I’m at my tenth-grade Field Day when my mom gives birth to a baby girl she names Nina. I rush home every day to hold her and sing to her and play with her. When anyone congratulates Jimmy, he just shakes his head, confused, and says, “I don’t know how it happened.” I like having a newborn in my house, and I invite some classmates over to check her out. I’m desperate to get my new friends to accept me, but since I’m just transferring in, I’m joining established friendships, and no matter how many memories we make, I’ll never catch up.
People at my new school think it’s cool that I have an entirely separate life and that I’m writing and acting in plays. We’re writing one right now, and we stay up late working on it. Afterward Paul, his brother Jonathan, and I trail behind Taylor to the after-parties; those nights I sleep at Gwen and Taylor’s on their couch. I call my mom when Gwen goes to bed to tell her it’s too late for me to walk home. Then Taylor keeps me up late doing coke. My mom is occupied with baby Nina and she doesn’t ask any questions.
I get a crush on a kid named Aram. He’s a year older and not my type, though I hardly know what that would be. He’s the smartest kid in school, loves sports, is frighteningly sexy, kind of a loner, never had a serious girlfriend, and already looks like a man. Friends Seminary is different from Whittaker. Our classes are mixed ages, so instead of having a small group of friends in just my grade, I have pockets of friends in several grades. And now that I smoke, I have my smoking alley friends, but I don’t have a confidante. Instead, I seem to have become the one people confide in, as well as the dispenser of advice. People admit things to me that, if they were my secrets, I’d never confess to anyone. I’ve certainly never told my friends how I have these terrifying attacks inside my body that make me feel like I’m dying. To tell anyone would mean revealing I’m defective or crazy. I keep everything to myself, which means people get closer to me, but I don’t get closer to them. The more time passes where I don’t reveal myself, the more convinced I become that I shouldn’t do it.
Maybe if I had a boyfriend, I’d have the closeness I crave. I’m desperate to get Aram to notice me, and since I’ve cowritten several plays already with my acting school, and my English teacher secretly submitted a play I wrote to a playwriting contest, I propose my idea of writing, directing, and producing a play at school to that same teacher, who loves the idea and volunteers to get permission. No other student has ever written, directed, and produced their own play independent from the theater department, and it’s a big deal when I get the go-ahead. I am both thrilled and nervous. I’ll ask Aram to be in it. Who doesn’t want to be in a play? I also ask my friends Miranda and Wren and, even though he’s a teacher, Paolo.
Our first rehearsal is just a conversation about the play and how I imagine it looking; having their attention on me, treating me like I’m a real producer, gives me a surge of confidence. Since Aram’s the star, his rehearsals go longer. We spend our rehearsals talking about the play, which is about suicide, and how hard it is being a teenager, and soon we’re talking about our parents and siblings, gender, sexuality, and race. I love the way he listens to me as though I actually have things to say that are valid.
I don’t think he knows I have a crush on him. I had thought I was making progress with him, bonding over these big questions, but then he starts asking if he and Miranda can have a kiss in the play, one that they’d have to rehearse. Fuck no: The only kiss that will occur takes place between his stage-parents, played by Wren and Paolo, and if I have my way, the only person Aram will be kissing is me.
At school people are talking about my play, with the opening night now just a few days away. I feel lucky that in the one place I do not excel—an academic environment—I am being given an opportunity to be noticed for my strengths. That belief in me is palpable, and I wonder if maybe being creative is a type of intelligence and people just don’t know it. I do everything myself: I design the lighting scheme and the sound track; I make the playbills and the tickets. The play is about a father’s suicide, and the teenage son who attempts suicide but survives. It takes place in a therapist’s office. The actors sit on chairs about six feet apart, with the light focused on one person at a time. Each character begins a sentence about his or her own experience, a line that is then completed by the next person, with the account changing drastically between perspectives.
Everyone thinks the sentence completion aspect is innovative, but what I don’t tell anyone is that my much smarter friend Naomi wrote a story that introduced me to the idea of this kind of shared, shifting monologue. She goes to a different school, so I’m not that worried. Aram is so smart, and now he thinks I’m smart, but I’m not. I’m hiding behind a pretense. Everywhere I go, there are always two of me. There is the me getting tested and the me who doesn’t know why. There is the me who suffers from countdowns and the me who pretends she’s unafraid. There is the me who pretends she knows things and the me who knows I know nothing.
On opening night I look down from the balcony into the Quaker meetinghouse, at the gray pews where we spend our mornings sitting in silence. Taylor and Gwen are there, along with Paul and his brother Jonathan, plus more than half of the school. The principal of the school introduces the show, the lights go out, and the performance is better than any rehearsal we’ve ever had. No one forgets their lines and the lighting is perfect and it all goes by too fast because suddenly the final scene is up and Wren and Paolo kiss as the lights fade to black. I take a deep breath.
When the houselights come up, though, there are audible gasps, because Paolo and Wren are still kissing. They leap apart, but it’s too late; everyone saw it, even the principal. Even Wren’s boyfriend, Carlos, saw it. I don’t have time to wonder whether a scandal will be good for publicity or not, because I’m called onto the stage and I bow and the applause grows and I can’t quite believe how incredible this moment feels. I am being seen and recognized for something I wrote. For something I wrote about feelings and emotions. Instead of being seen for what I’m doing wrong, people are clapping because I’ve done something no one else has done in this school before. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have people look at me the way I look at everyone else—like they know how to do things I don’t—and now, right in these very moments, they are. I don’t want it to end.
Afterward, Taylor and Gwen congratulate me, and I’m floating in a way that’s not terrifying. Except for the two of them, all the adults in my life seem out of touch; other people are concerned about the subject matter, asking if I am all right, and do I need to talk about anything? I’m annoyed that I had to do something so big to receive a question so small. It feels like too little too late. Yes, I did need to talk about something, years and years ago, but now I’m too far in to be extracted. I vow never to be an adult so unaware of the interior life of kids.
The attention and excitement of the night feel like a drug. For the entire two-night run, I am buoyant, but when it ends I crash hard on the other side. The despair is paralyzing, exhausting, and confusing. When by Monday it still hasn’t passed, I stay home. Midday, I get a weirdly frantic phone call from Aram, wondering where I am. I can hear the sounds of the schoolyard in the background. When I tell him I just needed a day of rest and will be back tomorrow, he doesn’t seem to believe me.
“You’re…uh, you’re not with Paolo, are you?” he asks.
“Paolo? No. He’s not at school?”
“Nope,” he says. “And it’s weird, because of…you know, the kiss.”
The kiss! I’d completely forgotten about it.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure he’s fine and will be back tomorrow,” I say, ignoring a wave of nerves.
As I’m about to hang up, Aram says, “We’re still friends, right? Like will we still hang out and stuff, even though the play is done?”
Holy shit. “Yes, of course,” I say, trying to sound casual. “I mean, I feel like the play made us closer, don’t you think?” I am expecting him to confess his love right there.
“Yeah, totally. Okay, I gotta get to class. Get rest!” he says and hangs up before I can say anything else.
When the phone rings again, I’m still smiling and I think it’s him again because I hear school sounds before the speaker says anything.
“Yeeeuuusss?” I say, singsongy.
“Hi there. May I please speak to Mrs. Stern?” a woman asks. “This is Eileen Duva.” The guidance counselor. I tell her my mother is out.
“I’d like to have a conversation with her about your college plans, and with you also. Will you be in tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I say. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Well, your grades are terrible, your PSAT scores are abysmal, your standardized testing scores are suboptimal, and while your achievements outside school are impressive, I’m afraid it’s your in-school performance colleges look for, and, quite frankly, you don’t have it.”
“I don’t want to go to college,” I retort, offended but also hurt. “I want to keep doing what I’m doing. Maybe work in film, or write. What’s the point of college?” Until I say it out loud, I haven’t even known that’s how I feel, but it’s true. I don’t want to go to college. If I already know what I want to do, why not just start doing it? Besides, I’m not smart enough for college.
“Do your parents know you feel this way?”
“No,” I say.
She agrees to have this conversation with my mother tomorrow. My mom didn’t go to college, so this probably won’t be a big deal. Eddie didn’t go to college either. He just went straight out into the real world and got himself an apartment and a job making T-shirts. When I think of jumping into the real world, it doesn’t scare me as much as college does. I can hide how academically out of my depth I am in the real world, but I can’t in college. I wonder where Aram will go to college. If I’m not in college, I’ll be able to visit him whenever I want.
I’m shocked out of my reverie by another phone call. This time it’s Paolo.
“I’m in so much trouble,” he says with no preamble. “I told them that was in the script, okay? That it was part of the play, so if they ask you, tell them that, all right?” he asks.
“Yeah, okay. Don’t worry.” I do my best to reassure him.
“Thanks…hopefully my one-day suspension will be all I have to deal with.”
“You got suspended?”
“Yep. All for you, kid. But don’t worry. It was fun and worth it,” he says. This reversal is odd—instead of being his student, I feel like his teacher, and if I’m his teacher, then I have a crush on a student, whom I’m on the phone with, at home, talking about a kiss that shouldn’t have happened, and annoyed by my layer of envy and resentment. Why are all these male teachers trying to fuck their students? Can’t they get anyone their own age? Hearing Paolo’s glee that he kissed a student, and the fact that he hasn’t even mentioned Wren, or how she might feel, makes me feel contempt for him. I hope she and Carlos don’t break up because of the kiss. Then it will be my fault.
Aram is waiting on the front steps for me the next day. I feel like a rock star at school; everyone congratulates me on the play, but because the topic of the play was suicide, they also seem a little wary of me, which I love. Even though I’m now dressing more like a painter than a punk, the more afraid people are of me, the more they’ll believe their own stories about me, and I’ll feel safe and hidden. I recognize the quandary I’ve gotten myself into here, but I don’t know how to get out. I wanted someone to figure out what was wrong with me, and in order to do that, I went in the direction they sent me, but that sent up a decoy that took on a life of its own and now the decoy is all they see. It’s too late to reveal my truth to anyone. I’m an idiot who can’t get anything right, and I’m not even trying to get someone to see what’s wrong with me.
Eileen Duva catches me in the hall. “I spoke with your mother this morning,” she says. “I think I woke her up.”
“Probably. Did you tell her I don’t want to go to college?”
“You’re going to college,” she says.
“But I don’t want to!” I protest. I am not ready for my lack of intelligence to be revealed. I won’t get in anywhere.
“My dear, according to your mother, you have no choice.”