Page 18

FRYING AN EGG , or a Compendium of Shirtless Blade Scenes

A full week of Roslessness passed. They’d spent every night at Jess’s. It was suddenly mid-July, and I’d wake in my army cot in a pool of sweat, look over at the bed across from me, and think, They are never coming back .

After Into the Woods closed, I had a few days when I could take a breath. Though we’d been texting and calling per the terms of the Modest Proposal, I FaceTimed my parents on a lazy Sunday morning to say hi. The pheasant featured prominently in the background, though now I couldn’t remember what we’d named him. If Ros had been around, I would have asked them.

“Every time I see this place, I’m jealous of your staying there,” my mom said. “ We should have gone there for the summer and made you stay home with the dogs. Buckets, that’s my breakfast, not yours.”

“How are they?” I asked.

“Old. Snoring. Extremely motivated by food.”

“Is that Andrew in the background?” my dad asked.

“Hi, Thomas!” Touchstone called to my dad. He was in the kitchen, scrounging for food, and I turned the camera to face him.

“How’s the theater workshop going?” my dad asked. “We’re excited to come up and see the showcase at the end of the summer!”

“It’s good,” said Touch. “We’ve been doing a lot of clowning, which is interesting… and, like, looking at the difference between clowns, and fools, and jesters.…”

“Do you get to wear a red nose?” my mom said. “I think Buckets would look good with a red nose.”

“Agree,” said Touch. “No red nose for me yet. I’m still working up to it.”

“Is Ros there?” my mom said. “I know their mom’s been trying to get ahold of them.…”

“They’re not here…,” I said. “They’re…”

I didn’t quite know what to say then. I wasn’t in the habit of lying to my parents. On the other hand, to tell them Ros had permanently shacked up with Jess would probably be met with disapproval, and I wasn’t ready for them to decide it was time for us to come home. It was hurtful that Ros was gone, but it wasn’t like they were in a ditch. They were with Jess; they’d told me they were with Jess. Her parents are okay with that? I’d texted. Just her mom. She’s gone a lot , they’d said. I’d read this and written back Wow , because I didn’t know what to say, and because, honestly, it sounded sort of sad—and similar to Ros’s situation, now that their dad was gone and their mom was working. 17

“They’re out,” I said finally.

At their girlfriend’s sex palace , I did not add.

“They’re at work,” I heard myself say. “At this plant store. It’s really cool. The store sells these beautiful arrangements and terrariums.”

“Oh!” my mom said. “Good for them.”

“Oh yeah,” said Andrew. “Ros has got a regular green thumb. They come home every day covered in soil, telling us all about orchids, how we should start a tomato garden.…”

I moved the camera away from him.

“ Anyway ,” I said. “The next play is The Trojan Women . By Euripides.”

“Sounds uplifting,” my dad said.

“It’s definitely depressing, but I think it’ll actually be easier than Into the Woods . It’s, like, war-torn and ravaged, so everyone is just in these raggedy tunics. The worse they look, the better.”

“Do you feel like you’re learning a lot?” my dad asked.

“I do,” I said. Phoebe had finally stopped having to unwind my tangled thread on the sewing machine, and Benna had told me that I seemed like I was finally getting the hang of it.

“Good,” my dad said. “What about you, Andrew? Is he still there?”

“He’s still here.” I swiveled the camera on Touchstone, who was now frying himself an egg.

“I’m learning a ton,” Touchstone said. “One of the clown teachers is really supportive. He’s got a connection to this school in Paris. He wants me to go.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “He wants you to go to French clown school?”

“It’s actually quite reputable,” said Touch.

“Whoa,” my mom said. “This would be next year?”

“Yeah. A gap year, maybe,” said Touchstone. “Instead of heading straight to college. I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“Sounds wonderful, Andrew,” my dad said.

“Does it?” I asked.

“Is The Trojan Women the one with Cassandra?” my mom said. “Poor Cassandra. No one ever listened to h—”

“I’ve gotta go,” I said, and I hung up the phone quickly and turned to Touchstone. “You didn’t tell me about clown school.”

“You didn’t ask,” he said, popping two pieces of gluten-free bread into the toaster and twisting the plastic on the bag. We were down to the heels, the part no one wanted to eat. “You lied to your parents about Ros.”

“Seemed easier than explaining about Jess,” I said.

“For them, or for you?”

I shrugged this off. “Would you seriously go all the way to Paris to be a clown?”

“Maybe,” he said. “The school is supposed to be good. You don’t have to be so judgmental about it.”

“I just… you hated French,” I said.

“Are you talking about sixth grade? I hated Madame Ernst, and I hated that stupid project we had to do.”

“Where we built the café? That was kind of fun, I thought.”

“Yeah, because you were good at French ,” he said. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. The egg sizzled. “Paris is far.”

“You knew I wanted to go to school out east. Paris really isn’t all that far away, especially if you’re on the East Coast, too.”

“They’re on different continents, and they speak a different language, and there’s a time change and…”

“Okay, okay, okay. You’ve made your point.” He flipped the egg, counted to ten. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“We’re going to be seniors. We have to apply somewhere. Have you thought about where you might want to go?”

“Of course I’ve thought about it,” I said. If you’d asked me then, I would’ve told you that I wanted to go east to college, to one of a dozen small liberal arts schools in New England. But the closer we got to becoming seniors, the more I started to dislike this plan. New England, like Paris, seemed impossibly far away and lonely without Touch and Ros. I knew the idea was that you made friends in college, but I felt that familiar stab of homesickness just thinking about it, and I didn’t have Ros there to make the whole thing better.

“My mom thinks I should take a year off,” I said.

“And do what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s got some loony idea as always. Move to Peru. Become a goat herder.”

“I like Audrey’s goats a lot, actually.”

“Yeah, I mean, goats are great. But do I want to spend a year working with goats? I don’t know. I mean, how does one figure out what they want, in the existential sense?”

Touchstone considered this, slid his egg onto the toast. My stomach rumbled. I was hungry.

“I think you have to ask yourself what you’re drawn to,” he said finally. I hated how wise and sure of himself he sounded. I was supposed to be the one who had everything figured out.

“I’ll tell you what I want,” I said. “I want the three of us—you, me, and Ros—to go live in a yurt, and fill it with plants, and have it be like My Side of the Mountain , or like The Boxcar Children , and where we, like, toast tangerine slices on a sunny tree branch and no one bothers us, except there’s also, like, a really good ice cream place down the street that’s never crowded and always open.”

“So you want this,” Touch said, looking around the Lily Pad. “You want real life, but magic.”

“I… is that from something?”

“Blanche DuBois says something similar,” Touch said. “ A Streetcar Named Desire .”

“Oh, Jesus. I don’t want to be Blanche DuBois!”

“Dude, you are not Blanche DuBois. Blanche DuBois wouldn’t be caught dead in overalls, and she sure as hell would not be a fan of Power Jam .”

He cut into his egg, and the yellow broke over the toast like water over a dam.

“We can’t live in the same place forever,” he said.

“Maybe not.”

“You’d get tired of toasted tangerine.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“Do you want me to fry you the last egg?”

“Yes, please. I’m so hungry.”

He laughed and started to move about the kitchen. He had a dish towel slung over his shoulder, an expression of mild concentration on his face. His red hair caught the light, turning different shades of copper and auburn; his freckles had deepened since the start of summer. He cracked pepper over the egg, which sizzled in the pan, whistling as he did so. He seemed somehow so confident and grown-up to me: I could see him preparing this same meal for his kids twenty years from now.

“One egg coming up,” he said.

“In Paris, I believe that’s called an ?uf .”

“ Mais oui ,” he said.

We spoke in French for a while—or I spoke in French and Touchstone shouted certain vocabulary words back at me—and when I finally ran out of vocabulary, we moved to French accents. The egg tasted good: buttery, with golden frilly edges and just the right amount of salt and a single twist of pepper. If I didn’t think about it too hard, I hardly noticed it was the heel of the bread.

And then, in the few days after Into the Woods closed and The Trojan Women opened, Oliver Teller asked me out.

That’s right. The extremely hot star of Power Jam asked me out. Not to do anything fancy, just go on a hike—but still. A date with a celebrity: There was a bucket-list item I could check off.

But here was the real kicker: I thought about saying no.

I thought about a lot of things, actually. I thought about Ros, and I thought about what Touchstone had said, about Oliver (“Old Fish Eyes”) trying to get into my pants. I thought about Ros some more, specifically them kissing Jess at Lovers’ Lagoon, and I thought about what Phoebe had said in the hospital: What am I going to do? Sit around and wait? I kept thinking about Ros, and I thought, begrudgingly, about my mother’s horoscope: Give someone new a chance; they might surprise you.

I thought a lot about how handsome he was. And, to be totally frank, I thought a lot about the scene where he has sex on a merry-go-round. 18

So I said yes and met him after work at the Lovesick Falls Trailhead a few days after Into the Woods closed, so we could “get our tourism on.” Oliver had gotten the same memo I had that the Lovesick Falls tour was cheesy and a waste of money, so we were hiking in via the steeper route, much to my chagrin. He’d made up the difference, he said, by bringing along the pamphlet from the Welcome Center, which he showed me at the start of our hike. Have You Ever Wished to Fall Out of Love? it said in big typeface across the top. I opened the pamphlet and read on:

In love with the wrong person? Jilted, rejected, or passed over for another? Stranded at the altar? In most places, your broken heart would be an unsolveable problem, but in Lovesick Falls, the cure for your heartsickness lies deep in our woods. One sip from our waters and you’ll be back to your old self in no time. Lovesick Falls has helped hundreds of thousands of people mend their broken hearts and carry on with their lives.

“They spelled unsolvable wrong,” I said, handing the pamphlet back to Oliver.

“That’s all you have to say?”

“It reads like an advertisement,” I said.

“I think it is ,” Oliver said. “I just thought it was silly. That you might like to see it.”

“I liked it,” I said. “Thanks for showing me.”

“You ready to see this spring?”

“Let’s do it,” I said, and we began our climb in earnest.

“How are rehearsals going?” I asked.

“Still kind of a mess,” Oliver said. “The director has me doing all these weird movement exercises to get me moving in a way that’s supposed to be more animal. But I’ve spent so much time on skates that I might have permanently damaged my relationship with movement. Everything is too flowy. Too liquid.”

“Ah yes, what a shame, to be too graceful ,” I said.

Oliver laughed. He seemed to laugh a lot with me, which struck me as a bit strange. Ros and I sent each other into hysterics, but only because we spoke a language entirely our own; among the three of us, I’d always thought of Touchstone as the funny one.

“Phoebe’s costume is looking really good,” I said. “She started with this coat, but now it’s becoming this, like, wild wrap thing. Kind of like a big blanket. I think it’s going to look great.”

“I have no doubt. She’s talented. She’s going to make great waves as a costumer someday, if that’s what she wants.”

The trail rose, and we moved to the side to catch our breath, letting some other hikers pass us.

“How did you know you wanted to be an actor?” I said when we started walking again, thinking of my recent conversation with Touchstone.

“I don’t know. I just thought I would be good at it. And I was.”

“Is it that easy?”

“Maybe for some people,” he said. “Do you want to keep doing costumes?”

“I don’t know. I like making costumes. Mostly applied for the internship so I could be here with my friends. I like it. I don’t know if I want… like, I don’t know if that’s what I want . You know?”

“What are you good at?” Oliver said.

“Color coding,” I said. “I do well in school, but the only thing I ever really felt like I was any good at was being friends with Ros and Touch.” I paused, my hands on my hips. “You know what job I really want? I want to be the person who comes up with names for nail polish.”

“Is that a thing?”

“Yes! They always have these wild names. Like, Meet Me in the Sleeper Car . Or Dressed to Krill .”

He laughed again. It was nice, the laughter. But I didn’t even think I was being funny; I was just being honest.

“ Dressed to Krill would be, like, pink?”

“Yes. Salmon. Heavily saturated.”

“You know what you are?” Oliver asked.

“Wondering when we’re going to get to this waterfall?” I said.

“You’re good with words,” he said. “If you don’t do something with nail polish colors, you should do something with languages.”

I let this sink in, surprised at how right Oliver was and how obvious it seemed when I thought about it for a half second. I did love languages. I’d taken Spanish and Latin all through high school; I would have taken French, too, if it’d fit in my schedule. I always called English my favorite subject, and wasn’t that a language, too? Oliver had hit the nail on the head—I’d be perfectly happy if I could study languages in college.

“I think we’re getting close,” Oliver said.

We’d been steadily talking louder as we’d been walking, approaching the sound of the waterfall. The trail grew steeper and more crowded. We were not the only ones getting our tourism on. The falls appeared through the trees suddenly: a thin cascade into a small, deep, blue-green pool. It was moodier than Lovers’ Lagoon—more hidden in the rocks, too small to swim in, and difficult to get to—but it was such a gorgeous color that you could see how people might invent stories about it.

“Wow,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”

“Seriously,” said Oliver.

We joined the line to scramble our way up close to the water’s edge, and once we were by the water, I dipped my fingers in: It was bracingly cold.

“So, what?” I said. “One sip from this, and you’re cured of your lovesickness?”

“Supposedly,” Oliver said, consulting his pamphlet again. “It’s so wild that people are that desperate to feel better that they’d come all this way.”

“Ridiculous,” I said, my voice small.

“Some serious magical thinking,” he said.

There it was again: that word, magic .

“You can see why people tell stories about it,” I said. “That kind of beauty. You have to say something about it. It does have power.”

Among the other tourists, we were sharing the spring with two families who’d hiked up with their preteen girls, and it didn’t take long for them to notice Oliver. They were several years younger than us—eleven, maybe, or twelve.

“Oliver,” I said in a low voice, “you’re being recognized.”

“Oh, really?”

He turned around and waved at the girls, who tittered shyly.

“Hey,” I said, going up to them. “Jammers?”

They nodded.

“He’s actually really nice,” I said, and then I turned back. “Oliver, come meet your fans.”

Oliver took some photos with them while I considered the water more. What would I call that color? Lovesick Blue. But it was greener than that. Lovesick Teal. But it didn’t come to me, and I wondered if nail polish perhaps wasn’t big enough. No nail polish name could possibly contain all the depth of that color.

“Oh, hey,” Oliver said, rejoining me and breaking my reverie. “I got you something.”

He handed me a pair of sunglasses with red-orange frames.

“They reminded me of the Cinderella dress that you refused to try on,” he said. “Do you think it’s Dressed to Krill ?”

“Close,” I said. I held the sunglasses in my hand. Not only had Oliver Teller asked me out on a date, but he had gotten me something. They were lovely. Thoughtful.

“Thank you so much. That’s really, really nice of you,” I said. I slid them on, but something about the lenses changed the color of the water—turned it yellowish, sickly. I propped the glasses on my head. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know,” he said. “I wanted to.”

We sat by the falls for a while. In his backpack, Oliver had brought cut melon in a Tupperware. I ate a piece. Ros hated cantaloupe. The Jammers hung around, looking at us. They were jealous of me, these girls, I could tell—getting to spend time with Blade—but all I could think about was Ros. What was wrong with me? As much as they were looking at Oliver, they were looking at me —like they couldn’t believe my good fortune, to be out here, in the woods, with the guy from Power Jam . And I was fortunate. So why couldn’t I like him? What was wrong with me? How could Blade push all my buttons, but Oliver still felt so much like a friend? And why, oh, why, was I still so hung up on Ros?

We rinsed our hands in the pool, and when Oliver wasn’t looking, I cupped my hand and drank the water, germs and all.

Later, bored and alone in the Lily Pad, I did two things: I baked a gluten-free cake that came out soupy in the middle thanks to the shitty oven, and I tried on the Cinderella dress that I was supposed to have returned to the Togshop weeks ago. The cake was an unmitigated disaster. But the dress?

Sure enough: It fit me perfectly. It was just a smidge stretchy, heavier than I’d expected, and as I slithered into it I felt like I was pulling on armor. I studied myself in the mirror, and I finally understood why my mom was always lamenting my wearing my preferred palette of grays and olives and browns—the sunset color of the dress did something for me, made me look alive, less waxy, brought out the golden undertones in my hair. The fit was snug on the hips and boobs, and my waist looked tiny, the cut like no dress (or pair of overalls) I had ever owned before. I was shocked. I had a body. I had a shape . I looked, no joke, like Marilyn Monroe. I turned in front of the mirror, stunned. I felt like a whole new person—a cross between a mermaid and a phoenix. And a thought occurred to me.

Maybe, no matter how much spring water I drank, I wouldn’t fall out of love with Ros.

But maybe, just maybe, if they saw me in this dress, the opposite would be true: Maybe they would fall in love with me.

Footnotes

17 The whole situation reminded me of my mother’s principal critique of Power Jam , which was “Where are these kids’ parents?” (Her other two favorites were “Do these kids ever go to school?” and “Why aren’t these kids in therapy?”). “Just let it go, Mom,” I’d say with a sigh. “Just enjoy it.” Because they seemed to enjoy it on the show. And Ros sure seemed to be enjoying it now.

18 Other scenes I thought about: Blade ripping his shirt off when they win regionals; the shot of Blade in the fourth episode emerging from the shower with a towel around his waist; Blade shirtless and skating in an effort to get in extra practice after Kenna accused him of not trying hard enough… if you’re sensing a theme here, and that theme is shirtless , you’d be correct.