Chapter 22 #2
After the curtain call, the hallway is a crush of people, everyone talking and shouting congratulations to each other.
My mind feels wiped clean, blank, and my body feels lighter, like I’m half helium balloon.
Amanda appears next to me. “Bravo,” she says, smiling.
“Some of us are going to Friendly’s for ice cream. You coming?”
“Ooh, yes. Let me just find the fam and tell them.”
I locate them waiting on the edge of the throng of audience members loitering in the hallway. Both my parents are beaming, and my brother is excitedly shaking a big bouquet of flowers toward me.
“These are for you!” he crows as soon as I get to them. He thrusts the stems into my hands. “Break a leg!”
He’s being so darn cute I don’t correct him on when it’s the right time to say that. It’s refreshing to see all three of them looking happy at the same time. All four of us, I realize suddenly.
“Thanks, Nate,” I say, making a big show of burying my nose in the blooms and inhaling deeply. “These are beautiful!”
“You were wonderful,” my mom says at the same time as my dad says, “Poise and presence. Real star quality.” It’s so like him to be over the top. I wonder for a millisecond what it’s even like to go to a play and not be able to see it, like you’re listening to an album in the dark.
“Thanks. Some of the cast are going to Friendly’s. Can I go?”
“Of course, hun,” my mom says. “Do you have enough money?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“Oh, here, take this anyway.” She presses two twenties in my hand. Whoa. Free money and no curfew reminder? I should be in a play more often.
The Friendly’s is mostly empty, so us theater kids feel entitled to take over.
We spread out over half a dozen booths, which is good because Richard ends up at the opposite end from me.
I briefly wonder how long my brain is going to constantly keep track of his location in relation to mine, like some hormonal GPS.
Ignore him. No, more than that. Forget about him.
Amanda and I slide into a booth at the other end of the group from Richard.
I note how unusual it is for her to be so far away from him, and I wonder if she’s feeling torn.
I didn’t really get her take on whether she thinks he betrayed her trust or saved her skin.
I study her, but she doesn’t look conflicted, just ready for sugar.
My favorite thing about Friendly’s is that there’s basically a whole page on the ice cream menu of stuff with peanut butter in it.
Peanut butter cups, peanut butter sauce, Reese’s Pieces, peanut butter shell coating.
The only thing I like more than chocolate is peanut butter.
Asha’s favorite is the strawberry shortcake sundae, which, to me, is a missed opportunity.
Why get fruit when you can have a peanut butter explosion?
Asha arrives in the next carload of kids and ends up stuffed into our booth, too, directly across the table from me.
We haven’t spoken since the failed séance, and the distance between us is getting more excruciating by the second.
I try to catch her eye, but she studiously avoids looking at me.
At a loss, I turn and start chatting with Amanda.
I laugh a little too loudly. If that makes Asha a tiny bit jealous, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
I probably should apologize to her, but I can’t frame in my mind how that would even look.
I didn’t say anything I didn’t mean at her house and she knows it.
And what about what she said to me? Maybe I’m the one who should be receiving an apology.
But are apologies something Asha even does?
Ultimately, I would rather just skip ahead to the part where we’ve already made up.
The messiness in between there and here feels like an ocean, and I’m wearing cinder blocks of shame on each ankle.
Ignore it. Pretend to have fun. Our cast parties always turn into boy versus girl duet battles, and since the official cast party got canceled, we do it here.
We go completely over the top, the cheesier the better.
The antidote to the cringiness of singing show tunes in a restaurant is to totally embrace it.
As usual, we start with Grease and end with a goofball song from High School Musical 2.
I watch Amanda effortlessly harmonize. At least I can now feel the freedom of being able to enjoy it instead of hate her for it. At least I’m not mad at everyone here.
The orders hit the tables and the singing stops, the clinking of spoons against glass making the most sound now.
Asha has been looking at her phone every thirty seconds since she sat down. Now she says to the table, “This was fun, y’all. Congrats, everybody. I’ve got to go.”
“Go where?” I can’t help asking. I had been hoping we’d get to talk before the night was over, which can’t happen if she leaves now. At least I’ve broken the seal with my intrusive question.
“A house,” she says, perfectly neutral. “I’m just trying something out,” she adds, as if that clarifies anything.
“Something or someone?” I ask.
“Nothing wrong with a little practice date.”
“But it’s like eleven. Isn’t that a little late to start something?” I say. Why am I being her mother right now?
“Exactly. If it’s going to be a practice date, I want it to be short. Only an hour until curfew. Okay?” she says, making it clear she doesn’t care whether it is or not.
“Okay,” I say helplessly. I may have surrendered any say I ever had in her life.
I go home with Amanda and end up sleeping over.
After midnight, when I’m lying on the foldout chair in Amanda’s room in the dark, I can’t stop thinking about how Asha talked to me at the Friendly’s, like I was someone whose name she couldn’t remember.
Asha and I have never really been on the outs before.
Which is pretty amazing, considering I’ve been friends with her for years and years.
The day we met at orientation before middle school started, I noticed her the minute I walked up to the sign-in table.
Intense concentration was coming off her in waves.
I remember thinking, How hard is it to write your name on a sheet?
but then I leaned over to see what she was doing.
She had a name tag sticker in front of her and a fine-line Sharpie in her hand.
Asha was already inked across the middle in perfect block letters, but what was taking all her focus was the drawing she was working on around her name, which was a handful of tiny but incredibly realistic sharks.
“That’s amazing,” I gasped without thinking.
She looked up with an open face and pushed her hair back over her shoulder. “I’m wholly obsessed with sharks right now. And lions. Wolves. Pretty much all the apex predators.”
“I thought you were going to say you were obsessed with art,” I said. “You could put that in a frame and hang it on the wall.” I didn’t know then that Asha was good at everything she tried, but that would become clear in a matter of weeks.
“Thanks,” she said, drawing a final dorsal fin. Then she peeled the sticker off the backing and placed in on her right thigh instead of over her heart, which at the time I thought was a real rebel move.
“I like octopuses,” I said. I immediately felt dumb about it—it made me sound like a first grader—but Asha just nodded like that was a good choice.
“Which grade school are you from?” she asked.
“Fillmore. You?”
“Revere. So glad to be out. It smelled like diapers there. Clean diapers, but still.”
“Haha. Wow, that’s really specific.” I’d never really thought about what my elementary school smelled like. I guess mostly chalk and that weird odor books get when the paper is old. “What does this school smell like?”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath through her nose. “Dry-erase markers and sawdust.”
I was enjoying this game. “What do you smell like?”
This time she didn’t have to inhale. She struck a pose. “Like magic. And you?”
I pulled the front of my shirt up to my nose. “Mmmm, better than magic. I smell like”—I took another whiff—“Cheeto Puffs.”
She threw back her head and cackled loudly enough to startle several parents nearby. “You’re funny,” she said.
I drank in the sound and then blushed when I realized how much I was smiling.
Looking down, I grabbed a name tag and scrawled my name, but before I could put it on, my mom came up and tried to get me to put on a sweatshirt because the air-conditioning was blasting.
I fought her off. When I turned around, Asha had drawn a delicate octopus wrapping its tentacles around my name, gathering up the H on one side and the E on the other like it was giving the letters a hug.
“Ooh, it’s so cute. I love it,” I said. I suddenly wanted to put the sticker on my right thigh, too, but I didn’t want to be a copycat. I settled for slapping it on my right sleeve above the elbow.
“We should probably sit,” she said. I nodded, and we moved toward where the chairs were set up.
Some friends from Fillmore waved at me and I headed toward them.
I thought she was behind me, but when I turned around, she wasn’t there.
After the presentation, I saw her on the other side, sitting with friends of her own.
They weren’t in chairs but were sitting cross-legged on the floor along the wall, which again, seemed cooler than anything I would do.
I felt a rush of disappointment that we hadn’t talked more, and completely irrational jealousy of the strangers she was with.
But after the orientation, Asha found me again as I was walking to the parking lot with my parents.
She introduced herself to them without a hint of shyness, and asked my mom to put Asha’s mom’s number into her phone.
Then Asha squeezed my hand. “Call me when you get your schedule so we can see if we have any classes together.”
“Okay, I will,” I said, and I did, and that was that. I’ve always felt lucky to have her, although I’ve also always wondered what she saw in me that first day. I still feel the urge to try to deserve her. And I’ve spent the last few weeks utterly failing. I hope it’s not too late to fix it.