The second week home I had another panic attack while I was alone one night, writing up in my room. I wasn’t feeling panicked about anything in particular, I didn’t think. I Skyped Lucien once I didn’t feel like my chest was going to crack in half, and he answered with Scottie sitting on his lap.
I told him, “It’s weird because I actually felt more consciously anxious when I was on the show, but I didn’t have panic attacks then.”
When Lucien is about to help me toward a realization, he looks like he’s biting on an invisible pipe.
“What’s today?” he asked me.
“Wednesday.”
“What time did you have the panic attack?”
“It was probably . . . a little bit after eight,” I said, understanding what he was getting at. “Oh. Okay. Right.”
That would have been show time. I haven’t been watching the show because I’m trying to separate myself from it. But I talk to both Mila and Lucien, so I always know who’s gone home. I hear it around school too. After me, it was Nikki. After Nikki, it was Ricky.
“I’m thinking these attacks might be a delayed response,” Lucien said in a baby voice to Scottie.
“Like maybe now I’m feeling the weight of performing because I have the time and space?”
“Maybe something about the experience hasn’t been worked through.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Oh, man, this kid just took a shit that came out the sides of her diaper,” Lucien said, and then he had to hang up abruptly.
The third saving grace has been the rediscovery of Jenny Irving. Jenny used to be in the group of thirty that grew from my group of fifteen in middle school that grew from my group of five in elementary school. In the group of thirty, there was always so much going on that it was easy to not actually know some of your friends. I never had a real sense of what Jenny was like.
But the second week back, I saw Jenny rolling her eyes at Sebastien Rodriguez when he jumped on the flagpole during our run in PE and yelled over at me, “I see you eyeing your new gym towel!” I rolled my eyes too, and it was like when you’re a little girl and you hold hands with a new friend, this tandem rolling of Jenny’s and my eyes.
Jenny and I started running together during PE. It was so easy to start doing this, it was almost—almost—hard for to me to remember how stuck within myself I’d felt. There was this role I was assigned, and I just couldn’t leave it, until I could.
After a fourth panic attack, Lucien had suggested I try dyeing my hair back as further separation from the show, to see how it felt. I thought that was a decent idea. Jenny’s hair is bleached platinum, and all I had to do was ask, “Do you dye your own hair?” She did, so I asked if she would help me go back to brunette. That night she came over with a box of Garnier Nutrisse in Sweet Cola. Yesterday Jenny and I had lunch together at the wall across from the lockers.
This morning when Lucien and I were Skyping before school, he had me virtually babysit Scottie for a few minutes so Amy, his wife, could take a shower and he could make himself breakfast. This just meant that I watched Scottie gum her teddy bear in her playpen via Lucien’s laptop. If there was a freak accident with the bear, I was supposed to scream at the top of my lungs so Lucien could hear me in the kitchen, and dial 911.
Scottie was still happily gumming the bear when Lucien sat back down with his waffles in front of the computer.
“So tell me how things are going with Jenny Irving,” he said, chewing. “Sounds like you two are simpatico.”
“Seems like it,” I agreed.
“I saw promise when you told me about the dual eye rolling. You know, lasting bonds are often built out of mutual antipathy for something. Does it surprise you that you’re going to end up being friends with her?”
“It just seems weird that that we weren’t friends before.” I was sitting at my bedroom desk and put my head down on my arm. “I guess I feel kind of stupid that all these hurdles I felt weren’t real.”
“They were real.”
“They probably didn’t exist outside my head.”
“There’s a distinction. I know you had a shitty—” He looked at Scottie. “Sorry,” he said to her. “Sorry,” he said to me. “I know you had a bad time on the show, but maybe you could make your peace with it by thinking about it as the place that started transforming your inner reality, right? It’s where you became friends with Mila.”
“True.”
“And where you profoundly bonded with me.”
“Yes, yes. I mean, what do you want to hear, that you’ve changed my life?”
“And Ford.”
I was quiet.
“And Ford,” Lucien said again.
I was still quiet.
“Should I go for a third?”
“I heard you.”
Lucien made the look like he was biting on an invisible pipe, and I thought, Here it comes.
He said, “Remember what I first responded to in your writing, what I said about your understanding of characters?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That when it comes to motivation and personality, you don’t see the world in black and white. You’re able to see . . .”
He paused. He wanted me to fill it in.
“Really?” I asked.
“Tell Scottie. She hasn’t heard it.” Scottie was lying facedown on top of the bear.
I sighed. “Gray.”
“There is it. You’re able to see gray. In people that don’t exist. You can’t do that in real life? You have to keep Ford in the black cowboy hat?”
“But I think I can do it in real life,” I say. “I don’t hate my mom, right? I still can see the gray in her, even though she’s ignoring me. I would never say she has only terrible qualities even if things are terrible between us right now. And, hey, Scott’s supposed to come over tonight and we’re actually going to try being real friends. When I came back home and I was able to say to myself, maybe there’s something worth preserving—that’s gray, right? I haven’t made him all bad in my head, or I wouldn’t be giving this a shot.”
“But Ford’s still not gray? How long do you want to carry that around with you?”
I lifted my head up and shook my backpack in front of my computer’s camera. “Well, conversation has to end here for today,” I said. “Got to get to school.”
47
I’d barely set foot on campus when Mrs. Corinthos spotted me. I was drinking a smoothie I’d picked up at McDonald’s on the way over to school. She was holding a travel mug in both hands and walking out of the main office.
“Magnolia, I want to talk to you!” she called. The first bell had already rung.
I pointed, trying to look busy. “I was just going to English.”
“As am I.”
So we started walking together because there really wasn’t much choice. Mrs. Corinthos’s stilettos echoed dimly on the concrete. She started shaking her head, curls bouncing on her shoulders. She said, “Honey, it’s really been bothering me that your dream was derailed.”
“Well, honestly, it wasn’t my dream—”
“Sweetheart, don’t do that ‘I don’t care about anything’ teenager move. I’ve been doing this long enough that that doesn’t work on me.”
“Okay.”
“But maybe it’s good you got away from that boy. I got the sense that he was distracting you. Maybe now you can pursue your dream without him keeping you—”
I looked at her. “Mrs. Corinthos, when you watch a movie and it has a love story in it, do you root for the two people to not end up together at the end of it?”
She gave me a confused glance. “Which movie?”
“I don’t know, any movie that has two people in it who fall for each other.”
“What? Why?”
“Because even if I hate
a movie, I’ll root for the two people to end up together. I don’t think it’s me buying into a message about life being about getting the guy. It’s just what’s uplifting about romance. You know? Romance fulfilling itself. Like it’s supposed to, if everything goes right.”
Mrs. Corinthos returned to shaking her head at me like I was making some kind of big mistake. “That’s what you think you think.”
“But isn’t that actually just what you think?”
“Huh?”
“Huh?”
“I like a good adult love story as much as anyone else.” When Mrs. Corinthos said adult, I was pretty sure she meant that a good story is about grown-ups and not that she was admitting to watching porn. She was telling me that your romance doesn’t really matter until you hit a certain age. Maybe it’s the age that she got married. Maybe it’s older than that, and she thinks she gave into romance too soon. I didn’t know, but I also didn’t want to know because life through her eyes was just kind of getting me down.
So I said, “Never mind.”
My cell phone rang from my backpack. I suddenly had the fantasy that Ford must have seen my mom on set with Jazz and managed to get her to give up my private number. I had to return the cell the show gave me an hour after I was eliminated.
Jazz was shaken by my elimination only because she thought my mom was going to drop out of her life, and that night she asked her to be her manager. My mom has been going back and forth between LA and Orange County since then, but she’s up in LA much more than she’s not. I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it’s honestly a relief to transfer my mom’s happiness over to Jazz. On the other, my mom’s absence has probably just made me angrier that being closer to fame is more important than being closer to me.
“Sorry, I have to take this,” I told Mrs. Corinthos, and fell back for some privacy.
What I hadn’t told Lucien this morning was that I had watched the show last night. Or, I’d watched Ford’s performance. It had been “love song” night. He stepped onto the stage. He looked directly into the camera, and I could see how that kind of stare becomes confusing when you’re on the other side of the screen. You forget there’s a screen. It’s easier than you think to feel a real connection, even if you don’t believe in it at the same time. Because you tell yourself, No, that’s silly. He’s on TV. But still you feel that you know him somehow.
Ford sang the song “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes. I knew the song and the words. He kept his eyes straight on the camera in front of him, and he sang about being blind before he met you—the “you” on the other side of the screen. He sang about how he wanted to let you know that it had taken forever. That he was especially slow. But he had a realization that he needed you, and he wanted to know about coming home.
I hit the answer button on my phone. It was the pharmacy’s automated machine telling me that my Xanax was ready.
48
Scott is standing under the hanging lantern on my porch, holding a bottle of champagne. He’s wearing the same blue poncho from when he visited me at the mansion.
“Hey,” I say.
“Heyyyy,” he says, more drawn out. He smiles. His face has that talented way of convincing itself that nothing has ever gone wrong.
This is the first time Scott’s been over to my house since the night he broke up with me at the beginning of summer. You could look at his presence on my doorstep as the result of a moment of weakness, but I don’t feel like that’s necessarily the whole truth. Yes, I was taken aback to run into him at Del Taco two days ago. Yes, that surprise might have given him the opportunity to say, “Please hold on, please don’t blow me off,” and just start talking.
Some of the things he said were “It was totally unfair of me to say I was jealous. I know now”; “It bums me out that we were so important to each other but I went and ruined that and turned it into nothing”; and “What do you think about trying to be friends, Tiny? I mean like real friends?”
While I was standing there listening to Scott, I was also thinking about change. About how the last time I saw him, I considered that change wasn’t a tumbler that just finally clicked into place. That it was more likely small movements that added up with you barely noticing. So change could be almost invisible, unknowable.
In Del Taco I watched Scott trying to bring me over to this friendship idea, tucking his hair behind his ears in agitation. I kind of zoned out, trying to pay attention to what I was feeling. The discovery was that I wasn’t feeling horrible about this friend idea. Bad feelings had changed into tolerable ones. I’m sure that falling for someone else had helped that along. Also, maybe I only had so many bad feelings to go around, and they had collected over in the parts of my brain responsible for caring about Ford and my mom.
Anyway, that’s why it was okay to invite him over to my house. Tonight we’re going to start our attempt at a friendship.
“Come on in,” I say.
He steps in and shuts the door behind him. He seems to be waiting for my mom to come out and wrap him in a bear hug, but it’s just us, and the house is quiet. “Your mom isn’t home?”
“She’s at Spotlight.”
As I said, my mom has been spending a lot of time up in LA ever since I got off the show. It’s not like she hasn’t been taking care of basic things—there’s food in the fridge and take-out money on the kitchen counter when she’s going to be gone past dinner—but she’s definitely been absent.
Mila tells me that Jazz disappears from the judge’s table during commercial breaks and huddles in the green room, whispering with my mom. I don’t know how they spend their time together during the day. Maybe they shop.
A couple of nights ago I asked my mom, “What do you and Jazz talk about?” and at first she looked surprised that I was asking her a conversational question. From my end it’s been a lot of “Do you mind if I turn on the heater, getting kind of cold,” and “Is there any more detergent in the garage?”
My mom looked like she was wrestling with herself about whether to give a normal answer or keep up the cold shoulder. Finally she said, “Stuff you wouldn’t care about.” But her tone was more sad than icy. Before there had been a distance between us because I wasn’t being completely honest with her about how I felt. Now we’re actually separate.
“Well, let’s celebrate that you’re not there anymore,” Scott says. He starts unpeeling the foil from the champagne bottle.
“None for me. I’m going to try to write later tonight. The writer who’s helping me wants to show some of my pages to some Hollywood executive this week.”
“Always thinking things through, Tiny.”
He disappears to go get my mom’s champagne flutes from the glass cabinet in the dining room. He knows where everything is in our house, down to the first-aid kit. I drop into the reproduction eighteenth-century France chair my mom moved from her bedroom down to the foyer. It has always made me feel like I’m sitting in a linen version of the buggy from the Haunted Mansion ride.
I hear clinking. Scott calls back, “When did your mom buy all this new fancy china? It looks like royal kind of shit.”
I say, “Her most recent attempt to get on Real Housewives.”
Soon he reappears holding a couple of her new flutes by their stems in one hand and a can of Diet Coke in the other (also my mom’s; he’s been to the fridge). “We’re going to have a toast, yes we are,” he says.
Scott pours Diet Coke into one flute and champagne into the other. Then, before he hands me the Diet Coke flute, he pours a little champagne into it. “Ceremonial splash.”
“I give in,” I say.
We tap our flutes together, and I take a sip of my champagne Diet Coke. The champagne just makes it taste even more diet.
“Where’d you get the champagne from?” I ask.
“Someone rang my doorbell and when I went outside, the bottle was just there
in a bassinet with a note that said, Please take care of me.” Scott laughs. Everything feels so familiar. I could have almost predicted that answer from him.
We take our glasses and the can and the bottle and sit in the backyard with our feet up on my mom’s iron patio table. It has so much scrollwork, it’s actually uncomfortable to get your legs under it. The air is crisp.
The first time we kissed, two winters ago, it was out here. We sat in my yard while my mom was at Sundance (for fun) and drank wine coolers, pretending like we were just going to be friends. I wanted him to understand that I was tipsy so that if there was a pause, and I looked at him, and the moment became awkwardly but also perfectly charged, we could write it off the next day if we had to. But we didn’t write it off.
Now I tell Scott a little bit about being friends again with Jenny, how she’s decided she’s going to be Buddhist now, just to piss off her parents. “I think I remember seeing that girl with you when you were a freshman,” he says.
“You noticed me before that day behind auto shop?”
Scott just jokingly gasps and covers his mouth with his hand, like he accidentally let that slip. I didn’t know this. My cell rings.
“One sec,” I say.
I get up from the table and walk around the side of my house. It’s an LA number on the screen, but I don’t recognize it. My chest tightens.
“Hello?” I answer.
“I did it!” yells Mila. “I finally did it!”
I look through the window at the time on the microwave. The elimination show has just ended. “Oh my God. Oh my God!” I say.
“They picked me over Felicia. The people watching.” She sounds like she’s maybe teary.
“Is it better now because you waited all these years for it to happen? How does it feel?”
“It feels totally magical. Better than I thought. I’d dreamed of it too. But it’s better.”
“You could easily win this whole thing. Oh my God, what are you going to do right now?” The final three give their finale performances in their hometowns this weekend. Lucien told me the network is giving the show a two-hour special on Sunday because they’re choosing to make a big deal out of it. There’s more money in the commercial time. But Mila’s from Sherman Oaks, so she won’t have anywhere to travel.
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