by Kim Fu
Isabel had mooned and planned all year. She thought about Elliott every night to soothe herself to sleep. His eyes, an ordinary blue when she saw him elsewhere at school, darkened onstage, became stormy, almost indigo. His soft-looking, feminine mouth, on a sharply defined jawline. His wavy brown hair, coiffed high off his forehead. After a while, though, the details became muted, and the words to describe them fell away. He was simply perfect. Each and every thing about him, perfect.
She had never spoken to Elliott, but the cast party would be her chance. She would tell him he’d been great, and he would know, from the way she said it, that she really appreciated his talent, really saw him, apart from and above the gushing compliments and congratulations that had to be bestowed on everyone else. And then! Then the summer romance of her dreams.
The drama teacher’s wife came from money, and they had no children. Their house was intimidating and sophisticated, many small rooms divided on a large swath of land, heavily decorated with fragile things. The teenagers clumped in the Greeleys’ living room with a case of soda and generic, family-size bags of chips. Isabel waited until Elliott was alone. She broke away from her sullen, skulking group—wearing their inferiority in the hunch of their shoulders—and strode up to him.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
She craned her neck to talk to him. He gazed down at her without moving his head, leaving it completely up to her to bridge the extraordinary height difference. “You were great tonight,” she said.
“Thanks.” He started scanning the room for someone else.
She stepped closer, which meant tilting her head back even farther or talking to his sternum. “No, I mean, really great.”
He looked at her again with a flicker of annoyance. “Thanks,” he repeated.
Isabel left the party and walked home. She forgot Marcy’s mother was supposed to drive her. She slipped out stealthily, on ghost feet, like a stagehand: a black shape on a black lawn through a black night.
As the party wrapped up, Marcy started looking for Isabel. She asked everyone if they had seen her. Kids who didn’t know Isabel pretended to look for her, using it as a pretext to open every door in their teacher’s house, poke through the closets and drawers as though she could be hiding there.
The drama teacher’s wife had the sense to call Isabel’s house and confirm that Isabel had made it home all right, and that she and her husband weren’t liable for the disappearance of a minor. Somehow this fact didn’t circulate. By Monday morning, people who weren’t at the party were asking if that missing girl had been found.
Gabe Ianesco, a junior and fellow backstage lackey, had been cured of a speech impediment as a child. It left behind a peculiar hesitancy to the way he talked. He would pause before speaking, stare hard at the auditor to make sure he had their full attention, screw up his mouth in preparation, half open his mouth, close it again, and only then would he begin. He had smooth, olive skin and symmetrical features that would have been attractive on someone else. His small, round head on his thin neck bobbled unnervingly. He drove a red salt-ruined subcompact that he called a “chick magnet” without irony. Almost everything that came out of his mouth was a lie. Everyone knew it. He was a creep and a loser. The lowest of the low.
It was nothing to Gabe, upon hearing about the missing girl, to brag that he’d taken her out to the backseat of his car. He told the potheads at the wooded edge of the parking lot, who sometimes let him come around and spin his tales while they smoked, like their personal court jester. He told his lab partners in biology and chemistry and his drill partners in PE, who were stuck by his side for an hour at a time. He told anyone unfortunate enough to be in the same block of lockers as his. He added new lewd details upon each retelling.
No one believed him, of course. Not exactly. But the story began to splinter and spread, each piece more believable than the whole. Maybe someone had sex at the cast party. In the drama teacher’s house? A shut-up bedroom somewhere. A handjob in a closet. The drama teacher’s house was near a deserted field, and a car had been seen parked on the field from a distance. Had Gabe disappeared from the party too? Nobody could remember. Nobody paid him much attention. Maybe it wasn’t Gabe, but was it Isabel?
The aura around Isabel changed, a whiff of scandal, a muttered slut from people who had never noticed her before.
Meanwhile, Isabel had had a lot of time to think, walking home from the party, and then lying awake in her bed, on the same pink flowered sheets she’d had as long as she could remember, so threadbare they were ephemerally soft and almost translucent. She’d spent a long school year watching Elliott work. Before and after drama, when everyone else stood around chatting and swinging their legs off the edge of the stage, or frantically copying homework for other classes, Elliott paced and practiced lines. She’d overheard enough conversations to know that this didn’t endear him to anyone, this weird, pretentious giant in his somber grown-up clothes and talk of method and Broadway. Elliott’s mother drove him to auditions sometimes hours away, where he would be told he wasn’t a cute child anymore, but he’d have to fill out to play a teenager. His actual, in-progress pubescence was too off-putting. So now he drank whey-protein shakes and took evening dance classes.
Isabel had taken to reading biographies of geniuses and novels about vampires without realizing what they had in common. Her attraction to Elliott had taken on a new shade: she envied him. She envied his passion, his talent, his single-mindedness, as she envied the great men of the past and the bloodlust of night creatures. She didn’t love anything the way he loved acting. She worked hard for her B-minuses, but not that hard. She bummed around the mall with Marcy, went to school, listened to music and read books and watched TV and masturbated. She was fifteen.
There was the surface pain of being rejected by Elliott, sharp and indulgent, something out of a sad song. She wasn’t pretty enough. Or cool enough. She could cry about that. And then there was a deeper pain, more like fear. From the way he had stared straight through her. She’d felt, for the first time, how ordinary she was. Saw in a flash of intuition the ordinary life before her, the ordinary, banal adulthood. Without beauty or meaning or fame. Her life in the audience.
It only made her want him more.
Rehearsals began on the fall show. Marcy quit drama altogether, unwilling to give up her summer, and the backstage kids weren’t needed for the first month. Isabel had a part-time job at the concession stand on the beach, pulling hot dogs from the filthy water of the steamer and dispensing runny soft-serve. She spent her days off at the beach too, lying on the water output pipe at low tide with a book or a magazine over her face until her arms got tired or she fell asleep. Sometimes Marcy joined her and they’d lie on the grassy knoll above the beach instead—the sand itself was impassable, full of rocks and glass and garbage—and suntan in their bikinis. Isabel had been a normal-size girl until about age eight, as tall as her peers, and then she got stuck there while they all shot past. Her body had stayed more or less the same, no more than the slight slant of a man’s chest. She could still wear children’s clothes. Marcy had breasts, stray hair sticking out the side of her bikini bottoms, the flesh on her thighs and bottom taking on an alien weight. They complained about their bodies halfheartedly, drugged by the sun, the silvery waves.
When Isabel was called into drama club, she considered following Marcy’s lead and not going. It had been a relief not to think about Elliott. But she worried that not facing the leers would come across as an admission of guilt, confirmation that something had happened the night of the cast party.
So she worked on the floor of the auditorium with the rest of the crew, cutting cardboard with X-ACTO blades and painting scrap wood and donated furniture. The school seemed different, the rooms mostly closed, the halls silent. The summer-school classes were quieter. The adults renting out the gym for who-knew-what were very quiet, sitting in circles or neat rows of folding chairs when Isabel peeked through the glass.
By the end
of July, when the tech team moved to the box and the catwalk to practice cues, the auditorium was sweltering. The crew worked in the dark whenever possible, sluggish and agitated, fighting over the one good paintbrush, hitting the wrong switch with an elbow, falling asleep. People started leaving early, arriving late with a Slurpee in hand, not showing up at all.
Elliott was the last to leave every day, insisting on one more run-through. His scene partners were often absent, so he pulled a standing fan onstage with him. The blades split and distorted his voice when he leaned in. Some of the newer people thought he was being intentionally funny; the rest knew better.
Mr. Greeley raged at their laziness, their unreliability. But even he got tired of waiting for Elliott to finish. It unnerved the teacher to see Elliott waiting outside the locked school doors when he arrived, drinking from a massive to-go coffee cup that couldn’t be good for a seventeen-year-old. Breaking several district rules, he gave Elliott a key to the auditorium’s outside door, which was accessed through the utility closet they were using to store props.
Isabel regularly contrived to be the second-to-last to leave, to feel that same surge in her heart as she had at Our Town as she watched Elliott and the fan alone onstage. On one such afternoon, just the two of them in the auditorium, the unthinkable happened: Elliott called out into the darkness. “Isabel? Is that you?”
Normally, she would have yelped, “Hi! Yes!” but she’d been, just a moment before, completely engrossed in his monologue. She instead stepped out of the shadows without a word, making herself visible in the shaft of light coming from the school hallway, beyond a crack in the auditorium door.
Elliott knew her name.
He squatted on the balls of his feet at the edge of the stage. “I knew I wasn’t alone.”
She didn’t trust herself to speak. She’d ruin this somehow.
“Do you mind coming up here and practicing with me? It would be so much easier if I just had a face to look at.”
He reached out a hand. Her heart was going to explode. She took his hand and he yanked her onstage. She gulped, looking around helplessly. “What do you want me to do?”
“Just stand there.”
He restarted his monologue. Isabel was conscious of her hands, her tongue in her mouth. Should she cross her arms? Let them hang by her sides? Should she look him in the eyes? She couldn’t do that. She bent and unbent her knees, locking and unlocking them. Had standing always been this complicated?
Elliott stopped midsentence. Midline. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
She almost said, Of course. “Sure.”
He paused. “Well. That thing with Gabe? At the cast party? That didn’t really happen, right?”
Isabel had had this conversation what felt like a million times. Every other time, she blurted out, sometimes yelled, “Of course not! God!” This time, she had another one of those brief, sad, adult feelings, an intuition she could not have explained in words. She said, “Not exactly.”
For the next week, Elliott talked and Isabel listened, like she was a priest or a therapist. They stayed in the auditorium for hours after everyone had left. They ran lines, or he did, Isabel’s face alternately blank, nervous, rapt. They sat in the theater seats in the dark and he talked about the future he dreamed of, the theater schools in New York or secondarily Los Angeles or tertiarily Toronto. The full houses, the artsy workshops. Caught up in this reverie, the boundlessness of summer, the closeness of their breath in the unlit auditorium, he kissed her. They kissed.
He ruined it immediately. “Look, can we keep this a secret?”
Her stomach dropped. The vein of self-hatred that had been dug the night of the cast party was still fresh, easily accessed. Its depths continued to surprise her.
“I mean, you of all people know how people at this school talk. I don’t want to make this whole thing worse for you.”
“I don’t care,” she said.
“And I don’t want it to distract from the show. It’s kind of barely hanging together as it is.”
The show? she thought. Who cared about the show?
“And”—he looked away from her now—“I’m actually not supposed to date. Because, like, my grades aren’t that great, since I’m always at acting class and dance class and auditions and stuff. So I promised my mom I wouldn’t do anything else to distract me from school.”
When would she ever talk to his mother? How would that even come up? He was ashamed of her, plain and simple. Who could blame him? She saw her worthlessness clearly now. She wondered how she could have missed it all these years.
Elliott had caught Isabel at a moment in her development as an animal where her skin was perpetually pricked and lit and full of fire. A caress on the shoulder made her shudder. A kiss on the neck felt like death. She came from his distracted kisses, the faint, inexpert rubbing of his hand through her jeans. She would never need less, never be more receptive or willing than this.
They kissed and fumbled in the theater seats. Every moment felt precious, high-stakes. Every time she thought it might be the last. After a week, when that new, dark intuition sensed he was getting bored, she pulled him wordlessly into the prop closet and dropped to her knees. After a month, he asked her if she had a condom. She didn’t then, but she did the next time, and—without discussing it with Marcy, as they’d always promised they would—she let him lift her tiny body against the wall, crush her, fill her with a deep, lancing pleasure that made her want to weep.
The last time, it was just too hot. August was drawing to a close. Isabel felt dizzy, addled, trapped in her body, claustrophobic in the closet. They peeled their sticky skin apart and turned away from each other, dressing in silence.
Her back to him, she said, “Hey, so. I was thinking. When school starts, we won’t be able to use the auditorium anymore.”
Elliott didn’t answer. She glanced over her shoulder. The muscles of his back flexed as his shirt dropped over them. The whey protein converted to new flesh like lumps of clay on a wire frame. Meatlike striation and stretch marks. This final obliteration of childhood, the body expanding to destroy itself from within. She stopped looking, focused on her own buttons and clasps as his clicked and rustled behind her.
“Let’s just see how things go, okay?” he said, at last.
School started. Isabel watched opening night from the catwalk, with a girl who chewed gum and breathed through her mouth at the same time. Elliott’s costume was unconvincing. He walked with a defeated slump, mumbled and cried out in anguish as needed, but no one involved in the production had the skill to make this suddenly movie-star-handsome young man into Willy Loman. In their perch, the girl said to Isabel, “Was Elliott always that hot?”
“Yes,” Isabel said.
Isabel knew every line of Death of a Salesman inside and out. She watched the audience instead. They were captivated as they’d never been at Our Town and Harvey. At the end, instead of a cheering crowd with a sobbing, Isabel-size hole in the middle, everyone was in tears. Even though, having seen each scene countless times, Isabel thought it was one of Elliott’s weaker performances. That night, he’d been greedy. He drew the eye when he shouldn’t. He undermined the other actors.
The next day, at school, the inscrutable hive mind buzzed about Elliott. The scale tipped, his blossoming good looks finally outweighing his weirdness. Over the week, hovering invisibly above them like a god, Isabel watched the demographic of the audience shift. It went from mostly parents, teachers, and those sweet old ladies, with a couple of patchy rows of students in the back, to the inverse. It was like watching the tide roll out, teenage bodies advancing forward, overtaking the empty seats, a shrinking coastline of grown-ups.
All at once, and from no traceable beginning, Elliott was popular. Elliott was cool. Even more inexplicably, drama was cool. Everyone had to see the show, not because they enjoyed it, but because they were afraid of missing out. People were already excited about the next one, the infinity of a whole school year aw
ay.
Elliott didn’t talk to Isabel at school. He didn’t talk to her before or after each show, as he hadn’t at rehearsals until everyone else was gone. She hadn’t considered until it was too late that she had no means of communicating with him at all. She didn’t even have his phone number. When they crossed paths in the halls at school, she begged with her eyes for the slightest acknowledgment, a flicker of recognition, anything. Even shame. Disgust. Some proof that it had happened.
She didn’t tell anyone. No one would believe her now. Not even Marcy, who she saw less and less, who was upset with Isabel for being distant and moody through the last part of summer, tired of her sideways complaints about Mr. Greeley and the other theater techs. “If you hate drama so much, then quit,” Marcy had said finally. “I’m sorry I got you into it.”
At the end of the run, the drama teacher hosted the cast party, as he always had. This time, cast and crew brought their friends, their friends’ friends, kids that tagged along on the way. Kids came in through the back door in the kitchen. Through the garage. The French doors in the study that led to the side garden. The unlatched window in the bathroom. Kids streamed in from all sides, faster than they could be identified and escorted out, with the force of an ocean against bailing buckets. Mr. Greeley and his wife ran around the house helplessly, running to the sound of a crash, or broken glass, closing and locking a door that reopened as soon as they were out of sight, grabbing the beer and cooler bottles that appeared in kids’ hands as though out of thin air. The teacher let it go on too long, thinking he could reason with them, that he had a close, long-established relationship with these kids, he knew they were mostly good, and he was a cool teacher, a young one, who cared and believed in them—
That was the last cast party.
One morning, as Isabel walked to her locker between first and second periods, she spotted Elliott leaning back against the radiator at the end of a busy hallway. She continued on her trajectory. Through a gap in students passing back and forth, lining the walls, she saw a girl sitting on the radiator, behind Elliott, with her arms around his neck. She nuzzled in the nook of his collarbone.