by Federle, Tim
“James Madison, the boy zero—you with me?” Libby says.
“Yes’m?”
“—tried to plant a stink bomb in the faculty bathroom today, but one of his stupid Bills of Rights got the prank wrong. He bought the whole package, allegedly, in West Virginia—”
“Well, there’s trouble right there.”
When you’re from Jankburg, PA, West Virginia is the only thing you can feel even remotely superior to.
“And James lit a firecracker instead of a stink bomb. Like, a big, pink, bursting-in-the-sky firecracker.”
“Holy Doonesbury!”
“And turns out Mr. Skinner was in the faculty john dropping a deuce, and the firecracker rolled underneath the stalls and practically burned his ta-ta off.”
“No way!”
The casting people come out and walk right over to Jordan Rylance, and his mother stands up and thrusts her breasts so hard into Rex Rollins’s face, I think she’s actually going to break his nose. I put the phone by my side and watch as Rex shakes Jordan’s hand.
And Jordan’s face scatters into a sad soup.
“O.M.G.,” I whisper to Libby, “I think Jordan Rylance was just released from the audition or something. I think he didn’t get any further,” and Heidi says, “Nate, be nice,” under her breath. But you know what? Heidi’s hopping up and down a little.
“I wonder if Jordan’ll post that on Facebook,” Libby says. “Just cut from E.T. on Broadway. Life sucks, but at least I’m still named after a river,” and we titter. Bad, bad kids. “But hold on,” Libby says, “there’s more, about the firecracker.”
“Burning off Mr. Skinner’s hoo-ha?”
I’m waiting for Rex Rollins to come over and cut me. I’m sure it’ll happen any moment. If Jordan Rylance, who has better teeth than I do and can sing higher, gets cut, why would anyone want me around?
“Yeah: Not only did school security launch a firecracker investigation, but there’s an even juicier rumor.”
“I’m all ears,” I say, but then, “hang on just a sec, Libby,” and I smile at Rex Rollins as he totally avoids Aunt Heidi and me, walking right past us, back into the audition room. “Jordan,” I call out when the door shuts, “everything okay?”
He looks at me and smiles—his tears were those of joy—and calls out, “They asked me if I’m afraid of heights!”
The flying-bicycle sequence, of course.
Mrs. Rylance smirks at me and grabs their stuff—the kind of family that travels with three rolling suitcases—and wheels him away to the elevator.
“God, this is making me so nervous,” Heidi says. “This is why I got out of acting.”
“I thought you got out of acting,” I say, stunned, “because of annoying ringlet-haired casting assistants.”
“Shut up, Nate,” Heidi says, and grabs my Vitamin Water back from me to take a final swig. That’s a real family-thing to do, to ingest somebody else’s backwash. Aunt Heidi’s cell phone rings, and she steps away. I go back to Libby.
“What was that, about a rumor?”
“Okay,” she says. “So after the firecracker incident, the principal searched James Madison’s locker, and he found, like, a raccoon cap and a bunch of stolen answer sheets and other minor-deal stuff.”
I would wet my pants trying to steal answer sheets, but I know what Libby means.
“But when school security searched the Bills of Rights’s lockers, not only did they find additional firecrackers—like, a buttload of ’em—”
“Yes?” I say, surprised that I am as invested in this story as I am, given that a group of adults is deciding, four feet away from me behind a wooden door that locks when children storm out of audition readings, if they should ruin my life and send me home. My mom would probably follow Jordan’s mom all the way back, on I-78, until his family pulled off into the nice part of town.
Not to be dramatic.
“But you know what else the cops found in their lockers?” Libby says. “Little Bill had a male porno magazine, something really vintage, in the very bottom, underneath his baseball mitt that everyone knows he doesn’t even really use.”
“What?” I say, or shout.
“Yeah, like Playgirl or something ancient. I think John Stamos was in it, on a horse.”
“Holy moley,” I say, or scream.
“So now the rumor is burning through school that little Bill has a secret gay crush on big Bill. James Madison dropped him from his gang and everything. Though I think James may have actually planted the magazine himself. As a distraction from FirecrackerGate. I’m working out the details now.” A torrent of children’s screams, white noise on Libby’s bus journey home, threatens to override key aspects of her story. I practically miss it back there. We’d be eating Clark Bars right now, to line our stomachs for Trick-or-Treating.
“What are you wearing? For Halloween?” I say, maybe avoiding the whole last minute’s conversation.
“I think I’m going to go as little Bill,” Libby says. “And dress up as a gay dude.”
There’s kind of a weird silence, and maybe I cough or maybe things just get quiet on her bus, but then Libby says, “I mean, I have absolutely no problem with gay people, Nate. Like, the opposite.”
“Mm . . . hmm?”
“My favorite step-uncle is gay. And I, like, DVR everything on Bravo.”
Uh-huh. “That’s cool, Libby.”
“I just mean . . . listen, I wasn’t trying to kiss you or anything. The other night. In your backyard.”
“You—what?” Yes she was. Oh, God, I’d hoped we would sidestep this follow-up forever.
“I know what you were thinking, but I wasn’t. Trying to. Kiss you.” Her voice sounds like a shaken pop bottle, opened into a geyser. “I could see it freaked you out. But it was, like, a miscommunication.”
“I’m not really kissing anyone these days, Libby. You know, regardless. I’m not a big kisser.” Shut up, Nate. Shut up, Nate.
“All I mean is, I don’t have any problem with gay people. That was all I meant.”
Aunt Heidi comes back from the window, and I think about Freckles and her, how great they’ve been with me. “Me neither, Libby. Some of my best friends are gay people.”
Rex Rollins and Monica, the spikey-haired dance assistant, come out the door and walk directly over to me, just like that. But something hits me: “Could I just have one more moment?”
Monica laughs. “By all means, bottle dancer.”
“Hey, Libby? How’s your mom?”
“Aw, Natey. She’s good. She’s good. I didn’t even get to tell you yet: She got in to see some really good doctor at UPMC, next Friday. Got the call this morning and she texted me at school. She feels really optimistic about it. Maybe your dad pulled some strings at the hospital or something.”
Well, here goes. “You know what, Libby? He’s not—my dad isn’t actually a doctor. He’s just a janitor at the hospital.”
“Finally. Nate. I’ve been waiting for you to just say it. I’ve always known that. Doctors don’t share minivans with their wives.”
If Mom and Dad divorce, one of them is going to have to get another car. Oh, God, where will I live?
“That’s awesome, Libby, about your mom.” Rex Rollins looks at me and kind of gives a WTF shrug. But I flash the “one second” index finger and say, “Libby, don’t go as little Bill tonight. Go as a cat. That’s what all the girls are wearing in New York. But just . . . don’t make fun of little Bill that way. I mean, if it’s true, I’m sure he’s really embarrassed. About the magazine.”
“You’re killing me, kid,” Libby says, and then, “Catch me on the flip. I’m pulling up to my bus stop, and I need to put out the spooky fiberglass cemetery stones in the yard. Mom’s insisting I decorate the house, to celebrate her good news.”
“Bye, Libby.” But she’s already gone.
There is some small part of me that wants to get home in time to see the Jones’s house decked out. To find out more about little
Bill’s secrets, in the hallways at school. To give Feather a big hug and cry all over his coat.
But a bigger part of me wants this, here. A bigger part of me knows this is my destiny, what thirteen years of torture have prepared me for, like my entire, tense childhood can be unspooled. Set free.
I put my Nokia away and look up to Rex and Monica. And Heidi reaches out to put her hand on my shoulder.
This is it, Natey.
“Thanks, Nate,” they say. And suddenly I see New York as something different: a cruel, real-time video game, where you might get second chances but you only get one life. “We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.”
That’s it. That’s all.
They don’t even ask if I’m afraid of heights.
Game over.
First Time I Didn’t Like a Sweet
It turns out that custard can taste really, really depressing when you’re not in the mood for it.
“Nate,” Heidi says, “it could mean anything. Honestly. ‘We’ll be in touch if we need anything else’ is open to a lot of interpretations.”
“Then why,” I say, licking this custard cone as if it’s made out of dirty shoelaces or something, “did Jordan Rylance get asked if he’s afraid of heights? That’s practically offering him a part, right there.”
I’m following Aunt Heidi into my first subway ride, and suddenly the newness of a musty underground tunnel, of another thing in New York I won’t have the opportunity to become bored with . . . well, it makes me so sad that it gets me angry.
“Come here,” Aunt Heidi says. “Let’s see if they still sell Fun Passes.”
We walk up to an awesome electric machine, like a big video game (even buying mass-transportation tickets here is a ball), and I grunt: “What’s so fun about today, huh?”
“Aw, come on Nate,” Heidi says, literally mussing my hair like I’m six, “this was a big day. They made a big deal out of you, and you even got to sing for them again and everything.”
“I thought I really had it,” I say, staring at this machine ejecting an amazing yellow card, like a credit card, all for me. A ticket to ride the subway, like some rollercoaster to Hades. A rollercoaster back to Jankburg. I bet a rollercoaster back to Jankburg would be completely flat and devoid of thrills, “The first rollercoaster in the world on which you can actually nap,” I bet they’d advertise.
“I didn’t even read the whole scene,” I say. “I obeyed them and everything and just read my part, opposite the reader in the chair. And she wasn’t even good as Gertie!”
Aunt Heidi laughs, and we push through the metal bars onto the other side of the station. It takes me about a thousand tries, either swiping too quickly or too slowly, or too stupidly, I bet mostly. I can’t even do it. Aunt Heidi has to reach over and swipe me through; I’m so stupid that I can’t even manage to swipe myself through a train entrance, and Aunt Heidi can do it backwards, not looking. That’s what it means to be here long enough for it to become home.
“Readers at auditions are generally awful,” Heidi says, “that’s why they’re readers and not real actors.” She kind of grimaces and says, “I’ve been doing so much work to be more positive. And it’s, like, twenty-four hours with you, mister”—talking right at me even though I’m staring into the subway tracks, mesmerized at the rats scurrying across the muck—“and I’m right back to my bitter old self.”
“It’s Jankburg,” I say in a drone. “It’s the Jankburg in my grey pores, seeping out and ticking you off and getting in the way of your Oprah mind-set.”
Aunt Heidi pulls me back, and a tremendous, horrible screeching (the way I probably sounded when I read the E.T. scene) careens down the corner. I reach out and shout, “Aunt Heidi! The rats are going to be killed! They’re going to be hurt, at least!” but she can’t hear me, such is this screeching. It’s so panicked and frightened that, honestly, I can relate to it.
“Why do you hate Jankburg so much, Nate?” Heidi says, finding us a couple of seats. The subway smells awful, I will say that. Somebody two people down from us is eating Chinese food, and even I know that’s a no-no in a small space.
“It’s not that I hate Jankburg. It’s that it hates me, Aunt Heidi.”
“Oh, who could hate you, Nate?” And if only she knew: the whole student body, led by James Madison, who can’t even tell the difference between a firecracker and a stink bomb but has somehow deduced that I’m broken.
“Just everybody,” I’m about to say, “just everybody hates me,” but instead I get lost reading all the subway-car ads.
“So . . . are you ready to see your mom again? Is there anything else we need to talk about?”
“What’s to say?” I go, holding my bookbag, resting my chin on top. “It’s not even like anyone ever told me what really happened between you guys. Like anyone in this family takes me serious.”
Aunt Heidi exhales in such a huge way that I think I see this lady’s skirt flip up, sitting across from us—oh my God, that’s a guy, in a kilt—and Heidi says, “You know, your grandma and grandpa were very, very traditional, Nate.”
I did know that. They were killed when their Jeep rolled over, during a Christian mission to convert non-Christian African settlements. True story.
“And I just—wasn’t that. You know? I just wasn’t that.”
“And Mom was?” I say, even though I know the answer.
“Well, we were just different, Nate. Right from the beginning. She was older than me, and—gosh, we don’t have to talk about this.”
But she’s quiet and can probably hear my brain shouting Yes we do! out from behind my bad haircut.
“And,” she continues, “you know, I got a tattoo when I was only sixteen, and I smoked through high school.”
“You still do,” I say, but in kind of a nice way if you could be here and hear it.
“Yes, thank you, Nate. And your mom just . . . in those days especially, especially when I got into theater and she was busy going to secretary school and dating your dad, who was quite an athlete before his accident—”
His accident? I never knew about an accident. Dad specifically never talks about the past, and Mom never talks about much, period, in front of Dad. It’s all about Anthony. All about Anthony’s future and nothing about the past, ever.
“And your mom, she just . . . I felt very judged by her, Nate. Especially when I wanted to go off to New York. And right before our parents, before your grandparents, got really serious about their religion, practically cultish actually, I—” She stops and smiles. Plays the opposite. “I found beer in your mom’s closet, in her room.”
I look away from the subway ads and can tell she’s never said this to anyone. Anyone other than her shrink, I bet. I’m the true definition of a shrink: just a shrunken little person with a family full of shattered people.
“And she never forgave me for that. For finding the beer and telling our parents. And they grounded her so hard. And they never really made up. And later that summer your grandparents went on their Christian peace mission and they, you know, got . . .”
“Crushed,” I say, probably too loudly, because some kids laugh on the subway, though they might just be laughing at my underbite, or my everything else. My big furry hooded-coat. Trust: I’ve still got it.
The subway rocks and sways, and finally we break out from underground and, just like that, like a surprise, we’re on an outdoor bridge, zooming straight out like a leap. It takes my breath away; for a second I think we’re flying, like the driver made a mistake and we’re bursting out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s glass ceiling.
Aunt Heidi touches my knee and says, “We’re Okay, Natey. It’s okay.”
“Keep going with the story.” I’m looking right into the sun. Nobody ever talks about how good it can feel to look right at the sun, probably because it’s so dangerous to. But it’s a fact: If you look right into the sun, you cannot feel scared or happy or anything. It puts you directly into a neutral state. True.
/>
“You can imagine being your mom, Nate, and getting grounded and having your boyfriend taken away—your dad, now—and how much you’d resent your little sister. Me. Especially when your parents go away and, you know. Die. Before ungrounding you.”
God. Oh my God.
“And she and I never really made up. We just . . .” Her voice drifts.
You know somebody has really cried a lot of tears over something when they don’t cry at the point a normal person would. This story—grandparents killed in a Jeep crash, and sisters not speaking to each other—she should be bawling. But her eyes are bone dry.
That’s therapy for you, I guess. Thanks, Aunt Heidi’s shrink.
“So—so that’s all?” I say. “You told Grandma and Grandpa that Mom had beer and they grounded her and that’s why she stopped talking to you?”
“Yes,” Heidi says, looking at me and then away, right away. “Yes, that and the fact that I had gay friends once I got to Pitt, and I loved theater, and I didn’t want to work at Grandma Flora’s flower shop. You know, all of it. We stopped talking because of all of it.”
Right. “Of course.” A very traditional barn with no room for black sheep.
I get an idea.
“Hey, Aunt Heidi? Do phones work on the subway?”
“Well,” she says, shifting and brushing something off her jeans, something that isn’t there. “It can be kind of rude to talk on the subway, on the phone—not that everybody doesn’t—but, yeah, above ground, here, you can use it.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “I just want to text somebody.”
I pull out my dying Nokia (three hours’ talk time, tops) and compose a text: “hey. in addition to not going as little bill for halloween, can you do me a huge favor & not tell anyone at school about anthony and his beer thing? just keep that to yourself. to us.”
And Libby texts back right away: “aye aye, captain manners.”
I close my phone and I guess I must be smiling, because Aunt Heidi says, “Good news, Natey?”
“Nah. I’m just trying to not let history repeat itself, is all,” and we pull up to Aunt Heidi’s stop and plop down the stairs two at a time, onto the street below.
