Big Girl Small (8 page)

The funny thing is, even though I started out by lying to Bill about the whole “between jobs” thing, I decided almost right after that to tell him my whole story, the way the reporters, and maybe even my parents and brothers and friends, would have liked to hear it. Bill doesn’t know how lucky he is to be the recipient of the epic dwarf download. Which is why he’s perfect. At first, I wasn’t sure how to tell him, even. I thought maybe I’d start with the hardest part, but then I rethought it, and decided I’d do it chronologically. I mean, I hinted that things turned out badly for me, and of course he knows—in whatever way it’s possible for a guy like him to know anything—that I ended up here and that that’s not good news. But I started with the beginning of my life at D’Arts.

I’ve already told him up to the part about Chessie’s party. Bill’s a good audience for drama, probably not comedy. I don’t think he’d get jokes. But he’s kind, and he listens. And he nods a lot. Maybe he’s on drugs and can’t manage much information. That’s basically why I decided I’d tell him—it’s like practice in case I ever have to talk about it with my family, a rehearsal. During the whole nightmare, I managed to say impressively close to nothing for someone with such a big mouth. But I might have to explain it at some point, my perspective, I mean. Maybe to Sam. The thought of Sam makes me feel like my heart might bite its way out of my chest, fangs all over the place. He must be so grossed out and hurt and—I wonder if everyone at Tappan is making fun of him. I wonder if he’s seen—I can’t think about it.

If I survive this, and leave the Motel Manor, even if I can’t ever bring myself to talk about it with Sam or Chad, I might need to tell my kids. I mean, if I ever have kids and they’re daughters or teenagers or something. I could make it like one of the “morality tales” Ms. Doman liked to talk about.

Ms. Doman had this whole thing about how we have to tell stories about whatever happens to us, and then we can use those stories to decide whether our lives are happy or not, whether events have redeeming aspects or are totally hopeless, that it’s really all about how we choose to shape and name things. If we can just make a bearable story out of what happens to us, then whatever happened becomes bearable. Ms. Doman once said that that’s how people rebound after losing their entire families in car crashes and stuff.

But I can’t do it, and my whole family isn’t even dead; I’m just disgraced, so what’s my problem? I mean, some nights I lie awake thinking about all the worse things that have happened to people in the world, and how can I feel this sorry for myself, etc. But none of it, no matter how gruesome, changes the fact that my life is ruined. So maybe suffering isn’t relative. And I can’t take Ms. Doman’s advice, because every time I start to try to make a story out of it, let alone make one I “can live with” or that makes me seem like a person who might be happy again in the end, I start chattering like a wind-up toy, clacking around the room. Literally. The first time I talked to Bill about what happened, I got so scared while telling him that I had to excuse myself and throw up.

Sometimes, at night, when my mind wanders back to the video and what it looked like and how many people are probably watching it right now—this minute—my teeth actually start banging against each other like shutters in a storm. Every night, even if I sleep for a few sweaty hours, it’s like I’m rewinding myself to start the anxiety again every time I wake up. So my new coping strategy is to watch
Friends
reruns all night, every night. It’s not working. I’m not coping.

My mom says I have a bad habit of tying all my anxieties together, which makes them seem “systemic,” rather than sorting them out and dealing with each at a time. My mom went to nursing school before she and my dad opened the Grill. She thought she wanted to be a nurse, but then decided she hated it before she had graduated. But she likes to use words like
systemic
, maybe to make herself feel like the whole enterprise wasn’t a waste. And it wasn’t. I mean, when we got hurt as kids, she always knew exactly what to do, even the time Chad cut his leg open on some terrifying submerged rock when we were swimming on vacation and my mother made a tourniquet out of her shirt and stopped the bleeding while we waited for an ambulance to come. Chad still has a scar so giant it looks like he used to have another mouth on his leg and they sewed that one shut, but at least he didn’t bleed to death. The paramedics said that my mom had saved his life. It took them forever to get there, but I can’t remember why. My dad almost fainted, apparently, did nothing to help. Poor guy. I guess he watched Sam and me, which is something, considering that we could have drowned while my mom was putting pressure on Chad’s leg. I was only five at the time. Sam was a toddler.

In this case, who cares if my panics are systemic? There’s only one giant one, and I don’t see how its only being one thing makes it any better.

To make matters more horrifying, someone knocked on my Motel Manor door this morning. I didn’t answer it, and they didn’t come in, so I know it wasn’t housekeeping. It wasn’t Bill, either, because he’s the only person I know here and he never comes to my door. It’s like an unspoken agreement we have that if I want to talk I stop by his room, 214, and knock twice quietly and once loud and he comes out. Or we peek into the hallway if we want to see each other. He’s almost always outside 214, smoking. I was scared it might be people looking for me—I don’t even know who, reporters, I guess. There’s no one I can stand to face, so I hid. In the closet. Maybe I’m losing my mind. I mean, when I think that out loud, even say it,
I hid in the closet
, it reminds me of
The Shining
, of how if you stay in a hotel too long, you go crazy. Of course I’ve been here only a few days. What if I stayed a month? A year? Forever? I wonder if the police are looking for me, but it wasn’t them, because I know from movies that when the police come to your door at the Motel Manor, they shout “Police” really loud and bash the door open, and that didn’t happen. Plus, I don’t think this whole thing, my life that is, is a big enough deal for the police. Although maybe it is. Hard to say. But maybe it was just some jackass looking for someone else. Part of me thinks it might have been my mom, but wouldn’t she have called my name? Or Sarah. It was gentle knocking, so I don’t think it was, like, the media, coming to ferret me out. I don’t know. The only certainty was it wasn’t anyone I could tolerate seeing.

My second week at Darcy, I moved through the days on a cloud. It was “placement week,” meaning we auditioned for voice and dance. Acting class was organized by grade: freshmen took freshman acting, sophomores took sophomore acting, and so on. Since I was a junior, I was automatically registered for junior acting. But for voice and dance, we had to try out. And even though in the school brochure, Darcy claimed that its “artistic productions are collaborative and inclusive rather than competitive,” someone gets to play Juliet, if you know what I mean. So they auditioned us that second week of school for our classes and then a few weeks later for whatever the winter production would be in February. We all knew it would be some huge thing that cast everyone, what with the fall production starring only Kyle and Elizabeth and two other senior guys, who played the “old man” by putting baby powder in their hair or the other guy part by wearing a fat suit. The official reason for doing such an unfair star vehicle of a show in the fall was that it went up four weeks into school, so they had to begin rehearsing before the year even started. There was no need for a party line about why Kyle and Elizabeth got the leads; they were both perfect in every way, a simple fact accepted by the rest of us, like gravity or the sun rising. But D’Arts would make it up to us with a huge winter show. We’d all get fabulous parts, they promised, and have to rehearse for a million hours, probably including over Christmas break. But we had signed up to make such sacrifices. The “professional world” was so demanding, and everyone acted like even though we were in high school, if our families took a vacation that meant we weren’t dedicated “artists.” We used the word
artist
all the time there.

My fall placement auditions happened the second Tuesday of school, the second day of my second week. I had told the dance teachers I’d just take the absolute beginning-level class and therefore there was no need to audition me, but they made me go in anyway. Before it even started, I was already blushing to the roots of my hair, wearing kid-sized yoga pants and a tank top instead of the leotard they required, and I made my way through the moves in the most half-assed way anyone has ever seen. The sad secret truth is that I love to dance, but only at home in my bedroom, on the bed with a fake microphone, or in front of the full-length mirror in my parents’ bedroom with Sam break dancing. I do not like to dance in tights in front of Ms. McCourt, whose anorexic daughter Katie goes to the school, or in front of Ms. Smith, the seven-foot Amazon dance teacher who used to be a professional dancer and still wears her hair in a bun so tight her eyes bulge like they’re going to explode out of her head. Her entire being is singed with disappointment that she ended up teaching. I barely made it through the audition, and when it was over Ms. Smith just said, “We’ll post the list later today,” so I knew I’d be in the beginning dance curriculum, which meant I had to learn basic ballet, tap, and jazz. I wondered if they regretted letting me into D’Arts at all. Maybe I’d be an embarrassment to the school.

I promised myself that I would do better in the singing audition, but as soon as I had the thought, I felt sick because before I blew the dance audition I hadn’t even had to think about the voice one because I’d been sure I would do great. Now my one song had so much riding on it. Why hadn’t I just practiced the dance moves more? What if some weird thing happened and I did a bad job at the voice audition, too, and everyone thought they had let me in as a total pity move? Worse, what if they had?

I tried to breathe deeply as I went into the auditorium, and visualized the sheet music, since that always helps focus me. I thought how unfair it was that they made us do our placements back to back. I mean, I was still nervous from the dance one. The director of the music department, a wiggly noodle of a guy named Mr. Gosford, was sitting with Ms. Vanderly and Mr. Stenson, the two voice teachers. I was thinking, “Please, just let me get into Ms. Vanderly’s section, so when I come out, I’ll have good news.” I didn’t even know what difference her section made, but I wanted to come out proud. And no one liked Mr. Stenson. He was new at the school, and had a bald head with some scabs on it. Mostly, he had no power to put you in senior voice halfway through the year, which was apparently the best thing that could happen to a person. Unless of course you got in right away, which was practically unheard of.

The teachers were all in the front row of seats, right in the middle. It reminded me of that crappy movie
Flashdance
when the girl from
The L Word
has to audition for everyone even though she’s a small-town girl who’s never had professional training. They’re all really skeptical until she runs up and down the walls, dancing all over them. Then they love her, of course. That’s after the money scene, the one where she goes on a dinner date and sucks lobster out of the shell like an animal while fondling her boyfriend’s crotch under the table with her foot. When I watched that movie with Chad and his high school girlfriend, Kate, I thought that scene was like the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. And so did Kate, apparently, because after that whenever she stayed for dinner, she ate with her hands and played footsie with Chad under the table like they were in
Flashdance
. My parents found this cute, grinned at each other, probably remembering when they used to play footsie in high school. Gross. Sam was the only one who never noticed, of course. He just gobbled his spaghetti and talked about his day at school while Kate picked red peppers from the salad and licked her oily fingers between each bite.

At my audition, I had one of those anxiety visions where you do something totally crazy in your mind, just to torture yourself with the possibility, just to wonder what would happen if you
actually
did it. I used to feel that same unbearable urge at Chad’s swim meets. I’d imagine running down from the risers, tearing my clothes off, and leaping into the pool during a race. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, the terrifying question of
what would they do
so huge I was almost elated to consider it. I think the thrill of contemplating that kind of thing is related to an idea my dad once told me when I was crying on the ski lift at Mount Brighton—that vertigo isn’t the fear of falling off a cliff, but the fear of jumping. His point was to comfort me, to be like, “You know you’re not going to jump, so why be scared?” But it only made me more scared because how do you know you’re not going to jump? I mean, how can you know who you’ll be twenty seconds from now? What evidence is there to prove that you’ll know the upcoming you? What if the Judy I become in two minutes does a striptease for the voice coaches, shocking everyone in the room with her dwarf sexuality?
What would
they do
?

I wonder if they would have noticed my body. This is conceited, but I think I have a get-out-of-jail-free card, so I’ll just say it straight out. It’s not only my face that’s cute—I also have a cute-looking shape—I mean, I may be too small and my arms and legs are a bit short, but I have a little waist and kind of big boobs for someone my size and a nice round butt. Sometimes, I can tell that boys look at me and think “Wow,” before they think, “Oh my god, did I think ‘Wow’ just now about that tiny person? And if she’s such a kindergartner, then how come she has a great butt?” I can see the transition on their faces, because I’ve seen it so many times. Achons like me tend to have hourglass bodies; it’s like a concession prize or something. That guy Joel at the Little People conference told his friend Ian who told Meghan who told me that I was the closest thing he’d ever seen to a living doll, with my long eyelashes and hot body.