Everybody Knows Your Name (7 page)

Once she gets to work bringing me clothes to try on, it doesn't seem like she's ever going to stop. This isn't the kind of stuff you might buy at your local JCPenney. She's got me putting on a purple puffy vest with bleached-out skinny jeans and chunky neon tennis shoes; a fur-lined leather parka and giant gold rope chain necklaces and a red baseball hat; a leopard-print jacket and short pants that stop halfway up my shin.

“Are you sure these aren't just long shorts?” I ask her, but she holds out her pinky, wraps it around mine, and swears that they're pants.

She has me trying on a big scarf that half covers my face (like you need a scarf in Los Angeles) and some kind of army coat with the sleeves ripped off. Black leather jackets and white leather jackets and red leather jackets; thin black dress ties and medallions and big belt buckles.

I'm trying to figure out which of these outfits looks like it belongs on a guy who's capable of winning a million dollars and an American stadium tour. I'm staring at myself in a tight Navajo-patterned sweater, silver pants, and weird sunglasses that look like somebody's covering your eyes with their hands, when doubt starts to set in.

I can tell that Robyn's really good at her job, but I'm just not so sure I can pull this stuff off.

“I'm sure some people would look great in this. But I don't know,” I say, taking off the hand glasses. “It's like Halloween. I usually only wear a T-shirt and jeans. I feel kind of stupid.”

“T-shirt and jeans are cool. That can be very cool. But hear me out, Ford.” She gets serious, and I'm reminded that she said she was going to look out for me. “In this contest, you only have a few minutes to make an impact. After you win, you can perform in a garbage sack and people will think it's cool. We don't have to go all crazy.” She pulls off the Navajo sweater. “But we should at least pick out one thing that's, y'know—”

“Memorable,” I finish.

“Yeah. I want you to be yourself, but it's just showmanship, man. Y'know. Theater.” As she says
theater
, she uses her hands to dramatically reveal her face, like she's a magician.

“Showmanship.”

“Look at it this way: you didn't come all the way from Arkansas just to be what you've always been. You came to reinvent yourself, yeah?”

I step over to the racks to look through my choices again. “I guess I do think this jacket is kind of cool.” It's slick black satin with a red silhouette of a ram's head on the back. “I mean, I'm an Aries.”

“Now we're talking. Take it with you, sleep in it, make it yours.”

“I do think I'm going to pass on these pants, though.” I gesture at the silver pants. “I don't want them exploding if I microwave something.” We smile at each other.

“Don't worry, dude, I'll get you some real jeans. Without rhinestones or anything.”

Another one of the contestants, Dillon, walks in for his wardrobe appointment. I talked to him for a while yesterday when we were waiting for vocal coaching to start, and he strikes me as an earnest but good guy. We give each other a slide handshake and shoot the shit for a couple of minutes while Robyn takes his measurements.

When she goes to the other side of the room to grab Dillon a pair of shoes, he asks me softly, “Did you see my wardrobe yesterday at the beach?”

“No.” They'd split the group up into two different camera crews so everyone could get done in a day. Dillon was with the bunch on the other side of the pier.

“I don't want to complain, but they put me in a Tommy Hilfiger shawl-neck cardigan,” he tells me. “How many Jews do you know who wear Tommy Hilfiger?”

I laugh. “I don't know any Jewish people except you,” I say. And that makes Dillon laugh too.

Robyn presents Dylan with a pair of velvet slippers, and I head over to check out my new outfit in the mirror. Studying myself, I try to imagine the Mattress King, with his purple robe and his scepter made of mattress springs, bowing down before me.

As I'm pushing the button for the elevator, I catch my reflection in the mirrored doors. The feeling is like I'm one of those guys in a movie who's jumped into someone else's body.

They trimmed my hair and now it lays different somehow. Zara, the hair stylist, said it was her version of young Elvis. I know it's only a new hairstyle and a fashion magazine jacket, but I have this odd sensation of not recognizing myself. What's more, I can't say if I'm excited or freaked out about it.

The mirrors slide away and reveal Magnolia. You know that rush of adrenaline or whatever it is you get under your chest that lets you know that you wanted to see someone more than you'd even realized? That's what I have right now.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hey,” I say.

“Are you getting in?” she asks at the same time I'm asking her, “You getting out?”

She shakes her head. “The past couple of nights I've told my mom I'm hanging out downstairs, but I've actually been going to the ice room. For personal space. I make sure to at least make the stop down here so it isn't a gross lie.” She has this habit of talking with her hands, demonstrating what's up, what's down for me as if she operates on her own compass. It's pretty cute.

I step into the elevator. “You hang out in the ice room?” Her floor is pressed, and I hit mine.

“It's not much to look at. But the ice cubes don't suggest new choreography to me.” She leans against the opposite wall, her hair falling down around her face. “You looked like you were getting pretty close with that starfish yesterday.”

I look doleful. “She left me for a sea urchin.”

The elevator chimes because we're at my floor. I take a look at Magnolia. I feel suddenly compelled to hook a finger in the loop of her jeans again and pull her near me, but I just say, “Have a good night.” I walk out.

“Ford—”

I turn, and she's blocking the sensor with her hand so the doors won't close. “I heard a rumor going around that both of your parents are dead.”

All the adrenaline from first seeing her plunges down into my stomach like it's a fist. “Right,” I say. “That's true.”

“I'm sorry.” Her face transforms, and she looks like she could almost cry. The change startles me.

“No, it's okay—”

“No, that's just what you say.”

I nod.

“My dad died from cancer a few years ago, so I know too.” She removes her hand from the sensor. “I just wanted to say that I'm sorry. We don't have to talk about it now. Or ever.” The elevator doors begin closing. “Since I'm assuming that's a big part of what you're trying to leave behind.”

We look each other in the eyes. Doing that makes me want to tell her what I've done. I could just tell her I made up a stupid lie. But then the next thing I know, I'm just looking at myself in the shiny door, and she's gone.

For the first show I'm going to be singing “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” Nirvana made it popular in the nineties, which is why I can use it, but it's a much older song. No one even knows who wrote it. It just appeared out of the mists of the old Appalachian Mountains almost a hundred years ago.

I love songs like that. They seem ancient and mysterious to me, like they have secrets I'll never totally understand no matter how many times I hear them.

The lyrics are all about this guy demanding this girl not to lie to him, to tell him where she slept last night. The answer goes:

In the pines, in the pines,

where the sun don't ever shine.

I would shiver the whole night through.

Now, I don't know if he's singing about his girlfriend or a daughter or what, and I don't even know what's meant by “in the pines,” exactly, but it sounds like a dark and lonely place. Like she's gone someplace or seen or done something too terrible to even speak of.

The way Kurt Cobain sings it really makes me catch my breath. When he sings, you know the pines are a kind of place you can't come back from, or at least you don't come back the same kind of person. You know the people in this song aren't ever gonna be the same after this. At least, that's what I hear when I'm listening to the track alone in my hotel room tonight. Leander would just call it the blues.

If it turns out the audience wants to hear something more upbeat or more danceable or whatever, then it'll be me who's “in the pines.” For me, the pines are back home in Calumet, where the sun hasn't really ever shined on me so much.

But I'm going with this song anyway because one, I love it and two, the producers want me to play up what they're calling my “roots.” They want me to bring out my guitar (well, not
my
guitar, which Cody pawned, but the one they've given me), and they want to project some kind of rural tree scene on the stage behind me while I sing. Stacy, the vocal coach, says I have to show my soul.

Since I'm working on being professional, none of this is a problem.

“Sorry in advance if I hurt your head, but we've got to get this out quick,” Zara says.

There's less than an hour until the first show goes live, but ten minutes ago, after I was already in full makeup and wardrobe, the producers decided that I should be something more exotic than a brunette. So Zara, the hair stylist, basically poured on some dye.

“Yes,” I said when they first made the suggestion. “Definitely.”

I really like the idea that it could be possible to change from the outside in. Bright hair. Bright outfit. Bright eyes. And then there will be actual brightness from the spotlight, of course.

Maybe I could be the kind of person who gets energized by being in the presence of lots of other people. You can't be the girl who's drawn to the corner when you're the girl who sings on a stage. And if other people see you as the second girl, then maybe you can actually move around as her in your life. You can meet people as her. They won't know any different. And then you don't have to feel like such a fraud for adopting this outward exuberance. You can become the kind of person who other people enjoy, if you can just get over your voice sounding tinny in your own ears.

My hair's supposed to turn out a shade of magenta (Zara described it to me as “not red, not purple, and without the baggage that burgundy carries with it”), but I'm taking her word for it because she's been keeping a warm towel wrapped around my head.

My mom has already been seated in the audience. Before leaving, she took both of my hands, held them to her heart, and said, “I can't believe I made you. I'm really proud. I'm really, really proud.” She was practically glowing, and it wasn't because of makeup.

I had the thought that even if I can't win, maybe I've done something for her. I didn't notice so much when I was really little, but once I became more aware of people's feelings, I could tell how badly she wanted to be chosen. It's like she's been waiting and waiting for the world to Red Rover her over to the side of the people who are watched. I know being here as my mom is only second best. But it's something.

Now Zara's violently shampooing me. It's like my skull is her piggy bank and she's trying to shake out her last penny.

We're out in a trailer on the back lot, and the sun is just starting to set, so the light coming in through the windows is blurring everything with goldenness. I have such anticipation about what tonight is going to change for me that I relax by imagining that Zara and I are two girlfriends in a doublewide in a field somewhere in the South, just doing hair. And I guess I'm imagining somewhere in Arkansas, where Ford is from, even though I've never even seen that part of the country before.

I can't help it, the last couple of days I've been thinking what his life back there looked like. Both of his parents are dead. Did he live alone?

“It's looking so good!” Zara shrieks with the underwire of her bra pressed right against my forehead.

“I'm excited!” I say. I mean, hair changes are no joke. Hair is an emotional thing. Look at Samson. Look at every girl who's ever cried because her hair got cut too short. Look at how my mom acted when she found her first gray one night while she was plucking her eyebrows.

“I've never dyed my hair before. I mean, I messed with Sun-In once in seventh grade, but I wouldn't count that.”

“I think you're going to love it.”

She does one last rinse and then sits me up. I can see myself in the mirror across from the chair. Even though my hair is still wet, the color almost glows off it like some kind of unreal halo. Like there's a mist made out of fruit punch and grape soda evaporating around my head.

“This is
great
,” I say.

Jesse the PA throws open the door to the trailer. He's visibly sweating. “They need Magnolia back in wardrobe ASAP—they want to switch out her shoes. Also, they're sending McKinley over to you in two seconds because his mom wants you to work on that weird curl he has.”

Zara says, “Shit!” and grabs a hairdryer so fast that you can see she probably wouldn't be all that bad with a gun if you dropped her into one of those old saloons.

There's the South again,
I think.

I flip my head upside down for her and stare at my feet.

“What's wrong with these shoes?” I yell. Zara doesn't hear me. They're iridescent high-tops that have lights in the soles when you walk on them. Bright shoes.

She straightens me up and dries my hair with her fingers while leaving it sort of undone like I've just rolled out of bed in time for the show. Then she pushes me outside to go back to wardrobe.

I head across the lot. Crewmembers are going about their jobs in golf carts and sunglasses like it's an ordinary afternoon. Up on the hill, the tram that gives tours of the studios wraps around a corner. It is incredibly weird to think that after tonight, next time the people in the tram see me they might go,
Hey, we know her
.

Mila is suddenly walking beside me in a white sequined minidress.

“Hey,” I say.

Even though we've been hanging out in the ice room the past couple of nights, we haven't really had a full conversation yet. Last night all she said was, “My sister won't stop talking,” and I said, “My mom, either,” and that was it. But I would say there's a certain understanding between us.

I know she's got this reputation for having a bad attitude—like when the choreographer wanted us to practice holding the mic, Mila said, “I've had a hand my whole life,” and left for lunch early. But if you pay careful attention to the subtleties of how she acts, I don't actually think she has a chip on her shoulder. I think it's just that she really hates to bullshit.

“Hey,” she says. “Did you also get called back to wardrobe?”

“They don't like my shoes.”

“Your hair looks good.”

“Thank you,” I say, knowing that she's not the type to say something like that just to be nice. “Yours too.”

They've kept her hair in long pigtails, French-braided at the scalp, maybe because she insisted. There's something very resolute about her.

She says, “Belinda the hippie is smoking salvia in her dressing room.”

I'm blown away by this information. I only know about salvia because of all the press Miley Cyrus got when she had to explain it wasn't weed in her bong. I've never gotten into casual drug use, probably because I have control issues. “What?”

“Belinda's an intense girl.”

“I know, but she's about to perform on national TV. That seems like it would really put a lot of additional pressure on you, you know? To possibly be going out of your mind while you're trying to sing and hold the microphone in the right way?”

“I've seen weirder preshow routines. My sister always spends the half hour before she has to perform in a headstand. She thinks the blood in her head gives her more energy. Like she needs more.”

I raise my eyebrows in agreement.

“She's been doing it since we were five.”

McKinley passes with his mom, coming out of wardrobe, and he winks at us. Mila shakes her head at him like she's saying no to the wink.

“She's been performing since she was five?” I ask.

“Both of us, since we were two. We were child stars,” Mila says, opening the door to wardrobe.

“There's my guh-irls!” shouts the show's stylist, Robyn, over rap coming from her laptop as we step in.

Surprised by what Mila just said, I study her profile and imagine her as a kid, trying to place her from some old sitcom or movie. This isn't a hard thing to imagine because like I said, the twins have got the kind of face that makes it seem like childhood was just over for them yesterday. While I'm looking at Mila, Robyn places a pair of black Doc Martens in my hands.

“Put these on,” she orders. “They said they wanted you to have a more rock look.” She rolls her eyes. “They have no idea what rock is. They think it's a skull temporary tattoo from the mall. But okay, sure, I know how to interpret their language.”

Mila grabs a hanging sea-foam green dress that belongs on an ice skating rink and starts to change. “I found out my sister's wearing sequins,” she explains.

I look at the Docs. “I'm trying to go . . . light. I'm trying to go bright.”

Robyn shrugs. “I think they're concerned your song is a little, like, drippy and so they want to edge you up.”

“Drippy!” I say. “Drippy?”

A ringtone goes off that's the chorus of Kanye's song about being a douchebag. Robyn says, “Ugh, I have to take this call—it's my boyfriend,” and then she ducks out of the trailer to talk.

I sit down in a chair and stare back and forth between my high-tops and the Docs. “So you've already been famous before?” I ask Mila.

“That's debatable.” She turns around for me to zip her.

“Why is it debatable?”

“You get called a child star if you were a child and you had regular paying work. It's like being called a porn star.”

I know what she means. A teacher from my high school was fired after someone's parents found out she was a “porn star,” and all that entailed was a gross couch in a video on the Internet.

Mila turns and goes to look at herself in the mirror on the wall. “This is very black-girl Tinker Bell,” she says, fluffing the skirt.

“Did you and your sister used to do that thing where you played the same kid?”

“All the time. When we got older, we auditioned for everything as twins—like to play twins. Then Felicia started getting called back for things I didn't, because people like her better in a room. When I was a small kid, I thought I wasn't socially well adjusted because I never went to normal school. But then I had to realize that Felicia didn't either.” She takes off the white heels she was wearing and starts going through Robyn's shoe racks for a new pair. “Did you ever hear about the
The All-New Mickey Mouse Club
? It used to have Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake and Ryan Gosling and all those people before they were famous.”

When I was younger, in the days back when my parents were still together, my mom would show me clips of
The
All-New Mickey Mouse Club
online and say things about Spears and the rest like, “They all started early. Maybe if someone had started me early . . .” She's a pretty creative person, but I know she always dreamed of having a specific talent that other people could point to in her.

Anyway, from what I remember, that show was canceled before the midnineties. Mila's only a couple of years older than me, and I don't think the club ever had a baby as a member.

“Aren't you too young to have been on that?”

“The one with Britney. But a couple of years ago they were going to do
The New New Mickey Mouse Club
. I learned how to do backflips for the audition. Felicia's personality is a double layout triple tuck whatever whatever that's followed by ten double pikes. So they cast her. I can't compete in a room.” She shrugs to herself.

“I only casually watch gymnastics during Olympic years. But I get what you mean,” I say. “I'm surprised they let her be on this show. Aren't we all supposed to be amateurs?”

“That pilot never made it to air.”

“Oh.”

“I'm a big enough person that I can admit that made me a little bit happy.”

I stand to go take a look in the mirror alongside Mila. During my fitting the other day, I really pressed for Robyn to put me in something upbeat. The producers wanted me to show some skin, so the compromise that resulted is what you'd technically call a tube top, and it's made out of shiny leotard material that's iridescent like the sneakers. I turn one way, it looks pink. I turn another, it looks green. It kind of has that rainbow effect, and who could ever say a rainbow is dark and tortured?

My white pants are very tight with a high rise, so you can only see the barest sliver of skin, right under my ribcage. The outfit isn't something I'd wear to school and it's not something you'd wear to your grandmother's house, but it's making me feel hopeful.

And I want to keep my matching shoes.

I say, “I'm keeping my shoes.”

“Okay, get down with your bad self.” Mila looks at me curiously. “Is that like a journal or a diary that you're always writing in when you're in the ice room?”

“It's not about my life, but kind of.”

Jesse, now sweaty, runs into wardrobe, out of breath. “Catherine wants everyone waiting in their dressing rooms. Now,” he says. “Need you two to head over this second.”

Robyn still hasn't come back from her phone call, but Mila shrugs and says, “We look finished to me.”

“But is a person ever really finished?” I'm joking, but I'm also not joking.

“Well, here's a bracelet,” Mila says, and she hands me one off her wrist, but she's kind of joking too.