Now You See Her (7 page)

Like, when I was little, I used to be embarrassed when my mother would make me sing in front of her company. And she
always
made me sing in front of her company. My dad called her Mama Rose, which was the name of the pushy stage mother in an old musical my mother loved.

But if you don’t have a stage mother, you—duh— don’t have a career.

At least, at first you don’t.

“Oh, sing for us, Bernadettte,” my mother would say whenever she got enough people in our house to make up an audience. “Sing, darling! Please.” She’d clap her hands. It was pretty stupid.

“Forget it,” I would say, even when I was, like, seven, which most people would consider talking back to your mother, but then, they didn’t have to deal with my mother’s bullshit . . . well, I thought it was bullshit, then. It wasn’t until I was eleven, and Annie, that I really got it. It was like she had a magic pill, and when I swallowed it, I saw everything differently.

But not when I was a little kid. I knew her friends thought I was a brat. I also knew that my own mother thought I had a potbelly and a big nose and she still wanted me to be her performing pig. It wasn’t like we were all cuddly when no one was around and this was a special thing between us that we loved.

“Please? For Mom?” she would beg. She never gave up, even when she could see I was gritting my teeth and that I just felt so ashamed.

“I said forget it,” I would tell her, and I would raise my voice. It was like she couldn’t hear. By then the other people would start getting embarrassed. I knew if I held out long enough, she’d sneak me into the screened-in porch and give me five bucks. Maybe ten bucks. I always did it eventually. I did it even when it made me want to crawl under the Oriental rug and flatten out like my brother’s hamster, Hammerstein, used to do—until the day our maid vacuumed over him.

There were a few times I totally refused.

But I noticed something. I noticed that if I didn’t sing, people just went back to what they were talking about as if I wasn’t even there. They were like, “Oh, kids. You know kids.” And my mother wouldn’t speak to me the whole next day. I hated her, but I hated it worse if she ignored me. So usually I’d do it. I’d get up and sing. I’d sing “When You Wish Upon a Star” or “Where Is

Love?” or one of the other couple of dozen songs my mother laminated and kept in a black binder she called my “repertoire.” It wasn’t that I liked the way they looked at me. It didn’t feel like it did to sing behind foot- lights, the way it did later. In my own living room, in front of the Weisses and the Schaeffers and Sherry Neeland, the biggest gossip in Bellamy and my mother’s so-called best friend, and sometimes even their kids, I felt big and hot and ugly. It was like telling a kid who plays basketball to do a layup in the kitchen “for Mom.” But I just put that thought aside and did it. I’m glad now she never gave up because of just that. It’s harder to perform in front of people you know than in front of a thousand strangers, just like it’s easier for me to tell Em things about how unfair they were to me than it is to tell my own father. It got me so over performance anxiety that I could have done anything, anywhere, which is how you’re supposed to be. Totally loose. For the first few years, I threw up before our Christmas party because I would know that my mother was going to make me sing “Some Children See Him” or “O Holy Night.” I dreaded that she was going to ask, but I couldn’t wait for her to ask. It was like torture, but it was torture that I started to love. I even started looking forward to the looks of disap- pointment that perfect Sherry Neeland gave her own kids when I got to the last note of “Stille Nacht” in

German. I would hold the note a little longer.

I would think, She wishes they were as good as me. Her kids were all very average. Average looking. Average in school. Average at sports or whatever they did. They would grow up and live average lives.

Then came eighth grade. And Bellamy was starting to feel like a shirt that didn’t button in front anymore. Ninth grade was worse: all these girls standing in groups of five or six, screaming and pretending to fall around laughing, hitting each other, texting each other every five minutes. DUCWIC? Duh. After I got my second national commercial, for a kind of sports shoe, for which I made thousands of dollars, they started calling me “Miss Unpopularity.” One of them, Liza Allesandro, even told me, “Not to be mean, but people think it’s kind of stuck- up that you have an agent and stuff. You should try to let them know you’re a regular person, and then they’ll be nicer to you.” I sat next to her in math, and I guess she was trying to be nice. She was some kind of weird Christian who believed in “giving.”

And I was totally shocked. I said, “I couldn’t care less if they include me in stuff!”

But I thought when I went to Starwood, I would have friends. I would have girls like me, who knew what was going on and didn’t expect me to act like a “regular person.” Then I got there six weeks early, for the summer

session, and I was miserable. There were probably only fifty kids there, and hardly any of them were regular stu- dents who would be there in the fall. They were not the real talent. More like the kids in the company back home. Not worth wasting my time on them.

The dorms were tacky and cold, and the floors were
linoleum
, and I had to do my own laundry. I had a chore every week. One week it was scraping spaghetti off plates. One week it was making copies of sheet music. Everybody had a rotating roster of chores. I’d never done laundry or dishes in my life! Was this some sort of price you had to pay? They never mentioned scraping off someone’s drooly food in the brochure, just cleaning up after yourself and looking well groomed. They told us it was to “instill responsibility,” but it was the exact oppo- site of what being an actor was supposed to be! Which was not having to do any of this crap for yourself. I told my parents. It turned out they
knew
I would have to carry sheets up three flights of stairs! My parents thought the wonderful experience of Starwood would make me be okay with the garbage-y stuff I had to do— stuff I thought would’ve been done for us by, like, the kind of lunch ladies they had when I was in middle school. Not the paying students! So they didn’t tell me. But no wonderful stuff had started yet! I was just alone, and everyone else was an idiot. And I was scraping

plates and had a tiny six-line part in some modern psy- cho play a former student wrote about people getting shot in an airport. I played a girl who couldn’t find a cab. About thirty people showed up for it.

The first semester started. And then, instead of really being nice to a new kid, everyone knew each other because they’d all gone there since seventh grade, and they all ignored me.

I wanted to go home—even to Bellamy—but my parents made me promise I would stay the whole first semester because they already paid up front and it was a lot and I would get used to it.

The first weeks were horrible! The choral director told me to stop shouting—that the object was to com- plement each other’s voices, not drown each other out. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. I think she just hated me because she was so freaking ugly and old. But she said I was probably used to “local” vocal groups where the standards were much lower. I almost died. I was going to just walk out, but people stared at me like only a freak would do that. I went back to my place. I was going to get on a bus and leave that night.

When I called my mother, she said, “Bernadette. Hope. You listen to me. Your brother had to go to public school to give you this chance. . . .”

“Uh, this is me, not caring,” I said.

“I don’t care if you don’t care,” she yelled at me. “Go back there and do what they tell you! This isn’t the first time in your life you’ve ever been corrected. . . .”

“It is the first time by some ninety-year-old idiot who tells stories about how she was in the original production of
Hair
!” I said. “In front of a whole bunch of kids who can’t probably do this stuff as good as I do it! I can’t stand it.”

“You can stand anything. And plus, I’m not paying for you to come back, so lump it,” she said, and she hung up. She sent me a hundred dollars by FedEx. I bought all these scented pens and junk.

And then it came to me.

One night, when I was practicing signing my name different ways. It came to me.

Why kids were ignoring me, and being so obvious about it. Why the teachers in dance class were like, “Didn’t you learn a double pirouette by now? Did you really study ballet?” And the teachers in English were like, “You don’t know what ‘observational’ means?”

It was this. They had never seen anyone like me. They were jealous. The other kids were there for an education along with acting. I was just there to make it to the next level. Even though a lot of the girls were beautiful and clique-y, they didn’t have what I had! I called my mother and asked her if she thought I was right, and she said, Of

course, people were always going to be jealous of the best one, and hadn’t she always said that? I started cry- ing and said yes, but that I didn’t know how brave you had to be. She said the good stuff is always hard. Someone came up to the phone booth—kids weren’t allowed cell phones until junior year—and asked if I was all right and I had to tell them to screw off.

My mother said, “Do something different. Make them want you. And think beyond Starwood. There are agents who come to see those shows all the time. What if they’re looking for a particular type, all over the coun- try? What if a big agent sees you and you’re at your best? You could end up leaving there for a movie. I bet you don’t even get to graduate.” I knew that she was right about this, at least.

So I started by starving until I was almost the thinnest girl at Starwood, practically, except for a couple of dancers. I had cheekbones that stuck out and made me look like photos of old movie stars. I studied Audrey Hepburn’s clothes and started wearing big sunglasses and capri pants and flat shoes on our “free day Fridays” and on weekends. I would just sit and stare in the mirror and measure how much thinner my face was every day. I was so skinny I looked sick, but sick in a beautiful way. They even asked to see me in the infirmary. But there was nothing wrong with me. I thought quickly and said

I had just started running and I hadn’t really done any hard exercise before, plus I was getting taller. They wanted me to come back after Thanksgiving to be checked, or they would contact my parents. Like my par- ents would have cared! My mom was giving me StarCaps when I was twelve! I knew enough not to get creepy, insect thin. When I got famous, I didn’t want to end up in magazines for being thin. So I walked this fine line. I looked in library books about the Oscars. I was sort of a dark-haired Gwyneth Whatever-Her-Name-Is. Like Keira Knightley, but dark-skinned. I had seen some of those Oscar movies. Most of them my mother had to make me watch; but then, it made sense why she wanted me to see them. I would be able to do comedy like that, like, so moving that it would make you cry. I would do tragedy so sly you could laugh. I would make all the stars in
People
look like dogs, but I would be womanly, too, and mysterious. The perfect combination of all of them. Not some teenybopper in cute movies about single dads with daughters who were twins.

Real films.

So that’s what I started getting ready for. My break.

I was sure it would come as soon as I got my first real role.

I ordered forty monologue books with my mom’s

credit card, and I started memorizing. After all, I only had to pass the other classes, not ace them. And they were easy. Science but not real science. Just enough so you weren’t a moron. My parents would have me tutored for the college entrance exams and have some- one write the essay for me. Eating got to be something I didn’t even want to do. One night, totally out of the blue, Carter, my brother, called me. He was like, “Are you all right?” and I was like, “Whatever.” I said, “How are you?” He said he was good. I was nice to him because I was that lonely. But I pushed it down. I was on a total quest.

Then, a lightning bolt hit the ground next to me.

I saw Logan for the first time in the cafeteria, where I was picking at my salad, sitting alone at one of the long wooden tables. He had just come to the school for his senior year, even though he’d already done a couple of guest appearances on a TV show. He came into the room like he was making an entrance, for which I didn’t blame him, and even the guys looked up. He wasn’t tall or big, but he made you feel he was tall and big and powerful. He scanned the whole room, with his hands stuck in the pockets of his old leather bomber jacket. And then he started across the room. Toward me! He came and swung his leg over the bench and sat down beside me! My breath started to come faster until I was almost dizzy.

But I told myself, Keep your thoughts straight. Stay in the center.

“What would you say if I told you that you were beautiful, kiddo?” he asked. And like, I know that was a line. But who cares?

I said, “I’d tell you that you were probably smart. And dumb. I might be beautiful. But you don’t just come up and tell a girl that.”

“Exotic.”

“Just different.” “Beyond different.” “It’s your call.”

“Then I’m calling it,” he said, and starting eating my cherry tomatoes.

It was like lines from a movie, and we were the stars. That natural and completely perfect. You don’t usually have a moment like that.

For the first time I knew why they call it being hit by an arrow through your heart when you fall in love. Go back and look at the beginning of this journal entry. Look at those Roman numerals. The IV. That doesn’t mean “intravenous.” That’s me, lonely, yes, but brave and thin and alone, glamorous in being alone. And then suddenly, there’s Logan. The arrow. There he is. And everything changes. I look into his gigantic green eyes, almost like fake eyes, with lashes longer than mine. And I’m shot

through the heart. “He jests at scars that never felt a wound,” says Romeo, right before the balcony scene. You might laugh, but I knew this was it. My whole life was going to change forever. And it did. I was a woman. Even before anything happened between us.