The Me You See (10 page)

“Because now that I’ve started, I think I would die if I
wasn’t on stage.”

“That’s kind of dramatic,” I said. “Fitting, coming from an
actress.”

She giggled and ate her last pretzel. She put her hand back
in the bowl and frowned, signifying the bowl was finally empty. Then, in true
I-don’t-care-what-you-think style, she turned the bowl over and stuck it on her
head, salt spilling into her hair.

“I guess I just like to give people something to see.”

“You’re a nut.” I laughed and flipped my hand at the bowl
to knock off her crown.

“But you’re watching,” Stefia said and laughed, catching
the bowl to put it back on her head. “So which of us is really the nut?”

“Stefia, get real. It’s kind of hard not to watch you,” I
said. “You’re a natural performer.”

“Indeed,” she said, and leaned backwards to flip off the
bed. But she misjudged the distance, and as she went over, rammed her feet
right into the full length mirror that hung on the wall.

“Oh, crap!” she said. She jumped up and stared at the
mirror that splintered into a million jagged pieces. “I’m sorry!”

“It’s okay,” I said. “No biggie. Cheap mirror.”

She crouched to the floor and checked for the few slivers
of glass that had fallen out. Her heel had made a perfect bull’s eye in the
middle the mirror, but luckily, most of the glass remained fractured inside the
frame.

“Everything okay up there?” my dad called from down the
hall.

“Yeah!” I yelled. “Stefia’s just up here trying to ruin my
luck by busting mirrors.”

“Need any help?”

I opened my bedroom door and yelled down the hallway, “No.
We’re fine. Really.”

He didn’t answer so I closed the door. And when I turned
back into the room, Stefia was still staring into the broken mirror.

“Stefia. I said it was fine. Don’t worry about it. The
mirror only cost like five bucks at…”

“Have you ever noticed how the cracks in the mirror mess up
the reflection?” she asked.

“Um…yeah. That’s generally what happens when the glass
breaks.”

“But, like…look. The cracks are all you can see.”

I picked up two pillows that had fallen on my lilac carpet
and tossed them up on the bed.

“Yeah? So? What are you getting at?”

She kept looking at the mirror, brushing her finger lightly
over her broken reflection.

“It’s not like that with people,” she said.

“Like what?”

“You know, with the cracks. There’s a lot of people walking
around that are really cracked.”

“Stefia, what in the world are you talking about?”

“Most of the time with people,” she said, “you can see
everything
but
the cracks.”

I threw a pillow at her.

“Stop being weird,” I said, brushing her off and pelting
her with a second pillow. “You don’t have to impress me with your deep wisdom,
you know.”

I handed her the pretzel bowl.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

“Stick it back on your head. It’s getting way too deep in
here.”

She smiled and flipped the bowl back over her hair. She
stepped up on the bed, blew me a kiss, curtsied, and sat back down cross-legged
right in the middle of my comforter.

“You’re watching,” she said, pointing a finger at me.

“Stefia,” I said, grabbing a bag of chocolate and tearing
it open, “shut up.”

**

For some reason, the whole
why do people watch
or
oh
look, you’re watching
became a thing between us. We’d be working at the
coffee shop and catch someone staring at the happenings of another table and
we’d snort to each other they’re watching and quietly hum the theme from
The
Twilight Zone
.

Like, we had this regular customer named Heidi. She worked rotating
shifts in labor and delivery at the hospital and sometimes stopped by for a
pick-me-up before her shift started. One day she was sitting at her usual table
in the corner, reading on her Kindle, and the only other customers in the shop—a
teenaged couple—started sniping at each other. At first you could tell she was
annoyed, because the nitpicking was distracting her from the book she was
trying to enjoy. But the longer they argued, the less she looked at her Kindle
and the more she looked at them. She just stared, totally sucked into what they
were allowing others to overhear. Like it was a show she was watching. Like
they were performing for her entertainment. She set her Kindle down and sucked
off the straw from her to-go cup and only looked away from them when it seemed
they might look at her.

We did a lot of people watching during our shifts, and what
we usually noticed was that lots of people were watching other people. But it
took us forever to figure out the why in why people watch.

And then there was the day of the crash in front of the
coffee shop. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Friday and Old Man Rogers
fell asleep driving his farm truck right down Main Street. He plowed into a
little yellow VW Bug that had Marissa Jenkins and her twin toddlers inside.
Right in front of our coffee shop.

A few customers stood up at their tables with their hands
over their mouths muttering
Oh nos
and
Oh
my Gods
. One
mother held her young son and put her hand over his eyes so he wouldn’t see the
carnage, but she was looking herself. Two customers ran up to the full glass
panels of our store front and gaped at the gathering crowd. I ran but stopped
when my hand hit the front door. I wondered if I should go out. I wondered what
I would do. I wondered if I could do anything at all.

Stefia, of course, ran out and jumped into the middle of
everything like it was part of a play that she’d been perfectly blocked for
what to do. I mean, she was out there a full three minutes before the cops and
firemen showed up.

Old Man Rogers was all bloodied, his face smashed into his
steering wheel, head snapped at some odd angle. I couldn’t even see Marissa in
the puckered mess left of her little car. I noticed one of her kids in the back
seat, motionless and staring blankly; the other had flown from the car and
landed on the tar just two feet from one of the tables on our sidewalk. I knew
neither one of them was still breathing.

The shriek of the sirens announced the emergency vehicles
were just making the corner. The sirens wailed and screeched, growing louder as
they sped closer. It was so strange to me that the louder the sirens got, the
quieter the air around us became. Except for Stefia, we all just stood there,
suspended in time, rooted to the tile or sidewalk we were standing on.

And all I could think was
We’re watching. We’re watching
and we can’t look away.

**

It was hard to talk about watching after that. It was hard
to even talk to Stefia after that. I suppose it was a mixture of disgust and guilt
and anger and disbelief. I kept avoiding Stefia because I didn’t want our
“thing” to come up. But two weeks later as we sat in the choir loft and waited
to sing for service, she passed a slip of paper down to me. It made its way
across the music folders of Jeanie and Thomas and Albert and finally over to
me.

“This better be good,” Albert whispered, shooting a look
that conveyed just how inappropriate it was to pass notes during the sermon.

I opened it up.

Taylor
Jean,

I know
now why people watch.

Stefia

After church, when we’d put our music away and descended
from the choir loft, I pulled Stefia into a corner by the church office.

“What do you mean?” I hissed. “What’s this note supposed to
mean?”

She didn’t say anything, just walked out the front door of
the church with a look like I should follow her. So I did. All the way across the
street to Beidermann’s Ice Cream Shop. She ordered two salted caramel sundaes
with pretzel topping, carried them outside to a table, and sat down.

“Here,” she said, handing one to me. “I know you like
pretzels so I ordered extra topping.”

I sat down and took the sundae from her. After a minute of
silence, in which I wondered what she was trying to do, I finally spooned a
glob into my mouth.

“What’s wrong?” Stefia finally said. “Why are things so
weird between us now?”

I didn’t say anything. Mostly because I didn’t have an
answer to her question. I didn’t know why things were weird. They shouldn’t
have been.

“So, here’s what I figured out,” Stefia said, like someone
had cut the scene we were in and started a whole new one. “I was thinking about
our thing. You know, why people watch? And ever since that accident, I’ve been
stuck on figuring it out.”

“Stefia,” I started, but she cut me off.

“No, it’s fine. I think sometimes we learn the most in
uncomfortable situations. And that was definitely uncomfortable.”

“You were uncomfortable?” I said, incredulously. “You?
Stefia, you jumped in there like you knew exactly what to do! The rest of us
just stood there like complete dumbasses, just…watching.”

And at watching, I lost it. I stabbed my spoon back in my
sundae, set it on the table, and sobbed into my hands.

“Taylor Jean, stop,” Stefia said. “Don’t beat yourself up.
Besides, it only
looked
like I knew what I was doing.”

“Well, you’re pretty damn good at looking like you know
what you’re doing.”

Stefia took a bite of her sundae, putting the spoon in her
mouth upside down and sucking the ice cream off the back of it.

“I’ve been told that before,” she said.

I rubbed beneath my eyes with the tops of my pointer
fingers and said, “I’m such a baby. I bet I look stupid.”

“Nah,” she said, and then added with a smirk, “do you
believe me?”

I smacked her on the shoulder.

A chickadee sat in the branch above our table, sputtering
out his call. I looked up into the leaves and wondered what it would be like to
wing around over everything, watching people live their ridiculous lives. Had
the chickadee been at the accident? Had he flown over Marissa’s car moments
before Old Man Jenkins rammed its engine into the backseat?

 “So what did you figure out?” I asked. “I mean, about why
people watch?”

“Oh,” she said. “That. Well, like I said, after the
accident I really started thinking about this whole thing. Why were people
standing around watching? I mean, it wasn’t pretty at all. I think the top half
of Melissa’s body was thrown about fifty feet from her car.”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking the memory from my head. “I know.”

“And I guess what I decided was that people watch so they
can be involved without really being involved. They can part of something. They
can say they were there, but at a safe distance.”

“Wait a second. I did not keep watching because I wanted to
be a part of the carnage,” I told Stefia. “You’re wrong.”

“Don’t you get it?” she asked. “It was okay for you to
watch. Everyone was watching and no one was judging anyone for watching. I
mean, think about it. You can witness something like that, something you don’t
normally see every day. You’re drawn to it. You’re part of the experience. You
don’t have to look away. Everyone is gawking so it’s okay if you do it, too.”

“I wanted to help, Stefia. I wanted to jump in there, but I
just couldn’t…”

“And that, Taylor Jean, is why you watched. You could have
looked away, you could have ignored it, but you didn’t. You watched.”

I watched.

**

I’m still wearing the Band-aid over where the nurse plunged
that needle under my skin a month ago to suck out my blood. It’s a multicolored
Band-aid that says “Give” and it doesn’t match at all with the dress I’m
wearing to the funeral.

And I really don’t care. Because right now I’m stuck on
thinking about the things we see, and what we watch, and how it tells a lot
about us when it’s all said and done. I’m choking on the bitter realization
that in the end, the Stefia that everyone got to see was not the beautifully
perfect, warm maple syrupy Stefia that they wanted, but instead a broken Stefia
fallen in the middle of five of her fellow actors in a puddle of blood and
piss.

Not exactly what the audience paid to see.

But, then, everybody likes to watch.

If people were honest, they’d all admit to being like an
iPod left on shuffle. No one’s song fits in any single file.

“Why is that, Kristopher? Why do you say that?” she had
asked me that night.

“Because we are all different people with every person we
know,” I answered.