"I … LINE," EMILY SAYS.
Mr. García calls out her line from the front row. "You are to be married—"
"Married to Faina," Emily finishes. "She is beautiful, brilliant. What could you … oh God, I'm so sorry. Line?"
Watching Emily always stresses me out, this scene more than the others. She has a crush on her scene partner, who plays my husband. Every time they make eye contact, she forgets her lines. The obnoxious thing is that he has a crush on her, too—everybody knows it—but they won't stop dancing around it and date already.
I retreat into the greenroom. A pair of sophomores sit in the corner, one on each massive leather sofa. I hate that those sofas are in here. It enables all the theater kids who are obsessed with couch piles and being way too physical with each other.
I sink into the chair at the end of the nearest sofa, stick in my earbuds, and take out my laptop. A paused game opens up, ready for me to resume. I hit play and sneak through the ruins, a huge assault rifle in my avatar's hand.
"I heard some guys saying it was Dr. Meyers," says Ani, the girl who plays my daughter.
Oh, great. They're talking about that whole thing. As if we haven't heard enough about it since Monday. Thank God the week's nearly over.
I let loose a volley of bullets on some approaching zombies. In my peripheral vision, Elizabeth puts her head on an armrest. Ani sprawls across the other couch.
"They probably just think she's hot," Elizabeth says. "Isn't it usually creepy old men who do this?"
"Not always," Ani says. "I heard this one time in Montana—"
I purse my lips and shoot some more zombies. Black blood explodes out of their heads as they keel to the side. Double-tapping the up key, I jump onto a crumbling stone wall, duck behind it, and find two packs of ammo. Score.
"—Kat?"
I jolt at my name. I hit pause and take out one of my earbuds. "What?"
Elizabeth says, "What do you think?"
I look from one to the other. "About the teacher-student thing?"
They nod.
"No opinion."
"Really?" Ani asks.
"Really. Don't care. I'm trying to focus on the show these days."
Ani and Elizabeth trade a glance. Their lips twitch.
"What?" I say, not letting my voice rise. The greenroom's soundproofing leaves something to be desired.
Ani shrugs. "Just, like, there are things that matter outside this play."
A response jumps to the front of my mouth—Is that why you still can't remember your fucking blocking?—but I manage to keep it from spilling out. Restraining myself to a frosty glare, I stick my earbud back in and return to my game. The looks they give me glow hot on the side of my face. I get those looks all the time: God, what a bitch. What is her problem?
They can think whatever they want. I don't need them. I don't need anybody.
It's sort of hilarious, though, how so many theater kids like to think they're social outcasts, talking with people who are obviously their friends about "never fitting in." They have no idea. If they did, they wouldn't glamorize it. The reality of isolation is unglamorous and unexciting.
Going years without talking to anybody—talking about anything that matters—seems hard in theory, but when you give one-word answers to anyone who approaches you, people piss off pretty fast. The last time I had a legitimate conversation was in eighth grade, before Mom decided we weren't worth her time and energy.
To be fair, it's not as if she didn't have a reason to leave. By the time Liv and I hit seventh grade, our parents got into screaming matches every week, about everything from what we ate for dinner to the clothes Olivia and I wore. It always ended with Dad snapping, "Great," sinking into a capital-M Mood, and not talking for hours. Mom would run off in an anxious frenzy and lock herself in their room. She was a ball of energy, our mom, and she used to electrify our dad. But year after unhappy year, she grew more unreliable, like a knot of wires fraying through.
I could forgive her wanting to leave. What's unforgivable is the way she did it.
Mom left our last family vacation early, after an all-night fight. By the time the rest of us got back home, she'd disappeared, leaving zero evidence that she'd ever lived there. Fluttery clothing, sketchbooks, tchotchkes that used to line the shelves—gone, gone, gone. She didn't leave a note. She didn't reply to the texts, calls, and emails we sent for weeks afterward.
What gets me the most is that she didn't have the decency to say good-bye. I knew Mom had her issues, but I never thought she was a coward.
Eventually, Dad tracked down her new number out west. Clear message there: she needed distance. But did she need 1,500 miles of it? If she wanted to start over, couldn't she have started over in Kansas City and seen me and Olivia on weekends? She chose the most selfish avenue and sprinted down it, right out of our lives. As far as I'm concerned, she can stay out.
I don't know what Mom said the one time she talked to Dad, but he never called her again. After that, a part of him packed up and left, too. He's hardly a shadow of himself now, worked to death, silent when we see him. Part of me still hopes my actual dad might come back, the dad who obsessively tracked weird sports like badminton and Ping-Pong and who started getting hyped for Christmas in August. When we put up the tree, he'd stuff tinsel in his beard and puff out his cheeks—Ho, ho, ho! Merry Tinselmas! Back in the day, it wasn't hard to tell where Olivia got her horrible sense of humor.
I never catch a glimpse of that man anymore. He's gotten lost in there somewhere, lost inside his own body. And I hate Mom for doing that to him. She had so much power that she ended up breaking him completely.
Nobody will ever do that to me.
· · · · · · ·
AFTER REHEARSAL ENDS, I HEAD BACK TO THE GREENROOM to collect my things. By the time I get my stuff and come back out into the theater, everybody else is gone.
"Shit." I needed to ask for a ride. My phone says it's already gone down to thirty-seven degrees. With today's wind, I'll be half frostbitten by the time I get home.
"Kat? Everything okay?" asks Mr. García, wheeling the ghost light toward the stage. Supposedly, ghost lights—left out to illuminate deserted stages—are for safety purposes, but I bet they're mostly for appeasing superstitious theater people.
I squint in the glare of the exposed bulb. "Yeah, everything's fine. Just realized I have to walk home."
The ghost light's sticky wheels squeak forward as García sets it center stage. "But it's freezing," he says. "You don't have a ride?"
"I was going to ask the others. Forgot."
"Well, I could drop you off."
"Really?" I stick my hands in my hoodie pockets. "I, uh, that'd be great."
"Okay, then. This way." He hops off the side of the stage and heads down the aisle to the faculty lot. I hurry after him, slipping through the door. Outside, the wind grasps at my hair, clutching it. García stops by a tiny white two-door that looks about an inch from collapse. It makes a clunking sound as I slide in. Still, getting out of the wind is an instant relief.
"So, where am I headed?" García asks, reversing out of his spot.
"Left here. And then a right up at the light." I glance around the car, which smells like Windex. The seats are bare, every inch clean and empty. A long row of CDs, stacked between the driver and passenger seats, are preserved in spotless plastic cases and alphabetized.
"Good rehearsal today, huh?" García says.
"Decent."
He smiles. "You're tough to impress. I'm guessing you want to do theater in college? Maybe a conservatory or something?"
"Yeah."
García turns right. "Well, they'll be lucky to have you." We accelerate down the widest road in Paloma, which runs through the entire city, top to toe. We pass a strip mall on the left. "I did a drama double-major in school," García says. "English and drama."
"Oh. Did you want to act?"
"No, I was a stage manager, mostly." García grimaces. "I got exactly one part in college, and I had two lines, and I messed both of them up opening night. So that went well."
I bite my tongue. I can't imagine college. It feels so far away—not even a distance in time so much as a physical distance. As if I'm trying to cover thousands of miles on foot.
"Left on Cypress Street," I say. García slips into the turn lane and rounds onto a narrow street filled with potholes.
"Out of curiosity," García says, "do you have a sister? Olivia?"
"Yeah. We're twins."
"Ah, okay. I was wondering. She's in my honors class."
"Of course," I say. "She's the smart one."
"Hey, you're just as smart. A different kind of smart," García says. "Believe me, Kat, it takes a lot of intelligence to show a character like you do onstage." He considers for a second. "I guess you can't put it on a scale, but in my book, it means more than a couple points on the SAT. It's definitely going to mean something to the audience on opening night."
I sneak a glance at him. He looks unconcerned, as if those words weighed nothing at all, but they settle and fasten themselves somewhere deep inside me. I've never felt smart beside Olivia. She's two math classes ahead of me. Even in the subjects I actually like—history and English—schoolwork never feels effortless, not like it seems for my sister.
These days, my grades are circling the drain. I don't have motivation anymore, just exhaustion. I don't care anymore, about anything besides the play, anyway.
I sink in my seat, resolving not to answer anything else. This shit's getting too personal.
Mr. García seems to sense me fortifying my walls. He stays quiet.
He probably thinks I'm jealous of my sister or that I hate her. I'm sure that's what Olivia thinks, but it's not true. I'm not going to braid Olivia's hair and make daisy chains with her, but God knows I don't hate her.
We used to be close in middle school, back before she blossomed out and I shrank in, before high school sent us down different roads. I guess we were close up until the second Mom let the door slam on her way out. That did something to Olivia: she got all bright-eyed and optimistic about Mom coming back, but I knew it would never happen. The first time Olivia talked about calling Mom back up, trying to stay in touch, I walked out of the room. Fucking delusional. Sometimes she still seems to be in denial, as if we're still some happy family with anything in common besides living under the same roof.
These past two years, I've gotten so exhausted with everyone, including my sister. It's so much simpler to fall into computer games and solitude, where, sure, nobody offers consolation, but nobody's going to hurt you, either. And at least the enemies there are clearly labeled.
I watch the houses outside my window shrink, the yards dwindling to small green-gray rectangles. The houses here on the western outskirts of Paloma are tiny and dilapidated.
"Left here," I say as we clunk over the eight hundredth pothole. "I'm on the right. Number 243."
"Great." A minute later, he pulls up our concrete driveway. Our house waits to the right, flat-roofed and beige. The sight of it fills me with resignation.
"I'll see you in class," Mr. García says.
"Yeah," I say, getting out. "Thanks for the lift."
"Sure."
I shut his door and head inside, already aching to collapse into bed.
