you sound like a drunk morning talk show host.”

  “If you’re going to insult me you can make your own food,” she snapped. “And since when do you not want to talk about her?” She turned to me. “I swear, he wants to sit here and chat like we’re girlfriends most of the time.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mom,” Ethan said. “OK, I’m sorry. But can we please just go? Dave and I need to work on his new scene.”

  Great, I thought miserably. The only thing that sounded worse than gossiping with Ethan’s mom about you—or watching another old movie while he provided a steady stream of commentary—was learning a new scene. I was only interested in the play if you were in it. Reading lines with Ethan would feel like banging my head against a wall.

  “Well, of course, honey,” Mrs. Entsky said. “The play’s the thing, right?”

  “I guess, if you take that line completely out of context,” Ethan sighed.

  My phone buzzed again; I’d slipped it into my back pocket when we’d gotten out of the car.

  Send pics! you’d texted. I glanced at Ethan. He hadn’t looked at his phone since we’d gotten on the ferry. Which meant you were only texting me.

  “Is everything OK?” Audrey asked.

  “Oh, yeah, just my dad checking in,” I lied.

  “Tell him we’ll take good care of you,” she said. “I’m making popovers tomorrow morning.”

  “You coming?” Ethan called. He was already standing by a door down the hallway, beckoning impatiently. I turned my phone off. I didn’t know what to write back just yet, and besides, I’ll admit, it felt good for once to be the one keeping you waiting.

  • • •

  “Don’t worry, there’s no new scene,” he said once we were safely out of earshot, down the stairs and around a corner into a carpeted, windowless den with a big leather sofa and a huge television sandwiched in between two bookcases lined with DVD box sets and collectible action figures staring out stoically from their original packaging.

  “Cool,” I said, “I wasn’t sure if you asked me out here to work or just hang.”

  “I wouldn’t make you come all the way out here just to rehearse,” Ethan said, crouching down to open a cabinet under the TV. “I’m not that much of an asshole, am I?”

  I walked over to a frame hanging on the wall. It was a Little League portrait, one of those preprinted cardboard things with the team photo in the middle and then a little oval picture of the kid by himself inset at the top. Ethan had a bowl cut, a missing tooth, and glasses that looked like goggles. You’d told me a few times that he’d been shy as a kid. Not like me. Mom always said I’d walk into a casting office at six years old like I owned the place. If one of us was an asshole, it definitely wasn’t Ethan.

  “Who do you want to be?”

  “Huh?” I spun around to see Ethan holding two Xbox controllers.

  “Destiny,” he said. “Ever played it?”

  I shook my head. “My parents never let me have a system,” I said.

  “Jesus.” Ethan stared at the TV, pressing buttons and switching between screens with lightning speed. “My parents gave up when I was like seven. My dad had a hip replacement and they were desperate for me to do anything by myself. Hence my lair.”

  I sat on the couch next to him and picked up the controller, feeling like some sort of Amish kid on a Rumspringa. I’d played at friends’ houses before, but not enough to get good. Still, I figured I’d rather have fun sucking at Xbox than whatever the alternative might be.

  “It’s standard POV shooter stuff, like Halo,” Ethan explained. “You can be a titan, a warlock, or a hunter, and then within that you can be human, a sort of Avatar-looking alien, or a humanoid machine.”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “Well, depends what skills you want to have. A titan’s like a big tank—you can take a lot of hits and Hulk out on people. A hunter’s faster and better at shooting, and then a warlock just sort of fucks shit up with spells, and can drain life force and stuff like that.”

  As he spoke, Ethan selected the blue-skinned alien warlock character for himself. He wore a long black coat and had some sort of magnetic energy ball in his hand.

  “I guess I’ll be . . . a hunter,” I said.

  “Human or machine?” Ethan asked, reaching over to correct my button-pushing.

  “Uh . . . human?”

  “That’s the most fallible,” he said. “Just so you know.”

  “I’m prepared to die quickly,” I laughed.

  “That’s good, Roth, because you are going down,” Ethan said, hunching over his controller.

  Within the first fifteen minutes, he’d sucked my life force three times, but I was weirdly more relaxed than I’d been in months. I think it was the fact that my mind was completely blank. No family, no school, no play, no future, and I didn’t even have to worry about whether I was impressing anyone. I was just running around some dystopian planet trying not to kill myself by accident, which was a pretty satisfyingly low mental bar. I almost forgot why I’d been afraid it would be awkward in Ethan’s house, until he reminded me.

  “You’ve had, like, a lot of girlfriends, right?” he asked during a pause in play while my health bar was regenerating after a robot punched me.

  “A few, I guess.” I acted like I didn’t know the actual number, which was seven. Eight if you counted Zoe Mueller, who I “went out with” for a week in fourth grade but never even spoke to.

  “Would it be incredibly lame if I asked your advice on something?” His tone told me he already knew the answer to that question, but I shrugged, bracing myself.

  “OK, so, Liv and I hooked up like six weeks ago,” Ethan said. “But since then it’s like . . . whenever we’re alone . . .”

  I held my breath.

  “. . . she doesn’t really touch me,” he finished. I could feel him looking at me but I didn’t want to see his face. It was harder to feel good about things that way.

  “At all?” I asked, hitting a button to
select my next weapon.

  “I mean, she’ll sometimes hold my hand,” he sighed. “But if I try to kiss her, she always says it’s not a good time. Because we’re at school. But she never wants to go anywhere that’s not school. I haven’t even been to her house since the party.”

  “Huh. Weird.” I was elated and leapt off a boulder onscreen in secret celebration.

  “So is that normal?” Ethan deftly leapt out from behind a rock and dropped a bomb on me.

  No, I thought. “I guess it depends,” I said. . . .

  . . . “Yeah.” Ethan got quiet for a minute, and then out of the corner of my eye I saw him drain the rest of his beer and set the bottle down. “I know . . . she’ll never like me the way I like her,” he finally said.

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  Ethan paused the game and went over to the bookcase on the right of the TV. He moved some video games out of the way on the bottom shelf, opened a hidden mini fridge, and took out two more beers. I kept avoiding eye contact.

  “I just wish I knew why she started it,” he said, handing one to me. “I never thought she’d make a move. I figured I’d always like her, and she’d never look at me, and that it would hurt but it would be enough.”

  I took a slug of my beer. It tasted bitter in my throat, like stomach acid.

  “But this is worse,” Ethan said. “I can’t tell if she’s even my girlfriend, really. And I don’t want to ask her because if she says no . . .” He shook his head, grimacing. “I should get a titanium exoskeleton.”

  “I should find a bathroom,” I said, standing up.

  “Around the corner.” Ethan nodded in its general direction; his hands were busy resetting the game. “We can switch characters, and maybe that’ll keep you alive longer.”