Losing It

by Cora Carmack

  I think I could actually feel the hormones released into the atmosphere when the girls in the room heard his accent. I felt Kelsey staring at me, but I fixed my eyes on one of the stage lights hanging overhead, and tried to think my rapidly beating heart into submission. This was bad. This was SO BAD.

  “Like Eric said, I did my Undergrad here, and then graduated this past May with an MFA in Acting from Temple University in Philadelphia. I’d been working in the theatre scene there for about six months when Eric called and asked if I’d be interested in the temporary position here.”

  I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, simultaneously anticipating and dreading the thought of making eye contact with him. He was not looking at me. In fact, his whole body was angled toward the students on the other side of the room, pretty much ignoring the entire section where I was seated. Other than the fact that he was pointedly not looking at one side of the room, there was no sign that he was worried or frazzled in any way; whereas I could feel the heat in my cheeks and my hands were shaking as I pressed them into my knees.

  “I loved my four years here, and I’m, uh…”

  He glanced at me, and I could do nothing but look back—wide eyed and petrified. He cleared his throat and returned his gaze to the other side of the room.

  “I’m really excited to be back.”

  I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

  I wanted to crawl into a hole at the bottom of a ravine, then be buried under an avalanche, and then die.

  I wanted… to cry.

  Eric excused himself then to let us get to know our new teacher. I wished I could excuse myself too because I happened to already know him plenty well.

  “Well, then,” Garrick started. “I realize that I’m not that much older than you lot.” Another flick of his eyes to mine. It was becoming nearly impossible to swallow.

  “But my goal here is to provide you with some insight into the next step in your journey from someone who isn’t so far removed. We all love Eric, Ben, Kate, and the rest of the faculty, but let’s face it, they’re not exactly the youngest kids on the block.” The whole class laughed. I was too busy concentrating on not throwing up. “It was a different world when they started their careers. When I was sitting where you are, we called this class Senior Prep; I think now it’s called the Business of Theatre. In it, we’ll be covering everything from auditions to career options to Actor’s Equity. We’ll also spend some time talking about the more abstract side of things. Because I hate to break it to you guys, but the hardest part about this business isn’t landing roles or making ends meet, though that is difficult. The hardest thing is keeping up your spirit and remembering why you chose this in the first place.”

  He didn’t have to try to hard to scare us about our futures. We were all already operating on Threat Level Orange. We’d been having middle of the night, soul-searching conversations (while drunk, of course) since the year started.

  “Now, if you don’t mind. I’d like to hear a bit about you all. Why don’t you tell me your names and what you’re interested in doing after you graduate.”

  There were about twenty in the class. The first eight or so all recited their names followed by the obligatory, “I’m moving to New York.”

  When you’re an actor, moving to New York is pretty much the dream. Those who are lucky can actually make it the plan. Some of us have to think a little more realistically.

  Cade, my best friend besides Kelsey said, “Cade Winston. At the moment I’m a little torn between Grad School and just going straight into auditioning. I can’t really tell if I actually want to go to Grad School or if I’m just scared.”

  Garrick smiled, and even though I was freaking out, I smiled, too. I felt like that about a lot of things in my life… not just acting.

  He said, “Good. That’s honest, Cade. And the more honest you can be with yourself the better. Hopes and dreams are great, but they are a lot easier to break than a solid plan. We’ll see if we can’t figure out exactly what you want while you’re in this class.”

  After that, it was like everyone felt okay to say what we were actually thinking, instead of what we felt was expected of us.

  We spend so much time defending our choice to do this that it becomes hard to show any vulnerability at all. There’s only so many times you can handle someone asking about your fall back for when things don’t work before you start thinking that maybe the fall back should just be your plan.

  Sometimes I wish I were a bit more like Kelsey. She was practically fearless. Though, I guess it’s easy to be a little fearless when your family is loaded.

  “Kelsey Summers. I’m taking a year off to travel and just explore before I decide on what I’m doing. People always say that the most interesting actors are interesting people, so I figure it’s a good investment to spend some time becoming more fascinating than I already am.”

  “Diva,” I muttered under my breath.

  She narrowed her eyes, and delivered a quick pinch to the back of my arm in response. I yelped, and nearly toppled out of my seat at the same time that Garrick turned his eyes on me and said, “And you?”

  Rubbing at my arm, I had to look away from his eyes before I could answer.

  “Bliss Edwards. I’m a little torn between acting and stage management. And since they don’t really offer Masters programs where you can do both, I think I’ll just go ahead and enter the, um, job market or whatever.”

  I looked back at him, but his eyes had already moved on to Dom, who was sitting one row above me.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Kelsey’s hand found mine, and she squeezed.

  It took another twenty minutes to finish up introductions because, well, we’re theatre people. We love to hear ourselves talk.

  With only five minutes left in class Garrick said, “Great. It sounds like you’ve all at least given a thought to the next step. Wednesday I want you all to come to class with your résumé and headshots and be ready to audition.”

  “For what?” Dom asked. “It’s the first week of class. There aren’t any auditions for a few weeks.” Dom loved to hear himself speak more than most.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Garrick answered. “In the real world, you might go to ten auditions in a day. You might have weeks to prepare or you might have an hour. Your job is only acting if you land the part, until then your job is auditioning, so you better be good at it. Dismissed. See you all on Wednesday.”

  He grinned. It wasn’t quite as awe-inspiring as the grins he wore last night, but it was still enough to make my steps stutter on my way down the risers.

  I was at the curtains, a mere ten feet away from the door when I heard, “Miss Edwards, can I speak to you for a moment?”

  Kelsey’s face was caught somewhere between pity and glee. For the first time in twelve hours I wanted to punch someone besides myself.

  “Lunch at noon?” She asked. I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure I would survive until noon. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I could stomach going to my next class.

  I took my time walking toward him, waiting for the rest of the class to clear. Dom was currently bombarding Garrick with questions, so I took a second to distract myself with Cade. Where Kelsey was the friend who dragged me out to bars and encouraged stupid behavior, Cade was the friend who always knew the right thing to say.

  His first words—“On a scale of one to bitchy, how hung-over are you?”

  I raised the corner of my mouth in a smile. That was all I could manage in my vortex of emotions, but it was a smile all the same. “Depends… right now? A solid seven. If Dom tries to talk to me… we’re going to need a bigger scale.”

  He laughed, and something made me wonder how last night would have gone if I’d told him my secret instead of Kelsey. Somehow I doubt things would have turned out the same.

  “I gotta run. Poli-Sci.” He made a face, and I concurred, glad I’d gotten that out of the way last year. “Let’s do something tonight, k?”

&
nbsp; “Sure.” This time I did smile, because Cade was great for distractions, and that was most definitely what I needed right then.

  He pecked me on the cheek, and then went on his way.

  I turned toward Garrick to find him watching me, his eyes dark and narrowed. Dom was long gone. He must have gone out the doors on the other side. We stood there awkwardly for several seconds. His hands were shoved in his pockets, and mine were fidgeting with the bag slung across my shoulders.

  Finally, he cleared his throat.

  “How’s your leg?”

  I swallowed, and looked down at my legs. I’d worn a skirt today to keep it uncovered. I tilted my leg so he could see the bandage. “Good. I re-bandaged it this morning. It’s blistered, but as far as I can tell, or well according to the Internet, that’s normal.”

  I looked back, but his eyes were still on my legs.

  I stiffened. God, this was so awkward.

  He cleared his throat again.

  “So… you’re in college.”

  “So… you’re not.”

  He stayed still for another second, then turned to the side abruptly, pacing several feet away from me, and then back. His fingers pushed through his hair in frustration, and all I could think about was my own fingers in his hair, and how incredibly soft it had been.

  “I thought—“ He started. “Well, I wasn’t doing much thinking at all. But, you don’t look like you’re in college. I said I went to school here, and that I’d just moved back, and you said ‘Me too’ so I just assumed you had done the same.”

  I kept having this irrational need to blink. I wasn’t crying or anything, but I just couldn’t stop. I said, “I lived in Texas when I was really young. I meant that I moved back here for school.”

  He nodded once, and then kept nodding. So, he was nodding and I was blinking and neither of us was saying what really needed to be said.

  And since I couldn’t stand silence, I was the first to break.

  “I won’t tell anyone.” His eyebrows raised, but I couldn’t tell if it was surprise or judgment or just a facial tick. “I mean not that there’s anything… not that we… I mean we didn’t actually… um, make the beast with two backs and all that.”

  OH. MY. GOD.

  KILLMENOWKILLMENOWKILLMENOWKILLMENOOOOOOW.

  The beast with two backs? Seriously?

  I’m 22-years-old, and rather than just spitting out the word sex, I used a Shakespeare reference! A really embarrassing Shakespeare reference.

  And he was smiling! And his smile did funny things to my insides that had me thinking about last night, which was totally not something I needed to be thinking about right now. No beasts. No backs. No last night.

  I looked away, trying to keep it together. I took a deep breath, and said as calmly as I could. “This doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

  He took a moment to answer, and I wondered if he was waiting for me to look at him. If he was, he’d be waiting for a while.

  “You’re right. We’re both adults. We can just forget it happened.”

  There was no way I could forget it happened. But I could pretend.

  I could act.

  “Right,” I nodded.

  I turned to leave, but his voice stopped me.

  “How’s your cat?”

  “What cat? Oh! MY CAT. The cat… that is mine. Oh, she’s... ” I had said it was a she, right? “She’s fine. All meowing and purring and other cat things.”

  God, why did the door have to be so far away?

  I kept walking away, calling back my last few words over my shoulders.

  “I’ve got to get to class. I’ll see you Wednesday I guess, okay, bye!”

  I speed-walked out the door, down the hallway into the art wing, past the ceramics classroom, and into the handicap bathroom that no one ever used. Then I sunk down to my knees (on a BATHROOM FLOOR. Clearly, I was distraught because… GROSS).

  I focused on not hyperventilating. Only I could have an affair with a teacher on accident. I knew one thing for sure. There was no way in hell I was going to my next class.

  Chapter Nine

  “I swear there was so much awkward in the air, it felt practically solid.”

  My face was pressed against the table in the student lounge while Kelsey tried to ply me with french fries and other wonderful carbohydrates.

  She patted at my back half-heartedly. There was nothing even remotely mothering about Kelsey, but at least she was trying. “You’re exaggerating, Bliss. The only thing I felt in the air was sexual tension. I mean, he didn’t look at you often, but when he did… Hello! Swoon!”

  “There is no way I can survive a semester in that class.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re an actor. Actors sleep with each other all the time, and then move on. Hell—don’t you remember Freshman year when you didn’t want to make out with Dom in that scene, and Eric sent you in the other room and told you to kiss until you guys were comfortable with each other?”

  “Why would you bring up what is, as of today, the second most mortifying moment of my life?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Because you got over it.”

  “I will never get over having Dom’s tongue down my throat. I can still taste the douchiness.”

  “You will be fine, Bliss. It’s five months. And you only have to see him for 3 hours a week. It will be over before you know it. Then you can jump his bones one more time before you travel the world with me.”

  “There are so many crazy things in that statement that I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “You will begin by eating, or we’ll be late for Directing.”

  Grumbling, I shoved a few fries in my mouth to appease her.

  She rummaged around in her purse for her phone, but her hands closed around something else. “Oh, I forgot. I have advil… you want some?”

  I swallowed and said, “Why would I want that?”

  She quirked her head to the side, “Aren’t you sore after… you know… getting your freak on?”

  Stupid Bliss. So freaking stupid.

  “Oh! Oh, right. No, no I’m fine. I took a bunch this morning. I’m good, thanks.”

  “That a girl.”

  I moved through the rest of the day on autopilot, ready to get home and crawl into the cocoon of forgetting that is sleep. I didn’t even bother taking off my clothes before I fell into bed.

  My phone woke me a few hours later. It was Cade.

  “Hey babe—you ready to hangout?”

  I peered blearily at the clock PM. It was only 7 o’ clock.

  I yawned. “Yeah… sure. What did you have in mind?”

  “Well, I was thinking—“

  “No drinking,” I cut him off. “I cannot handle any drinking.”

  He laughed. “No hair of the dog for you? Fine… Lindsay’s playing tonight at Grind. How does coffee sound?”

  I yawned again. Lindsay was a fellow theatre major. A night listening to her music would be simple and mellow. Exactly what I needed. “Coffee sounds perfect.”

  When I walked outside 20 minutes later, my head swung from side to side, paranoid that I’d run into Garrick. When I was certain no one was around, I jogged into the parking lot and climbed in to Cade’s beat up old Honda.

  He greeted me with a smile. I resisted the urge to glance back in the direction of Garrick’s apartment.

  “I forgot to mention earlier that you looked great today. I mean, minus that lovely hung-over quality. You never wear skirts to class.”

  I wanted to say, ‘Just drive already!’ But that would have sounded crazy even for me. So I answered, “Oh, I burned my leg, and I’m not supposed to wear tight clothing over it.”

  “Seriously?” He asked. “What happened?”

  I couldn’t exactly tell him the real reason. Because then he’d want to know whose motorcycle it had been and why I had been with them and yadda, yadda.

  “Oh, I burned it with my straightener.”

  “You burned your leg
with your straightener? How long is your leg hair?”

  You’d think after all the lying I’d done in the past twenty-four hours that I would be getting slightly better at it. You would be wrong.

  “Ha-Ha. So funny!” I grimaced. “I knocked it off the counter, you punk, and it hit my leg.”

  I fiddled with the air-conditioning vent even though it barely worked in his piece of junk car.

  “Just don’t drop your coffee on yourself. Or better yet… get iced coffee.”

  I said, “Aye, aye captain."

  Grind was a cute little house on the edge of campus that had been turned into a coffee house a few years ago. Inside you ordered coffee, and outside there was a veranda where they hosted live music on most nights. The inside was packed. I sent Cade outside to find seats, and told him I’d get the drinks. I got an iced café mocha for me and a smoothie for Cade. He doesn’t even like coffee, but he comes here for me.

  I stood in line for 10 or 15 minutes, so by the time I headed outside, I had no idea where Cade was. I strolled past the tables, nodding at people I knew, avoiding eye contact with those I didn’t. I caught Lindsay’s eye up on stage as she was setting up, and she grinned.

  Finally I spotted Cade standing by a table up near the front. It was an awesome spot considering how packed this place was.

  I came up behind him, and nudged my elbow into his back.

  “Jesus, Cade, I thought I’d never find you out here. Couldn’t you have at least texted?”

  Cade glanced over his shoulder at me, then wrapped his arm around my shoulder, and took the smoothie from my left hand.

  “Sorry, babe, I was talking and got distracted. Look who it is!”

  He pulled me forward, and there was Garrick.

  This time, I wasn’t lucky enough to have already put down my coffee. So when I saw Garrick, it slipped out of my hand, and splashed all over my feet.

  Cade, with his super fast reflexes, narrowly dodged getting it all over his Toms.

  “Holy crap, Bliss. I was joking about the iced coffee, but I’m glad you listened. I swear you didn’t used to be this clumsy.”

  I still couldn’t speak. My feet were cold and sticky. And my face felt way too hot.

  “Here,” Cade said. “Sit down, Mr. Taylor said we could share his table.”

  “It’s Garrick, Cade.” I’m sure he’d told Cade that half a dozen times already.

  Cade ignored him and turned to me. “ I’ll run inside and get you some napkins. You want another drink?”

  “No, no. I’m good, Cade. You stay. I’ll go clean up.”

  “Forget it. You like Lindsay’s music much more than I do. All ‘be the change’ and ‘girl power’ stuff. I don’t want you to miss it. Sit.” This time, his hands pushed down on my shoulders until my butt hit the seat. Then he was off, and I was left alone with Garrick again.

  “What are you doing here?” My question came out angry.

  By comparison, he was sweet and calm, and possibly a little sad. “My Internet still isn’t hooked up at the apartment, and I needed to check my email. I can go, if you’d like.”

  YES.

  “No,” I sighed. “I’m not going to run you off. I just wish you hadn’t invited us to sit with you.”

  “Well, Cade didn’t say he was here with you. I was just trying to be nice.”

  “I’m sorry… I just … this is awkward. Cade doesn’t know—“

  “—I’m not going to tell him, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’d like to keep this job, and besides, your personal life is none of my business. What happened between us is over. ”

  His voice turned hard as he spoke. Over? Why did that feel like a punch to