“Yeah, Mom?”
“What if this is the beginning of a whole new existence?”
“I know,” I say.
She pulls the white curtain shut, and I hear the shower come on a few seconds later. I go over to the window and open the long striped curtain that runs the whole width of the room. The other side of the glass is dotted with raindrops. The view looks out over the freeway and wavering city lights. The hills are in the distance. The streets underneath me shine from the drizzle floating on top of car oil.
I think I’m probably young enough to pull off a whole new existence. I really boxed myself into my old one.
3
Back in elementary school, I used to have a group of five friends. It was easier then. We ate lunch together and hit up the book fair at recess together, but maybe that’s just it—everything we did was over at 2:51 p.m. Then we could go our separate ways because we were too young to have social lives and not in charge enough to have to make plans.
Then we got to middle school, which was bigger. And our group of five was automatically expected to join up with other groups that were coming from other elementary schools. So then we were eating lunch in a circle of fifteen, just like that. I was buying fourteen identical gifts at the holidays. Roller-skating in a long chain. Sitting in parks at night and needing multiple tables. The phone was ringing all the time. And by high school it became a group of at least thirty, give or take whoever was mad at whomever or liked whomever on any given day, and it was so many personalities and so many plans (and parties added onto that now too) and just so much talking that I cracked.
One day I broke off and started eating lunch alone in a corner by the history building. I got the nickname Dark Star. A lot of people thought I was depressed or angry or your standard kind of asshole who thinks she’s too good for everybody else.
On the third anniversary of my dad’s death, I was having a really bad day. It was worse than the second anniversary, but I still couldn’t tell you why. I just knew I was going to burst into tears if I walked into fifth-period math.
So I went to collect myself behind the auto shop building, since they only teach those classes in the morning; it’s a ghost town after lunch. I lay down on the concrete, and maybe a minute later this long-haired upperclassman guy came around the corner and almost kicked my head with his Vans. He was hiding from a campus security guy, who’d spotted him trying to take off early. The way he put it was, “I was gonna pack it up for the day.”
You know how in movies they have those things called meet-cutes? Like when two people knock heads while going for the same frozen yogurt topping. This was more like a meet-sad. The guy asked if I minded if he stayed for a minute, until the narc was gone, and just as I’d suspected, anyone saying anything to me made tears come. They started rolling down my face just because of a nothing question.
People who have seen me cry are confused sometimes because I don’t hiccup or sob. I just get a very wet face, very fast. I’m like one of those fountain walls at a restaurant.
“Whoa,” the guy said, and there was the first moment between Scott and me.
I know that girls throwing over their girlfriends for a guy is a thing, but in my defense, I had already thrown over my friends for myself. We have a sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Corinthos, who’s more worried about female students getting too into their boyfriends than she is about teaching how to write a coherent essay. She’s known to call conferences with girls she’s seen draped over their boyfriends, even ones who aren’t in her class, to tell them that their romance might seem incredibly important right now, but they can’t let it take over their lives or they’ll be sorry later. Which now that I’m thinking about it, is just another way of trying to convince them that they’re going to change.
I had Mrs. Corinthos’s class. After she saw Scott jokingly press his lips and then his bare chest to her window to cheer me up on the fourth anniversary of my dad’s death, she called me in for an after-school conference.
“So was that your boyfriend who came to show you his nipple?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She sighed like she had to break really bad news to me. “Listen, I know he seems like your world right now, but I just want you to remember that you’ve got to keep up other parts of your life. And I’m not just talking about school. Keep up with your friends. Keep up with your hobbies. What do you like to do?”
Being my English teacher, she of all people should have noticed that I liked writing. That instead of using the week’s vocab words in unrelated sentences, I’d been keeping a running plot of an imaginary TV show going for both of our entertainment. I called it Ships in the Night (because it was set in a small seaside town and was about people who constantly misunderstood each other’s needs). I had two families who hated each other. I had “covert” (vocab) make-out sessions and an unsolved murder. And I turned every vocab assignment into another episode.
I’d gotten less interested in solving the murder than just updating Mrs. Corinthos on whatever issues the characters were working through. Like Warren Gettysburg, teenage son of the richest couple in town, who had become incredibly “capricious” (vocab) after he realized all the bad things his parents were up to. He couldn’t help but start to see his whole existence as this hollow thing.
Anyway, what I said to Mrs. Corinthos was, “I like to make out.”
I didn’t mean it as disrespectfully as it sounds. I wasn’t trying to throw her concern about me back in her face. I was just sticking up for myself.
Because even though I was one of those girls always with her boyfriend, I didn’t believe that everything had to come down to me being young and dumb. I was a person who’d gotten seriously stressed out by being a part of a group. And when I met Scott, I was able to combine a friend and a guy I wanted to make out with into one person.
One person!
It was the perfect situation for someone like me.
So what if making out instantly became one of my favorite hobbies? Maybe from the outside it was, Oh, there’s another one of those girls, but from the inside, I still don’t understand why a romance can’t matter until you’re old enough to say you’re going to stay together forever and no one laughs.
Mrs. Corinthos looked so bummed out for me. So I threw her a bone and said, “I also like singing in my room, and in the car too.”
“That’s it,” she said, staring me at me intensely with an important message. “Get into singing.”
If only Mrs. Corinthos could have seen a semester into the future, then she would have been happy to find out not only that I’d been released from the terrible easygoing influence of my boyfriend but also that I was as serious as ever about singing in the car, and it would lead me to where I’m standing right now.
Scott and I broke up at the beginning of this summer. He was supposed to go away to do environmental studies at Reed, moving to Oregon at the end of June, and I was only going into my junior year.
But then he put off leaving, saying that there were things he still needed to take care of. Those things turned out to be lots of surfing and sleeping on people’s couches but didn’t have much to do with me. We never talked about why we’d actually broken up if Scott wasn’t going anywhere. We just stopped hanging out. But in July he started a habit of calling every few days to pretend like we’re actual friends.
So my phone will ring at two in the morning, and Scott will be there, asking, “Did I wake you up, Tiny?” That’s what he calls me, even though I’m not ridiculously small or anything.
“What’s going on?” I’ll say, but I’ll wish I could just hang up because I quickly learned that every one of our surface conversations (usual topics: weird things neighbors are up to; pollution at the beach; the theory of the universe as a hologram and how much it stresses me out; secret cures for surf rash) leaves me feeling more hollow than when I picked up.
Why don’t I hang up on Scott? Well, here’s exactly what I’ve been getting toward—and I understand this sounds really, incredibly simple—but it is so hard to change how you act.
Like at school, I know that there’s this idea of me, and all I’d have to do to shake it up is do something surprising. Smile for a whole day. Invite someone new to have lunch. Join a committee. Wear a conversation piece sweatshirt. I don’t know. Same deal when it comes to Scott. Instead of being a person he can still call, all I have to do is not pick up the phone. I think the real obstacle to changing is that once people decide on an idea of you, it’s so hard to ditch it yourself that it basically feels impossible.
Which is why I’m here.
4
A few months ago my mom and I were driving to the beach and she had her phone’s camera on record, which I didn’t know. So I had my head tipped against the window and I was belting out Beyoncé’s song “Halo,” because my mom always has the radio on a top 40 station and that’s what was on. She says it keeps her current, in this way that makes it sound like the Black Eyed Peas deliver her the world news.
She’d already been trying to get on The Real Housewives of Orange County for a few years. The producers had brought her in for three different interviews, and they’d even come by to see our house. My mom showed them what she looked like coming down what she called our “grand staircase.” But the interest never turned into anything.
When my mom realized she hadn’t gotten on the show, first she said that she knew it was because she was too stable. “It’s hard to make me cry,” she told me, “and people can tell that about a person.”
Then she got more depressed about how close she’d come, and she started saying that it was because she didn’t have a husband or at least a steady boyfriend.
“But you had Dad,” I said, and she shot me a look like I’d gone crazy. Dad died when I was eleven, but he’d left her when I was ten, and so she liked to act like he’d never mattered.
Next thing you know, she was secretly taping me. Then a few weeks ago she was jumping up and down in the kitchen after our phone rang.
“You’re on the cast!” she shouted, and I said, “Of what?” and she just said, “Oh my God, you’re one of the ten!” and I said, “Ten who?” and we went back and forth like that for at least a couple of minutes before she finally calmed down enough to explain to me what she’d done.
“You’re going to be famous,” was the last thing she said to me before I went to bed that night. “Even if it’s just for a minute.”
But being famous is not really what I’m concerned about. What I want is to get out from under the weight of my current existence. It’s not that my life is so terrible beyond certain sadnesses. My dad being gone. Scott at a distance. The loneliness I feel, especially in the presence of other people.
It’s not that stuff. It’s me. I’m sick of myself. I’m sick of looking out from this head. Sometimes I imagine it like my own perspective is a concrete slab that flattened me down. I mean, it didn’t just pin me like a bug—it trampled me: That’s who you are. Don’t move. I did it to myself, and my understanding just adds that much more heaviness. I cemented myself somehow, and now I can’t see myself any differently.
But I had the realization that going on a TV show could be so disorienting that I’d forget what (I’ve come to believe) I’m incapable of. Police officers had an assembly at our school last year to talk about teenagers on drugs. One officer said that he’d seen a kid on PCP land a four-story jump like a cat. This kid just thought he could do it. And it worked for him! Not that I’m looking to acquire a drug problem, but I think this show could take my head between its hands and shake it up. I want to be a little dizzy. I want to give up my old securities.
I pick up the phone on the desk and dial Scott’s cell number. I have done this way too much.
“Hello?” he answers, sounding groggy. I can practically hear him wrinkling his eyebrows together.
“Hey,” I say.
“Where are you, Tiny? What number is this?” he asks.
“In a hotel room in downtown LA. Don’t ask.” I stare at a drop of water on the other side of the window. “Where are you?”
“At this guy’s house in Malibu, in a sleeping bag on his living room floor. We’re getting up early to hit the water. You and me aren’t that far away right now.”
I’m going to be outgoing. I’m going to have energy. I’m going to entertain. I’m going to picture all those people out there boogie boarding naked, even picture their genitals chafing against the plastic foam, and I’m going to be something new to them. And then maybe I can be new again to myself too.
I say, “I called to ask you to stop calling me.”
“Whoa,” Scott says. “What?”
My mom opens the curtain with a luxurious robe on and her hair wrapped in a big towel. “Is that the producers?” she asks breathlessly, like she’s just gone for a swim instead of a shower. “Have they been waiting a long time?”
“What?” Scott is saying.
“So, no more calls. I’m serious. I’ve got to go,” I tell him, and then I hang up the phone.
5
I’d never seen a desert before yesterday, and now it feels like I’ll never see the end of this one. My old Triumph motorcycle has already made it a thousand miles farther than I thought it would. If I break down out here in this wasteland, I’m picturing my road trip turning into an episode of I Shouldn’t Be Alive, me drinking water out of cactuses, eating scorpions like they’re corn chips. Still, there’s one thing I definitely like about the desert: it’s a long way from home.
Home is Calumet, Arkansas. My tiny white three-room shack (I could call it a house, but I’d be lying) so close to the railroad tracks that it sounds like the train rolls straight through my bedroom at night. I never minded that so much, though, because at least I had the place to myself. Compared to the mayhem I dealt with when I still lived with my family, a rumbling train sounded like a lullaby. Getting out of their house was the second best thing that’s ever happened to me.
The best? When the producers from Spotlight called at the music store a few weeks ago to tell me they wanted me on the show.
I hadn’t told anyone that I was going for it. I just borrowed a video camera and recorded myself singing “The Weight” by the Band out on the back porch, only because that’s a song I’ve been singing since I can first remember. When I sent that entry, it seemed like I might as well be throwing my audition into a black hole. But somehow a few months later there was this lady on the other end of the line saying, “We love your voice . . . totally genuine . . . That’s what America’s about.”
After I left work, I walked in a daze until I looked up to find myself at the highway on the edge of town. The sun was going down. The cicadas chirping in the trees, the smell of someone barbequing dinner, the sunset reflecting off the metal grain silos—everything was so clear and bright and loud. Same old town, nothing had changed, but everything felt different.
I’d always wanted to figure a way out of this town, but I never thought today would be the day. Some strange voice on the end of the phone wasn’t enough to make it seem real. Music is all I’m really good at, so I daydreamed I could play my way out. But I’d never got any further than playing for six drunks at a West Memphis bar. There isn’t exactly a thriving music scene down here.
And before that, as a kid, I even dreamed that I might grow up to try out for a TV singing competition, but when I did get older, I never could afford to travel to a major city for the auditions. Then the last few years that whole American Idol thing started to seem on its way down. I read that all those shows’ ratings were dropping. It truly seemed like I’d missed my chance, since I had no idea how an ordinary person gets his foot in the door.
Then I saw the ads for Spotlight, a new show coming in the fall and looking for talent. All you had
to do was send in a video.
I figured, what did I have to lose?
6
I’ve got only two hundred miles to go, when a blast of desert wind slams into my motorcycle, taking control away from me. I feel my stomach drop as adrenaline shoots through my bloodstream. I’m almost off the road before I push hard on my left handlebar to swerve, straightening out. Breathing again, I tell myself, Okay, you’re still upright. Fifteen hundred miles is a long way on a motorcycle.
It would have been easier to fly, but my free flight to Los Angeles left without me two nights ago. When the producers sent me the ticket, there was nothing in the world that would have stopped me from getting on that flight . . . well, nothing except being handcuffed in the backseat of a police car while my plane was taking off.
I’d made a bad mistake: I’d gone by my parents’ house to try to get my grandfather’s guitar, the Telecaster he’d left to me that had magically disappeared the day I moved out.
See, my family has always had a real close relationship with local law enforcement. The county jail has basically been our vacation home over the years; someone or another was always “away” for a stretch. The best way you can understand my family is to think of one of those flash floods that come in the summer, sweeping up everything they touch and leaving a ton of debris behind.
When I got to my family’s house and saw they were having a party, I should have just turned right around. Out front, beat-up cars were parked all over the lawn. Drunk guys were shouting and shoving each other around. Couples were making out in the shadows. Once I got inside, I found the living room full of people drinking and dancing to Jay-Z. You’d be surprised how much rednecks like hip-hop.
I spotted my dad on the couch, smoking weed out of a beer can with a hole cut in it. I know it ain’t normal, but my family parties together, old and young.
Everybody Knows Your Name Page 2