Better Nate Than Ever

by Federle, Tim

“To be honest,” I start again, “I lied. I—I got on the bus and got a message from the casting people, and they wanted me to come back and sing for them. Today.”

  I take a swig of Sprite.

  “Okay?” Heidi says, her eyes doing the Manhattan Dart. She waves to somebody in the back, not a friendly Disney-princess wave but an I’ll-be-right-there-when-I’m-through-strangling-my-nephew wave.

  “And after the callback, I talked to my friend Libby.”

  “The underwear sniffer,” Aunt Heidi says, which is technically accurate but a little rude.

  “Yep. The underwear sniffer. She and I talked, and she’s just . . . covering for me back home. While I work things out here.”

  Aunt Heidi cackles, throwing her head back (she’d make a great Witch in Into the Woods), eyebrows frantic and mouth twitching. “You are twelve years old, Nate. What are you ‘working out’?”

  “I’m nearly fourteen, actually,” I want to say, but I actually just go, “Um.”

  “Heidi,” her freckled bartender friend says, “Mitch is kind of pissed.”

  Mitch is the manager. I know that in one second flat.

  “Stay here,” Heidi says, turning from me and then doubling right back, “and I mean it, Nathan.”

  Freckles the bartender refills my Sprite, without me even asking, and throws a cherry on top, probably because he senses I’m about to lose it and am in need of something sweet. He puts his elbows on the bar top. “You want a salad or something? Do kids eat salads?”

  “Some kids do,” I say. “Rich kids across town whose schools have salad bars instead of just Jell-O,” I’m about to add, but I just say, “Thanks anyway. Not tonight.”

  “How about some pasta? We’ve got a shrimp-over-penne thing, topped with a homemade vodka sauce.”

  “That’s nice, sir, but my parents would never let me drink vodka.”

  I don’t know why, but he giggles. “So you’re from Pittsburgh, huh, Nathan?”

  “Forty-five minutes outside of, but yes.” How does he know all this? And do I tell him it’s just “Nate,” and risk stuttering?

  “You might want to tiptoe around your Aunt Heidi, a little,” he says. “I know she was already really freaked out that you weren’t going to make it back to Pittsburgh alive, and seeing you show up here? I have a feeling it’s thrown her for a loop.” He shines a glass.

  The guy reading the news on his iPhone looks up at us and reaches across, scooping a few pretzels. “You mind?” he says, and I say, “No problem, sir, they’re for everyone.”

  Freckles turns around, back to where Heidi disappeared, and whispers to me, “You know, your Aunt Heidi is quite the actress herself.”

  “Oh, really?” I say, licking the pretzel bowl clean. He refills my Sprite glass again, with two more cherries this time. Man, I’m downing this stuff like it’s—well, a Shirley Temple, which I never actually gave up.

  “Yeah,” Freckles says, “we did a production of Midsummer in Cleveland three years ago. And she was luminous.”

  Beautiful word if I knew what the heck it meant.

  “So why isn’t Aunt Heidi still acting?” I say.

  “Tough business,” Freckles says, stepping back, wiping his hands on a bar towel tucked into his little waist; no adult man where I’m from has a waist so trim. “And she got some weirdly bad notices for Midsummer—we met there and became BFFs—and after, she kind of said she was going to take a break. She went to Scottsdale for a couple of weeks and came back wearing a lot of turquoise. And now she just kind of works here all the time.”

  I’m stuck on the fact that anyone over fifteen is using the term “BFF.”

  “And are you still an actor?” I say. “I had my first audition ever today.”

  “Aw, that’s great. Yeah, your Aunt Heidi was telling me. I really respect singers a lot.”

  He does? “You do?”

  “Yup, if I could sing, I’d be a total star,” and Freckles winks at me. A town of winkers, that’s for certain. “But believe me, being another guy with another NYU undergrad degree in acting, it’s like there’s a zillion of us actors here.”

  A zillion!

  I bet Pittsburgh doesn’t even have a million actors. I bet Pittsburgh doesn’t even have a zillion people of any profession.

  “And how did your audition go?” Freckles says, chopping a lemon.

  “Oh, pretty good, I guess.” I just can’t believe I’m talking about theater with another guy and he’s not slamming my face into a toilet. “There was a British guy who was kind of mean to me—”

  “Ugh, they always are,” Freckles says. “Really condescending? Talking to you like you’re an idiot and wouldn’t be able to handle ‘the language’ because you’re American?” Freckles is working himself up a little, the top button of his white shirt straining.

  “Yeah. And I said something about Hamlet taking place in 1400, and that kind of irked him.”

  Freckles says, “Ha ha,” like a machine gun, and then, “Well, at least you sing.” Talking to me like I’m a real actor. “Try being a classical actor and born in Utah. Hard to be taken seriously.” I’m pretty sure a glass, from behind the bar, breaks in his hand, because he says the S-word and crouches down, and then a “one minute” finger appears from behind the bar, and he’s up, his face red. “Wow, I really can’t believe I’m, like, vomiting all this to a twelve-year-old.”

  “I’m almost fourteen,” I say. “So don’t worry about it.”

  “Ha,” he says, this time like a single bullet. And then, “So what do you like about New York so much? That you would venture all the way here and not tell anyone?”

  “Two boys were dancing together in a club,” I want to say, “and nobody stopped them.” But instead I say, “I want to be on Broadway, and you can’t do that forty-five minutes outside of Pittsburgh. Have you ever been to Pittsburgh?”

  “Yes, actually. Right out of college, I did a kind of bad postmodern Chekhov thing, set in the Holocaust era—which is just always a really bad idea—at the Public Theater.”

  Ah, yeah, the Pittsburgh Public. I asked Mom if I could see a show there, once, but she said the themes were too adult, switching on another Disney movie in the VCR. We don’t even have a DVD player.

  Now, I would do anything to sit through Freckles’s bad Holocaust production of Chekhov. My new hero Freckles.

  “But you’re right, Nathan. Even when you live in Astoria, there’s nothing like New York.”

  “I know!” I say. “There’s cupcake places, like, everywhere, and boys can dance next to each other.” But I don’t actually say the part after the cupcake part.

  “Cupcake places,” Freckles says, twinkling again. I guess he hasn’t stopped to think about what’s so great in New York, in a while.

  “And, you know?” I say. “The Broadway thing? It’s just—it’s my dream. I know that sounds so cheesy—”

  “It doesn’t,” Mr. Freckles says.

  “It’s my one chance out of Jankburg.”

  It feels good to say these words to someone who isn’t my guidance counselor, especially because my guidance counselor also doubles as the track coach, and hates me.

  “Well, you two are getting along fine,” Heidi says, returning with an empty tray. “Okay, so here’s the deal, Nate. I’m calling your mom on my next break, and we’re sorting this out. I’m really, really unhappy right now, and glad you’re alive but really resentful at being put in this position.”

  “I’m so sorry, Aunt Heidi,” I say. I place my Nokia and charger on the bar and put my head down.

  When I look up again, Aunt Heidi is shaking her head at me. “This is just a lot of trouble, Nate, you know that?” She whaps the tray against her hip. “A lot of trouble.”

  And I guess I must burst into tears again, because here I am seeing my stupid face in the bathroom’s porthole mirror, which now just feels idiotic. Like, what is this place trying to be? Just admit you’re in New York, don’t act like you’re some kind of boat tha
t serves food, right? Am I right?

  I can smell myself in the bathroom and wish I’d brought my bag, to swipe some old non-Mitchum deodorant, wondering if Freckles was on to my changing-body routine. If I’ve embarrassed myself in front of an actual nice man. And this makes me cry harder. That my one chance at making friends with another boy, even if he’s a million years older than me (Freckles is at least twenty-five and maybe even thirty) is ruined, probably. Further soiled by me drinking all his free drinks, like a stupid freeloader, not even tipping him for all the expensive cherries he keeps throwing on top.

  I think I’m about to throw up, and run to the toilet (with a wooden seat, like we’re in freaking Maine), but I just end up with the hiccups, rendering me even more fragile and stupid and unable to control myself.

  And when I finally get back to the bar, hiccupping and burping and reconvinced that Freckles hates me, he’s standing there with Heidi, and they’re both kind of frowning. And now she’s holding her tray like it’s a teddy bear.

  “We plugged your phone in,” Freckles says, handling it like evidence, a murder weapon.

  “Okay,” I say, or hiccup.

  “And you got a call while you were in the bathroom,” Heidi says, her face in a bunch of angles, like a Picasso.

  “Okay,” Hiccup. Pause. Hiccup-hiccup.

  “And I just picked up,” Heidi says, overexplaining, “not looking, thinking maybe it was your mom.”

  “She even said, ‘Sherrie, is this you?’ and everything,” Freckles says. He puts my phone down and refills my Sprite.

  “But it wasn’t your mom,” Heidi says, and she pats the stool seat and I jump up. “It was the E.T. casting people.”

  “They called?” I say, or yell, and of course I hiccup and leap to my feet and knock the fresh Sprite to its side. All over Freckles.

  And that’s when I know it’s bad news. Because he doesn’t even look mad at me.

  “They said you’re a little too old to play Elliot,” Heidi says. “They don’t need to see you again, Nate. You can just . . . you’re free to go home now. It’s . . . it’s over.”

  I don’t believe it. “I don’t believe you. I—”

  But she holds up my Nokia: a seventeen-second phone call logged from an incoming 212 number. Broadway’s area code.

  “They don’t want to see me again? At all?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Seventeen seconds was all it took.

  And then, just like that, my hiccups are gone.

  The Next Part

  I go to the bathroom again (for the third time! Freckles probably thinks I have a bowel condition or something).

  And cry so hard that a foam of spit blasts out across the framed reviews for Aw Shucks.

  It’s just pretty embarrassing and I don’t need to go into it here, okay?

  You’d think, the way I’m crying, that I’d died. And not that just my dreams and soul had.

  After I leave the bathroom, having pulled my bangs as far over my eyes as possible, Freckles tells me he didn’t get his first job until after his tenth audition in New York. “So every no is closer to a yes, huh, buddy?”

  But it’s not working.

  It’s back to Jankburg. And rifles and bad test grades and grey fields full of grey cows, and—oh, God. The bathroom. To cry it out just one last time I swear.

  A Couch That Thinks It’s an Envelope

  “It’s really cool,” I say, surveying Aunt Heidi’s futon. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” I open and close it, folding it back and forth on itself. “A couch that thinks it’s an envelope or something,” I say, and Freckles and Heidi laugh. Turns out they’re roommates.

  “You must be exhausted,” Aunt Heidi says. Because she is, I’m sure.

  “I’m actually completely wound up,” I say. And I am.

  “Let me run you a bath.”

  I don’t have the heart to tell her that I haven’t taken a bath for a hundred years. Freckles and I sit on the futon, and he kicks his shoes off. He’s in funny socks.

  “You’re looking at my funny socks, huh?”

  “Nah,” I say.

  “Dressy socks,” he says, wiggling his toes. “Church socks, every Sunday.”

  Huh. Freckles goes to church?

  “Big day, huh?” he says.

  I remove my giant coat and then, remembering that I stink, place it over myself like a blanket.

  “You cold?” Freckles says. “Because we’ve got blankets.

  “Oh no, no, I’m fine, thanks.” Their place is smaller than I could have even imagined. All those Friends reruns, the soaring loft ceilings and funky-colored walls? Nope. It’s a bare white box and big clanking pipes and one framed show poster from a production of Grand Hotel at Walnut Street Theater.

  It’s heaven, though.

  Freckles turns the TV on, pretuned to a channel that broadcasts only New York news, which is amazing.

  “I wonder if I could get this back home,” I say. “Oh God, home. I should call Libby.”

  “You want me to leave you alone?” Freckles asks.

  “Well, I don’t want to annoy you.” Dad hates when I talk on my cell phone during Steelers games, even if I’m in my own bedroom.

  “Nah, but why don’t you go into Heidi’s room, for privacy?”

  A moment later I’m sitting on Aunt Heidi’s floor, not wanting to disturb the bed. A kitty circles me.

  “Libby?”

  “Oh, boy, how are you?” she says.

  “I’m okay. I’m at my Aunt Heidi’s. It’s been a rough night.”

  “You’re telling me. They called off the neighborhood search when your aunt got through to your mom.”

  I wish I could just pause time or fast-forward or something. I don’t even want to hear, but still: “What—what did my mom say?”

  “She was going to call my mom and rat me out for lying about Extreme Hide-and-Seek, but I did the crying thing again and everyone oohed and aahed and just told me to get lost,” Libby says. “So I’m home now, waiting for you to call.”

  “Is your mom okay?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Is Anthony okay?” I can’t believe I’m asking about him.

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, he won’t be playing for six weeks or something, which is sort of devastating to him. But it’s not as if he killed himself or anything.”

  “Right.”

  “So did you hear anything else about E.T.?”

  “Yeah.” I swallow and look at the cat. “I didn’t get farther. They—I guess they just weren’t looking for little boys my age.”

  “Oh, that’s weird,” Libby says, “because Jordan Rylance posted something on Facebook that he has a callback for Elliott tomorrow, and the whole world Liked it. As if he already got the part or whatever.”

  She just shouldn’t have said that, and we both know it, immediately, and I basically want to melt into the floor and let Aunt Heidi’s kitty eat me as dinner.

  “Wow, good for Jordan Rylance,” I say, just as sarcastically as you can imagine a guy like me’d say it.

  “You’re back home tomorrow, though?” Libby says. She doesn’t usually let me see her this hopeful and vulnerable, so it’s kind of nice.

  “Yeah, we’re waking up at, like, five a.m. and going back to the bus station, and I’ll be home in time for the last class of the day, I’m sure. I’m sure Mom’ll make me go right to school, and then I’ll get home with twelve hours of homework and they’ll ground me and not even let me Trick-or-Treat.” Aunt Heidi’s cat, I see as my eyes adjust, is jet black. And crossing me. “Or Dad’ll just kill me, actually. And then send my body to school the next day.”

  “Well,” Libby says, “at least I’ll be there. And luckily, you already sort of act like a corpse in class.”

  “Yeah,” I say. And then I brighten for her. “Yeah, it’ll be great to see you. This whole thing has been . . . really overwhelming.”

  “You’ll have to tell me every single moment, or act it ou
t, when we’re face to face in my basement.”

  But I know I won’t be able to. That to talk about New York would mean to remember everything I’m leaving, everything I didn’t get to get used to. Just to get a taste of. Even the Chevys chips were better than the ones back home, and I’d know, because I had two baskets.

  I hang up. Heidi’s still in the bathroom, the water running on full blast, and Freckles is sitting on the futon with his laptop out. “Everything cool?” he says.

  “Yeah, that was just my best friend.”

  “The underwear sniffer?” I expect him to say, but he just goes, “It’s good to have a best friend,” like I’m seven years old or something and up next he’s going to teach me the difference between circles and squares.

  I sit on the futon Indian style and can feel the weight of the day on my head, my eyes drifty.

  Heidi comes out of the bathroom, having done a total costume change, standing there in sweats and an old Pitt T-shirt, looking like college photos Mom used to have of her. Before she put them all away.

  “Okay, Natey, the bathroom’s all yours,” she says.

  I hop in the bath and, come to think of, maybe I should take them more often. It’s like a big wet hug, in a good way. And something about seeing my body reflected back at me, like I’m looking at somebody else’s? It’s just not as bad as I might have thought.

  I close my eyes and wince, thinking about the return to Jankburg, and I sink to the bottom, below the layer of bubbles Aunt Heidi put in. And for a second, underwater, I nod off, asleep or maybe even hoping to drown.

  If I have to die—and according to everyone I go to school with, I have to die often, and soon—it might as well be in New York.

  It’s Like a Bed but Stranger and Lumpier and with More Wooden Slats, and Hidden Crumbs

  If you’ve never been tucked into a futon, you don’t know what you’re missing.

  “Night, Nate.”

  You’re missing nothing, I meant.

  “Night, Aunt Heidi.”

  She flips the lamp off, next to the couch/futon/bed thing, and asks me if I’ve got enough blankets, and then, just when a normal person would go back to her own bed, she stays.