Whatever.
If you were my boyfriend, I bet you’d write me a song or, I don’t know, maybe do something homemade. You don’t seem like a flowers-and-chocolate kind of guy. You’d make cookies that are burned but I still love, or maybe write a ten-page letter filled with all the reasons you adore me. These are both totally acceptable, by the way.
I’m sort of dying to know what you got Summer. What she got you. You’ve been together for a year, so I bet it’s something special. She’s a senior like you, a va-va-voom redhead who somehow makes being in choir sexy. I’d like to believe that if things were different, you might pick me, but all it takes is one look at Summer and I’m quickly disabused of the notion. Mom says I have an interesting face, which is just a nice way of saying I’m not pretty. Sorry, she says, you take after your dad’s side of the family.
The bell rings and I’m off to second period—AP Comp with Mr. Jackson. The halls are packed as students bleed out of their classrooms. I walk on my tiptoes, looking for your fedora even as I tell myself I’m not really stalking you. Usually I’m guaranteed a Gavin sighting on my walk to Comp because you’re in the classroom across from mine, but nope, you are nowhere to be found.
I sink into my chair just as the final bell rings, resigned. You are likely with Summer, ditching and in love. I am stuck in English, trying not to think about you ditching and in love.
Mr. Jackson turns off the lights so that we can watch the conclusion of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, which we started a couple days ago. It’s a pretty badass version, with a young Leonardo DiCaprio who could seriously give you a run for your money in the hotness department. You win, though, hands down.
By the time the credits are rolling, half the class is pretending not to cry as Romeo and Juliet lie dead. It’s like, we knew it was going to end badly but, even so, it guts us to watch it happen.
TWO
The bell for lunch rings and I make my way toward Drama. I’ve got the blues and the only thing that will even slightly cure me is the next forty minutes. The Roosevelt High drama room is my personal sanctuary. I love the black velvet curtains, how they hang there like a promise, and the cumbersome wooden blocks we use in scenes to act as tables, benches, or chairs. You’d never know we’re in Central California, agriculture Mecca of America: we build kingdoms here, big-city love affairs, and the ancient houses of gods and monsters.
This is my favorite part of the day, when I open the heavy metal door, which is extra tall to allow sets to be brought in, and am immediately submerged in the din of voices, laughter, singing.
We are the music-makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.
We thespian types laugh loudly and often, tumble over one another’s sentences, a dogpile of exuberance. Look at us, we’re saying to anyone nearby. Let me entertain you, let me make you smile. Our ears are fine-tuned; we wait for applause.
Every time I walk into this room I know that someday, even if it seems impossibly far away, I’m going to New York City, a small-town girl with stars in her eyes like what’sherface in Rock of Ages. I’m not forging a new path in my desire to run away from my home, from a mother who squeezes the life out of me and a stepfather who’s always two seconds away from a slap—I’m walking, as fast as I can, down a well-trod path. I’m the girl who’s desperate to get out of her small town because if she doesn’t she knows she’ll die. She knows her soul will start to rot, like fruit gone bad.
One more year, I tell myself. One more year until graduation. I can make it that long.
I think.
I step through the door and let out the breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding in. The whole gang is here, focused on the current obsession over auditions for the spring musical, Chicago. I’ll be stage managing, a part I’ve already been cast in, by choice. According to Miss B, it’s a stepping-stone to directing. For the first time in a long while I sort of wish I were auditioning—I don’t think I could get away with wearing black fishnets and a leotard as the stage manager. I secretly want you to see me like that. I actually had a moment of doubt and told my mom I was thinking about auditioning.
You can’t sing, she said.
My mom went to one of those hard-core Catholic schools. She’s big on Being Realistic. She’s not trying to be mean; she’s trying to help me. It’s just that sometimes her words feel like a nun’s ruler smacking across my knuckles.
Grace and her pipe dreams, The Giant says whenever I talk about directing plays on Broadway. He’s big on Being an Asshole. The Giant has a life motto and this is it: Money is king. It’s the code he lives by. Obviously we don’t see eye-to-eye on the whole starving artist thing.
So instead of being in the cast, I’ll help run rehearsals and for performances I’ll be in charge, calling the show. Light cue 47, Go. Sound Cue 21, Go. Blackout. I always feel like such a badass, like I’m in Air Traffic Control or something.
Today, I laugh and smile with the others, but I’m not paying attention, not really, because on top of dealing with the fact that there are no boys in love with me (especially you), I’m thinking about how to sneak off to the cafeteria to grab my food without anyone coming along. Sneaking off is hard to do when you’re wearing a bright pink skirt with a black poodle on it. See, my friends pay with money, but my currency is the little green tickets the poor kids who need free school lunches get. I’d use my own money for lunch, but I need it for stuff like clothes and books and deodorant because The Giant sure as hell won’t buy me any of that. I should have gone to the caf first, but what if you came in to say hi before going off campus and I missed you?
The group’s up to its usual antics. Peter does the voices of his favorite video game characters. Kyle stands around looking like a young Bruno Mars, occasionally bursting into song. Our whole group is comprised of juniors, except for three seniors: you (Lead singer of Evergreen! Love of my life!), Ryan (your best friend and bass player for Evergreen), and your girlfriend, Summer (boo, hiss).
Natalie and Alyssa are discussing the pros and cons of leggings worn as pants rather than as a substitute for tights. Normally I get all I-read-Vogue-every-month when the subject of fashion comes up, but today I just listen: I’m too whatever I am to join in.
“They make everyone look fat,” Lys is saying. She nods to a group of freshmen passing by the drama room. “Case in point.”
Nat swats Lys on the arm. “Be nice. That is so not cool.”
Lys shrugs. “Neither are leggings.”
My two best friends are polar opposites. Nat wears a dress to school almost every day and has perfect makeup and hair with flipped ends, like it’s 1950. She wears a tiny cross necklace and this thing called a promise ring, which represents how she’s going to wait to have sex until she’s married (she says she takes it off when she messes around with her boyfriends, LOL). I can totally imagine her as First Lady someday, with pearls and Jackie O sunglasses. Lys has a wild bob, bleached so that it’s almost white, and wears sexy manga clothes like she’s Sailor Moon. She’s always getting in trouble for violating the dress code—she’s got this thing for Catholic schoolgirl plaid skirts. Sometimes she wears tulle, like she’s just performed in a psychedelic ballet, all neon and crazy patterns. I guess I’m in the middle because I’m the one who wears vintage thrift stuff, scarves in her hair, and lip gloss that tastes like Dr Pepper.
Peter switches from video game impersonation to strutting across the drama room’s makeshift stage, busting out his best vintage Britney Spears moves. He’s on this whole Britney kick right now. Last month it was Katy Perry. He’s not gay—he’s got a hard-on for pop stars that he takes to ridiculous extremes.
“Hit me baby one more time!”
“Not that you were ever remotely cool socially,” Lys says, “but you’ve just taken away any hope of that status changing.”
Today she’s wearing a black tulle skirt over neon-green tights, crazy platform boots, and a T-shirt with a knife stabbing a heart.
“Hater alert!” Kyle calls
. He boos Lys and she rolls her Cleopatra eyes.
I scan the students passing by the door, which is propped open and gives a good view of the quad. I’m hoping to spot a certain black fedora.
“Where’s Gavin?” I ask, casual. At least, I hope I sound casual and non-stalkerish.
“Probably humping Summer,” Ryan says. He’s your best friend so I guess he would know. He takes a bite of one of the soggy burritos they sell on campus, oblivious to the horror on my face.
I get a pins-and-needles feeling in my heart. It’s kind of like a heart attack but worse because it’s a heart attack for unloved girls. This is a medical fact: when a girl hears another girl is engaging in sexual activities with the boy said girl likes, her heart turns into a pincushion. Pure science.
“Humping? Ewww.” Natalie wrinkles her nose. “Summer doesn’t hump.”
I hope that’s true. I hope your worst is the PDA you two engage in all over school: kissing against the lockers, your hands gripping the skin at her waist, fingertips under her shirt. Because that is seriously bad enough. But you just look like someone who has sex a lot. I’m not holding out hope that you’re saving yourself for me.
“Oh, sorry,” Ryan says. “Would you prefer make love?”
“Or, do the nasty?” Kyle says.
“Get boned?” Peter adds.
In an unspoken decision to shun the boys in the group, Alyssa, Natalie, and I close ranks.
“This,” Lys says, “is yet another reason I thank God I was born a lesbian.”
Lys just came out last year and has yet to find a girlfriend. I wonder if that’s why she keeps saying Valentine’s Day is a social construct of The Man.
“Oh, baby, baby, how was I supposed to know…?” Kyle and Peter start up, serenading us.
“Remind me why we hang out with these fools again?” Natalie asks.
“I don’t remember,” I say.
Lys pulls out her trig homework. “I have better things to do, anyway.” She shoots the boys a glare. “FYI, you look like a bunch of asshats. I hope you weren’t intending to lose your virginity anytime soon.”
“Oh, burn,” Ryan says.
My stomach growls and I start edging toward the cafeteria. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
I turn and hurry into the thick mess of students outside before anyone can react. Despite wanting to be invisible, a part of me is sad because none of the boys in our group seem to notice my departure. None of the boys notice me, period. This sucks, but I’m a drama girl and I know my casting. I’m not the ingenue, the pretty one, the one who bursts with life. That’s Natalie. Summer. Instead, I’m somewhere hovering on the edges: of talent, of popularity, of intelligence. I’m in honors classes, but I have to study twice as hard as everyone else to keep up. The only reason I get to be involved in every show at RHS is because I take the part nobody wants: stage manager, assistant director, Everyone’s Bitch. I was the sophomore class secretary last year, but that was just luck: I impersonated a stoner in my speech and it won me the popular vote. I know lots of in-crowders (cheerleaders, jocks), but I’d never be part of their cliques. I barely get the slightest glance from them in the halls between classes. Knowing you, the Gavin Davis, is weird luck that proves I’m on Dionysus’s good side, long may the god of drama reign.
I have just enough time to scarf down the slice of pizza the government paid for and make it back to the drama room before the bell rings. I walk through the door and stop. Somehow, in just a few minutes, a black cloud swept in to block out our sun.
Summer is there sans you, her usually smooth auburn hair a frizzy mess. There are dark circles under her eyes and her face is red and puffy from crying.
A little part of me—an evil part of me—lifts. Did you break up with her?
“What’s wrong?” I murmur as I come up.
The group’s energy has gone from ten to zero in a matter of minutes. Kyle is bear-hugging Summer. He looks … stricken. I’ve never seen him this serious.
Natalie edges closer to me. “It’s Gavin,” she whispers. My stomach turns. I don’t like the way she says your name, the horror on her face.
“What about him?”
“He…” She shakes her head, big brown eyes filling. “He tried to kill himself.”
The words fly through my mind, around and around, a dog chasing its tail. Kill himself, kill himself. The bell rings and we all stand there, lost.
It can’t be true. People like you don’t kill themselves until after they’re famous. Then, and only then, are you supposed to overdose on heroin or drive an expensive car too fast on Mulholland or do any number of things that rock gods do.
I will later hear that Summer had broken up with you, that you’d gone to her house and sobbed on her front porch and said you would do it, you’d kill yourself. And she kept that door closed on you anyway. It will take me a long time—over a year—to see that her dumping you was an act of bravery.
You’d left her house, your Mustang roaring down the street. Later that night, your parents found you in the bathtub, fully clothed. The only thing that saved you was that you’d cut the wrong way and fainted before you could finish the job.
I learn all this on the five-minute walk to history, where Natalie, Kyle, Peter, and I discuss you at length. The guys can’t believe Summer was stupid enough to break up with you—you walk on water for them, too. They fall to competing over who’s most in the know about your and Summer’s relationship. This knowledge is suddenly a status symbol—whoever knows the most is your BFF. I secretly think Summer’s crazy to give you up, but I keep quiet because I don’t know you like the guys do—but I’ve wanted to and here’s my chance.
I pull out a piece of paper, suddenly compelled to write you a letter. I still don’t know exactly why I did it. I guess the thought of a world without Gavin Davis was too horrifying.
I know we don’t know each other really well …
If you ever need someone to talk to …
I’m here for you …
I don’t realize now, but this is the moment. The moment when the rest of my life in high school—the rest of my whole life—will change. The moment when I begin to lose a part of myself I’ll have to fight like hell to get back for five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.
All because of a love letter in disguise.
When I see Ryan in the hall after class, I give him the letter to pass on. You two are like brothers—I know he’ll be seeing you at some point today or tomorrow. By the end of the day, we find out that you have been, for all intents and purposes, committed to a mental hospital. Birch Grove Recovery Center is where you go when you do stuff like try to kill yourself in your bathtub. Normally this isn’t the kind of thing that makes a girl swoon, but there’s something so dramatic and beautiful about a boy whose heart is breaking and my imagination latches onto that, elaborates on your suffering. You immediately reach mythical status for me, a Byron who’s given himself over completely to the ecstasy and agony of love. Van Gogh, cutting off his ear.
Of course I’m worried about you and sad, but there’s also this feeling of excitement, which I know is probably wrong, but all the same I can’t help feeling it. Suicide is taking matters into your own hands and to me that seems courageous, fierce. You aren’t just the rocker/actor everyone loves, the one we all think will for sure make it when he moves to LA. Suddenly, you’re Romeo shunned by Rosaline. Or Hamlet, suffering the slings and arrows of destiny: To be, or not to be, that is the question.
I’m taken with the morbid romance of it all, that someone in our world of drive-throughs and cow patties and evangelical churches has done the sort of thing we’ve only seen onstage. Something inside me echoes that refusal to participate in the awfulness of life. I admire the guts it takes to give up. Only tortured artists do that, and being a tortured artist is my most fervent longing.
I know what it feels like, the hopelessness you’re wrestling with. I feel it every day at home, when Mom treats me like her personal
slave or when The Giant raises his hand just to watch me flinch. When Dad calls, drunk, teetering on the edge of surliness, making promises he’ll never keep, telling lies he believes. Sometimes I wish I could sit my life out. Like, Hey, it’s cool but I’m over it. Peace.
I understand …
I know right now it seems like …
You matter, even if you think you don’t …
You are the most talented person I’ve ever …
Later, you’ll tell me how you read and reread that letter—the only valentine you received. How my words had been a life raft. How—as impossible as it may seem—you fell in love with me when you were imprisoned in that stark white room at Birch Grove Recovery Center, your wrists wrapped in gauze.
I guess crazy is catching.
THREE
You haven’t been at school for a week and your absence never seems normal. It’s not something I get used to. It’s like someone turned down all the colors. Still, the rest of us have to go on with normal life, which for me means after-school shifts at the Honey Pot.
The mall is packed, so we’ve got a line. Since there’re only two of us on this shift and Matt, my coworker/ex-boyfriend is in the back mixing up cookie dough, I stay in front, rushing from the oven to the trays of cookies that are lined up behind the glass case. I use a long spatula to transfer the cookies into the customers’ bags, trying to be patient as they pick out the specific ones they want. A dozen for twenty bucks or one seventy-five each. Expensive, but worth every penny. My favorite is the sugar cookie—with or without sprinkles. You haven’t had a sugar cookie until you’ve tasted the buttery, sweet, soft delight that is the Honey Pot’s Sugar Daddy. Sometimes, when I’m really daring, I’ll put frosting on top.