You in Five Acts(44)

“I wish there was some way for me to get out of going to Florida with my parents, but it’s my cousin’s wedding, so I’m screwed,” Ethan continued, somehow managing to make a tropical vacation in the dead of winter sound like a punishment. “I thought we were in a good place, but obviously we’re not. So we’ll need to amp up our rehearsals for now.”

“Come on,” you said, finally breaking your silence. “That’s crazy. We’re both already off-book. We’ve got the blocking down. Once we decide what we—what our characters want . . .” You looked at me, and for the first time in days you didn’t look angry. “It’ll all fall into place,” you finished.

“What they want?” Ethan asked, finally moving his hand from my back to gesture theatrically at you. “What do you mean, what they want? I think it’s pretty clear what they want.”

“To jump off the bridge,” I said, biting my lip. The second pill was finally starting its magic; the filter on the room changed.

“No,” Ethan said. “I mean, yes, that’s what they do, or try to do, but it’s not what they want. What they want is to be seen, and heard, and connected with.” He walked over to me and took my hand, lifted it to his mouth, and kissed it gently. It was actually sweet, and caught me off guard. It didn’t make me cringe. It reminded me of little Ethan Entsky from my ninth grade diction class, with the voice that hadn’t fully changed and would crack at inopportune moments.

“What they want,” Ethan said, looking at me earnestly, “is each other.”

“Right,” I said, running my dry tongue across the roof of my mouth. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want Ethan, but I didn’t want to hurt him, either, or ruin the play he’d worked so hard on . . . for me. He’d done it for me, I knew that—everyone did. All that time I’d been throwing it in his face, when I should have been thanking him. Some people got liquid courage, but in that moment I had 150 milligrams of clarity.

I couldn’t choose you. That wasn’t an option—too much was at stake, we were already in too deep. In five weeks, when the curtain fell and it was all over, I could tell you how your smile made my knees shake, how I’d secretly stolen the drama cast list from the bulletin board, folded it up and stuck it in my purse just to be able to file it away in a closet shoebox with all of my old birthday cards and passed notes and love letters, because I knew someday I would look back at our names side by side and say, that was the beginning. In five weeks I could tell you everything. I just had to hold on until then.

“So when do you want to—” I dropped Ethan’s hand and turned to ask you about your schedule, but all I saw was the curtain swaying from your stage-left exit.

I didn’t know how much I’d hurt you then. I didn’t know how much more damage I’d do before I was finished.

All I knew was that you were already gone.





Chapter Sixteen


    March

Two months left


MARCH WAS A RABBIT HOLE. I have memories of places without knowing exactly how I got there, or why. One Saturday I even ended up at a Law & Order open casting call in some depressing midtown office. I read for a valedictorian who was getting cyber-bullied, but my hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t read the sides and they told me to go get some water but instead I took two muscle relaxers and walked over to Bryant Park and fell asleep on the grass.

At school I started avoiding everyone, hanging out on the squares with the art kids at lunch, chain-smoking and watching Jasper hold court with his stupid tongue-pierced, ombré-haired groupies and shivering in my coat even as the temperature climbed into the sixties week by week. I was always cold, and when I made a fist you could see the grooves in the bones under my skin, like a Día de los Muertos figurine. My parents kept asking me if I was OK and I would tell them it was just stress. I stayed in my room most of the time and pretended to be working but instead I was hunched over my desk with a CVS pill crusher, grinding up the Nuvigil and Adderall and whatever else I could find to experiment with and sucking them through a plastic straw because they weren’t working anymore. Nothing was working, everyone had a different reason to hate me, and no one cared where I was, so I could do anything. So much for my septum.

At some point my ritual stopped making me better and started making me worse, but it was way too late to stop, so I just kept marching, going through the motions at rehearsals and nodding at any criticisms like I knew just how to fix it, even though the words had lost all meaning. I was treating the lines like they were just a very long password spelled out phonetically, and if I said them in the right order and at the right volume I’d be set free for the night. If Showcase still scared me during those lost weeks I don’t remember it, but I don’t think I had the capacity to be scared anymore. I barely felt anything, which was the whole point.

I went uptown on the weekends, saying I was going to Joy’s but ending up at one of Dante’s friends’ instead, repeats of Smoke Dog’s party only without me crying or throwing up, because I’d developed a tolerance and because Dante told me he’d ban me if I ever “acted like a basic high school bitch” again. I’m pretty sure I texted you from some of those parties, but in the mornings I’d just delete everything, as if erasing the messages could take them back. For all I knew you’d blocked me. You never responded, and I burned with shame every single time.