by Katie Dozier
I just hoped Lilly the leopard was having a better time traveling, and that she actually had a home to go back to. They said I couldn’t talk to any of the Comets, and not even Kara. I guess that meant I’d never even get to pet Blondie again.
It turned out that home to me was Landis Hall, though I didn’t have fuzzy feelings about walking up through the green, complete with my crazy Dolly Parton hair. I didn’t even really consider showing up at my aunt’s house where Dad might still be, since she had never really liked me anyway. Plus, I still had my classes to complete—assuming that they were going to be as understanding as E.T. claimed they would be back when I signed the contract.
At least I’d been able to take off the fake nose ring, and I’d pulled off the fake nails back on the way to LAX. My fingers were slightly bloody nubs. I’d never thought they could look worse than they did at Mom’s funeral, but, once again, I’d been wrong.
I put in the old school key to #314, but for some reason it wouldn’t click, no matter how much I jiggled. So I knocked.
“Who is it?”
Whoever said it sounded like someone at Strozier shaming me for a late library book.
“Uh, this is my room?”
A girl with glasses opened the door wide enough so that I could see her Star Wars comforter, her huge computer monitor, and her Lego Movie poster—right where all my stuff had been.
“What?”
A girl scuttled down the hallway. Tiffanie!
“Oh…hey! Ella…Sorry that you didn’t win, but good job!”
“What happened to my stuff?” I ran into the room, searching for any sign that I had, as of only a few weeks ago, actually lived here.
“Oh! A guy came from the housing office. Said you weren’t going to be living here anymore.”
I dropped my purse on the floor like a weightlifter after a heavy set with a dumbell.
“I thought,” Tiffanie continued, “that you had already signed a deal or something in LA and were just dropping out which seemed a little crazy to me, considering that your dad is a really smart brain surgeon, but I thought cool, too, because that would be like you really coming into your own or whatever. But your dad sent this right before you left, and I didn’t give it up because…well I borrowed it. Hope you don’t mind!”
She handed me my red poofy, would-have-been prom dress, and I threw it over my suitcase.
Chapter Sixty-Six
♪ Foolish Games ♪
* * *
E ven though Mom had paid for my meal plan and tuition, that still meant—according to housing affairs—someone had to pay my dorm room bill every month. And a payment had never been made. After a two month grace period, someone had shown up and taken all of my stuff like I had died or something.
After that overpriced sympathy ice cream I’d had in the Atlanta airport, I had $7 in my wallet.
So there I was in the far end of campus by the giant football stadium with a pink daisy suitcase, when only last night I’d been on national television.
The housing affairs guy let me use his phone to call Dad, but his cell phone had also been disconnected. There was no answer at my aunt’s and I got Huck’s voicemail—but couldn’t find it in me to leave a message.
I also didn’t have it in me to beg to share Tiffanie’s twin bed that night, and I didn’t even dare to try to use the emergency credit card Dad gave me—I’d had enough humiliation for one day.
So I wandered on campus, headphone-less, and lost in a place I knew so well.
I might not have had a roof to sleep under, but I realized that, thanks to Mom, I still could eat. I walked into RFOC pulling the ridiculous suitcase, and left it at the table while I loaded up my free tray. I didn’t really care if someone decided to steal it while I was grabbing deep fried burritos with extra sour cream.
While I devoured the food, I saw a table in the corner. A man with a clipboard was checking off things while a young Indian kid spoke.
Then I noticed a sign overhead that read:
Real Food On Campus: Now Hiring Student Workers
It was ironic, I guess, a bulimic spending her days as a cashier in a huge buffet. Or maybe the best word to describe it would be “logical.”
To improve a night sleeping in a rehearsal room with mold on the ceiling, that night I’d made a bed of all my clothes and propped the suitcase up against me, as if I were sleeping in a forest—which likely would have smelled a lot better. And I’d write songs in my head until I fell asleep.
My favorite to write was, “I Will Hold On Forever.”
“ But that’s just the way, that a dream is, ” I sang to myself, as I drifted off to sleep.
In the morning I forced myself to trudge across campus to the gym, which at five am was full of college students in neon spandex. They were so shiny, it hurt to look at them, just like the sun. I left my worthless belonging in one of the lockers, not even stopping to check if it was closed.
I’d work all mornings during the week, since my classes were all late, and I could work full days on the weekends. On Saturday I showed up right on time wearing my vomit-green polo they’d given me the day before, but the door was locked. I knocked on the glass, and a large woman shuffled towards me.
“Employee entrance through the alley.”
She slammed the door in my face, and I didn’t even wince.
After work one day, I finally reached Huck on the phone in the kitchen.
“Hello, who is this?” he asked.
“It’s me, Ella?”
“Oh, Ella, it’s you! I’ve been trying to reach you. Good job on the show… Why aren’t you calling from your phone?”
Big Mike was eyeing me as he pushed a dirty mop along the floor.
“Look, that’s a long story. Where are you?”
“Didn’t you get my billion voicemails or texts or emails? I’m at NYU!”
“What?”
“I made it off the waitlist and they let me transfer right away! This place is awesome!”
I looked around at a crusted grill-top and a bowl of salsa with a fly circling it.
“Yeah, well, I’ve gotta go in a sec.”
“Is something wrong? I mean I know it really sucks you’re off the show but you did a great job.”
The fly fell into the salsa and squirmed.
For some reason, I couldn’t tell him how much I missed him. I said, “No, I’m fine.”
Chapter Sixty-Seven
♪ I Walk the Line ♪
* * *
I t turned out that they didn’t actually need cashiers at RFOC. My actual job was going to be even less glamorous. Every morning I came in, and forced my gross blonde weave (now made even more gross by the fact that I had mousy brown roots poking through) into a hairnet.
And not only did I have to wear a hairnet in the kitchen, I had to wear it out in the massive dining hall too, along with latex gloves that made my hands itch like crazy. I’d double fry French fries, then take a batch out to the front.
“Fry the fries, take 'em to the front,” I’d been told.
It was perhaps the most efficient (and unfortunately apt) job description in the world. I could see it on my resume. For a hundred years, I would have a job that was basically a faulty conveyer belt.
I never missed my headphones as much as when I had to “Take ‘em to the front.” Sometimes, I longed for the sound of music even more than I missed Mom. And after being unable to find the words to ask a new NYU student for help, I gave up calling Huck or trying to reach Dad again. What would I have said to him anyway?
“Hey,” said one of the football players, to me. “Excuse me, ma’am.”
Ma’am . Is there a worse word in the English language? Not that I could really blame him, with my hair shoved in the hairnet, gloves on my hands, no makeup and more bloodshot eyes every day, I sure as hell looked like…a ma’am.
He studied my face.
“Uh, these fries aren’t hot.”
His eyes blinked in recognition
as I went to wordlessly repeat the first part of my job description.
I became a faster conveyer belt back to the kitchen when I heard him say to the entire FSU football team, “You guys won’t believe it! I just saw that chubby snake girl from TV!”
And variations on that played out all day, every day for weeks once my cover was blown. But even with the scant paychecks, I was still sleeping in the same moldy rehearsal room—saving up money to pay my outstanding dorm room fees before I could move back in.
The insults hurt more at first, until they just felt like checking the weather and seeing it would rain again in the afternoon, just when you wanted to go to the beach.
That is, until the one person walked up that could make it really hurt.
I know it sounds hard to believe, but I had just made fries, and I was taking ‘em to the front.
Perhaps the only thing different about this time was that I had gotten a little more bold with my bulimia. If I timed the rush just right I could eat some, then puke without even having to clock in for a break.
So before I took the fries to the front—again—I jabbed a handful into a plate of ketchup I’d stashed under the prep bench and shoved them into my mouth.
I was still chewing as I saw him and wiped a glob of ketchup from my cheek.
He leaned over the buffet, as if I were a ghost, which is funny, because that was what he felt like to me.
“Ella?” asked David.
“Go ahead and laugh,” I said, while continuing to be a conveyor belt.
“I’ve been emailing you for weeks…I need to talk to you,” he said.
“The only thing I will talk to you about, is fries.”
I poured the sheet tray into the huge stainless steel bowl. Hundreds of them, glittering with salt.
An image of them swirling in a toilet bowl flashed in my mind.
“Are these enough for you, sir? Do you like them? Would you like to secretly film me? The failed singer? Would you like me to stick my face in this bowl of ketchup for you, sir?”
“Please, Ella—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”
I pushed the silver door to the back open, happy to at least be a mobile conveyor belt.
David stayed there all day, even when the dinner rush was over and I had to scuttle around the cafeteria in my hair net, picking up the trays for the kids too lazy to take them to the actual conveyer belt.
The conveyor belt was piled with pizza crusts, entire discarded salads, and pools of different liquids—blue punch swirled with mustard, with dabs of soft serve hidden in the bottom of cardboard cones.
“You better take care of him. I don’t wanna see him tomorrow. Weird for customers,” said my boss, while eating a piece of key lime pie with her hands in the back. “Stop hiding in here, and take ‘em to the front.”
I hesitated and opened my mouth.
“Tomorrow’s gonna be your last day if he come back here holding up fries again.”
So, I took the fries to the front.
“Ella, just give me two minutes. That’s all I ask of you.”
Seriously, he used the phrase, “ All I ask of you!”
I felt my boss’s eyes on the back of my head through the window in the stainless door.
I slammed down my sheet tray of fries on the back of the buffet counter, and half the contents fell to the floor like salty matchsticks ready to be sparked.
“Alright! Just leave me alone now and I’ll let you insult me again somewhere else.”
“Thanks so much, I’m so sorry I did—”
I turned to David.
“What do you want me to say to you—that I forgive you? Well I don’t!”
“I just want a chance to explain.” Were those fake tears in the asshole’s eyes?
“Okay, okay…but not here,” I said, while using my expanding hips to cover the product on the floor. “Meet me uh, by the gym tonight, at nine-thirty after we close.”
RFOC closed at eight, but I had plans for my dinner already.
After the doors were locked, and the blue shades over the glass cafeteria doors were drawn, we workers came out from behind the kitchen like the cockroaches the football players thought we were.
Big Mike who worked the worst of the tasks—even worse than his duties of also being the janitor—he was the one that scraped off the trays at the end of the conveyor belt in a tiny dishwashing room.
Yet he came out of what he called—with a toothless smirk and New Orleans accent—his “laboratoriee” every day with a smile. This time he also emerged with his signature laugh. It was a huge one, like the kind of laugh when you’ve been really sad and then finally, finally something is really funny.
He practically skipped in, all four hundred pounds of him, as the rest of us loaded up our trays of the food that would’ve been thrown away had we not eaten it.
It struck me as funny that I was the only one here that had already paid for my food, or at least Mom had. But there was no denying that I was an outcast even here, always eating my dinner alone. I bet they thought I was a rich kid that daddy was trying to teach a lesson to—not knowing that I was the only one among them that was literally homeless—unless the moldy rehearsal room counted as a home.
I piled on overcooked pasta and alfredo sauce, and then I spooned on a few of the deep fried, previously frozen mystery meat balls on top.
Big Mike grabbed a tray and wandered around plucking a cookie here, a breadstick there, chuckling all the while, baiting someone, anyone, to ask him what was so funny.
My boss laughed from the cool kids table—because wherever people eat, there is always a cool kid table—and I am never at it.
“Big Mike,” my boss called out, while twirling an ice cream cone in the air. “You’re laughin’ like a damned fool.”
He treated it like an invitation to explain, as I watched from a far away table. A table that was just close enough to say—I am vaguely part of this group, but even they don’t like me.
Big Mike put his tray down by the soft serve, stopping the stream of ice cream mid-go on top of his pile of pancakes. He straightened up like he was about to give a presidential address.
“Well you know how I hate tomato soup?”
He gestured to his apron, where he was wearing a bowl of it.
“Yeah, we see that,” my boss said, as her minions chuckled.
“This big bowl came through today, an’ I saw it, an’ I thought—who wastes a whole bowla soup. Then this happened. I spilt it all over myself.”
“So?” said my boss. “You always come out of there looking like you were in a food tornado.”
“So, I was so mad that I started to just throw the tray away. It was everywhere. Looked like a murder scene back there.”
He motioned to his Labratoriee, then caught his mistake.
“Not that I ever throw a tray away before, and I wasn’t really goin’ to. But the point is, I look down, where that bowl was, and I found...”
He jingled around in his pocket, and his hand emerged with a $100 bill.
Everyone laughed.
“And there I was, covered in soup, but that bengi bill been sitting under that bowl, and there wasn’t a single tomateee on it!”
His smile was so broad that I saw a glint of silver on one of his molars.
I felt happy for Big Mike, even though we’d barely spoken—the joy from his toothless smile was so great it was like he’d won the lottery, or America’s Next Star . Even though Mom had died, and even though I was homeless.
Then I remembered that I told David I would meet him. But more importantly, I remembered that if he showed up tomorrow and harassed me, my boss would squash me like the cockroach I was.
When the others started to clean up, that’s when I usually cleaned out the dessert section when their backs were turned. Not that they really would’ve cared, I just worried that they all thought I was a stupid rich kid probably going home to a fridge full of food.
A layer of cookies in a serving bowl. A
layer of soft serve chocolate. A layer of cookies, a layer of vanilla soft serve. I basically pretended I was making something last minute to serve a dozen guests, but I ate it all.
I waited until almost everyone had gone home, except Big Mike, who was always the last to leave. I shut myself in the bathroom, and barely had to put two fingers down my throat, crumbles of cookies, then vanilla soft serve—soft serve was the easiest thing to throw up by the way—then, red?
Heave. Red. Heave. Cookies. Ice cream. Red.
But I hadn’t eaten tomato sauce—so this didn’t make sense. And the red, it was too bright to have come out of a jar anyway.
I pulled my fingers out of my mouth as soon as I realized it.
I was staring at my own blood swirling in the bowl.
I rinsed my mouth out.
Blood in the water.
Blood on my fingers.
And it was only then—when I fell on the green tile floor—that I saw the truth for the first time in months.
I wasn’t just wasting food or hurting my voice or trying to lose weight.
I was killing myself.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
♪ Rise Up ♪
* * *
M om’s necklace clacked onto the floor, as I lay there sweating, shaking.
How many times did I tell myself that would be the last time I threw up? David had lied to me. Preston maybe had lied to me.
But someone had lied to me way more than anyone else.
Me.
It all went black for who knows how long.
“You in there Ella?” asked Big Mike. “I gotta lock up.”
Blurriness—my head hurt so much that I could only function by pretending I wasn’t inside of it.
But as I looked at my outstretched hands splayed on the floor, I could see Mom’s necklace, which looked like two fuzzy pieces.
Had I broken something other than myself?
“Just a sec,” I said, grabbing the necklace.
It was open in two halves, but it was still fused like a book.
The necklace she had worn every day since I was five was actually a locket, with a picture.