Snark and Stage Fright (15 page)

So when Michael caught my elbow as I was packing up my books after class and suggested we work together again, I spat in exasperation, “Are you
se
rious?”

“Yeah. I think we made a good team last year,” he replied. He had this stubborn set to his jaw at first, and then his mouth quirked into a smile as he conceded, “It took a while, yeah, but you have to admit we had perfect scores on our projects all year. And this is just one little history project. You can even pick the topic.”

I raised one eyebrow at him and held it as long as I could, shocked at his sudden desire to spend time with me, never mind his willingness to cede total control for once. Weeks ago it had seemed like he wanted nothing to do with me. Now he wanted to tutor me in math and sign up for a school project together? All I could think was that Michael’s always been very concerned about his grades. Maybe he thought that while I was not girlfriend material, I was still school project material. Maybe he didn’t want to risk his GPA on an untested project partner. I shook my head and said as I got up to go to my next class, “Okay. But as my partner, I feel you should warn me if you have recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.”

He smiled, a real smile this time, no trace of a sneer, and allowed, “That seems fair. So we’re a team again?” He held out his hand to shake and I swallowed hard before gripping his hand to seal our deal.

As I walked out the door with him behind me, I was thinking I really was going to need some kind of playbook for how to get through this post-breakup period, especially now. I knew it would be a lot easier to not work with him, to be able to just try to ignore him and not be reminded a thousand times a day what it felt like to put a palm against the sharp planes of his cheekbones or how his lips somehow knew how to apply the exact right amount of pressure when they kissed me, things I remembered every time I saw him. He was ready for the “just friends” phase because he had moved on with Diana. But I wasn’t.

Why would I agree to see him more than I had to and have to remember what I had lost?

I’ve never been someone who knows what she’s doing. I’ve never been the girl with the plan. But I don’t think I’ve ever been this confused before.

And it didn’t seem like the mental and emotional fog I found myself in would lift anytime soon.

I should have said “no” to Michael. Or transferred to a school in Novosibirsk. But we had shaken on it.

12 
One of Us

I started my new after-school job as wrangler of small thespians the following week. My job was pretty simple: when the kids weren’t needed onstage, I helped them go over their lines and generally kept them out of trouble. But line memorization got kind of dull so I invented a game to help in which I pretended to be a circus trainer and they knelt on the floor, waiting for me to give them a cue. Then they had to say their next line, and if they got it right, I tossed them an animal cracker and they’d snap it up with their mouths, which was hard to do. We made a lot of crumbs to clean up, but they knew their lines before Curt Blandon, who played Rolf, the Nazi wannabe who sings
You are Sixteen
to Diana’s character, Liesl. Curt had created a bit of a stir when he’d joined the cast because he was a former star linebacker for the LHS Minutemen, but he had suffered so many concussions his mom wouldn’t let him play anymore. As a senior with no football recruitment prospects and iffy grades at best, Curt had decided that he needed an “artsy” extracurricular to look good on his college apps.

“His voice is not terrible, exactly,” I told my parents at dinner that night. “If you’ve seen that video of the goats screaming, then you get an idea of what he sounds like. And he’s lucky that playing a future jackbooted thug allows for a certain measure of stiffness onstage.” I was happy to have extracurricular activity to share for once, since no one wanted to hear what I was writing for
The Alt
, ever.

I also said it to amuse Cassie because there is nothing Cassie likes more than to hear about a football player—unless it is to hear about others’ failings, and this story had both. But she didn’t respond, so I asked her, looking at Leigh so she could see that I had had a brilliant idea that would benefit her, too, by packing the audience full of rowdy fans, “Is the whole team gonna come out and support him on opening night?”

“No way,” Cassie scoffed as she reached for the salad bowl. “The team’s already torturing him about it. Some guys won’t even talk to him anymore.”

My dad shook his head in a way that said he would have expected nothing more from these boys, but I couldn’t help but gape at Cassie a little. This was the first time I had ever heard her speak of an athlete in less than reverent tones. Next, Leigh would be opining that Jesus was a nice guy but nothing special. Truly, nothing in my life made sense anymore.

“Are you serious? What a bunch of troglodytes,” I said. “I actually feel sorry for Curt now.”

She nodded and revealed, “Last year, he made fun of Darren Holt for wearing a light purple polo shirt—he said it was ‘gay-ass.’”

“Ugh, forget it! I don’t feel sorry for Curt at all.”

“And he pinned Marly Baylor against a locker once, saying she owed him a kiss for making a field goal. And when everyone was all over me about texting those pictures to Jeremy last year … ” She trailed off with a shudder. “At least I don’t have to deal with Curt this season … ”

This seemed to me to imply that she was dealing with something or someone else, but I don’t think my parents heard her. They were too busy whispering about something having to do with my dad always having to work late. But Leigh’s eyebrows shot up into her fluffy bangs and I asked quietly, kind of out of the side of my mouth, “Is something going on this season, Cass?”

“No,” she snapped, then took a sip of her water and amended, “Nothing I want to talk about, okay?”

“Okay. But, you know, if you want to talk … ”

Cassie rolled her gray-marble eyes at me and said, “So you can fix it like you did last year, when you suggested I wear that big red A on my clothes after everyone bullied me for the stuff with Jeremy? I don’t think so.”

I knew something was wrong, but I wasn’t going to push it. Not after my
Scarlet Letter
idea last year had made everyone laugh at Cassie even more than the sexts that had gone viral at school. We both knew she could get better advice from a can of pineapple chunks, so I resolved to keep my mouth shut. At least for now.

***

Before I could find out what was going on with Cassie, I had to figure out how to study history with someone with whom I had a history. In the week since we’d decided to work together, Michael had been treating me like one of his great friends—and that was the problem. Sitting next to him in class, sitting at the same table at lunch, or at an
Alt
meeting when he could make it—somehow it all felt like a lie.
How can we just be friends,
I wanted to shout,
when we were so much more?
Every time Diana giggled at one of his jokes or he snuck a French fry or something off of her lunch tray I felt my stomach curl up like a dried leaf. I could see them growing closer right before my eyes, in little increments each day, a shared laugh here, a whisper there. I didn’t know how many official dates they’d had by now, and I wasn’t going to ask, but every lunch period with the two of them at my table was like watching a movie trailer for a romantic comedy and having no doubt how it will end. They even looked good together like a movie couple, a preppie perfect pair.

I figured the loud, sloppy, crazy Cryptic Pigs from Hell show in Ashworth would be the antithesis of the romcom playing out in front of me. Since Gary had provided me with a steady supply of punk MP3 files for about a year now, I had grown to really like the thrash and crash and energy of stuff like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls and lots of other bands I had never really listened to before. I even attempted to schiz out my hair and do eye makeup like Siouxsie from the Banshees. Shondra stuck some feathers in her braids for the show and when he saw them Dave said she looked like Annabella Somebody from some band called BowWowWow.

As we swayed to the bass line thump of
Holiday in the Sun
, I felt my whole body loosen like a hose that’s been coiled under a porch all winter. Until I saw Michael Endicott emerge through the packed crowd that seemed to part for him like the Red Sea, like a body rejecting an invading virus. Because of course Michael showed up in a tan polo shirt—but at least he had on his scruffiest-looking pair of jeans. He looked like he had meant to teleport to a country club but had set the controls for “punk club” and accidentally landed here instead. I had to smile at the sheer incongruity of it and he grinned back and hurried over to me and Shondra, weaving through the human forest of flailing limbs and thrashing arms with unexpected finesse.

“Whoa. You look different!” he yelled in the general vicinity of my ear.

“Oh, you know me,” I yelled back. “Always trying to fit in.”

“Hey, they’re pretty good! Are you supposed to dance to it?”

“You can pogo,” I said and pointed to some people who were basically jumping up and down and sometimes leaning from side to side; others were thrashing around each other, and if they crashed into people who did not feel the same spirit of anarchic camaraderie—or did not like to have their drinks spilled—they’d go thrash around some more receptive people in another corner. “Or you can slam. Shond and I are just sort of going with the flow.”

The three of us watched the crowd and nodded our heads in time to the music. As the Pigs’ cover of the Buzzcocks’
Ever Fallen in Love
ended and we clapped and whooped our approval, Michael asked me, “Did you come up with our topic for the project yet?”

“Women in the Russian Revolution,” I said, having just decided on that topic at that exact moment.

He scowled for a second, but it turned into a crooked smile. I guess we remembered at the same time how irritated he had been last fall when he’d been stuck in a group project for English with me and Shondra and we’d insisted on talking about women in Chaucer. He nodded knowingly and guessed, “And you want me to speak for the soulless aristocrats, right? Maybe for the presentation we can reenact the murder of the Tsar’s family. You can line me up against the wall and shoot.”

“Sure,” I said, “but make sure you don’t slump down dead right away because the bullets need to ricochet off the jewels your servants sewed into your clothing.”

He smiled and tipped back a bottle of root beer. For a place called Club Razorburn, management seemed to take the “all-ages show” rules about alcohol very seriously. Which was okay with me, because it was so hot in there with everyone packed in so tight I figured a beer would have made me barf.

“Okay,” Michael yelled over the next song after some thought. “Maybe I’ll look into writing about Alexander Kerensky. If he’d stayed in power, the last hundred years of history would be totally different.”

I nodded toward Gary in his manic gyrations and said, “Don’t let him hear that you’re backing the moderate in the revolution, though. That’s as risky as wearing Ralph Lauren to a Pigs show—you’ll end up on the bottom of the mosh pit, stomped to a preppie pulp.”

“I’ll survive,” he assured me as he leaned against a metal pole like he spent every Saturday night in a mosh pit. “You’re not selling vegan cookies and stuff at this show?” Last year, Dave and Gary had convinced me to bake a bunch of brownies and cupcakes and cookies to sell at another all-ages show, and I had sold out before they were far into the first set.

“My vegan baking empire is on hold for awhile. I don’t have time for it.”

“Why?” I think he asked, but even with my ear cupped I wasn’t sure because it was hard to hear. I looked up at Gary, who was bobbing his head in time to the monster bass riff he was pumping out. The spikes of his Mohawk were flailing like those inflatable guys with long bendy arms that advertise sales at tire stores.

Shondra answered for me as she shuffle-jumped in a kind of hybrid hip-hop pogo move that I could never hope to replicate. She shouted, “Because, believe it or not, she’s babysitting the kids in the fall musical.”

“Oh, right. Di told me. So what are the kids like?” Michael asked when the band stopped wailing so that Dave could speak to the crowd about upcoming gigs.

“They’re pretty chill, for the most part. Andy, the youngest boy, is really sweet, but the youngest girl, Leila, is a total diva. She’s auditioned for
America’s Got Talent
already and she’s only six.”

“Well, does she got talent?” Michael drawled over the lip of his bottle.

Before I could answer, Dave and Gary were dedicating the next song to their “favorite alt news writer,” Michael Endicott.

“It’s got a beat he’ll appreciate, we think,” Dave announced as they launched into the Clash’s
White Man in Hammersmith Palais
.

“Awww, they’re playing a little reggae-style punk for you,” Shondra said as she hip-checked Michael, who looked embarrassed by the attention. “Like it or not, you’re one of us now.”

Michael raised his hands slightly in mock horror and looked over at me to see what I thought, just as an overly enthusiastic slam-dancer crashed into me from behind, creating a chain reaction that shoved my face right into Michael’s chest. In a few deft movements, he managed to ditch his drink and put both arms around me to steady me before I toppled to the floor. And he kept holding me long enough, I’m sure, to feel that my heart was beating like a hummingbird’s now. He looked down at me as I pulled my face free from the little embroidered polo player on his chest; that slow smile played across his face and he opened his mouth to say something, but the words were subsumed by one of Gary’s rock-god screams and a decibel-shattering guitar solo. Michael let go and the moment—if it had really been a moment—was gone.