He's There - Chapter 49
It's a little rocky, and I'm in a hurry, but here it is!
HE'S (@) THERE
Chapter 49 - Supernova
The way I went a day without hysterically crying, it seemed I was a girl of stone. It wasn't believable to me that this could happen, so when I wasn't consciously blocking out memories of racing through the dark or gripping the grass, I'd recall them like dreams. I pretended to be sick and skipped school, and under such an incredulous mindset, many other scenes of my recent past seemed like dreams, too. When all I did was see the outside world through the window, I thought about how much it might help me if I just stayed there instead of walking into trouble all over again. I no longer had the attitude that I was involved in a solution. There was nothing but a storm running its course, now, I thought.
So I had my breakdown in the middle of the night and stayed on the verge of nausea that week, assuming that it would be a repeat of the previous week; that he'd disappear a while, then come back again, then text me again, then repeatedly try to call me, and refuse to take my rejection as reality. I was preparing to tell my parents, preparing to call the police, preparing to say I had a stalker, preparing to die of mortified heartbreak.
But he just didn't come back. I would go through something similar to the stages of death, waiting.
Denial
After the first few days of Erik's disappearance, all the tears that could possibly come from my body finally ran their course, and I was beginning to suspect that he also had enough time to hurt over what happened. Yes... I was still thinking about his feelings during all this. Perhaps he too saw what had happened between us as a dream for the first few days, but then he'd want to apologize; he'd want to be down on his knees; he wouldn't be able to sleep. Just to function, he'd have to hear from me. See, he wasn't the only one who could predict the other. Not only was I sure he was coming back, but this extended absence was a tactic to calm me down and then catch me off guard. He was going to come back, and I'd have to make myself completely immune to an ambush. I wouldn't go to a single place but Bat Boy practice and work. No, I was sick of being at that place at night with a bunch of kids. I'd tell my parents I knew the practices were going to be very demanding, and I'd quit my job.
* * *
We had our first readings for Bat Boy. I did no smiling all week except here, where there was an infectious positivity, and innocence, and simplicity. Westin made it sound like, instead of a bat, we had a monkey in the choir room because his character was feral for the first act. I couldn't stop myself from looking away from the script so I could catch his facial expressions. The meeting was like a daydream of something like joy, but it couldn't last forever.
* * *
The weekend, four days since I'd seen Erik: No one knew I was in a Hitchcockian nightmare, waiting for the bomb to go off. I'd been rehearsing my lines as Shelley Parker, and rehearsing my lines as Lily Terrasi, the girl who-... would have to tell Mariam, and Giry, and her parents, all separately, that... she'd almost been kidnapped. I couldn't get through what I wanted to say before I managed to cry even more than seemed possible.
* * *
Monday, March 26th, six days since I'd seen Erik: I called my boss and quit Baskin Robbin over the weekend, but they needed me for one more week, Tuesday through Thursday. I was worrying about what would happen during those nights, but Leslie was keeping me a little bit of company after practice, filling my head with better thoughts, which I wished could stay with me longer than the walk home. She had the big sister air about her, and seemed to have all of her shit together. She told me she was going straight to London for two terms, studying theatre and art history. For myself, I could acknowledge this production and nothing else, like I'd just be ready to lie down and die afterward. She had to remind me when I seemed a little negative, maybe, that next year I'd become one of Mrs. Vardega's “veterans”, and after all this work I'd most likely be ready for anything she threw at us.
* * *
Tuesday, March 27th, a week since I'd seen Erik: I was convinced this would be the day he'd show up at my work and disrupt everything. After sundown, the place got quiet. I'd go in the back room to clean up so that it didn't look like I was there, and I'd keep looking out the tinted windows.
My paranoia was so high I had a dream he broke into my house and I couldn't use my hands to push him away because they were in crippling agony, like they'd been pricked over and over, to the bone.
* * *
Anger
Thursday, March 29th, a week and two days since I'd seen Erik: I never told Giry or Mariam what happened... I kept putting it off...
They thought he had never returned at all, and Giry would keep telling me she hadn't heard a thing. Mariam started to postulate that telling my parents and actually stepping up between he and I had scared him off. They thought maybe I'd be free, now.
Well I didn't feel anything close to free. There didn't seem to be a future for me. He didn't even have to be here, or make any indication about what he was doing or what he knew, and still he was cramming me into a box. Fuck him, if he would leave me like this, not giving me a sense of closure but a sense of hanging in space, vision blackened, wanting to drop, trying to climb, wondering if thorns are higher up the rope. Maybe he was really gone.
Fuck him to Hell for doing this to me.
* * *
Friday, March 30th, a week and three days since I'd seen Erik: Westin and Leslie were from another universe: a universe of light. They thought when I seemed moody that I was just shy. Leslie was always trying to nudge me towards something better. She noticed I could never sing to anyone in the eye. “Sing it to me,” Leslie'd say mid-lyric. “Sing it to him!” “Look to the Bat Boy!” If that didn't work, Westin would try to hop into my line of vision. But if Mrs. Vardega was watching and we knew we couldn't screw up blocking, they'd both make telescope gestures at me before we started the song.
* * *
Monday, April 2nd, a week and six days since I'd seen Erik: There came to be a point when I decided that at all costs I would choose my own life to live, my own sentiments to keep in my heart, and my own universe in which to reside, and I picked that of the “Bat Ensemble”. I kept thinking about Erik's power; how a single flawed individual could make my every thought and action about him, as if that was any right of his to do. I would create a force-field to keep Erik out.
Jeffrey never stopped acting weird around me, even though he wanted to be polite, but I agreed around Mariam that Erik must have been gone, and how convenient it was with such a wonderful play developing right before my eyes. She liked seeing me act so empowered and believed that it was all sincere. I was even convincing myself it was sincere. I'd rehearse with her, but she still thought I ought to have Leslie's part. I told her I couldn't dwell on that. I had to hold on to Shelley.
Typical of her, to say “you know, she kisses two characters and flat out has sex with Bat Boy in the Enchanted Forest, in the full version.”
I managed a real smile: “well, I don't even need to tell you that Mrs. Vardega revised that scene.”
* * *
Friday, April 6th, two weeks and three days since I'd seen Erik: Mrs. Vardega passively mentioned that if we felt like it, we could schedule our own meetings to practice, and Leslie was keen on it, as well as our Mr. Parker (Keith) and Shelley's boyfriend for the first act, Rick (Joey). But, meanwhile, during official practice, I'd taken to watching Westin far too intently, just to experience how truly concentrated he was getting out those tongue-twisters, or singing large amounts of lyrics without interruption. His eyes would always start wandering around blankly in front of him when he was practicing alone, then flicker to anyone watching, and that ended up being me much of the time. He probably thought I liked him, but it wasn't possible. Just to make sure he didn't get any ideas, I wouldn't pay him more than polite attention once everyone was packing up.
* * *
Tuesday, April 10th, three weeks since I'd seen Erik: My parents had monitored me enough to see that I really truly was going nowhere, seeing no one, devoting myself only to that play, so I got a few privileges back. When everyone around me had begun to act like things had slowed down, gotten better somehow, been rid of the monsters of Pandora's Box which I had opened, it seemed like time to let go. Maybe that box was empty now.
If I was willing to give myself the time to think about why that hurt my feelings, I may have realized I was afraid everything would go back to normal and there was no way to stop that but to have him in my life. By then I'd associated a little pain with a little ecstasy... no other way to get it, right? Was this the reason I felt like there was no future, even if I wanted to be rid of him, rid of these feelings?
* * *
Thursday, April 12th, three weeks and two days since I'd seen Erik: Westin came to our independent practice and caught up with me afterward, wondering why I wasn't heading towards school. I told him I lived close by, so he walked me to my door. Mom happened to be looking out the kitchen window at the time, and Westin had to say hello. I think - even though we couldn't speak about this as it was happening - that he was very tempted upon having a motherly figure present again, play or no play, to act like he was Edgar.
My mom looked at him, even against her desire to be friendly, as if he might have meant more to me, and I still wondered what would motivate him to walk me to my door.
* * *
Friday, April 13th, three weeks and three days since I'd seen Erik:
Westin: “Your mom seemed very nervous seeing me at your door, Lily.”
Leslie: “And what were you doing at Lily's door?”
Me: “I live down the street.”
Leslie: “That still doesn't answer my question!”
Westin: “I don't think Lily's mom got any closure, either.”
Leslie had a smile only for me before someone nearby started chatting with her. I had to explain my Mom was nervous about boys, even though that had never exactly been true for most of my life.
Westin: “Must make it hard to date.”
* * *
Against all that I knew to be best for me, I woke up in the middle of the night, lost that sleepy feeling, and instinctively rolled over to hug my pillow. And I kept myself close to it for a while. “I can feel your heartbeat,” I said in my head.
“What of it?” Erik answered in that trance-like voice.
* * *
Monday, April 16th, three weeks and six days since I'd seen Erik: Giry was getting awfully busy for some reason that I failed to ask about, and couldn't come watch us practice the same day Mariam did. I was simultaneously pleased and disappointed when Mariam got a glimpse of our cast and star and later wondered if Westin was gay. “And it's too bad if he is; he's quite cute.”
“He's more your type than mine,” I said, and she agreed. He was that type of clean-cut “Aryan” boy she'd always had her eye on, with his dark blond hair, and eyes I hadn't really decided were green or blue. I was thinking of saying to her that he was simultaneously soft-faced and calculating, though. Deliberate, almost professional, even when it was just us students. He'd look on me with a thorough, but kind judgment, and then I wouldn't hate my life quite so much anymore. I didn't want her to know I'd been observing him so much. Before I could try to articulate anything, she had more to add:
“Well, you seem to be his type, even if he just wants to be friends with you. Come on, I saw how it looked. Reminded me a bit of Jeffrey, but more civilized...” She smiled to herself.
I'd never had a problem before with the smiles and the looks we shared, but now that a meaning was being applied to them even further, I became guilty.
* * *
Negotiation
Tuesday, April 17th, one month since I'd seen Erik: No one seemed to know I was groping inside Pandora's Box, now. A month had dissolved the truth I had discovered our last night together, or so I thought. I didn't remember, or claimed to myself not to remember what had truly happened and what had been fabricated. I'd had so many dreams involving him, good and bad.
He was going to come back and break up with me the way it should have been done. The way that made him know I had to stay away but I loved him and wanted him to own up to his mistakes, for the sake of us. I wanted to force him to become honest, to have integrity, and to earn a time in the future when he could gain back my trust, for the sake of us. We must surely have been collapsing into ourselves. And why?
Us was still a thing. Who was I kidding?
* * *
Thursday, April 19th, one month and two days since I'd seen Erik: Inside Your Heart was a song that was beginning to fill me with anxiety. Shelley harbored feelings for Edgar (the Bat Boy, the Westin) by the second act, and they would be quite literally consummated in the original production, but of course in our high school rendition we did nothing but kiss, and we'd do it yet again after we sang this song.
Mrs. Vardega told us we'd be practicing it in a couple weeks, and it seemed to be on Westin's mind during our next independent practice. It had somehow derailed into anarchy and everyone decided they'd rather get ice cream (forget the irony of that), but he asked me if I'd been practicing that song once the theater was emptying out. “I've been having at it every now and then,” he said, “but I'm sure it'd sound much better with the both of us.” I told him I was a little frustrated; that the last note was just at the edge of my range, and left out that all my work on eye-contact might also have been for naught during such an intense moment.
The theater would officially be “open”, as much as concepts of open and closed had never much applied to me, until 9:00, and Westin knew it. It was obvious he wanted me to stay and practice the song while everyone was away. “We haven't got the music,” I said, but he had a CD in his bag that he took straight to the player we'd wheeled back behind the curtains. He didn't deserve to feel badly about this, t-this feeling I had that I shouldn't be there because I belonged to someone else, so I just behaved in all the ways one does when they're obligated to leave, even if they don't want to: I found my sweater, gathered my stuff, walked all the way to the back of the auditorium, said I had a paper that I'd barely started... But he was a terrible, terrible boy who gave me guilt I could not handle once I was on the other side of the door.
I came back in and he was doing a sideways jog in place with a gaping smile.
He tried, and he tried, and he tried to get me to sing my part, and told me something that wasn't meant to sting but to tease: “this simply won't do if you want to be an actress!” I still wondered if he was gay the entire time, but it was of no consequence, what with the way it looked like, being alone here. I had to balance a sense of warmth towards him and of distance from him, at the same time, like I had tried with Mariam, and none of it felt right.
He thought I looked nervous, so he gave up planting me into the song and sang his part as if it was performance night. He tried to pretend I was pursuing him, begging him to take my blood, and whipped from left to right when I didn't oblige to Shelley's position, but I was laughing to myself in painful excitement and a will to at least be there...
Shelley's hand would have to be warmly cupped and captured in both his, for quite a while, so he followed that action. The boy was belting at me in a powerful voice which echoed in all the places Erik and I had been, and I could no longer understand what exactly I was avoiding about the situation. Maybe it all didn't mean anything and I just got worked up because I had never been a character in a conspicuous romance onstage - only offstage, with one person, whose every movement was meant to spin me in a web. But boys were not all spiders, I had to remind myself.
* * *
Friday, April 20th, a month and two days since I'd seen Erik:
The wardrobe was still in the attic.
During a break from practice, I went up the spiral stairs and left a note inside.
* * *
Monday, April 23rd, one month and five days since I'd seen Erik: The more the play came together, the more it dawned on me that some of the people graduating this year were going places and were not afraid. Leslie was such a poised actress when the scenes began to be practiced in full that I sometimes tried too hard to be like her and forgot the more juvenile qualities of Shelley's singing and body language.
Some of our other cast was trying to block for the song “Children, Children,” which involved a group of “love-making” creatures of the forest dancing around while me and Bat Boy realized we wanted to roll around at center-stage. Even so, the prospect of singing my own song straight to Westin's face and feeling the warm hands covering mine... it scared me more. He just had to keep reminding me about it, too. He got an idea while no one was paying attention to us and jumped behind the curtain. “I'll sing back here and you sing out there. Just pretend that I'm a disembodied voice that helps you practice.”
He had no idea the joke he was making, but I still refused.
“It's either now or in classsss... and at this rate, that will be running before you can crawl.”
“We're already in 'class'.”
“Well obviously I meant we'll come back later,” his voice corrected.
“I can't do it with you here!” I shouted at the curtain. “I don't like being here when everyone leaves.”
“Then you can come to my house,” he answered.
And then we argued about whether or not it would be any good to visit his house, which through the course of our imaginations became a dark, dripping cave somewhere in the forest. He finally reemerged and tried his hardest to claim it was better kept than I thought.
* * *
Such a lovely boy,
Look at what you've done to me.
Woke me up, and set me free.
So look at me.
Such a lovely boy,
This way you'll be mine at last
And I'll be fine, I heal real fast!
So look at me!
Look at me!
I will shield you from harm, but spend your life on my arm
I see no better way to start
Let me prove I love you
Let me become part of you
Now we shall never be apart.
I'll always live inside your heart.
* * *
I wished somebody would hold me again.
* * *
Depression
Wednesday, April 25th, one month and one week since I'd seen Erik: Yeah, I went to Westin's house. They obviously had a lot of money; they lived on the hill and both his parents had transferred to Oregon for opportunities in the Lewis & Clark English department, so urgent that they would cut off their son from finishing high school when he was just a year away. I wanted to slap myself for enjoying the snack he made, and the tour he gave, and the way he worked with my unexplained discomfort by letting me practice Inside Your Heart... inside the entryway closet.
My voice was faltering, though. I didn't think the song should be sung for him. If I were fully my character, costume and all, maybe, but like this... it was too intimate. I realized in the darkness, standing between his parents' winter coats, that I had lost it all, officially, and now I was here... The note was still in the wardrobe; there was not a trace of the man of my past, even though I'd been asking Giry too frequently. She'd started to get worried about me when she wasn't preparing for graduation. Mariam wanted to know if I was going out with Westin any time soon, who sounded just as splendid as usual at the other side of the door.
He didn't know what was going through my head, and so he entered the closet when we tried it a second time. For a moment, I saw the boy with the smooth, scarless arms, then the light was left behind as the door closed, and who really held my hands? Who shouted “you don't know what you're saying”?
“Shut up! That's it! I'm staying!” I pretended to say with amusement.
“I will shield you from harm,” he started, but I brushed him off and left the closet.
I had never laughed so much without meaning any of it, just trying to prove it was nothing personal that I had to get going.
* * *
Sunday, April 29th, one month, one week, and four days since I'd seen Erik: I was a widow too fresh to pursue. I had absolutely no desire for anyone to replace any memory of what it was like to be close to someone like I had been close to Erik. It felt like he was dead, the way my note remained in the wardrobe, untouched, unwritten upon. I found the note where I'd left it so many times by a certain point that I began to consider myself “winning” some stupid, awful game of guessing whether it was there. What became denial that Erik was gone became denial that he would ever return. I now belonged to an imaginary person, yet there was nothing new about that. I was back where I'd started, all the wiser, all the braver. I wish I could've been happy about that.
* * *
Wednesday, May 2nd, one month and two weeks since I'd seen Erik: Mariam started to notice I had been avoiding Westin when I had no news about him when she asked, and when, brace yourselves, he had to ask her personally if it would be a bad idea to ask me to prom.
“He seemed a little worried that you thought he hit on you and you didn't like it, and he would gladly go as friends.”
“Why would I want to go to prom? You know I hate dances.”
* * *
Saturday, May 5th, one month, two weeks, and three days since I'd seen Erik: I knew before we were in the same room together that Giry and Mariam wanted to have a talk with me because they knew Erik somehow had an influence on me still.
It may as well have been the times I had with my parents, all over again. They didn't want me to feel cornered. We were in Mariam's room on a warm day with the windows open. Mariam had gotten us some drinks and we'd been doing nothing in particular for a little while, but when things turned to me, it would be inevitably ugly. There was no need to say I thought I loved him. They knew. I think that they were even offended that when you looked at me inside out, the way they were able to the more they pressed and pressed that something was wrong, I was still on fire for Erik.
Giry hadn't known much of anything about Westin besides that he was starring as the Bat Boy and Mariam thought we were getting along swimmingly, but when she found out I was thinking of rejecting his offer to prom, she was all for jumping on Mariam's side. It was such a bad idea to turn him down.
Originally, that was the argument. Why turn him down? They were able to recognize that it was too early and I shouldn't have any type of “rebound boy”, but why would I turn down Junior Prom with someone who had been so nice to me all this time?
Because he might have liked me.
“What's the problem with that?!”
“I don't want anyone to like me.”
“Because Erik still likes you?”
“Because I still-. Just let me get over this when I'm ready.”
It was awful, watching them. I could sense that this had never been an ambush attempt, but that what I'd said was giving them visceral reactions, as if I'd admitted to wanting to torture myself. They made me feel like I was the greatest victim of Stockholm Syndrome the world had ever seen, and further, that I was comfortable around a man who hurt my friends, too.
No, I was not comfortable. I didn't want him to come back tomorrow and sweep me up in his arms and pretend we could get back to putting vintage clips in my hair. That had already been what he tried to do once I'd seen him hurt someone, but it would never be possible again.
So what did I want? They wondered, and they had too much patience to find out. They let me look out the window and focus on the shadows of the trees in another yard, formed by a canopy of leaves under a bright sun. Time had really, truly passed since I'd been around him.
A little while ago, I wanted Winter back. I had been fighting against the destruction of a perfect fantasy, but I wasn't thinking clearly enough about how inevitably the stars began to align when Erik started clasping me hard enough to eclipse the pleasure of it all. It would never be easy with Erik - he wanted us to be two mirrors facing, so he could consume me for infinity - and that was what defined the beautiful horror that should have only had its appeal in my imagination. But I did find it beautiful in reality. It was why I never managed to “fix” him if that was even possible.
I had learned that I could no longer want Erik anymore, but I had a deeper wish granted: that Erik would exist. That he would be somewhere in my world.
Mariam and Giry weren't happy with a word of this. They were holding me by the shoulders. “He isn't Erik. He's never been Erik. There is no such thing as Erik.”
But I guess I wondered how “Erik” could be defined, or anyone for that matter. My Erik had told me once that anything imagined that would mean something to me, that would find its way into my heart, had first to be composed by elements of the world I knew, or I'd never understand it. He told me this to keep me from ever dismissing the things I loved that I thought weren't real, to give me hope that I could find them all over again if I remembered to look for them.
I didn't know what he was talking about until he said I was composed from a supernova. That energy never goes away, only changes form. Mariam and Giry pictured a deformed man living underground over a century ago, but I kept thinking of a supernova in some hybrid of a real and imagined space, where something lost or unknown dispersed and regathered itself as best it could in this man I had found whose eyes slashed me in two. I wanted an explanation for this fulfilled prophecy, and the way memories of my racing heart and the dirt beneath my fingernails melded with my bedside story, and why he always made the world I perceived ten times more vivid.
“I don't know how to break through to her,” Giry said to Mariam as if I wasn't there.
“This was not a man who was 'Erik', Lily. It was somebody who wanted you to think this way! You sound like he's completely brainwashed you. Please tell me that that isn't true, and that you're in there, and you won't let him anywhere near you, because it sounds like you want him to come back!” Mariam refused to break eye-contact, but I could almost see right through her.
“I don't want him to come back. I promise. Giry, I really-”
“Her name is Paulina, Lily.”
“I don't want to be with him anymore. I just want him to be okay.”
Giry's tactic was not quite so forward. She felt like a slightly different person by now. “Well he didn't want you to be okay, Lily. He wanted to take you down to his level so he wouldn't have to be there alone.”
“He was desperate. Something was not right with him,” I shouted over Mariam's shoulder.
“And it's going to stay not-right!” She shouted back. “I hope that he got himself arrested, because God knows he did enough to deserve it,” Giry continued, saying it to herself. “I mean, that must have been what happened because otherwise we all know he can't keep himself away from you. He was willing to destroy the whole world just to have you, and he already started to.”
“I don't want to go back to that. Can you please just understand that there was a time he wasn't like this? There was a time he wasn't like this. He wasn't desperate. He was trying- he was trying to-.” They waited, Giry on the bed and Mariam right before me, but I sensed nothing in them that would receive what I said as truth. “You know, you're right, he's not okay, he's never been okay, he's an insomniac, I think he was imagining things, he talked about things in his head, about wanting to die, about people who couldn't sleep killing themselves, and I'm never going to forget any of it. You weren't there to hear it,”
“He was manipulating you-” Giry started.
“You don't think I know a good deception from reality - well, I do. And I don't care what you say. I told you I don't want to be with him, but don't tell me what's real. He's someone real!”
* * *
Saturday, May 19th, two months since I'd seen Erik: I hoped that he would be okay eventually. That's all I could ever do from hereon, and I was allowed to do that.
I continued - we all continued - to work our asses off. Mariam and Gi- Paulina apologized to me in time for prom, and I apologized back for getting so angry, but I never ended up going. On a night when friends were typically united, we just weren't. My parents were thinking something was very questionable about me these days, but they knew what work the production had been, and I told them the premiere would be my own kind of prom. I would wear something nice to and from the show, and I would be glowing, I said. And I meant it.
Mariam really wanted me to go, but Jeffrey's presence made it so she could go without me and enjoy his circle of friends again. After all, things had changed...
Westin was a real sport about it, which helped cheer me up. I told him I could dance up and down the block if it was for theatre, but prom intimidated me. He told me not to eat too much ice cream if I stayed at home or “I'd get a tummy ache.”
* * *
Acceptance
Sunday, May 20th, two months and a day since I'd seen Erik: On the night of dress rehearsal, Mrs. Vardega rounded us up on the stage and did her usual speech about being proud of us, and barely being able to contain her excitement to see it nearly as it would be in front of an audience. We all felt that way, really. Our choir that would be singing all of the back-up was there, the members of band who had volunteered to play the soundtrack (a slightly simpler version, but hey) were tuning their instruments in the sound pit, and other members of the stage crew were handling the set pieces and costumes. Seeing the detail of the pieces made specifically for us was always a motivator to really become that character and take the set space for reality.
My heart was fluttering just from sitting across from Leslie with my hair in curlers, watching her in a similar situation, getting her nails painted fire-engine red. We were having a made-up argument about what to do with Edgar when Westin showed up with his head completely shaved, about ready to get his ears and teeth adhered. When he came back, look completed with the mismatched Thirftstore clothes, he crawled around at our feet making noises at us for a few minutes before Mrs. Normann asked to speak to him.
Meanwhile, our Mrs. Taylor was a boy with a giant pair of bouncing knockers made out of balloons, and Shelley's father was getting to look a lot like Mr. Crocker from The Fairly Odd Parents, but it all worked considering how crazy he was.
I could have gone on and on about the visual stimuli that night. But, more important than that, I was surprised how harder work made better friends. I felt like my cast, maybe more people than others, had become friends, even if I'd never see them again. It dawned on me that it was May, and Leslie and Westin and about half of the cast were graduating, along with Paulina, and they might forget about this world, and never step foot in this theater again. I thought “what if Erik was once in this position?” But now it seemed unlikely that he had ever felt this type of camaraderie, because if he had, he wouldn't have turned out as he did.
* * *
No one seemed to be letting go of their characters the entire four hours that we spent setting up and running through the show, even when they were backstage, and even if those characters turned very R-rated when Mrs. Vardega and our other teachers weren't listening.
However, it got very quiet when the Enchanted Forest cast left the stage in their ridiculous get-ups and I had to sing under a spotlight, in nothing but a slip. I could have been imagining that the silence outside of our song was so intense, but it felt to me like all eyes and ears were scrutinizing us, even if they'd already seen it before. He was a very good actor. When I kissed him, and he reciprocated, he made sure to make it look and feel like he meant it.
I tried to be rather aloof as we were walking off the stage, not really looking at one thing or another as I kept up with him, but Mrs. Vardega had called us both “beautiful”. We had been clapping after every song for one another, but I caught Leslie looking me right in the eye and I tensed up like I'd just felt a powerful shiver.
* * *
I wasn't planning to ever forget the night, and there was no fair way to call it incomplete, but I wondered what Erik would have thought of it if he weren't battling his demons and had room to be proud of me the way that I was proud of myself. Everyone was more stoked than I had ever seen a cast before a premiere. We didn't feel like going home right away and lingered around the lobby and the front porch. Still within the group, but as naturally as ever, Westin just leaned forward with an excited grin and gave me a quick kiss not meant for Shelley, but for me. Only when he saw my face did it finally occur to him that things weren't simple like that, and never had been.
* * *
There was no way I could have a serious relationship for a long time, with anybody, and that was the mantra I told myself all through the next twenty four hours, when the pre-performance jitters were making memory of the whole day at school quite hard to remember. But I remember Westin had been apologizing to me here and there, naturally bent out of shape that I looked far from happy about what he had done. I wanted to reassure him everything was fine between us, and I did, but maybe it would be dangerous to continue being close, even if we had never been that close at all. Maybe he'd start asking me what I was doing that summer. I wouldn't have liked to disclose that I'd had a stalker and needed a breath of fresh air. I liked it so much better that he thought I was just a nice girl from the theatre department who rode her bike in her spare time.
I missed a part of what I used to have, but right then, I liked the thought of seeing myself that way, too.
* * *
It was on a clear night that we had our premiere and invited everyone into the place where I had seen the best of people, and the worst. Our teachers may have been there, my parents were there, Mariam was there, Jeffrey was there, and of course there were a hundred others, but we really seemed to be lending our voices to each other, speaking to each other through our lines, trying not to laugh at each other too audibly from our secret places beside the stage.
Mom said she and Dad kept laughing, partly because we just barely remained in the frame of decency for a high school production. I don't think even Mrs. Vardega quite anticipated what we would try to get away with even though she was dedicated at toning down the opening song choreography, as well as that of the Enchanted Forest. But maybe that had something to do with it being the best show our school had ever put on, at least for me. Working with so many seniors made me feel like I too was on the edge of something else, even if before I hadn't quite imagined it.
I wish that I could have made it through the entire five days unscathed, but let's not dwell on it.
For one single night, normalcy had been officially achieved. My parents' suspicions about the relationship I wouldn't talked about but claimed I had ended were still present, but it pleased them to see Mariam visiting the house again. We went to hang out and giggle incessantly in the computer room, and it would seem nothing was locked up in my heart anymore. In my bed, I grinned stupidly thinking about how Mariam observed my post-show talk with Mr. Frackson and posited that I must have wanted to go to prom with him all along and was quite disappointed, being asked instead by the divine boy who thoroughly “showed us a thing or two”.
I fell asleep and dreamed I was running down a path at the park, trying to find some jewel I had left hidden there. Then, I was leaving the Spring graduation ceremony that would take place still two weeks in the future, and Leslie and Paulina were talking together in front of me, about someone being there, but I couldn't see what they were pointing at. Then, finally, Erik was in my room to remind me what had formed and dispersed and would never return. He stood by the window, but something seemed different about him. I moved and lost that weightless trance, and all my senses activated.
No, this wasn't a dream.
HE'S (@) THERE
Chapter 49 - Supernova
The way I went a day without hysterically crying, it seemed I was a girl of stone. It wasn't believable to me that this could happen, so when I wasn't consciously blocking out memories of racing through the dark or gripping the grass, I'd recall them like dreams. I pretended to be sick and skipped school, and under such an incredulous mindset, many other scenes of my recent past seemed like dreams, too. When all I did was see the outside world through the window, I thought about how much it might help me if I just stayed there instead of walking into trouble all over again. I no longer had the attitude that I was involved in a solution. There was nothing but a storm running its course, now, I thought.
So I had my breakdown in the middle of the night and stayed on the verge of nausea that week, assuming that it would be a repeat of the previous week; that he'd disappear a while, then come back again, then text me again, then repeatedly try to call me, and refuse to take my rejection as reality. I was preparing to tell my parents, preparing to call the police, preparing to say I had a stalker, preparing to die of mortified heartbreak.
But he just didn't come back. I would go through something similar to the stages of death, waiting.
Denial
After the first few days of Erik's disappearance, all the tears that could possibly come from my body finally ran their course, and I was beginning to suspect that he also had enough time to hurt over what happened. Yes... I was still thinking about his feelings during all this. Perhaps he too saw what had happened between us as a dream for the first few days, but then he'd want to apologize; he'd want to be down on his knees; he wouldn't be able to sleep. Just to function, he'd have to hear from me. See, he wasn't the only one who could predict the other. Not only was I sure he was coming back, but this extended absence was a tactic to calm me down and then catch me off guard. He was going to come back, and I'd have to make myself completely immune to an ambush. I wouldn't go to a single place but Bat Boy practice and work. No, I was sick of being at that place at night with a bunch of kids. I'd tell my parents I knew the practices were going to be very demanding, and I'd quit my job.
* * *
We had our first readings for Bat Boy. I did no smiling all week except here, where there was an infectious positivity, and innocence, and simplicity. Westin made it sound like, instead of a bat, we had a monkey in the choir room because his character was feral for the first act. I couldn't stop myself from looking away from the script so I could catch his facial expressions. The meeting was like a daydream of something like joy, but it couldn't last forever.
* * *
The weekend, four days since I'd seen Erik: No one knew I was in a Hitchcockian nightmare, waiting for the bomb to go off. I'd been rehearsing my lines as Shelley Parker, and rehearsing my lines as Lily Terrasi, the girl who-... would have to tell Mariam, and Giry, and her parents, all separately, that... she'd almost been kidnapped. I couldn't get through what I wanted to say before I managed to cry even more than seemed possible.
* * *
Monday, March 26th, six days since I'd seen Erik: I called my boss and quit Baskin Robbin over the weekend, but they needed me for one more week, Tuesday through Thursday. I was worrying about what would happen during those nights, but Leslie was keeping me a little bit of company after practice, filling my head with better thoughts, which I wished could stay with me longer than the walk home. She had the big sister air about her, and seemed to have all of her shit together. She told me she was going straight to London for two terms, studying theatre and art history. For myself, I could acknowledge this production and nothing else, like I'd just be ready to lie down and die afterward. She had to remind me when I seemed a little negative, maybe, that next year I'd become one of Mrs. Vardega's “veterans”, and after all this work I'd most likely be ready for anything she threw at us.
* * *
Tuesday, March 27th, a week since I'd seen Erik: I was convinced this would be the day he'd show up at my work and disrupt everything. After sundown, the place got quiet. I'd go in the back room to clean up so that it didn't look like I was there, and I'd keep looking out the tinted windows.
My paranoia was so high I had a dream he broke into my house and I couldn't use my hands to push him away because they were in crippling agony, like they'd been pricked over and over, to the bone.
* * *
Anger
Thursday, March 29th, a week and two days since I'd seen Erik: I never told Giry or Mariam what happened... I kept putting it off...
They thought he had never returned at all, and Giry would keep telling me she hadn't heard a thing. Mariam started to postulate that telling my parents and actually stepping up between he and I had scared him off. They thought maybe I'd be free, now.
Well I didn't feel anything close to free. There didn't seem to be a future for me. He didn't even have to be here, or make any indication about what he was doing or what he knew, and still he was cramming me into a box. Fuck him, if he would leave me like this, not giving me a sense of closure but a sense of hanging in space, vision blackened, wanting to drop, trying to climb, wondering if thorns are higher up the rope. Maybe he was really gone.
Fuck him to Hell for doing this to me.
* * *
Friday, March 30th, a week and three days since I'd seen Erik: Westin and Leslie were from another universe: a universe of light. They thought when I seemed moody that I was just shy. Leslie was always trying to nudge me towards something better. She noticed I could never sing to anyone in the eye. “Sing it to me,” Leslie'd say mid-lyric. “Sing it to him!” “Look to the Bat Boy!” If that didn't work, Westin would try to hop into my line of vision. But if Mrs. Vardega was watching and we knew we couldn't screw up blocking, they'd both make telescope gestures at me before we started the song.
* * *
Monday, April 2nd, a week and six days since I'd seen Erik: There came to be a point when I decided that at all costs I would choose my own life to live, my own sentiments to keep in my heart, and my own universe in which to reside, and I picked that of the “Bat Ensemble”. I kept thinking about Erik's power; how a single flawed individual could make my every thought and action about him, as if that was any right of his to do. I would create a force-field to keep Erik out.
Jeffrey never stopped acting weird around me, even though he wanted to be polite, but I agreed around Mariam that Erik must have been gone, and how convenient it was with such a wonderful play developing right before my eyes. She liked seeing me act so empowered and believed that it was all sincere. I was even convincing myself it was sincere. I'd rehearse with her, but she still thought I ought to have Leslie's part. I told her I couldn't dwell on that. I had to hold on to Shelley.
Typical of her, to say “you know, she kisses two characters and flat out has sex with Bat Boy in the Enchanted Forest, in the full version.”
I managed a real smile: “well, I don't even need to tell you that Mrs. Vardega revised that scene.”
* * *
Friday, April 6th, two weeks and three days since I'd seen Erik: Mrs. Vardega passively mentioned that if we felt like it, we could schedule our own meetings to practice, and Leslie was keen on it, as well as our Mr. Parker (Keith) and Shelley's boyfriend for the first act, Rick (Joey). But, meanwhile, during official practice, I'd taken to watching Westin far too intently, just to experience how truly concentrated he was getting out those tongue-twisters, or singing large amounts of lyrics without interruption. His eyes would always start wandering around blankly in front of him when he was practicing alone, then flicker to anyone watching, and that ended up being me much of the time. He probably thought I liked him, but it wasn't possible. Just to make sure he didn't get any ideas, I wouldn't pay him more than polite attention once everyone was packing up.
* * *
Tuesday, April 10th, three weeks since I'd seen Erik: My parents had monitored me enough to see that I really truly was going nowhere, seeing no one, devoting myself only to that play, so I got a few privileges back. When everyone around me had begun to act like things had slowed down, gotten better somehow, been rid of the monsters of Pandora's Box which I had opened, it seemed like time to let go. Maybe that box was empty now.
If I was willing to give myself the time to think about why that hurt my feelings, I may have realized I was afraid everything would go back to normal and there was no way to stop that but to have him in my life. By then I'd associated a little pain with a little ecstasy... no other way to get it, right? Was this the reason I felt like there was no future, even if I wanted to be rid of him, rid of these feelings?
* * *
Thursday, April 12th, three weeks and two days since I'd seen Erik: Westin came to our independent practice and caught up with me afterward, wondering why I wasn't heading towards school. I told him I lived close by, so he walked me to my door. Mom happened to be looking out the kitchen window at the time, and Westin had to say hello. I think - even though we couldn't speak about this as it was happening - that he was very tempted upon having a motherly figure present again, play or no play, to act like he was Edgar.
My mom looked at him, even against her desire to be friendly, as if he might have meant more to me, and I still wondered what would motivate him to walk me to my door.
* * *
Friday, April 13th, three weeks and three days since I'd seen Erik:
Westin: “Your mom seemed very nervous seeing me at your door, Lily.”
Leslie: “And what were you doing at Lily's door?”
Me: “I live down the street.”
Leslie: “That still doesn't answer my question!”
Westin: “I don't think Lily's mom got any closure, either.”
Leslie had a smile only for me before someone nearby started chatting with her. I had to explain my Mom was nervous about boys, even though that had never exactly been true for most of my life.
Westin: “Must make it hard to date.”
* * *
Against all that I knew to be best for me, I woke up in the middle of the night, lost that sleepy feeling, and instinctively rolled over to hug my pillow. And I kept myself close to it for a while. “I can feel your heartbeat,” I said in my head.
“What of it?” Erik answered in that trance-like voice.
* * *
Monday, April 16th, three weeks and six days since I'd seen Erik: Giry was getting awfully busy for some reason that I failed to ask about, and couldn't come watch us practice the same day Mariam did. I was simultaneously pleased and disappointed when Mariam got a glimpse of our cast and star and later wondered if Westin was gay. “And it's too bad if he is; he's quite cute.”
“He's more your type than mine,” I said, and she agreed. He was that type of clean-cut “Aryan” boy she'd always had her eye on, with his dark blond hair, and eyes I hadn't really decided were green or blue. I was thinking of saying to her that he was simultaneously soft-faced and calculating, though. Deliberate, almost professional, even when it was just us students. He'd look on me with a thorough, but kind judgment, and then I wouldn't hate my life quite so much anymore. I didn't want her to know I'd been observing him so much. Before I could try to articulate anything, she had more to add:
“Well, you seem to be his type, even if he just wants to be friends with you. Come on, I saw how it looked. Reminded me a bit of Jeffrey, but more civilized...” She smiled to herself.
I'd never had a problem before with the smiles and the looks we shared, but now that a meaning was being applied to them even further, I became guilty.
* * *
Negotiation
Tuesday, April 17th, one month since I'd seen Erik: No one seemed to know I was groping inside Pandora's Box, now. A month had dissolved the truth I had discovered our last night together, or so I thought. I didn't remember, or claimed to myself not to remember what had truly happened and what had been fabricated. I'd had so many dreams involving him, good and bad.
He was going to come back and break up with me the way it should have been done. The way that made him know I had to stay away but I loved him and wanted him to own up to his mistakes, for the sake of us. I wanted to force him to become honest, to have integrity, and to earn a time in the future when he could gain back my trust, for the sake of us. We must surely have been collapsing into ourselves. And why?
Us was still a thing. Who was I kidding?
* * *
Thursday, April 19th, one month and two days since I'd seen Erik: Inside Your Heart was a song that was beginning to fill me with anxiety. Shelley harbored feelings for Edgar (the Bat Boy, the Westin) by the second act, and they would be quite literally consummated in the original production, but of course in our high school rendition we did nothing but kiss, and we'd do it yet again after we sang this song.
Mrs. Vardega told us we'd be practicing it in a couple weeks, and it seemed to be on Westin's mind during our next independent practice. It had somehow derailed into anarchy and everyone decided they'd rather get ice cream (forget the irony of that), but he asked me if I'd been practicing that song once the theater was emptying out. “I've been having at it every now and then,” he said, “but I'm sure it'd sound much better with the both of us.” I told him I was a little frustrated; that the last note was just at the edge of my range, and left out that all my work on eye-contact might also have been for naught during such an intense moment.
The theater would officially be “open”, as much as concepts of open and closed had never much applied to me, until 9:00, and Westin knew it. It was obvious he wanted me to stay and practice the song while everyone was away. “We haven't got the music,” I said, but he had a CD in his bag that he took straight to the player we'd wheeled back behind the curtains. He didn't deserve to feel badly about this, t-this feeling I had that I shouldn't be there because I belonged to someone else, so I just behaved in all the ways one does when they're obligated to leave, even if they don't want to: I found my sweater, gathered my stuff, walked all the way to the back of the auditorium, said I had a paper that I'd barely started... But he was a terrible, terrible boy who gave me guilt I could not handle once I was on the other side of the door.
I came back in and he was doing a sideways jog in place with a gaping smile.
He tried, and he tried, and he tried to get me to sing my part, and told me something that wasn't meant to sting but to tease: “this simply won't do if you want to be an actress!” I still wondered if he was gay the entire time, but it was of no consequence, what with the way it looked like, being alone here. I had to balance a sense of warmth towards him and of distance from him, at the same time, like I had tried with Mariam, and none of it felt right.
He thought I looked nervous, so he gave up planting me into the song and sang his part as if it was performance night. He tried to pretend I was pursuing him, begging him to take my blood, and whipped from left to right when I didn't oblige to Shelley's position, but I was laughing to myself in painful excitement and a will to at least be there...
Shelley's hand would have to be warmly cupped and captured in both his, for quite a while, so he followed that action. The boy was belting at me in a powerful voice which echoed in all the places Erik and I had been, and I could no longer understand what exactly I was avoiding about the situation. Maybe it all didn't mean anything and I just got worked up because I had never been a character in a conspicuous romance onstage - only offstage, with one person, whose every movement was meant to spin me in a web. But boys were not all spiders, I had to remind myself.
* * *
Friday, April 20th, a month and two days since I'd seen Erik:
The wardrobe was still in the attic.
During a break from practice, I went up the spiral stairs and left a note inside.
* * *
Monday, April 23rd, one month and five days since I'd seen Erik: The more the play came together, the more it dawned on me that some of the people graduating this year were going places and were not afraid. Leslie was such a poised actress when the scenes began to be practiced in full that I sometimes tried too hard to be like her and forgot the more juvenile qualities of Shelley's singing and body language.
Some of our other cast was trying to block for the song “Children, Children,” which involved a group of “love-making” creatures of the forest dancing around while me and Bat Boy realized we wanted to roll around at center-stage. Even so, the prospect of singing my own song straight to Westin's face and feeling the warm hands covering mine... it scared me more. He just had to keep reminding me about it, too. He got an idea while no one was paying attention to us and jumped behind the curtain. “I'll sing back here and you sing out there. Just pretend that I'm a disembodied voice that helps you practice.”
He had no idea the joke he was making, but I still refused.
“It's either now or in classsss... and at this rate, that will be running before you can crawl.”
“We're already in 'class'.”
“Well obviously I meant we'll come back later,” his voice corrected.
“I can't do it with you here!” I shouted at the curtain. “I don't like being here when everyone leaves.”
“Then you can come to my house,” he answered.
And then we argued about whether or not it would be any good to visit his house, which through the course of our imaginations became a dark, dripping cave somewhere in the forest. He finally reemerged and tried his hardest to claim it was better kept than I thought.
* * *
Such a lovely boy,
Look at what you've done to me.
Woke me up, and set me free.
So look at me.
Such a lovely boy,
This way you'll be mine at last
And I'll be fine, I heal real fast!
So look at me!
Look at me!
I will shield you from harm, but spend your life on my arm
I see no better way to start
Let me prove I love you
Let me become part of you
Now we shall never be apart.
I'll always live inside your heart.
* * *
I wished somebody would hold me again.
* * *
Depression
Wednesday, April 25th, one month and one week since I'd seen Erik: Yeah, I went to Westin's house. They obviously had a lot of money; they lived on the hill and both his parents had transferred to Oregon for opportunities in the Lewis & Clark English department, so urgent that they would cut off their son from finishing high school when he was just a year away. I wanted to slap myself for enjoying the snack he made, and the tour he gave, and the way he worked with my unexplained discomfort by letting me practice Inside Your Heart... inside the entryway closet.
My voice was faltering, though. I didn't think the song should be sung for him. If I were fully my character, costume and all, maybe, but like this... it was too intimate. I realized in the darkness, standing between his parents' winter coats, that I had lost it all, officially, and now I was here... The note was still in the wardrobe; there was not a trace of the man of my past, even though I'd been asking Giry too frequently. She'd started to get worried about me when she wasn't preparing for graduation. Mariam wanted to know if I was going out with Westin any time soon, who sounded just as splendid as usual at the other side of the door.
He didn't know what was going through my head, and so he entered the closet when we tried it a second time. For a moment, I saw the boy with the smooth, scarless arms, then the light was left behind as the door closed, and who really held my hands? Who shouted “you don't know what you're saying”?
“Shut up! That's it! I'm staying!” I pretended to say with amusement.
“I will shield you from harm,” he started, but I brushed him off and left the closet.
I had never laughed so much without meaning any of it, just trying to prove it was nothing personal that I had to get going.
* * *
Sunday, April 29th, one month, one week, and four days since I'd seen Erik: I was a widow too fresh to pursue. I had absolutely no desire for anyone to replace any memory of what it was like to be close to someone like I had been close to Erik. It felt like he was dead, the way my note remained in the wardrobe, untouched, unwritten upon. I found the note where I'd left it so many times by a certain point that I began to consider myself “winning” some stupid, awful game of guessing whether it was there. What became denial that Erik was gone became denial that he would ever return. I now belonged to an imaginary person, yet there was nothing new about that. I was back where I'd started, all the wiser, all the braver. I wish I could've been happy about that.
* * *
Wednesday, May 2nd, one month and two weeks since I'd seen Erik: Mariam started to notice I had been avoiding Westin when I had no news about him when she asked, and when, brace yourselves, he had to ask her personally if it would be a bad idea to ask me to prom.
“He seemed a little worried that you thought he hit on you and you didn't like it, and he would gladly go as friends.”
“Why would I want to go to prom? You know I hate dances.”
* * *
Saturday, May 5th, one month, two weeks, and three days since I'd seen Erik: I knew before we were in the same room together that Giry and Mariam wanted to have a talk with me because they knew Erik somehow had an influence on me still.
It may as well have been the times I had with my parents, all over again. They didn't want me to feel cornered. We were in Mariam's room on a warm day with the windows open. Mariam had gotten us some drinks and we'd been doing nothing in particular for a little while, but when things turned to me, it would be inevitably ugly. There was no need to say I thought I loved him. They knew. I think that they were even offended that when you looked at me inside out, the way they were able to the more they pressed and pressed that something was wrong, I was still on fire for Erik.
Giry hadn't known much of anything about Westin besides that he was starring as the Bat Boy and Mariam thought we were getting along swimmingly, but when she found out I was thinking of rejecting his offer to prom, she was all for jumping on Mariam's side. It was such a bad idea to turn him down.
Originally, that was the argument. Why turn him down? They were able to recognize that it was too early and I shouldn't have any type of “rebound boy”, but why would I turn down Junior Prom with someone who had been so nice to me all this time?
Because he might have liked me.
“What's the problem with that?!”
“I don't want anyone to like me.”
“Because Erik still likes you?”
“Because I still-. Just let me get over this when I'm ready.”
It was awful, watching them. I could sense that this had never been an ambush attempt, but that what I'd said was giving them visceral reactions, as if I'd admitted to wanting to torture myself. They made me feel like I was the greatest victim of Stockholm Syndrome the world had ever seen, and further, that I was comfortable around a man who hurt my friends, too.
No, I was not comfortable. I didn't want him to come back tomorrow and sweep me up in his arms and pretend we could get back to putting vintage clips in my hair. That had already been what he tried to do once I'd seen him hurt someone, but it would never be possible again.
So what did I want? They wondered, and they had too much patience to find out. They let me look out the window and focus on the shadows of the trees in another yard, formed by a canopy of leaves under a bright sun. Time had really, truly passed since I'd been around him.
A little while ago, I wanted Winter back. I had been fighting against the destruction of a perfect fantasy, but I wasn't thinking clearly enough about how inevitably the stars began to align when Erik started clasping me hard enough to eclipse the pleasure of it all. It would never be easy with Erik - he wanted us to be two mirrors facing, so he could consume me for infinity - and that was what defined the beautiful horror that should have only had its appeal in my imagination. But I did find it beautiful in reality. It was why I never managed to “fix” him if that was even possible.
I had learned that I could no longer want Erik anymore, but I had a deeper wish granted: that Erik would exist. That he would be somewhere in my world.
Mariam and Giry weren't happy with a word of this. They were holding me by the shoulders. “He isn't Erik. He's never been Erik. There is no such thing as Erik.”
But I guess I wondered how “Erik” could be defined, or anyone for that matter. My Erik had told me once that anything imagined that would mean something to me, that would find its way into my heart, had first to be composed by elements of the world I knew, or I'd never understand it. He told me this to keep me from ever dismissing the things I loved that I thought weren't real, to give me hope that I could find them all over again if I remembered to look for them.
I didn't know what he was talking about until he said I was composed from a supernova. That energy never goes away, only changes form. Mariam and Giry pictured a deformed man living underground over a century ago, but I kept thinking of a supernova in some hybrid of a real and imagined space, where something lost or unknown dispersed and regathered itself as best it could in this man I had found whose eyes slashed me in two. I wanted an explanation for this fulfilled prophecy, and the way memories of my racing heart and the dirt beneath my fingernails melded with my bedside story, and why he always made the world I perceived ten times more vivid.
“I don't know how to break through to her,” Giry said to Mariam as if I wasn't there.
“This was not a man who was 'Erik', Lily. It was somebody who wanted you to think this way! You sound like he's completely brainwashed you. Please tell me that that isn't true, and that you're in there, and you won't let him anywhere near you, because it sounds like you want him to come back!” Mariam refused to break eye-contact, but I could almost see right through her.
“I don't want him to come back. I promise. Giry, I really-”
“Her name is Paulina, Lily.”
“I don't want to be with him anymore. I just want him to be okay.”
Giry's tactic was not quite so forward. She felt like a slightly different person by now. “Well he didn't want you to be okay, Lily. He wanted to take you down to his level so he wouldn't have to be there alone.”
“He was desperate. Something was not right with him,” I shouted over Mariam's shoulder.
“And it's going to stay not-right!” She shouted back. “I hope that he got himself arrested, because God knows he did enough to deserve it,” Giry continued, saying it to herself. “I mean, that must have been what happened because otherwise we all know he can't keep himself away from you. He was willing to destroy the whole world just to have you, and he already started to.”
“I don't want to go back to that. Can you please just understand that there was a time he wasn't like this? There was a time he wasn't like this. He wasn't desperate. He was trying- he was trying to-.” They waited, Giry on the bed and Mariam right before me, but I sensed nothing in them that would receive what I said as truth. “You know, you're right, he's not okay, he's never been okay, he's an insomniac, I think he was imagining things, he talked about things in his head, about wanting to die, about people who couldn't sleep killing themselves, and I'm never going to forget any of it. You weren't there to hear it,”
“He was manipulating you-” Giry started.
“You don't think I know a good deception from reality - well, I do. And I don't care what you say. I told you I don't want to be with him, but don't tell me what's real. He's someone real!”
* * *
Saturday, May 19th, two months since I'd seen Erik: I hoped that he would be okay eventually. That's all I could ever do from hereon, and I was allowed to do that.
I continued - we all continued - to work our asses off. Mariam and Gi- Paulina apologized to me in time for prom, and I apologized back for getting so angry, but I never ended up going. On a night when friends were typically united, we just weren't. My parents were thinking something was very questionable about me these days, but they knew what work the production had been, and I told them the premiere would be my own kind of prom. I would wear something nice to and from the show, and I would be glowing, I said. And I meant it.
Mariam really wanted me to go, but Jeffrey's presence made it so she could go without me and enjoy his circle of friends again. After all, things had changed...
Westin was a real sport about it, which helped cheer me up. I told him I could dance up and down the block if it was for theatre, but prom intimidated me. He told me not to eat too much ice cream if I stayed at home or “I'd get a tummy ache.”
* * *
Acceptance
Sunday, May 20th, two months and a day since I'd seen Erik: On the night of dress rehearsal, Mrs. Vardega rounded us up on the stage and did her usual speech about being proud of us, and barely being able to contain her excitement to see it nearly as it would be in front of an audience. We all felt that way, really. Our choir that would be singing all of the back-up was there, the members of band who had volunteered to play the soundtrack (a slightly simpler version, but hey) were tuning their instruments in the sound pit, and other members of the stage crew were handling the set pieces and costumes. Seeing the detail of the pieces made specifically for us was always a motivator to really become that character and take the set space for reality.
My heart was fluttering just from sitting across from Leslie with my hair in curlers, watching her in a similar situation, getting her nails painted fire-engine red. We were having a made-up argument about what to do with Edgar when Westin showed up with his head completely shaved, about ready to get his ears and teeth adhered. When he came back, look completed with the mismatched Thirftstore clothes, he crawled around at our feet making noises at us for a few minutes before Mrs. Normann asked to speak to him.
Meanwhile, our Mrs. Taylor was a boy with a giant pair of bouncing knockers made out of balloons, and Shelley's father was getting to look a lot like Mr. Crocker from The Fairly Odd Parents, but it all worked considering how crazy he was.
I could have gone on and on about the visual stimuli that night. But, more important than that, I was surprised how harder work made better friends. I felt like my cast, maybe more people than others, had become friends, even if I'd never see them again. It dawned on me that it was May, and Leslie and Westin and about half of the cast were graduating, along with Paulina, and they might forget about this world, and never step foot in this theater again. I thought “what if Erik was once in this position?” But now it seemed unlikely that he had ever felt this type of camaraderie, because if he had, he wouldn't have turned out as he did.
* * *
No one seemed to be letting go of their characters the entire four hours that we spent setting up and running through the show, even when they were backstage, and even if those characters turned very R-rated when Mrs. Vardega and our other teachers weren't listening.
However, it got very quiet when the Enchanted Forest cast left the stage in their ridiculous get-ups and I had to sing under a spotlight, in nothing but a slip. I could have been imagining that the silence outside of our song was so intense, but it felt to me like all eyes and ears were scrutinizing us, even if they'd already seen it before. He was a very good actor. When I kissed him, and he reciprocated, he made sure to make it look and feel like he meant it.
I tried to be rather aloof as we were walking off the stage, not really looking at one thing or another as I kept up with him, but Mrs. Vardega had called us both “beautiful”. We had been clapping after every song for one another, but I caught Leslie looking me right in the eye and I tensed up like I'd just felt a powerful shiver.
* * *
I wasn't planning to ever forget the night, and there was no fair way to call it incomplete, but I wondered what Erik would have thought of it if he weren't battling his demons and had room to be proud of me the way that I was proud of myself. Everyone was more stoked than I had ever seen a cast before a premiere. We didn't feel like going home right away and lingered around the lobby and the front porch. Still within the group, but as naturally as ever, Westin just leaned forward with an excited grin and gave me a quick kiss not meant for Shelley, but for me. Only when he saw my face did it finally occur to him that things weren't simple like that, and never had been.
* * *
There was no way I could have a serious relationship for a long time, with anybody, and that was the mantra I told myself all through the next twenty four hours, when the pre-performance jitters were making memory of the whole day at school quite hard to remember. But I remember Westin had been apologizing to me here and there, naturally bent out of shape that I looked far from happy about what he had done. I wanted to reassure him everything was fine between us, and I did, but maybe it would be dangerous to continue being close, even if we had never been that close at all. Maybe he'd start asking me what I was doing that summer. I wouldn't have liked to disclose that I'd had a stalker and needed a breath of fresh air. I liked it so much better that he thought I was just a nice girl from the theatre department who rode her bike in her spare time.
I missed a part of what I used to have, but right then, I liked the thought of seeing myself that way, too.
* * *
It was on a clear night that we had our premiere and invited everyone into the place where I had seen the best of people, and the worst. Our teachers may have been there, my parents were there, Mariam was there, Jeffrey was there, and of course there were a hundred others, but we really seemed to be lending our voices to each other, speaking to each other through our lines, trying not to laugh at each other too audibly from our secret places beside the stage.
Mom said she and Dad kept laughing, partly because we just barely remained in the frame of decency for a high school production. I don't think even Mrs. Vardega quite anticipated what we would try to get away with even though she was dedicated at toning down the opening song choreography, as well as that of the Enchanted Forest. But maybe that had something to do with it being the best show our school had ever put on, at least for me. Working with so many seniors made me feel like I too was on the edge of something else, even if before I hadn't quite imagined it.
I wish that I could have made it through the entire five days unscathed, but let's not dwell on it.
For one single night, normalcy had been officially achieved. My parents' suspicions about the relationship I wouldn't talked about but claimed I had ended were still present, but it pleased them to see Mariam visiting the house again. We went to hang out and giggle incessantly in the computer room, and it would seem nothing was locked up in my heart anymore. In my bed, I grinned stupidly thinking about how Mariam observed my post-show talk with Mr. Frackson and posited that I must have wanted to go to prom with him all along and was quite disappointed, being asked instead by the divine boy who thoroughly “showed us a thing or two”.
I fell asleep and dreamed I was running down a path at the park, trying to find some jewel I had left hidden there. Then, I was leaving the Spring graduation ceremony that would take place still two weeks in the future, and Leslie and Paulina were talking together in front of me, about someone being there, but I couldn't see what they were pointing at. Then, finally, Erik was in my room to remind me what had formed and dispersed and would never return. He stood by the window, but something seemed different about him. I moved and lost that weightless trance, and all my senses activated.
No, this wasn't a dream.