The Me You See (11 page)

“How do we know then who anyone really is?”

“I guess we don’t. No…I know we don’t.

My dad, James Harper, started up the little Crystal Plains
Theater about four years ago with his old college buddy, Niles. My parents were
wannabe actors with old money; Niles was a stage wizard with a penchant for
collecting odd things. The three of them imagined that our little town needed
some culture and figured community theater was the way to put Granite Ledge on
the map. At first, everyone laughed. They said
this isn’t New York
and
what’s
wrong with the plays at the elementary school?

Stefia changed all that. No one would admit it, but I think
she was a big reason people came to the theater. The other actors were good,
but Stefia…holy shit. She seriously belonged somewhere else—like New York.

I mean, just to watch her on stage? Holy shit. You know how
someone walks in and you just know they’ve got it? That was her. My dad said
so, Niles said so, the directors said so, and the audience said so—over and
over again. It’s like the mighty gods of theater dropped her in this little
town as an itty bitty present for all of us to unwrap and enjoy.

Merry freaking Christmas. And Happy Hanukah, too.

My mom and dad were all about theater. They were crazy
hyper, in your face extroverts who aspired to be awesome actors but never quite
got there. Because you know, you can either act or you can’t. That’s just the
way it is. But they had passion—and money—so they opened a theater instead. How
they ended up with an introverted, mandolin playing son is beyond me. They
always pushed at me to bust out of my shell and pop up on stage with everyone
else. But there were only, like, four people in the world who were ever allowed
to hear me play.

Stefia made five.

I had watched Stefia from the audience since the first show
she was in, way back when she was fourteen and I was just old enough to drive
myself to the theater to watch her. I never talked to her. I made it a point
not to talk to her. It was easier to keep my fantasy alive that way. It was
easier to pretend the reason we never talked was because there was no time, not
because she wouldn’t give the time of day if there ever was.

I’m not stupid. Stefia could have anyone. So why would she
have me?

“How do we know then who anyone really is?” she had asked
that night.

We don’t, Stefia. We can’t.

**

I waited for her that night.

I’d tossed dad some line about hanging out late at the
theater to see if I could imagine myself on stage. He nodded, and then sighed
like I’d finally seen the light.

“Make sure you lock up when you leave,” he called after me
as I walked out the door with my mandolin.

She’s a beautiful instrument; a specially ordered red
Gibson F-style mandolin. A ridiculous price tag, but I guess that’s the perk of
having parents with money. Or should I say, parents who want to see you on
stage and happen to have money to blow.

At the theater, I sat in the unlit house as the actors
milled around on stage, collecting their things after rehearsal.  Although I
wasn’t a fan of being on stage, I enjoyed sitting in the audience. The cushion
of the seat, the anticipatory silence, the crisp air, the way each person
enjoyed a different performance of the same show depending on what seat they
chose and where their mind traveled to when they sat down.

I knew Stefia hadn’t left yet. She was in the wings, stage
left, talking to Niles. Niles often came to the theater just to check up on
things. Neither he nor my parents ever really helped out with much—directing,
stage stuff, or casting—but I guess when you’re part owner you like to hang out
and see what’s what.

After a minute, Niles walked down the steps to the right of
the stage and out the exit door into the parking lot. From my estimation, that
left Stefia and I as the only people in the theater.

From a lit stage, it’s hard to see past the second row of
the audience. I was sitting in the 14th so I stayed well concealed. Well, that
was until I started playing my mandolin.

I don’t mind saying that I’m good at playing. I wasn’t good
at much—I’d barely graduated two years earlier and I was never popular because
I didn’t care for sports—but music, I was good at music. I was good at the
mandolin— as good as Stefia was on stage.

The kicker, and the entire reason I was sitting in the
audience playing, was that I happened to know that Stefia liked the mandolin. A
lot.

How did I know that? An introvert listens. An introvert
observes. And an introverted quiet mandolin player will sit in wait until the
skills he has can win him something he wants.

It didn’t take long until Stefia appeared around the corner
of the curtain, craning her neck to see where the music was coming from. She
shaded her eyes from the stage light that, for some reason, was still on,
trying to see if she could identify who was playing the music. She closed her
eyes, swayed her head with the classical tune I delivered, and lilted around
the stage. When I finished the song, she clapped her hands.

And I wished those hands were around me. I wished she would
take those hands and…

“You’re good,” she said in my direction. 

I didn’t say anything.

“God…like, really good. Have you been playing long?”

“Awhile.”

“Do I know you?”

“No.”

She left open a silence just long enough for me to slip
into another song. I didn’t think about the notes. I have never had to think
about the notes. It left me free to study her face while she listened to me
play.  My fingers frisked along the length of the strings, her lips spreading
into a smile that seemed too big for her face. She punctuated the end of my
song with a well placed sigh.

“I absolutely love the mandolin,” she said, opening her
eyes. “You’re very talented.”

“I’ve heard the same about you.”

“Do I know you?” she asked again.

I didn’t answer.

She walked to the stairs off the side of the stage.

“Stay on the stage,” I said. “Or I’ll stop playing.”

She grinned like we were playing a game.

“Why are you here?” she asked. “I mean, do you have a reason
to be here? Are you picking someone up? Because I don’t think there is anyone
left to…”

“I’m waiting for someone. I thought I’d sit and play while
I waited.”

“But there’s no one else here…”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

She didn’t respond although I could tell she wanted to. She
wanted to know who I was; she wanted to know how I knew who she was. It was
right there on the tip of her tongue. But hearing the music that I refused to
stop playing was mind-numbing, and she had no problem giving herself over to
its power.

See, people who don’t understand music can’t possibly
conceive that it’s the same as a drug. It can screw with your mind. It can give
you power. It can weaken you. It can take over your head—both playing it and
hearing it. Know how you’re driving and you hear a song on the radio you like
and you look down and you’re going eighty miles an hour? That’s the music
speaking to you. Music gives you power. Music inspires. Music can take away
your troubles…or give you everything you want. I guess it was all in how you
looked at it.

**

My hands had never been clumsy. My fingers were always
nimble and quick like Jack. But somehow when I pushed her against the door of
the orchestra pit, one palm pressing into her hip bone, the heel of my other
hand under her jaw, my hands felt thick and stupid. For half a second, I wasn’t
so sure of what I was doing anymore.

Fuck. Help me. I need to finish this.

She felt small in my hands. When I pushed my open hand from
her hip up along her ribcage, spanning my fingers to take her all in, I was
stupefied at how minuscule she suddenly felt. This girl I’d watched for four
years, who had tangled herself into every corner of my brain, who commanded
respect from her peers and applause from her audience, now felt little. Inconsequential.
How could that be?

My lips brushed at her neck and I pulled in the smell of
her; the mix of a nameless flowery perfume and  sweat from a two hour
rehearsal. She was there, right in front of me. I was inhaling her. I was
tasting her. It was real.

My thumb wrenched into her ribs right under her breast and
my other hand was wrapped behind her neck. I would take her. I would take her
and everything that was in her.

But something didn’t feel right.

She wasn’t fighting. She acted like she should fight, but
she didn’t fight. And something about that was surprising enough…weird
enough…wrong enough…that it caught me off guard and I found myself watching her
eyes.

I mean, really watching. Searching for something. And I
found it.

Something that was wrong.

Her transparent eyes brimmed with a sentiment I’d never
been able to see from the audience. A disturbance you’d only notice if you got
in close to her. If she let you in.

Fear.

I don’t know how exactly I could tell, but I knew the fear
wasn’t directed at me. I sensed a fear like I’d stepped into a nightmare that
was all hers and had nothing to do with me. Her eyes were full of something raw
and desperate and somehow even though she was still fully clothed, she was more
exposed than I’d ever imagined seeing her. And just for one second, I stopped.
I stopped pushing and just held on.

“Help me,” she whispered. And the inflection in her voice
told me it was not a suggestion, it was a pleading and desperate solicitation.

“What?” I asked. “Help you?”

“Help me, Kristopher. Please.”

Fuck. She said my name. She said my fucking name.

“You know who I am?” I clamored, my voice cracking with
disbelief.

“Kristopher, please…”

“Wait. How do you fucking know who I am?”

My hands fell off of her, shaking. This changed everything.

“Just…help me,” she breathed and blinked away a single
tear.

“What do you want me to do?”

And I didn’t have the first clue what was going to tumble
out of her mouth. Reasons filled my mind—she needed me to take care of some
asshole for her, she needed money, she wanted out of some mess at home. Fuck,
why was she confiding in me? I came here to…

“Kristopher.”

“What?”

“Finish what you came here to do.”

I questioned her by staring just a half second too long and
she answered by moving my left hand to where she thought it belonged.

The button of her jeans.

All at once, I didn’t know what was happening. It was like
she became my music. My skinny, long fingers danced across and inside her as if
she was somehow predictable like the frets of my mandolin, which she wasn’t…but
somehow I knew what to do. I pressed and plucked and strummed and she sang like
something amazing and beautiful and rare and impossible to recreate.

It wasn’t the same anymore. It wasn’t me going to the
theater to do what I had planned to do. This was something entirely different.
I wasn’t forcing anything. I wasn’t getting away with something I’d thought
about every day since I’d first seen her. So what was I supposed to call it
now? Unexpected, for one. Unexplainable, for two. Amazing and holy and screwed
up and one hell of a mind game, for the rest.

Stefia was hurting. And she wanted me to take it away.

Of all people, me.

**

She stared up into the flies where the scenery hung,
dragging her fingers across her bare stomach. She’d never been as beautiful as
she was then; somehow broken, exposed, and turning me into a mystified mess. I
got the feeling I’d touched upon something of hers that no one yet had, and I
didn’t mean any specific part of her body. No, it was deeper than that. 
Something she kept well hidden.

Stefia was an amazing actress.

“Play a song for me,” she said, and then added, “Please.”

As if I wouldn’t have done it anyway if she’d demanded it
like a snotty nosed two-year-old. As if I wouldn’t help her in any way I
possibly could.

My fingers danced across the instrument, hopping from one
fret to another, jumping strings and making them ring out in ways that people
would never imagine they could.

She continued her gaze into the flies of the theater, lost
in thought, millions of miles beyond the roof of the building we were in. Off
in the stars. Off to the things that shone almost as brightly as she did.

“Lost in thought?” I asked. I didn’t know if I should even
ruin the moment with the noise of my voice because sometimes words can be so
ugly.

“Not really lost,” she answered. “Just trying to figure out
what I want.”

“Sometimes that’s hard to do.”

“No,” she corrected. “It’s not hard to
know
what you
want. It’s hard to
get
what you want.”