Everything You Want Me to Be(14)
The first character I remember playing was Fearless Little Sister.
Even when we were little, my brother, Greg, had all the gleeful meanness of a teenager with a sack of cherry bombs and one of his favorite games was trying to terrorize me. He’d hide things in my room—frogs, chameleons, spiders, snakes, everything in a farm kid’s arsenal—trying to get me to scream and that’s exactly what I wanted to do. Instead, I made myself scoop up each wriggling, disgusting little critter and I carried them back to his room, asking him questions, calm as peaches. Where’d you get this snake? Look at the stripe on its belly. What should I name him?
He tried to spook me by telling me it was going to turn my hands green or make my hair fall out, but I just laughed and called him a liar. Oh, I was still scared. I hated the sight of a shoe box, because I knew he’d trapped something slimy or scaly inside it, but I learned how to turn a cry into a grin and how to talk loud when I wanted to curl up and whimper.
I didn’t mind when Greg signed up for the army right after graduation and shipped off to Afghanistan. I knew he’d come home changed; I just didn’t know if it would be changed better or changed worse.
The first and most important lesson in acting is to read your audience. Know what they want you to be and give it to them. My Sunday-school teacher always wanted sweet smiles and soft voices. My middle-school gym teacher wanted aggressive baseball players, swinging like Sosa even if you couldn’t hit a parked car. My dad wanted hard workers—finish the chores well and without complaint. And even though I didn’t like my chores, I became Cinderella and slogged through them as patient and graceful as you please. Fit the character to the play.
You knew you were playing it right when your audience was happy. They smiled and praised you and told each other how wonderful you were. Maybe part of you wished they’d see past the act, even once, and tell you Bridget Jones–style that they liked you just for who you were, but that never happened. No one wanted to go see independent movies with you. They laughed at the books you were reading and thought you were snobby because of the way you talked. So you put on the show, waiting for your real life to begin someday. And the applause made things inside of you warm that you hadn’t even known needed to be warmed up. The real you might be so much colder. So you kept doing it.
I’d acted my entire life and so far it’d only gotten me here, to the first day of senior year at Pine Valley High School. My last year in this building EVER. The last year of mandatory pep fests, the last year of rubbery macaroni and cheese smells in the hallways, the last year of showing my work on math formulas with sine, cosine, and the other one.
I’d always been good at school, not because I was so interested in most of it, but because I could remember anything I read or heard. And that was pretty much what school was, just reading things and then saying them back. Teachers loved that. What I really hated, though, was doing group projects. The teachers always paired up the smart kids with the stupid or lazy kids, which was completely unfair. Sometimes we got to pick our own groups, but even then I always ended up with someone who didn’t understand what we were doing. In American history last spring, Portia and Heather and I did a project on the civil rights movement and Heather kept confusing MLK with Malcolm X. Seriously. And at the end of class one day, Portia said, “I totally understand why you mix them up. I mean, they’re both black.”
And Heather just said, “Yeah,” like Portia was serious.
Portia looked at me like she couldn’t believe it—she’s very sensitive to race issues because she’s Hmong. But she’s sensitive to everything else, too, and that’s because she’s Portia.
Later Portia passed me a note that said, “Don’t u hate it when ur dumb friends r dumber than u think they r?” I almost died laughing and had to hide the note before Mr. Jacobs saw it.
Portia’s family moved here from Chicago when we were in ninth grade. Before then I’d been sure there was something wrong with me. Everyone else seemed to belong here without even trying; they didn’t have to pretend to like things like 4-H or American Idol. Then Portia came, bursting with stories about the Magnificent Mile and the lights on the marquee of the Goodman Theatre, and I realized there were places where it didn’t matter if your cow won a blue ribbon at the state fair. We’d been best friends ever since.
I pulled up to school in Greg’s old truck and waved at Portia, who was just walking in. She waited for me.
“OMG, I love it,” Portia said, eyeing my outfit as I walked up. “Turn around.”
“You like?” I did a catwalk turn. My first-day-of-school outfit was the best New York impression I could find in the Apache mall in Rochester—a black pencil skirt and a gray twinset with my black church heels that had the pointy toes. My hair was long and straight, light brown because mom wouldn’t let me dye it, and I usually wore it like today, swooped over my forehead and tied into a low, sleek ponytail.
“You’re so East Coast, darling.”
“And you are totally California chic.” I grinned at her sundress and chunky sunglasses. “I guess it makes sense that we’re meeting in the middle.”
Portia laughed, slung her arm through mine, and pulled me inside.
“You just missed Becca Larson. She’s got tan lines all over her boobs and half the football team was checking her out. I tried calling Maggie like three times to compare schedules, but she didn’t answer or text back, so I don’t know what her deal is.”