Not Otherwise Specified (2 page)

“Do your brothers happen to mention how really mature you are?”

“Screw you.”

“Whatever. I'll call Rachel later. We broke
up
, Tasha.”

“Yeah, well, the world's full of boys.”

“Warn Rachel to change her number if you want.”

“Yeah, I'll do that.”

Flawless comeback, Tasha.

“And by the way?” she shouts after me. And this time I think she is yelling at me. “ ‘Bitch' is sexist gendered language and I'm pretty disgusted you decided to wear it right over your tits. And by the way?” She pauses there.

I can't stand it. I turn around. “By the way what?”

“By the way,” she says. She's smiling. “You always were a little bitch.”

TODAY IS OUR FIRST DAY
back at school, but it's on a Tuesday, weirdly, which means I have my six a.m. tap class before school. It's a ridiculous time to be dancing, but until Dykepocalypse, my after-school time was taken up by Pride Alliance and by chorus, which I still have, and my eating disorder support group, which is new and wouldn't have fit into my old schedule anyway, back when I did ballet. But I don't do ballet anymore.

I like to be in the back for tap class, not because I don't want to be looked at, not because I'm shy, not even because I don't want to see myself in the mirror, but just because I like to be in my own place when I dance. The other girls in my class are giggly and chatty between exercises, laughing at each other when they mess up and whispering about people
from the public school everyone goes to but me. It's not that I don't like them, or that I'm not friendly with them, because I am. I'm friendly with them after class or on break, but when I'm dancing, I want it to be just me. I do chorus to get out there and interact with people. I did Pride for the same reason. Hell, I do ED group for the same reason. Even though tap has never been my favorite, it, you know, fills the void. I did tap as a little kid but picked it back up a few years ago because my ex-girlfriend was into it, and I never gave it up out of spite, because it wasn't that kind of breakup.

It's not hard to be in my own world today, because I'm busy having some inner-monologue freakout about what happened at Cupcake last night, not to mention the really stressful conversation with my mother this morning about why she hasn't seen the Dykes lately. (She didn't call them “the Dykes,” just like she won't say “eating disorder” out loud. She'll throw in a
Um, so, how's group?
every once in a while to prove she's rooting for me without actually having to do anything, and I think treatment is convincing me I have deep-seated issues with my mom, or hell, maybe I actually do, because it's not like she's ever said “bisexual” out loud either.) Even everyone in dance class clacking together, this sound I always love, isn't pulling me out of this.

I make more mistakes than usual, and when Ms. Hoole calls me over at the end of class, I'm completely prepared to be chewed out. She likes me, because to be perfectly honest
I could dance these other girls under a table, but that also means she expects all these things from me, and if there's one thing I've been trying to convince people since the time I was freaking born and have completely failed to get through to people is not to expect things from me, but guess what happens when you're a rich black was-ballerina in
Nebraska
, you know? I mean, excuse me for wanting to make out with girls instead of guys under all that pressure, you know?

But she doesn't chew me out. She says, “This came into the office and I thought of you right away. You're always talking about New York.”

Of course I'm always talking about New York. New York is the theater kid's Jerusalem. When I was seven, I had four different stuffed animals all named Manhattan, and one enormous plush frog named Juilliard.

I take the flyer.

“One of the best arts high schools in the whole country,” she says, like I'm new. “Holding auditions for a few more scholarship students for next year.”

I've applied to Brentwood every semester since I was a freshman. My mom fought me on it at first, but I think at this point she's resigned herself to the fact that I'm never going to get in, so she just signs the forms without arguing. I mean, it's
Brentwood
, so to get accepted you not only have to dance like you're in
Black Swan
and belt out a B over high C like it's a middle G and cry on cue through a memorized six thousand
lines of Shakespeare, but you have to do it all at once, while having a 4.0 and forking over a hundred thousand dollars and giving the admissions director a blow job, apparently, but once you're in, you're in, it's Brentwood then Juilliard then fame and fortune, and even if not, it's New York City, baby, and the most important part of this equation is Brooklyn Bridge at midnight and tiny dogs in Chelsea and the Staten Island Ferry and that ex-girlfriend (don't think about that, should I think about that?) and the answer to the goddamn equation is the absolute value of
not Nebraska
.

“I've never even been called for an audition,” I say. “I think they just shred my applications on sight by now. ‘Etta again?'
Zzzzt
.”

“This is different,” she says. “Read the damn flyer! Talent search. Starts with the audition and all the paperwork comes after. I have a friend who works there, and she's implied that they've been getting a lot of applications from overinflated entitled egos delicate-flowering around the place.”

“So they're starting with the auditions?”

“Maybe they want to see people in person before they can be dazzled by the credentials. Meet someone who sparkles in person, not just on paper.”

“Someone like me?”

“Yeah, kiddo. Someone like you.” She hands me another piece of paper. “And this, m'dear, is a group of kids getting together to practice for the auditions together. Maybe make
some friends, get some practice in?” It's in the same community center as my chorus and my ED group, meeting just a little while after ED.

The thing is that it feels like a sign.

The thing is the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight and tiny dogs in Chelsea and the Staten Island Ferry.

And the thing is that she just called me sparkly, and the last time anyone even hinted that I was sparkly, I was at Cupcake making out with a girl and covered in actual glitter. And now I'm standing here just sweaty and too-tight-leotarded, just me.

•  •  •

I change into my uniform—what up, Mary Janes, missed you not—in the car and mess my dreads up because the last thing you want to be is too pretty when you're a (not) lesbian at an all-girls school. I definitely need to look like I'm not trying to pick anyone up. Uglying-down is an old habit at this point, but it's the first day back and it feels weird. Maybe because this is the first time I'm doing it by myself instead of half-naked in the backseat of Natasha's car while we draw on messy eyeliner and change out of the disco clothes we wore only for the drive to school, just on principle. I smudge my lipstick.

Saint Em's is very old-British-boarding-school style, except it's not an old castle, just some thirty-year-old building trying to look like an old castle in the middle of nowhere, but the first thing you see when you walk in are those bright-green metal
lockers, so, very subtle, school. Plus girls are gross and rich girls are worse so it's kind of a vandalized mess.

If it isn't obvious, I hate it here.

I open my locker and well, awesome, that's interesting. There are condoms filled with what-the-hell-even-is-that hanging off the hooks inside my locker, the hooks where I used to hang my aforementionedly-stolen disco clothes. I really need to change my combination.

I wonder which of them deigned to buy condoms. They probably found some guy to do it. God forbid anyone in the world ever think they're straight. (Or bisexual, I don't know if you've heard of this? It's a thing!)

God. It's just that I really thought stuff was going to go back to normal.

One of the condoms is dripping onto my history textbook. Whatever. I give in and taste it. Ranch dressing. All right then.

At lunch I make sure they're looking at me at my new loner loser table (Rachel's not there; I overheard her bio partner saying she has strep throat), and I squeeze a condom right on top of my salad. Titania makes this big show of gagging.

“Fat dyke,” this junior bitch Liliana mumbles as she glides past my table, and I ignore her, because yeah right, pay more attention, Liliana. She slips past me, and I focus again on the Dykes.

I dip my finger into the condom and lick it clean. 148 calories and my daily value of
screw you
. Delicious.

GROUP
.

We sit in a circle in flimsy desks, about exactly how these things are set up on TV, except crazy people on TV have this habit of not actually being crazy, because actual screwed-up people aren't cuddly and relatable. We're too busy leaning back in our seats so that our stomachs won't touch the desk, and jiggling our knees and tapping our feet because any movement is better than nothing and body checking, fingers around wrists, thumbs on the sides of waists, our fingers knitted together, squeezing, our nails tapping against collarbones. Then there are the girls who won't even sit down—who
can't
sit down, because standing burns more calories and shuffling their feet really burns more calories, and maybe they want us to feel like they're better than us, or maybe they don't, or maybe
they are just so, so past giving a shit what people think about them. We're all here because it's not fun for us anymore, but those are the girls who make you realize that this shit hasn't been fun for a really, really long time. They're shifting, shivering statues, and
this is what you wanted to be
.
At some point there really was a choice.
At some point you really did jump off a cliff, and we can sit here and cry about it all we want about how
no
, we were not expecting what would be at the bottom, and we just wanted to be skinny and we just wanted to disappear and be perfect and be noticed and to be in control and to starve and purge out everything that's wrong with us, but at some point we decided we were going to do this and the thing is that you
don't
disappear (and that's really it, isn't it), you linger around and wilt in the corners of community rec centers.

I'm one of the bigger girls here, but there are actually a bunch around my size. One of them's Taylor, who's talking right now about how frustrating this whole diagnostic process is. You have to have a BMI under a certain ridiculous number
and
you have to stop getting your period to be diagnosed anorexic, so that rules out me and the two boys I sometimes forget are here. The diagnoses are something we've talked about a billion times, and it's something our leader
still
lets us talk about because it's still goddamn frustrating.

“I just want that stupid label,” Taylor says. Taylor doesn't curse. Taylor says “stupid.” “And it's ridiculous because, like, the whole
issue
at school is
stop labeling me, stop putting me in your stupid box
,
and then here I am dying to count as anorexic instead of ‘eating disordered not otherwise specified.' ”

“My doctor wouldn't even say that out loud,” I say. “Like, I've read the DSM entries, I know it's EDNOS, but she just says ‘It's not the diagnosis that's important.' ”

“But that is important to you,” says Angela, our leader. She's older than we are and licensed or something.

“There are a billion things about this that are important to me and every one of them contradicts or takes away from one of the other ones. I just want this to add up in a way that makes me look more . . .”

“Sane?” Angela tries.

“Legitimate,” says a voice, tiny, in the corner. I don't even have to look up to know who it is, because even though she doesn't talk very much, when she does, it's in that broken, significant voice. If this were a movie, everyone would part around her, but instead it's just a little shifting around and a few turned heads. You still can't see her. She stands in the back—I've never seen her sit down—and she is the smallest of the small. Blonder than blond but not bleached, I don't think, too muted and wispy to be intentional. Just natural, a little dull. A lot of the skinny girls are toothpicks. Bianca is smoke.

I have this fascination with her because she's young—fourteen—which is one of the few things she's ever said about herself, and because I can tell by her clothes that she's poor, and because she just looks so sick and so sad. She's the
Tiny Tim of our group, and a part of me maybe doesn't believe she's real. She's just
too
tragic. She's the shattered little girl at the beginning of the fairy tale, and I can't shake this feeling that if she would just get better then we all would. But I also feel so sure that she is never, ever going to be okay. Maybe the fascination is that I'm kind of waiting for her to die. I'd feel worse about this if I didn't know from experience that she's waiting for it too.

Taylor talks some more, but I feel drained and done for the day. I wish I were at chorus instead, which is weird for me because I've never been a huge fan of chorus. I don't even know why I do it, except that it felt weird to be such a ridiculous musical theater geek but not be in any singing group. How am I going to pretend my life is a Special Musical Episode if I never sing? How am I going to even pretend I'm qualified for a musical theater audition if I sit at home and watch
Cabaret
over and over and don't at least try to sing? So I get out, I try, I sing.

The thing is that I'm not that good. I don't know. This whole audition process just sounds like something they'd do in that episode of whatever that show was when they're supposed to attempt something they'd fail at, and everyone fails as expected and ends up hating themselves. It feels about that likely that I'm going to get into Brentwood or even get past the first round of auditions, and do I really need to hate myself right now? I have four angry lesbians handling that job pretty well.