Not Otherwise Specified (3 page)

Well, three. I still have no proof Rachel hasn't forgiven me. I tried calling her last night but she didn't pick up. Babysitting, I guess. Or strep. Maybe her sisters have strep too, that would keep her busy. Probably that.

Group ends, and yeah, maybe I creepily watch Bianca a little when she's packing up, but actually that's because I want to leave when she's leaving because she has this ridiculously hot older brother—I thought maybe it was her boyfriend at first, but she actually brings it up all the time,
my brother's picking me up today
, all this warmth in her voice, she loves him—who comes and gets her sometimes, and seeing him is depressingly often the highlight of my week, and it will definitely make me feel better about the fact that I've been sitting here studying his little sister's non-body for an hour with some mixture of jealousy or lust and Jesus Christ Etta she is fourteen and
sick
, this is not sexy. And it's not even that I think it is, or that when I close my eyes to dream about girls, I see ones who look anything like her. It's just that I can't ever get out of my head what it would feel to touch a body like that. And, you know. For a variety of reasons I'm never going to get there. The biggest one being that I really do mostly not want to.

I really hate group. I really do.

Bianca slips her backpack over her shoulder—she has this really deliberate way of moving, and I wonder if she does ballet, figures that she would, really, but I know most of the advanced girls in the state and it's not like I'd forget her—so I
fiddle with my coat for a while to look natural and then I leave too. Her brother drives this shabby car and never gets out, but seriously, I just want to glance at his face and walk home writing a little song to myself about how he obviously noticed me and fell in love with me and we're going to have beautiful children and raise them to be happier than his sister, or me.

Except I am happy, most of the time. That's the messed-up part of this.

Even with all of this, I'm just a happy damn person. I lie around watching scary movies with my sister and knitting with my mom and I tap dance and I ace math tests and I am happy.

It could just be a lot easier to be happier right now, is the thing.

Bianca doesn't head outside, which means no hope of seeing Hot Brother today. Poor me. She's heading somewhere else inside the building, so I give up and look at this flyer to find the audition group, and the flyer has little drawings of musical notes on it and I get so stupidly excited. I headbang to some imaginary music and hop up the stairs.

I will pass by the third floor without looking in. I will pass by the third floor without looking in. Damn it, this is why I am not supposed to stick around the community center after group. Go straight home, go cry into a bowl of fruit, don't think.

I keep winding up another set of stairs and then down a hallway, and it gets harder and harder to ignore that Bianca's
headed in the same direction. I start to feel really awkward about it and duck into the bathroom for a minute. It gives me some time to tug and tug on this shirt I'm wearing, this old, pre-Dyke T-shirt I found balled up on the floor of my closet because I obviously wasn't going to wear my uniform to group, but my seventies clothes don't fit well and to be honest I was a little happy about that because I really, really did not want to wear them. Not anymore.

It's not like I ever looked good in hot pants anyway.

Because seriously, no one looks good in hot pants.

I get to the audition room and don't see Bianca, so maybe she was headed to something different after all. Or maybe she's itsy-bitsy and standing behind a normal-size person. Honestly I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it, because my headbanging and all my thoughts are swallowed up by this tiny room overflowing with actual music. There's a piano, but no one's really playing it. People are every once in a while just wandering over to play a few notes, check pitch, and I can't hear it anyway over the twenty people singing on top of each other. It's not pretty. Everyone's singing and reciting monologues, alone or in small groups. Two people are singing “On My Own,” and only one is on key. Everyone has their fingers pressed into the insides of their ears so they can hear the sound reverberating off their jawbone. Trick of the trade, and it makes the loud room bearable.

Makes it kind of amazing.

Chorus is fine, but it's a lot of nineteenth-century chamber music, and I am not nineteenth-century chamber music. I'm “Out Tonight” and “No Good Deed” and “Let's Hear It for the Boy,” the last of which I'm hearing right now from somewhere in the corner, ringing out through everything. It's one of those voices I've always been jealous of, one that's so clear and clean and sounds so
effortless
, like whoever it is is just opening their mouth and the words are falling out, like she doesn't even need to breathe.

So I look and . . . well.

It's Bianca.

And that guy sitting next to her, coaching her gently? That'd be Hot Brother.

So, you know, that's a thing. I'm going to be sticking around, I think. (What the hell else am I going to do, go home and wait for Rachel to not call?)

•  •  •

I sing and talk to people and tell them they're awesome and they tell me I'm awesome back, and I mean it for a few of them and maybe a few of them even mean it for me, and eventually people start clearing out. The first round of auditions aren't until next week, so I guess I don't know how this works. No one made any announcements. Mostly I just sang and didn't think, and it was surprisingly . . . nice. It was just nice.

But maybe Bianca can tell me what we're really doing here, so I give her this little smile across the room, and when
most people are gone I go to her and say, “You are really, really good.”

Bianca jumps like I touched her, or like I hit her, even.

“Shit, sorry. I'm Etta,” I say. “I'm in group with you.”

“I know,” she says, but she doesn't say it mean. She says it like she's
ashamed
that I approached her first, like she thinks she's
let me down
, and maybe that's a lot for me to get from two words, or maybe it's just hitting a little too close to home. (What self-starved girl isn't letting
everyone
down? Seriously.)

Because, really, I don't think anyone who's ever been within two miles of Bianca would expect her to be the type to make the first move.

Here I am thinking like I know her. I get like this with girls. I just do. (Rachel said it was one of her favorite things about me. Rachel said,
You care so much, Etta, you care so much about getting your ass laid, that's what this really is, huh, go get 'em tigress.
)

(This isn't that. This is
let me see your scars, let me show you mine too
.)

(This is maybe a little
how the hell did you get this thin
.)

So instead I say, “You do a damn good job with a song meant for a big black girl.”

“Those are the best songs.”

“I'm gonna tell my mom that. She thinks all girls should be Kristin Chenoweth.”

“Did you know that her real name is Kristi?”

I say, “It is?”

Bianca and I are the same height, I realize. That doesn't happen much. “Chenoweth,” she says. “Her real name is Kristi. She added the
n
to look more serious.”

“No way.”

Jesus,
gently
, Etta. She looks like she's worried I'm going to shove her at a polygraph. “Um, yes,” she says. “Sorry. I should go.” I'm watching her gather up her stuff, watching those skinny damn arms—Jesus Christ—when I see a hand come down onto her shoulder. Well hey there, Hot Brother.

“Hi,” I say. “I'm Etta.”

“James. Hey.”

“My sister's name is Kristina,” I say to Bianca. “I'll tell her to chop the
a
off. She wants to be a librarian, so serious is probably better.”

Bianca smiles a little and looks up at James. “Etta's my friend from . . .” She looks at me like she thinks I might not want it said. Aw, sweetie.

But then for some reason I can't say it. He picks her up every week, she's about to break in half, seriously, this is not a secret. And I don't mind people knowing, not now that I'm getting better. It kind of helps to talk about it, to hear people say their stupid little things about how they're proud of me, because yeah, you know what, I started therapy because I felt like it and not because I got forced into it like practically every other girl in my group. I'm proud of me too, y'know?

So screw it. “We're in that eating-disorder group together,” I say.

He says, “Hey, see, Bee? I knew there were cool girls in there.” He smiles at me. “She tries to tell me none of the girls in there have any interests other than . . .”

“Sticking their fingers down their throats?” I say.

“Oh, yes, we like her,” James says. “Etta can stay.”

“I'm a big proponent of no-fingers-down-throat,” I say. “I should have a shirt made up.”

“Etta's good,” Bianca says, quietly. “Etta's always saying brave things. Inspiring.”

“Damn, girl. Thank you.” I can't think of any inspiring thing I've said, but I guess I do say stuff that's a lot lighter than some of the girls, and that when it gets too heavy I'm always inclined to be like
hey so how about this puppy I saw this weekend!!
and pass my phone around. It's a defense mechanism, whatever, but so's half the shit people do, and at least being kind of irreverent makes me happy, and here's this girl calling it brave and inspiring, so that's pretty badass. Really it's hard to be in that group and not feel like I just think
differently
from these girls, that everything's a little sparklier for me than it is for them. Sometimes this shit just isn't so bad. I mean yeah, recovery sucks, my friends dumped me, I've just been way outshined by a room full of singers, but it could be all that and also raining, you know?

James says, “We're actually going out to get some food now. There's a
local co-op place she likes. Do you want to come? No stress.”

I look at her. “Would that be okay?”

She nods.

“Yeah, I'd like that a lot.” Human interaction!

“Awesome,” James says. “Mason's coming too. Mason!”

A guy across the room lifts his head from his backpack and looks up. Hoookay, he's no Hot Brother, but he definitely does not cause me any eye strain if you know what I mean.

Yes. Human interaction. Human interaction can stay.

I GET THIS PUMPKIN RAVIOLI
because Bianca's just getting a salad, and I know it's important that I eat more than she does. I've done that
who can eat less?
game with reluctant (or unaware) participant Disco Dykes, and I don't want her feeling like she has to compete with me. For all their (now obviously apparent) faults, the Dykes were really good with the eating disorder thing, always telling me I looked beautiful and trying to be these role models of eating and accepting their bodies, when of course they were all better-looking than me (Rachel especially, tall, Japanese, perfect—it figures we live in the white capital of Whiteland and my best friend is not only ten times more beautiful than me but also nonwhite to boot) so it wasn't really hard for them, but whatever. I'm really trying not to hate people for being pretty.

Especially because right now I can just fall back on a kindergartner's strategy of hating people because they're more talented, because goddamn. Bianca and James have been doing theater since they were tiny, and even though I didn't hear him sing, I can tell by his speaking voice that he's got to be decent, and being related to syrup-voiced Bianca has got to be a good sign. No idea if Mason's at that level, but he spits out credentials like he generally doesn't think they're a big deal, and hi, I'm Etta and I go to dance class.

“So how'd you guys meet?” I say.

Bianca says, “I was born, and James was like, there.”

I say, “Oh, shut up, you.”

She grins, and it makes the restaurant seem even warmer. I like it here. It's a little outside of town in the direction (away from Fremont, and Omaha, and general civilization) that I don't typically go, but maybe I need to start venturing further into the cornfield wastelands. Topically, the walls are painted with kind of creepily realistic pictures of farmers, like we're supposed to believe they're harvesting our food as we sit here. But this ravioli is really, really good, and after two months in recovery I'm just now getting to the point where I can genuinely enjoy food (while frantically calculating calories in my head, yeah. I'm not a superhero. Unless ridiculously precise food-math counts as a superpower).

“I met James at day camp when we were goddamn infants,” Mason says. He curses, the siblings don't. I've figured out from
the way they bowed their heads before they ate, all subtle, in unison, that they're definitely religious, and I've figured out from the way that James holds his fork—because come on it's not like I don't know my shit in this department—that he is definitely gay.

I say, “That's like me and my best friend. We were like betrothed at birth or something.”

“Does she do theater too?” Mason says.

I shake my head. “We did kiddie dance classes together, but she was never really into it. Meanwhile I latched on to it and never stopped.”

“Oh, so you're a dancer.”

Shut it down! “I'm so completely not a dancer. I just do dance classes. You have to be good to be a dancer.” I don't know why I'm saying this, really, because the truth is . . . I'm pretty damn good. It's the same way I used to pretend I ate a lot, I think. What if someday they see me dance and they think I'm not good? I have to start letting them down now. Jesus, I'm psychotic.