Why Can't I Be You (13 page)

W
hen the conference
was done for the day, I went back to my room to relax. I showered in the big bathtub-shower combo. Before I got in, I opened the doors to the balcony and slid the Japanese screen to the bathtub open. The cool, fresh air and the hot water was the perfect combo. I filled the room with steam.

After my shower, I made a pot of coffee and drank two cups while sitting out on the balcony in my big fluffy white hotel robe, taking in the view, trying my hardest to just be. But then I realized I should probably change my spa stay to just one person. There were appointments booked, and I didn’t want to get billed for Deagan’s massages and mud baths. I paced around my hotel room while I waited for someone to pick up the phone.

“Hi,” I said, “I have reservations booked for next week, with my boyfriend, but now it looks like I’ll be coming alone. Under Jenny Shaw.”

“Hmm,” the woman on the other end of the phone said. “I don’t see anything here.”

“Maybe it’s under Deagan Holmes?”

“Okay . . . ,” she said, and I could hear her typing. “It looks like that reservation was canceled.”

“Canceled?”

“Yes, there’s a note here in the system that the reservation was canceled last month.”

“Last month?” My heart pounded. So not only had Deagan dumped me to “explore” Faye, but he’d planned on doing it for at least a month.

We’d been a couple in that month. Things had been pretty normal. We went to dinner. We watched movies on the couch. We had sex. And that whole time he was already planning to break up with me. He was pretending like everything was fine, and he already had one foot out the door.

I hung up the phone and sat on the floor. The cool, fresh air was starting to get too cool, but I couldn’t bring myself to go shut the door, so I just sat there, crying and shivering like a pathetic mess.

There was a knock at the door, so I picked myself up off the floor and wiped my face on the sleeve of my robe.

“It’s Myra,” I heard her yell, before I even got to the door.

“You’re not ready yet,” she said, when I let her in. “What’s going on?”

“I just . . . ,” I said, and then I broke down again.

“Oh, honey,” Myra said, and handed me a pack of tissues from her purse.

“A whole month,” I said. “He was planning to dump me for a whole month! He canceled the spa reservations a month ago!”

“Oh no!” Myra said, wrapping her arms around me. “I’m so sorry, J.”

“How could he? How could he pretend that everything was normal while he was planning to break up with me the whole time? He’s such a liar.” Of course, as soon as I said it, I realized what a big fat double standard it was to call Deagan a liar, and that made me cry harder.

“I think you dodged a bullet,” Myra said. “He showed you who he really is, and, thankfully, he did that before you got married or bought a house or had a kid.”

“He didn’t even want any of those things with me.”

“Which just goes to show you how stupid he is,” Myra said. “So you dodged a bullet.” She sat down on the bed.

I crashed on the floor again, wrapping my robe around myself tightly and hugging my legs to my chest. “I guess I’m just finding it hard to feel lucky,” I said.

“Well, of course. When someone shows you their true colors like that, you still get to be sad that they aren’t who you wanted them to be. You miss who you thought they were, even if who they really are completely sucks.”

She looked at me. It was a hard, heavy look, and it made me wonder if this wisdom she was sharing with me was something she’d learned the hard way when her best friend disappeared right after high school. If it was, I guessed Myra was way too polite to ever say so.

I felt guilty in the strangest way, as if I’d been the one to hurt her all those years ago. Of course, I was pretty much feeling all-round awful, so it was hard to separate misplaced Jessie guilt from just plain misery.

“Hey, you’re still coming to the reunion, right?”

I sighed and shook my head. I knew I shouldn’t go. I knew I needed to end the charade. When I thought my life was simple, it was a big mess. Now that it was actually a mess, how would I fare?

“Come on,” Myra said. “I won’t take no for an answer.”

“No,” I said, smiling weakly.

“See, I’m not going to accept that,” she said, grabbing my hands and pulling me up off the floor. “Do you want me to wait while you get ready?”

“No,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I’m sure you have stuff to take care of, Madam Better President Than I Ever Was.”

“I can come back, and we can walk down together.”

“I’m a big girl,” I said. “I can manage. I’ll meet you down there.”

Myra left. I stood in the bathroom, drying my hair with the fat round brush I’d bought from the hairdresser. I thought about bailing. Myra would probably be busy with all the people and the last-minute details. Maybe she’d forget about me. I had an excuse. I got dumped. I got worse than dumped. I was cheated on and canceled on and lied to and humiliated.

I couldn’t stop picturing Deagan and Faye lying in bed together, talking about how he was going to dump me. Did they have discussions about how stupidly oblivious I was? Other people had to know. Had I missed the pitying looks when I’d gone to the Old Toad for beers with the volleyball team after a game? Was everyone talking about clueless, ridiculous me behind my back? I thought about it while I put my makeup on, while I found my shoes and shimmied into my red dress and grabbed the name tag I’d swiped the night before. I thought about it when I left my room and took the elevator downstairs. What I didn’t think about was what I was about to do, and then I was at the door to the reunion, with all the streamers and glitter and a DJ playing Depeche Mode, and I just stood there, like a deer caught in the disco-ball lights.

Then I had a horrible, horrible thought: What if Jessie Morgan did show up?

I scanned the room in a panic, looking for someone who looked like me. But I couldn’t see faces in the dim light. She could be lurking and I wouldn’t even know it. I couldn’t even check to see if she’d picked up her name tag, because I had it.

I decided I needed to just go back to my room, wash my face and go to bed, catch an early flight home in the morning, and pretend none of this ever happened.

“Well, you sure clean up nice, Jessie,” some guy said, as I walked past him on my way back to the elevator. His name tag read “Marshall Hetfield.” In the high school picture next to his name, he was a younger, smiling guy with slightly more hair. He wore a letter jacket and held a football up by his ear like he was about to make a pass. The high school version of Marshall Hetfield was the kind of guy who never had acne or got picked last in gym, who was prom king and dated the head cheerleader.

Adult Marshall was still attractive, but he wasn’t what he had been.

He put his hand on my shoulder, like he was holding me in place.

“Hi, Marshall,” I said, smiling. There was something thrilling about getting away with being Jessie, and it snapped me out of my panic.

“You heading in?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.” The adrenaline kicked in. It was good to feel something other than hurt.

“I’m just running out for a smoke, but it’s really good to see you.” He slipped his hand around my waist and kissed my cheek. I could practically taste his cologne. “What do you say, when I get back we head over to the high school and meet up under the bleachers like old times?” he whispered into my ear.

“I’m good for now,” I said, smiling enough to seem at least a little bit flirty. “But thanks.” While I was in bed by ten on Friday nights in high school, wondering what it felt like to be actually, honest-to-goodness kissed, Jessie Morgan was hooking up with guys in dark corners.

From across the room, by the door, Fish was watching us, glaring. He looked away when he caught me watching him back.

“Find me if you change your mind,” Marshall said, his face still very close to mine. His breath was hot. “I dream about you.” I saw a flash of gold on his finger. When he walked away, I could still smell his cologne and the whiskey on his breath, like it had soaked into my hair and my dress.

“Hey,” Myra said, running across the lobby to me. “I have a surprise for you.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“Don’t kill me.” She held her hands over her face and peered at me between her fingers.

“Are you giving me a reason to?” I looked for Fish, but he had disappeared into the darkened reception room.

“Okay, so yesterday,” she said, grabbing my hand and leading me across the room, “Robbie and I talked the DJ into bringing his karaoke machine.”

“I don’t like where this is going.”

I had never sung karaoke in my life. Not even when Luanne dragged me out to some dive bar on the west side because she had an urge to belt out “I Will Survive” to a room full of strangers after a bad breakup. I hid in the bathroom until it was over. Luanne was too drunk to notice I wasn’t singing backup.

“Come on, Jess!” Myra said. “It’ll make Robbie’s day.”

“What song?” I asked, cringing. Not that any answer would be a good one.

“Do you even have to ask?” She pushed me up the stairs to the stage.

Robbie was already standing there with a mic in his hand.

“Hey, guys,” he said to the crowd. “Do you remember Jessie Morgan?” The guys in the class yelled and whooped and hollered. I think a couple of the girls may have booed. My heart was pounding so hard—I felt like the whole room lurched with every beat.

What was the song? What if I didn’t know the song? And even if I did, I’d never sung alone in public before. I was in chamber choir in high school, so I had an excuse to stay late after school. I loved adding my voice to the Fauré Requiem or old English madrigals. I liked feeling a part of something, pretending the people in choir were my friends. But it was one thing to be a tiny little voice in the alto section. There was safety in that. It is another thing entirely to be up on stage singing karaoke in front of a class full of strangers. There were at least three hundred people in the room.

Everyone stared at the well-lit stage. I made note of the exit signs, but they seemed so far away. If I didn’t go through with it, I’d have to push though a sea of people to escape. There wasn’t a good way out.

Part of me wanted to do it, to know if I could. Everybody has rock-star dreams sometimes. Everyone wants an excuse to let go. I had mine in front me. All I had to do was take it.

The music started, and I knew the song. It was “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” My dad was a huge Meat Loaf fan. I grew up listening to that record. I didn’t know all the words, but I knew enough to get by if I followed along with the karaoke screen.

I walked toward Robbie. There were people. So many people. And the light was bright, and my stomach was churning.

Robbie jumped down from the stage, grabbed Heather’s scarf from her neck, and ran back up, waving it around. He flipped his head like he had long Meat Loaf hair, even though he had a buzz cut, and when he sang, he even kind of sounded like Meat Loaf.

Everyone watching was going to expect me to go for it like that. Jessie Morgan had to have been amazing. She had to have given it everything. She was a girl who wore tube tops and stole her dad’s credit card. She had no inhibitions. If I was going to be her, I had to get rid of mine.

The DJ had a shot and a beer waiting for him on the deck. I stole his shot. He saw me do it and was about to say something, but I mouthed, “Thank you,” and gave him a big smile, and he smiled back. It’s amazing what a little red dress can do. I would not, in my usual clothes, with my old haircut, have gotten the same reaction. In my usual clothes, I would never have grabbed the mic, but me in that red dress was another story.

I missed chiming in on the first chorus. When my solo came around, every single inch of me was shaking, but I could feel the burn of tequila all the way down to my stomach. I took a deep breath. I was terrified that when I opened my mouth, I would throw up in the middle of the stage. I looked at Robbie and pretended it was just him and me. I could sing in front of Robbie. When he smiled, I felt like he was looking out for me. I opened my mouth and belted out the words and tried my best to not look like I was terrified. My voice shook at first, but two lines in it started to sound strong.