Look Both Ways (10 page)

By the time I get back to the dorm, the warm, fuzzy feeling of Russell’s companionship has worn off, and the futility of my situation hits me like a canoe paddle to the face. I’m not cast on the main stage. The master classes are humiliating bullshit masquerading as brilliant lessons in technique. My “show” is so nebulous that the person
writing
it doesn’t even seem to know what it’s about. So what am I doing here at Allerdale? Slinging a wrench all summer isn’t going to teach me how to be a real performer or help me fit in with my family. I might as well be working at the Pinkberry down the street from my apartment. It would certainly make my back hurt less.

When I open the door to my room, Zoe’s on the phone, but the second she registers the expression on my face, she says, “Hey, I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? Love you.” She makes a kissing noise and hangs up. “You all right?” she asks. “How’d rehearsal go?”

I drop my bag onto the floor. “I think ‘absurd’ pretty much covers it?”

“Oh no. What happened?”

I tell her everything, imitating put-upon Clark and silent Alberto and Pandora’s sexy animal walks. Zoe listens to the whole thing with wide, sympathetic eyes, but she’s also laughing. She has this boisterous, unrestrained giggle that’s way goofier than I’d expect from someone so put-together. When I’m done, I flop facedown onto my bed. “I’m glad my pain amuses you,” I say.

“No, no, I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you. The whole thing sounds awful. It’s just, you looked
exactly
like Pandora when you did that sexy cat walk. She’s in
Midsummer
with us, and that’s her fairy walk, too.”

“Well, enjoy my impressions while you can, because it’s obviously the only acting I’m going to be allowed to do here.”

“Aw, don’t say that,” Zoe says. “It’s possible it’ll get better, right? When Alberto finally manages to write a script, maybe—”

“It’s not going to get better,” I say. “The whole thing is a complete joke. Seriously, if they thought I wasn’t good enough to be here, they should’ve rejected me. They didn’t have to punish me with
Señor Hidalgo.
”

“Brooklyn, you’re obviously good enough to be here, or you wouldn’t be here.”

She has no idea. “And yet I’m not allowed to set foot on the main stage unless I’m holding tools. I’m not even good at
that.
You should’ve seen—”

Zoe cuts me off. “Okay, that’s enough.” She stands up, and I’m positive she’s about to walk straight out the door and find someone better to hang out with.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t bitch about this so much. I’ll try to—”

“No, that’s not the problem. Stand up.”

“Why? Are you going to throw eggs at me?”

“Just do it!”

I stand, and she marches me over to the full-length mirror on her closet door. “Shoulders back, chin up,” she says. “Look your reflection in the eyes.”

I look at her reflection instead. “What are we doing?”

“You’re doing what I say.”

“So bossy,” I complain, but I smile, and she smiles back. Her hands feel warm and steady on my shoulders. I make eye contact with myself, stand up straight, and lift my chin. Even the posture change makes me feel a tiny bit better.

“Good,” she says. “Now say, ‘I deserve to be here.’ ”

I turn all the way around and look at her. “Are you seriously making me do
affirmations
?”

Zoe spins me back toward the mirror. “Say it!” she orders.

It seems easier to get this over with than to argue. “Fine,” I say. “I deserve to be here.” It comes out sounding incredibly sarcastic.

“That is officially the least affirming thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You have to mean it!”

“But what if I don’t mean it?”

“Brooklyn, that’s the entire point of affirmations. If you say it enough times, you start to mean it.” She points to the mirror. “Again.”

“I deserve to be here.” I try to sound more confident this time.

“Louder!”

“I deserve to be here!”

“Scream it! Let the whole dorm know!”

“I deserve to be here!”
I shout at the top of my lungs, and then I burst out laughing, and so does Zoe.

“Good!” she says. “Now say, ‘I am talented!’ ”

“I am talented!” I scream.

“I am beautiful!” Zoe yells.

“I am beautiful!” I repeat, but now all I can do is wonder if Zoe really thinks I’m beautiful. “Your turn,” I say, because I need her to stop looking at me for a minute.

“Okay.” She moves to stand beside me and squares her shoulders. “I can act over the Barney song!” she shouts. “I get to play Kim on the main stage!
I got into fucking Juilliard!
”

“I can hang a Source Four!” I shout.

“I have a fantastic ass!” Zoe screams, and then we’re both laughing so hard, it’s difficult to breathe. It’s the kind of laughter that’s almost painful, where you feel like your body is barely holding itself together, but the pain is so good, you don’t want it to stop. My legs start to buckle, and I clutch at Zoe’s shoulder to keep me upright, but she’s equally weak-kneed, and we melt toward the floor together in slow motion. That makes everything even funnier, and I start hiccupping. Zoe’s face is bright pink and wet with tears.

Jessa opens our door without knocking. “What the hell is going on with you people?”

“We are amazing!” I shout at her at the same time that Zoe screams, “We’re hot, talented bitches!”

Jessa shakes her head. “Y’all belong in the loony bin.”

She withdraws and shuts the door, and even though I feel weird for thinking it, I’m glad she’s gone. I want this moment with Zoe to myself. My roommate buries her face in my shoulder as she struggles to calm down, and her hair drapes over us both like a curtain. When I glance up at the mirror, I like how our reflections look, all messy and sprawled and tangled together.

When she can speak again, Zoe says, “That was awesome. We should do that every day.”

“We’d get thrown out of the dorm.”

“But we’d feel so good about ourselves!” She giggles and wipes her damp cheeks. “Admit it, you feel a little better now, right?”

“I do, yeah.” I don’t tell her that the reason I feel better is because
she
sees me as this bright, shiny, better version of myself, not because I actually believe I deserve to be here.

Zoe sits back up. “Seriously, though, being in bad shows is part of the business. Those are your actor battle scars, you know? They’re the stories you’ll pull out at dinner parties forever. It sucks now, but it’ll be hilarious later.”

She’s right; my entire family has war stories like this, and they’re always laughing about them at Family Nights. The whole point of coming here was to be like them, and at least in this way, I finally will be.

“What’s the worst show you’ve ever been in?” I ask.

Zoe settles into a more comfortable position on the floor. “Probably this student-written musical in tenth grade. The girl who wrote it was in love with our acting teacher, and the whole show was basically about him secretly being into her, too. I played her, and my then-boyfriend played the acting teacher, and then we broke up in the middle of the rehearsal process. And the
actual
acting teacher was the director, so it was basically this giant hurricane of awkward.”

“Oh God,” I say. “That might be even worse than
Señor Hidalgo.
”

“Fortunately, my friend Brian was in it with me. I wouldn’t have made it through without him.”

“I’ve got an ally, too,” I say. “Do you know Russell, that supertall guy from scenic? He’s doing our set, and he’s really cool. We talked a little bit after rehearsal.”

“Oooh.” Zoe sits up straighter. “No, I don’t know him. Is he cute?”

I picture Russell’s warm brown eyes and curls and strong arms. “Yeah, really cute. But also gay.”

“Damn. Are you sure? I thought Carlos was gay when I first met him, and…um…he is
definitely
not.” Her face turns a little pinker, and even though I’m the only other person here, I suddenly feel excluded from the conversation.

“I’m pretty sure about Russell. He knows about hair products, and he’s totally into that guy who’s doing the set for
Midsummer.
Olivier something?”

“Really?” Zoe wrinkles her nose. “Isn’t that guy, like, fifty?”

“He’s pretty attractive, though. Russell showed me a picture on his phone.”

“Russell has a
picture
of him on his
phone
?”

I raise an eyebrow at her. “I know, right?”

“Yeah, definitely gay. That sucks.”

“Why’d you think Carlos was?”

“This is going to sound awful, but he seemed too respectful to be straight. He looked me in the eyes when we talked, instead of trying to peek down my shirt. My last couple of boyfriends before him basically wanted a set of boobs to hang out with.”

“Can I see a picture?” I ask.

“Of my boobs?”

I laugh. “Of your
boyfriend.
”

“I know. I’m just messing with you.” Zoe pulls out her phone and opens a picture. Carlos has a stubbly beard, squarish black glasses, and those deep parentheses around his smile that are almost dimples but not quite. His teeth look incredibly white against the tan of his skin. Zoe’s in the picture, too, wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and pressing her cheek against his. They look totally at ease with each other, and I’m flooded with an irrational wave of jealousy that there are people in the world who know Zoe so much better than I do. I want to skip ahead to a time when we’ve known each other for years, when we meet new people and they marvel at the depth of our friendship.

“He’s adorable,” I manage to say.

“Isn’t he?” Even though she must’ve seen the picture a million times, Zoe’s still practically glowing as she looks at it.

“How long have you guys been together?”

“About ten months. Are you dating anyone?”

I shake my head. “I was with this guy Jason for, like, five months this past year, but we broke up in April. He was really cute and sweet and everything, but we weren’t into any of the same stuff. We kind of ran out of things to talk about.”

Zoe nods. “That sucks. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine; it was my decision. Plus, now I don’t have to listen to my mom complain every single day about how he’s not right for me.”

“She didn’t like him?”

“She thought he was nice. But he wasn’t a theater person, and my parents kind of have this thing about how only theater people can really understand other theater people. My uncle’s dating this financial analyst, and my mom will
not
leave him alone about it.”

“Wait,
everyone
in your family’s a theater person?”

“Pretty much.”

“Wow, that’s crazy. Are they all actors?”

Zoe’s getting uncomfortably close to the truth. I wish I didn’t have to be secretive with her when she’s making such an effort with me, but I can’t tell her about my mom right now, not when our friendship is progressing so well. Maybe I’ll never have to tell her.

“They do lots of different stuff,” I say. “Some of them sing opera or dance or direct or whatever, but pretty much everyone is an insanely talented performer. They all came to Allerdale, and they were all really successful, so that’s why it sucks so much that I’ve basically failed here.”

“You haven’t failed, Brooklyn. You’re being way too hard on yourself.”

“We don’t have to talk about it anymore,” I say, hoping she’ll take the hint and drop it.

“Okay.” She shifts, and for a minute I’m afraid I’ve unintentionally ended the conversation altogether. But she just changes position so that we’re both cross-legged and facing each other, knees almost touching. “Road trips, love or hate?” she asks.

It’s so unexpected that I start laughing. “Um, hate, I guess—I can’t drive, I have no sense of direction, and I have a really small bladder. Why do you ask?”

“Because I want to know more things about you.”

I feel a small shift deep inside me, a little click, like something tiny has ignited. Zoe, with the Juilliard acceptance letter and the circle of admirers, wants to know more things about
me.

“Oh,” I say, because I’m too surprised to say anything else.

“Now you,” she says, and I realize with a surge of happiness that this game could go on indefinitely.

“Okay,” I say. “Um, leggings—love or hate?”

“Under dresses, love. As pants, hate.”

“Me too!”

“
Cats,
love or hate?” she asks.

“The animal or the musical?”

“The musical.”

I feel pretty neutral about it, but I say, “Hate,” because I know every self-respecting theater person is supposed to hate
Cats.
“You?” I ask.

Zoe smiles sheepishly. “I kind of love it, honestly. It makes me nostalgic. I used to pin a scarf to the butt of a leotard like a tail and dance to the sound track every day when I was little.”

I love that she answered that way. I also wonder if she was testing me.

“Sleeping till noon, love or hate?” I ask her.

“Love,” Zoe says. “Sex—love or hate?”

I think about lying again, but that’s already backfired on me once, so I decide to go with the truth. “Not applicable,” I say.