Then everybody came out, and we did four numbers together before the six of us doing real solos exited and lined up backstage. I came out first again, the spotlight so bright in my eyes I couldn’t see anything. I took a steadying breath and sang “We Belong Together,” the whole song out into absolute blankness that could have been my room or the shower or outer space, except my parents and Chad and Sam and Kyle and Ginger and her mother and Molly and Goth Sarah and what I considered to be the rest of the world were all watching, listening.
I came back to consciousness during the last verse:
Shall we weigh along these streets
Young lions on the lam?
Are the signs you hid deep in your heart
All left on neon for them?
Then it was a blur. The audience was standing and screaming, and we were done, had sung our solos and the finale and felt like rock stars even though the fans were our parents and brothers and teachers and their hundred-year-old husbands. Backstage was like being inside a hot air popper. Everyone had rushed back there and was hugging and screaming and congratulating each other. I spotted Kyle right away; he was standing near the doorway to the auditorium with Chris and a woman I guessed must be Chris’s mom. She was fine-boned, wearing a simple black dress with a cream cardigan over it, and black boots with a lot of stitching on them. Her hair was pulled up into a gold clip, and she had on soft pink lipstick. Both of her arms were wrapped around Chris, and she looked like she might die of love and pride. To my surprise, he didn’t seem to mind, was returning the snuggle, unembarrassed. I wondered how his dad could have left them, if she had lots of boyfriends, if Chris was jealous. Alan was there too, but before I could figure out who his parents were, mine arrived to smother me with compliments.
I could see past them that Kyle was making his way over, although maybe he was just headed to the door to leave. But in any case, as he walked by, he was like, “Judy Lohden, congrats, man, that was great!”
My parents were standing there like cardboard cutouts of themselves. I said, “Thanks, Kyle!” really fast, and my voice was all high-pitched and squeaky so I tried to cover it up by saying, “So were you,” which was horrible because he hadn’t been in the concert because he wasn’t in senior voice. But instead of being like, “I mean, I know you would have been good,” or whatever I could have said to unembarrass myself and continue making it worse, I managed to stay quiet. This was good, because it meant I could keep hearing my name in his voice. It echoed in the dark, empty chamber of my mind. Ginger was standing there too, and she was like, yeah, good job, Judy, and even though I was grateful that she said it, because now the stupid thing I’d said to Kyle wasn’t the last thing anyone had said, I pushed her voice away so it wouldn’t ruin Kyle’s. Because my name sounded different when he said it from how it was when anyone else, including me, said it. In his voice, it was crunchy, like car wheels on a gravel driveway.
My parents took Molly, Goth Sarah, Chad, and Sam and me to the Grill that night, where Brad, the manager with floppy blond hair and a unibrow, already had banana splits ready for Chad and Sam and a mint chocolate sundae for me. He asked what Molly and Goth Sarah wanted, and Goth Sarah was like, “Coffee, please, black,” and Molly ordered lemon sorbet. I saw my parents look at each other. I’m not allowed to have coffee, maybe because it stunts your growth. I felt like a little kid, eating my stupid frothy sundae while Molly and Sarah spooned sorbet and sipped coffee. We sat in the front, listening to the rain pound down on the roof and gossiping about the concert.
“He’s a thousand-year-old fossil,” I said.
“Yeah, but he’s amazing. I mean, did you read
Under Babylon
?” Goth Sarah asked. My mom was so impressed she could barely contain herself.
“I didn’t,” I said, “but my mom did.”
“It’s a wonderful novel,” my mom said, “I’ve been encouraging Judy to read it for years!”
“My dad has that book at home,” Molly said. “I’m going to check it out.”
“Norman made a point of coming up to us to say what a fabulous job you did tonight, honey,” my mom said to me. This made me think of Kyle’s voice saying, “Judy Lohden, congrats, man,” and my stomach flipped like a pancake.
“You were dope!” Sam said. “I mean, no one else was as good, and they were seniors! Everyone in the audience thought so.”
“Thanks, Sam.”
“So, is Ginger coming over again?”
I was surprised he would ask this in front of Sarah and Molly. I saw Sarah shoot Molly a look like, “Of course,” but Molly grinned.
“Who’s Ginger?” Chad asked, and I started to say, “You know Ginger—” but Sarah was staring at me like, “Shut up,” and then thankfully my mom said, “Ginger is a new friend of Judy’s” before I could say, “The one your hideous friend Santana freaked at that party we didn’t tell Mom and Dad about.”
“A
hot
girl,” said Sam. Molly and Chad and I laughed, and even Sarah had to admit that it was funny with a begrudging snort, but my mom shook her head. She looked at Sam meaningfully. “That’s an offensive way to talk about Judy’s friends.”
After she said this, she looked at Sarah and Molly, and I was wondering what she could be thinking, maybe something along the lines of: “Well, at least neither of you is hot enough to get objectified by my twelve-year old son.”
Then Chad was like, “I have to take off. I told Alice I’d pick her up after her study group. Congratulations, J., you were great. Molly, Sarah, nice to meet you two.” I liked this; he was pretending he hadn’t met them before, at the party our parents didn’t know had happened. He even winked at us. I bet Molly and Sarah loved that.
“So, Judy,” my dad said, as Chad walked away. “Where’d you find that song?”
I felt in this question something about what it must be like to be a parent, to realize that your kids’ lives actually take place without you, in dark practice rooms, in their bedrooms, in their private, inaccessible imaginations and minds.
“I’ve been listening to nothing else for three years, Dad,” I said, punishing him for no reason. I never cut my parents any slack at all. And I’m sorry for that now.
“Oh,” he said. “I’m surprised I’ve never heard it before, then.”
“I had never heard it either,” Goth Sarah said, and I wondered if this was true, or if she was just kind and wanted to make my dad feel better.
“Me, neither,” Molly said.
We drove home in the kind of warm car glow that exists only when your life hasn’t been totally ruined. I remember it now, because it’s raining outside the Motel Manor, and the window in my room is leaking just enough so that the gray paint on the windowsill is bubbling and the carpet next to the window is sopping and black.
If I close my eyes as tight as I can and rub them until dots of light form, I can still see Sam next to me in the backseat the night of the SV concert, and the backs of my parents, my mom with her arm stretched between the seats. It was warm in the car with Sam and my parents all safe. And I had just had the thrill of being in the senior voice concert. My mom was playing with the little bit of hair curling down into my dad’s collar. She was thrilled, because of the concert and my polite friends, and because she had seen all three of her kids that night and we all seemed happy.
“You want a haircut, Max?” she asked, playing with my dad’s hair.
“Do I need one?”
My mom always cuts my dad’s hair. I don’t think he’s ever had his hair cut by anyone else. My parents met the summer after high school and got married when they were twenty. Those were their “hippie years,” when they moved to New Mexico and made belts and definitely smoked a lot of pot while their one pig and six chickens ran around the yard. They didn’t stay, because I guess it wasn’t a great life for Chad. I wonder if all the pot-smoking I’m guessing they did was related to my foreshortened limbs.
Later that night, I heard my parents in the bathroom, setting up the haircutting salon, and Sam thumping plastic strums to “The Boys Are Back.”
I didn’t listen to the vent, just lay down on my stomach on my bed and wrote a long entry in pink in my leather diary—a gift my dad had gotten me at the Ann Arbor Art Fair. I wrote all about the concert, Norman Crump, my voice, the way it sounds coming from my body and how it must sound different to people who aren’t inside my body. And Kyle. What he hears when he listens to me. How I think he’s a good listener, so unlike most boys. I wrote about AP bio, how I’d gotten Rachael Collins as my lab partner, and how I liked her because she was tidy and reserved, with short dark hair and a big vocabulary. She worked on the school paper, wrote a current events column, and saved most of her words for that; she didn’t talk much. I suggested naming our dead cat “Cletus the Fetus,” not so much because I wanted Rachael to think I was funny (although I would have liked it if she had), but because joking about the rubbery plucked cat made me feel less miserable about carving up someone’s beloved pet, or worse, a helpless stray. Our teacher, Mr. Abraham, who was constantly touching us with his moist, fat hands, posted cat-part pictures on the class website and made jokes about “partbook” being like, our “facebook.” Grownups who use Facebook are embarrassing, and even if Mr. Abraham had known better than to be on Facebook himself, we still wouldn’t have found him cool for knowing what it was. It’s better not to pander to teenagers, since we have super sharp pander radars. But Mr. Abraham probably wouldn’t have been embarrassed to learn that we thought he was a loser anyway, because there are two kinds of people in the world: people who get embarrassed and people who embarrass others. And Mr. Abraham was definitely the latter. He’d probably be thrilled to know that he and Cletus the Fetus are characters in my diary.
I wrote a lot about that cat, even drew diagrams of him. I don’t know why; maybe I wanted to honor him in some way, after violating him with all that cutting and labeling. We started with his midventral muscles: transverse abdomens, rectus abdominus, internal oblique, external oblique. The more we hacked away, the more he looked like a chicken. It reminded me of that horrible thing people say when they eat creatures no human should eat, like frogs and rabbits, how they “taste like chicken,” and I decided never to eat meat again. Rachael almost threw up when we cut up the jejunum. I don’t know why she found it grosser than the urinary bladder, maybe the unfamiliar word grossed her out. People hate things they’ve never heard of.
Right before I fell asleep the night of the concert, I flipped to the back of my diary and wrote out the lyrics to my Rickie Lee Jones solo, even though I’d had them memorized for years. I have a habit of flipping ahead, writing notes to my future self: “How are things now? Did you pass the math test? Did the boy you liked end up falling in love with you, too?”
Are the signs you hid deep in your heart
All left on neon for them?
I don’t know what made me write those down that night. Maybe I sensed that soon all the secret signs in my heart would be utterly neon—for the world to gape at and label.
8
My second American lit paper for Ms. Doman was on Pecola Breedlove, and how race, fate, and longing ruin her before the plot even starts. If you’re ever feeling bad, reread
The Bluest Eye
, because Pecola Breedlove has such a tragic life that it makes even what happened to me seem like a sneeze. The funny thing about literature is that if you have a name like Breedlove, you’re fucked. There’s no way an author calls you that without making you breed your father’s baby after he rapes you on the kitchen floor. But the part of that book that kills me is how she loves the blond doll. How she wants to be what she can never be. That’s life-ruining enough, I think. So my paper was kind of on that, and Ms. Doman read it out loud to the class, even though it was six pages long.
Then she followed me down to the auditorium, because we had auditions for the spring show,
Runaways
, an utter piece of shit with the single advantage of a cast of dozens of teenagers. It was because of
Runaways
that I started seeing Kyle every day after school, not to mention Chris and Alan, who were always picking him up, working on the senior show, swimming, or doing whatever it was they did in the building after hours. It’s funny how being at school after school gives you a lawless feeling. Even if you’re there for rehearsal or something utterly, nerdily school-related, the energy is a jittery, giddy sort, unlike the trapped vibe of daytime.
Runaways
also made us feel reckless, as if we were actually kids living on the streets, rather than our lucky private school selves dusted with a little makeup to look dirty.
I vividly remember the day we auditioned, because I got cast as a deaf black guy named Hubbel, after doing some comically bad fake sign language. And because Ms. Doman and I had a conversation that made me nervous.
“Judy,” she said, in an oddly serious tone, “can we walk down together?”
“Sure! Are you casting
Runaways
?”
“No, of course not—they don’t give the bookworms any say!” she said, smiling. “I just wanted to watch you guys do your thing. Are you nervous?”
I nodded.
“I’m sure you’ll be divine. You were stunning at the voice concert, Judy. Really stunning. But you know what?”
“What?”
“I hope you’ll think about being a writer.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I don’t mean it as a compliment. I mean it as an assignment.”
“Okay,” I said.
She waited for a minute, kind of watching me. We had arrived at the auditorium and were standing still outside the door. I felt uncomfortable.
“How’re things going?” she asked, and something about the fake casualness of it reminded me of my mom.
“Really good!” I said, and it came out too high and too fake, as if they weren’t good, but they actually were, so I was weirded out by myself. Why did I sound like I was lying to Ms. Doman?
“If you ever want to talk to me about anything, just come by, okay? Doesn’t have to be just the books we talk about in class.” She pushed the auditorium door open and we walked in.