You in Five Acts

by Una LaMarche

  “Besa mi culo,” I said sweetly. Kiss my ass. I knew it was a gamble, but I was betting he’d laugh, and he did.

  “I don’t know,” he sighed, rubbing his chin, which was covered in a thick growth of black stubble. “I mean, not that rolling up with a beautiful girl wouldn’t make me look good, but . . .”

  “I’m not really a customer, anyway,” I said. “I’m your cousin’s friend. I could just be your friend.” I was still smiling, but I said friend firmly. I needed Dante to know that I wasn’t interested in him that way. And besides, I was already sort of dating someone else I wasn’t interested in that way.

  “That’s the thing, though,” Dante said, frowning. “Customers aren’t friends, and friends aren’t customers. You pay me, you’re a customer. So I don’t want you coming around next week trying to get me to front you because we’re buddies now.”

  “I won’t,” I promised.

  “Can you be cool?” he asked.

  “I’m always cool,” I said. But the pulsing in my temples and the sour ache in my stomach told me otherwise. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, so on our walk east we stopped at a deli, where I got a granola bar and a Diet Coke. I had the pill in my mouth before we were out the door, the carbonated bubbles tickling my throat as a loud chime rang out over my head, making me feel like a boxer stepping back in the ring, getting ready to start a new round.

  • • •

  It turned out that Dante’s friend lived in the housing projects just off 105th Street near the river, which made me feel uneasy and then ashamed of feeling uneasy. After all, I wasn’t supposed to be some bougie bitch who couldn’t hang. I was the cool girl who was down for whatever, and who was about to get high. I already felt a flutter in my veins and a cottony feeling in my ears; I could feel it coming on, the first licks of a wave that would eventually crash over my head, dragging me under. Just wait for it, I told myself as we got buzzed in by a security guard behind scratched, bullet-proof glass. Any second now, it’ll kick in, and then nothing will matter.

  Dante’s friend, who got introduced to me as Smoke Dog, was tall and skinny with a deep voice and a lazy smile. The living room was lined with couches, all angled toward a big TV where two other guys were playing some video game, the first-person kind where you’re just running around a gray wasteland, shooting at anything that moves. The air was thick with smoke; I saw a huge blunt propped against an ashtray on the coffee table. Adrenaline zipped through my body; my vision seemed to sharpen. I felt like a soda can that someone had shaken before popping the tab.

  “This is Liv,” Dante said, guiding me in with his hand on my back.

  “Welcome,” Smoke Dog said. “You can ditch coats anywhere, but it’s gonna get crazy soon, so keep whatever you need on you.” I clutched my bag to my chest, my pulse beating like a bass line through the thick leather. Suddenly it felt like I needed everything. But my skin was singing and I wanted to feel light and free and so I stuck my wallet in one back pocket of my jeans, my keys in the other, and another pill in the front right pocket—just in case. Then my coat and my purse disappeared, I didn’t know where, and someone was handing me a bottle and someone else was passing me the blunt and then I was gone. Just like I wanted.

  Here’s what I remember, spots of static through the haze: Sitting on the couch, running my nails over my wrists; laughing so hard at something that I actually physically couldn’t stop; having an intense conversation with a girl wearing diamond hoop earrings that I couldn’t take my eyes off of, like a cat tracking a butterfly; leaving that pow-wow to stumble to the bathroom, where I threw up quickly while holding the door closed with my foot; walking up an endless stairwell clutching Dante’s arm; standing on the roof, smoking a cigarette, watching the city sparkle and sway until I got pulled back, hard, and someone yelled that I was standing too close to the edge.

  Somehow it had gotten dark. Time slowed down and sped up but neither it nor I could seem to stand still.

  I was coming down by that point, slowly but surely, the wave retreating as the shine wore off the world. I remember staring at my phone and seeing no little number where the new messages should have been and having the brief, sudden urge to hurl it off the building, and then bursting into tears instead. Next I was tripping down the stairs and following a thumping bass line to a door and stepping inside, where I saw Smoke Dog sitting on the couch with a girl on his lap. She was facing him, kissing him, running her hands up under his shirt, and it made me want to text you, but then I remembered that you hated me and so I decided to take the second pill instead.

  I traced my way back to the bathroom by holding on to the walls, and when I got inside I looked in the mirror, my face not quite in focus, like someone had dragged their thumb across and smudged it. I dug the pill out of my pocket and then dropped it by accident into the sink, and there was a brief, awful pause when I thought it had gone down the drain, and the loathing I felt for myself in that moment was so deep and piercing that I felt like turning around and going back to the roof and taking a running leap, but then I spotted it, stuck to the porcelain, damp and bitter but still intact, and that was enough.

  I had just washed it down when someone started banging on the door. There was no lock and I couldn’t hold it closed that time, so within a few seconds it was open and there was Dante, standing with Diego, who had the same look on his face that you’d had at your apartment that afternoon, or that Joy had had in the laundry room at the party, or that Ethan had every time I recoiled from his touch. It was a naked stare of confused disappointment. It was a deafening chorus screaming in unison, You’re not who we thought you were.

  • • •

  My exit from the party was much less gracious than my entrance.

  “I don’t need a babysitter,” I spat at Dante, who, with Diego, was physically removing me from the building.

  “Keep your voice down,” Dante said, as we squeezed through a cluster of people in the hallway who watched me through half-lidded eyes, laughing. “You’re embarrassing me, and yourself.”

  “Why’d you even bring her here, man?” Diego whispered.

  “I told you, she begged me,” Dante said. Once we made it to the hallway he grabbed my arm roughly and spun me around to face him. “Listen, my supplier is here. It doesn’t look good for me to be hanging around with underage bitches who can’t handle their shit.”

  The second pill was starting to lift me up, up, up by that point, so the words barely registered. “I’m sorry,” I said, blinking into the fluorescent lights. My coat and bag had magically reappeared, and Diego was helping me put them on.

  “You can find a way to make it up to me,” Dante said.

  “She doesn’t owe you anything, man,” Diego said. “If anything, this is your fault. Come on, Liv.” We were halfway down the stairs when Dante called after us.

  “No me jodas.” Don’t fuck with me.

  Diego winced, but we kept going.

  • • •

  “Sorry I don’t have money for a cab,” he said once we got back out onto the street.

  “I don’t care!” I said, and I didn’t. The air felt sharp against my face, in a good way, like pins and needles, a rush of blood into an empty limb. The street lamps had just turned on. They looked like stars caught in fishing nets. “I can get home,” I said, the words slurring together. If he had let me, I probably would have walked the whole way.

  “No, I’m coming with you,” Diego said. “You look . . . tired.”

  I didn’t feel tired, not in my brain, anyway, but my legs were getting heavy, so I leaned on him while we walked the four long blocks over to 5th Avenue and then five blocks north to the train. I concentrated on the sound of my heels clacking on the concrete, trying to keep time with my thundering heart.

  I threw up again at the mouth of the subway, into a garbage can. I couldn’t tell if the pill came out. Maybe Dante had been right—maybe one
was enough. I felt shaky and sick.

  “You won’t tell Joy, will you?” I asked, when Diego emerged from the nearby convenience store with napkins and Gatorade. He guided me over to the same bench that Dante and I had sat on hours earlier—it seemed like a lifetime ago—and helped me wipe my face.

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “Is that a threat?” I flopped back against the bench closed my eyes, feeling the street tilt. He held the bottle up to my lips. Fruit punch. I made a gagging noise.

  “No,” he said again. “I don’t know. I just know she’s worr—she thinks about you. Misses you or something.”

  “Fuck her,” I groaned. “I mean, I’m sorry, I know you’re in love with her, but fuck her. If she misses me so much why doesn’t she fucking text me?” Diego got quiet for a long time after that.

  “Does she know?” he finally asked.

  “About me or you?”

  “Me.”

  “No,” I said. “She doesn’t notice anything that’s not part of perfect Joyland.”

  He laughed.

  “Well, I won’t tell if you won’t tell,” I said, slumping against him. The words came out in a slush, linked like a daisy chain.

  “Let’s get you home,” he said.

  I slept fitfully through the train ride—the pill must have come up, either that or it was a pretty shitty drug for narcolepsy—and the next thing I knew Diego was more or less carrying me through the lobby of my building, past Hector, and into the elevator. He couldn’t hold me up and root through my bag for keys, so he knocked, and Mom answered the door in silk pajamas, holding a glass of wine.

  “It’s only 9:30,” she said, with a little smile. “I didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow.”

  “Surprise!” I said, still clutching Diego for support. My eyelids felt so heavy, I could barely keep them open.

  We walked—well, he walked—into the living room, where Dad was sitting on the couch. There were takeout boxes on the coffee table and an old movie was playing on the TV.

  “We go back a long way,” some guy on screen was saying. “And I’m not gonna piss that away because you’re higher than a kite.” I started giggling.

  “Honey,” Dad said, frowning, “I think you should go to bed.”

  “Sleep it off, baby,” Mom agreed, giving me a swift, dry kiss on the cheek. “There’s aspirin in the cabinet. Diego, are you”—my eyes were just slits by then but I could hear the raised eyebrow in the tone of her voice—“staying over?”

  “No, I’m just dropping her off,” Diego said, ushering me down the hallway to my room, basically lifting me by the armpits while my toes brushed the carpet runner.

  “Thank you for that,” I heard Mom call after us. “I’m glad she has good friends to look out for her.”

  I can look out for myself, I thought, the words dragging through my brain, heavy as bricks. I believed it. I thought I was holding it together, when really I was falling fast.

  Which wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t taken everyone else down with me.

  Everything that happened next, it was all my fault.

  Don’t you think I know that?

  There’s no drug strong enough to ever let me forget.

  Chapter Fifteen

  March

  Two months left

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Nuvigil to become my new best friend. It made my skin tingle, took a hundred pounds off my brain and another five off my body because I was too busy to eat but never too busy to drink, gallons and gallons of water, like a camel, or bottles of soda that fired like Pop Rocks on my desert of a tongue. At the beginning it kept me high for ten hours at a time, but the best kind of high, the kind that dulls the pain and heightens the senses at the same time. I could memorize the entire Boroughed Trouble script in an afternoon, or write a paper on the Harlem Renaissance that actually sounded good because I’d stayed up till four reading the books and writing feverish notes in the margins instead of googling the Wikipedia entries an hour beforehand like usual.

  But it was hard to come down from, and I couldn’t sleep unless I took a few Ambien or smoked a few bowls, sometimes both, washed down with at least two glasses of wine from the stash in the pantry, the good stuff that tasted like velvet and left a purple ring on my lips. And then I’d wake up feeling like shit run over by a dump truck, so I had to take a pill as soon as I got up, and then it all started again. Pretty soon I was up to one and a half a day, then two, going through them twice as fast as Dr. Dante recommended, but that was the thing with medicine: when it wore off you had to take more, otherwise it stopped working.

  I needed it to work, because Showcase was looming, getting bigger and bigger in the distance like a wave crashing into shore, and I had to be better than I’d ever been, with a director who never gave me notes because he was too busy trying to make out with me, and a costar who all of a sudden hated being in the same room as me. Which kind of affected our chemistry.

  “WHAT HAPPENED?” Ethan yelled one day when we did a run-through for our faculty supervisor, Mr. Francisco. “This scene was perfect last week!”

  I couldn’t remember when last week was, or what we had done differently, but apparently it was important because Ethan shut his script with a thud and ran his hands through his hair, his eyes popping out behind his glasses like he was a NASA engineer watching a space shuttle explode. I glared at him and chewed the inside of my cheeks. This terrible thing had happened where just looking at him had started to repulse me, so I was being a giant bitch pretty much all the time, and I was actually even better at being a bitch on Nuvigil since I was so focused.

  “You look and sound exactly like Charlie Brown right now,” I said under my breath.

  “Bill,” he said, turning to Mr. Francisco, which was exactly the kind of thing Ethan did on purpose to make people not like him, calling teachers by their first names. “I promise, it’s not usually like this.”

  “What is it usually like, then?” Mr. Francisco asked. He had snow-white hair and a face dotted with broken blood vessels. Gin blossoms, people called them. I wondered if Mr. Francisco was a boozehound, or if he’d done so much acid in the 60s that his brain looked like a big gray honeycomb. (Joy would sometimes comment, out of nowhere, that MDMA took “ice cream scoops” out of the frontal lobe, or that the DEA listed Adderall in the same class as heroin and coke. I’m pretty sure eighth-grade health class scared her straight forever.)

  “Let’s just take it from the top,” Ethan said, sitting back down in his seat looking sweaty and mad. “Scene one, Viola’s entrance. If we can’t get this one right, people, then I don’t know what we’re doing here.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” you said under your breath.

  I’d almost forgotten you were there because I was trying so hard to forget you just weren’t talking to me. But I looked straight at you and smiled to pretend it was a joke, so that Ethan wouldn’t flip out. You looked disgusted. I wanted another pill.

  “Places!” Ethan barked and walked off stage while you assumed a crouched position front and center, building your bridge. Or burning it, I thought miserably. One thing Nuvigil couldn’t seem to do was take my mind off you. But I guess if anyone ever marketed a drug that made you forget a crush, no one would even go outside anymore, we’d all just lie in bed overdosing.

  I watched the muscles in your back move under your shirt as you pantomimed hammering, desire bubbling up from beneath the restless relay race of electrodes in my brain trying to keep me steady.

  “And . . . action!” Ethan called.

  “It’s not a film set,” Mr. Francisco sighed.

  I took a deep breath and tried to get into character. I was totally off-book, but as exhausted as I was from so little sleep and food it was really hard to commit to being a suicidal Polish garment worker whose mother had just died of tuberculosis. Sti
ll, I tried to channel how I’d felt leaving, humiliated, from your apartment building—that need to just be anywhere else, and fast.

  I ran toward you, trying to arrange my features in a way that looked like I was “making a choice” about how to enter the scene instead of just moving from one place to another. You saw me and leapt up. Rodolpho was supposed to be shocked, but you just looked bored. At least we were both phoning it in.

  I stopped short and turned around.

  “Wait, wait!” you called. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  I looked back over my shoulder. Maybe I was hearing things, but I could swear that the line hadn’t always sounded so accusatory. Why are you here? Did you just want to see me? Then it dawned on me: we’d already done the scene at your apartment.

  “Nothing,” I said, suddenly much more defensive than Viola was supposed to be. Maybe I did. But not anymore. “I was just leaving. I lost my way.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” you said. “This bridge isn’t finished.”

  “Cut!” Ethan yelled. “You’re not supposed to be pissed that she’s there. You work the night shift with a bunch of old dudes who don’t talk to you—this is a beautiful woman your age. You want to keep her there forever, not scare her off.”

  “Right,” you said, looking down at the stage.

  “And Liv, you look like you don’t know where you’re going. Do you know where you’re going?”

  “To jump off a bridge,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, feeling the faint but manic thumpthumpthumpthumpthump that had become my heart. In the theater’s state-of-the-art acoustics, I wondered if everyone could hear it.

  “Exactly,” Ethan sighed, “so that should be the only thing motivating you in this scene. You are determined to jump off that bridge and you’re not going to let some handsome stranger you just met get in your way.”

  “Got it.”