The Me You See (15 page)

“What?” Naomi asked.

“I’ve got to take this message. Give me a second, okay?”

So Stefia got back out of the car, sent the number through
on her phone, and walked away from the car to talk.

“Who is she talking to?” I asked, not hiding my annoyance.
“The pope?”

“Who knows,” Naomi said from the front passenger seat.
“Don’t be mad.”

“She said this was just going to be a sister day. Now
Hollywood calls and she’s just going to ditch us?”

Naomi turned around.

“What is your problem? Who said Hollywood was calling? It
could have been dad for all we know.”

“If it were dad, she wouldn’t have gotten out of the car to
return the call.”

“Maybe he was asking about a Christmas list. Maybe he was
asking what Stefia had already bought someone and he didn’t want you to know.”

“Why couldn’t she just text that back to him?”

“Gabriella, honestly,” Naomi said, heaving out a sigh of
exasperation. “What does it matter who is on the phone anyway?”

“Because this was just supposed to be a sister afternoon.”

“Why can’t you just be happy for her? I mean, Christ! She’s
practically a small town movie star.”

“No, she’s not,” I said. “She’s just my sister.”

Naomi turned back around in the seat and looked out the
windshield. She muttered something under her breath and shook her head.

“What?” I yelled.

“Nothing.”

“No, tell me!”

Stefia was standing in front of the car, facing away from
us but you could tell from the way she was holding her stomach that she was
laughing.

“I just don’t get why you have to be so bitter,” Naomi
said, not bothering to turn around and look at me. “It doesn’t help her at
all.”

“Now I’m supposed to help her?” I said. “I don’t know why
she needs our help. She seems to be doing just fine on her own.”

“It’s not her fault that people think she’s talented at
what she does. Gabriella, she
is
talented. Don’t you get that?”

“Yeah, I do. But so what?”

“So…I don’t know why in the world that means you have to be
mad at her. You’re punishing her for something she has no control over.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“What?”

“I said bullshit. I think she likes the fame.”

“I didn’t say she didn’t. Who wouldn’t? I said she can’t
control that people like her and want her to do stuff. I mean, the girl could
read the back of a cereal box and people would fall down at her feet. I think
that’s pretty darn amazing.”

“I think it’s bullshit,” I said, staring out my window.
Stefia finished her phone call and opened the car door to hop back into the
driver’s seat.

“Sorry, gals,” she said, bubbly as ever. “No more
interruptions from now on.”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Dad. He thought we were going to be home by now. I asked
him if he forgot we were catching the movie. He said he had, and was thinking
maybe some group of men carried the three of us off. He was wondering if he
needed to send out a SWAT team to find us.”

Naomi and she collapsed into giggles in the front seat,
squealing about dad and his overactive imagination, and Stefia started the car
and steered it towards the movie theater.

But me? I wasn’t laughing. Because I didn’t believe that
Stefia had been talking to dad. Stefia was an actress, master of making people
believe all things. I imagined her as reading a script most of the time she was
awake. Just reciting lines she was supposed to say.

I wished someone would have just written her a scene where
she looked me in the eye and said,
Gosh, I’m so glad to be your sister. And
you matter to me.

Now that would have been a moving, emotional scene.

Too bad she never picked up that script.

**

Adam leans into my back with a gentle kiss, pressing his
fingers into my shoulder.

“Are you coming?” he teases. “There’s plenty of room in the
shower for both of us…”

He tugs at the sheets, pulling them off slowly, leaving me
more and more exposed as the bedding slips to the floor. I ignore him.

“Come on, Gabriella. You’re going to get cold. Come
conserve water in the shower with me.”

I close my eyes and think of Stefia.

He stops tugging on the bedding, picks up one of the
pillows and throws it at my head.

“Come on, Gabriella. It’s not funny anymore. Get out of
bed. We have to leave in an hour.”

“Adam, I told you I’m not going.”

He stands at the right hand side of the bed, hands on hips,
still feeling smart for tossing the pillow that I didn’t bother to move off my
face where it landed.

“I already told you we have to go,” he said. “What will
people think if we don’t?”

“Why do you care?”

“People will want you to be there.”

“They never did before.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means if they didn’t care if I was around or not when
she was alive, what the hell difference does it make now that she’s dead?”

“You can’t mean that.”

“I do mean it.”

His eyes would not divert from me, as if he was trying to
see past my skin to determine if I was telling the truth.

“Well, I’m still going,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m still going to the funeral.”

“My family hardly knows you, Adam.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to pay my respects to the
dead.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said.”

He picks up the bedding off the floor, sets it back up on
the mattress, and walks around the bed to pick the pillow up that he tossed.

“You will regret not going to her funeral,” he said,
brushing my hair out of my face.

“I have never regretted anything I’ve done except for not
being born first.”

He stares at me. His eyes beat through my skin and make the
hairs on my neck stand up. Suddenly I’m cold.

“I’m getting in the shower,” he says finally. “If you
change your mind about getting ready to go, you know where I’ll be.”

I don’t respond. I just watch him walk into the bathroom
and pull the door almost shut, just enough so it doesn’t quite latch.

An invitation.

One I will decline.

I’ve spent my life living in someone else’s shadow. I’ve
spent my life wondering why doing the right things didn’t get me the all-adoring
eyes that my sister seemed to attract just by breathing. The blood pumping
through her body was enough to make people flat out stupid with undeserved
respect for something anyone could have done just as well as her if she only
would have sat down long enough for someone else to try.

I hear the water turn on and splash at the floor of the
shower. Adam hums a nameless tune.

My eyelids close and in my head I hear six gunshots. Six
lifeless bodies breaking and slumping to the floor. I hear the squishing and
pumping of Stefia’s heart slowing. I hear her breath choking. I hear the chaos
of gurgling and sputtering. I hear screams that are fading….fading…fading…

How is it that even after the light has gone out, she still
manages to shine? How is it that in her death, she’s still more important than
anything else that’s alive?

I’m not going to the funeral. I knew that when we got on
the plane to come here. And I haven’t changed my mind.

I’m not going.

I’m not going.

I’m not going.

And then I can hear her voice. Her gurgling sputtering
voice that’s choking on blood. Suddenly she’s not so pretty anymore. Suddenly
she’s not the gorgeous supermodel type angel up on a pedestal. She’s fallen and
is just lying in a pool of her own fluid.

Please. Be here,
she
says.

I’m not going.

I want you here
, she
says.

I’m not going.

Please don’t leave. I need you here.

I’m not going, Stefia.

Please. Be. Here.

No.

Community theater doesn’t just attract actors living in the
immediate community. Every actor has a checklist of roles on their bucket list;
Simon Bradford Collins from
Don’t Mind If I Do
was in my top three. So
when the Crystal Plains Theater announced they were holding auditions for it
last summer—directed by David Jeffery Hank, no less—I figured it was totally
worth the hour and twenty minute drive to try my luck.

Last summer was the first time Crystal Plains decided to do
two summer shows. Both were smaller productions involving less people and cost,
but it was a great way to toss up the palette of theater goers in the area.
They chose one family oriented show for the beginning of the summer, and ran an
edgier show for the second half.

Don’t Mind If I Do
was
the edgier show. Some people thought it was too sinful for Granite Ledge to do.
One of those “if you aren’t old enough to drive yourself to the show, you
probably shouldn’t be in the audience when it’s running” kind of deals. But the
two guys who started up the theater, Niles and James, knew how to make waves.
It’s how they sold tickets. When someone from the local paper interviewed Niles
about the questionable nature of the show they had chosen, Niles simply grinned
and said, “If people don’t want to see it, by all means, stay home.”

Anyway, so I auditioned. And there were two surprises that
happened. The first surprise being that I actually got cast in the role I
wanted. The second surprise was that a 16 year old was cast opposite me, in a
role meant for someone almost twice her age.

Now, at the time of the show, I was twenty-four. I wasn’t
far off from Simon’s actual age of twenty-eight. But a sixteen-year-old in the
role of twenty-eight-year-old Kate? I wanted to ask David why he hadn’t closed
the auditions to minors, but you really shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you.

So I showed up a few minutes early to the first full cast
read through, and made small talk with the director trying to get a sense of
what to expect from this Stefia before I met her.

“So…sixteen?” It was all I could think of to say.

“She’s almost seventeen,” David said. “Don’t let her age
scare you off. I mean, I get it. I do. But really, she’s ah-ma-zing.”

He said it just like that: ah-ma-zing. And I figured she
better be good, causing a grown man to talk like a total idiot and all.

“Trust me,” he continued, with an easy smile, “I’m the
director. I know what I’m doing.”

And while I was wondering what I could say to back pedal so
he wouldn’t worry about having issues between the two leads, Stefia walked in.

Shit.

Not that Stefia looked like she was sixteen. Because if you
wouldn’t have told me otherwise, I would have assumed I could have taken her
out for drinks after our read through. And not that she acted like she was
sixteen. Because all she had to do was open her mouth and you’d have figured
she was working on her PhD in Psychiatry. But she
was
sixteen.
Like…eight years younger than me. In high school. Just starting to drive by
herself. I had friends who were getting married and having kids…and the
director wanted me to act out those crazy scenes against a sixteen-year-old?

Shit.

She was gorgeous. And when she opened her mouth for lines
at that read through I probably looked like she'd hit me in the chest. I mean,
a person could happily choke listening to the thick velvet ribbons that spun
from her lips.

But she was sixteen.

Sixteen. Sixteen. Sixteen.

***

Anyone who tells you that what happens on stage is just
pretend has never been on stage. I mean, it is pretend, it’s not real life…and
yet it is its own kind of reality. Like being on stage is its own world, where
the rules don’t matter. Relationships between actors in a play are deep and
unexplainable. I mean, you’re not together…but you are. You’re more together on
stage than you are with anyone in real life. There’s only so much acting that
goes into making something believable…and the rest is real. You pour yourself
into a role and you leave a part of yourself there. You get so deep into your
character’s head that at some point it’s not possible to completely come back
out.

I knew my last scene of the play was going to be rough to
block. My character had to toss Stefia’s character around the stage like she
was a ragdoll and have his way with her. It wasn’t just a quick thing, either.
It was this scene that went on and on.