Beige

by Cecil Castellucci

“I just haven’t met my tribe yet,” Lake says.

  “What?” I say. It sounds like something I might think.

  “Do you know how frustrating it is to be, like, a twenty-six-year-old trapped inside a sixteen-year-old body? I can’t do anything that I want to do. I can’t do anything that I’m ready for. I have to wait and get this whole teenage thing out of the way before I can go and do what I want. I figure I might as well find something to write about,” Lake says. “So yeah, I had a thing with Leo during the school year. Big deal. I just needed him for the angst. For my songwriting. And then he got all attached. And when I started hanging out with you, he tried to make me jealous by putting the moves on you.”

  She’s wrong. She must be wrong. He likes me. He said so. I can’t believe that he looked at me with those eyes and said those things and kissed me like that just to get back at Lake.

  “That doesn’t even make any sense. It wouldn’t work. You would never be jealous of me, because I’m beige,” I say.

  “You know, you have a lot of angst,” Lake says. “I bet you’d write great lyrics. You should maybe try it. Jot stuff down, get some of that rage out of you.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “I’m not the angry person. You are.”

  Lake starts laughing. Really laughing.

  “Right, Beige, you’re not repressing anything,” Lake says. “Sure you don’t want to write a song now?”

  I shoot her a look.

  I don’t want to hear her lies about Leo anymore. I want to giggle with someone over him. I want to be excited. She doesn’t know anything about anything. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t in his arms. He wasn’t whispering in her ear. He likes me. For me. Not Lake.

  “For what it’s worth, I told him to stay away from you,” she says.

  I turn away from her.

  She sighs big.

  “OK, then, he’s not an asshole. He really does like you. Don’t believe me. Whatever. Maybe he is your true love. But I’ll bet you one of my Guitar Center gift certificates that you don’t hear from him anytime soon. It was a party. He used you. That’s it.”

  “It’s not like that,” I say.

  But deep down, I know it is.

  “Maybe you’re just jealous that I met a boy who really likes me.”

  Lake rolls her eyes.

  “Come on, Beige. Let’s go kick out some jams,” she says.

  “No,” I say. “I’m going to stay here.”

  “The jam space makes everybody feel better,” Lake says.

  “So does the sun,” I say. “But ultimately, it gives you cancer.”

  “HA! Those would make good lyrics,” Lake says. “Actually, I’m going to write that down!”

  She pulls out her notebook and scratches down what I said. Then she sticks her hands out for me to pull her up. I ignore her.

  “You coming?” she asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “Suit yourself,” she says, and then she gets up and blows out of my room.

  I wonder, though, what I would write down. I think about how I am feeling. Hurt. Hopeful. Giddy. Sad. Happy. Lonely. Frustrated. Betrayed. Girlie. In love. Dumb.

  I see him the next morning, in the pool, doing his laps earlier than usual. My heart jumps. I rush to get dressed. I put some lip gloss on. I pinch my cheeks. I check myself out in the mirror. I look pretty good.

  I go down to the pool to meet him.

  “Hello,” I say. I say it like a heroine. I say it like a leading lady. I say it like his true love.

  He looks away from me and adjusts his goggles.

  I start to tremble. Maybe Lake isn’t a liar. No. She can’t be right.

  “Leo,” I say, more insistent. More desperate. I can’t help it. I don’t want Lake’s version to be the truth. I reach my hand out to touch him. He moves away.

  “Why are you ignoring me?” I ask.

  He takes three long steps and dives back into the pool.

  I stand at the edge and watch him do his laps.

  It’s not that I don’t want to leave. I’m just stunned. Stunned into staying in place. I’m still standing there when Leo finishes his set and pulls himself out of the pool. He takes his towel and dabs his eyes, then dries himself off.

  He has to pass me to get out of the pool area. He walks toward me. I won’t let him through.

  “What’s going on?” I say.

  I thought you liked me, I think. All those things you said while we were kissing. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? There must be something I can do or say that will make you be like you were at the party.

  He stops. Shakes his head.

  “Just because we hooked up at the party doesn’t mean I like you,” he says.

  He pushes by me and I offer no resistance.

  My heart feels heavy, like it’s being pulled under. I feel like I’m drowning.

  I shudder. Then I start to cry.

  “I knew you’d eventually find your way here,” Lake says. She is on the floor of the jam space with the paper cutter, slicing Grown-Ups handbills into fourths. “Move that merch stuff and help me.”

  Why does she have to be right? Why does she have to know that I’d make my way here and that it does make me feel better?

  “Why do you have all this merch?” I ask, moving one of the boxes to join Lake on the floor.

  “That’s how we’re going to make money for my demo.”

  “Wouldn’t it just be easier to ask your dad to pay for it?”

  “Merch is also about creating a buzz, getting our name out there,” Lake says. “You don’t get it.”

  No. I don’t. I don’t get it. I still don’t get it. It’s like the millionth thing I don’t get. What I should get by now is to just keep my mouth shut. I fall back to doing what I know how to do best, being quiet. It’s easier. I stop what I’m doing and go sit on the couch and start reading.

  “Excuse me. Weren’t you, like, helping me?” Lake says.

  “Now I’m reading.”

  “The other Grown-Ups girls were supposed to get here like an hour ago,” Lake says. “I don’t think they are coming.”

  How is this my problem? Why do I have to pick up their slack?

  “Why do you play with them? You don’t even like them. They’re not even helpful.”

  “I had to get a new band after I kicked everyone out of my old band,” Lake says. “At least this time they know how to play their instruments.”

  Lake seems to kick a lot of people out of her life. I wonder if she’s planning on kicking me out. I bet she won’t bother. She just thinks of me as a sidekick. No one kicks a sidekick out of their life. It’s not even worth the trouble.

  I submit to my fate, slide off the couch, and pull a stack of the handbills toward me. I start cutting them into fourths. Now that I’ve taken over, Lake dusts herself off and picks up her guitar, plugs in, and starts noodling.

  Under her breath, Lake sings the same lyrics over and over again:

  “My tiny heart

  Swims up to you

  And breaks apart

  Before anything even starts

  I still haven’t heard from you.

  You turn

  Into nothing new.”

  The lyrics kind of sneak into my head. It’s how I feel about Leo. But not quite.

  “Shit!” Lake says. Even though I’m used to her outbursts now, she startles me and I slip with the cutter. I draw blood. I suck on my finger. I don’t complain. But I shoot her a look.

  I stop cutting handbills. I’m thinking. There is no harm in asking her what the problem is. At least talking to her about her problem would distract me from thinking about Leo. It hurts to think about him.

  “What’s the problem?” I ask.

  “The thing is about music is that there are only so many combinations. Or maybe it’s that I only know a certain number of those combinations,” Lake says. “This one sounds a little like the Go-Go’s song ‘We Got the Beat.’”

  She starts to play.
<
br />   “Listen to it. Tell me. Am I wrong? We got the A, we got the D, we got the G, C, we got the A!” I watch her fingers as she presses on the strings. Her fingers fly. They press; they speak in code.

  We got the A, we got the D, we got the G, C, we got the A!

  I repeat it in my head as she repeats it on the guitar. Then she starts to play her new song.

  “What do you think? Too similar?” she asks.

  “Maybe you need to work on the way you sing it? Maybe emphasize something different?”

  She shrugs.

  “Duh!” she says. “But what?”

  I shrug back. “I don’t know!”

  “Yeah.” She laughs. “You don’t.”

  Then Lake starts futzing around with the song again.

  She sings it a million more times. She plays it in a million more different ways. But suddenly, to my ears, the solution is obvious. It’s not the music that’s wrong; it’s the words. The words aren’t right. I scribble something down on the back of one of the flyers.

  “Lake,” I say.

  She looks up from the guitar.

  “What?”

  I say her lines back to her, with a twist:

  “It’s been

  three days

  still haven’t

  heard from you.

  My heart

  lives underwater

  breathing for you.

  But you

  break apart

  my tiny heart,

  giving me

  no chance to start

  something

  with you.

  I dove into the pool

  I dove in

  hoping to swim

  now I’m drowning.”

  “Hey, I like that, Beige. It’s kind of poetic.”

  When she sings it back to me, she slows it down, makes it sweet, almost tender.

  At last the melody is not something that sounds wrong; it’s not something that sounds irritating. Everything seems to fall into place.

  I’m done with the flyers, so I settle in and start reading my new library book. I’m on the Ms.

  As I read, Lake keeps singing, but I realize I don’t mind. I actually kind of like it. The words on the page and the words in Lake’s song make me feel something. They make me feel better.

  Mom’s voice is far away. Instead of talking about the arrangements to get home, she keeps talking about Vittorio.

  I now know that Vittorio has a PhD in ancient civilizations, his specialty being moon images in ancient cultures. He is from Turin, Italy, but is a professor at the University of Madrid. He is forty-five, divorced, no kids. He can cook a gourmet meal on a Bunsen burner and is allergic to bee stings.

  “He sounds OK,” I say.

  “He’s amazing,” Mom says. “I’ve never met anyone like him.”

  “You must be anxious to get home and start working on your thesis,” I say.

  “Well, yes, I am.” She says it very slowly. “I have a new theory on domestic rituals.”

  “When can I book my flight home? The summer is almost over, and I don’t know when I’m going home.”

  “Well, that’s the thing, Katy. I need to write now.”

  “I know.”

  “And pretty much a person can write anywhere,” she says.

  “Mmm-hmm,” I say.

  “I really need to be away from distractions and also to be able to communicate with someone who understands my theories. Someone who was on the site.”

  “Right,” I say. “That makes sense. Can we go shopping when I get home? I want to go to Cours Mont-Royal and get some new clothes before school starts. And I want to eat some poutine. Do you know you can’t get cheese curds in the U.S.? Crazy, eh?”

  “Well, Katy, Vittorio has invited me to go to Madrid with him to continue work on my thesis because he has to go back to get ready for school.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, it means that I’m on a roll.”

  “But school starts in two weeks,” I say. “I have to get ready. I have to go home.”

  “I know, I know. But there’s a great international high school in Madrid. You can start there in three weeks. Won’t that be amazing? It’s going to be such a great cultural opportunity for you.”

  The floor has dropped out from under me.

  “Now?” I say. “Now you want me to have a cultural experience?”

  “Just think, you’ll be surrounded by a two-thousand-year-old city!”

  I wanted to go to the rain forest. I wanted to be on the dig. I wanted to shower outside. I wanted to live in a tent. I don’t want to go to Madrid. I want to go home to Montréal.

  I know what’s going on. Vittorio. She’s in love with him.

  I could have stopped this whole love affair with Vittorio if I had gone to Peru. Mom wouldn’t have forgotten about her responsibilities to me. What did The Rat call being on tour? Unreal. A dream. Adventure time. She is just on adventure time. This Vittorio thing can’t be real. She’s dreaming. She’s not being realistic.

  Going to Madrid for a guy is stupid.

  “You’re going to give up your place at McGill for Vittorio?” I say. “You’re going to do that for a man? I thought you said that a woman never does stuff like that. A woman should be independent.”

  “First of all, I am independent,” my mother says, her tone more serious. “Second of all, we live in the twenty-first century. I’m writing my thesis. I’ll be in correspondence with my advisor at McGill.”

  “You’re moving for a guy.”

  “I’m moving because the man that I am doing my research with lives in Madrid, and I want to be with him. The distance was going to be a complication, so I eliminated it.”

  She says it so simply. So matter-of-factly. So unlike the Mom I know. She’s changed.

  “So that’s it,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “We’ll go to Montréal, pick up our stuff, and go to Madrid. I’ve already sublet the house.”

  All at once, I can’t see straight. Tears are shooting right out of my eyeballs, and the phone has slid off my ear and is sitting limply in my palm, threatening to fall to the floor. I’m barely holding on to it when The Rat comes over and takes it out of my hand and puts the phone up to his ear.

  I don’t hear what he’s saying into the phone to my mom. It’s like I’m wearing a helmet over my head. Or I’ve suddenly gone deaf. And asthmatic. I can’t breathe.

  Suddenly The Rat is holding the phone up against my ear. And from far away I hear my mom say that everything is going to be all right and that she loves me.

  I know she’s a liar. She loves Vittorio more.

  I’m still crying. I don’t say anything back. And then the phone is put away and The Rat is steering me toward my bedroom and I’m blubbering. Almost screaming. And he’s lying to me, too. Telling me that everything is going to be fine.

  I lie on my bed and I start kicking and screaming. And it’s like I’m watching myself from one million miles away, like I’m having some kind of out-of-body experience. I’m not even acting like myself. I’m acting like a two-year-old.

  I start punching my pillow. I sit up and I punch the pillow. I punch and punch it.

  The Rat comes into my room, standing in the doorway, watching me. And now he’s punching his fists on his thighs and it makes a beat and so I start punching the pillow in time with him.

  I start saying words as I punch. “Di-sas-ter. Cat-a-stroph-ic. A-poc-a-lyp-tic. Earth-shat-ter-ing. Aw-ful.”

  One punch per syllable.

  Somehow, the rhythm relaxes me. I keep doing it until I feel worn out and tired.

  I don’t even get out of my clothes. I don’t even get under the covers. I just lie back and hit the bed. And then I’m asleep.

  When I wake up the next day, my shoes are off and the knit blanket is over me and Sid Vicious is purring next to me and the sun is streaming in through the window all happy-like and it makes me smile. But when I’m fully awake, I rem
ember.

  I’m finally going back to home to Montréal only to abandon it for Madrid.

  “I heard what happened,” Trixie says when she opens the door.

  I nod. She’s whispering because Auggie is asleep.

  “Well, I have to get to work. How about we talk about it when I get home?”

  I nod. I don’t speak. I’ve given up speaking. No one understands. Trixie nods back and heads out the door.

  I sit on the couch. I don’t turn on the TV. I don’t open my book. I just stare at the wall. A scratch at the door startles me, and I let out a little yelp when it opens.

  Trixie stands in the frame.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” she says.

  I nod.

  “Fuck work. Do you want to talk?”

  I nod.

  “I’ll put some chamomile tea on.”

  I sit like a zombie on the couch, being totally unhelpful, while she putters in the kitchen and then the kettle screams and then Trixie comes through the beaded curtain of La Sirena that separates the kitchen from the living room, carrying a tray with tea, cookies, a pint of ice cream, and two spoons. She puts the tray on the coffee table and sits down next to me.

  “I brought out all the emergency girl-talk rations.”

  I lean forward and take a cookie and put it in my mouth and chew. The chocolate kind of melts in my mouth, and after I swallow, I start talking. I look straight ahead and I tell Trixie everything that I can’t say to The Rat. I say things I can’t say to Mom. I say things I didn’t even know I felt.

  “I didn’t want to come here. I didn’t want to be separated. I wanted to go to Peru. I was afraid that I was going to lose her. Lose our special bond. And now I have.”

  “You’re not losing her,” Trixie says.

  “My mom and I are a team,” I say.

  “You still are.”

  “No, she and Vittorio are a team now.”

  “That’s how it feels, but it’s not true.”

  I don’t want to let her get a word in edgewise, so I just open my mouth and talk.

  “I don’t like The Rat. I was fine without him. I didn’t need him in my life. And I feel like I’ve had to be nice to him because he’s trying so hard. And did you know that Lake was bribed all summer to be friends with me? Lake calls me Beige, because that’s what I am. Boring. Bland. Beige. She doesn’t even like me. No one here likes me. Except Garth. But Garth likes everyone, so that doesn’t really count. And then there is Leo. I liked Leo so much and he used me. I liked Leo so much, and I hurt so much, and if Mom were here, then I could talk to her about it and she could give me advice. But I can’t because she’s in love and she’s forgotten all about me and no one ever asked me what I wanted.”