Brittany Bends

by Grayson, Kristine

  “I’m enjoying the class,” I say weakly.

  “Well, good,” she says. “But you really can’t understand drama unless you participate in it. When do you work?”

  “After school,” I say, because that’s all I know at the moment.

  “Every day?” she asks.

  “No,” I say, because I’m not supposed to lie. And besides, even if I did lie, she’d probably see me around here, and then she’d want to know why I wasn’t working, and I am just not that good at making up lies on the spot. Even if I do, I blush, which I’m really getting sick of and that’s something I’ve only done frequently since I moved here.

  I hate not having magic. I hate hate hate hate it.

  She sighs. “Look, Brittany, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t want to hold auditions for the part.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Think about it,” she starts, then she catches herself. “Wait, you’re not familiar with the piece. Helen is not really a character. She’s an ideal. The play is very clear about that.”

  “So?” I ask. I can sense that she’s trying to convince me, and she might actually succeed at it, because when someone pressures me, I cave, most of the time.

  I have to learn how to bend, how to stand up for myself and not make people really, really, really mad.

  “So,” Mrs. Schmidt says, “usually auditions are about the reading, the performance. This audition would be about what the girl looks like. I would have to pick a girl based on how she appears, and tell her that she’s not ideal.”

  I frown. The bell sounds, but I can’t remember if that’s first bell or second bell.

  Mrs. Schmidt doesn’t even look up. She’s still watching me. I have to say something, and there’s only one thing I can think of to mention.

  “You’re picking me because of how I look.” I don’t add that this is twice in twenty-four hours, and that’s weird, because I think I look like everyone else in this town.

  “Well, that’s not what I’m going to be telling my students,” Mrs. Schmidt says.

  I tense. Is she telling me she’s going to lie?

  “I’m going to tell them I picked you because you are from Greece.”

  “But I won’t have any lines,” I say.

  She smiles. “I know.”

  “So everyone will know that’s not true,” I say.

  “But they won’t challenge me on it,” she says, “and it won’t hurt their fragile teenage egos.”

  I frown at her. The other girls have fragile egos? I hadn’t noticed. It doesn’t seem that way to me.

  “I won’t take no for an answer,” she says.

  I don’t think I can get any tenser. My entire body is humming. “Then why are you even asking?”

  “Why indeed?” she says. “It’s done then. You’re my Helen. You’re Helen of Troy.”

  EIGHT

  I’M HELEN OF TROY. All day, I can’t get the words out of my head. My family would be so freaked out about this. My magical family. I don’t know if they’d make fun of me or tell me to quit or just say that it’s bad luck.

  My family here—I have no idea what they’ll think, except that I have to brace myself for another announcement at dinner.

  Eric picks me and Lise up from school. Apparently Mom had to take an early lunch so that he could go to the tire place, and she paid for his tires, and he’s going to owe her a fortune now (he says) but at least he can drive.

  We stop at my new job and get my schedule, which starts on Saturday. I have to show up at nine. Fortunately, I don’t have to work on Sunday. Maybe Mrs. Larson remembers (knows?) that church attendance is required in the Johnson Family. (I find the whole ritual strangely fascinating.)

  I also forget (neglect?) to tell Mrs. Larson about Megan, and I’m going to have to say something. Parts of Sunday just aren’t workable for me. I’m not sure what I’m going to say, but I’ll come up with something.

  You see, Mrs. Larson, I’ve never lived without magic before or without my two closest sisters, so we all have a therapist mandated by the Powers That Be as a condition of our new lives. Megan sees us all on Sunday. She goes to New York first, then pops into Superior, and then heads to Eugene, and finally ends up at home in L.A. And, oh, yeah, I have to be honest with her because she’s an empath. Yeah, they’re real, magic is real, and all that stuff you call myths—real.

  I know that won’t go over well.

  Mrs. Larson doesn’t have a lot of time to talk to me. She gives me the schedule, says the store won’t be open yet so I should wear grubby clothes, and then says she’ll see me Saturday.

  She also says she’ll give me a permanent schedule once the store opens. I don’t get a chance to talk to her about the play.

  In fact, I haven’t told anyone. I don’t really want to tell anyone either, except that I’m going to need someone to drive me back and forth to rehearsal if it’s after school. So I might as well fess up right away.

  By the time we get home, the snow has melted. I wouldn’t have been able to tell there had even been any snow, except for the tiny, sideways snowman sitting in the middle of the front lawn.

  I’ve seen pictures of snowmen before, and they’re always perfectly symmetrical. But this one looks like chunks of rock-filled ice rolled into a half-assed balls, placed one on top of the other. Twigs form the arms and a somewhat green carrot sticks out of the face. The mouth is a line in the top ice ball, painted red with something I don’t recognize.

  The eyes, though, are creepiest of all. They’re doll eyes with fringed lashes, and I actually recognize them. Ivan had glued them to a paddle from a ruined canoe and, for at least a week, used them to scare anyone who came around the corner into the dining room too fast. Then he scared Mom, and that was the end of that.

  (Although I have to admit: her scream was one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.)

  The eyes move in the wind, almost like they’re winking or blinking out of synch.

  I can’t look at them, and fortunately, Eric drives the car to his parking spot in the back so I don’t have to.

  I thank him, and get out, hurrying up the stairs. The wind isn’t bad either, thank heavens, but I want to get warm all the same. I’ve been chilled all day. If this is just a taste of what winter’s going to be like, I’m going to freeze my butt off.

  No one’s in the kitchen, but it smells like hot cocoa and fresh-baked sugar cookies. The babysitter who comes in twice a week must have made something for the little kids when the snowman-building was done.

  I head to the white board and double-check my chore schedule. I’m on cleanup duty after dinner, but that’s not too bad. I hope.

  Then I hang up my coat in the coat closet and head to my room. I scatter my books on the bed until I find the copy of Doctor Faustus that Mrs. Schmidt gave me. It’s some kind of special school edition that has analysis in the back.

  I tuck the book under my arm and go off in search of a quiet place to read.

  The quiet places vary according to time of day. Once everyone gets home and the dinner crew starts working, the entire first floor is too loud for homework. Weekend mornings are another story, though, because Hilde and Hans are supposed to play quietly until everyone is up.

  Usually that means they hang out in Hans, Ivan, and Leif’s room, playing games on the computer (in theory, Leif supervises) or playing a board game or something. That means the living room and the kitchen are usually pretty quiet.

  If my room didn’t feel so dang claustrophobic, I’d stay in there, but it is. So, on days like this, I usually go to the attic and sit in what Lise calls “The lounge.”

  Eric has made his own room out of one side of the attic, and he barricaded it with boxes that are probably older than Karl. Eric has taken one of the two windows as his own. The attic is pretty narrow. I can’t stand upright in the center. It slopes steeply to each side, and it’s filled with interesting stuff, from Mom’s wedding dress (which is just lovely) to old prom dresses and eve
n older dresses that smell of mothballs. Boxes and boxes of old toys and photographs and letters are pressed under the eaves—for insulation, Karl says. Because they belong to family, Mom says.

  Then, near the other window, there’s an old velvet couch-like thing that Lise calls a chaise lounge and Anna calls a divan and Mom calls something that needs recycling. Near it is an overstuffed chair that lists to one side, and a horsehair footstool that I liked until I knew what it was made out of.

  That’s the lounge. Mom keeps threatening to make it go away, and Eric has offered repeatedly to turn it into a bedroom for me, but I can’t see how it would be much better than the room I have. No one is willing to toss all the boxes, which means I’d have even less space, even if I did have a window.

  Besides, I like the lounge. It’s a great place to read (unless the little kids are fighting in Leif’s room, directly below). I brought up a reading lamp as the days started getting darker (and who knew they did that?) and now, I feel like whenever I climb onto the divan, I’m entering my own little world.

  My own little cold world tonight. There’s no heat in the attic because, Karl says, heat rises. Besides, someone (Eric?) left the window partially open, and the breeze that’s coming in is frigid.

  It takes some work to shove the window closed, but I manage. Then I climb onto the divan and open Doctor Faustus.

  The damn thing is written in verse. I resist the urge to skip to the analysis at the end, and I also try really hard not to skip ahead to the section we’re going to perform.

  As I start the play, I wish I had brought a dictionary with me. I also wish I could read it on the computer. I don’t know half the words. After trying a few times to read the opening, I go down to my room, grab a dictionary, and climb back to the lounge.

  I look up “surfeits” and “necromancy” and start to feel really uncomfortable. My dictionary gives me two meanings for “necromancy.” One is plain old witchcraft (as if witchcraft can be plain) and the other is trying to use the spirits of the dead to predict the future (as if that works).

  Still, neither is positive, and I find myself staring at the lines:

  He surfeits upon cursed necromancy.

  Nothing so sweet as magic is to him;

  I’m beginning to think, as I read, that magic is the bad guy here. And I understand how this Faustus feels. Magic is sweet to me too (kinda). I suspect I’m not supposed to like this guy—and I don’t—but we have a lot in common.

  We both like magic, and everyone is trying to take it away from us.

  Tears prick my eyes, and I hear Ingrid all over again.

  “Drama queen,” I whisper, trying to find some resolve to be something else.

  I bring my knees up and keep reading, understanding maybe a third of what I see. I’ve given up reading along with the dictionary. I’m just trying to get a sense of this thing.

  And the sense I’m getting is this: This guy doesn’t like the religious crap he’s fed, and he thinks smart people are magicians (well, duh) and he wants everything that magic can give him, so he makes a deal with the devil, which I’ve learned from watching a million movies is a bad thing.

  This guy gets a choice: He can live a “godly” life or he can live a life of “sin and magic,” and he chooses sin and magic.

  And apparently, I—as Helen of Troy—am going to be the symbol of his downfall.

  Oh, wow. That’s just weird and uncomfortable and way too close to my own life.

  Because, in a way, we three girls have made a deal with the devil—if you want to call Megan a devil, which I don’t. Or maybe Daddy is the devil. He made us the most powerful mages in all of the world, but without guidance and without knowledge, and tried to use us as tools of his own strange schemes. Then, when we failed (and boy, did we fail), he didn’t defend us.

  Crystal says she doubted he even knew who we were when he picked us. He just thought we were the right age and easy to twist to his will.

  So, unlike this Faustus guy, we’re turning our backs on magic, but it still feels odd, at least to me, and I’ll be the one on stage, as the representative of all that is magical and devilish and—

  “Brit-tan-eee!”

  I recognize that yell. It’s Anna. Someone told her to find me, and she’s yelling up the stairs because she doesn’t want to climb up here.

  “Here!” I shout back. I shut off the light, grab my books, and head down the stairs.

  I feel really weird, because I can’t tell anyone anything about what I’ve read and realized. Imagine me telling Mrs. Schmidt that it’s not good for me to be the representative of something that I might not believe in (and besides, I don’t look like Helen). Or trying to tell someone in my family besides Mom, who probably won’t listen anyway. Or Tiff or Crystal.

  Tiff would probably be happy that I’m reading and figuring out stuff for myself, and Crystal has enough to think about. She actually thought of running away a few weeks back.

  I couldn’t let her come here, because there’s not enough room for me. Then she disappeared for a few hours and won’t tell me or Tiff where she went. We’re worried about her, but she says she’s okay now.

  Tiff says she’s adjusting too.

  Me, I’m just going along.

  The downstairs smells like fake cheese and hotdogs. I’ve come to recognize that smell as little kid night. Hans, Hilde, and Ingrid “cook,” while someone, usually Karl, supervises.

  I make it to the table to find Ivan setting out the pitchers of ice water. “It’ll be about five minutes,” he says.

  Mom is standing near the door, still wearing her work clothes. My gaze meets hers.

  “Can I talk to you?” I ask.

  She runs a hand through her already messy hair, but gives me a small tired smile. “Sure,” she says. “If it won’t take long.”

  “It won’t,” I say.

  I lead her into the living room. Anna zooms past, looking for the other kids, probably.

  “Mrs. Schmidt is kinda making me take a part in this play,” I say.

  “‘Making you?’” Mom asks.

  “She says she doesn’t want anyone to audition for it, just wants to give it to someone,” I say. “And that someone is me.”

  “And the part is?” Mom asks.

  I’m already disappointed. I was hoping she would disapprove of plays or something.

  “Helen of Troy,” I say.

  Mom lets out a bark of laughter, then puts her hand over her mouth. “I suppose she cast you because of your accent?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s a nonspeaking role. It’s in Doctor Faustus, this play by some guy named Marlowe and it’s about—”

  “I know the play,” Mom says. “I majored in theater in college.”

  Well, those are two new facts. I had no idea Mom went to college or that she was interested in theater at all. She barely watches television.

  “It’s like anti-magic, and I’m supposed to be this symbol, and the part—”

  “Is mostly about standing there, looking beautiful,” Mom says.

  “Yeah,” I say, hoping she understands how upset I am.

  “What’s the problem?” Mom asks.

  Do I tell her I don’t look like Helen of Troy? Or that it’ll upset Hera? Or that I don’t like the magic theme?

  “I’m…not sure I can do it, with work and all,” I say, and fortunately that’s partly true so I only half blush.

  But Mom sees through me. “What’s the real problem?”

  “I was kinda hoping you could forbid me from doing it,” I say.

  “Because…?”

  “Because I’m not Helen of Troy,” I say.

  Mom doesn’t say anything for a long minute. Finally, she says, “This is about your dad, isn’t it?”

  “She’s not the most popular person in my family,” I say, then get even redder. “Sorry. You know. The family that I grew up in—”

  “Is she still alive?” Mom asks.

  “Oh, no,” I say. “She’s been
dead for centuries.”

  Mom sighs. “You don’t want to do this because of the portrayal of Helen?”

  “It just feels weird, Mom,” I say.

  “You’re uncomfortable because your drama teacher has cast you as the most beautiful woman in the world,” Mom says. “Right after you got a job partly because you’re pretty.”

  I stare at her for a minute. She’s right. That does make me uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I say. “I mean, neither of those things have anything to do with me.”

  “But I beg to differ,” Mom says. “You’re beautiful, Brit, in a way that is really admired in this country. It’s something you’re going to have to deal with.”

  I’ve never thought of myself as pretty. I’ve always been the strange pale person in my family. Only Apollo is as fair-haired and that’s because he’s filled with sunlight half the time.

  “Why will I have to deal with this?” I ask.

  “Because,” Mom says, “your looks will cause people to act differently around you.”

  I frown at her. She glances over her shoulder. Anna hurries through the living room, with Lise behind her.

  “Seen Eric?” Anna asks.

  “Not in the last hour,” Mom says.

  “Crap,” Anna says, then pales. “I mean, dang. I mean—”

  “Language,” Mom says, although her tone is flat, like she’s tired of repeating that.

  “Sorry,” Anna says, then whirls and heads back up the stairs. Lise walks past us into the dining room.

  Mom faces me again, then leans just a bit closer. “Brit, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to deal with your looks for a long time. I’m sure you already are. People probably stare at you sometimes. Boys might ask you out, even if they’ve never spoken to you—”

  Like that Jake kid from this morning. And his friends. And his comment about having a class across from one of mine.

  “—and,” Mom says, “you’ll get things, like your job, because of how you look. But there’s a downside too. People will think you’re stupid because, for some reason in this country, blonde and beautiful also mean dumb.”

  “I’m not dumb,” I whisper, even though I’m afraid it might be true. I’m not as verbal as Crystal and I’m not as smart as Tiffany, and I do tend to overreact to things, which Crystal says is just plain predictable.