“Okay, but can I just ask you one thing, though?” She’s standing there in the doorway of my room, all nervous. Kristina’s taller and bigger than me, but there’s something about her that’s really small, something that I want to take and fold into my shirt and keep safe, and I need to remember that that still exists even when I’m wishing that everything else in the world didn’t.
I sit down on my bed. “Heavily” is just so the right word right now. “Yeah.”
“Am I ugly?”
“What? Come here.”
She’s on the bed in a second, all squished into my side. “I really thought this boy from Saint Anthony’s liked me, and then no, he’s dating Claire Bowman all of a sudden, and he was not dating her last week, and guess who he was IMing with four nights out of last week, uh, hint, not Claire Bowman.”
“Messed up.”
“Guys always like you.” It’s so weird, all the different things people in my life tell me about me.
“You should try pushing your boobs in their face. They like that.”
“Huh. Yeah.”
I rest my head on her shoulder. “I’m building on this theory that Saint Em’s is actually a torture chamber that they built for young female delinquents and that you and I did something very horrible when we were children that we don’t remember. And now we’re being punished. Intensely.”
She laughs a little. “You can’t blame Em’s for everything.”
“I think probably I can. No, but seriously, you can’t tell me that girls who aren’t stuck in a tube for eight hours a day with just other girls, all of whom have the money for whatever the hell plastic surgery and designer whateverthehell it could take to make them look a hundred times better than any fifteen-year-old is supposed to, are having as rough a time with this shit as we are.”
“I’m just bitching.” She buries her face in my side. “I’m okay.”
God, I wish I were just bitching. I wish I were okay. Talking to Rachel has brought this all to this gross peak in my head, and I’m turning all the little bits of shit I’ve faced lately—and let’s not even pretend most of it isn’t these pointed silent treatments punctuated by unpredictable verbal jabs from the Dykes—into this pattern, into this big overarching comment on my current existence.
I hate Nebraska because Nebraska is where I am.
But there’s more important shit going on. I say, “You’re freaking beautiful is what you are, okay?”
“How come I can’t get a boyfriend?”
“Because boyfriends are stupid.”
“Shitty answer.”
“Yeah, I know. It’ll happen.”
“You smell like smoke.”
“I should smell like smoke, bike exhaust, and coffee.”
“Why is your life so much cooler than mine?”
“I forgot the stink of wasted talent and desperation. I had chorus and this audition prep today too.”
“Even when you were my age you were doing cool stuff.”
“Yeah, well, I was Mom’s lost cause, she let me do whatever. You’ve got to be sweet.”
“I am not a sweet person, is the problem.”
I sit up and groan. “I have homework. If I’m so rebellious and cool, why do I have homework?”
“At least you don’t have to spend a billion hours doing ballet practice anymore.”
“Hey, you ever miss it?” I ask. We took lessons together when we were little. Kristina gave it up early, if “gave it up” means “lay on the floor in the hallway outside our class and shrieked and bailed and refused to go in.” My baby girl is feisty.
“Miss what?” she says.
“Dancing.”
She looks at me like I’m crazy.
“I know,” I say. “Me neither.”
“I mean, you have tap. So why would you.”
“Exactly.” Tap. Right.
You don’t have to be skinny for tap.
(Apparently you don’t have to love it either.)
8
CHICKEN FEET! CHICKEN FEET IN my locker. I don’t even know the significance of this one. Or where you would even buy a ton of chicken feet. Or why the hell I haven’t changed my locker combination.
I tie them up in an old Shakespeare paper and throw them away and spritz some perfume around my locker.
Try harder, Dykes.
• • •
I guess they got the message somehow, and I guess what’s really stupid is that a dozen chicken feet in my locker bother me a lot less than ETTA SINCLAIR IS A WHORE scribbled on one of the whiteboards in calculus. What’s extra stupid is that the dirty picture next to it looks like a really hideous drawing of (some virgin’s imagining of—yeah, that’s right, looking at you, Natasha) cunnilingus, which is obviously the opposite of my crimes here. The Dykes probably couldn’t bring themselves to form a penis with their perfect gold-star-lesbian hands.
Or maybe the Dykes didn’t do it. Maybe this is Liliana or the girl from my gym class or someone else who found out the Dykes aren’t guarding me anymore and it’s duck season! Etta season! or something.
God, it’s not even creative. And here’s Tasha perched on the table chewing gum and giggling with seniors who would so not ever talk to some outcast junior except that she happens to be laughing at an outcast-outcast junior and so that makes it okay. As long as there’s someone else below you, right, then you’re fine.
It’s times like this I miss Danielle. She’d be too busy messing around on her calculator figuring out equations that graph pornographically to give a shit about what was written about me on some board, and I guess that kind of stuff is the reason she got out of Saint Em’s. And out of Nebraska.
I erase the board and the girls boo and throw colored pencils at my ass. Wow, Mr. Burbank, you can show up anytime now.
Natasha’s the only one of the Dykes in this class. I don’t know why that’s making it harder, but it is, and I look at her and she looks back and I know that (a) she probably put that on the board; she’s got this generic handwriting but she looks way too proud, and (b) even if she didn’t, she’s going to sit there and wish she did, and honestly that’s just as bad. So the thing is that it isn’t looking like some monolithic bullying force now, it’s just Natasha. I used to walk her dog when she went out of town. I helped her brother build his tree house. I read Twelfth Night to her in dramatic inappropriate accents when we were stoned and cramming for our midterms last year. She’s calling me a whore? Who’s the one who asked me what sex was like? Who’s the one who got all teary when she confessed to me she was a virgin, tell me what it’s like, you know so much about sex, Etta, tell me it’s going to get better, you’re so smart, Etta, you’re so experienced.
The goddamn bullshit of all of this, I swear. The whole world makes you think God forbid you actually enjoy sex, but at least you’ve got your friends to tell you all the right stuff about how a woman’s sexual energy is no one’s business but her own and should be respected, and that Natasha, you shouldn’t pretend to be more experienced than you are, being a virgin is nothing to be ashamed of. (Being so incredibly desperate to lose your virginity and not having the balls to ask a girl out maybe is, but I didn’t say that at the time and well I’m no longer friends with her, so way to be a brave one, there, Tasha.) And, Etta, you are a paradigm of new waves of feminism blah blah blah, but apparently new feminists are all lesbians, what do you know. I’m beginning to really wish Disco Dykes had come with a contract to sign or at the very least a memo. (The sad thing is I think I would have signed it, and I don’t know what that says about me, and I really don’t know what it says about the legitimacy of this sexuality I’m fighting so hard for.)
(Not gay enough, not straight enough, not sick enough, not healthy enough. I am Etta Not Otherwise Specified.)
(Or I’m Etta the bitch—written in rhinestone across my boobs and all—because I used to talk shit about Natasha behind her back, I’d bitch to Rachel that Tasha was obsessed with her and desperate and insecure and I’d m
ake these little barbs to Natasha about her outfits because she was trying to horn in on my place with Rachel and this is her revenge.)
(Or. You know. I’m Etta the whore.)
Is it any wonder I cut class and go to the computer lab and commit the whole Brentwood site to memory?
• • •
“Mom?”
She looks up. She’s in bed with her big work tray across her lap, looking through documents or something. She likes to make coffee and bring it back to her room and do work in her nightgown. I’ve always kind of loved that.
“Ettalou. What’s wrong?”
“Can I sit with you?”
She moves her tray to the floor and fluffs up the comforter next to her. “Of course.”
I crawl into bed next to her and rest my head on her shoulder. My mother is thin but soft, like she was supposed to be this way, like she doesn’t care. She orders salads a lot. She orders them because she likes salad.
She turns her head to kiss my temple. “What’s the matter?”
“Can I change schools?”
She sighs a little, but like she’s sad, not like she’s really exasperated with me. I wouldn’t really blame her. We’ve had this conversation every time the Dykes and I have gotten into fights. Or anytime I’ve looked outside of our gay fantasy world and hated everyone else and looked back and hated us, too.
We pretended we were better than everyone.
The thing is that that’s kind of gross.
“You’re doing so well there,” she says, then adds, “academically.”
“It’s really awful there, Mom.”
“What happened?”
“Just this stupid fight.” I hear myself making it sound smaller than it is, and I hate that, but I think I’m terrified that if I tell her the truth, she won’t believe me. It will sound too big and too scary. Bullying is the subject of a TV movie. I don’t fit that. Irony of irony, right? Here I am too small for something. (Or lying to myself to sound smaller, and isn’t that more like me.) “All my stupid friends.”
“Rachel too?”
“Sort of. Yeah.”
She rubs circles on my back. “You two always work it out.”
“But do we have to? I mean we keep saying I can ride this shit out but why should I have to?”
“Saint Emily’s is going to do good things for you, sweetie. And just in retrospect, I know, and that really sucks. But a lot of people hate high school.”
“It’s . . . different.”
“All those good colleges you want to go to? Saint Emily’s is a great foot in the door. They’re gonna see your grades at a tough school and give you a shot and then see you’re just as amazing as that piece of paper makes you look.”
“I just want to come before a piece of paper about me for once.”
“You’re the only person in the world who could pull that off, baby girl. God knows I couldn’t. The system’s not set up for personalities like yours, huh?”
“High school isn’t set up for personalities like mine.”
“Ha, that I can relate to.”
“You hated high school?”
“With a passion. But I blocked it out and worked hard, and it helped me all the way to law school. I’d hate for a fight with your friends to ruin your future, wouldn’t you?”
She’s making it sound like I have some kind of say in what she decides. She’s making it sound like she’s deciding anything. She’s not.
“Just public school, maybe?”
“Honey,” she says. “Nothing in Nebraska’s gonna make you happy.”
“Screw Nebraska.”
“Hey, if I’d known it would be this bad for you, I might have.”
I’ve been telling her it’s this bad for me since kindergarten. If she’d believed me, she might have gotten me out of here, and how damn frustrating is that for the girl who checked herself into therapy, you know?
“Year and a half, baby,” she says. “Year and a half and you’re out of here. Just ride it out, okay?”
Or I could get the hell out of here now.
“Okay,” I say.
I need to get into Brentwood.
• • •
What I gathered from my Brentwood research is that I really need to learn how to sing. And I have chorus tomorrow, so all of a sudden everything’s coming up Etta.
I have this fantasy that I’ll just become a better singer, like this is Legally Blonde and this audition is my LSAT. I’ll learn to sing on this drive to chorus, and then I’ll get there and stun everyone. Word will get out and they’ll move the audition forward just to accommodate my new talent. I’ll sing and dazzle everyone, and that’ll all be the first ten minutes of the show, and the rest of it will be me at Brentwood being awesome and having a tiny dog and whatever the hell else. I think she gets to slap her professor at one point, I’m not sure.
Unfortunately, half a run-through of the In the Heights sound track on my way to the community center is a billion times more than enough to teach me that desperation is clearly not one of the best methods toward improving your singing. So predictably I sound like shit all through chorus, and everyone looks at me even a little more like why can’t this black girl sing than they usually do, so after rehearsal I suck it up and go up to Candice, our director, and I tell her about Brentwood and ask her if she knows how heavily singing is weighted for the audition, even though I was just on the website and guess how many sentences were devoted to telling you exactly what type and how much music you can bring in and whether or not you can expect an accompanist (four) and how many were even sort of about dancing (one half).
She’s putting her music back into her folder. “Well,” she says, “I can’t say I’m all that familiar with Brentwood. They’re a little too show-tuney for me!” Candice is very intense in her belief that no good music has been written after 1800. A little too show-tuney for me! might be a correct write-off in this case, but I’ve also been noticing lately that it’s her critique of anything. Whenever I hold a note too long I’m being a little too show-tuney for her! If we want to try staggering the volume of the different sections through different parts of the song? A little too show-tuney! We think we should move rehearsal to Friday this week? A little too show-tuney!
I say, “But you know about this kind of program.”
“As far as I know, musical theater programs do put a heavy stress on the musical portion rather than the theater.”
“ ‘Musical’ should really include dancing. . . .”
“I think the consensus is that dancing, at least for a specific show, and acting, just in general, can be taught more readily than singing. Singing requires years and years of refinement.”
“And a big heaping spoonful of natural talent.” I’ve been taking voice lessons since I was a baby and I do not sound like Bianca, you can’t fool me.
She says, “It’s my opinion that with enough practice, anyone can get anywhere. Are you really passionate about improving, Etta? It can’t just be to get into the program. You have to really want to sing better or you’re going to get much too easily frustrated with the amount of work. And to really get your voice to its very peak takes years and years of continuous effort.”
“I’ve been singing for ages.”
“But to be a singer, you need to be highly disciplined.”
It’s the world’s most triggering damn word, “discipline.” I could have been four hundred damn pounds and laughed at every day, but I guarantee that if my weight had never gotten tied into the idea that I was a failure, that I didn’t work hard enough, that I didn’t care enough, I would be in my pointe shoes doing goddamn pas de chat right now.
I blink and look down.
“I’ll be able to help you,” Candice says. “If that’s what you want.”
I think about Bianca’s tiny little body, her painful little bones, but then I think about the notes falling out of her like they’re nothing, and I think that there is something beautifully, fantastically unrest
rained about it. I think that no amount of discipline is going to get me to the point where singing looks effortless.
And I think what’s the point, your mom’s rich, stay in Nebraska until you graduate and then go to some nice school and stop whining about it.
The problem is that if I don’t go now, I’m scared I’m never going to go. What if I’m not really one of the people who’s going to get out? What if I’m a delusional version of one of the people who stays?
“Thanks,” I say. “I think I’m good.”
I’m going to get there somehow.
9
“WHO ARE YOU TEEEEXTING.”
“You’re such a little kid, it’s ridiculous.”
Bianca bounces in front of my phone. “Who who who who.”
“Maaaaason.”
“Eeee!” She does a damn cartwheel. It’s a bunch of days post-whiteboard-incident, so obviously it’s been a bunch of texts, mostly from people I don’t even know making dirty jokes (can’t they just go back to talking behind my back instead of talking to my inbox?), but a good, beautiful handful of the texts are from Mason, and I’m supposed to see him tonight. He’s texting me suggesting places. Dinner and a movie, what even is this? When did I sign up to date this boy? Whatever, I’m going with it.
Bianca and I are in one of the rooms on the fourth floor of the community center where a bunch of dance classes (but not my tap class, of course, because that would be too convenient) are taught. I’m pretty sure I did have a ballet class in this room at some point, when I was really young, but it’s hard to tell because the whole damn building looks the same. But I think this might be off the hallway where Kristina had her hissy fit.
Anyway right now this room is empty and we came up here after group, since there’s no audition prep today, to listen through some sound tracks and figure out what the hell I’m going to do for my audition. It’s a little premature because, like Mason said, we don’t sing our own choices unless we get through to the second audition, and it’s also a little pointless because I still haven’t figured out how to sing.
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