I can hear my niece, Annabelle, crying as soon as I walk in the door. I don’t know what it is about that kid, but she’s always bawling. Her sheer unwillingness to be ignored is actually kind of impressive. She’s not even two yet, but it’s like she already knows that in order to make it in this house she’s going to have to announce herself, and if she knows that much, she’s way ahead of the game.
“Anyone home?” I drop my bookbag down on a stool in our kitchen.
“Paye!” Annabelle yells.
My sister, Joanna, comes running down the stairs, Annabelle tucked underneath her arm like a football. “Have you seen Mom?” Joanna asks. Her face is red, and her hair looks damp.
“No, just got home.” I turn my head upside down and look at Annabelle. “Hey, you.”
Annabelle puts on this goofy grin and reaches out her tiny, chubby arms. I swing her out of Joanna’s arms and into mine.
My sister seems to crumble as soon as I take Annabelle, her shoulders sagging down by her collapsed sides.
“What’s up, Jo? You okay?”
“Okay!” Annabelle parrots.
My sister and I are the two siblings left in the house. Both of our older brothers have moved out. There is talk of Bill, my sister’s boyfriend and Annabelle’s father, moving in, but he recently started community college and his parents’ house is closer to school. His family won’t let Joanna move in with them, so for now he visits her and Annabelle on the weekends. Here’s a fun fact: When you’re nineteen and have a kid and no money, your parents control a lot more than you’d like them to.
My sister ignores the question and looks me up and down. “Where have you been?”
Ever since she got pregnant, Joanna has considered herself to be totally grown up. She had this huge belly at her high school graduation, and yet she was instructing me on how to clean my room and how not to come home after curfew. As if becoming a mom made her my mom, too.
I shrug. “Trinkets n’ Things.”
She eyes me. “What were you doing?”
“Selling drugs out the back door.”
Joanna rolls her eyes and flops onto the couch. “Mom was supposed to come home an hour ago.”
“I’m not sure what to tell you.” I rub my hand in small circles over Annabelle’s back, but she just blinks a few times and then starts crying again. Joanna picks herself up off the couch and snatches Annabelle out of my hands.
Joanna sighs. “Look, just tell Mom I left.”
She hooks her bag over her arm, shifts Annabelle, and heads out the door. Annabelle waves as they go, her hand like a duck beak, a tear rolling down her cheek.
After they leave, the house is dead silent. The quiet feels strange to me. When I was growing up, our house was filled with kids, and the older I got, the more people were around. My brothers always had friends over, and by the time I got to fifth grade, Joanna was already attached to Bill.
I hoist my bag on my shoulder and plod my way upstairs. Once I’m in my room, I take the flyer out of my pocket, smooth the edges down flat on the carpet, and look at it.
There is a black-and-white picture of a girl on the front, but she’s in silhouette, so it’s hard to make out any details about who she is or what she looks like. Printed across the top of the page are the words OPEN CASTING CALL FOR LOCKED. They give me goose bumps. It’s the same feeling I get in an auditorium or a movie theater right when the lights go down. Like maybe that could be me up there. That someday people might know my name, even recognize me. That I wouldn’t be little Paige, the runt of the Townsen litter. I’d just be Paige Townsen: the one and only. That feeling of possibility. Of the fact that right here and right now, everything could change.
The odds of my getting this part are practically nonexistent, I know that, but still, someone has to. Why not me?
My cell phone lights up. It’s Cassandra. She’s talking even before I say hello.
“… I think I fell asleep halfway through.”
“The movie?”
She huffs, like duh. “What are you doing tonight?”
I fold the flyer over in my hands, embarrassed to even be holding it. What I’m doing is practicing. What I’m doing is reading that book cover to cover.
“I’m kind of tired,” I say.
“Laurie make you stock shelves?”
“Yes,” I lie. The truth is I did nothing but play thumb war with myself behind the register. We had only two customers come in today, and neither one bought anything.
“Jake is here,” Cassandra says. I hear some rustling and whispering, and then she comes back on the phone. “Maybe we’ll stop by later?”
I picture Jake turning down the cell. He’s petrified of radiation and refuses to even carry one, which makes meeting up kind of difficult. Luckily he’s usually with one of us already.
“Sounds good,” I say.
Jake shouts good-bye—Cassandra must have held the phone out—and then it clicks off.
I hear my dad’s car pull into the driveway. I don’t have to look out my window to know he’s opening the car door, walking around the back to get his briefcase, checking both car mirrors, then the tires, then clicking the lock twice, and walking in the door. He does the same routine every day and has been probably since he could drive. I imagine my dad going through the whole thing when they pulled into the hospital on the nights my siblings and I were born. Did my mom yell? In all my years of seeing my dad’s parking regimen, I’ve never once heard her try to hurry him up.
I walk out onto the landing and see him come in. My dad wears a bow tie every day. He even has some of those tweed jackets with the elbow patches on them.
“You look like a teacher,” I tell him.
He looks up and smiles. “Funny you should say that. I just came from school.”
“It’s summer vacation,” I say, making my way downstairs, “haven’t you heard?”
“Curriculums rest for no man.”
My dad is the only member of my family who gets me. He’s also the quietest person I know. I never realized he was a morning person until I joined the swim team sophomore year and had to wake up early for practice. I came downstairs one morning at five AM to find him sipping from a coffee cup. He was so still the air around him could have been water and he wouldn’t even have made a ripple.
He smiles at me when I reach the last step. “Where’s your sister?”
I try to remember where she said she was going. I shrug and follow him into the kitchen. “Dunno.”
Unlike the rest of my family, my dad doesn’t discourage my acting ambitions. My sister thinks I’m too self-involved; my brothers don’t understand it because it’s not a team sport. My mom thinks acting is best reserved for daydreams and the occasional community production, not for “real life.”
My dad, though. My dad has never told me outright what he thinks, but I feel his support. I’ve often heard him say that parenting is like a building. One person has to be the height; the other, the foundation. My dad isn’t a tall man, but he’s a solid one. With four children, if you’re the base, you’re pretty well cemented in there.
He gives me a little nod and heads into his bedroom. He’ll spend the afternoon fixing whatever is broken around the house. He does all the upkeep himself, always has.
I crane my neck to make sure my sister isn’t pulling into the driveway, and then go to her bookshelf and run my hand across the spines until I find her copy of Locked. I don’t know why I’m being so sneaky about it. It’s not like she wouldn’t let me borrow it or anything. It’s just that I feel like if she saw me she’d somehow know. She’d put it together and then when I didn’t get the part it would be further confirmation that my dreams are stupid and shallow and totally unrealistic. I don’t really need any more of that in our house. And yet—
What would you sacrifice for love?
The one line, printed across the top of the back cover, makes my heart speed up to a sprint. I take it to my room and close the door. I pull the flyer out from underneath my bed and hold them both in my hands. The girl on the book cover has her back turned, but unlike on the flyer, you can tell her hair is red. It tumbles down her back and looks like it runs right into the waves of the ocean. They surround her, about to swallow her whole.
I open to the first page, and then I start to read.