Snark and Stage Fright (22 page)

When Michael left, I led Dave out into the entryway of the house with its hideous floral wallpaper as Tori’s and Trey’s eyes followed us with great interest. I can only imagine what Tori had shared with him about my fracked up feelings for Michael and my date with Dave. They were probably waiting with cell phones poised to dial 911 in case my head or heart finally exploded.

I leaned on the front windowsill with the rain beating against the glass like it wanted to be let in and asked Dave as cheerily as possible, “So what’s up?”

Dave stuck his hands in his jacket and said, “I hope it’s okay to just come over like this. I didn’t know you had company.”

“Trey and Michael aren’t company, really,” I assured him. “Trey’s practically family, and … ” I trailed off at an utter loss to explain why Michael had been there and left so suddenly upon his arrival.

He looked confused for a second but burst with, “I just couldn’t stand it anymore,” and I felt my heart drop into my stomach with a splash. “I can’t take not talking about it. Not even
mentioning
the fact that we went out on a date a month ago—or I thought we did—but you haven’t even mentioned it since.” He paused to push his glasses back up his nose before saying, “You’ve been acting so weird and depressed for a while, I didn’t want to say anything, but I can’t take it anymore. I mean, was I wrong? Was that
not
a date? It felt like one to me.”

I choked back a big blob of self-loathing as I realized at last that while I had been plastering myself with Band-Aids for weeks, someone right next to me had needed a tourniquet. All the time I had been moping around feeling like life—and Michael Endicott—were torturing me, I had been inadvertently torturing Dave, the last person on this earth who deserved it.

“Oh my God, Dave—I’m sorry. I really am,” I said lamely as I sank to the floor, knees bent to my quivering chin.

“I should have known you weren’t feeling me when you didn’t kiss me back right away,” he sighed, which stamped the seal of approval on my application for Worst Human Being on the Face of the Earth.

“I tried to,” I flailed, but cut myself off as I realized that this assurance was as hurtful as anything else I had done. “I’m a mess, and you shouldn’t want to be around me. Like, at all. I’m still not over Michael, and I should have told you that, but I wasn’t a
hundred
percent sure that it was a date we were on, so I didn’t say anything because I was afraid it would be awkward.” I tried to smile, but the tears came out anyway. “Aren’t you glad I avoided any awkward feelings?” I sort of wailed as I jabbed at my eyes with a fist.

Dave nodded sadly and shoved his hands in his hoodie pockets, asking, “So Michael was over here … because you guys are back together?”

“No.” I raised my eyes to the ceiling, hoping that meant the tears wouldn’t spill out of them, but it didn’t work. “He’s with Diana now,” I managed to say.

“Oh, Georgia,” Dave said so kindly it made me start crying harder, which was stupid and selfish because
he’s
the one who had been wronged. By me. I didn’t deserve his kindness. But he put his arms around me and I let him. He patted my head like I was a puppy or a little girl and let me sob into his sweatshirt.

Moments later, I got a grip on myself and sniffled, “This is stupid,” as I pulled away from him. “Diana and he make so much more sense together than he and I do. And you shouldn’t be nice to me. I don’t deserve it.”

Dave leaned against the little fireplace with its chipped white molding and said, “This whole ‘liking’ people—it doesn’t always make sense, though, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” I agreed, then tried again even though it was hopelessly inadequate, “I’m really sorry, Dave … I am.”

He sighed and held up a hand like a stop sign, saying, “I know. And you didn’t do anything. You just weren’t feelin’ it. It happens.”

I snorted all of the snot back into my nose and pulled myself together.

Finally, he said with the ghost of a smile, “You know, I’m not going to say anything to them, but Gary and Shondra would never believe this, that Georgia Barrett was crying.”

“Shondra’s seen me looking pretty pathetic before. Believe me,” I said, recalling the non-double movie date that fall and all the times I’d whined this summer about having to go to Michael’s family’s houses on the Cape and my dragging her to Cameron’s party so I could throw myself at Michael one more time.

“Well, more people should see it. It’s kind of nice, actually.”

“Nice?” I snorted, dislodging more snot, which I had to wipe with the back of my hand, making Dave laugh, and then I laughed a little, too, because it was all so awful and pathetic.

“Nice, yeah,” he said as I stepped into the living room for a tissue and returned. “It makes you human.”

“You guys know I’m human. You know I’m fallible, at least. I fuck up all the time, after all.”

“Yeah, but you never crack. I mean, you get angry, sure, but you never … break. The shell is always solid.” He ducked his head for a second and then looked at me with a small smile. “It’s nice to see the gooey center inside Georgia Barrett.”

“You should be honored. Do you think I do this with every young man who drops by the house?” My voice cracked through the tears and mucus.

Dave barked out a short laugh and shook his head.

“And she’s back. Good old snarky Georgia. I’ll see you in school tomorrow,” he said as he opened the front door and turned back for a second. “But the real, not-so-solid Georgia is pretty good, too. You should let her out sometimes.”

I watched him walk out to his car in the rain and started crying again, so ashamed of myself, because he was just about the nicest person on the planet and he deserved so much better than me. I walked outside then, despite the rain, and thought about all the nice people I actually knew. I sat on the front step and made a wish on the rain that Dave found someone worthy of him. It shouldn’t be too hard to find someone who deserved him more than I did. He could pretty much open up the phone book.

I sat outside for a long time, hoping to get pneumonia so I wouldn’t have to go back to school after break and see the boy I should love and the other I couldn’t stop loving.

18 
Emotionally Naked

Back at school after break, Michael and I were the first to give our presentation in history class and it went well. He spoke first to set up our two approaches to social and political revolution, within and outside the system, and he did as well as I knew he would. And if I wasn’t as eloquent as he was, I at least made sense and didn’t bore the crap out of anybody. When we got back to our desks, Michael tapped his fist against mine and said, “See? We make a great team,” and I nodded but I felt sort of sick because we weren’t a team. Not really. Not anymore. Not ever again.

At lunch, Michael was telling Diana about how well our presentation had gone when she gasped as Monica Summers, the junior playing the Baroness in
The Sound of Music
, stumbled in on crutches.

“Oh, no! There’s no way she can play the part with a broken leg!” Diana worried.

“Maybe the theater techies can set her up with a really blinged-out, elegant wheelchair,” I suggested, but after school at rehearsal Ms. Duval announced that Monica’s understudy, Alicia Price, would take over the role, and everyone clapped politely but I heard some groans, too. Alicia had been diva-ing her way through rehearsals as if she were a one-woman show unto herself, even though she really had a part only if someone else lost theirs. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that she had pushed Monica down a flight of stairs, but Diana was sure it was a skiing accident that had done the damage. Either way, the production was in trouble. In the stage version of the show, the Baroness doesn’t have a huge part, but it’s important to the story. She has to be beautiful, shallow, and charming; all in a pretty comical way, and the only comical thing about Alicia’s performance lay in its unintentionally robotic qualities.

When she took the stage with the force of a Category 3 hurricane, I did my best to ignore her paint-peeling vocals. I was focused on helping Leila, Andy, Peter, and Amanda finish a fake night sky backdrop, showing them how to make stars look twinkly in the hall outside the auditorium, when Michael and Cameron and three other guys from the cross-country team came through.

“Look!” Leila stage-whispered to me. “Your boyfriend’s here!”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I told her at one-tenth of the volume, my face as hot as a car hood in the desert. “He’s Diana’s boyfriend.”

“Oh,” she said, looking at me with pity.

The team looked as lost as if they had been dropped blindfolded into the Amazon. So Michael led them over to our painting party and said, “Uh, George, we’re supposed to find somebody named Violet Newsome. The wardrobe person? We’re supposed to be fitted.”

I had to smile because they looked more like they were being herded together to offer slices of their brains to a lab rather than to be measured for tuxedos and uniforms.

“Violet’s in the room down the hall. And I promise it won’t hurt,” I said, and he saluted before leading his squad to Violet’s lair.

“He’s cute,” Amanda whispered to Leila, who shrugged and said, “I like the blond one with the mole on his cheek,” and I didn’t know whether to be amused or disgusted that little girls were ogling and rating older boys the way construction workers check out women on the street.

“Whatcha guys working on? Oooh, so pretty!” Diana exclaimed as she came by and bent to admire our work.

Leila informed her, “Your boyfriend is down the hall.”

“Do you mean Rolf? Curt?” she asked, confused and blushing. “Curt’s onstage.”

“Noooo, your
real-life
boyfriend,” Leila explained with some exasperation, and Amanda giggled.

Diana turned the color of a pickled beet and I told them, “Curt is not her boyfriend. Curt should not be
any
body’s boyfriend. Curt has cooties.”

“There’s no such thing as cooties,” Leila informed me, disgusted by my ignorance.

I suggested then that she and the other kids go watch the rehearsals while the paint dried, so we observed Alicia, in a fake mink stole and platinum-blond wig, thrash around onstage like she was in a roller derby but forgot her skates. She was so off-key most of the time it made me wince, and I had to shush Leila and Andy because they couldn’t help but laugh at her. I could see Dave and Gary cringing in the orchestra pit every time she mangled a note, but Alicia seemed pretty pleased with her performance. She was up there with Spencer and Todd, the boy playing Max, the Baroness’s charming but parasitic friend, and they were singing about how difficult it was for the Baroness to get Captain von Trapp to love her because, ironically, there were no obstacles preventing their love.

“‘Two millionaires with a dream are we, we’ll make our love survive,’” Alicia screeched, and Andy clapped his hands over his ears, but as awful as she sounded, even with Todd doing his best to drown her out, the song presented an interesting point of view. All great romances in literature and movies are about two people who are so different—one is poor, one is rich, for instance—they face huge obstacles that threaten their love but cling to each other despite the odds. And that’s what makes the stories so romantic: the struggle. In real life, though, as I learned this summer, it’s not like that. In real life, serious differences just make you doomed. And miserable, even if the Baroness sings about how there’s no real love without drama. She complains that she can’t “go out and steal” for the captain, or “die like Camille” for him, so how could he ever know she loved him? I wondered if real-life love required big gestures like that. I also wondered if Michael could hear the song from wherever he stood, bravely facing Violet’s tape measure. I could only imagine that if he could, he was categorizing his objections to the Baroness’s thesis. Because Michael does not like drama. That’s why he was with the sweet-tempered Diana now.

I mentioned this question of whether love requires grand gestures to Tori when she called me that evening to check in on me and try to convince me, again, to bare my soul to Michael one more time, even if he was with Diana now.

“From what I saw last weekend when I was home, I still think there’s a chance for you two. After all, you were both happy until the trip this summer.”

“But we argued all the time,” I pointed out as I combed tufts of the shag throw rug in our bedroom with my toes.

“You
squabbled
all the time. Because you like squabbling. Squabbling is not the same as arguing. You actually agree on all the big things.”

I looked over at Tori’s empty bed, wishing for the thousandth time that she was there, and flipped over on my stomach, almost squishing Teeny the zebra-striped cat, giving her a good excuse to bite my heel. Not that Teeny ever needs an excuse to bite someone.

“What do you mean, ‘all the big things’?”

“You know—like what’s important in life, what you want out of life. The way the world works and how you deal with it. You and Michael actually think pretty much the same on the big things, and that’s what matters. Yeah, Michael comes from money, but you made too big a deal about that. It’s not like that mattered to Michael,” she said.

I flipped over and sat up, suddenly feeling more awake and aware than I had been since coming home from the Cape.

Tori continued, “But the Baroness in the show is right about one thing: you have to tell your partner how you feel. You don’t need a big gesture, but you do have to be willing to open up and not just snark your way through everything. You have to be … vulnerable … which you hate being.”

I protested, “I was pretty vulnerable the night our relationship crumbled to pieces. I mean, I was naked … ”

“E
mo
tionally naked, George,” she corrected me. “You have to let yourself be emotionally naked. Look, I gotta go, but think about what I said. And Trey thinks Michael is still definitely feeling you, you know.”