SHAWN AND I AUDITIONED for a melodrama at Worm Creek. I saw Charles
at the first rehearsal and spent half the evening working up the courage
to talk to him. When I did, finally, he confided in me that he was in
love with Sadie. This wasn’t ideal, but it did give us something to talk
about.
Shawn and I drove home together. He sat behind the wheel, glaring
at the road as if it had wronged him.
“I saw you talking to Charles,” he said. “You don’t want people
thinking you’re that kind of girl.”
“The kind that talks?”
“You know what I mean,” he said.
The next night, Shawn came into my room unexpectedly and found
me smudging my eyelashes with Audrey’s old mascara.
“You wear makeup now?” he said.
“I guess.”
He spun around to leave but paused in the doorframe. “I thought
you were better,” he said. “But you’re just like the rest.”
He stopped calling me Siddle Lister. “Let’s go, Fish Eyes!” he
shouted from across the theater one night. Charles looked around
curiously. Shawn began to explain the name, so I started laughing—
loud enough, I hoped, to drown him out. I laughed as if I loved the
name.
The first time I wore lip gloss, Shawn said I was a whore. I was in my
bedroom, standing in front of my mirror, trying it out, when Shawn
appeared in the doorway. He said it like a joke but I wiped the color
from my lips anyway. Later that night, at the theater, when I noticed
Charles staring at Sadie, I reapplied it and saw Shawn’s expression
twist. The drive home that night was tense. The temperature outside
had fallen well below zero. I said I was cold and Shawn moved to turn
up the heat. Then he paused, laughed to himself, and rolled all the
windows down. The January wind hit me like a bucket of ice. I tried to
roll up my window, but he’d put on the child lock. I asked him to roll it
up. “I’m cold,” I kept saying, “I’m really, really cold.” He just laughed.
He drove all twelve miles like that, cackling as if it were a game, as if
we were both in on it, as if my teeth weren’t clattering.