You in Five Acts(38)

“If you wanted to find out more about Ethan, you could just ask him,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Or better yet, go to his house. You’re his girlfriend, right?”

You glared at me. You weren’t wearing the FUCK OFF necklace, but I got the message loud and clear. “That’s really none of your business.”

“I think it is,” I said. “Because instead of showing up at his house, you’re at mine. And you didn’t come to run lines, right?” You stared at me wide-eyed but said nothing. Neither of us made a move for the door.

“You don’t understand anything,” you finally said. “I can’t just . . .” You shook your head, narrowed your eyes. “It’s complicated.”

“Why, because of his stupid play?” I asked.

“It’s not stupid to me!” you cried. “I need that play. I don’t have an agent or a résumé or a f*cking Golden Globe nomination. I’m not some diamond in the rough like Joy, and I can’t write my own ticket like Ethan. I’m an aspiring actress in New York City. I might as well say I’m an ant in an ant farm.”

You are special, I should have said. Instead, I laughed dismissively, like a dick.

“You can’t even see what you have, can you?” you asked. “Everyone at school would kill themselves to be you. And you don’t even care.”

“I didn’t think you cared,” I said. “I thought you were better.”

You nodded slowly, your eyes glistening somewhere between anger and tears. “I thought you were nicer,” you said. I swallowed, hard.

“You should go to Staten Island,” I said. “I’m not his understudy.”

I felt guilty when the door slammed behind you, but not as guilty as I feel now. If I had known what you were going through, and how bad it was getting, I never would have said any of it. I never would have said anything at all. I would have opened that door and held you in my arms and never let you go.





Act Three


   Liv





Chapter Fourteen


    February 25

77 days left


I SHOULDN’T HAVE JUST SHOWN UP at your house, I knew that—don’t you think I knew that? I hadn’t even planned to, but then the train screeched to a stop at 86th and I was already on the platform before I even realized I’d stood up. This time it wasn’t an accident, though—“D, Sun, 2pm.” God, how high had I been when I’d written that down? High enough to forget who the “D” stood for—and as I climbed the stairs up to Broadway, I just kept thinking, maybe. Maybe you’d be home. Maybe you’d let me in. Maybe sitting in your room, listening to you talk while your grandma clinked around in the kitchen would work again, and I could leave feeling happy and hopeful and not like I needed to get back on the train to go meet the other D, the one who gave me that feeling in a bottle for twenty bucks.

But that had been a mistake, clearly, and so I was panicking as I walked as fast as I could to the subway, my boots slip-sliding on the black ice, my skin sweaty under my clothes, my heart racing so fast it was hard to believe I hadn’t already taken something. The night before I’d gotten drunk and stoned, which took the edge off the Ritalin, and drifted off into an easy sleep, but I’d woken up in the morning with a monster headache and I was all out of pills so I knew what I had to do if I wanted to feel normal again.

It really does go the way they say it will, a Just Say No cliché all the way. In middle school, there was this acting troupe that came to perform sometimes, a bunch of hammy college kids who did Afterschool Special–style skits about drugs and sex and all of the other things that are supposed to be scary but end up being mind-numbingly boring since they happen in middle school assemblies. A girl would be sitting on a stoop with her friends, and some popular guy—it was always the popular guy, who you could tell was a total *, just based on his preferred wardrobe of leather jacket and jorts—would offer her a joint and she’d be tentative but then everyone else would act like it was no big deal, and by the next scene she’d be blowing rails off the seat of someone’s motorcycle, needing something, anything, to make her feel good.

Obviously some of the details didn’t apply to me, like I would never listen to anyone wearing jorts, not even Drake, and my first joint came from my dad—well, from his sock drawer, anyway. No one was around to pressure me to light it. If anything, I became the instigator, the girl whose parents let her do whatever, who could always throw a party and who never judged. And it was just parties, for a while. I mean, I always smoked, with Jasper and by myself, but harder stuff was strictly social. I’d shroom or take ecstasy . . . I only did coke a few times, because I’d seen way too many celebrity noses cave in on themselves, and I liked mine too much to risk it. But pills were different. They were so easy, so quick—now you see it, now you don’t!—and they didn’t leave a mark or make my hair smell or inspire me to eat an entire can of Pringles dipped in ketchup.

Ironically I started using pills to make me feel less like I was dying. My mom had some Vicodin way back in the medicine cabinet from an old surgery, and the day after Jasper dumped me, when all I could do was lie motionless, crying until I couldn’t breathe and then dry-heaving over the toilet, I took one just to see if it would make me feel less like the entire world was a sucking black hole—and it did. That worked for about a week, but I had to stop taking them when she noticed how empty the bottle was getting. Painkillers in general were harder to get, but I convinced my therapist to prescribe me Xanax, and to balance that out I started taking Adderall or Ritalin, or whatever smart drug I could get my psychopharmacologist to prescribe by phone when I complained that I still had trouble focusing. Those ones made me manic and wired, so I always needed booze or weed to sleep. And since Jasper was gone, I had called Dante, and he had delivered, literally.