Now You See Her (2 page)

IX

I DON’ T KNOW IF IT’S the end of my… 155

X

I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO have these news articles. 177

About the Author

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I
‌

H

OPE IS VANISHING
.

Does that sound too dramatic?

Okay, fine. It’s really just barely dramatic enough. Maybe not even enough.

I don’t mean “hope” the way they think. How could I explain it to them? They’re beyond stupid. They’re clueless and retarded. All of them. I hear my mother and father say, “She doesn’t realize the gravity of all this. . . .” and I want to yell, Are you crazy? Are you on crack?

I’m the one it happened to. So I, like, sort of under- stand the
gravity
. I had the bruises on my wrists for weeks. I wouldn’t even go outside to walk to the class- room building from my gorgeous dorm here for months, either. And I still won’t go out at night. I don’t even like to look out the window when it’s dark.

Let’s try this again, class. This time with motions!

I was a girl with a gift, who was totally going places, and now I’m the girl no one will ever know except as “that Hope somebody-or-other, the girl who vanished.” Well, at least for the time being, until I can straighten everyone’s head out. That’s not exactly fun and games!

My mother used to say that every news story, even a bad review, was good if they spelled your name right. Good for an actor, that is. (We never said “actress” in our house. That was for people who didn’t know any better. Anyone who’s serious about acting is an “actor,” even if they’re a girl.) What my mother meant was that someday I’d be on Broadway or in the movies or have CDs with my name on them bigger than the title of the CD, and then we wouldn’t care less what people thought of my performances, because I’d be wonderful and I’d know it!

I don’t think she had this in mind!

What’s really
grave
is
the effect on me
. They talk about everything that happened right in front of me like I’m not there. They don’t see me. When you don’t see some- one, she disappears. That’s why I’m vanishing. And not the way the police and the school said. And definitely not the way the newspapers said.

Let me try to show you how I feel right now. This is my All-About-Me Journal you’re seeing. (Sweet Jesus, we all have to do these. I haven’t written stuff like “Gee, I like kitties and pizza and birthday parties and the color

pink” since the first grade! That’s what they actually want us to write! One day’s assignment, I swear, was a list of All The Things I Like About Me.) Every time I make an entry, I have to date it. Except I won’t date it, because that’s what Miss Taylor wants me to do, so I use a mark of my own, just to piss her off. Look back: See that little “I”? At the top of the first page? That “I,” it could be a Roman Numeral One. Or it could be a person’s self ! Your ego, who you are.

Your “I.”

That’s how big I feel. As big as that little letter. And getting smaller and
smaller
and
smaller
.

I’m shrinking outside—and I was already very, very thin—but I’m shrinking inside, too. Down to a little, lit- tle mouth with a tiny, squeaky voice that says “Help me.” Like Alice in Wonderland, when she drank from the bot- tle that said, “Drink Me.” (Or was it when she ate the cake? I don’t remember.) But if I don’t find the reverse potion fast, there’s going to be nothing left. It’s unbelievable.

I’m sure my parents are very concerned. Everyone here at my new school says my parents are very, very concerned.

But if I had to bet, I would bet my mother cried that morning at the school when they told her what happened. Then she would have blotted her mascara with tissue. Not to get carried away. That would be so un-Marian.

When they finally brought me to my parents, that’s exactly what she did. I saw it! Two perfect, elegant tears, and then blot, blot, let’s not wreck the look! Let’s not stain the Kate Spade sweater! There I was—cold and dirty and bruised and dehydrated and scared to death, and my mother just wanted to make sure her “face,” as she calls it, was still perfect. My dad at least messed his hair up, and kept muttering to the police things like “That seems impossible.” Or, “How could she have done that?” And, “No, that was her mother’s sister, not her sis- ter. We only have one other child, a son.” Or, “Are you sure?”

And he might have been pulling on his tie and mess- ing up his hair, but he sure was
not
all over me with kisses and relief and joy. I sure wasn’t his little princess then, his superstar, his little stick of dynamite—all those things he’d called me when he came running to the stage door, night after night, every time I was in a show for the past eight years! He acted like none of that had ever hap- pened. He didn’t pick me up and swing me around and give me a big bouquet of yellow roses (our special flower, though I read somewhere it means betrayal).

They looked at me like the princess who turned into a frog.

It made me think, Really, did they ever really care? About me? The real me? Was there a real me—to them?

Or was it just, ever so casually, “Oh, Hope got the lead in this. . . . Hope won that competition in Los Angeles. . . .” My mom used to find a way to work every conversation around to me being an actor—it was like
she
won the competition or got the role. It was all she could ever talk about, and I can’t imagine how she would go on when I wasn’t even there to get embar- rassed and tell her to shut the hell up or I would walk out of the house. And when I would just do normal kid things, which was not very often (I had to sleep ten hours and in a cucumber mask!), she wouldn’t even notice me, except when I was walking out. She’d say, “Don’t eat fries, Hopie. Use your skin lotion, Hopie.”

I can’t blame the kids I used to go to school with for hating my guts when I got paid hundreds or even thou- sands of dollars for being in a commercial or a play—or even acting in the regional theater group when I couldn’t get something that paid. I was better than they were—I don’t mean better at acting; I mean, just better, and pret- tier, and more grown-up. They must have thought I was totally stuck-up because I didn’t go out for burgers or stay over or go to the nine o’clock movie. You can’t expect reg- ular people to understand. I know that. Kids thought I was nuts that I gave up going to the pool (tanning wrecks your skin) and Disney World (no time) and all that junk for “my art.”

But my parents! They made me who I am! You’d think they’d want to at least protect and take care of the girl they gave ten hundred lessons, the girl they took to ten hundred auditions. I remember them sending me up to the studio or agent’s office. (They would stand down- stairs and smoke. They thought I didn’t know.) I can remember them saying afterward they were “just sure” I’d done the best of anyone . . . but did I remember to smile on the word “super”? Was I sure? You’d have thought my parents would at least think of how valuable I was, and how dear to them, and how damned hard I tried for them. For me too, of course. For me too.

But all I had to do was get in trouble once (never mind that I had nothing to do with it!), and they went cold as the ice on the lake.

Maybe all they ever cared about anyway was how things looked. That’s it. How things looked to the gour- met group and the Fine Arts Council and the Bellamy Country Club.

Not me. The Gift.

Yeah, what they cared about was The Gift.

It’s like I’m just a coat that was wrapped around The Gift.

I remember it all. When I was twelve and I made, like, half a noise about wanting to be a cheerleader for

just one year. And they were, like, “You have a
gift
, Hope. And we’ve spent years and a great deal of money devel- oping that gift . . . but we want you to be happy, and if you want to give it up, we’ll understand. . . .”

Well, I didn’t then, not after a complete guilt trip! The next week I was back getting a song ready to try out for some Christmas show at the Civic Center.

And they liked me again.

It was as if The Gift and I were two
people
, two sep- arate people.

Only one of them—Hope—nobody cared about. And nobody does still, I guess!

The Gift always wanted more, and always got what it wanted. The Gift wanted me acting and singing in plays, being in commercials, and someday being in movies. The Gift was my parents’ little medal they could take out and wear.

When I was little, it was just fun. When I got a little bigger, it wasn’t so much fun.

And then, when I got old enough that I actually could have stopped acting if I wanted to—they couldn’t have forced me—I was obsessed with it. And plus, there isn’t anything else I could ever do. The world of back- stage in a theater, the smell of makeup and dust and chalk, is more real to me than my own bedroom. My parents made sure of that. They dragged me to Broadway

shows that were written when
they
were kids. Revivals, they called them. And you practically had to revive me after I saw one, like
Oklahoma!
Because it was so boring. But they said if I wanted to be a big movie star, I had to “pay my dues” on the stage. All really famous actors did. They loved “the stage.” For me, until I got used to it, I could never understand how you wouldn’t go bonkers saying the same words over and over and over every day. But then, I got to know, like every time a singer sings a song, even if it’s their famous song they’ve done a thou- sand times, it feels different. And people go crazy over you. There’s nothing like people going crazy over you. That’s what you want, even more than the money.

My mother would tell me how she and her two sis- ters, Maggie and Marjorie, went to every Broadway show when it opened and sat in the cheapest seats with their grandmother. How her grandmother taught my mom to play the piano, though my mother can’t do it anymore. Even when I was little, before I got addicted to the applause and the attention, my mom was already addicted to it for me. She was going to be an actor when
she
was young, but I picked up that her parents made her get married instead. She got married, like, four months after she met my father. You had to then if you were pregnant. Her sister Marjorie was going to be a dancer. She didn’t do it either. She quit. Her other sister had no

talent except for a little singing, and she didn’t do it long. And she ended up as a biology professor.

See, if you don’t care about what my mother cares about, you don’t count. Just like her sister (my mother calls her “the frog dissection queen”) doesn’t count, even though she used to sing. It was Aunt Maggie’s choice to quit. Something happened to Aunt Marjorie—maybe she pulled a groin muscle or something. I don’t remem- ber. Anyhow, she didn’t have to quit. If you have The Gift and quit anyhow, you don’t count.

Now I don’t count.

Which makes no sense because it wasn’t my decision. You know what I expected, after all I’d been through? I really thought I’d get taken care of at home kind of care- fully for part of a semester, like someone who’d been sick. Instead, they started driving, and I thought we were going home so I went to sleep in the backseat. Until they turned in to Miss Taylor’s I didn’t know a thing.

I was so pissed off that I punched my dad and told him what a lying crap he was. I wouldn’t get out of the car, so they sent this beautiful but wacko girl, Suzette, who has, like, four zillion tattoos, down to talk to me. Suzette told me I could sit there until I starved to death and I would still have to come in anyway. She said she wanted to sing in a metal band but her parents wanted her to go to Yale, so guess who won? After

that, I could tell it was no use.

My parents were going to get their way. At least tem- porarily. They couldn’t wait to get me stuck away here. All nice and out of sight. Nothing to embarrass the Romanos once the big hoopla died down in the news- papers. But after that, my parents didn’t come to see me for a month! And I was only allowed to call them once because I was supposed to get used to my new environ- ment and “trust” it. I’m so sure.

I think they’re embarrassed. They’ve done so much bragging about me to their friends—the guys with their red martini noses and the women with their lips so stuffed with collagen they look like a bass or a goldfish. Now those “friends” have something juicy to gossip about. It’s probably get-even time for them. They can talk about me, but that’s because their own kids have no talent. They practically have no lives. Their fat daughters are good in
math
! Or
history
! That’s so fine. Except math and history don’t make you famous. Name one person who’s famous for math.

Okay, Einstein.

The kids were always jealous of me, but the parents were worse. It must have been awful for them to have kids who were so dull and ordinary. The girls whose feet got so big they would never make it past city in gymnas- tics, even if they took lessons until they were forty, and