Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (2 page)

“Okay!” I said, hopping off my bike and running up the path to their house. I reached into my Aztec-print knapsack, pulled out a flyer, and handed it to Damon. “If you change your mind about girls, come over at two o'clock.”

“He'll be there.” Karen smiled and put her arm around Damon's shoulder. “He'll be there.”

He rolled his eyes on cue.

“Damon,” I said, climbing back onto the banana seat of my bike. “You could be an awesome Darth Vader.” I paused a minute, for effect, and looked past him, up toward some distant point in the sky. “Not sure how many other kids are going to be competing for the part, though. Maybe a lot. You might want to get there early.”

I rode off, thinking about the morning of the play's opening. We'd have a penny carnival, maybe some sexy cancan girls. Around midday, the kids would perform
Star Wars
. After that, we'd go back to the penny carnival and I'd rake in the cash. Cash, however, wasn't my main motive. That would just be a tangible demonstration, to any skeptical adults, that I was indeed a prodigy to behold and a burgeoning success within the entertainment industry.

For the moment, though, I had a problem: no cast.

I needed to get serious.

After my little visit with Damon and his mom, my second stop was Jordan's house. Jordan was a nice enough kid; he had a lot of toys and we never fought over them and that's pretty much the foundation for any successful friendship. Jordan's mom was Venezuelan, and everything that went on in his house was straight out of my personal fantasy world. His mom let her kids put chocolate milk in bottles and DRINK OUT OF THE BOTTLES. She gave them an Easy-Bake Oven, a hamster, a polar bear fur rug, and the “Chicken Dance” record. They even had a fish tank full of guppies. My mom wouldn't let me have any of these things; she thought they were fine for other people but disgusting in her own home. “Hamsters are breathing balls of pee, fur, and disease.” Even though she grew up on a farm and we were a middle-class family in one of the least respected cities in Canada, my mother acted as though we were all Ladies and my father was the Duke of Wellington.

When I got there, the kids were all out on the front lawn: Jordan, Ian, and Troy. I pulled up on my bike and grabbed a handful of the pamphlets from my backpack.

“You guys want to be famous?”

“What's this for?” Jordan asked, taking a pamphlet.

“FAME, Jordan! I wrote a play, and everyone's going to perform it in my yard. There's going to be a penny carnival. All we have to do is cast it first. Be at my house at two o'clock!”

Ian—a freckly, buck-toothed kid—looked up from my handout. “
Star Wars
is the greatest movie of all time. It's not a play. How are you going to
make a light saber
?!”

I stood back and held my arms out in front of me. “Imagine a light saber made out of the most amazing cardboard you've ever laid your eyes on.
Meeerrrrrr! Merrrrrrrr! Merrrrrrrrr!
” I said, swinging my imaginary saber back and forth across Ian's and Jordan's throats, decapitating the boys.

“Is that the saber sound we're going to use?” Jordan said. “Amateur. How many plays have you done?” He didn't look impressed.

My light saber sound was epic, actually. But my playwriting skills were juvenile. I tried to sway Jordan. “I wrote one play. It was called
The Kids of the Haunted Tree Hole
. But it really wasn't as good as
Star Wars
. So I've written out the best parts of
Star Wars
, like Jabba and the Death Star stuff, and we can act that out. I can make a metal bikini out of tuna cans.”

It wasn't just plays. I'd also attempted to write truthful stories of living with my actual family—my Pooh Bear of a real estate mogul father, my annoyingly sweet younger sister, and my lovingly neurotic mother, a nurse who would bring me in to the doctor's office at least once a week, convinced that this was the week I'd inevitably developed leukemia, heart damage from undiagnosed strep throat, or some viral hemorrhagic fever from accidentally touching blood in a public bathroom.

But while I was watching
Star Wars
, I was moved. I wanted to see my friends as those characters. They were more exciting than my family. I didn't give a shit about Harrison Ford. But I cared a lot about my friends, and I wanted them to have the chance to be stars.

Ian started swinging his imaginary light saber. No sound. “Where are you going to put on your play? School? That's not gonna happen.”

“I'm gonna get my dad and his friend to build me a stage, you know-it-all. Like Doozers. They're going to build it and then we'll have a penny carnival and make some money.”

Jordan perked up. “How much money do I get?”

“Uh—NONE,” I said. “It's my idea! IT'S MY YARD!”

Jordan looked at the sheet, then handed it back to me. “I don't want to be in a play.”

“What the heck are you talking about? You'd rather chicken dance for no one?”

Jordan just stood there, running his fingers through his half-Venezuelan, half-Jewfro hair.

I looked him square in the eye. “It's
STAR WARS
, Jordan! Look at you—you're Han Solo if I ever saw him. Now, I'm not guaranteeing you're going to get the part, but I'm just saying . . .
I
see you as Han.” I winked.

Troy, the kid who inhaled a piece of banana and almost died a few months prior, spoke up. “How many other kids are auditioning?”

I sighed dramatically and looked off into the distance again for effect. The kids all turned to see what I was looking at.

“Hmm.
Dozens
,” I said, stalling for time. Then I had an idea. “Hey, can you guys take some of these down to the park and give them to any kids who are playing there?” I passed them the rest of the sheets. I wasn't allowed to go to the park without an adult, but they totally were. I got on my bike, rode to the end of the street, got off the bike, walked it across the street after looking both ways and behind me, got back on the bike, and headed home.

I spent the rest of the morning lining up chairs in our living room, my makeshift waiting room for the auditions. Then I went to see my dad.

“Dad. We need to go to the 7-Eleven to rent the camera again!”

Dad's large eyebrows went up, and he quickly stroked his lifelong Burt Reynolds mustache as he looked up from his desk in the tiny room my parents used for their computer. This was his “newspaper desk”: he would stand at the desk and read through the paper while watching TV. He never sat down. He was always ready to run out the door and into the action, like a superhero. A superhero, that is, who once owned a pair of gravity boots and threw his back out for life while doing inverted sit-ups.

“What do you need the camera for this time?” he asked, his voice lifting with excitement.

One of Dad's greatest memories was from when he was sixteen: “Now, don't ever do this, but when I was sixteen my parents went away for a week and me and John Walt stole their car and drove to California. We surfed, we went to the studios, and they told me at MGM that I had a face for the screen.
The screen.
Of course, we had to come back to Canada. Don't ever do that.” After this secret confirmation of potential fame, my dad drove his parents' car back to Canada and became a property manager. My desire to be a part of the entertainment world would always spark that lingering ache for famous-screen-face that my dad still fantasized about.

“I'm holding auditions for my play. I need to record them for review. Also? You're going to need to build me a stage.”

We went down to the 7-Eleven to rent the camera. When we got home, I set it up on a table in the computer room, which I'd commandeered for our audition room. Then I sat down, wrote out all the lines I wanted the kids to read for their auditions, put them in a big black binder, and kicked back with a Capri Sun.

At around two o'clock, just as I'd planned, the kids started filing in.

Besides all the kids I'd visited earlier that morning, others showed up
solely on the basis of my awesome flyers
. There were ten kids. With my sister and me, that was the dozen I'd been looking for.

I clutched my black binder to my chest and jovially rubbed Jordan's hair—mostly out of half-Jewfro curiosity, but also because I was proud of him for coming.

“I'm glad you made it . . .” I said, then cocked my eyebrow and lowered my voice to a whisper: “. . .
Han.
”

Then I turned to the crowd. “ALL RIGHT, EVERYONE! GRAB A CAPRI SUN AND FIND A CHAIR! BE CAREFUL WHEN YOU PIERCE THE JUICE POUCH—THIS CARPET IS AN HEIRLOOM!” Everyone obeyed. This was it: I was in my zone.

“I'M GOING TO BE HOLDING THE AUDITIONS IN THE AUDITION ROOM. I'LL CALL YOUR NUMBER WHEN IT'S YOUR TURN.” And with that I passed out a number to each kid in the room. Of course I was making this all much more difficult than it had to be:
These kids all lived in my neighborhood. I knew all their names.
But I knew the formalities of this sort of thing, and I couldn't gloss over them—I needed to show them I was SERIOUS. If I respected the protocol, they would respect my production. That was certainly how Mr. George Lucas conducted his auditions.

I looked over at Damon, and he was looking pretty serious too. He was wearing a clean white button-up shirt and a pair of black dress pants. Even his face was clean. Karen must have put him up to it. Just for playing along, though, I decided right then and there to bestow upon him the honor of being my Darth Vader. It was the least I could do. When no one was looking, I opened my binder and found the name “Darth Vader.” Beside it, I wrote “Damon, obviously.” Then I stood up and gazed upon the room.

“EVERYONE!” I commanded. “I'm just going to go to the bathroom before we start. One short break, and then we'll get this afternoon rolling!”

As I left the room for a pee, I stopped for a moment, then shouted out: “Please don't open my binder!!”

It was the dumbest thing I could have said to a roomful of children. Of course, I was a child and didn't understand how even I, myself, thought. When I got back, the kids were all huddled in a circle, staring into my open binder. My SISTER was staring into the binder! EVERYONE WAS LOOKING AT MY NOTES. Who were these animals?! Carrie Fisher wouldn't have looked at Mr. George Lucas's black binder. I really didn't have anything in there to hide. This was a simple matter of respect and order.

“OH MY GOD! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?” It's a good thing my bladder was empty or I would have peed myself right there in the audition room.

Troy looked up at me in fury, his fingers stretched and frozen in an air grip, his hands and arms shooting out. “I didn't even get to
audition
for Darth Vader!! I would have been amazing!!” He slapped his leg then made a serious face. “LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER. See?”

I pushed my way through the crowd and grabbed my binder. My eyes took in the sight of all these horrible kids, one more horrible than the next, standing over my private notes—all but Jordan without a hint of shame.

“EVERYONE GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!!!!” I screamed, shredding my throat.

Everyone backed off except my little sister, Lauren. Idiot people always thought Lauren and I were twins because we both had dark hair and glasses. She was two inches shorter than I was and two years younger. People were idiots. Lauren whined and pleaded, “But I live h—”

“YOU ARE A TRAITOR!” I squealed as the other, non-blood-related children filed quickly out the front door. “I AM NOT SHARING A BEDROOM WITH YOU ANYMORE!!!”

Lauren looked scared. “Why are you flipping out?” she asked. What an idiot.

“COME ON! Why am I flipping out?! I'm flipping out because you looked at the director's notes. You can get ARRESTED for stuff like this in Hollywood. You kids are animals! I can't work with animals!!” I stormed out of the living room and into my bedroom.

The dream was over. No neighborhood penny carnival. No giving Damon the Darth Vader role. No making my dad or mom or Karen proud of me.

A little while later, my mom came into my room. She was very good at these Mom moments. I think it's what she was best at—even though I always fought the support, because to me support always felt like 100 percent failure. And I knew I was not a failure.

My mom was naturally slender, despite her addiction to Coffee Crisp chocolate bars. Her hair was thick and black and her eyes were gray, which always kind of freaked me out. When she sat down on the bed, it barely moved. “Lauren told me you flipped out.”

“They ruined everything.” I rolled over to face the wall so she couldn't see me crying. With all the screaming, I noticed, my voice was starting to sound a little gravelly, like Karen's. Silver lining.

“They went through MY NOTES!”

She started to rub my back.
Oh God. That's a stage three support move.
I was such a failure.

“Kids can be dumb,” she said matter-of-factly. “I don't think they did it to disrespect you. I don't think they think that way.”

Snot rolled down to my lip; it tasted salty. “But they DID disrespect me.” I wiped my face. “Even if they didn't mean to, they did. I can't take it.”

My mom sighed dramatically, playing up the drama for me. My mother was a good lady.

“I know!” she said. “Maybe you should try to do the play at school? Ask your teacher. You could do it during recess. There are so many more kids there. Ask your teacher tomorrow. It'll be way more fun! Just imagine—”

“Okay, Mom,” I interrupted. If I didn't, she'd go on all afternoon. “I get it.”

My school was a French immersion school. My teacher was Mme. Misbet, a French Canadian woman who looked like a cross between Celine Dion and Janet from
Three's Company
. In her classroom, near her desk, there was an aquarium, and in that aquarium was housed a school of tadpoles—a wormy, creepy cloud of inky frog babies. If I wanted to mount my production of
Star Wars
at school, I would have to walk past that aquarium, full of giant tadpoles with their disgusting leg buds, and ask her.