The Me You See (9 page)

“Well, if I got called back…”

“Yeah. If.”

I smiled at her and then looked down at the paper.

“Shall we?” I asked.

She nodded.

She read her part and as she concentrated on the lines, my
hand crept across the cushion of the couch and rested on her thigh.

“Niles,” she said, scanning her eyes quickly down the page.
Her eyes fixed on my fingers spread out on her thigh. “That’s not in the
script.”

“No. It’s not.”

“Niles, don’t…”

I slid a finger up to my lips to shush her, and then pushed
her back to lie down on the couch. Her eyes were fat with panic and her breath
tangled somewhere inside her chest. I watched her head meet the cushion, her
hair spill out all around her face, and her lips part to say something—but I
never heard what it was. All I knew was that my hot breath on her face as my
hands fumbled with the hem of her skirt was melting what little bit of girl was
left inside her.

The look on her face.

Oh, god.

I will never forget that look.

**

At 6:30 am on a Sunday morning, two weeks after that first
run ended, I sat at my dining room table drinking a mug of equal parts Baileys
and coffee. The slow swirl of light into dark was mesmerizing and I resisted
the urge to stir it all together with my spoon.

A quiet tap on the front door shook me and when I looked up
to the etched pane of glass I’d just changed out three days earlier, I saw the
outline of someone who looked a lot like Stefia.

I opened the door and neither of us said anything. I could
hardly believe she was standing in front of me.

She’d come back.

“Hi,” she squeaked after a minute.

“Hi.”

It had snowed the night before and her boots made prints on
the porch.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked. “It’s cold…”

“No.”

The knitted red mittens she wore looked warm, but she
rubbed her hands together and blew on them even so.

“Look,” she said, agitated and almost impatient. “Auditions
are the beginning of next month.”

I watched the squint of her eyes as she focused on a drip
of paint that had dried on the spindle of the porch. She wouldn’t even look at
me.

“Niles, I need your help to audition.”

“I’d be more than happy to…”

“Don’t say anything,” she said, looking to the ground and
kicking her boot at the snow that had warmed to slush under her feet. “Just let
me talk.”

The cold air drifted into my house and I heard my furnace
kick on. I didn’t dare ask her a second time to come inside, so I stepped out
on the porch and pulled the door closed behind me.

 “I need to be on stage, Niles. I need this theater. I
can’t even explain it to you because it doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me, Stefia. I…”

“I shouldn’t even be here talking to you. You get that,
right? The last thing I should have done this morning was walk over here to
talk to you. But I couldn’t stop.”

Stefia pulled her hat down further over her ears and then
wrapped her arms around herself.

“I was ready to quit. I was going to just be done. I was
going to…”

She looked at the railing of the porch, unable to finish.
The cold had crisped the features of her face, pinching at her cheeks and eyes.
Tears clung to the edge of her eyelids, but I knew it wasn’t because she was
crying.

 “Theater is like a drug, darling,” I said, breathing out a
long sigh that looked like a string of smoke in the cold air. “It’s addicting.
Makes a person do all sorts of things they wouldn’t normally do.”

She finally looked at me. Our eyes connected, hers boring
into mine with a mix with ferocity and hope.

“Wait,” she asked. “Are we talking about me…or you?”

“We’re both her slave,” I said, ignoring the question.
“Once you’re a part of the theater, the lines between real life and life on
stage start to blur.”

“And that’s okay?” she spit. “It’s just suddenly okay that
everything is a blurry confused mess?”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s okay,” I said. “It’s just the
way it is.”

**

And so our odd life of being together—but pretending we
weren’t—went on. The blurry confused mess that was
us
made perfect,
beautiful sense.

I know it did. Because she told me it did.

In the end, our secret died with Stefia. I know she never
told another living soul because she told me she wouldn’t. And I believed every
word she ever said.

She was always good at making people believe.

I actually missed the first call about the shooting. When
it rang through, I was laying on a table in Spencer Grove, waiting to donate
blood for the first time. Afterwards, the irony made me gag, because it was
Stefia who had always told me I was wimp for not having donated the minute I
turned eighteen.

The nurse swabbed iodine all over the vein and then checked
her watch.

“This has to sit on your arm for thirty seconds,” she
explained, “and then you’re ready to rock.”

She unwrapped the needle and placed it next to where she
was going to punch it under my skin and into my vein.

“If you think you’re gonna be one of those people who don’t
like to watch,” she said, “now would be the time to look away.”

“Nah. I’m okay,” I said. “I actually like to watch.”

**

Stefia and I were the same age but since I was part of that
underground, radical unschooling, hippy Christian world, we weren’t in the same
grade. I first knew Stefia from church. We became good friends at thirteen when
we were old enough to join the choir. The older ladies called us the Giggle
Girls because we were always chatting and laughing while the other sections
practiced their parts. We’d talk about beads and bands and books we’d read and
boys we thought were cute.

And we talked about coffee. My family owned the coffee shop
in Granite Ledge and I got Stefia a job there as soon as she turned fifteen.  I
thought I would have to work pretty hard to convince my parents that Stefia
would be a worthy addition to our list of employees, seeing as how she wasn’t
part of the underground we normally associated with. As it turned out, they
thought it was a great idea. Actually, they were completely enamored with
Stefia—like most adults seemed to be—and jumped at the opportunity to employ
her. See, everyone thought Stefia was mature. And responsible. And had a
pleasing personality.

To be honest, she was just about everything you could want
in someone else.

Stefia had this voice that was syrupy and maple, a voice
that stuck you to what she was saying or singing. It was like the cinnamon
sugar I put on my warm buttered toast every morning. She was the perfect
complement to everyone around her, a chameleon who could talk to anyone. And
yet, as much as she seemed to be able to meld herself to any situation, she
wasn’t fake. Her interest in people was completely genuine.

And maybe that’s why I clung so tightly to her as a friend.
If I was with Stefia, maybe a little of what everyone wanted would rub off on
me.

I could only hope.

I think that’s why I liked to watch her. Probably why we
all did. I mean, she was gorgeous. A kind of gorgeous that took her beyond
trying to look like every other girl our age that followed some fad to be
pretty. Stefia was her own breed of beautiful. She didn’t even have to try.
Watching her was the closest thing to being her that we’d ever get.

Stefia had this guy friend named Elliot who was always
following her around. They weren’t together or anything. He was more like a
brother, she said. He was a year older than us; kind of cute and awfully nice,
but his younger brothers were jerks. One of them, Mitch was his name, hated me
for about a thousand unknown reasons. Probably because I was homeschooled. Or
wore too many beaded bracelets. Or because I wouldn’t date him. Who knows. But
this one day Mitch and Elliot came into the coffee shop just about the time
Stefia and I were done with work. 

“Can I get an Americano?” Elliot asked Stefia. “And
Mitch…he wants…Mitch, what do you want?”

Mitch was watching me wipe coffee grounds off the back
counter.

“Hey, Taylor Jean!” he said, way too loudly, ignoring his
brother’s question.

“What?”

“Are you lezzing out over there?”

“Huh?”

I realized that while I’d been wiping coffee grounds off
the counter and into the trash can, I’d been staring at Stefia the entire time.
And he’d seen me. I rolled my eyes at him and went back to straightening the
counter.

“Should I call you TJ?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“You know, TJ. Like a guy’s name, so you can stare at
Stefia all you want and no one will think anything about it?”

“Don’t be an ass, Mitch,” said Elliot.

Stefia had started making Elliot’s Americano but left it at
the machine.

“Yeah, Mitch,” she said as she walked over to me. She spun
me around, held my cheeks in both of her hands, and kissed me squarely on the
lips.

Then she glared at Mitch.

“And don’t be jealous,” she said to him, and winked.

Stefia was always doing things like that. One minute she’d
be quoting Shakespeare or rattling off stats from the New York Stock Exchange.
The next minute, she’d pull out something totally random—like kissing her
female co-worker—and knock everyone off their feet.

Being around Stefia was magical. It made me feel like I was
worth something. I would stare at her and imagine that indescribable thing she
had that everyone wanted oozing off of her and right onto me.

Actually, Stefia and I kind of had a thing about being
watched. It was an inside joke that turned into a huge philosophical
discussion. It was just after my sixteenth birthday and I had invited her over
to my house after work to hang out, eat crappy food, and watch YouTube videos
because I had faster internet. We tripped upon a video titled
How to Make
Hair Dye with Ketchup
and discovered it was actually a ridiculously lewd
journey through what the YouTuber wanted to do with each and every girl on his
local softball team.

“That’s a little far,” I said, as I clicked on the flag
below the video to report it. “I mean, who makes this stuff?”

“People with too much time on their hands,” Stefia said,
dismissively.

“It’s disturbing.” I closed my laptop and shoved it further
back on my desk.

“Oh, come on, Taylor Jean,” Stefia said, flopping back on
my bed and flipping her feet up on a stack of pillows. “Everyone likes to
watch.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Stefia grabbed a handful of butter spindle pretzels and
shoved three in her mouth at once. She chewed slowly, and I could tell she was
carefully choosing her words.

“Why do guys go to strip clubs?” she asked. “Why do we
watch talk shows where people freak out and fight with each other?”

“I don’t think those two things are the same…”

“Why not? What makes them different?”

“For one,” I said, rolling my eyes, “guys are desperate
perverts. That’s why they go to strip clubs.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Stefia said. “Okay, some guys
are desperate perverts…”

“Like Mitch?” I interrupted.

“Like Mitch,” she agreed. “But I don’t think that’s why
they watch. I think it’s something deeper than that. Something that everyone
has inside. I mean, why do people watch a play?”

“To be entertained.”

“But what if it’s not an entertaining play?”

“Then,” I said, grabbing my own handful of pretzels, “the
actors have failed. Let that be a warning to you!”

Stefia giggled and shoved her hand back in the pretzel
bowl.

“No,” she said. “What I’m saying is some plays are
entertaining by nature. A love story, a story where the guy gets the girl, a
story where everyone gets what they want in the end. But what about the stories
that aren’t like that? What about stories about death and destruction? Certainly
those aren’t entertaining…”

“Not in the normal sense, no,” I agreed. “Let me ask you a
question. Why do you act?”

“Huh?”

“You’re up there on stage and people are watching you. And
obviously you’re not uncomfortable or you wouldn’t be up there. So…why do you
act? Why are you on stage?”

Stefia thought for a minute, twirling her last pretzel in
the air like she was writing on my ceiling.