Spectacle (A Young Adult Novel)

by Angie McCullagh

  Jamie began kissing her again, more insistently this time. He rose up slightly so he arched over her, his hands pinning her wrists to the mattress.

  Trix felt herself stirring, her body responding to his. She could do this. It would be nice to lose herself for a while.

  In her head, a voice spoke. The voice was a prism: part Emily, part her guidance counselor, part her dad, and part Trix herself: Don’t give in. It’s not what you want. Not really.

  How do you know?

  Because you’ll never love yourself until you stop giving it up to any boy who wants your body.

  Shut up.

  Please?

  Shut up.

  Jamie pressed his pelvis into hers and started grinding.

  Wanting her body wasn’t the same as wanting her, she knew that. So why did she pretend it was?

  “Take off your jeans,” Jamie murmured.

  65. Not The Mother She Would Have Chosen

  EMILY COULD’VE KEPT it together if Winslow hadn’t said, “You should be nice to your mother. She gave birth to you, after all. She gave you life.”

  Emily started to cry. Why had she thought a surprise visit to Marilyn would be a good idea? She’d rather have kept the fantasy that her mother was a shiny fashion model retired to the south of France or even a strung out drug addict in the city.

  Tears coursing down her cheeks, Emily looked at Marilyn, really looked at her frizzy, long hair, gaunt face, the silver and turquoise earrings, the lack of concern in her eyes. She knew her visit had been a mistake. Or, if you took it another way, a wake-up call. Maybe that was good?

  She stood, swaying, and said, “I’ll just get my bag and go. I’ll leave you alone. Thank you for dinner. Thank you for … my life. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  Neither Winslow nor Marilyn protested. They watched her over their glasses of port, the stupid, jazzy Christmas music still playing.

  “Shall we call you a cab?” Winslow asked.

  “I can walk,” Emily grabbed her backpack and camera bag, fumbled with the doorknob, and burst out of the little, stucco house.

  She couldn’t help herself as she wobbled away—she looked back. She looked back hoping for a glimpse of her mother in the window, her hand to the glass, her eyes full. But all she saw was the palm plant dotted with white lights.

  The night was cool and very dark. She wished she’d thought to pack a flashlight. Luckily, she had a decent sense of direction and, even drunkish, thought she could find her way to the hostel.

  66. Escape

  “C’MON,” JAMIE PRODDED, his fingers working Trix’s jeans button.

  Then, without thinking, without a single conscious thought directing her, Trix slapped his hand away.

  She sat and tugged down the hem of her shirt. She crawled toward the closed tailgate and started banging at it.

  “Hey! What the hell?”

  “Let me out!”

  “What? Why? Jesus!”

  She kicked until the door of the cap popped open. She climbed over the cold metal tailgate and started to run.

  “Seriously?” he bellowed. “Dicktease!”

  She didn’t care what he said. She didn’t care. She ran on her high-heeled boots through the mist, the sailboats still sloshing and clanking. She had no idea how she’d get to her mom’s or her dad’s or wherever she was supposed to call home.

  The wind felt good on her face. Her breath was hot and cold in her lungs. She wanted to laugh and suddenly she did, huge peals ripping through her. Her exhalations and low cackling filled the night.

  She’d done it. She’d gotten away without giving in. And, though she didn’t know how she’d get back to her dad’s duplex other than on her own two feet, she felt free. Different from the pseudofreedom she’d claimed earlier. Free like she could make her own decisions about her body for once, like she wasn’t shackled to her slutty identity.

  Trix knew what it felt like now to turn a boy down. She’d do it again. And again after that until she found someone smart and kind who cared about her as much as she cared about him.

  That night she walked three-and-a-half miles in her high heels and slept at her dad’s with just David the cat for company. In the morning, Christmas morning, she made herself a pot of coffee from good beans she’d been saving and scrambled two eggs. She didn’t have any presents to open and, though that was admittedly a little painful, she felt better than she had in a long time. She tried to consider her new freedom a gift in itself. Waking that day and feeling not exactly pure, but clean and hopeful, was a great thing.

  She sat down with her sketchbook and, while David twirled around her legs at the rickety table, which was really a card table with an old sheet tossed over it, drew an angular model wearing a short shirt and long, flowy jacket with bell sleeves. Working her way down to a pair of stacked heel boots, she realized the apartment was dead quiet and got up to turn on the radio.

  Jingle Bells quavered through the speakers. Trix went to change the station, then thought, Oh, why not? She could handle a few Christmas carols.

  As she turned to go back to the table, she saw something tucked against the second-hand entertainment center that hadn’t been there before. It was a white plastic bag taped closed. On top sat a crushed blue bow.

  She went over to it, looking for clues as to what was inside. Finally, she just decided to open it.

  Trix peeled the bag away and gasped.

  It was a sewing machine. Not the used model she’d had her eye on, but one that looked brand new with 60 stitch functions and three different presser feet. She scrabbled at the box, yanking it open, removing the protective Styrofoam and gazing at the gleaming plastic machine.

  Just then, her crappy cell phone rang.

  She didn’t recognize the number, but answered anyway. The first thing she heard was the rush of traffic. Or a river.

  “Merry Christmas, babe!” her dad said.

  “Hey, Dad, you too.” Trix could hear the smile in her voice. “Where are you?”

  “At a pay phone in Colville. What about you?”

  “At home.” And she realized that, even though she had no bedroom of her own at her dad’s duplex, this was her home for now, at least until she graduated. “So, I just found a bag with a sewing machine inside.”

  Her dad laughed, a hearty chuckle she didn’t hear from him often. “That’s why I’m calling. I didn’t have time to write out a gift tag or what have you.”

  “Thank you so much, Dad. It’s the nicest thing—” Her voice caught on the words. She cleared her throat. “It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever gotten.”

  “Maybe you can use it when you get into that fancy art school.”

  “I will. Before that. I’m going to set it up right now.”

  And she did. She spent Christmas day poring over the owner’s manual and threading bobbins and mending some of her dad’s torn flannel shirts. Trix was the most content she could remember having been in a long, long time.

  Like the solid tracks she stitched across whatever fabric she could find in her dad’s duplex, it finally seemed imaginable that her life might move forward in even rows stretching on and on as far as the eye could see.

  67. Where Am I?

  EMILY WOKE IN the hard hostel bed, a scratchy blanket around her waist. She heard a toilet flush. It took a minute for it all to come back. The night before. Her mother who couldn’t have cared less that Emily had come. The sadness.

  And then, because she couldn’t not, she thought about Ryan and wondered what he’d started to say in his voice mail? He couldn’t believe what? That they weren’t together anymore? That he was going to be a father?

  Then she remembered, it was Christmas morning.

  She squeezed her eyes closed, wishing she were home, wishing she and Ryan were still together and would be seeing each other later that day, wishing she could at least call Trix and relay the ridiculous, painful details of the night before.

  Emily realized she’d forgotten to call her dad
and wondered how furious he was.

  Gray light filtered into the small room. She got dressed and took her turn in the small bathroom. Her stomach churned. She remembered the photo album she’d given Marilyn and how she’d glanced back on her way out and saw it sitting, still wrapped, on a low pine end table.

  She went to the hostel’s front desk and canceled her reservation for the remaining two nights. She called the airport shuttle service from her cell phone. Her plan was to go to Tucson and hang around the Alaska Airlines gates until she could fly back to Seattle on standby.

  A couple hours later, after getting coffee and a scone from a café, she was loading into the ratty van again and driving through Bisbee. The hills surrounding the town made it feel tucked in and cozy. But also stifled. Isolated.

  All she could think about was home. She wanted to put some distance between herself and this place where Marilyn Wozniak lived, distance between the girl Emily had been and the person she was becoming. She wasn’t sure who that was yet, but knew that after the past three months she was a lot closer to finding out.

  Postscript

  EMILY WORE HER new jeans, which she’d finally ordered online, a cute pair of black ankle boots she’d found at Target, and a chocolate brown cardigan that had always served her well. She felt strangely, eerily calm.

  The day was unusually warm and sunny for mid-March. Emily hopped off her bike and crouched to lock it, her heart pounding. In less than an hour she’d be on stage in front of the whole school.

  To distract herself, she thought about sleeping over at Kennedy’s that coming night. She’d done it twice before and both times they’d stayed up until two a.m. streaming episodes of Glee and Gossip Girl and talking. She was beyond surprised at how well she and Kennedy got along. There was none of the underlying antagonism she’d always felt with Trix or the squirmy fear that if she did well at something, Trix would feel insecure.

  Emily still couldn’t stomach the other two Farkettes and, thankfully, Kennedy seemed to have pulled apart from them like a small planet breaking free of its wobbly orbit.

  Slinging her camera bag and backpack over her shoulder, Emily moved toward the hulking brick building and quickly realized she’d stepped in dog crap. She weaved toward a grassy patch to wipe her shoe clean.

  “Hey, Bean,” a male voice said from the other side of a massive oak. Ryan emerged, looking a little haggard and harder lived than he had earlier in the year. A week or two before, Jessie’d given birth to a baby girl and given it up for adoption. While no paternity tests had been done, the girl had apparently been born with a shock of curly brown hair and wide-set eyes that looked a lot like Ryan’s.

  “Hi,” Emily said. She still couldn’t help the smile that hijacked her face and the lift she felt when she saw him.

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “So I see. I just, uh, had an unfortunate mishap.”

  Ryan laughed, then crouched and began loosening her shoe. While she stood like a flamingo, he scrubbed the sole with a dry leaf.

  “How chivalrous,” she teased.

  “Anything for you,” he looked up at her as he worked.

  Emily and Ryan were tentatively resuming their friendship. They weren’t officially dating. Ryan was too scarred for anything right then. Still, she liked his texts, his waves in the hallway, and the occasional times he waited and walked into school with her.

  “Jeez, this is rank,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Not your fault. It’s the negligent dog owner’s fault.”

  “Maybe it was some feral pug.”

  Ryan laughed again.

  Emily had, as the pediatric endocrinologist predicted, continued to grow. Ryan, surprisingly, had grown some, too.

  She still had him by several centimeters, but she could live with that.

  In the fall, Kristen was going off to Wazoo, otherwise known as Washington State University, in Pullman. Emily would miss her. But she also suspected her perfect sister’s absence might open up a space in her to grow, not physically, but emotionally. She knew she still had some flourishing to do and Kristen’s being gone may help that along.

  Emily’s dad was still, well, Emily’s dad. She wished she could say he’d mellowed, made work a lesser priority, but she couldn’t. Since Emily met her mom, though, her sympathy for and acceptance of her dad had deepened some. His anger, his overworking, sprouted from fear. Fear that he’d lose what he held dear again; fear that he’d have to live in poverty like he had as a kid.

  Those realizations didn’t make him any easier to live with, they just helped her understand.

  Still, Melissa managed to live with Bob Lucas quite happily. She was still drinking green smoothies and sitting on her yoga ball while analyzing data for local businesses. She often forwarded Emily sales ads for stores she knew carried long jeans.

  And, instead of being embarrassed and snotty about it, Emily just replied, “Thanks!” and checked out the deals.

  “Are you nervous?” Ryan asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Like some old-time shoe salesman, Ryan held out Emily’s ankle boot so she could slip her foot into it.

  “Thanks,” she said, feeling a little like a low-rent Cinderella.

  For once, the school hallways were subdued and clean. A weak sun tried to project blocks of yellow onto the tile floor, but only cast silvery, early spring light.

  It would be a while before the audience tromped up to the auditorium, filling the school with smells of cologne and cold air and grilled onions whisked in on the winter coats everyone still wore.

  “You’re early,” she said.

  Ryan grinned. “I wanted a good seat.”

  Once they reached Johnson’s room, which was next to the auditorium, Ryan reached up and touched her cheek. “Break a leg.”

  The brush of his hand after so many months made her tingle. “Thank you.”

  “I’ll be watching.”

  After they parted, time acted as if it were being blown and sucked and stopped up in a tunnel. It dragged interminably. It raced. Emily’s hands flew over the keyboard as she sat in one of the student desks and completed last minute edits on her project.

  And suddenly there was silence and the inhalation of hundreds of people. Johnson’s voice blared through the sound system as he welcomed the audience to the first ever Spring Spectacle.

  Backstage, Emily got to work hooking her laptop to the projector. She looped a headset over her ear and asked the kid working sound if he had the right tracks. He confirmed he did. She took deep breaths to calm her nerves.

  She silently questioned her sanity. She reminded herself that she needed to do this, to prove herself, to show mean kids that everyone was unique and not to be made fun of.

  Emily sat in the wings, through a group of seniors acting out a scene from Twilight, a boy Emily didn’t recognize sitting on stool by himself and playing an acoustic version of a Coldplay song, and Marjorie’s “band” wearing hot pink boas and hooting like the siamangs Emily remembered from her childhood trips to the Woodland Park Zoo.

  Finally, the stage manager, a senior girl whose paintings were always displayed in school art shows, came up and asked Emily if she was ready. “You’re on next,” she said.

  “Yup. I’m good,” Emily said. Though she was anything but good. Her stomach writhed like an animal in pain and her hands shook. She knew Ryan was out there. The Farkettes. Trix might be somewhere in the building. Even Melissa and Kristen had come. She had to learn to be okay with being on stage though, with being a standout. It was her lot and she needed to own it.

  Emily inhaled deeply, cloaked in the quiet shadows of backstage, when a movement from the side caught her eye. She looked up and saw Thomas, a shaft of light coming in through the door behind him. He held a paper-wrapped bouquet of calla lilies.

  Emily skirted over and threw her arms around his skinny shoulders.

  He whispered, “You can have these if you knock ‘em dead.”


  “What if I don’t?”

  “You will.”

  “Thank you for coming,” she said, breathless. “Truly.”

  Grinning, he said, “Afterward, you have to point out everyone to me. I need faces with names, girl.”

  She waved him away and skittered back into the wing where she stood stiffly.

  Finally, she heard her name over the sound system and began the slow, surreal walk, pushing the cart with her computer and projector to the side of the stage. The auditorium was so quiet she could hear her shoes squeak.

  A white screen descended from the ceiling behind her. Her music, a mashup of her favorite electronica and house tunes, thumped. The spotlight, hot and yellow, illuminated her. At the microphone, she cleared her throat and said, “Present Tense.”

  Then she proceeded to recite a poem she’d written in the days right after Ryan broke up with her:

  “You may think I’m strong (I can be)

  You may think I don’t feel (I do)

  You may think this is all a big game (it’s not)

  People say, ‘It will get better when you’re older’

  People say, ‘High school is not real life’

  But to us

  This all seems

  Bitingly, excruciatingly, horridly, amazingly, thrillingly

  Real.”

  She sat on a tall stool and tapped her keyboard. The spotlight faded. The beats throbbed and the first photo appeared onscreen. It was a black and white shot of Trix at Greenlake. The day after she’d had the one-night stand at Jason Bleak’s party. She wore her fake-fur coat and over-the-knee suede boots. She looked to the left and her face was etched with profound sadness. Emily prayed Trix would like it. She thought Trix looked beautiful.

  The image faded and in its place appeared an abandoned beer bottle on a bus stop bench. Then a line up of kids along the second floor hall, some in focus, some blurred, some studying, some caught in animated conversation.

  Then Ryan, smiling enormously, his eyes squinting with joy, his teeth gleaming. A shot of Brenna Toast, an overweight freshman, looking soft and pensive appeared. The photos kept coming. There were seventy-six in all. Kids. Places they all went. Some, like a photo of a Fatty’s burger and fries, were mildly humorous, but most, she hoped, would inspire thought and compassion.