Better Nate Than Ever (18 page)

“How much are these?” I say. I’ve only a penny left to my name.

“Aw, these are free to any nephew of Heidi’s,” he says, and turns around to grab somebody a beer. I don’t get the appeal of beer. I tasted it once, at a Fourth of July party when I was eleven, thinking it was a glass of apple cider. But yuck. I literally thought somebody had collected rainwater in a boot.

A guy next to me is flicking through the news on his iPhone (an iPhone for everyone!) and I push back my seat, without thinking, and hop down the thirty or so stories to the floor, yanking out my Nokia, now on my hands and knees searching for an outlet.

“What are you
doing
?”

I whack my head into a copper foot bar on the stool. “Oh, hi, Aunt Heidi. I’m just looking for a plug.”

She doesn’t even have to say anything. I just stand.

“You know I
work
here, right?” she says. “That this is really awkward, and we’re not even supposed to serve kids at the bar? Can you explain to me in forty seconds or less—because I have a table full of Southern business executives, and I can practically smell their per diem and need to get them their fried clams—why you’re still in New York?”

“Well, I—”

“And if your mother knows anything about this yet?”

I jump up to my seat and think about taking a handful of Goldfish pretzels, to stall, but Heidi’s really got to get back to those Southern guys.

“I’ll be honest, Aunt Heidi—”

“That’s a first,” she says, arms crossed, a small cocktail-sauce stain where her heart is.

“To be honest,” I start again, “I lied. I—I got on the bus and got a message from the casting people, and they wanted me to come back and sing for them. Today.”

I take a swig of Sprite.

“Okay?” Heidi says, her eyes doing the Manhattan Dart. She waves to somebody in the back, not a friendly Disney-princess wave but an I’ll-be-right-there-when-I’m-through-strangling-my-nephew wave.

“And after the callback, I talked to my friend Libby.”

“The underwear sniffer,” Aunt Heidi says, which is technically accurate but a little rude.

“Yep. The underwear sniffer. She and I talked, and she’s just . . .
covering
for me back home. While I work things out here.”

Aunt Heidi cackles, throwing her head back (she’d make a great Witch in
Into the Woods
), eyebrows frantic and mouth twitching. “You are
twelve
years old, Nate.
What
are you ‘working out’?”

“I’m nearly fourteen, actually,” I want to say, but I actually just go, “Um.”

“Heidi,” her freckled bartender friend says, “Mitch is kind of pissed.”

Mitch is the manager. I know that in one second flat.

“Stay here,” Heidi says, turning from me and then doubling right back, “and I mean it, Nathan.”

Freckles the bartender refills my Sprite, without me even asking, and throws a cherry on top, probably because he senses I’m about to lose it and am in need of something sweet. He puts his elbows on the bar top. “You want a salad or something? Do kids eat salads?”

“Some kids do,” I say. “Rich kids across town whose schools have salad bars instead of just Jell-O,” I’m about to add, but I just say, “Thanks anyway. Not tonight.”

“How about some pasta? We’ve got a shrimp-over-penne thing, topped with a homemade vodka sauce.”

“That’s nice, sir, but my parents would never let me drink vodka.”

I don’t know why, but he giggles. “So you’re from Pittsburgh, huh, Nathan?”

“Forty-five minutes outside of, but yes.” How does he know all this? And do I tell him it’s just “Nate,” and risk stuttering?

“You might want to tiptoe around your Aunt Heidi, a little,” he says. “I know she was already really freaked out that you weren’t going to make it back to Pittsburgh alive, and seeing you show up here? I have a feeling it’s thrown her for a loop.” He shines a glass.

The guy reading the news on his iPhone looks up at us and reaches across, scooping a few pretzels. “You mind?” he says, and I say, “No problem, sir, they’re for everyone.”

Freckles turns around, back to where Heidi disappeared, and whispers to me, “You
know
, your Aunt Heidi is quite the actress herself.”

“Oh, really?” I say, licking the pretzel bowl clean. He refills my Sprite glass again, with two more cherries this time. Man, I’m downing this stuff like it’s—well, a Shirley Temple, which I never actually gave up.

“Yeah,” Freckles says, “we did a production of
Midsummer
in Cleveland three years ago. And she was luminous.”

Beautiful word if I knew what the heck it meant.

“So why isn’t Aunt Heidi still acting?” I say.

“Tough business,” Freckles says, stepping back, wiping his hands on a bar towel tucked into his little waist; no adult man where I’m from has a waist so trim. “And she got some weirdly bad notices for
Midsummer
—we met there and became BFFs—and after, she kind of said she was going to take a break. She went to
Scottsdale for a couple of weeks and came back wearing a lot of turquoise. And now she just kind of works here all the time.”

I’m stuck on the fact that anyone over fifteen is using the term “BFF.”

“And are you still an actor?” I say. “I had my first audition ever today.”

“Aw, that’s great. Yeah, your Aunt Heidi was telling me. I really respect singers a lot.”

He does? “You do?”

“Yup, if I could sing, I’d be a total star,” and Freckles winks at me. A town of winkers, that’s for certain. “But believe me, being another guy with another NYU undergrad degree in acting, it’s like there’s a zillion of us actors here.”

A zillion!

I bet Pittsburgh doesn’t even have a
million
actors. I bet Pittsburgh doesn’t even have a zillion people of
any
profession.

“And how did your audition go?” Freckles says, chopping a lemon.

“Oh, pretty good, I guess.” I just can’t believe I’m talking about theater with another guy and he’s not slamming my face into a toilet. “There was a British guy who was kind of mean to me—”

“Ugh, they always are,” Freckles says. “Really condescending? Talking to you like you’re an idiot and
wouldn’t be able to handle ‘the language’ because you’re American?” Freckles is working himself up a little, the top button of his white shirt straining.

“Yeah. And I said something about Hamlet taking place in 1400, and that kind of irked him.”

Freckles says, “Ha ha,” like a machine gun, and then, “Well, at least you sing.” Talking to me like I’m a real actor. “Try being a classical actor and born in Utah. Hard to be taken seriously.” I’m pretty sure a glass, from behind the bar, breaks in his hand, because he says the S-word and crouches down, and then a “one minute” finger appears from behind the bar, and he’s up, his face red. “Wow, I really can’t believe I’m, like, vomiting all this to a twelve-year-old.”

“I’m almost fourteen,” I say. “So don’t worry about it.”

“Ha,” he says, this time like a single bullet. And then, “So what do you like about New York so much? That you would venture all the way here and not tell anyone?”

“Two boys were dancing together in a club,” I want to say, “and nobody stopped them.” But instead I say, “I want to be on Broadway, and you can’t do that forty-five minutes outside of Pittsburgh. Have you ever been to Pittsburgh?”

“Yes, actually. Right out of college, I did a kind of bad postmodern Chekhov thing, set in the Holocaust
era—which is just
always
a really bad idea—at the Public Theater.”

Ah, yeah, the Pittsburgh Public. I asked Mom if I could see a show there, once, but she said the themes were too adult, switching on another Disney movie in the VCR. We don’t even have a DVD player.

Now, I would do anything to sit through Freckles’s bad Holocaust production of Chekhov. My new hero Freckles.

“But you’re right, Nathan. Even when you live in Astoria, there’s nothing like New York.”

“I know!” I say. “There’s cupcake places, like, everywhere, and boys can dance next to each other.” But I don’t actually say the part after the cupcake part.

“Cupcake places,” Freckles says, twinkling again. I guess he hasn’t stopped to think about what’s so great in New York, in a while.

“And, you know?” I say. “The Broadway thing? It’s just—it’s my dream. I know that sounds so cheesy—”

“It doesn’t,” Mr. Freckles says.

“It’s my one chance out of Jankburg.”

It feels good to say these words to someone who isn’t my guidance counselor, especially because my guidance counselor also doubles as the track coach, and hates me.

“Well, you two are getting along fine,” Heidi says, returning with an empty tray. “Okay, so here’s the
deal, Nate. I’m calling your mom on my next break, and we’re sorting this out. I’m really, really unhappy right now, and glad you’re alive but really resentful at being put in this position.”

“I’m so sorry, Aunt Heidi,” I say. I place my Nokia and charger on the bar and put my head down.

When I look up again, Aunt Heidi is shaking her head at me. “This is just a lot of trouble, Nate, you know that?” She whaps the tray against her hip. “A lot of trouble.”

And I guess I must burst into tears again, because here I am seeing my stupid face in the bathroom’s porthole mirror, which now just feels idiotic. Like,
what
is this place trying to be? Just admit you’re in New York, don’t act like you’re some kind of boat that serves food, right? Am I right?

I can smell myself in the bathroom and wish I’d brought my bag, to swipe some old non-Mitchum deodorant, wondering if Freckles was on to my changing-body routine. If I’ve embarrassed myself in front of an actual nice man. And this makes me cry harder. That my one chance at making friends with another boy, even if he’s a million years older than me (Freckles is at least twenty-five and maybe even thirty) is ruined, probably. Further soiled by me drinking all his free drinks, like a stupid freeloader, not even tipping him for all the expensive cherries he keeps throwing on top.

I think I’m about to throw up, and run to the toilet (with a wooden seat, like we’re in freaking
Maine
), but I just end up with the hiccups, rendering me even more fragile and stupid and unable to control myself.

And when I finally get back to the bar, hiccupping and burping and reconvinced that Freckles hates me, he’s standing there with Heidi, and they’re both kind of frowning. And now she’s holding her tray like it’s a teddy bear.

“We plugged your phone in,” Freckles says, handling it like evidence, a murder weapon.

“Okay,” I say, or hiccup.

“And you got a call while you were in the bathroom,” Heidi says, her face in a bunch of angles, like a Picasso.

“Okay,” Hiccup. Pause. Hiccup-hiccup.

“And I just picked up,” Heidi says, overexplaining, “not looking, thinking maybe it was your mom.”

“She even said, ‘Sherrie, is this you?’ and everything,” Freckles says. He puts my phone down and refills my Sprite.

“But it wasn’t your mom,” Heidi says, and she pats the stool seat and I jump up. “It was the
E.T.
casting people.”

“They called?” I say, or yell, and of course I hiccup and leap to my feet and knock the fresh Sprite to its side. All over Freckles.

And that’s when I know it’s bad news. Because he doesn’t even look mad at me.

“They said you’re a little too old to play Elliot,” Heidi says. “They don’t need to see you again, Nate. You can just . . . you’re free to go home now. It’s . . . it’s over.”

I don’t believe it. “I don’t believe you. I—”

But she holds up my Nokia: a seventeen-second phone call logged from an incoming 212 number. Broadway’s area code.

“They don’t want to see me again? At all?”

“I’m sorry.”

Seventeen seconds was all it took.

And then, just like that, my hiccups are gone.

I
go to the bathroom again (for the third time! Freckles probably thinks I have a bowel condition or something).

And cry so hard that a foam of spit blasts out across the framed reviews for Aw Shucks.

It’s just pretty embarrassing and I don’t need to go into it here, okay?

You’d think, the way I’m crying, that I’d
died
. And not that just my dreams and soul had.

After I leave the bathroom, having pulled my bangs as far over my eyes as possible, Freckles tells me he didn’t get
his
first job until after his tenth audition in New York. “So every no is closer to a yes, huh, buddy?”

But it’s not working.

It’s back to Jankburg. And rifles and bad test grades and grey fields full of grey cows, and—oh, God. The bathroom. To cry it out just one last time I swear.

“I
t’s really cool,” I say, surveying Aunt Heidi’s futon. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” I open and close it, folding it back and forth on itself. “A couch that thinks it’s an envelope or something,” I say, and Freckles and Heidi laugh. Turns out they’re roommates.

“You must be exhausted,” Aunt Heidi says. Because she is, I’m sure.

“I’m actually completely wound up,” I say. And I am.

“Let me run you a bath.”

I don’t have the heart to tell her that I haven’t taken a bath for a hundred years. Freckles and I sit on the futon, and he kicks his shoes off. He’s in funny socks.

“You’re looking at my funny socks, huh?”

“Nah,” I say.

“Dressy socks,” he says, wiggling his toes. “Church socks, every Sunday.”

Huh.
Freckles goes to church?

“Big day, huh?” he says.

I remove my giant coat and then, remembering that I stink, place it over myself like a blanket.

“You cold?” Freckles says. “Because we’ve got blankets.

“Oh no, no, I’m fine, thanks.” Their place is smaller than I could have even imagined. All those
Friends
reruns, the soaring loft ceilings and funky-colored walls? Nope. It’s a bare white box and big clanking pipes and one framed show poster from a production of
Grand Hotel
at Walnut Street Theater.