Bad Romance

by Heather Demetrios

  “It did,” you say. “Help, I mean.”

  Something in my bones tells me this moment is important.

  Miss B calls your name before we can say anything else and you pass me your audition slip (your handwriting is surprisingly neat) and lope to the front of the room. You hand your music to the pianist, then look at us with what my grandpa would call a shit-eating grin.

  You’re suddenly Billy Flynn, perfect casting for the conniving lawyer. Anyone who wants that part probably gave up the moment they heard you were still auditioning. Like so much, it’s yours for the taking.

  This is Drama King Gavin: life of the party, the guy who takes nothing and no one seriously. Especially himself. Band Gavin is more like the real Gavin I’ll be getting to know: broody, moods shifting like tectonic plates. Vulnerable.

  Despite the smile on your face and the magnetism that crackles around you whenever you’re onstage, I can feel the apprehension in the room. Everyone leans forward in their seats. I can almost see the neon sign blinking above your head: SUICIDE SUICIDE SUICIDE.

  You sing “One Song Glory” from Rent and I wonder if this is the song you’d originally planned to sing, or your way of telling us, I’m okay now. It’s definitely not the kind of jazzy song everyone else is doing and not your band’s brand of angst rock. It’s … beautiful. Delicate and raw, laced with gritty elegance. I want to make out with you so bad right now.

  One song, he had the world at his feet,

  Glory, in the eyes of a young girl, a young girl …

  I’m that young girl.

  I just don’t know it yet.

  FIVE

  All my guy friends at school are horny. Their favorite thing to do is figure out what each of us girls’ porn names would be. I guess a lot of people in porn use their middle name as their first name and the street they live on as their last name. This would make me Marie Laye.

  Unfortunate (or perfect), I know.

  You, Kyle, Peter, and Ryan think it’s the most hilarious thing in the world that I live on Laye Avenue. It’s a pretty perfect name for a porn star. It cracks you up and seeing you laugh makes me happy, so I don’t care that the four of you are plotting my side career in adult films. I guess if directing doesn’t work out, I’ll have something to fall back on.

  Gavin Davis.

  I can’t get you out of my head. The air around you is changed, weighted somehow, by what happened. You look older, like you’ve really been through something. You don’t even try to hide your scars. You almost wear them like a badge of honor. Battle scars. I like that. You seem wise somehow. Like you found the answer to a question you’ve been asking for a long time. I want to know the answer.

  The words I wrote you two weeks ago make my fingers burn. I hold them to my lips now and suddenly think, I wonder what it would be like to kiss him. Summer has moved from fear and sadness to seriously pissed off at you—she doesn’t hang around with us anymore. Lys, who plans to be a psychologist someday like her parents, says that Summer is moving through the stages of grief.

  Summer says you’re controlling, that you didn’t like her having guy friends. I mean, I guess that’s not cool but she is pretty flirty with other guys. Even I’ve noticed that. He wanted to be with me all the time, she says. He wanted to be the most important thing. Sorry, but I don’t see what’s so bad about that. I mean, if you were my boyfriend, I can’t imagine not wanting to hang out with you every second of every day. If that’s crazy, sign me up. Attach me to your hip.

  The bell at the end of my last class rings, jolting me out of my thoughts, bringing me back to Now, which is not a happy place. I’d like to pass Go and collect my two hundred dollars, but college feels like a long way off. So the bell rings and my heart sinks. I hate this part of the day, when I know I have to go home.

  There’s a collective happy sigh as Mr. Denson says, “Do your homework or you’ll end up homeless. Say it with me: Trigonometry is good.”

  We all groan out, “Trigonometry is good.”

  I realize I haven’t heard a thing Mr. Denson has been saying for the past hour. This happens to me all the time. I get lost in my thoughts, daydream whole classes away.

  Get your head out of the clouds, Mom says.

  My house is only a few blocks from campus, so I’m home pretty quick. Pro: I don’t have a long-ass walk. Con: I get home before I want to, which is never. You know that bummed-out feeling you get on Sundays—the Sunday blues? That’s how coming home is. That’s how I feel every second I’m in my family’s house.

  I’m not really sure why my mom had me. By that I mean that I wasn’t a mistake baby, like an oh-shit-I-got-knocked-up baby. My mom wanted me. Which is why it’s so weird that she doesn’t seem to want me now. I feel like I’ve somehow intruded on her, like she and The Giant have a big No Trespassing sign and an electric fence around them and Sam. I am constantly bumping into the goddamn fence.

  They don’t want me here. In some of our worse arguments, when I threaten to go live with my drug addict of a dad, my mom says, Fine, see how you like it there. And I don’t know what she means by that. Like, Fine, I don’t care? Or does she mean the life she gives me is so much better? And if she does mean that, isn’t it, like, not really impressive that she’s giving me a better life than a drug addict? The bar is set pretty low, is what I’m saying.

  To my mom and The Giant, I’m a nuisance first, a servant second, and a person a distant third. My life at home is an endless list of chores. To name a few: scrubbing between the tiles in the shower, organizing the recycling (crushing every individual can first), watering the lawn, dusting, vacuuming, folding laundry, prepping dinner, washing the windows (God forbid I leave a streak), making beds that aren’t mine, doing dishes, and babysitting. My mother, she can’t stand dirt. Everything has to be spotless, in its right place, and it is my job to do that regardless of my pile of homework or the friends who want to see a movie, hang out. The Giant gets in on this action, too. For example, it’s my job to wash his car every week and I’m often stuck doing his laundry.

  My friends and I secretly dubbed him The Giant because he has a very fee fi fo fum personality. He drinks vodka tonics and has a voice that throws goose bumps over your arms. His word is law. Our house is full of yelling and tears, walls that hide the truth from our neighbors. The Giant can be very charming, you see. When he’s outside our house, he’s an ogre in disguise, morphing into Friendly Neighbor or Dedicated Parent. He’s an accountant with a business that costs more than it makes, but his true calling, I think, is acting: he’s so very talented at pretending to be a good person.

  We live in a one-story with three bedrooms. I used to share my room with my older sister, Beth, which is why I have a bunk bed. I claimed the bottom one because it feels like a cocoon, like I can hide there when things get too hard.

  I’ve stuck up pictures of my friends on the wall beside the bed, a mixture of show photos and random candid shots. There’s one of you sitting on the edge of the stage, fixing me with a lazy grin. I have pictures of my idols: Julie Taymor (only the best director ever), Walt Whitman. There’s also my favorite quote, which my freshman-year English teacher had on a poster above the whiteboard: Medicine, law, business, engineering are necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, and love—these are what we live for. It’s basically my mission statement.

  The quote’s from Dead Poets Society, one of the parts where Robin Williams is in the classroom, teaching his students about Shakespeare. No one had to get me to like Shakespeare. I’ve memorized nearly all of Romeo and Juliet. I understand how trapped they feel, how desperate they are to get out. In eighth grade, I carried it everywhere, reading and rereading it in all my spare moments. My copy is pretty beat-up, but it would probably be the first thing I saved in a fire. The pages are brittle and yellowing already, stained with the hope that bled through my fingers, a new girl in a new town looking for something epic in her life.

  I remember the day we moved here from LA. My mom
and The Giant had just gotten married, and Beth and I stayed up late in the dark, crying. It was too quiet—we missed the sound of the freeway, the helicopters. It smelled weird, like dung and dirt and broken dreams. We made a list of all our favorite things about LA and then posted it on our bedroom wall. It’s still up there: Venice Beach, the Fifties Cafe, Pickwick Ice Rink, standing in line at Pink’s, Mexican food.

  I dump my backpack on the floor in the entryway of our house just as Sam skips in. Even though I love him, Sam, through no fault of his own, is kind of the bane of my existence. My mom has already told me that my (unpaid, unappreciated) job this summer will be to babysit him every day, all day, whenever I’m not at the Honey Pot. Beth and I used to share the burden, but now it’s all on me—babysitting, chores, punching bag. Mom takes advantage of the free labor so that she can spend time on Mineral Magic, this makeup company she does parties for, selling the makeup to her friends and their friends and their friends.

  “Gace!” Sam yells.

  He has trouble pronouncing his r’s. Sam reaches his arms up, smiling, and I hug him to me, pick him up and spin him around. I like the way he throws his head back and how the laughter starts somewhere deep in his belly. Right now, he’s not the bane of my existence: he is adorable and sweet and really the only good thing about this house.

  “Grace!”

  My mom, already calling, impatient, irritated. It’s chore time, I just know it. I swing Sam around so I’m carrying him piggyback style and head for the kitchen. Mom’s doing her drink ritual: glass, ice, water, lemon wedge, one packet of Equal. Place in glass in that order, stir three times clockwise, three times counterclockwise. She has me make it for her all the time. Grace, I need a water. She’ll do that, just call me out of my room while I’m doing homework, like I’m some on-call bartender. One time she caught me stirring it four times—I was daydreaming about you and lost track. She screamed at me for wasting the lemon, the Equal, the water during a drought as she poured the contents out, rinsed the glass, then set it on the counter. Do it again.

  “I need you to weed the backyard,” she says. “Take Sam with you and keep an eye on him.”

  No Hey, how was your day? No Do you have a lot of homework? Did any more of your friends try to commit suicide?

  Ever since last week I kept wanting to talk to her about you because sometimes adults know stuff, but she’s always busy with some new project and now I feel like, what’s the point? I hate the yo-yo that is our relationship. Sometimes I feel so close to my mom, like we’re two soldiers in a trench, clutching our guns to our chest, ready to charge when the enemy comes. Other times, she is the enemy.

  This is my attempt to not have the worst afternoon ever: “I have to do a ton of trig before work—”

  She raises her hand. “You should have thought about that before you decided not to weed last weekend.”

  The anger in me simmers just under the surface of my skin. It’s there, right when I want it. Waiting. I only have an hour to do homework before I have to work the closing shift at the Honey Pot. Now I don’t even have that.

  “Mom, that’s not fair. I had work and then that big project for English to finish, remember?”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  She’s yelling now. It doesn’t take much to get her there. Sam digs his forehead into my back like he’s trying to hide. My mom is angry all the time. When she talks to me, she clenches her teeth, growling. I’m too old for an actual spanking, but my face, my arms, the back of my head—all that’s up for grabs. I’d like to avoid getting slapped around today. I’d like to not hate her.

  “Okay,” I say, my voice suddenly quiet. Beaten-Down Daughter. I curl my toes. Stare at my Doc Martens. Except I don’t do a good enough job of hiding my frustration this time.

  “I’m this close to keeping you home.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, contrite, like she’s Jesus and I’m asking for forgiveness.

  If I skip work today, I could lose my job. I just want it to stop. This constant confrontation—it’s exhausting. Mom has three major states: Angry, Depressed, Unhinged. By unhinged I mean she’ll decide to reorganize the Christmas decorations in July—at three in the morning.

  I’m so tired.

  When I try to explain how awful it feels here to my friends, when I try to explain the fear I constantly live with that the bit of freedom I have is going to get taken from me—it just comes out sounding petty. Poor me. And their sympathy isn’t what I want, anyway. I need righteous anger. I need someone pounding on the front door, ready to tell my mom and The Giant just how lucky they are. I get straight A’s. I’m a virgin. The only alcohol I’ve ever had is a thimble of Communion wine when my Grams takes Beth and me to church. I’ve never smoked pot or a cigarette or even been in a room where those things are present. I don’t jaywalk, I don’t ditch classes, I never lie to my mom. In short, I am a really good fucking kid. But they don’t see that. They see someone trespassing on a life that would, it seems to me, be much better without me in it.

  Please don’t ground me. Those are the words that go round and round in my head right now. I was grounded for half of last month because I hadn’t cleaned the master bathroom that my mom and Roy share before I went to Nat’s house. I was running late and wiped it down quickly, hoping she wouldn’t notice. But she did, of course she did. There was a hair on the base of the toilet (You call this CLEAN?) and a speck of mold between two tiles (And THIS. I’m not blind, Grace.). My punishment: two weeks of imprisonment, which just happened to coincide with a home improvement project that The Giant was undertaking.

  Mom’s voice turns indifferent—my apology does nothing. “When you’re done you can go.”

  “Are you still okay to drive me?”

  The mall is a half-hour walk away and my mom refuses to let me get my license because she says it’s an adult responsibility and I’m not mature enough to handle it (except: Straight A’s! Virgin! Sober!).

  “Let’s see how you do on the lawn.”

  This is how I pick up the pieces of my afternoon, how I hold on to the hope of making it to work on time and thus not losing my job: I nod, wrapping my meekness around me like a cloak.

  I change out of my vintage mod dress and into old jeans and a T-shirt, then head out the sliding glass door that leads to the back, picking Sam up on my way. I squeeze him too tight and he cries out and I snap at him, the anger pouring out of me, hot and quick. The guilt is instantaneous. I’m not any better than my mom.

  “I’m sorry, buddy,” I whisper to Sam as we get outside.

  I help him over to his swing set, then pull on gardening gloves and get to work on the weeds.

  Being seventeen with fascist parents sucks. You get to feeling like nothing is yours except the thoughts in your head and these tiny private moments.

  Don’t be a martyr, Mom would say.

  Look, I’m not this upset because I have to do one stupid chore or babysit my brother for a few hours after school. It’s that things have gotten to the point where everything is bad all the time, so one little thing pushes me right over. Sometimes I wish I had split lips or bruises to show the school counselor—it’s hard to explain the torture of living in this house, the way the constant nagging and housework and yelling grinds you down. Before, when there were welts on my skin from The Giant, I was too young to know what to do about them. Now I’d love to present them to a school counselor and say, See? I can’t live like this anymore. I’m trapped, suffocating. Living in this house is like the time I was in my cousin’s pool and a big raft everyone was playing on covered me. I was stuck underwater with it just over my head and for a few seconds I was certain I was going to drown.

  It’s not bad one hundred percent of the time, but if anything good happens, there are always strings attached. I’ve learned to barter. Time with my friends, clothes, movie tickets, a night out—these all cost something. Is having fun Friday night worth a weekend’s worth of chores or babysitting? I remember once how Lys tri
ed to explain that this wasn’t normal, that parents would do nice things for their kids because they wanted to, because they loved them. There was no you owe me, no what’s in it for me? It sounded too good to be true.

  I pull weeds, the sun hot on my back. It’s unseasonably warm, even though we’re used to crazy heat in this part of California—ninety degrees even though it’s March. Money’s tight, though, so being inside isn’t much better. On days like this, Mom only puts the air-conditioning on at night. It’s too expensive to keep it on all day. I take a break and look at the sky—the same sky as the one over Paris. I pretend for a minute that I’m there, walking along the Seine. I’m wearing a chic skirt and blouse, and … carrying a picnic basket with a baguette, cheese, and wine inside. And of course I’m holding hands with my boyfriend (Jacques? Pierre?). Or maybe I’m in New York City walking along Fifth Avenue, my hand in yours …

  Mom opens the door and shouts at me to pay attention—Sam is climbing too high on his jungle gym. Every few minutes I have to get Sam away from one thing or another: the hose, the garden tools, the grill. I am never going to finish. I check my phone: 4:15. My shift starts at five. I speed-dial Beth and my perpetually busy sister actually picks up on the first ring.

  “Hey, little sis,” she says, and I burst into tears.

  “Ah,” she says softly. “What’d they do this time?”

  I tell her about being on thin ice, how I’m scared Mom and The Giant aren’t going to let me go to Interlochen. I tell her about you and about weeding the backyard and about being exhausted.

  “Why does she have to make everything harder?” I say.

  “Because … it’s hard for her, too. With Roy. You know?” Beth says. “I don’t even think Mom realizes she’s like this.”

  Beth has sort of become the voice of reason since going away to college. It’s like the distance is letting her see what’s happening at home more clearly. I don’t know how I feel about that. I don’t think it’s okay to let Mom off the hook. I liked when we were in the thick of things together, war buddies.