Little Panic

by Amanda Stern

  Eddie is moody and sullen and he barely talks to anyone anymore. It feels like a privilege when he pays attention to you now, like when the Italian women call down for Loosies.

  One night I’m playing Nerf basketball in my room when Eddie knocks on my door.

  “You wanna help me dye my hair green?” he asks.

  “Sure!” I say, dropping the ball and following him into the bathroom. He shows me what to do. The whole time, though, I can’t help checking if he’s sure. Green is not the most flattering color for my pale, redheaded brother. But he’s sure. When we’re done, and he looks in the mirror, he looks so ugly I’m scared he’s going to murder my face off, or worse, dye my hair green.

  “It’s fucking awesome,” he says.

  “But…it’s sort of…ugly,” I tell him, nervous.

  “That’s the point, dumbass,” he says and walks out of the bathroom.

  I’m confused. Doesn’t he want to be good-looking? Doesn’t everyone?

  When I hear my mom screaming at him later, I know she thinks it’s ugly, too. I know she doesn’t get it either. I worry Eddie might be the only one who does. But what if he’s right? If ugly is the point, then pretty isn’t the point, and if being pretty isn’t the point, then maybe I actually have a chance. No matter how many things I try to do to make myself look better, I’ll never actually be pretty, but maybe there is another avenue to reach for. Maybe Eddie is showing me the way. Changing how you look might be the answer after all, just not the way I thought. My mom probably never imagined we’d grow up to look and act the way we do. Sometimes I think about Etan’s parents, and his siblings, and I feel stabs of sadness that they don’t get to see him change the way they’re changing. It makes me feel guilty for wanting to be different from how I was, because he’ll never get that chance, and because it means we’re all moving farther and farther away from him.

  * * *

  Spring sprints toward us, and soon it’s June. Everyone else in my family is sitting together in the church, but I’m with my class. I know I’m going to cry hysterically when I hear the first notes of Pachelbel’s “Canon” and see my sister walking down the aisle, like we’re giving her away. Mrs. Baldwin gives me permission to stand behind the column, where I can see my sister better. How will I survive this? I’m so homesick for my sister. At home it’s all I’ve been able to talk and think about for weeks. Kara says she’ll come home in a few months and I’ll see her then, but that’s too far in the future to feel real. Jimmy says we can visit her, but I know we won’t. Eddie says I’m a fucking idiot, and my mom says she wishes Kara didn’t have to go either. I am too old to feel the way I do, I know. But somehow, while I’m no longer in grade school, I’ve yet to outgrow my fears. Maybe I got stuck, like a clock that broke at noon; I can’t move forward until someone restores me, takes me apart and rewires my interior, which I know they won’t do and never will because all anyone’s done is focus on my exterior: resanding and repainting the outside, never going farther than my stuckness, never finding out the why of me.

  My sister is the smartest person I know, and of course she wins a lot of awards at the graduation ceremony, which makes me feel proud, but also inferior. When her name is called for her diploma, I’m practically hyperventilating, but I clap because I know people will notice if I don’t, and then they’ll see for themselves that I’m a fucking idiot. Everyone is happy except me.

  Although she’s not leaving for two more months, the air already feels buckled and warped. Who will I be without Kara? When Mom is mad at me, Kara talks to her and makes things better. I don’t want Kara to leave me. I don’t know why she even wants to go to college. The invisible wrongs inside my body feel embossed onto the atmosphere. Maybe every error or mistake I’ve made in my life stained the world, and each dent and divot I try not to fall into is a piece of old me, a pockmarked reminder of my difference and abnormality. Is this how I’ll leave my mark?

  * * *

  Even as I’m trying to wrestle down my future, the past and I can’t let each other go. A photo of Etan is found in Massachusetts, and a New York City cabdriver comes forward to say he’d picked up an older man and Etan the day he disappeared. The photo appeared in a calendar and led the police to NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association. The cabdriver’s story doesn’t pan out, but now the police think Etan was pulled into a sex ring. I don’t want to think about whatever that might mean. It’s May 25, 1984, five years to the day since Etan went missing, and the second year of National Missing Children’s Day, created in Etan’s honor. Enough kids disappear for there to be a commemoration day. Why do people lie about what happens when reality always knows where to find you and tell you the truth? He’s eleven now, and he wouldn’t look like his picture. We might pass by him all the time, never even knowing. Just like us teenagers, we’re unrecognizable. I don’t know what he’d look like anymore; no one does.

  As the summer arrives, my countdowns get worse in preparation for Kara’s departure. I’m desperate to stop this all-encompassing dread. I have to toughen myself up somehow, but how? I see Madison over the summer and we practice smoking, which is awful and doesn’t work at all. Then I try drinking, which is even more revolting and makes me throw up. And then Eddie puts a bunch of his clothes in a box to toss out, and I go through it and take every last piece. As I’m trying on his army green sweater and rolling up the too-long holey black jeans, I look in the mirror and see a different me. A cooler, tougher, jaded-looking me. For the first time in my life, I see something I haven’t before—the outside of me is telling a story about the inside of me, and even though the stories don’t entirely match, I like what the outside story suggests better than the truth, much better than any dumb blazer.

  Then I spot the buzzer that Eddie used for his Mohawk, and I clip one side of my hair short, keeping the other asymmetrically long. When I stand back and look at my uneven, crazy haircut, I see myself out of someone else’s eyes. WOW! Look at that girl! She’s tough and scary, not at all fragile and scared or feeling like she’s dying because her sister is going to college and she still can’t leave her mommy. My new look tells the world to back the fuck up and not hurt me because I’ll hurt you first.

  1984

  Dr. Parker Prentice

  Amanda’s mother brought her in for a language and learning evaluation because of school troubles and low scores on Standardized Tests. After doing poorly on an ERB Intelligence Test in 1981, she was twice more evaluated for learning and language problems. Previous testing identified weaknesses in sound discrimination, auditory memory, and integration difficulties. However, it was evident that emotionally based factors contributed to her vast unevenness of functioning during testing, and it was recommended that her overall scores be interpreted with caution.

  Mrs. Stern did not find that evaluation helpful. After repeating sixth grade, Amanda’s scores did not improve, nor did her grades, and further testing was administered in 1983, with similar results. Using my own methodology, I aim to interpret Amanda’s accumulated test results in order to build a portrait of her as both a learner and a person. This assessment aims to uncover academic weaknesses that may have been overlooked, as well as personality traits of the child, in order to better understand Amanda as an individual and as a student.

  I’m the Test to Solve

  Maybe it was the summer break; maybe it’s my new look. Whatever the case, when I show up in Eddie’s clothes for the first week of eighth grade, I’m popular again. People start buying the same clothes as me. Soon Madison, Tatum, and Amelia all have asymmetrical haircuts, a double pierce, and spiked jean jackets. It’s so annoying that when I’m finally trying to be different from everyone that everyone wants to be like me. Except Libby. She still dresses like Madonna, and I respect her for that.

  I feel like I’m in some sort of powerful disguise. I try to act the way I look: invulnerable. It’s easier than I’d expected. Pretending I’m unafraid of the world actually does make me feel safe and in control
. I have never felt in control. It helps me deal with the loss of Kara. The more I play up this new persona, the further away I, and everyone else, get from the fucking idiot who is the real me. This works out well because I loathe that me.

  Friends again, Tatum and I have decided we want to be famous actresses. We’re not sure how to make that happen, until the school drags us into a special assembly about available after-school programs. Onstage a collection of grown-ups perch awkwardly on chairs, facing us. One by one, in their suits and pearls, they stand and sell us their wares: cross-country skiing, croquet, horseback riding, golf, sailing, art collecting for children, and then, finally, an acting school for teens. The presenters are Taylor and Gwen, a cool, casually dressed, artistic couple in their late twenties or maybe early thirties, and I’m instantly mesmerized; even their names sound elite. Two expensive-looking stalks, synchronized down to their split ends. Gwen is the color palette of my dreams, the living, breathing incarnation of how I wish I looked, but know I never will. Their school meets three times a week for acting and playwriting classes. At the end of each semester, they perform their plays in front of an audience, on an actual stage that is not a school auditorium. Also, it’s coed.

  Tatum and I exchange knowing glances. After school, we take the crosstown bus to the acting school on the Upper West Side, where a line of teenagers runs halfway down the block. The line moves oddly fast, and when we near the front we discover they’re taking in eight kids at a time. We’re led into the basement of a town house. A blackboard is on the wall and a long conference table has been pushed off to the side. Fold-up chairs pile on top of each other, frozen-looking, like teens trying not to get caught by their parents. No longer sandwiched between lady-suits and matching pearl sets, Gwen doesn’t look different from any other young, rich woman whose parents bought them a classic six as a wedding present. Gwen moves with the confidence of an Upper East Side girl, the swagger of knowing she can have anything she wants and, worse, the belief she deserves it. She reminds me of Madison and I get a twinge in my gut. Tatum loves Madison, and I am getting closer to Tatum, and also Libby, but despite how hard I fight to get back into her good graces, outside of school Madison is becoming less and less appealing to me. I feel like we’re growing apart, even though I don’t feel like I’m growing in any direction at all. Taylor looks like a poor boy dressed up in rich person’s clothes. Tattoos wrap around both his arms like sleeves. I wonder whose house we’re in.

  Four kids are already sitting on the ground. They look too comfortable to be auditioning. Aren’t we supposed to be reading monologues or something? The eight newcomers are told to join them and sit, and Tatum and I lower ourselves into a clinging halo of cigarette smoke. These, it turns out, are the kids already in the acting school. One boy has long black curly hair and wears an army jacket, torn black jeans, and combat boots. A small, curly-haired boy, in puka beads and loose Guatemalan pants, twists the bottom of his shirt, then draws it up and over his collar so it hangs down like a ponytail between his nipples. Next to him is a beautiful blond girl with a pushed-out pucker, and another boy—or maybe a girl? It’s hard to tell with the pink hair, blue nails, and faint facial stubble. Tatum and I are the only ones in school uniforms. Taylor and Gwen want to know all about us. Who are we? Why do we want to act? Do we have prior experience? How is our home life? Do our parents treat us well? What are our struggles, our troubles, our demons? What pains us and brings us shame? Trouble, they tell us, is the source of acting. Pain is the wellspring from which performances rise. The more we suffer, the better actors we’ll be, and we are here to become the best, right? Perhaps sensing some skepticism, Taylor adds: We do want to become actors…don’t we? The acting kids stare, and the eight of us nod in the affirmative.

  “So,” Gwen says, “that’s why you’re here today. To tell us your story, to tell us who you are. Convince us, convince me, that you’ve got what it takes, that you deserve to be one of us.”

  I have no idea what she’s asking, and I look at Tatum, who shrugs, not panicked by the not knowing.

  “Paul, why don’t you kick things off?” Gwen asks.

  “Sure thing. I’m Paul; I go to Dwight, otherwise known as ‘Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together.’ My brother is gay and I wish he wasn’t.”

  A wash of realization spreads over Paul’s face and he quickly looks over to the kid with pink hair. “I didn’t mean…Sorry, Cole, you know what I mean, right?”

  Cole stares at his lap and nods. Okay, he’s a boy, and I guess he’s also gay.

  “Anyway…I wish my brother wasn’t gay because my parents take it out on me. And that sucks.” Paul turns to the blonde with the lips, but she stares straight ahead until he pokes her and a confused giggle escapes.

  “Oh! My turn!” She talks in a baby voice and leans her head onto Paul’s shoulder. “I’m Claire. Paul’s my boyfriend, so you bitches better stay away!” She laughs while glaring at the circle. “No, I’m kidding! Of course I’m kidding. Well, not about the fact that he’s my boyfriend; he is my boyfriend, but about staying away from him. No wait! I do want you to stay away from him…Paul! Help me!” She blushes and shoots an angry look at Paul because he isn’t doing a thing to save Claire from herself. Gwen cuts in.

  “Graham?”

  “Hi. I’m Graham.” The boy is all monotone. “I used to live with my dad, but he killed himself so now I live with my mom, who’s a drunk. Fun times.”

  And on it goes, and the nearer it draws to me, the more horrified I become. I have an extended and confusing family, but it’s obvious how lucky I am by comparison. Although my parents divorced when I was a baby, and they don’t truly seem to see or understand me, and are constantly trying and failing to fix me, I still have them. I may feel rejected by my father in favor of his new, holiday-card-perfect kids whom he takes on separate vacations, has celebratory family dinners with that don’t include us, and absentmindedly refers to as “his children,” even when telling Kara, Eddie, and me about them—but he’s still alive. Sure there are screaming and yelling fights at my house, and my mom and stepsiblings are at one another’s throats. There are eight people in my house, and though we barricade ourselves in our rooms and barely interact, the house is big enough for eight people to have their own rooms, and there is always food in the refrigerator. My family is every dysfunctional family. I feel alone and desperate for recognition and deep connection, but that’s because I’m broken, not because my family is broken.

  I am scrambling to come up with something I can give to this group, but I’m stuck. I glance at Tatum, who doesn’t look frightened, just appalled. Around the circle every confession offers up a perpetrator, maybe a parent who harmed them either physically or emotionally; but no one has anything wrong on the inside of them, like I do. How will I be a good actress if I haven’t suffered? I never expected that one day I’d be forced to publicly expose my secret defects.

  What am I supposed to say? I was born with a basketball net slung over my top ribs where the world dunks its balls of dread? That since I was small I’ve had an army of tutors and testers and evaluators assessing my brain because I’m an idiot who can’t get anything right? Or that I still think about a boy who went missing more than five years ago and even pretended to find him? My best friend and grandfather died the first time I left home, and even though I’m now fourteen, I still believe I’m a jinx? That I can feel a part of the world no one else seems to, that my body betrays me all the time?

  When my body starts freaking out in public, the only way I can control my internal hysteria is to withdraw as much as possible. Fear—and my reaction to fear—governs my life, but no one beats me or locks me in closets; no one burns cigarette holes into my arms or pushes me down uncarpeted stairs, and as the revelations have rolled around the circle, I’ve felt a twisted envy, awed by the traumas sustained by these kids, jealous that what Taylor and Gwen want, these kids have to deliver. I am envious they have a name for what hurts them. My new look broadcasts tou
ghness, but it doesn’t say what’s wrong. Imogen’s hearing aids did that. So did the hook on Omar James’s hand. I can’t believe I am still yearning for some visible sign of a problem that can be fixed. My terror grows as soon as it’s Tatum’s turn—I’m next, and I will never have anything good enough to say.

  But Tatum just rolls her eyes. She isn’t buying it. I didn’t realize not buying it was an option. “Honestly, I feel sorry for all of you. Your lives totally suck,” Tatum says. “I’m not sure how this is supposed to make you a better actor. All it’s doing is depressing me.” Tatum isn’t afraid people will leave her if she’s true to herself.

  “You don’t get it,” Paul says.

  “Well, that’s one thing we can agree on.” She turns to me with a big smile. “Your turn!”

  My brain is inflamed with suffocating white noise. As the group waits for my answer, I hear individual swallows; their nervousness for me activates my concern for them, and in order to alleviate them of their uneasiness, I have to say or do something, even if it isn’t what I mean to say or do. When I shake my head, I know they can see my scrambled insides. My expression is revealing every humiliating secret about me. They will never let me into this acting school.