The Vanishing Half(70)
“You’re a lifesaver,” she’d say, or, “I owe you one.” Never just, thank you.
During the first act, before preparing the concession stand for intermission, Jude slipped into the wing to watch a play that became sillier the more times she saw it. A western musical about a spunky girl who arrives in a ghost town to find it occupied by actual ghosts.
“I think it’s very clever,” Kennedy said. “Sort of like Hamlet when you think about it.” The play was nothing like Hamlet, but she said it with such conviction that you almost believed her. It was the first starring role she’d landed since dropping out of school two months ago, she told Jude one evening after a show. They were sitting together at a diner across the street, Kennedy dipping fries into a puddle of ranch.
“My mother still hasn’t been to a show,” she said. “She’s so pissed at me for leaving school. She thinks I’m gambling away my future. And maybe I am. Hardly anyone makes it, right?”
For the first time, she dropped the bravado, looking so genuinely unsure of herself that Jude almost squeezed her hand. The sudden rush of empathy startled her. Was that what it was like to be this girl? An unwise choice earning you sympathy, not scorn, a single moment of doubt forcing a practical stranger to affirm that you were, in fact, special?
“No one gets into med school either,” Jude said.
“Oh, it’s not the same. My mother would love if I were going to be a doctor, trust me. I suppose most mothers would. They all want us to live better lives than they did, right?”
“What was hers like?”
“Rough. You know, real white trash, Grapes of Wrath. Walked ten miles each day just to get to school, all that.”
“She come from a big family?”
“Oh no. Just her. But her mother and father died years ago. She’s the only one left.”
Sometimes you could understand why Stella passed over. Who didn’t dream of leaving herself behind and starting over as someone new? But how could she kill the people who’d loved her? How could she leave the people who still longed for her, years later, and never even look back? That was the part that Jude could never understand.
“I don’t know how you put up with her,” Barry said. “That girl never stops talking! I’d shove that bonnet in her mouth.”
Like the rest of the cast, he found Kennedy insufferable. But Jude needed to hear her talk. She was searching all of her stories for Stella. So she lifted that dress over her head, listening to Kennedy go on about how she wanted to visit India over the summer, but she was worried, you know. You can’t even drink the water in a place like that, and she had a friend—well, not really a friend, a childhood neighbor, Tammy Roberts—who went on a mission trip there and came back sick from eating fruit. Can you imagine it, fruit? She’d rather die with a needle jabbed in her arm than let a mango kill her. Another time, Kennedy told her that an old fling would be in the audience, a married surfer who lived in her apartment building. She’d slept with him once after he brought a bottle of absinthe back from France.
“We saw some trippy shit,” she said, stretching out barefoot on the lumpy couch.
Curtain was in fifteen, and she still wasn’t even dressed yet. She was never focused, never prepared. When Jude arrived to help her dress, she always answered the door a little surprised, as if she hadn’t been the one to ask Jude in the first place. She always mentioned her mother suddenly, like when she told Jude before a show that she had first started acting when she was eleven. Her mother had placed her in all of these different activities because that’s what parents do in Brentwood, cast their children out like a fishing net and hope that they catch a talent. So she’d taken tennis lessons and ballet classes and clarinet and piano—enough instruments to start her own symphony, really. But nothing stuck. She was horribly mediocre. Her mother was embarrassed.
“She never said as much but I could tell,” Kennedy said. “She really wanted me to be special.”
So on a whim, she’d auditioned for a school play about the gold rush and earned a small role as a Chinese railroad worker. Only seven lines, but her mother helped her memorize them, holding the script in one hand, stirring pasta sauce with the other. Kennedy dragging her invisible pick across the kitchen floor.
“I mean, it was completely ridiculous,” she said. “Here I am, playing some coolie in one of those straw hats. You couldn’t even see my face. But my mother told me I did a good job. She was . . . I don’t know, she seemed excited for once.”
She spoke about her mother wistfully, the way everyone talked about Stella. That was the only part that felt real.
* * *
—
FOR THE REST OF NOVEMBER, Jude Winston worked The Midnight Marauders shift. She refilled the popcorn machines, passed out Playbills at the door, helped old ladies to their seats. At night, she fell asleep, still hearing the overture. She closed her eyes and saw Kennedy at center stage, glowing in light. They couldn’t be cousins. Each time the blonde swept into the theater, her face hidden behind sunglasses, the idea seemed even more preposterous. A long-lost relative—you’d have something in common, wouldn’t you? Maybe you couldn’t spot it at first, but in time, you’d feel, somehow, your shared blood. But the longer she spent around Kennedy, the more foreign the girl seemed.