Everybody Knows Your Name (2 page)

The clerk has put us on one of the top floors. When the elevator door opens, there's a woman backed into the far corner wearing a tight gold minidress. The straps have fallen off her shoulders, and she's got her face toward the elevator wall, so all I can really see of her is her long red hair.

“Are you getting out?” my mom asks, and the woman just says, “Mmm,” which makes it pretty impossible to decide if that's a yes or a no. So my mom and I look at each other and then at the woman, who isn't budging, and then we get in, figuring she's at least willing to go on another ride.

The elevator starts with more of a jolt than I was expecting. I lose my balance, and tip over onto the panel with the buttons, which means that my shoulder lights up a bunch of floors we don't need. My mom laughs at me and raps, “Errrrybody in the elevator gettin' tipsy.”

At this, the woman in the gold dress rolls along the wall so she's facing us. She's somewhere around thirty, and if I wasn't sure before, now I can tell she's completely wasted.

“You shouldn't play around in an elevator,” she slurs. She stabilizes her head and eyes enough to shoot us an amazingly exasperated look that says we should know better. “Can't be doing that, thinking the 'vator is your own house, you know,
jeez
.” She huffs out that last word like she's proud of the points she just made. The elevator door chimes and opens on the third floor, courtesy of my shoulder.

“Are you—” my mom says, and I think she's going to finish with something like,
in need of a stomach pumping?
But before she can get out the rest of the question, the woman in the gold dress lifts her head higher and asks, “Dooya recognize me?”

The elevator starts again. My mom takes a step forward like she does whenever she's charged with excitement and can't help herself.

“You are! I loved you in that movie where you play the girl who's torn between the guy you think is trying to kill you and the policeman who's been protecting you. Whenever it comes on cable, I'm going to watch it and I don't care if it's three in the morning!”

“That one,” says the woman, chuckling and tucking her hair behind an ear. “A good one, that one. He was always saying, let's go on vacation, come on, let's go see palm trees. I can't get enough of you in a bikini. Listen, I want you. In a bikini. On the inside of my eyelids.”

Listening to her, I wonder if I should picture everyone in America in bikinis instead while I'm singing. They could be tossing each other beach balls, riding boogie boards, things like that. Boogie boards are automatically stupid things to think about.

“Which costar?” my mom asks. “The killer or the policeman?”

“Wasn't a killer in real life, ya know.”

The elevator opens to no one on the fifth floor.

“Obviously. But he was so good in the movie.” My mom nods thoughtfully. “The two of you together, it makes complete sense.”

“It sure did. Only once, though, way back then,” says the actress. “It only made sense
once
.”

By the time the elevator gets to our floor, the actress isn't the same person who was scolding us for messing around. She's eager to tell my mom trivia from the set, but the information's like a puzzle you can only finish partway because some of the pieces are lost in another box. Either it was the director who wore a wig or else it was the guy who made her wigs for the movie who fought the director. I don't know. It doesn't seem to matter to my mom, whatever the story.

“Were you outgoing when you were a kid?” I suddenly ask the actress. I'm wondering if she always wanted to get out there and perform for others, or if it was something that snuck up and surprised her.

She looks at me like I've startled her. She says, “Areyoo asking if I was a slut?”

In this situation, I think most moms would probably warn the drunk actress to cool it toward their daughters. But my mom says to her, “Obviously you weren't.”

The elevator doors open on eleven. “This is us,” I say to the actress. “Do you want me to push a button for you?”

She points upward. She's forgiven me. “Going to the roof. There's a pool. There's stars.”

I push that button for her, and we say bye, getting out. The actress is saying something about how people should never horse around in the pool—never—as the doors shut on her again.

“She was pretty cool, even if she was sort of out of it,” my mom says as we walk down the hallway. “Maybe she's staying here and we'll run into her again. Because I don't know if it counts as meeting someone if they don't remember you.”

“You still got to talk to her.”

“Technically. But I feel like it doesn't matter unless you actually made an impression. People must come up and talk to her all the time.”

“Maybe they don't, especially when she's like that.”

My mom still seems disturbed by the way she left things with the actress, so I ask, “Do you want to go up to the pool and try to have a longer conversation? I'm fine by myself for a while.” I want this experience to be everything my mom needs from it. If it's too late in life for her to really change, then at least I don't want her collecting regrets.

She shakes her head. I think it's more to shake herself out of the idea of going up there than for my benefit. “No, stop it, I'm fine. Here we are.”

She pushes the key card into the reader, and we enter the room we'll be sharing for the next couple of nights, or however long it takes to seal skylights. The two beds are on low gray platforms with lampshades attached to the wall behind them. Then there's one more floor lamp that's just a glowing white tube.

The room feels like it's futuristic and old-fashioned at the same time, like it's a bedroom on a private airplane, but an airplane from a few decades before I was born. The airplane of a swinger. I don't actually know what a swinger likes in terms of decoration, but from the ideas I have about swinging, this seems pretty right.

The weirdest part is that there's a glass wall in between the bedroom and the bathroom, so you can watch someone washing their face. Or even worse, if you're staying with your mom, you can watch someone shower. But thankfully, there's also a white curtain you can pull shut.

My mom says, “Look, Mag, flowers and a note.” Over on the built-in desk that runs along the window there's an arrangement. It's very tropical-looking with green and yellow orchids in a tall bamboo vase.

The only other time in my life I remember getting flowers was when I was little and my dad gave me a bouquet of carnations after my dance recital. He told me that you give roses to women and carnations to girls, and that's why he loved carnations. Because he thought they were happier flowers in that way.

“Thoughtful,” I say.

My mom takes the note out of the envelope and reads, “‘Welcome, Magnolia and Diana.' I'll have to let them know that I go by Di. ‘We hope you'll find your room comfortable until we can get you into the mansion—sorry about the last-minute change of plans. Please feel free to order room service on our account. A producer will be calling tonight to make sure that you have everything you need and to go over the schedule for tomorrow.'”

She touches one of the orchid's petals like she's making sure it's real. “Okay, then I'm going to hop in the shower before they call.” She starts taking off her rings and putting them next to the vase. Then she goes into the bathroom and checks out the minisoaps and mini-shampoos before calling out, “Mag?”

“Yeah, Mom?”

“What if this is the beginning of a whole new existence?”

“I know,” I say.

She pulls the white curtain shut, and I hear the shower come on a few seconds later. I go over to the window and open the long striped curtain that runs the whole width of the room. The other side of the glass is dotted with raindrops. The view looks out over the freeway and wavering city lights. The hills are in the distance. The streets underneath me shine from the drizzle floating on top of car oil.

I think I'm probably young enough to pull off a whole new existence. I really boxed myself into my old one.

Back in elementary school, I used to have a group of five friends. It was easier then. We ate lunch together and hit up the book fair at recess together, but maybe that's just it—everything we did was over at 2:51 p.m. Then we could go our separate ways because we were too young to have social lives and not in charge enough to have to make plans.

Then we got to middle school, which was bigger. And our group of five was automatically expected to join up with other groups that were coming from other elementary schools. So then we were eating lunch in a circle of fifteen, just like that. I was buying fourteen identical gifts at the holidays. Roller-skating in a long chain. Sitting in parks at night and needing multiple tables. The phone was ringing all the time. And by high school it became a group of at least thirty, give or take whoever was mad at whomever or liked whomever on any given day, and it was so many personalities and so many plans (and parties added onto that now too) and just so much talking that I cracked.

One day I broke off and started eating lunch alone in a corner by the history building. I got the nickname Dark Star. A lot of people thought I was depressed or angry or your standard kind of asshole who thinks she's too good for everybody else.

On the third anniversary of my dad's death, I was having a really bad day. It was worse than the second anniversary, but I still couldn't tell you why. I just knew I was going to burst into tears if I walked into fifth-period math.

So I went to collect myself behind the auto shop building, since they only teach those classes in the morning; it's a ghost town after lunch. I lay down on the concrete, and maybe a minute later this long-haired upperclassman guy came around the corner and almost kicked my head with his Vans. He was hiding from a campus security guy, who'd spotted him trying to take off early. The way he put it was, “I was gonna pack it up for the day.”

You know how in movies they have those things called meet-cutes? Like when two people knock heads while going for the same frozen yogurt topping. This was more like a meet-sad. The guy asked if I minded if he stayed for a minute, until the narc was gone, and just as I'd suspected, anyone saying anything to me made tears come. They started rolling down my face just because of a nothing question.

People who have seen me cry are confused sometimes because I don't hiccup or sob. I just get a very wet face, very fast. I'm like one of those fountain walls at a restaurant.

“Whoa,” the guy said, and there was the first moment between Scott and me.

I know that girls throwing over their girlfriends for a guy is a thing, but in my defense, I had already thrown over my friends for myself. We have a sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Corinthos, who's more worried about female students getting too into their boyfriends than she is about teaching how to write a coherent essay. She's known to call conferences with girls she's seen draped over their boyfriends, even ones who aren't in her class, to tell them that their romance might seem incredibly important right now, but they can't let it take over their lives or they'll be sorry later. Which now that I'm thinking about it, is just another way of trying to convince them that they're going to change.

I had Mrs. Corinthos's class. After she saw Scott jokingly press his lips and then his bare chest to her window to cheer me up on the fourth anniversary of my dad's death, she called me in for an after-school conference.

“So was that your boyfriend who came to show you his nipple?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

She sighed like she had to break really bad news to me. “Listen, I know he seems like your world right now, but I just want you to remember that you've got to keep up other parts of your life. And I'm not just talking about school. Keep up with your friends. Keep up with your hobbies. What do you like to do?”

Being my English teacher, she of all people should have noticed that I liked writing. That instead of using the week's vocab words in unrelated sentences, I'd been keeping a running plot of an imaginary TV show going for both of our entertainment. I called it
Ships in the Night
(because it was set in a small seaside town and was about people who constantly misunderstood each other's needs). I had two families who hated each other. I had “covert” (vocab) make-out sessions and an unsolved murder. And I turned every vocab assignment into another episode.

I'd gotten less interested in solving the murder than just updating Mrs. Corinthos on whatever issues the characters were working through. Like Warren Gettysburg, teenage son of the richest couple in town, who had become incredibly “capricious” (vocab) after he realized all the bad things his parents were up to. He couldn't help but start to see his whole existence as this hollow thing.

Anyway, what I said to Mrs. Corinthos was, “I like to make out.”

I didn't mean it as disrespectfully as it sounds. I wasn't trying to throw her concern about me back in her face. I was just sticking up for myself.

Because even though I was one of those girls always with her boyfriend, I didn't believe that everything had to come down to me being young and dumb. I was a person who'd gotten seriously stressed out by being a part of a group. And when I met Scott, I was able to combine a friend and a guy I wanted to make out with into one person.

One person!

It was the perfect situation for someone like me.

So what if making out instantly became one of my favorite hobbies? Maybe from the outside it was,
Oh, there's another one of those girls
, but from the inside, I still don't understand why a romance can't matter until you're old enough to say you're going to stay together forever and no one laughs.

Mrs. Corinthos looked so bummed out for me. So I threw her a bone and said, “I also like singing in my room, and in the car too.”

“That's it,” she said, staring me at me intensely with an important message.
“Get into singing.”

If only Mrs. Corinthos could have seen a semester into the future, then she would have been happy to find out not only that I'd been released from the terrible easygoing influence of my boyfriend but also that I was as serious as ever about singing in the car, and it would lead me to where I'm standing right now.

Scott and I broke up at the beginning of this summer. He was supposed to go away to do environmental studies at Reed, moving to Oregon at the end of June, and I was only going into my junior year.

But then he put off leaving, saying that there were things he still needed to take care of. Those things turned out to be lots of surfing and sleeping on people's couches but didn't have much to do with me. We never talked about why we'd actually broken up if Scott wasn't going anywhere. We just stopped hanging out. But in July he started a habit of calling every few days to pretend like we're actual friends.

So my phone will ring at two in the morning, and Scott will be there, asking, “Did I wake you up, Tiny?” That's what he calls me, even though I'm not ridiculously small or anything.

“What's going on?” I'll say, but I'll wish I could just hang up because I quickly learned that every one of our surface conversations (usual topics: weird things neighbors are up to; pollution at the beach; the theory of the universe as a hologram and how much it stresses me out; secret cures for surf rash) leaves me feeling more hollow than when I picked up.

Why don't I hang up on Scott? Well, here's exactly what I've been getting toward—and I understand this sounds really, incredibly simple—but it is
so hard to change how you act
.

Like at school, I know that there's this idea of me, and all I'd have to do to shake it up is do something surprising. Smile for a whole day. Invite someone new to have lunch. Join a committee. Wear a conversation piece sweatshirt. I don't know. Same deal when it comes to Scott. Instead of being a person he can still call, all I have to do is not pick up the phone. I think the real obstacle to changing is that once people decide on an idea of you, it's so hard to ditch it yourself that it basically feels impossible.

Which is why I'm here.