America's Next Star

by Katie Dozier

  “Her eyes are open, that’s gotta be good, right? Oh Ella!”

  A blurred olive-skinned figure was by me. Why was I lying down when moments ago I’d been flying? The blare of a siren pulsated in my ears.

  And the funny part was that I saw the red blur of my hood, as if I was still acting, as if it was all still just a play. And something else was nagging me, like a rabid dog biting my ankle. What was it that I both needed to remember but wanted to forget?

  Chapter Ten

  ♪ Closing Time ♪

  * * *

  T he next time I opened my eyes, instead of red, I saw white.

  White walls, white floor—whiter than my untanned skin.

  Even the steel sides of my bed felt white from the cold.

  A man bent over me and fiddled with the tubes coming out of my arm.

  “Oh… you’re coming to now,” he said.

  Huck rushed beside me, and instead of being a blurry figure, the same big nose and well-plucked eyebrows he’d always had actually came into focus.

  “Ella, can you say something, anything?”

  I’d never known Huck’s forehead to have so many creases before.

  “The show must go on,” I said.

  He laughed with tears in his eyes. I tried to laugh but was met with pain. First with pulsing in my ribs, and then with the vague realization of something far more agonizing. But that must’ve been a nightmare, right?

  “Lay back, Ms. Windmill. I’m afraid that…there have been some complications, and I have to—”

  My head was spinning and I couldn’t concentrate. Dad, coming home in a blanket. Saying what had happened without actually saying it. Must’ve been a nightmare.

  Huck put his nose inches from the doctor’s.

  “Tell me she is going to make it!”

  “Uh, yes… she will,” the doctor said. Huck put a manicured hand on my meaty calf, as the doctor continued, “You just have some bruised ribs, nothing on you is broken but there is—”

  “But she’ll be alright?”

  “In short, yes. Just take it easy. It’s rare that we see a fall of this magnitude that doesn’t result in at least a few broken bones.” He studied the beeping monitor to the right. “We’ll need to keep you overnight, and, um…”

  The doctor paused by me, opened his mouth, then closed it along with the curtain behind him.

  “Good thing I told you we needed all those leaves on the ground,” said Huck.

  “Yeah, but I was the one that made most of them.”

  Huck traced his hand gently on my leg, like he was petting a kitten.

  “And the cape, it kind of encircled your head like a helmet.”

  But if all that stuff with Mom had been a nightmare, why wasn’t she with me now? I sat up and fought the urge to vomit over the side of my bed.

  “Where are my parents?”

  Huck cleared his throat. “Well, Mr. Hille is in the waiting room, trying to reach them.”

  I felt another twinge of pain in my stomach.

  “Did I screw it all up for you?”

  Huck shook his head. “No, you were great until…well you know. We just cancelled the rest of the show.”

  “What about the NYU guy?”

  “Ella, what matters is that you’re going to be okay,” he said.

  I winced. Huck could try to diminish it all he wanted, but I knew it was just for my benefit. He’d been talking about NYU for as long as I could remember, and that favor his dad called in to get the NYU guy to CBHS was with the understanding that Huck’s production would be the opposite of his test scores.

  “I’m so sorry, Huck.”

  “Well, I’m the one who’s sorry. I mean you wouldn’t have done this at all if I hadn’t told Mr. Hille you could sing. And it was crazy to think one show would make a difference to NYU—being waitlisted is just a nice way of saying that I won’t be going to my dream school.”

  “Come on, Huck, it’s not your fault at all. They should’ve accepted you. That’s bullshit.”

  “Well, at least we’ll get to go to FSU together! And I really don’t care about NYU…I’m just so glad that you’re fine.”

  I plucked at the tubes connected to me like they were strings on a harp. As the minutes ticked by, I was nauseous at the absence of Mom, and beginning to accept that I had even worse news for Huck.

  “Well I wouldn’t exactly say I’m fine,” I said. I tried to knit some words together, but I knew there’d be no more room to deny everything once I spoke it out loud. Whenever I finally had something planned that resembled a coherent sentence, my brain shook them away as if confronted by a strong gust of wind.

  “And you did what I asked on stage,” Huck said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve never seen anyone burst that enthusiastically from inside the belly of the wolf!”

  “Huck!” I laughed a little without much pain, and restarted the attempt at how I was going to get out the words that I was pretty sure were true by now.

  The track of the hospital divider curtain clicked open a single bead at a time, eventually revealing one pair of blue eyes rimmed with red. I held my breath for a moment, but when Dad pulled the curtain closed immediately after him, that’s when I knew for sure.

  Dad stumbled to my bed and began sobbing, much to the shock of Huck.

  “Thank God you’re alright.” He went to hold my hand by the side of the bed. “Huck, thanks for everything—”

  “She’s going to be fine, Mr. Windmill,” Huck said, his eyes as big as mine while surveying Dad’s reaction that must have seemed a touch dramatic to him.

  Huck hugged me like an egg before he left at Dad’s suggestion.

  “You had a concussion?”

  I nodded.

  He put the question in his eyes, but I couldn’t bring myself to just answer.

  “You…” His voice quivered like a mouse’s whiskers when facing down a bear. “You remember what happened before you left?”

  Was that smell coming off of him beer?

  Moments pasted together as I replayed the events in my mind. In the pit of my stomach, I knew that the blue of that fleece ambulance blanket cemented it. There’s no way I’d remember that much if it had all been a nightmare. I’d had my escape, however short lived, during the play. All that was left was a few bruised ribs, a migraine, and the downpour of reality.

  He held my wet gaze and pressed up against me as we cried. The tubes strangled me like enchanted vines.

  Through the agony, a dark thought bubbled up like lava breaking through the cracks in my brain: It was all my fault for doing that stupid play. Otherwise she would’ve been pouring wine at work at that very minute. I killed her.

  Chapter Eleven

  ♪ Yesterday ♪

  * * *

  I thought my first ride in a limo would be at my senior prom. Why is death a time to show up in a fancy car, anyway? I could’ve been in the Batmobile and the experience would’ve been completely lost on me. But then again, arriving via car to a funeral of someone that died in a car would always be the cruelest of ironies.

  The limo held lifeless hum of classical music playing in the safe scale of C Major—though most of it was swallowed whole by the leather seats—as if to remind us this was serious. As if I was in danger of thinking we were bound for a movie premiere—dressed in black with eyes redder than that dress I knew I would never actually wear to prom.

  If I could have picked, we would have been listening to one of Mom’s old school melancholy favorites, maybe a Beatles song. But then again hearing the first few words of, “Yesterday,” would have sent me into a fit of hysterics, like when I buried my phone deep in the Banana River the day after the worst day of my life.

  I was sitting in the row boat docked behind out house on the water, peeling strips of flaking navy paint off the side. My Calculus book was plunked in my lap as if just holding it there would make me understand any of it. Or as if I had any intention of actually doing any school
work ever again. I had the most stupid thought, that I needed to ask Mom how to tell Huck that she died.

  I kept thinking about how I’d never get another text from her again, and that I didn’t want to talk to anyone again ever anyway. That’s when my phone rang, and for some idiotic reason my heart skipped a beat as if might be Mom.

  It was Huck, and when I rejected the call he just went on redialing and sending a flurry of texts. I never asked who told him, I guess it was all over the news, but I kept away from all that. Maybe Dad told him. The clashing notes coming from my screaming phone were as deafening as the realization that my Mom would never contact me on it again.

  So I jumped off the side of the faded blue row boat and held my breath to plunge it towards the muddy sand at the bottom of the Banana River. After a second of debate, I clawed my way to the surface, because I heard Dad calling out to me from the back door. He wanted me to order pizza, as if it was just a normal day at the Windmill’s.

  I ate the whole pizza while Dad was out buying beer, and he yelled at me, saying the pizza had been for us. Us …Like we were still some form of a family without Mom. Had he seen the pizza, well, that would have been a different kind of argument.

  Because I auto-pilot ordered a supreme (like I did with Huck) even though Dad is a vegetarian.

  After he screamed at me, I realized how I looked like I was nine months pregnant. The button of my jeans felt painful against my gross bulges, and I was so desperate to just go back to when I had it so good but had no idea that I did.

  And after looking long enough, I kind of found a reset button—on the side of the toilet. Because I forced myself to throw up, which sounds gross, but really it was just nice to feel something other than guilt for Mom’s death, even if that feeling was literally vomit.

  Dad’s tuxedo pants slid over on the black leather, until they were against my leg, forcing me back to reality.

  We’d had our last fight a minute before we left. I wanted to walk, for obvious reasons. But maybe we’d die on the way over the bridge from Cocoa Beach to Merritt Island, and at least then if I died it would be with some twinge of fate.

  Dad won the argument. Like always. He pulled something out of his pocket.

  “I think…” He let the gold necklace dangle in the air, and even the tinted windows couldn’t stop the dented, scratched gold from catching the light.

  I don’t know why she always wore it, it was just a small-ish oval, and it was battered to hell. It looked like a fragment of a seashell—something that used to be pretty but now was just fighting disintegration from the elements.

  She must’ve been wearing it when she died. I shook the thought from my mind before it could break me open.

  “I think your mom would have wanted you to have this.”

  He motioned for me to turn so he could put it on, but why should I pretend that we were close now. We weren’t before he drove Mom off the bridge on the causeway after being swerved into by a drunk driver, and we still weren’t.

  With everything else changing around me, why did we have to pretend to change too?

  I grabbed the necklace from his hand and struggled with the tiny clasp for a full minute until I felt the tiny lobster claw click into place. I couldn’t help but think about how her slender neck looked so much better in it.

  It must have looked as tight as a choker on me. But if she always wore it, how was it even found?

  Dad sensed the question.

  “They found it three days ago…with the remains.” He put an arm around me as he forced a smile. “Listen, I thought maybe the necklace would make you want to sing today. Amazing Grace? Your mom loved your voice—”

  Dad’s sister, Aunt Renee, was my only other family member. She flailed her arms around as if there was a bee in the limo.

  “Oh, Ella—are you going to sing? That would be beautiful!”

  “No!”

  They both inched backwards in their seats, their weak smiles deflated. I realized that I had just screamed at my aunt.

  “No,” I said in a meek tone, as if to erase my yell from earlier. These days it seemed like I either couldn’t find any words or found ones that were too big.

  At least one thing hadn’t changed. Aunt Renee had always hated me, ever since I picked every flower from her garden one day when I was five. I’d torn the blooms by the fistful, and made myself a bed of flowers on the grass, before she came outside and threatened me with a wooden spoon.

  So I wasn’t surprised when she continued to badger me.

  “But it would be so beautiful if you sing, and I know your mom would have wanted it.”

  “Don’t you fucking tell me what my mom would want! You hardly even knew her!”

  Once again, I muttered an apology. The only thing the three of us seemed capable of agreeing on was not talking anymore.

  Our limo finally pulled into at Shaded Oaks, with the tiny font, “Funeral Home,” barely on the outskirts of the sign, as if anyone showed up there not reeking of the aftermath of death and pain. Inside, the walls were lined with fake magnolia blossoms. It smelled like the forced sweetness of vanilla, mixed with the chemical fumes of what I hoped was just Windex.

  I was wearing one of Mom’s black blazers, the ones she used to wear to work and were a bit loose on her. I’d put more effort into lining my eyes with her charcoal liner than even thinking about singing—which, come to think of it, was the real reason Dad had screamed at me. Though downing his pizza certainly hadn’t helped things. Even if he wouldn’t have been able to eat it anyway.

  How could I sing, “ I once was lost but now I’m found/was blind but now I see, ” when I was more lost than ever?

  If I felt like singing anything it would have been Mom’s favorite song of all time, Let It Be , but it just would’ve felt too fake. How could I possibly think about her death as something to just move on from—like the number one cliché that I’d heard a billion times since Mom’s death, “It is what it is.”

  What it is, is just a stupid cliché. The phrase meant even less to me than my Calculus textbook.

  If I wanted to get all theatrical, I could have performed Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again , from Phantom of the Opera . I’d practiced it at home and with Huck a million times before wimping out on auditioning for Into the Woods .

  If I’d auditioned this year I may have gotten the part of little red riding hood legitimately, at least Huck said so. Though I guess that would’ve made Mom’s insistence on getting out of work to come for opening night (and therefore her death) basically a certainty. The only thing that made me feel like it was mostly instead of completely my fault was that I’d told her it wasn’t worth taking off of her busiest night at work just to see a play I was only a behind-the-scenes part of.

  And then, there Mom was. The afternoon sun put a slice of light on her wooden box at the front of an empty room.

  I don’t know if it made it more or less difficult that it was a closed casket—that I would never get to see her gray eyes stare back at me with reproach, or even fight with her about going to prom.

  A wreath of real white roses was on top of her coffin, but fake magnolias loomed along the back wall and hung from the ceiling like bats. How many deaths had those fake flowers seen? How many funeral goers had noticed these blooms were plastic? Plastic basically never dissolves, but wood does. How long would it be before any particle of Mom really ceased to exist at all. Those dusty plastic magnolias would outlive us all.

  “Hey,” Huck said and gave me a hug. I wondered how long I’d been standing there, blocking the doorway, unable to move any closer to what remained of Mom. At least I didn’t have to tell anyone, Dad kept telling me how all of his colleagues were covering Mom’s death. I hadn’t even been able to muster the strength to answer the door when Huck had rang our doorbell over and over—the carefree descending tune of A, G, F, echoed through the house like a mockingjay in The Hunger Games .

  Huck didn’t have my burden of red bug-eyes, and I could
n’t help but think that he looked handsome. He must have been wearing the tux he got for prom, so he was a little too dressed up, and the coat tails reminded me of a butler on Downton Abbey , but how do you tell your best friend that he looked great when you’re at your mom’s funeral? It was weird that I noticed at all. Telling someone they look great at a funeral is almost insulting—like how dare you look good, my mother is dead in that box over there.

  I looked like the exact opposite of how great Huck looked. I had remnants of vomited cereal on my velvet black blazer that I was for some reason wearing when it was over eighty degrees and humid as hell. I guess I was terrified that if I felt cold, even for an instant I’d be reminded of the morbid reality of Mom’s death: plunged out the window and over the bridge in a tailspin when a drunk driver slammed them on the bridge. The odd thing was, I thought Mom always wore her seatbelt. Back before Huck drove us everywhere, Mom would always turn around to check we were belted in before she’d even start the engine.

  They’d crossed the bridge to buy me flowers for opening night. The thought hit me like food poisoning. She didn’t have her seatbelt on probably because she was holding too many flowers for you. I fought to turn my brain off.

  At least I out of giving a eulogy, and Dad gave up pressuring me to sing after my freak-out in the limo. Given that I couldn’t even manage a vocal reply to Huck, there’s no way I would have been up for anything requiring speech anyway.

  But I knew that I wouldn’t have managed to croak through the alphabet song if I’d been offered a spot in FSU’s Musical Theater program, or on America’s Next Star to do it, not that anyone in either group would’ve given me even a passing glance in an audition.

  Instead, Aunt Renee sang a version of Amazing Grace where she was at least an entire note away from the correct pitch for the entire song. S he pointed her nose at me but avoided my eye contact—not that I could blame her after my multiple freak-outs in the limo. It was one of the first times I’d really felt the sting of how small our family was, with Mom having been an only child. None of my grandparents lived to see me born.