by Una LaMarche
“Do you?” Ethan narrowed his eyes, tapping his pen on his knee. “Do you get it? Because there’s a difference between being determined and being on speed.” He pushed up his glasses. “You look like the Roadrunner.”
Icy fear shot through my veins. How could he know? No one knew, that was the magic. Not that my parents even cared that I drank their wine or smoked pot in my room, but I was careful. I only drank from open bottles. I left my windows cracked and lit lavender-scented candles. I kept my weed folded up in a maxi pad at the bottom of a box of super-plus tampons. I took fucking photos and put everything back, and I never got caught, I was careful.
I was trying to think of something to come back with, some explanation or defense, when Ethan just laughed and said, “Stop drinking so much diet soda, that stuff’ll kill you.”
The relief hit so quick it made me nauseated.
• • •
When I came back from the bathroom, you and Ethan were alone on stage. You both looked miserable, like you were waiting for Godot but with period cramps.
“Well,” Ethan shouted when he saw me, pacing back and forth across the “bridge” that was marked on the floor with three pieces of gaff tape, “Mr. Francisco thinks we’re not ready to go up in a month. He told me I should consider recasting.”
“What?!” The pill hadn’t even dropped into my stomach and I felt a rush of vertigo. I knew if one of us got recast it would be me. You were a name people recognized. They didn’t know everything you’d told me in confidence, how you’d never even wanted to act, how your mom had pushed you into it, or how the Saving Nathan shoot ended up being so stressful that by the end of filming your parents were sleeping in separate rooms. They didn’t know and you wouldn’t tell them, so it would be me on the chopping block. Showcase could come and go and everyone else would get handshakes and business cards from agents and casting directors and I would get some terrible gap-year job folding palazzo pants at Forever 21. Even worse, Showcase was a half course credit. Without it, I wouldn’t even graduate.
“Don’t worry, I’m not doing it,” Ethan said, walking over and putting his hand on my back. It wouldn’t have been so bad except he kept moving his fingers around like he was trying to give me the world’s tiniest massage. “He’s a bloviating hack, but he made some good points. I mean, Jesus. I should at least have cast some understudies.”
You and I looked up at each other at the same time. You’re not his understudy, I wanted to scream. Don’t you see? He’s yours.
“Whatever,” you said, stretching your arms over your head.
“Glad to see you care so much,” Ethan snapped. He stopped pacing and put his hands on his hips. “Listen, your performances make or break this play. Two weeks ago you were on point. I need you back there. I don’t care what it takes.”
I glanced over at you, but you were staring pointedly at the empty front row. I wondered if it had been the same for both of us, before: the secret thrill of seeing a text come in, the delicious possibility of an innocent sentence ended with a semicolon followed by a right parenthesis. What would it take for us to get back there? I already knew the answer; he was still drawing circles on my spine.
“We only have a couple weeks before spring break,” Ethan sighed, and I let myself float out of the conversation, into ten days of possibility I’d forgotten were getting so close. Just remembering they existed made my heart stop sputtering like an outboard motor for a second. Over spring break I could sleep all day. I could stop making myself stay up and just chill, reset, start to fix things.
“I wish there was some way for me to get out of going to Florida with my parents, but it’s my cousin’s wedding, so I’m screwed,” Ethan continued, somehow managing to make a tropical vacation in the dead of winter sound like a punishment. “I thought we were in a good place, but obviously we’re not. So we’ll need to amp up our rehearsals for now.”
“Come on,” you said, finally breaking your silence. “That’s crazy. We’re both already off-book. We’ve got the blocking down. Once we decide what we—what our characters want . . .” You looked at me, and for the first time in days you didn’t look angry. “It’ll all fall into place,” you finished.
“What they want?” Ethan asked, finally moving his hand from my back to gesture theatrically at you. “What do you mean, what they want? I think it’s pretty clear what they want.”
“To jump off the bridge,” I said, biting my lip. The second pill was finally starting its magic; the filter on the room changed.
“No,” Ethan said. “I mean, yes, that’s what they do, or try to do, but it’s not what they want. What they want is to be seen, and heard, and connected with.” He walked over to me and took my hand, lifted it to his mouth, and kissed it gently. It was actually sweet, and caught me off guard. It didn’t make me cringe. It reminded me of little Ethan Entsky from my ninth grade diction class, with the voice that hadn’t fully changed and would crack at inopportune moments.
“What they want,” Ethan said, looking at me earnestly, “is each other.”
“Right,” I said, running my dry tongue across the roof of my mouth. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want Ethan, but I didn’t want to hurt him, either, or ruin the play he’d worked so hard on . . . for me. He’d done it for me, I knew that—everyone did. All that time I’d been throwing it in his face, when I should have been thanking him. Some people got liquid courage, but in that moment I had 150 milligrams of clarity.
I couldn’t choose you. That wasn’t an option—too much was at stake, we were already in too deep. In five weeks, when the curtain fell and it was all over, I could tell you how your smile made my knees shake, how I’d secretly stolen the drama cast list from the bulletin board, folded it up and stuck it in my purse just to be able to file it away in a closet shoebox with all of my old birthday cards and passed notes and love letters, because I knew someday I would look back at our names side by side and say, that was the beginning. In five weeks I could tell you everything. I just had to hold on until then.
“So when do you want to—” I dropped Ethan’s hand and turned to ask you about your schedule, but all I saw was the curtain swaying from your stage-left exit.
I didn’t know how much I’d hurt you then. I didn’t know how much more damage I’d do before I was finished.
All I knew was that you were already gone.
Chapter Sixteen
March
Two months left
MARCH WAS A RABBIT HOLE. I have memories of places without knowing exactly how I got there, or why. One Saturday I even ended up at a Law & Order open casting call in some depressing midtown office. I read for a valedictorian who was getting cyber-bullied, but my hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t read the sides and they told me to go get some water but instead I took two muscle relaxers and walked over to Bryant Park and fell asleep on the grass.
At school I started avoiding everyone, hanging out on the squares with the art kids at lunch, chain-smoking and watching Jasper hold court with his stupid tongue-pierced, ombré-haired groupies and shivering in my coat even as the temperature climbed into the sixties week by week. I was always cold, and when I made a fist you could see the grooves in the bones under my skin, like a Día de los Muertos figurine. My parents kept asking me if I was OK and I would tell them it was just stress. I stayed in my room most of the time and pretended to be working but instead I was hunched over my desk with a CVS pill crusher, grinding up the Nuvigil and Adderall and whatever else I could find to experiment with and sucking them through a plastic straw because they weren’t working anymore. Nothing was working, everyone had a different reason to hate me, and no one cared where I was, so I could do anything. So much for my septum.
At some point my ritual stopped making me better and started making me worse, but it was way too late to stop, so I just kept marching, going through the motions at rehearsals and nodding at any critic
isms like I knew just how to fix it, even though the words had lost all meaning. I was treating the lines like they were just a very long password spelled out phonetically, and if I said them in the right order and at the right volume I’d be set free for the night. If Showcase still scared me during those lost weeks I don’t remember it, but I don’t think I had the capacity to be scared anymore. I barely felt anything, which was the whole point.
I went uptown on the weekends, saying I was going to Joy’s but ending up at one of Dante’s friends’ instead, repeats of Smoke Dog’s party only without me crying or throwing up, because I’d developed a tolerance and because Dante told me he’d ban me if I ever “acted like a basic high school bitch” again. I’m pretty sure I texted you from some of those parties, but in the mornings I’d just delete everything, as if erasing the messages could take them back. For all I knew you’d blocked me. You never responded, and I burned with shame every single time.
One night on the way home, I took something palmed to me by Dante’s friend “T”—that he whispered was some homemade brew of heroin and speed. My heart started skipping beats when I was by myself in an empty subway car, and I got dizzy and slid off the bench onto the grimy floor next to an empty Cup Noodles. I don’t know how long I was lying there, but I woke up to an old Chinese woman standing over me yelling something I couldn’t understand, so I got up and staggered off the train and realized I was in Brooklyn. I walked home, I guess—somehow I was in my bed the next morning, feeling like someone drilled a hole in my skull and put a brick on my chest. I stayed home “sick” for a few days and slept, but the sleeping wasn’t enough, my brain wouldn’t start without jumper cables, and so I gave in and got out my straw and when I took the first sniff my brain caught on fire and I actually screamed. But then after a minute it started to feel better, even good, almost, so I told my mom I’d seen a roach and kept the door shut.
Ethan came by after school to check on me. He brought me flowers and soup and ran his fingers through my hair, and for the first time ever I didn’t want him to stop touching me, so I pulled him down and kissed him with my eyes closed so I could pretend he was you. After a minute, though, he pulled back and looked at me with that hungry, glassy-eyed look that boys get and said, “Why can’t we do this all the time?” And when I said I didn’t know, he asked me if he was my boyfriend, and I shook my head, not sure if my chin was moving up and down or side to side.
I did manage to hang with Joy once, on a weekend when she wasn’t rehearsing. I invited her over to make cookies from a roll of premade dough and watch DVR’d episodes of I Survived, a creepy budget reality show about people who should pretty much be dead, but weren’t. (Back then I think I thought it made me feel better about my own situation—like, at least I hadn’t been stabbed a million times in a home invasion and wrapped in a carpet—but now I think I watched it because I wanted to see life from the other side.) Right before she came over, though, I was running around the house checking everything to make sure it looked normal, layering sweaters to hide my skinny arms, and blinking back tears of Visine to get the pink tint out of my eyes. I was setting up for my supposed best friend the way I usually set up for a party, scrambling to hide everything that mattered.
We said all the things that girls always say when there’s tension that nobody wants to address—I miss you! (a veiled accusation); How ARE you? (cheerful, but with a sad smile that lets her know she doesn’t text enough); Life’s just been craaaaazy lately! (with a shrug that translates to “You would know what I’m talking about if you’d been there.”). If someone else had been eavesdropping it would have sounded semi-normal, but it wasn’t. I wish I had just told her what was going on, but I couldn’t risk making her even more upset with me. So instead I freaked out after she left and went to Dante’s. He had friends over and acted like I was crazy for showing up, which reminded me of you, and made me sad all over again. (You talked to me only if it was scripted. One night, after rehearsal, I’d caught up with you at the corner of Broadway but when I touched your arm, you shook you head and said, “Sorry, I just can’t do this.”)
You can’t tell Diego I see you, I begged Dante. You can’t tell him I come up here.
“What’s in it for me?” Dante asked with a slow smile, and before I knew what was happening I walked out with a deal and three bottles of pills that I paid for by taking out a cash advance on my dad’s AmEx at a bodega ATM. One bottle was for me, and the others were for me to “distribute.”
I guess you could say I’d found my motivation.
I guess you could say I was making a choice.
Chapter Seventeen
Mid-April
Less than a month left
THE FRIDAY BEFORE SPRING BREAK Ethan left school early to catch his flight to Key West, leaving you and me with strict instructions to rehearse every day while he was gone. That seemed at least like a legitimate reason to talk to you without having you avoid me, but when I found you at the fountain during lunch and asked you when you were free you made a face and said, “I don’t think we need to. It’s going to suck anyway.”
It was warm and bright and perfect that day, like a Woody Allen movie. My head was refreshingly clear since I’d added an online Klonopin prescription into my regimen, and I was suddenly the most popular girl in school again, thanks to my al fresco lunchtime sales calls. I didn’t know if it was the promise of spring or the promise of being alone with you, but for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t cold.
“What, the play?” I asked.
“Everything,” you said. You looked at me for a few seconds, longer than we’d held eye contact in months, and I felt my breath hitch.
I miss you, I wanted to say. Instead I said, “We should at least try.”
You looked pained. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It’s not my idea, it’s Ethan’s command,” I said, raising my arm in a salute. The corners of your lips twitched and when I raised an eyebrow you finally gave me a begrudging half-smile.
“I guess I can do tonight,” you said. “But after that, no promises.”
“Promises are overrated,” I said.
• • •
After my midday Nuvigil (I was up to three a day and had to borrow from my inventory so that Dante wouldn’t know how much I was using, but all I had to do to even out the till was up my prices—it was so easy, as long as I took enough pills to stay on top of it), I stalked the dance studios, trying to find the room where Joy was rehearsing. I missed her so much it actually hurt sometimes, like the bruises I seemed to wake up with every day despite having no memory of falling down. And Ethan being gone felt like a trap opening; kissing him back in January had been the mistake that set everything in motion, and since he was always around, it was always hanging over every interaction. But maybe, I thought, just maybe, now that I had some breathing room I could get Joy alone and try to explain things—maybe not everything, but some things. Maybe she would understand, and maybe things could go back to the way they were. Maybe. Maybe.
I finally saw her through one of the doors, framed in a small window webbed with cracks: Joy, Diego, the piano guy, and that asshole dance teacher with the raisin face. I couldn’t hear the music very well, but Diego was standing in the center of the floor, turning to watch Joy with a dreamy smile as she twirled around him. Then he came up and put his arms gently on her waist, beaming as he lifted her off the floor, her long legs extended in an effortless-looking jeté. (At least, I think it was a jeté, Joy had explained all of the terms to me during a sleepover freshman year while we got wired on orange Crush and laughed hysterically through the movie Center Stage, but I was constantly confusing them.)
I couldn’t hear the music, but I didn’t have to. They were perfect together. It made me weirdly sad to watch. Diego could look at Joy that way because she wasn’t pretending to date anyone, let alone the third person in the room. And Joy could look at him th
at way if she wanted to, but she didn’t because she was stubborn or blind or both. Diligent, hardworking Joy, so focused and responsible that she brought flash cards to the temple to memorize during my bat mitzvah, since we had a French quiz the next day. “That girl has her eyes on the prize,” my dad had said. But watching her dance, I wondered if she knew there was more than one kind of prize, and that sometimes you didn’t have to keep your eyes on them for them to come to you.
Diego stood to the side while Joy crossed the floor in a series of turns en pointe. She started out fine, but after a second she suddenly faltered, stepping down quickly onto the other foot and screwing up her mouth in pain. My heart started racing; I had my hand on the knob and had almost opened the door before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be there. Luckily, Diego rushed to help her. I turned quickly and pressed my back against the wall outside the studio, letting my bag slide to the floor. Being high and jittery and lonely with no place to go wasn’t fun, but I had at least another hour to kill before the rehearsal that you had finally agreed to at five o’clock.
A few minutes later, the door opened, and Ms. Bitchface stepped out halfway, pointing one ballet-slipper-clad toe into the hallway.
“I’m concerned, Joy,” she said. “I want you icing, heating, compressing, and elevating over break. And I’m going to have Lolly come in once we’re back to learn your part, just in case.” She rapped on the doorframe with a bony fist. “We can’t be too careful.”
“What the fuck?” I said out loud, before I could catch myself.
“Hello, Ms. Gerstein,” she said coolly, turning to me with a sour smirk. “Practicing your diction, I see.”
“Liv?” Joy called from inside. The teacher took off down the hall and I caught the door before it swung shut. Joy was sitting against the far wall of the studio, unlacing her pointe shoes, and Diego was standing with his hands on his hips and his sweaty hair plastered to his face, looking uneasy.