Act Thirteen
Baylee Wright
54 Days to Infini’s Premiere
I finally have a use for my floral-patterned, blank journal, a well-meaning 19th birthday present from my grandparents. Maybe they figured I’d take after my dad, but I couldn’t think of anything to write until now.
I make a list.
And I write slowly like the ink is made of my blood and these words are oath. Shedding my feelings on paper kind of feels that permanent.
“How’s the dating going?” my aunt asks via video chat. My laptop is propped on my pillow, and I sit cross-legged on my bottom bunk, journal on my thigh.
I talk to Aunt Lucy about three times a week, and I’ve kept her in the loop about my dating life and about me trying not to close myself off to guys.
I pause writing at her question, and immediately, I think of Luka. We’ve kept it professional in the gym, but every single day, the underlying tension mounts greater and stronger. And it was already unbearable to begin with.
“At the moment,” I say, “dating is non-existent. I barely have time to eat lunch on weekdays.”
In the square video box, Aunt Lucy lounges on her suede couch, already in white designer pajamas, makeup off, and her hair is in beautiful micro braids splayed on her shoulder. It’s late Saturday night for her, but evening in Vegas. She may be an on-the-go, thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, but she relaxes better than me.
Evidence: I can see myself in that little rectangle in the upper-right hand corner of the screen. My back is achingly straight tonight.
Staring at myself a little more, I know I’m a mixture of my mom and dad. My warm, medium-brown skin is a product of my dad’s fair and my mom’s dark brown. I have my mom’s flat chest, full lips, and her rich brown eyes. From my dad, I have his tiny dimples and long neck. My parents aren’t here, but every time I look in the mirror, small things remind me of them.
“No more online dating then?” Aunt Lucy asks. “You could always sit at a bar and wait for Mr. Right to buy you a drink.” She smiles into her sip of hot chocolate. She always says that she has an abnormal craving for marshmallows, and not just because she’s four-months pregnant.
Online dating. I sucked at it.
I gave up when I learned it’s all about numbers. The more people you meet for a first date, the more likely you’ll find a perfect match. But I don’t have that much time for a numbers game, and I’m not lucky enough to be an exception.
I twirl my pen. “If I sat at a bar, chances are, my Mr. Right would be buying a drink for the girl on the other side of me.” I hesitate to say more because I’m not alone. I share a suite with Nikolai, Thora, and Katya, but a bedroom and bunk bed solely with Katya, Luka’s sixteen-year-old sister.
I glance to the left.
At our wooden desk, Katya has her nose practically pressed to her own laptop. Cosmetics are spread out beside a tiny mirror. I think she’s watching makeup tutorials. I don’t ask. I’ve been trying to give Katya space.
I eye our cramped room, something that I’m sure resembles a dorm. Katya already decorated the walls with Aerial Ethereal posters, and her feather boas and knock-off purses are draped over the posts of our bunk bed.
We haven’t really spoken at all. Long, long ago, I used to be friends with Katya. To be in Luk’s life means to be in Timo and Kat’s—it’s just how it is. Whenever we went to Coney Island, we used to ditch the guys and play carnival games together.
We had one goal: to win a green stuffed dinosaur that we named Marvin. We won him a year later, and we joked about having joint custody. He stayed with me four days out of the week. Katya for three.
Then I got into trouble with Luka, signed the contracts, and abruptly stopped speaking to or even seeing him. Not long after, Katya confronted me by the gym’s water fountain. I was just fourteen.
She was twelve, and she tried sucking down her tears. Physically sniffing until they submerged. “Why did you two have to do that?” Her voice nearly split. “You really couldn’t stay away from drugs?”
I shrugged, too distraught to speak.
Katya frowned. “Luka said that you’re not friends anymore.”
I nodded.
“This isn’t fair.” She nearly burst into tears. “You’re my first friend that’s a girl. We’re…we’re friends, and you…” She took a breath. “You have to make up with him.”
“I can’t,” I said softly.
“Why not?” Her features cracked.
“I just can’t.”
“Not even for me?” Katya bit her bottom lip.
I knew I couldn’t stay friends with Katya. She was so attached to Luka. They’re inseparable. It was like asking Luka to be friends with my brother and avoid me—it’d never work.
I ripped off a Band-Aid by blurting out, “I can’t be friends with you either. Your whole family is a bad influence…” I couldn’t finish. Tears leaked out of her eyes, and I broke my heart and hers.
Later that day, I found our stuffed dinosaur at my door with a note that said, you can have Marvin. I’m a bad influence anyway.
I couldn’t even bear to look at that dinosaur, but I also couldn’t bear to throw him away. I crammed Marvin in a cardboard box, and he’s now collecting dust in our shared closet.
I try to let our last interaction from the past drift away, and my aunt’s voice draws my attention to the computer.
“What happened to ‘putting yourself out there’ and not being pessimistic about love?” she asks.
I clutch my journal tight and think, that’s exactly what I’m about to do. “Is that how you met Devon?” I wonder. “You just sat at a bar and waited for him?” It seems like a one-in-a-million likelihood.
“Yes,” my aunt says into a growing grin, an awful liar.
“You’re terrible.”
“She is.” Devon pops his head into the frame, his smile brighter than hers. He’s tall, black, a New York attorney, and Lucy’s doting husband of three years. “We met in the line of Superheroes & Scones, and she approached me.”
“Get out of here.” Laughing, she elbows him out of the frame. “And I only talked to you first because I wanted to know why a man your age was holding three Storm plushies.”
“For my nieces!” I hear him off-screen.
Aunt Lucy rolls her eyes but sets them back on me. “You’re deflecting again.”
“I’m not,” I say seriously. “I like hearing about you.” More than I like talking about myself. And I’d rather not stress my aunt out with my life. She’s pregnant. Unloading any kind of grief onto her shoulders won’t do any good. “How long will you get for maternity leave?”
I feel her assessing me. “A lot longer than most. A perk of working for a company owned by a feminist.” Barely pausing, she asks, “What’ve you been writing?”
I go still. In the video screen, she can see my pen but not the journal. “Just…a list of things I need to fix and work on.”
“Like…?”
“I can’t really say.” I peek at Katya again. She’s slumped forward, face in her hand. She looks upset at something.
My aunt takes the hint about the list, but she’s not finished prying. “And Luka?”
I jolt. “What?” My neck instantly heats. “What about him?”
Severity shrouds her usually sweet-natured face. “I talked to Brenden yesterday. He said you’re working with him.”
“Who’s Luka?” Devon asks from off-screen.
Her eyes flicker to him. “No one, baby.” To me, she adds, “No one, right?”
A lump lodges in my throat. “Yeah…yeah, he’s just a co-worker.” I understand her concern. Like Nikolai and Dimitri, she sees him as a youthful fling—someone I dated and got into trouble with. He’s a kid that used to make me happy. A long-ago memory.
No one worth risking a career over.
No one worth risking the dreams of other children.
He’s no one.
I open my mouth, and I ache to shake my head. To say, he’s so much more than no one. How can I explain this to my aunt? She’ll say that I’m in love with the idea. The fantasy.
Not reality.
But she’s not here. She has no idea how much I trust Luka with my body, my heart—my life.
Katya suddenly sniffles. She’s crying? I’m staring at the back of her head, so I can’t tell for certain.
“I have to go,” I say to my aunt.
With casual goodbyes, we log off, and I pop out my earbuds. Swinging my legs off the bed, I sit on the very edge. I hate that I hesitate to approach or even call out her name, but I do.
I shouldn’t tear open a friendship that we closed poorly and painfully. I should leave her alone.
Marc’s email must’ve shattered more than one fortification in my mind—because I stand up. When before, I would’ve never even chanced nearing Kat.
I set my journal on my bed and reach our desk.
She startles at my presence and quickly shields her face with her long straight hair.
A YouTube makeup tutorial plays from her laptop. I watch a vlogger showcase a compact of highlighter or blush. I can’t really discern which.
“What do you want?” she asks uneasily.
To rewind time and never have to hurt you. I examine her spread of cosmetics, which must’ve cost a ton of money. She may’ve even tapped into her savings.
“What?” she asks just as cautiously.
I pick up a tube of lipstick. “I always thought you’d stay sporty with me.” I try to smile, but it won’t form. We both believed intense makeup was a hassle. All I use: eyeliner, lipstick, and concealer, just to hide zits.
“People change.” Her tone is soft and morose.
People change. I didn’t just miss Luka’s life. I missed my friend grow older.
And it’s not like I collect a million friends either. The tiny handful that I made from the past few years have all transferred to touring shows. I’m left with my brother and Zhen.
I miss having girls around me, but really, I miss Katya.
I set the lipstick down. “You really want to wear all of this?”
Katya takes a breath. “Yes,” she combats.
My defenses don’t skyrocket. I lean against the desk. “Nikolai?” I’m guessing he’s already been on her case. “Did he tell you to return it all?”
“Yeah.” Katya slumps forward. “I thought if I’d buy the best stuff it’d make me look less like a clown, but then I figured out that, no, I just paint on makeup like a literal clown.”
I get it.
We all have to do our own costume makeup, and we can’t choose the design either. AE gives us a detailed picture of the colors, strokes, blends, shapes—all around our neck, eyes, and lips. Those Aerial Ethereal classes teaching us how to shade and shadow were my least favorite.
I was awful at first. Plus costume makeup is so much different than one coat of lipstick. It’s drastic and extreme lines that pop your features. All so the person in the very back row can see some facial detail.
Katya tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I suck at everything the first thousand times I do it, and I swear Nik would be great at cat-eyeliner on his first go-around. He’s better than average at everything.”
It’s why we never let her brothers try to win Marvin for us. They would’ve succeeded in less than half the time, and the point wasn’t just to get the stuffed dinosaur. It was to prove that we didn’t need a boy to validate what we always believed: that we had the power to do anything we wanted ourselves.
I hope she never lost that after she lost me.
I bend to the laptop and click into another makeup tutorial. “Yeah, well, we don’t need Nik.”
“We?” She’s skeptical.
I glance over my shoulder at Kat.
Thick, blocky eyeliner shrinks her usually big eyes, doing the inverse of what she probably wants. Dark-red, blunt lip-liner makes her mouth look cartoonish, and pink blush streaks her cheekbones, very over-drawn like stage makeup.
I can’t tell if I’d be able to do any better. “I’m still Sporty Spice,” I say, noting how we used to both be the same Spice Girl together. We liked sharing the title. We liked sharing a lot of our things, actually. “But if you want to be Posh, I can try to help.”
“Why?” she asks, eyes watering.
I shrug, searching for words that I’m allowed to say. “Because I…” miss you. “…because we’re suitemates and roommates.”
“Right…” She nods to herself and tucks another piece of hair behind her ear.
I click into a smoky eye and bold lip tutorial. We watch the video together, not all of the tension has been expunged. Our past still stretches uncomfortably between us.
“You can sit down,” Katya offers a minute later. She scoots and gives me room on the same chair.
I take a seat next to her, and she plucks out a makeup wipe to clean her face.
“Why are there so many steps?” I mutter and rewind thirty seconds.
“It’s like they’re setting us up to fail.”
“Conspiracies I can get behind.” I rewind again, and midway through the video, I peek at Kat out of the corner of my eye.
She peeks at me.
In New York, I became close to Katya around the time that my parents passed away. She was a girl who grew up without a mother figure, and I’d just lost mine. We bonded, not because of Luka, but because we needed someone who understood what we missed.
I’m not her mom. She’s not mine. We just fill this warm place of empathy that no one else can touch or reach, and I want to be allowed to return. I want to laugh about how awful we are at makeup and try hard to make my friend the best Posh Spice she can be.
I vacillate between cans and cants—then suddenly I hear music from the living room. My thoughts torpedo, and I stiffen and look at the closed door.
It’s not just any music.
I shut my eyes, soaking in my favorite music and my current favorite singer. Nori Amada’s plays and floods me with raw energy and vigor. Even on my bluest days, her music can stir something deep inside of me.
Most soca can, the contemporary Caribbean genre affectionately known as the soul of calypso. Really, it’s an evolution of calypso, invented by Garfield Blackman (a.k.a Lord Shorty) who feared the disappearance of the genre as reggae was rising. Soca was a way of popularizing calypso again.
I like thinking of soca as lively with energetic tempos and melodies, creating this upbeat rhythm with steel drums, horns and trumpets, keyboards and synths. It’s music that immediately makes people want to stand up and dance.
It originated in Trinidad and Tobago, but soca has since spread throughout the Caribbean. My mom had so much fondness for it. On Sunday mornings, Joyce Wright would put Winston Soso’s “I Don’t Mind” on her record player. She’d push the kitchen table aside, and she’d dance with her son and daughter.
With Brenden and me.
At the stove, Neal Wright would whip up grilled cheese and watch us. Love behind his black-rimmed glasses.
“He saw your Nori Amada poster,” Katya suddenly says.
My eyes snap open. “Who?” But I know. I think I knew from the start.
“Luka,” Kat says. “You should go. He’s trying to draw you out.” She shakes her head. “He’s so obvious. He’s such a dork.”
I’m smiling. I can’t stop smiling. I agree; he’s way too thoughtful. Too ridiculous. Too much of everything I love. Oh God. My stomach overturns, nervous.
And my lips falter at the thought of being caught by Marc’s two company spies. Even if it seems unlikely.
I say, “I can’t…”
Katya elbows me.
I elbow back.
“Stand up,” she tells me. “Remember how much you really liked him.” That’s not hard. “And if you can find it in your heart, try to be friends with him again?” She smiles morosely at that idea, not believing it’ll ever happen either. “He’s not bad. I promise. He’s the best ever.”
I know.
“If you can’t be friends with me, at least…for Luka.” She has to look away from me, her eyes glassing.
I want that more than she can ever know.
So I stand up.
I follow my instinct which travels towards the music. Towards Luka.
And the consequences fade to the background.