by Katie Henry
She laughs through a sniffle. “Definitely not.”
“Then the point isn’t greatness, or success. The point is you. All the joy it gives you. And the person it makes you into.”
“I get what you’re saying. It’s a net benefit, no matter what.”
“I’m saying a lot more than that.” I put my hand on my shoulder. “Mo. This thing we do—it’s magic.”
She stands, rolls her shoulders back, cracks her neck. Then she sticks out her hand the same way she did the first day we met, all confidence and certainty. This time, I take it without a moment’s hesitation.
“Well, come on, then.” She pulls me up with her. “We’ve got magic to do.”
For all her worrying, Mo did great. Not just good, but great. Though she’d told me beforehand she was just going to do her Broadway riot bit, she ended up mixing and matching from her various sets. I think she might have been doing it on the fly, which is even more impressive.
Luckily, I went first and didn’t have to follow her excellent performance. It went well, better than I expected. Fourteen laughs for a three-and-a-half-minute set, which is almost at the marker. It was fun, and I was good, and that’s all that matters to me. None of this means to me what it means to Mo, and I’d be her warm-up act over and over, if it would make her believe she could be great.
When I get off the stage, it’s not Mo or any of the boys who find me first. It’s Charlotte. She’s got a drink in her hand—I wonder who bought it for her—and a look that can’t be summed up in a single word. She looks baffled. And amused. And maybe even proud.
“I was right.” She shakes her head. “You’re a pod person.”
“Was it weird?” I ask. “Seeing me do that?”
“Yeah. But a good kind of weird.”
I think back to my first night at the Forest. Weird isn’t weird, I’d thought. But maybe Charlotte’s closer to the mark. Letting people into your life, letting them see who you really are is weird—but it’s a good kind of weird.
“Where did you tell Mom and Dad you were going tonight?” I ask.
“They didn’t ask.” She sips her drink. “The benefits of adulthood. You?”
I can feel my mouth tightening. My shoulders, too. “They didn’t ask me, either.”
Charlotte is quiet. She probably thinks I’m being ridiculous. She was always skipping out early on family dinners and evading Mom’s questions. Peter was always showing up hours past his curfew with terrible excuses. I’ve never done any of that, but I could have, a lot more easily than either of them. She probably thinks it’s unfair, that I can go anywhere—even a bar, at sixteen, on a Thursday—with no interference.
And yeah, I wouldn’t be in this club if my parents kept tabs on me like other kids’ parents do. I should be grateful I made it here, that my parents didn’t stop me at the door and interrogate me about my plans.
But they didn’t even ask.
“Is that really how you feel?” Charlotte blurts out.
“About what?”
“Our family. What you said onstage. That you don’t really belong with us?”
“Oh. It’s just a bit.”
“Yeah, okay. But is it true?”
“Some of it,” I admit. “Some of it has to be true, or it’s not funny.”
“Is this because I used to tell you that you were adopted and your real parents were carnival clowns?”
I laugh. “No.”
“That’s a relief.” She sets her drink down on the bar. “I couldn’t live with the guilt.”
“It’s just—” I hesitate. “You and Mom and Dad and Peter are all so—I don’t know. Confident. Outgoing. Loud.”
“But you were all those things.” Charlotte tosses her head toward the stage. “There. Right now.”
“I was?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s just a character,” I explain. “Or a persona, or—it’s acting. It’s not really me.”
“I don’t know. It sure looked like you.” She shrugs. “Maybe you just needed a different stage.”
Huh. As I turn that around in my head, I realize . . . Charlotte’s right. Our kitchen table isn’t the only place I’ll ever eat. I’ll have other classrooms outside my high school, other homes outside this city, other families besides the one I was born into. And if I’m different, somehow, in any of those places, it doesn’t mean I’m faking it. It doesn’t mean I’m pretending or acting.
It’s just a brand-new stage.
Mitch the Booker sidles up alongside us. “Didn’t she do great?” he says to Charlotte, without bothering to ask who she is. Which is weird. He puts his hand on my shoulder. Which is weird, too.
“She did amazing,” Charlotte agrees, and my heart swells.
“I just need to borrow her for a moment,” he says, almost apologetically. Then turns to me. “Let’s go to my office real quick.”
Mitch’s office is smaller than I expected, with enough room for a desk, a file cabinet, and a couple chairs. He’s got a couch, lumpy and a horrible mauve color, shoved to one wall, but it still seems in the way. The door knocks against one of its armrests as he ushers me in. The room would be way less crowded if he got rid of it. Maybe he has to sleep here, a lot.
“So. Did you have a good time?” he asks. “Did you like the room?”
I nod. “It was a good crowd.”
“They always are.”
“It was really nice of you,” I add, feeling bad for focusing on the audience and the room before I even thanked him. “To invite me.”
He smiles. “It was nice. Wasn’t it?”
Well . . . yes? I just said it was nice. He didn’t have to say it again. You’re not supposed to say it about yourself.
“Yeah,” I say, but slowly, like I’m not so sure anymore. And maybe I’m not.
His smile doesn’t break. “I bet you’re nice, too. You seem like a nice girl.”
“Um—”
“Though I’ve got to say, you’re not dressed like it.”
My face goes hot and my shoulders go rigid. I look down at myself—I didn’t wear my green dress today. It didn’t seem professional enough. So what I’m looking down at are my tallest heels, sheerest tights, and the slimmest sweater dress I own, the one I bought with my own money. When I looked in the mirror before I left, I felt pretty. Grown-up. Maybe even elegant. And now I feel . . . naked.
I stare back at him, and some of the shame must show on my face. He laughs. “It’s only a joke. Of course you’re a nice girl.”
I don’t understand. I don’t understand what makes this dress not nice, as if it’s got a middle finger painted on it or it holds small children for ransom. I don’t understand what I’m dressed like, if it’s not like a nice girl. I don’t understand why he keeps talking about what kind of a girl I am at all.
“You are, aren’t you?”
“What?” I ask, feeling stupid, and small, and a little scared.
“Nice.”
“Yes.”
He gets up from his chair. And though he doesn’t move any closer, I can feel it. The shift. The shift in his weight from the chair. The shift of the mood in the room.
“And you had fun, didn’t you?” he asks. “Tonight.”
“Yes,” I say, quieter this time.
“I did, too.” He leans on the edge of his desk. “I think we could get a good thing going here. You and me.”
I know I’m supposed to be getting this. I can tell from the way he’s looking at me, I’m supposed to understand what’s happening.
“I’d love to perform again,” I say, trying to sound calm. Like a professional. Like the girl who would wear this dress and these heels, whoever she is. “If you’ll have me.”
“Well, now you’re getting it,” he says. But I’m not. I’m not at all. I frown. He takes a step forward, cautiously, without sudden movements, like I’m a large and potentially dangerous bird of prey. “I want to have you any way I can get you.”
Or maybe I’m the pre
y.
“I don’t—” My mouth is dry, my throat is tight, the words are jumbled letters in my frozen brain. “I don’t know what you—”
“You do something nice for me,” he says. “I’ll do something nice for you.”
And with the sickening thud of my heart into my stomach, it clicks. I know. I know why he closed the door, why he said that about my clothes, why he’s walking toward me now, like a hunter who’s wounded his target and is ready to deliver the kill shot.
I think: I shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be doing this.
I think: Do something, do something, before he does something.
I say: “My sister is waiting for me.”
He laughs, like he’s heard that one before. “She can wait five minutes.”
Then he reaches in with a big, eager hand and pushes a loose lock of my hair behind my ear. Just the way Alex does.
I don’t think. I don’t say. I only react, like a fox in a trap, and lash out, knocking his hand away with one of mine, shoving his heavy, broad chest away from me with the other.
“Jesus!” he says, stumbling back a step. He looks at me half-wounded and half-stunned, like I just shot an arrow into his foot for no reason. “What the fuck is your problem?”
I wish I had an arrow. I wish I had an army. I wish I had words instead of jumbled letters in my brain. “Don’t—”
“Jesus Christ,” he says. “All I did was offer, you crazy bitch. All you had to say was no.”
I didn’t have the word, I try to explain helplessly, silently, in my own head. I don’t have words for anything anymore.
“Don’t play this game with me,” he says. Nearly snarls. “You shoved your tits in that little dress, came up here alone, and now you want to act offended? You knew what this was. You just wanted another gig out of it.”
“I’m—” I swallow. I grab my bag on the floor, without taking my eyes off him. I don’t want to see him and his stupid face, his terrible hat covering his thinning hair, his bleached teeth gritted in his angry mouth. But I can’t let him out of my sight. “I’m going.”
“So go!” he yells, flinging an arm at the door. “I’m not stopping you. Fuck, you try to be nice to somebody and they try to take your goddamn arm off—go ahead and go!”
I open the door and flee, like the dumb, helpless animal I am.
Chapter 16
I DON’T TELL Mo about it. I don’t tell my parents, or Alex, or even a diary, not that I have one. I don’t tell anybody.
It’s just one moment, and I can bury one moment down deep inside my brain. It’s not that big of a deal, anyway. A shitty, gross guy saying a shitty, gross thing. It’s not the first time. The first time, it was a college kid in a Northwestern sweatshirt who yelled at me to impress his friends and told me I was so fucking hot. I was so fucking twelve.
It’s not the first time. It’s not the worst thing I’ve heard. But we were in such a small room, and I didn’t expect it, and I’d been so happy. He said I was good onstage. And then he showed me all he really thought I was good for.
I hate him. I hate myself. I never want to get onstage again.
Charlotte went back to college two days later, so the only other people who know about that night are my friends. If I just stay at home, in my room, surrounded by plants and plays and no people, I’m safe.
I know that’s stupid. I do. No one is ever really safe.
But I can’t imagine how bad I would feel if I saw Mo again. If I went back to that club he brought me to, or the Forest, where he found me, or . . . anywhere. Anywhere like that. If I can stay away, maybe it’ll help keep this feeling away. It’s hard to describe it. Put it into words. I’ll be fine, I’ll be thinking of something good, and then I’ll hear something, or see something that reminds me of what happened, and—it feels like a stitch in my side, the kind you get from running. Sharp and unexpected and searing. It feels like a splinter under my fingernail. So small. So painful. And impossible to ignore.
After a week of this, though, Mo loses her patience.
“We’re getting lunch,” she says to me on video chat. “I’m free Saturday.”
“I don’t know, I’m kind of—”
“Izzy, you’ve been super weird since the bringer show.”
I grimace. “I haven’t.”
“Can you see your face right now?” She points toward the corner of the screen, where she knows I can see myself. “That is a weird face.”
“Are you calling me ugly?” I say, trying for a joke.
She’s having none of it. “I’m calling you full of shit. We’re getting lunch.”
“Wow,” she says, her eyes traveling from my hair, half-brushed and up in a bun, to the oversized flannel shirt poking out of my coat sleeves, down to my oldest boots, caked with mud. “You look, um—”
“I woke up late,” I mumble, dropping down next to her on the bench at Millennium Park.
“Okay.”
“I know I look terrible.”
“You don’t,” Mo assures me. “You just look . . . not like you.”
I shrug. “I mean, these are my clothes, so.”
She looks taken aback, and I feel bad. I know I’m being rude, and it’s not her fault. I’m just mad at everything and everyone and she’s the person who’s here.
“Okay,” she says again. “But . . . I’ve never seen you wear pants, let alone sweatpants.”
She’s always seen me in a dress, the green dress and the black one. The one I wore in the club. My throat tightens.
“Or sneakers . . .”
I almost tripped in my heels, going up the stairs to his office. My stomach clenches.
That’s what he saw, he saw the heels and the dress and thought that meant I wanted things I didn’t. My heart pounds, my chest caves in.
“What if nothing I do is actually for me?”
Mo wrinkles her brow. “Huh?”
“What if all the things I thought I chose for myself were really for everyone else? What if I only wear skirts all the time because people treat me nicer when I do? Or I put on makeup because I like it, but also because I feel like I have to, just to look normal. Or I have long hair because my mom’s been telling me how pretty it is, that other girls would kill for hair like mine, since I was three and hacked off a hunk of it with scissors.”
I’m getting louder, without meaning to, but I can’t seem to bring it down. I don’t want people to stare, but I can’t be quieter. And Mo doesn’t ask me to.
“You said I don’t look like me, but I don’t even know what that means. How much of it is me, and how much of it is the makeover kit I got on my seventh birthday, all those dolls I never played with—God, the pink onesie I wore out of the fucking hospital!”
“You can ditch it,” Mo says. “All of it, the dresses and the makeup and the pink, if you want to. You’re allowed to. I did.”
But that’s not me, either, I want to say. It would just be a different box. But I don’t want Mo to take it the wrong way, so I just shake my head. Then, after a moment: “Mo,” I ask. “Do you . . . feel like a girl?”
“Yeah.” She blinks at me. “Do you?”
“I guess. Maybe. I don’t know,” I say helplessly. “What does it feel like, to feel like a girl?”
“Well—” Mo runs her hands through her hair. “It just does. I don’t think it goes into words like that.”
“Then how do I know if I do, or I don’t, if there aren’t any words?”
“You don’t have to identify as a girl,” she says gently. “If it doesn’t fit.”
“But it’s not that I feel like a boy.”
“There’s more than just ‘girl’ or ‘boy,’ you know.”
I do know that. And it’s good that it’s true, but what I can’t figure out is whether it’s true for me. Do I really not feel like a girl, or is it just that I don’t want to deal with all the baggage that comes with it? It’s like turning thirteen—and suddenly going up four inches in height and three cup sizes—ca
me with all these terms and conditions I never agreed to.
You can’t wear that. It’s too short now.
You can’t say that. Someone will think you’re flirting with them now.
Don’t bend over like that, sit like that, stretch like that—
Mom always talked about womanhood like it was this great gift, but it wasn’t ever on my wish list, and sometimes I think I’d like to make a return.
“If you could wake up tomorrow,” Mo asks me, “and everything was perfect. What would that look like?”
“I don’t know.” When I try to think about who I am—really am—it feels like looking at myself in a photo someone else took. It’s me, of course it’s me, but the person behind the camera is there, too. Choosing the angle. Picking the shot. It all gets tangled up together, the parts of me that are real and the parts that got filtered through outside eyes. How much of me is only a reflection of how people have treated me, instead of what I wanted? What would it look like if I could tell the universe who I was before it could decide that for me? What would I look like?
“I want to wear clothes and have them not mean anything,” I say. “I want to take up just as much space as I need, I want to stop smiling when I don’t feel like it, I want to walk down the street and not be a target because men want to fuck me, or be invisible if they don’t. I just want to be a person.” My voice cracks. “Am I ever going to get to be a person?”
“Of course you are,” Mo rushes to say. “You already are. And I know it sucks, believe me, but it’ll get better—”
“No it won’t!” I say, suddenly furious. “It won’t get better, because I won’t get better, because I’m weak and stupid, so stupid—”
Mo, suddenly looking alarmed, reaches for me. “Izzy, holy shit, you’re not stupid—”
“I am.” Even my hands are weak. They’re shaking. I fold my arms across my chest to stop them. “I’m not good enough to get invited to a show, Jonah knew it and you knew it, too, but I did it anyway and of course he wanted something, of course he just thought I was some stupid—” I blink away tears. “It’s my fault.”
