Snark and Stage Fright (12 page)

Shondra laughed at the return of my snark and turned back to see what Senora was writing on the board.

I decided not to invite Diana to the first
Alt
meeting of the year, which I had to leave early. I had to get to my new after-school job: babysitting my neighbor’s four-year-old. But as soon as I got there, expecting to meet the boy’s grandmother, who picked him up at preschool and stayed until I could get there, I was met at the door by his very harried looking and very pregnant mother.

“Georgia!” she cried and invited me in, where she brought me a lemonade and then somewhat tearfully (hormones, I guess) explained that she wouldn’t need me to watch Liam because her obstetrician had just put her on bed rest for most of the day. She’d be taking an early maternity leave so she’d be able to hang out with Liam as part of her few allotted hours of activity after Liam’s grandmother went home at three. I told her I was sorry to hear that but hoped she took it easy and that she shouldn’t worry about me. But I was disappointed because Liam is fun to hang out with, like most four-year-olds are. One minute he thinks he’s a horse and wants you to feed him pretend oats out of a beach bucket and the next he’s a ninja wearing
Dinosaur Train
underpants over his head as his mask. His is a nice world to live in for a few hours a day. Not to mention the fact that I needed to save up some money for college next year. And I couldn’t go back to working for Dr. Endicott, even if that weren’t a totally humiliating proposition, because his receptionist was back from maternity leave. Pregnant and recently pregnant ladies were really messing with my employment status.

I didn’t look forward to telling my parents I was insolvent again, but at dinner, Mom assured me that she would find someone through her Longbourne Newcomers’ Club who needed a babysitter or mother’s helper. But then Leigh suggested the director of the LHS Drama Club, who was looking for someone to help during rehearsals for
The Sound of Music
to keep the little kids under control and ready for their cues, starting at the end of the month.

“So you’ll be
playing
Maria, but I’ll have to actually
be
the singing nanny nun?” I clarified.

“If I get the part,” Leigh demurred, but before Mom and Dad could jump in to reassure her that of course she would, Cassie snickered over her plate of turkey tetrazzini.

“No one wants you to be a singing
any
thing,” she said to me.

“I think it’s a brilliant idea, Leigh,” Mom said. She loves to see a problem solved through no effort of her own. “George, you can earn some money
and
list Drama Club as one of your extracurriculars for college applications. You only have the newspaper now on that list,” she pointed out, adding in a whisper fit for the stage, “The al
te
rnative newspaper.”

I looked at Dad, who just nodded slightly and went back to the article he was reading on his Blackberry because he thought no one would notice his lack of engagement. It was enough, he seemed to think, that he sat at the table with us.

The next day Leigh introduced me to the musical’s director, Ms. Duval, who hired me right away, and all I had to do was wait for my little troop of von Trapps to be cast. And then the real fun—wrangling six or seven kids instead of one—would begin.

I was less than a week into my senior year and nothing was going the way it was supposed to.

It was going to be a long year.

***

I wanted to talk to Tori, but I hadn’t wanted to ruin her second week of college with pestering phone calls about my laughable and self-induced romantic purgatory. So when my phone buzzed as I was walking home on Friday and I saw her name on the screen, I did a little hop step on the sidewalk that amused a mail carrier.

“Hey, Tor! How’s college life?”

“Great! Are you walking home right now?”

“Yeah. I’m almost at the Westies’ yard, but I don’t think they’re outside right now.” I always stopped by the house a block from ours that has two West Highland terriers; I like to let them lick my hand through the fence and then chase me, yapping, along the length of the yard. Especially on days like today, it makes me really childishly, shamelessly happy. “How’s the roommate situation?”

“Mara’s okay. And I guess all that moving around we did over the years for dad’s work has helped me get along with all kinds of people. Still … I wish she’d tone down the Jewish thing a little.”

“Whoa! Eva Braun, please hand the phone back to my sister because I can’t tolerate your anti-Semitism!”

“Come on, George. You know what I mean. Mara’s Orthodox, so she takes it really seriously. And she doesn’t get me, either. She went to a yeshiva school and doesn’t even want to let me turn on the lights on Saturdays, the Sabbath.”

As I rounded the corner to our block I said, “Tor, you’ve dealt with religious zealots before.”

“Who?”

“Hello? Have you met our sister, Leigh? She’s the one with the purity ring and the lyrics to Carrie Underwood’s
Jesus, Take the Wheel
practically tattooed to her arm.”

Tori didn’t answer for a while, but I heard her talking to someone else and then come back and say, “Sorry. That was Naleema, across the hall.”

I allowed myself a few seconds to envy Tori hanging out every day with exotic people from all over the planet while I was stuck in Longbourne with a strawberry blond American Girl doll and a cranky ex-boyfriend.

“So what’s going on with Michael?”

I sank onto our front steps and waved at Cassie as she zoomed past me into the house to change into her cheerleading uniform for an away game.

“Nothing. Same thing. He’s ‘thinking’ it out and I am giving him the space to do it, I guess.”

“Well, are you guys talking at all?”

“Yeah.”

“And how does he sound? Miserable, I bet. How does he treat you?”

“Like he treats everybody else. Though he said something kind of mean to me the other day. He described me as vegan, ‘like a vegetarian, only more militant.’”

Tori laughed. “You guys are always teasing each other, though.”

“Yeah, but it was the way he said it. And who he said it to.” I poured out a description of Diana DeBourgh and how it was driving me crazy that I couldn’t even hate her because she was turning out to be, from what I could tell, pretty much the nicest person this side of Santa Claus. Just yesterday she had brought in these fancy macaroons to share with everyone at our lunch table. They weren’t vegan, but I ate one anyway, to be nice to her—and to prove to Michael that I can be sociable and accepting. He watched me take all three bites with an odd smile on his face.

“So how long are you going to give this ‘thinking it out’ thing?” she sighed when I was done.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you don’t have to hang around forever and wait for him to make a decision. You don’t have to wait for him to call. You can call him and tell him you need to talk.”

I chewed on the ends of a hank of hair, something I haven’t done since I was about five years old. Her proposition, while both obvious and reasonable, had reduced me to the emotional maturity of a five-year-old. Maybe I should go over to Michael’s house and knock down any Lego towers he happened to have sitting around.

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

“George!” Tori practically shouted. “You’re afraid to speak your mind? Is this the girl who brought the entire cafeteria to its knees last year with a tirade about the sexual double standard? Who writes blistering editorials comparing meat-eaters to commandants at Auschwitz?”

“Yeeees … ”

“Call. Him.”

“Okay. I promise. Is Trey coming to visit this weekend?” I asked to detour the conversation because I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to do what I had just promised I would do.

Instead, I came up with an alternative, almost-as-proactive plan: I decided that I would drop by the party at Cameron Lowe’s house tomorrow. Because Cameron was on the cross-country team, I was almost certain Michael would be there. My plan was to show up and drink just enough to be brave enough to confront Michael but not to embarrass either one of us. My mom was thrilled that I was going to a social event and I managed to talk Shondra into going, too, for moral support.

I spent the afternoon picking out my outfit and hating myself the whole time I was doing it, for caring so much about what friggin’ shirt I was going to wear to a party I didn’t even want to go to. But after much internal debate and a photo DM-ed to Tori, I decided on a lavender short-sleeved blouse with little white chevron-y things on it and a pair of skinny jeans. I wanted to look great but not like I
tried
to look great.

When I got to Cameron’s party, Michael was already there and he and Shondra and I talked for half an hour about the first week of school and which classes were going to be hard and which teachers needed to retire. Then Michael left us to talk to some guys from the cross-country team and I realized that I had started shaking a little. Party-induced palsy? Or had my time in love limbo affected my muscle control?

“You’ve got to talk to him, George,” Shondra advised as she ushered me over to a couch and motioned for two girls in miniskirts to make room for us. “Like, now.”

But I waited another hour, during which I talked to everyone who came by, as if I were the unofficial ambassador to the Republic of Cameron’s Couch. My mom would have been delighted to see me being so friendly and I could tell my sudden affability surprised everyone else. But when I saw Michael was leaving the party I knew my stalling time was up and I followed him out to his car.

“Hey!” I called as he was opening the driver’s side door. He looked up and I asked, “Can I talk to you?”, each word coated in gravel as it rose up my throat.

He slid into the car and my heart plummeted to the tops of my sandals. But then he opened the passenger’s door for me, so I got in.

“What’s up, George?” he asked. Something about the casual, careless way he asked it made me do an emotional one-eighty, spinning from abject to angry. Obviously this whole breakup was causing me a lot more pain than he felt.

“‘What’s up?’” I snapped. “I don’t know, Michael. You tell me.”

He slumped a little in his seat and sighed.

“I don’t know.”

“Really? ’Cause it looks like you’re no longer ‘thinking things through.’ It looks like you’ve moved on with someone else. I guess I just didn’t get the memo about it.”

He turned to me now and looked genuinely confused.

“What are you talking about?”

“You and Diana. You seem happy together.”

“We’ve gone out once,” he informed me with the kind of smile you’d see on a dentist holding a long needle. “And she’s a really sweet girl.”

If a heart can explode then I was pretty sure mine had splattered all over my ribcage. Groping for the door handle, I managed to say, “Then I hope you’re really happy together,” and was prepared to run—to the Pacific Northwest, if necessary—but Michael reached across me and pulled the door shut again. The shock of this sudden movement and once-familiar physical intimacy, his arm against my chest, reduced me to warm pathetic tears.

Michael slumped back against his seat, reached out an uncertain hand toward me, then slumped again. And that gesture, that split second of his wanting to comfort me and deciding not to, made me want to stab myself with the nearest sharp object because that would have hurt less. That’s when I knew for certain that it was over. There was no us anymore. And somehow I felt small, diminished, like without us there was less of me.

“I miss you,” I whispered through my tears. “And I deserve to, because of what I said, because I laughed. I don’t know … I just miss you.”

He said, almost apologetically, “I couldn’t keep going the way we were.”

“What ‘way’? You mean the not-having-sex way?” I snorted. “Are you going to give me some kind of 1950s lecture about how young men have ‘needs’ and girls have to understand those needs or the men will get blue balls or whatever it was called—”

“
That
!” Michael barked, practically lifting himself out of his seat. “I couldn’t take any more of your saying stuff like
that
! You make such a big deal out of things sometimes!”

“Well, sex
is
a big deal! Or at least, it should be. I mean, I have no problem, people hooking up—”

“We weren’t exactly hooking up, George,” he interrupted through clenched teeth.

“No. Because I’ve never done that. Not like you and Catalina.”

“No,” he groaned. “Not this again.” He turned the key in the ignition, and a blast of reggae music burst from the speakers. I realized this was my cue to go, but the sound made me so sad I couldn’t move.

Instead I asked, “Do you remember last New Year’s Eve? We were sitting in your car after another party, listening to Bob Marley … ”

“This is Jimmy Cliff,” he corrected as if part of the fundamental flaw in our relationship had been my inability to correctly identify reggae artists. As we sat looking at each other, I knew he could tell that I knew he was being deliberately obtuse, so he ducked his head, kind of embarrassed, and said, “Look, George—”

“It’s okay,” I assured him because I knew that if I spent one more second in that car I would expire, right there in his passenger seat. I opened the car door again, but I paused before climbing out onto the sidewalk. Without looking back at him, I said, “But I want to say this: Maybe this is immature and unsophisticated, but my first time was so important to me that I got really nervous … and I blew the whole thing. I didn’t trust you—no, I didn’t trust us enough, didn’t trust us not to change. I knew everything would be different afterward, and I was so happy then, I didn’t want to risk that.” I slid out of the car with one foot on the sidewalk and looked over at him. He wasn’t looking at me now but was sitting very still, either absorbing my words or working hard to tune them out. I couldn’t tell and I couldn’t stand being there long enough to figure it out. “I just want you to know that I’m sorry that anything I said or did that night hurt you. I still wouldn’t want to hurt you, ever.”