“Wait, you’re doing what?” Abbi asks, pausing with her fork in the air.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Abs,” I say, and she shoots me a snotty look.
“I think it’s great that you’re trying something new,” Mom says in a calm tone. She’s very good at reacting to things in a measured, nonjudgmental manner. This is annoying when it comes to Abbi’s pregnancy because I just want someone to pepper her with questions until she spills everything, but I appreciate it right now.
Although you wouldn’t know it if you looked at her, my mom used to play music. She actually dropped out of college to tour with her all-female punk band, Sister Wives. She met my dad in some no-name bar in Ohio and even though, as she put it, “nothing about him was remotely cool,” she fell in love with him and they got married. Eventually she went back to college to become a school counselor so she could work with kids who are, in her words, as screwed up as she was. When I see pictures of her wearing a nose ring and a T-shirt with no bra, I wonder how she ended up here, married with two kids and a house and a Subaru in the driveway. The only way you’d even know about her past is because she has framed concert posters instead of framed paintings, and she listens to Sonic Youth in the car instead of the country station, like Evelyn’s mom does. It’s not that she seems unhappy, but I guess part of me wonders if she regrets it. If she wishes she were still crammed into a dirty van, headed to some town she’s never been to in Pennsylvania, playing the drums night after night. I wonder if she looks at her kids—one of them pregnant, the other not even able to get kissed—and wonders where she went wrong.
“Thanks for the encouragement, Mom,” I say sweetly, keeping my eyes on Abbi.
“But you hate being in front of people,” Abbi continues. “Remember when Mom said you had to be in the fourth-grade musical and you cried for days?”
Ugh. I wish she hadn’t reminded me. I was so nervous about it that the only thing that calmed me down was when Derek came over and performed stand-up comedy routines he’d memorized by secretly staying up late watching Comedy Central. Let me tell you, Patton Oswalt routines lose a lot of their punch when they’re recited by a fourth-grade boy, but they were still funny enough that I was able to stop freaking out.
“We had to sing Disney songs. It was beneath me.”
“I just wanted you to have a new experience,” Mom says, spooning more roasted carrots onto her plate. “But you’ve always been a little hesitant to try new things.”
I’d be offended, but she’s right. For my fifth-birthday party, they bought me a tricycle, but instead of trying to ride it, I hid in the garage and cried until everyone went home.
“So you actually want to be on a stage? Like, with people looking at you?” Abbi asks.
The thing is, she’s not trying to be mean. She’s way too obvious for that. She’s genuinely confused about what I’m doing, and I wish she’d just shut her mouth (both figuratively and literally, because I don’t need to see the half-chewed pork tenderloin that’s in there).
“I hope you teach your child better manners,” I say, and Abbi closes her mouth and chews deliberately while staring at me.
“Anyway, Evelyn’s coming over tonight to help me prepare,” I say, polishing off the last bite of my carrots. I stand up and give my dad a quick kiss on the head. “Thanks for dinner, Dad.”
“Thank Giada De Laurentiis,” he says. “The woman knows her way around a pork roast.”
Abbi screws up her face. “Gross, Dad.”
He shrugs. “What? I like watching Food Network.”
Mom raises her eyebrows. “Really? Then why aren’t you waxing rhapsodic about Bobby Flay?”
I’m walking into the kitchen to escape their conversation when I hear the doorbell ring. “I’ll get it!” I yell.
It’s Evelyn, as expected, and she has Derek in tow.
“Why are you here?” I ask.
“Oh, I’m fine, thanks for asking, how are you?” he asks as he brushes past me into the house.
Evelyn smiles wide as she steps inside. “I figured you could use a practice audience. And what better audience than your best friends?”
Derek rubs his hands together. “I hope you’re ready for some serious heckling.”
I sigh as we walk back to my room (but not before Derek stops by the dining room to say hello to my family; annoyingly, they seem to like him more than they like me). Evelyn’s right—having an audience will be nice, and the great thing about her and Derek is that they’re well aware of all my weaknesses, so they can zero in on them and beat them out of me. You know, musical theater–style.
Evelyn sits down on my bed and brandishes a sheet of paper. “Guess what I have?”
We stare at her blankly.
“A … piece of paper?” I ask.
“Yes,” Evelyn says. “But what’s on the piece of paper?”
I open my mouth, but before I can speak she says, “Please don’t say words and sentences.”
I shut my mouth.
“This is a list I wrote for you. ‘Jolie Peterson’s No-Fail Guide to Taking Up Space and Projecting Onstage.’”
Derek and I keep staring at her.
“Okay, so it’s a long name, but it’s accurate,” she says. “Since you’re trying out for a background part, you don’t have to do much—just read the part Mrs. Mulaney gives you.”
I nod.
“But,” she continues, pointing at me, “you do have to prepare. Because if you go up there looking like you do right now, you’re not going to get even the smallest part.”
“What’s wrong with how I look right now?” I self-consciously touch my face. “Do I have pork tenderloin in my teeth?”
“Nothing’s wrong with how you look,” Evelyn says. “This is about presence.”
“Presence?” I repeat.
“You can’t just stand there with your shoulders hunched and a frown on your face. You’ve gotta earn that spotlight.”
“Right,” I say, unconvinced.
Evelyn claps her hands. “Okay, stand up!”
Reluctantly, I stand up.
“Shoulders back,” Evelyn says, standing in front of me and physically pushing my shoulders down. “No, Jolie, not up by your ears. Back.”
“Got it.”
“Chin up,” she says, pushing my chin up from its permanently tucked-in position. “Arms uncrossed. And eye contact!” She points at her own eyes.
I widen mine at her dramatically. “Are you happy now?”
“Almost,” she says, sitting back down on the bed beside Derek. “Now, tell us who you are.”
I look back and forth between them. “Um … Jolie?”
“No!” she shouts with such ferocity that Derek jumps.
“Good Lord, Evie!” he says. “Do you really think going full-on Whiplash is the best tactic here?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Evelyn says sweetly. “I wasn’t aware that holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ would get Jolie the lead in the musical.”
Derek shrugs at me like he’s saying, Sorry, I tried.
I shrug back, like I’m saying, Yeah, well, Evelyn’s an unstoppable force of nature.
“Stop using your secret eye language!” Evelyn says, pointing to both of us. “Just remember: No ‘ums.’ That’s public speaking 101. If you don’t know what to say, don’t use a filler. Just pause. A powerful pause.”
“A powerful pause,” I repeat slowly.
“Okay,” Evelyn says. “Now tell us who you are again. And make eye contact.”
I clear my throat. “I’m Jolie Peterson,” I say, looking back and forth between Derek and Evie. Derek crosses his eyes and I try not to laugh. “And I’m auditioning for a background part.”
“Louder!” Evelyn shouts with glee.
We spend the better part of an hour this way, with Evie adjusting my posture and my voice to mold me into someone who appears to have confidence. Or talent. Or presence.
They finally leave when Derek says he has to have his nightly phone chat with Melody (“Right, your girlfriend,” Evie says, doing air quotes behind his back).
“You’ll be fine tomorrow,” Derek says on his way toward the door.
I roll my eyes, and I don’t know if I’m just really obvious or if we have some sort of psychic best-friend bond from having known each other for so long, but he stops, comes back, and looks me straight in the eye. “I mean it, Peterson,” he says, putting his hands on my shoulders. “Go kick some musical-theater ass.”
“Make out with Noah Reed until he can’t see straight!” Evelyn shouts.
“I’m not attempting to blind anyone with my make-out prowess, but okay, thanks,” I say, giving her a hug.
Then I’m left alone in my room. I flop back onto my bed, my nest of fluffy pillows catching me as my stomach churns with dread and anticipation. For maybe one tiny moment when Evelyn was shouting at me, I felt like this was achievable, that I could actually get a part, however small, in the musical.
But can I? I stand up and cross the room to stare at myself in the mirror. I lift my chin and put my shoulders back like Evelyn taught me. I’m so used to keeping my chin down, my eyes down, my shoulders up. Anything to hide what I don’t want people to see—me. After all, this face isn’t the final product. And in the power pose Evelyn taught me, my imperfections are on full display. It’s like I’m daring people to notice me, and it feels all wrong.
I’m tilting my face back and forth, inspecting my jaw in profile, when Abbi knocks and then walks in without waiting for my response. “Hey, weirdo. Your friends leave?”
“Yep,” I say, meeting her eyes in the mirror.
She stands beside me, and I’m forced to take in our reflections, side by side. We’re like one of those games I used to play in Highlights magazine where you had to inspect two similar pictures and point out the differences. This sister has a jaw defect; this one doesn’t. This sister has never even made out with anyone; this one’s pregnant.
“So you’re seriously trying out for the musical, huh?” Abbi asks, grabbing one of my bottles of lotion and squeezing some on her hands.
“Yep,” I say again. I’m waiting for her to say something else—to express more confusion, to point out that I threw up in the kitchen sink the last time I had to give a speech in history class, to tell me I should save myself the embarrassment.
But instead she focuses on rubbing the lotion into her hands and says, “Good for you, Jolie. I’m glad you’re doing something new. You’ve got to take life by the balls while you still can. Or by”—she squints—“the ovaries. Or something less gendered, I don’t know. The point is, you always think you have all the time in the world, but you don’t, you know?”
She meets my eyes in the mirror and all of a sudden I get the feeling that we’re not really talking about me at all.
“Yeah, I know,” I say, even though I don’t. I give her a smile and watch my jaw in the mirror.
* * *
I can’t sleep. I just keep imagining myself onstage, people looking at me, people judging me. People saying, Why did that girl think she could do this? Why did she think people wanted to look at her? Why did she just run offstage crying, muttering something about how this was just like the tricycle at her fifth-birthday party?
Plus, spending so much time talking (sorry, “projecting”) today has given me a jaw ache that’s morphed into a headache. The thing about having a jaw that’s out of alignment is that it’s basically normal for it to hurt, and Dr. Kelley says that if I don’t get the surgery, it will only get worse. After I run to the medicine cabinet to pop a Tylenol, I grab my laptop and get back into bed.
Reddit has a pretty bad reputation as a place where gross trolls congregate and share hacked photos of female celebrities, but there’s a whole other side of it, too. No matter what sort of niche you’re interested in reading about (horror stories, skin care, or pictures of old people doing ridiculous things on Facebook), there’s an entire community of people asking questions and sharing their personal experiences. So it comes as no surprise that there are tons of people writing frantic posts about their upcoming jaw surgeries and lots of threads with titles like “I Had Surgery to Correct My Severe Underbite: Ask Me Anything.”
Sometimes, scrolling through these can help me. I like the before-and-afters, seeing exactly how people’s faces changed. Most of the time, I even like reading their recovery stories, even though they’re usually full of pain pills and Ensure nutrition drinks and massive swelling. Tonight, I click on a thread I’ve read a million times before from a guy in Australia who had underbite surgery two years ago. But right now, even reading the normally reassuring details of someone else’s transformation doesn’t make me feel better. All I can think about is the harsh glare of the spotlight on me as I stand onstage, my voice squeaking out of my mouth and floating up toward the rafters as everyone in the audience laughs at me or feels sorry for me.
I pull out my phone and call Derek.
“Hello?” he asks.
“Sorry,” I say. “Did I wake you up?”
He chuckles. “Yeah, no. I’m on the Wikipedia page for lemurs. Did you know that lemur means ‘spirit of the night’ in Latin?”
“I did not,” I say. “And I can’t imagine many people do.”
“Well, now we both know, so you’re welcome.”
“I’m sure this will come in very handy during the ‘Lemur Facts’ portion of my audition tomorrow.”
We’re both silent for a moment, and then he says, “So what’s up?”
I sigh. “I’m nervous. Why am I doing this?”
“Honestly, I’m not super clear on that.”
“Not helpful!”
“Okay, okay.” For a few moments, he doesn’t say anything, and I start to think the call got dropped. I’m just about to ask if he’s still there when he says, “You’re doing this because you want to try something. You feel like taking a risk. You’re ready to let people really see you.”
Oh. Derek can always do this—easily figure out exactly what’s really going on in my head, even if I can’t. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve known someone almost your whole life.
“And because I want to kiss Noah Reed,” I say lightly.
“Hey,” Derek says, “did you know lemurs have something called a toilet claw?”
“Hanging up now!” I laugh.
“Night, Jolie.”
“Good night.”
I sit my phone back on my nightstand, rest my head against the pillow, and stare at the ceiling. Yeah, so I tried to play it off like I’m only doing this to kiss Noah. And I do want to kiss him.
But Derek’s right—there’s a pretty big part of me that’s actually curious about whether or not I can do this. Can I, the same Jolie Peterson who’s spent years doing everything she can to make sure people don’t see her, actually get up onstage and demand attention?
My phone buzzes.
A text from Derek: Seriously, stop stressing out and get some sleep.
I smile and close my eyes.
* * *
I wake up feeling queasy about the audition after school, but first I have to get through an appointment with Dr. Kelley. Getting out of my morning classes is the only good part of going to my appointment, where Dr. Kelley will inevitably study my X-rays while making a serious face and muttering to herself. In my experience, you never want someone to mutter while they’re looking at an X-ray of your face. It just doesn’t bode well for you.
There are fewer menopause-related magazine ads in Dr. Kelley’s waiting room, which is probably because I’m surrounded by twelve-year-olds. The TV is playing a compilation of Disney songs, and the small children surrounding me are rapt. I feel like leaning over to the girl next to me and asking, “What are you in for?” but she’s busy texting. And anyway, I can tell by looking at her that she doesn’t have an underbite. She probably just has a gap between her front teeth or crowded molars or some other minor issue that’s easy to correct. I involuntarily sneer at her at the exact moment she looks up at me, and I have to glance away quickly.
The TV has just started playing “Let It Go” for the third time when the receptionist calls my name and both Mom and I stand up.
“Seriously, Mom. You don’t have to go in there with me.”
“Of course I have to go with you,” Mom says, striding ahead of me as I sigh, feeling even more like one of the twelve-year-olds in the waiting room.
Dr. Kelley has tight curls that are always perfectly maintained and she wears heels that look at least five inches tall, which seem like they would be difficult to stand on all day. But she always looks calm, comfortable, and in control, which is exactly how I want the person who’s going to break my jaw to look.
We all look at the printouts of my jaw. Sometimes, it’s easy for me to forget how different my face is from everyone else’s, but looking at it in front of me in black and white, it’s impossible not to see.
Dr. Kelley points out the place where my jaw will be broken, how much of it she’ll take out, and how she’ll slide it back into place to approximate a more “typical bite.” Referring to my teeth as a “bite” will never stop being funny to me, but I’ve learned not to laugh or make too many vampire references.
“So,” I say, “I was reading on WebMD—”
“Don’t do that,” Dr. Kelley says.
“Well, it’s too late, and I read that sometimes surgery can cause permanent facial numbness. Is that true?”
Dr. Kelley nods slowly. “It’s possible, but I urge you not to take that too seriously. Any numbness is typically not that noticeable.”
After a second of silence, I ask, “So could I die during surgery?”
“Jolie!” my mom scolds.
Dr. Kelley stifles a laugh. “There’s always a risk involved in any surgery. But, no, I can say with almost certainty that you’re not going to die.”
“But I could,” I say, raising my eyebrows.
“And a rogue asteroid could hit our building right now and kill us all,” Dr. Kelley says.
Great. Another thing to add to my list of worries: a giant asteroid.
“Which is not to say that there aren’t risks,” she continues.
I lean forward again. “Like?”
“The aforementioned numbness. Nerve damage.”
“What about leaving a towel inside my body?” I ask.
Dr. Kelley tilts her head. “I’m pretty sure I would notice if there was a towel in your jaw.”
“Right.” I nod. “That would probably be more of an issue if we were operating on my stomach or something.”
Dr. Kelley opens her mouth, then closes it again. “Let’s get back to your X-ray,” she says finally.
I half listen as she goes through the details of the surgery, the ones that I’ve already heard a million times. All I’m thinking about is numbness. It could happen—my lips could become numb. I’ve never even had a full-blown, mind-melting, hot and heavy make-out sesh, and now I could get saddled with numb lips? Life is unfair. I start to understand what Abbi was telling me last night, about how you think you have all the time in the world when you really don’t.
I know I should be relieved that Dr. Kelley said I’m not likely to die, but she didn’t say it was impossible. It’s not like Derek’s dad knew he was going to die when he went to work that day— it just happened, and he wasn’t even going under anesthesia.
When we leave the appointment, I’m only thinking about one thing, and it’s not the weird sugar-free lollipops they give out at the reception desk or the trig test I have to take.
I’m thinking of Noah Reed’s lips, and how if I want to get anywhere near them, I have to ace this audition.