Like It Never Happened (12 page)

My parents, for all of their tidiness, had always been secret hoarders. I had inherited their tendency to shove things into closets.

“Probably not.” I sighed, irritated.

Mary crossed the room, tested the weight of the dresser, and climbed skillfully to the top. Her upper half disappeared inside the cavity of the closet; only her silk-clad legs remained in view. Stuff began falling from the shelves: mateless shoes, spiral notebooks. A stuffed dog landed on its stomach and began to sing, in a hauntingly mechanical voice, “Bingo was his name-o!”

Mary gave a cry of discovery. And then she tumbled to the carpet, clutching a small glass dragon to her chest. Mary sniffed the bowl-shaped end of the figurine—which now I realized was actually a pipe—and smiled.

“What. The. Hell?” I asked with Charlie-esque incredulity.

My sister shoved the pipe inside the breast pocket of her pajama top. “I was seventeen and they had developed this habit of obsessively searching my room every time I left the house. So I stashed my favorite pipe in here. Years later I woke up in the middle of the night and suddenly remembered I had left drug paraphernalia in your closet. I worried you would grow into the clean-cut kid you are, and Mom would decide to get rid of your baby clothes before the reality television producers came knocking, and in the process of cleaning your room would find it and assume you were a pothead and freak out accordingly.”

I stared at her.

“I simply couldn't have that on my conscience,” she added.

“What if I wasn't a clean-cut kid?” I challenged.

She shrugged. “I probably wouldn't have bothered. You would have to get caught for something, in that case.”

I wanted to remind her that I had provided the cigarettes. I had consumed two glasses of champagne in the living room and suffered only a brief bout of hiccups in the process. Plus I had a boyfriend, and he wasn't even that nice.

“Can I have it?” I asked.

She looked surprised, but recovered quickly. “No way.” She winked. “That's not what big sisters are for.”

“What are they for?” I asked.

With one hand on the door, she considered this. “I guess you will have to wait and see.” She leaned in to kiss my forehead, more like a mother than a sister.

She left me in her wake of perfume and cigarette smoke. She left me with the stuffed dog lying on the carpet, dismayed by its own resurrection.

Naturally I had observed that my sister was completely crazy.

But also, I noticed, Mary was completely in control.

I
n the morning my parents took Mary to Café Broder—which actually serves the most delicious breakfast the world has ever known—but I stayed in bed, because I had started reading
A Streetcar Named Desire
and I could not stop. It was completely different from the plays we had done before. Meaning it was very intense. Of course
The Crucible
was intense in a certain way; we were always screaming, possessed by the devil. But it felt like we were making fun of the way people used to be.
The Seagull
was slightly more relevant to our lives, but nothing shocking ever happened onstage.

A Streetcar Named Desire
is about a woman named Blanche DuBois who shows up at her sister Stella's apartment in New Orleans and tries to convince Stella that her husband, Stanley, is too poor and generally too violent to be a good husband. Blanche herself is not particularly sane—she's kind of a drunk, and prone to mental breakdowns. But her excuse is that she was once married to a man who turned out to be gay, and who shot himself because of it. Afterward she became something of a slut, sleeping with everyone in her hometown, including a seventeen-year-old boy.

When Stanley finds out about Blanche's sordid past, he's upset that she was pretending to be so superior, calling him “brute” all the time. He's also tired of her hanging around their tiny apartment, hogging the bathroom and drinking all the booze. Things spiral out of control and toward the end Stanley attacks Blanche. The curtain falls.

I researched the play online and found out that he supposedly rapes her.

Afterward, Stella decides to believe her husband's word over her sister's, and they ship Blanche off to a mental hospital because she's completely insane by that point. Blanche's final line is delivered to the doctor who hauls her offstage: “I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Then the play ends.

Mary stuck her head into my bedroom to say good-bye before returning to Lake Oswego to be with her golfer.

“Aren't you going to get up?” she asked.

I was on the bed, holding my rolled-up script to my chest like a knife. “Eventually.”

“Hey.” She stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. She was wearing white pants and a yellow sweater, hair pulled into a smooth ponytail. She looked like a girl in a tampon commercial.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I nodded. Having glimpsed the next few months of my life, I needed to be left the hell alone.

Mary dug around in her giant purse and produced the dragon-shaped pipe. She placed it on the mattress beside me, then backed away from her offering. “I changed my mind,” she said. “You can have this.”

“I'll probably never use it.”

“Of course not.”

I couldn't tell if she was making fun of me. Since my mother was prone to bursting in unannounced, I pushed the pipe beneath the covers. It was weird to think that it had been in my closet the whole time.

Retreating from the room, Mary pointed a finger at me. “I'll see you soon, okay?”

I grunted.

Downstairs, I heard Mom ask, “When do we get to meet this Jeffrey Cline?”

I didn't catch Mary's reply. Listening to my sister drive away, I felt overwhelmed by the nauseating silence of Sunday afternoon, and also by fear. For the first time in my life I was terrified to play the lead.

On Monday morning, the Essential Five plus a small assembly of nonessentials waited outside the auditorium. None of us could really talk. It was like our real selves ceased to exist while we waited to be cast as new people. We couldn't interact before we knew our roles.

Minutes before the bell, Mr. McFadden appeared waving a sheet of paper above his head. He pressed the list into the cork and turned dramatically on his heel. He never stuck around to observe the damage.

I felt the usual kick of elation when I found our names at the top of the list.

• BLANCHE.................................... Rebecca Rivers

• STELLA.........................................Liane Gallagher

• STANLEY.......................................Charlie Lamb

• MITCH...........................................Tim Li

• EUNICE..........................................Tess Dunham

Of the leftover roles, Hadley Clarke had been cast as the doctor, who only appears at the very end of the play. I could kind of feel her eyes boring into my back.

“You would have made a good Blanche,” someone said to Hadley.

“I'll make a good doctor,” Hadley asserted.

“Absofuckinglutely you will,” said the same kid, clad in skinny jeans and a paisley button-down, who must have been Hadley's boyfriend. “This McFadden guy is totally blind to real talent. His decisions are all about nepotism.”

“We're not his
children
,” protested Tim.

“So then what are you?” challenged Hadley's boyfriend, draping a protective arm over her shoulder.

“The best,” breathed Charlie. He was staring at the cast list, mouth stretched so wide I thought his face might crack. For days he had been talking about playing Stanley. The part involved a lot of cursing and swigging from bottles, which excited him.

“See?” said Liane to me. “I knew you were untouchable.”

Tim and Tess were already drifting toward class. After patting me lamely on the shoulder, Liane jogged after them.

Charlie was grinning at me like a cartoon shark. “Well?” he said. “You think you can handle me playing another girl's husband?”

At first I was confused, and then horrified.

Because I had taken it for granted that Charlie would play Stanley, the male lead. But I had utterly failed to observe that if I starred as Blanche DuBois, somebody else had to play Stella, Stanley's devoted wife.

“Somebody else” happened to be Liane.

Before we could start rehearsing for
A Streetcar Named Desire,
we had to figure out what to do for the homecoming assembly. On Friday morning, each club would be required to demonstrate their special skills for the entire student body. Since the thespian troupe was technically a club, Mr. McFadden had put the five of us in charge.

We met backstage to discuss our options. Mr. McFadden was so upset about having to sacrifice rehearsal time for the “frivolous notion of school spirit” that he didn't really give us any guidance. He just sat at his desk, shuffling papers around.

Charlie insisted we perform a scene we already knew—like something from
The Seagull
—in order to save our energy for
Streetcar
. Tess, however, thought we should sing a song from
Hair,
the musical. Tim was enthusiastic about that idea because he was in one of those anti-haircut stages that boys go through. Every time one of us suggested something new, Mr. McFadden made a rude noise with his nasal passages. Eventually we agreed that this was hindering the whole process, so we seized our backpacks and left.

We wandered away from the school, halfheartedly throwing ideas around. Liane proposed that we refuse to participate altogether, but Charlie pointed out that the last thing we needed was to piss off the administration. Apparently they had been skeptical of Mr. McFadden's selection for the fall play, thinking
Streetcar
“too mature” for a teenage cast. Our director had written this whole letter in our defense, citing our reverence for the stage and his obligation to prepare us for our future careers, “not with the tap dances and painted-on smiles of a family friendly musical—but with Mr. Williams's prize-winning tale of deceit and delusion.”

We were walking on Division Street, which was just south of our school and always made me feel like I didn't actually live in a big city. The apartment buildings were all worn out, interspersed with dive bars and auto shops. The problem with Portland was that, no matter how inner-city you got, you were still in Oregon.

“You know what would be funny?” said Tess. She was balancing on the curb, holding out her arms. “If we made, like, an advertisement for the fall play. We could take a camera on the streetcar during rush hour, and film all of the businesspeople looking bored. And then at the very back, Rebecca and Charlie could be, I don't know, making out. And a voice-over would be like:
A Streetcar Named Desire
, coming soon to Bickford Park Alternative School.”

It wasn't actually funny.

Eventually Liane said, “I don't know if we'll even have time for something like that.” The rest of us mumbled agreement. I avoided looking Charlie in the eye.

We weren't exactly prone to making out on public transportation. Or really any place where people could see us. It was actually starting to bother me. I thought boys were supposed to want to touch their girlfriends, jealous costars be damned.

Of course, everything changed the moment we were alone—in the ink-blue darkness of his bedroom, or on my rusted porch swing that emitted bloodcurdling shrieks if we weren't careful. Then things got physical very quickly. His hands would be up my shirt and his heart would be beating fast against mine. It never seemed like a good time to complain.