Not Otherwise Specified (18 page)

None of these girls except Bianca heard me do a bizarre rendition of “Far from the Home I Love” like the same one-trick pony I apparently am, so they're all looking at me like I'm crazy all anew just like those girls did. I'm choosing to believe that's a good sign because hey, it worked once, and Bianca's smiling at me.

And then it's singing time.

They go reverse-order this time so I'm near the beginning. I've practiced this a hundred times, so even if I know it's far from perfect, it's not especially scary. I focus on getting the character through and
not
making it look like I've done it a hundred damn times.

And when I get to the chorus I sing a few of the notes as pretty and clear as I can to show that I have at least
some
skill, that I can do more than talk my way through a song that's conveniently meant to be talked through. What's weird is that I do pretty well on showing off those couple of notes. I only have
to sing a little bit, all in all, so as long as they don't clock me on that I'm pretty sure I got through it, and it's not like I didn't do the song how it's supposed to be done. All they can judge me for is my song choice, and, you know, fair enough, but just like the monologue this is about all I can do. I can't hold a whole song on my own like Bianca. I can't hit the high note in Maggie's part of “At the Ballet,” so I'll just be Sheila and I'll do a damn good job.

Unlike the confused silence after my monologue, I get some applause now, hooray.

Some other girls go, and I'm actually surprised by how just okay some of them are. Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of talent here, but in between there are girls who I'm kind of wondering how they got through. I mean, they're no worse than me (except this one girl, did she sleep with someone?) but they didn't choose the right song for them. Like, come on, don't try to sing “It Won't Be Long Now” if you can't fly your way into Vanessa's high notes, y'know?

And then it's Bianca, and God, she's nervous in this way she's only supposed to be for the dancing. I give her wrist a little squeeze on her way up to the front of the room. She can do this. She's auditioned with “Let's Hear It for the Boy” a billion times. I realize all of a sudden that there's a good chance these exact auditioners have heard her do “Let's Hear It for the Boy” a billion times and maybe they'll remember her as the girl they once let in or maybe they'll take off points for that
maybe being the only song she can sing. But it isn't. Bianca could sing
anything
.

But she doesn't. She's afraid.

So she sings it, and she sings it well. She hits her notes and gets her vibrato on the right ones. But she doesn't sing it like she's having fun. She doesn't sing it with that spark in her. She doesn't sing like it's easy and she wants it and she's pouring out notes like water.

She doesn't sing it like
Bianca
.

And I know in that minute that she's screwed.

•  •  •

Called back:

James Grey

a really small group of people we don't care about

Me

ME.

Who the hell have I fooled?

The list is posted online somewhere between fifth and sixth period and I see it when I've run to the computer lab to check, and there it is, there it freaking is, fifty names from all over the country and one of them is James and one of them is
me
. In two weeks they're flying us into New York to meet with the board and sing and dance and read all by ourselves for the final audition.

And one of them is
me
.

And none of them is Bianca.

I know at some point I need to call her, or maybe James first, but I can't. My phone immediately lights up with texts from Mason.
Congrats!!
and
dinner tonight?
but I can't, I can't,
because I don't know how many spots they're looking to fill but I know that, on some level, it could have been Bianca and not me. They could have taken me out and put her in.

And I know there is a part of me that does want to call and convince them to switch her in for me.

And there is a part of me that
doesn't
.

So no, I can't call her right now. I can't do anything but duck into the nearest bathroom and bawl, and I didn't even process what time it is or what floor I'm on and then I hear that voice, all feathers and cream and
home
, saying, “Etta?”

I sink to the floor of my stall and I'm crying so hard I can't see her, but then she crawls under the door of the stall and unlocks it and she's sitting with me and she says, “Shh shh shh okay, come here. Etta, it's okay, hey hey hey.”

I hear the bathroom door open and someone says, “Rachel?” I think it's Isabel.

“Fuck off, okay?” Rachel says.

“Jesus, fine.” The door closes.

Rachel pulls me into her, crossing her legs over mine, whispering, “Okay, okay. Did they do something?” she says. “I told them to leave you alone, honey, I told them . . .”

“I'm a terrible friend, I'm a terrible friend, I'm a terrible goddamn friend.”

“No. Hey. No, you're not.”

“Y-yes.”

“No. And come on, who would know better than me.”

I sniffle and hide in the collar of her expensive coat and God, it's so familiar, this is so safe, why did I ever want to go to New York when this girl was right here, I need to call and convince them to switch Bianca in for me, I need to make all of this right, I can fix this, I can
fix
this. If Rachel's holding me I can fix anything.

“Is this about Cupcake?” she says.

“What?”

“You didn't hear.”

“Rachel, what?”

“Come on,” she says. “Screw Spanish. You need something chocolate.”

•  •  •

We're at the retro coffee shop. She buys me hot chocolate and gets just tea for herself. They're out of caramel apple lattes. Being best friends with a diabetic was always such a mindfuck for a wannabe anorexic, but it's not like diabetics can't eat sugar, they just have to shoot up extra for it, so she'd use it as a card to play sometimes,
look, if I can eat a cookie so can you
.

“So tell me what happened,” she says.

“We went to the audition and we'd prepared so hard, all three of us. I didn't hear the boys audition and I've never heard Ian sing so I don't know, maybe he wasn't that good, but he got through to the second round so he couldn't have been awful but then again so did I and how did I make it to
third
—”

“Slow down. Who's Ian?”

“James's boyfriend.”

“And James is . . .”

“Bianca's brother. He's my friend.”

Old Rachel would have teased me,
you're friends with a boy? Do you know where their hands have been?
Especially a gay boy. All that
Queer as Folk
bullshit about lesbians and gay boys being friends is, yeah, bullshit. We dance at the same clubs and that's about it.

Except apparently not even that, because Cupcake's closing down. They're shutting down the whole strip. Health code violations, noise complaints, crime, gay gay gay gay gay.

I pause and say, “I can't believe that. Cupcake was the only decent thing around here.”

“Right? I don't even know what's going to happen now. We'll have to found our own club. One with an actual liquor bar.” She's coughing out this laugh, but she's red under the eyes and I think maybe she's been crying about Cupcake, and that makes me wonder, comparatively, how much she's cried about me.

“Hey,” Rachel says. “Keep talking.”

“About Bianca?”

“Uh-huh.”

“She's amazing, and she wasn't even
bad
, not even
sort of
, she just wasn't good
enough
. She just wasn't fucking
perfect
and like what do I do with that, we're trying to convince this girl that she can eat, that she doesn't have to be this delicate
little thing, that she doesn't have to be
perfect
, and then here she is and she blew everything because she had
one
off day, how am I supposed to expect her to eat a freaking sandwich now?”

“You really love her, huh?” Rachel says, and I really don't care that she doesn't mean it the way I do because it doesn't matter.

“I really, really do.”

“And you don't want to do this, do you? Brentwood. Not really.”

I didn't say that part, but maybe she's right.

“Come on,” she says. “Theater school? What happened to math?”

“I know.”

“I thought you wanted to be a teacher.” It's that voice again, that
I thought I knew you
.

I wanted to be a dance teacher.
“I do, I just . . .”

“You want to do this first?”

I nod a little.

She says, “You'll get in. I know you will.”

“I don't know how I've gotten through this far. It doesn't make sense.”

“They see something in you. Come on, don't look so surprised. So maybe you're not the best of all of them, but you're a star, Etta. You've got a drive in you other people just don't.”

“I don't know.”

“If you could spend a day as someone else, you would. Nobody else cares about things like you do. Nobody sets their mind to stuff and just gets it done. You're the only person I know who can get an A on a test just because she decides she's going to.”

I mean, I decide I'm going to and then decide to study for three hours a night the week before the test—there's no magic going on here, you know?—but I know what she means. And I like it, even if I don't know if I believe her. I'm
just
Etta.

I was just named after a damn musical goddess, I know, I know, and I really need to go call my other half.

She says, “I just . . . you know.”

I don't know. “What?”

“Don't want you to go.”

“Oh . . .”

“No, I know it's stupid and selfish, it's just . . . I don't know. I feel like we're fixing us, you know?”

I nod, even though I'm not sure, because this feels too much like I'm making a new friend and not enough like I'm falling back into what we had. Right now I can't imagine going home with Rachel and baking cookies for her sisters and falling asleep watching
Paris Is Burning
. I feel like those things happened in another life.

“I started ballet again,” I say, even though it's (maybe) not technically true, just as a test of some kind, I guess.

Her face is neutral. “Yeah?” she says. “Why?”

“Because I felt like if I didn't I would die, or something,” I say, which is a quote from
My So-Called Life
, which we devoured when we were in fourth grade. We thought we would be Angela and Rayanne. We thought we would have them make up in the finale and grow old together. We would have so much more than one season.

She cracks a smile.

Maybe this means something. Maybe this means I can really do ballet again. God, I shouldn't need her approval for it. I don't know.

“You should come out with us tonight,” she says. “Cupcake's open another week. We're doing this big push-the-boat-out party.”

“We?”

She crosses her ankles with a shrug. She never looks at home in this uniform. She should be in her flare-leg jeans, her hippy-dippy headbands, her white eyeliner. No, she should be in her T-shirt and yoga pants like she was in middle school, before we knew the Disco Dykes existed. She should be in the crap I wear now because it's all that fits.

If it were a movie, I'd dump Rachel like she dumped me and find a hot guy and make out on her car. I mean, I would get Mason to make out on her car with me. It's kind of weird that my mind didn't immediately go to him, I guess.

I was supposed to have dinner with him tonight. And I know I'm supposed to see Bianca.

“I'll talk to them,” she says. “If I tell them to be cool, they'll be cool. Or I'll just get them really drunk first, whatever.”

“Can we get really drunk first? Like, now?”

She checks her watch. “It's Tuesday?”

“Uh-huh. Your mom works late. Twins have gymnastics.”

“Yep. Yes. We can get really drunk first like now.”

RACHEL BARELY DRINKS BECAUSE HER
blood sugar tanks, so pretty much we're just cashed out on her bathroom floor with some bottle of wine she produces from her parents' cellar and she's had two sips and I've had a zillion and she's giggly because I'm giggly or I'm giggly because she's giggly and we are lying on the rug where she taught me how to play Jenga when I was five and taught me how to have an orgasm when I was fifteen and I just love her. I fell in love and fell inside of this girl, forever, and maybe this is what I wanted this whole time. Not Danielle. Not Brentwood. Not New York, not Bianca, not skinny or happy or ballet or healthy, just
home
. This rug, and a lot of wine, and Rachel.

“Rachel,” I say. “Rachel, we've gotta . . . be us.”

“Aw, we are, sweetie,” she says. That doesn't sound right. “We will be.”

“You got it. You
got
it.” I curl up with my head on her knee and she braids some of my dreadlocks. “What if I go to New York?”

She laughs a little. “Remember when we used to make plans?” In our PSAT prep class—we have the exact same type of mother, I swear—we would sit in the back in our hip-huggers and platforms that were somehow so
sad
when we were in that community center and look at the printouts from the practice tests they gave us and the scores that never got higher and never got lower no matter what we did, whether we studied or cried or took them flat-out stoned, and we memorized bus schedules and wrote them in the front of each other's study books, and she wanted to go to Chicago but I wanted to go to New York and for the first time in our entire lives she gave in and let me win because I wanted it
so much
(God, that was the first time, that was the only time, this is my best friend) and we wrote maps to bus stations and maps for Manhattan subways and maps to where our parents hid their credit cards, and we knew we were never going to do it and that made us want to do it so much more, and shit, we're not fifteen anymore, I might be actually going, I could drop out of this audition and go to New York with Rachel and I wouldn't be stealing Bianca's dream and maybe we'd bring Bianca with us because Rachel would
love
her and we could work in coffeehouses and Bianca
could sing in subway stations and we'd save up and send her to Brentwood and I would find Danielle or I would marry Rachel because she is beautiful and she gives me wine and everything would be beautiful and perfect forever.