Big Girl Small (29 page)

But now it was somber, awkward in the car. Meghan and I climbed up into the backseat, and nobody really said much past “Hi,” before Molly was like, “Are you okay?” I said, “I’m fine.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Molly asked, and I thought how she sounded like a shrink on TV.

“Not really,” I said. “Can you put some music on?”

I saw her and Sarah make eye contact in the front seat, before Molly turned the radio on, loud. I wondered what their narrative about me was—that I was a horrible friend, certainly, but past that? I tried to turn my mind off. I can’t remember what was playing; I was just grateful for the noise. When we got to my house, Meghan hung out on my bed looking at photo albums and talking to Molly while I showered. Molly was half putting her stage makeup on. To my great surprise, I heard her ask Meghan, “What’s it like being a little person there?”

“Same as anywhere, I guess,” Meghan said. “I mean, people in Berkeley are nice and crunchy, so mostly they either don’t care or pretend not to care.”

Then Sarah turned on the hair dryer, and I couldn’t hear anything else. Sometimes Molly’s straightforwardness put me off. Why was it so easy for her to be so friendly and such a goody-goody, always asking and telling everything that was on her mind, without ever apologizing? Of course, as soon as I had this thought, I recognized that the problem was mine. Then I kept thinking, if only I hadn’t fucked Kyle and maybe his two idiot friends and there weren’t a video of me circulating, then this would be fun, being here on the opening night of my first play at Darcy with Goth Sarah and Perfect Molly and Comfort Food Meghan, curling our hair and gossiping. I began to feel grateful that I hadn’t seen the tape yet. I guess I knew it was my last chance ever to have a normal life, even for a few hours. I could pretend I hadn’t seen it, because it wouldn’t be pretending. I could pretend, in front of my family, for at least tonight, that nothing was happening. If I was going to go through with
Runaways
, then maybe I didn’t want to have watched it beforehand, even if everyone else had.

I called my mom, said we were going early, that Sarah and Molly were taking Meghan and me. She was thrilled, of course. Sarah drove extra slow and stopped at every yellow light on Washtenaw. Maybe she felt vulnerable, like now that this terrible thing had happened to me, everything bad could happen to all of us and we weren’t immune even from car accidents. It was also a wet, cold February night, so maybe she was just worried that the car would hydroplane or something. Molly kept changing the radio station, and I fought a totally unfair urge to scream at her to leave it alone.

School was a circus. As soon as we pulled into the D’Arts student lot, and I had opened the door and jumped out of the passenger seat, I saw Kyle. I could taste my heart in my mouth. I considered running up to him and demanding an explanation. But he was standing with two grown-ups who, at least from the back, looked like parents. His dad was wearing a dark pink jacket with gray flecks in it, black suit pants, and shoes so gleaming and black they looked like giant, live beetles. His mom was in beige wool Banana Republic– type slacks, brown pointy boots, and a long cream coat. They were both very preppy from behind. Sarah and Meghan dragged me into the school, but I could barely rip my eyes away from the sight of Kyle and his mom and dad. A white, scalding panic came over me.

Inside the school there were more parents in the halls, and kids everywhere. We went backstage, where everyone was bustling crazily, painting makeup on, giggling, getting into costume in front of each other, warming up. I saw Kyle, without his parents now, but he was looking down, texting as he walked. This time I went straight up to him, and said, “We have to talk,” and he barely looked at me, just kept his eyes on the phone.

He said, softly, “Yeah, I know” but then we both saw Ms. Vanderly and Ms. Minogue come in, so Kyle said, “How about after the show?” I wished he had said my name, that he had said, “Yeah, I know, Judy,” or “How about after the show, Judy?” but he didn’t. Maybe because still knowing or saying my name would have made him accountable. Or maybe he just didn’t think of it.

Ms. Vanderly made us stand in a circle and then she was like, “Ginger Mews has flu, and sadly won’t be able to be here tonight, so her understudy, Molly, will play the role of Izzy. I know this is a surprise and a challenging adjustment for opening night, but I have absolute confidence in Molly and know that you all will work as an ensemble to support her and make sure the performance is top-notch. And I have a get-well card here for Ginger, who will no doubt be very disappointed to miss tonight; we’ll pass it around the dressing room so everyone can sign it.”

I felt a surge of relief that Ginger was just sick and it had nothing to do with me. And that Molly would get a real part. In spite of my having been annoyed at Molly earlier, I hoped Ginger wouldn’t get well too fast, because we only had six performances, and I wanted Molly to get to do at least three of them. It was only fair. Of course I never considered the possibility that I’d miss the rest of them too, and that my understudy, a mousy girl named Sonya, whose regular job it was to be chorus member seven, would play Hubbel.

After the buzz died down following Ms. Vanderly’s announcement, we did our voice exercises and Kyle moved far away from me, maybe so he wouldn’t have to hold my hand, and I thought I was going to cry. Everyone was watching us and it was totally obvious that this was about to be the worst story ever to hit the school.

Then, as I walked out of the backstage area right before my entrance, I heard him say my name. He was like “Judy,” and I took a sharp breath in and whipped around to see him standing behind me.

“I just wanted—”

“Take your places!” Ms. Vanderly yelled. She was right in front of me, and she turned around and saw me, facing the wrong way, waiting for Kyle to speak.

“Judy, dear,” Ms. Vanderly said, and put her hand on my shoulder to lead me into the wings. I was first out on stage, as usual. But I kept my face turned toward Kyle, and he said, “Judy, I didn’t—”

Ms. Vanderly was pushing me gently. “Didn’t what?” I asked. “Didn’t what?” But Kyle had turned so he could cross backstage and get ready for his entrance from the left. I rotated “didn’t” around in my mind. Didn’t what? Do it? Mean it? Make a tape? Was he apologizing? And if so, for what? My fear crystallized into something solid.

The show was a surreal nightmare. I was a robot, didn’t care, didn’t get my sign language right, think, stay in character, hear my own voice singing, or feel my body moving. I didn’t consider Ms. Doman, Norman Crump, Ms. Vanderly, Mr. Luther, or my family, even afterward, when everyone was congratulating everyone else. If anyone noticed how unprofessional and bad I’d been, they didn’t say so. Which made me think for a moment that maybe I had never been good at anything and every compliment I’d ever gotten was a patronizing lie. But I had so much agony on other fronts that I tried not to follow the path of that thought too. I’d save the am-Inot-even- a-good- actress-or-singer torture for after I had figured out what the Kyle disaster was and what it meant.

My mom had brought me a bouquet, which I carried around for two minutes before feeling so numb and humiliated that I asked Chad’s girlfriend, Alice, to hold it. She looked sporty and pretty in a light brown ponytail, wearing a Michigan sweatshirt and skinny jeans. When I handed her the flowers, she was nice about my making her do me a favor, said, “No problem, I totally understand,” meaning my not wanting to carry them, but I thought about how little she could possibly understand about that night. How it was lasting forever. How I was desperate to hear the end of Kyle’s sentence, to find a copy of the video or, better yet, hear him say there was no video, that it didn’t exist, had all been a joke. But I couldn’t find Kyle anywhere, so I turned my desperation toward leaving. All I wanted was to get out of the school and never come back. I practically dragged my confused family out the door, with Meghan’s help.

Of course, leaving offered me no relief. I went home, hurt my parents’ feelings by showing no interest in the usual debriefing about who had been especially great in the show. I didn’t want to go to the Grill for ice cream. Meghan and I went straight to my room and stared at each other, each thinking there was nothing we could do and how were we going to make it through the night. Then Meghan, who I think felt terrible that there was nothing she could say to make this better, went to take a shower. As soon as she was in the bathroom, I thought of one thing I wanted to do. It was almost midnight, but I called Ms. Doman at home.

To my horror, Norman Orb Crump picked up.

“Who may I say is calling?” he asked.

“Um, Judy,” I said. “I’m her student. I’m sorry it’s so—” I kept thinking, Orb. Orb. Orb. Like some weird drumbeat in my mind. I kept holding the phone with my left hand and put my right hand up to my head to stop the noise.

“Okay, Judy. Let me locate her. Hang on.”

I thought,
locate
? Then there was a pause and Ms. Doman’s warm, deep voice. “Hi, Judy! You were wonderful tonight. I didn’t have a chance to tell you afterward how fabulous—”

“I’m sorry it’s so late,” I said.

“Are you okay?” she asked suddenly, and her voice had gone from zero to sixty, like she was instantly super, super worried.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I have kind of a problem I was hoping I might be able to talk to you about. Could we meet tomorrow?”

“Of course—do you want to come to my room first thing in the morning?”

“Um, I’m not feeling well, so I don’t think I’ll be at school. Could we maybe do it in the afternoon?”

“Absolutely. Tell me how I can help.”

“Can you meet me somewhere other than school, please?”

“Judy, is this an emergency? Do you need help right now?”

“No, no,” I said, “after school tomorrow is fine.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m at home.”

“Oh, okay. Good. Why don’t you come over to my house at two thirty. I’m done early on Tuesdays. I live on Ferdon, near Burns Park—136 Ferdon—do you need directions?”

I felt the black cloud shift a bit, so it wasn’t directly over my head anymore.

“I can look it up. Thank you so much, Ms. Doman.” I said. “I’ll see you at two thirty.”

It was only after I hung up that I wondered whether Norman Crump would be home when I went over. I hoped not.

Meghan came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel.

“Who was that?” She sounded hopeful, like maybe it had been Kyle and he had made this all okay.

“My AP English teacher.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I really like her. And if everyone’s about to find out anyway, I think I want to talk to her first.”

“Are you going to go to school tomorrow?”

“Hell no. But I have to pretend to my parents I am.”

“What do you want to do now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Watch TV?”

We stayed up all night, until Meghan betrayed me by falling asleep at four, still sitting up. I watched the sun come up out my window. At six, I woke her.

“Hey,” she said, looking around. Then she took me in for real, and I saw her remember that my life was ruined, in one of those icy surges that gets you right when you’re warm and vulnerable, in between asleep and awake. They keep happening to me every single morning of my life now. I sometimes wonder, from my dirty perch in the Motel Manor, whether they’ll ever stop happening.

“Did you stay up all night?” Meghan asked me as soon as she was lucid.

I nodded.

“Poor baby. Do you want me to get up and shower and dress first?”

“No, ’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go first and you can sleep a few minutes more.”

She rolled back over and burrowed under the covers while I showered and dressed. When I was ready to go downstairs, I shook Meghan’s shoulder and she woke up and got into the shower.

I had breakfast with my mom and Sam, who were talking about the play, and how vast my range is. “I mean, a deaf black guy!” Sam kept saying, until I had a rare moment of real annoyance at him.

“Enough!” I said, and he was crushed.

My mom looked me over, surprised and irritated. “He was giving you a compliment, Judy,” she said. “ ‘Thank you’ will suffice.”

“Fine,” I sulked, “thank you.”

He pushed his chair back and went to get his backpack. I told my mom that Meghan and I were going to ride bikes to school, so she kissed my forehead and took Sam to school and herself to the Grill. The house felt empty and cold after they left, and I added snapping at Sam to the list of things I was feeling bad about. I rinsed my cereal bowl as Meghan came down the stairs.

“Everyone gone already?”

I nodded.

We rode our bikes to Gallup Park, over the train tracks, over the little wooden bridge, and then around the park until we came to the little island in the middle of the Huron River. We tucked our bikes behind a bush and sat on the riverbank. I wanted to hold that moment, stay there forever, hidden with Meghan, my new bike and my old bike she had ridden waiting to take us if we ever wanted to leave. We sat like that until we were too cold to sit outside anymore, even though it was a warmish day for February. Then we huddled in the concession stand, eating popcorn and cookies and drinking Swiss Miss hot chocolate, the powdery, chalky kind you mix with water. I watched the hard marshmallows bob at the surface of the foam cup, little bits of chemical foam forming a film around them. I took a sip.

“Let’s go back out,” I said to Meghan, and she nodded. We walked back to the island, our hands wrapped around the cocoa cups.

“Do you think it’s because you’re little?” she asked. And I felt a surge of tremendous gratitude for her, since this was a question only she could ask me with real empathy and impunity.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I don’t know what it is, yet. But I think Kyle—I mean, I thought Kyle, I think Kyle liked me just because.”

“I’m sure he does,” she said. “And even if it’s part of why he likes you, then that’s the same as liking you for who you are, right?”

I shrugged. “I guess so.”