Where I End and You Begin

by Preston Norton

  “Wait,” I said—fumbling out of the driver’s-side door, shuffling after her. “Wait, wait, wait. Maybe we should talk this over first?”

  Wynonna shook her head. “No. I already know everything I’m going to say.”

  I followed Wynonna helplessly to Roscoe’s door. She knocked…um…fervently. It was less a “We’d like to share a message about the Book of Mormon” knock and more a “POLICE, OPEN UP” knock.

  Roscoe opened up. He didn’t look happy.

  Then he saw who it was.

  He looked even less happy.

  He smelled like hangover and self-loathing. His longish hair was stuck to one side of his face. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, khaki cargo shorts, and argyle socks with—god help us all—bright blue Crocs. All of this begged one’s undivided attention and horror. But the thing that ultimately grabbed my attention was the inside of his apartment—the split second I saw of it—before he slipped outside and closed the door behind him.

  Boxes.

  Lots of boxes. Most of them looked like they were filled, taped shut, and stacked in cardboard pillars.

  “Whoa, wait,” I said. “Are you moving already?”

  Roscoe turned his head. Looked at me like I was a complete stranger. I realized this was the first time he had seen me as myself.

  “Um, I’m Ezra,” I said. And then, as if I needed to clarify further, “The real Ezra.”

  Roscoe absorbed this slowly—about a thousand times slower than normal human information absorption. Nodded even slower.

  “Are you moving?” I repeated.

  Roscoe didn’t even respond. Didn’t even acknowledge that I had asked a question.

  Looked at Wynonna.

  “This isn’t a great time,” he said. “Sorry.”

  He sounded genuinely apologetic, too. Like he had finally come to terms with the reality of his situation. Like he was apologizing for everything.

  But Wynonna was having none of that.

  “Like fuck it isn’t,” she said. “Give me one good reason why I should go to Switzerland with you. Just one.”

  Roscoe’s eyes were distant. Like the only way he knew how to handle the situation was to remove himself from it. To go to some faraway place where death was just a phase, hate didn’t exist, and he wasn’t responsible for losing everything precious to him in a single instant.

  He said nothing. What could he say?

  “Give me one reason why I should forgive you,” said Wynonna. “Just one. Fucking. Reason.”

  Roscoe shrugged his shoulders, looking too broken for words.

  “No.” Wynonna shook her head fiercely. “Don’t you dare shrug your shoulders at me. I asked you a question—”

  “I don’t have a reason for you,” he said, finally. “I wish I did. But I don’t.”

  Wynonna exploded. “Then what the fuck do you want from me? What exactly were you expecting to get out of this? That I have some biological obligation to accept you as my dad? Because I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have a dad. You’re nothing to me. You’re just the motherfucker who killed my mom. You want my forgiveness? Then give me my mom back, you drunk piece of shit.”

  Roscoe’s eyes were wet, glossed over with sadness. But he didn’t blink. He took every word like it was a punch he deserved.

  By the end of it all, he nodded. Accepting.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness. I don’t deserve my own forgiveness, let alone yours. All I can tell you is that I’m sorry. That there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t hate myself for what happened. I wish I could somehow make it up to you. But truth is, I can’t. I can’t ever give back what I took from you. Or Carol. Your mother was irreplaceable. She was too good for this world, and she was certainly too good for me.”

  A tear trickled down his cheek. Disappeared into the foliage of his beard.

  “I never expected you to forgive me,” he said. “I just thought I got lucky.”

  I had been so lost in Roscoe’s apology, I hadn’t even thought to look at Wynonna.

  Her face was red. Her eyes were slits, compressed with emotion. She was shaking.

  “Yeah?” she said, finally. “Well, you thought wrong.”

  She stormed off. Across the building hallway, down the stairwell, out of sight.

  I glanced hopelessly between the two of them. For the briefest moment, Roscoe and I made forlorn eye contact. There was even a flicker there—somewhere, deep down—that seemed to recognize me.

  “Sorry,” I murmured, helplessly.

  I chased after her.

  • •

  I took my time getting to the car. From a distance, through the glare of the windshield, I could tell that she was crying. Sobbing relentlessly. The moment she saw me, she shook herself to her senses, wiping away the evidence of heartbreak. Meanwhile, I took slow, deliberate steps.

  By the time I reached the passenger-side door, she had collected herself.

  “As my friend,” she said, “can you promise me never to talk about this?”

  I bit my lip. Nodded.

  “I promise.”

  Twelfth Night was finally upon us. Due to the performance starting at three p.m. sharp—which, on a school day, was crazypants insane—Ziggy begged Principal Durden to give us excused absences from seventh period. We needed more time.

  Principal Durden—who was totally fangirling about her son in the lead male role—gave us excused absences from fourth period on.

  We were ready. We were prepared. There was no way anything could go wrong.

  Or so we thought.

  It happened as I was putting on my torn “shipwreck dress”—ready to be washed ashore, like flotsam, upon the coast of Illyria.

  Flash.

  Suddenly, my face was pressed against someone else’s face, and we were in a dim room, and I was pretty sure I was leaning against a shelf. I attempted to pull away and bumped into a long vertical stick. The stick fell over, knocking a stack of soft white cylinders off the shelf with it. Toilet paper?

  I grabbed my chest. It was as flat as the earth according to acclaimed rapper B.o.B.

  “Oh my god,” I said, and it was my voice. Ezra Slevin’s voice.

  “What’s wrong?” said Holden. “Are you okay?”

  Holden flipped the lights on. We were in the janitor’s closet. He was decked out in Duke Orsino’s dark waistcoat and matching cravat. His hair was a hot mess.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” I said.

  “Are you still Wynonna?” said Holden. “You’re still Wynonna, right? Please tell me you’re still Wynonna.”

  There was a distant scream of flat, low-level panic, escalating rapidly in frequency. It was the sound of Wynonna having a meltdown.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god—” I said, with no sign of stopping. I fumbled with the janitor’s closet door, opened it, and stumbled out. The handle of a mop came with me, landing with a swift crack.

  “I can explain,” said Holden. “You see, I told Wynonna I was nervous, and she was like, ‘Oh yeah? I’ve got something for that,’ and she grabbed me by the hand, and dragged me into the janitor’s closet, and—”

  “Dude, I don’t care about that,” I said. “We’ve got a much bigger problem.”

  “We do?”

  Was he seriously serious?

  “Viola?” I offered, hint-wise.

  Holden’s eyes drifted, then crystallized with realization. “Oh.”

  “Oh” was right. We had a Viola on our hands who—suddenly and inexplicably—didn’t know her lines. And she was only the STAR OF THE FUCKING SHOW.

  My power walk escalated into a frenzied sprint. I barreled around the corner to the hallway leading “backstage”—sliding, scraping for traction—just as shipwrecked Wynonna was blasting through the backstage doors.

  Wynonna spotted me and said, “What do we do, what do we do?”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,�
�� I replied.

  “Maybe…we could get a headset or something?” said Holden. “And Ezra can read you your lines?”

  “And where would we get a headset?” said Wynonna. “The show starts in, like, a half hour!”

  “Viola can’t wear a headset!” I exclaimed.

  “Viola doesn’t know her goddamn lines!” said Wynonna.

  “Even if we did get a headset, that only solves half the problem. It’s a performance, not just reading lines. It’s practically choreographed.”

  “Ohhhhhh god,” said Wynonna, collapsing to her knees, enveloping herself in the folds of her shipwreck dress. “I’m going to be sick. I think I have a hernia.”

  “What’s going on?”

  This came from Imogen—just now arriving on the scene, wearing a long-sleeve black dress and a veil pulled back over her hair. Olivia would soon be mourning the deaths of her father and brother. Provided the play didn’t collapse due to the sudden amnesia of Viola.

  “The show can’t go on,” said Wynonna. “I have a hernia.”

  “Ezra, are you kidding me?” said Imogen. “This thing starts in a half hour.”

  “That’s not Ezra,” I said.

  Imogen glanced from me, to Wynonna, back to me, and back to her.

  “Oh crud,” she said.

  Meanwhile, Holden was silently having an existential crisis because he had accidentally made out with his best friend in the janitor’s closet.

  “Someone, call nine-one-one,” said Wynonna. She moaned, and rolled onto her side, and curled into the fetal position. “I have a hernia.”

  “C’mon, you do not have a hernia.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I was you just two minutes ago!”

  “Oh yeah?” said Wynonna—suddenly looking more challenging than ill. “You think just because you were me, you know everything about me? You don’t know me!”

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, shaking my head.

  “The auditorium is filling up,” said Imogen. “We need to figure this out, fast.”

  “Really?” said Holden. “People are actually showing up to this thing?”

  “What? Yes! Of course they are! Why wouldn’t people show up?”

  Holden shrugged. “This just seems like the Special Olympics of Shakespeare productions.”

  Imogen opened her mouth, appalled. “I can’t believe you said that. The Special Olympics is a wonderful organization. That’s the most offensive thing I’ve heard all week!”

  “Look, I wasn’t trying to diss the Special Olympics. I’m just saying…It was a figure of speech!”

  “This is how I die,” said Wynonna, still lying on the floor.

  “Seriously, man,” I said. “It was kind of fucked up. And, Wynonna, you’re not going to die.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry!” said Holden, hands in the air. “I submit my official apology to Imogen, and Ezra, and the entire Special Olympics.”

  “Herniaaaaaaaa!” Wynonna moaned.

  “What, do you want an apology, too?!” said Holden, unhinged.

  “I want you to kill me,” said Wynonna, sprawling onto her back, writhing like an ant under a magnifying glass. “Kill me now, before it’s too late.”

  “Okay, okay, okay,” said Imogen. “We need to figure this”—she made an ambiguous gesture to her best friend, doing a variation of the worm on the floor—“out.”

  “Think, think, think,” I said aloud, tapping my head like I was Winnie the fucking Pooh.

  “What would a genius do in a time like this?” said Holden, because he apparently wanted to be a part of the conversation. “What would Shakespeare do?”

  “What would…Shakespeare…” said Imogen, breathless. Her eyes lit up like sparklers. “Shakespeare! That’s it!”

  “That’s it?” I said. “What’s it?”

  Imogen grabbed my hand and tore off backstage, dragging me behind her like a human streamer.

  “Wait!” I said. “What about Viola?”

  “You’re Viola,” said Imogen. She turned and gave me a devilish grin. “You were always Viola.”

  • •

  Fact: During Shakespeare’s time, all the roles were played by men. The male roles, the female roles, the female-pretending-to-be-male roles…

  All men.

  That was just the sexist state of things at the time. After all, who could trust a woman to accurately portray her own gender? Absurd!

  But it meant that Viola was initially played by a dude.

  Tonight, we were going to be digging deep into the roots of Shakespeare.

  The trick was that I had to still appear like a woman to the audience—even though I was pretending to be a man. This meant that the makeup was staying on, and it was staying heavier than ever.

  Imogen was my makeup artist. She stepped away from my face with a powder brush in hand. Scanned me up and down. She seemed less than impressed.

  “How bad is it?” I said.

  “What?” said Imogen. “No, no, your face is perfect. Everything’s perfect.”

  Her gaze shifted downward.

  “Everything except for your chest. Your chest is as flat as Texas.”

  I glanced down at my chest. I was wearing the shipwreck dress—this low-cut, dirty-green thing, somewhere between algae and snot. Even though it was stretched a little tight on the shoulders, there was a definite excess of loose fabric in the front.

  “You need a bra,” said Imogen.

  She glanced down at her own chest. Her bra would maybe fit around the thickest part of my thigh.

  She glanced at Wynonna, who was standing nearby, watching my transformation—miraculously healed from her hernia! Wynonna glanced down at her own chest.

  “I mean, you could try,” said Wynonna, “but it’ll probably cut off blood circulation in his entire body.”

  “What’s going on?” said a new voice.

  We all turned. It was Daisy Munk.

  “Daisy!” Imogen exclaimed. “I will give you anything if you let Ezra wear your bra for the next two hours.”

  “Uh…” said Daisy. “Does Ziggy know about this?”

  “Not yet,” said Imogen. “But Wynonna has a hernia.”

  Daisy glanced at Wynonna, who was dressed in Ezra’s trusty Servant costume. Wynonna hunched over—suddenly deathly ill—and gave a weak cough. I was 100 percent certain she had no idea what a hernia was.

  “I know all of Viola’s lines,” I said.

  Daisy narrowed her eyes, unconvinced. And then—whether to test me or to prove a point—she said: “Will you hoist sail, sir? Here lies your way.”

  Act 1. Scene 5. Line…um…one hundred and something?

  “No, good swabber,” I said—elevating my tone, scraping for some solid ground between masculine and feminine. “I am to hull here a little longer.” I turned to Imogen. “Some mollification for your giant, sweet lady.”

  “Wow,” said Daisy, duly impressed. “Okay, then. This should be interesting.” She started for the girls’ bathroom and called out, “One bra coming up!”

  • •

  Ziggy’s failure in the art of delegation had turned him into our one and only stagehand. He was so all over the place, it was shockingly easy to step in as Viola.

  As act 1, scene 1 ended, Duke Orsino, Curio, and Valentine exited the stage. Ziggy—dressed in all black, like a ninja—pushed out a blue silk curtain on a roller rack. Duct-taped to one of the vertical rods was a cardboard cutout of a capsizing ship, hand-drawn in Sharpie. Ziggy had already turned on the fan—sitting offstage, to the left—which caused the blue silk curtain to ripple and sway.

  It was supposed to be the sea. A very low-budget sea.

  The boy playing Captain—a chubby kid with a red, splotchy skin condition and a gray beard glued to his face—crawled onto the stage from the left. I crawled on from the right. It was then, and only then, that most of our cast recognized the drag situation. A wave of hushed whispers and what-the-fucks came from all directions,
hailing together like the whistling of the wind. Ziggy turned, searching for the source of the commotion and made brief eye contact with me, sprawled across the center of the stage, wearing a dress.

  He turned as white as the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

  I crawled to my feet. Glanced down at Captain—who was still on his hands and knees, just now noticing that the one person he interacted with in the whole play had been replaced by the dude who auditioned for “tree.”

  “What country, friends, is this?” I said.

  “Uh,” said Captain. He staggered to his feet. “This is Illyria, lady.”

  “And what should I do in Illyria?” My tone was deliberately sick with dread. “My brother he is in Elysium. Perchance he is not drown’d: what think you, sailors?”

  “It is perchance…” said Captain, finding his groove, pausing to choose his scripted words carefully, “…that you yourself were sav’d.”

  “O my poor brother!” I clutched my hands to my heart. “And so perchance may he be.”

  Captain and I finished the scene. We exited, and Sir Toby Belch (Jayden) and Maria (Daisy, braless) entered. Sir Toby was distraught by Olivia’s behavior—mourning the death of her brother and all. Didn’t she know that grieving was bad for your health?

  The moment I stepped offstage, Ziggy—still in black—materialized from the shadows like a Ringwraith.

  “I’m not even going to ask what’s going on,” said Ziggy, hands in the air. “It’s working. Just do me a solid and make sure it keeps working, ’kay?”

  And that was that.

  I quickly changed out of the dress and into my Cesario costume. Imogen helped. She insisted I keep the bra on. I needed to “emphasize the femininity of Viola” because I would spend the rest of the play dressed as a man. She lightened up the makeup but only slightly. Imogen informed me that my facial bone structure was “way too masculine, like Hugh Grant” to take off too much.

  I’d never really associated “Hugh Grant” with “masculine,” but still. That made me blush.

  Imogen smiled, pretending not to notice.

  “What”—said a voice that was unmistakably Willow—“the fuck?”

  Imogen and I turned and looked at her—in full Malvolio costume, which made her look kind of like an impish goblin who had abandoned her post at Gringotts.