Page 3 of Impossible

Then, rehearsal.

“Indie!” Rose jogs across the stage to me, all straight white teeth and auburn balayage and designer everything. She doesn’t hug me. I don’t know when we stopped hugging.

“Hey.” I sag to the stage, trying to catch my breath. I bend and pretend that it’s a stretch rather than saving myself from the poprock-static going off in my vision.

Rose is not fooled. “When did you last eat?” she asks.

I do not like this question.

My system is simple: if people are around, I eat. If no people are around, I don’t. After an accidental three-day fast in October when I was feeling reclusive and ended up going into hypoglycemic shock while alone in my room—Indie the Impressive—the system has been appended to allow for a protein bar in place of meals missed. Each one is 180 calories. A perfect day is a 2-bar, no-meal day. Another exception has been made for my multi-vitamins—85 calories, gummies non-negotiable—because I’m not actually trying to die, and I don’t like my hair falling out. A final exception for coffee creamer. Because 35 calories from a sweet and creamy coffee that won’t burn a hole in my esophagus is a fantastic replacement for a 400-calorie meal.

I used to eat a lot more. Cam and Rose and I ate lunch together every day, and usually dinner as well. Dinners faded out when I caught feelings for Cam and suddenly Rose had equestrian team practice and Cam had rowing and show choir and girlfriends and I had dishes to wash. Lunches faded out when I graduated and started working in the kitchen rather than eating them in the cafeteria. Even on the days when I could eat with Cam and Rose now, it seems like she’s been busy with things like Honor Society and ASB and avoiding me.

“I had a doctor’s appointment over lunch,” I sigh.

Rose’s eyes narrow. She’s one of those people who still thinks it’s cool to have doctor’s appointments with mysterious causes that pull you from class in front of everybody. I used to be the same way, until I realized that nobody actually cared if I was starving myself and still fat. It’s only now that I’m skinny that it looks like I’m doing it for attention, when I no longer am. Indie the Ironic.

Rose is not a fan. She’s always been the best of us. Smaller, smarter, younger, more desirable. Me getting skinny threw a wrench in our dynamic. She thinks the cotton gauze taped to the inside of my elbow is a cry for attention. Attention she’d rather have on her.

We got voted ‘Dynamic Duo’ for the yearbook before I graduated last year, but something tells me that once the wheels of her dad’s private plane touch down in California this fall for her to attend Stanford, we won’t be friends anymore. I’m still not sure how I feel about that.

Once rehearsal is under way, I find I don’t much care.

I sit up in the booth with my headset on, my reading light clamped to the bible in front of me. My cues are in tidy lines in the margins of my massive script. I call the lights, the music, the curtains, watch the set pieces whirl around each other and come together, the same every time. The world dances to my commands, everything perfectly in place. I watch as Rose’s Juliet and Cam’s Romeo fall in love on stage.

When I was a student, I acted. It was so much easier than just being myself, showing people what they wanted to see, playing my feelings by the book. I thought I wanted to be like Rose, pretty and desirable. Indie the Ingenue.

Now that I’m graduated, I get paid to stage manage instead, and it’s even better. Nobody’s eyes on me. In control of everything. Exhilarating and anonymous.

Rehearsal flies by. This is when I resent losing time. The show goes up in a few weeks, and when it ends, so will this last vestige of happiness. I don’t let myself think about that. I call the show and clap at the end and flush when the director compliments the seamless transitions and well-timed cues. Stage-managing is hard, and even with my brain feeling like I’ve sent it through a blender, I’m good at it. I wish I could bottle the feeling to pull out at other times. Like when I have to look in a mirror.

We haze the freshmen after curfew.

I say we, but I mean Rose. She dresses them in taffeta and tiaras and feather boas and we all laugh while they perform showtunes in the woods behind Rose’s dorm and silently thank the heavens that we aren’t them.

We were them, once. The hazing is a long held Adams Academy tradition, passed from queen bee to queen bee over the generations. No freshman escapes unscathed—if you’re privileged enough to be cast in a show your first year on the high school campus, you’re going to pay for it. Can’t let anybody’s ego get ahead of them.

The smell of orange soda is cloying. I sip my vodka-water and try to pretend that my silence is mysterious and sophisticated rather than exhausted and shy. An art I’ve perfected over the years of being Rose’s number two.

I need to job hunt for next year. I need to eat. I desperately need to sleep.

I had some goldfish ahead of this, knowing I’d be drinking and not wanting to get completely obliterated. But vodka has calories, empty, useless calories, and how can I go back and put more in my body after wasting myself on poison and simple carbs instead? Indigo the Irrational. My stomach gnaws at itself. I pour gas on the fire with every sip of watered-down liquor.

The ick passes over me while I sit and try to keep things in focus. Drinking is never fun anymore. Not like it is for the others, stumbling around and kissing each other and pretending not to remember in the morning. Theatre kids, loud and proud and everything I wish I could stop caring long enough to be.

But I am Indigo the Incomprehensible. I play pretty and quiet and leave them wanting every time. So they won’t find me wanting.

I find Rose in the crowd—she is laughing at something Cam said. Standing close to him. Watching a game of spin the bottle come into existence from the throbbing mess of adolescents.

She looks at me and something behind her eyes flickers. My summons.

The headrush is immediate and vicious when I stand. I try to save myself from the rolling blackness and wasp-like buzzing, but I’m drowning in it. I crouch, letting gravity force the blood to my brain if my body won’t.

The dirt is cold and damp and I try to right myself, slowly, slowly, so slowly, fingertips dragging as I steady.

“Rose?” Cam’s voice is laden with concern. I want to wave him away, but my weight is heavy on my hands, barely staying upright. Rose will be mad. I don’t want him to see me weak. Problems problems problems, all I am is one big problem. I shouldn’t have come. I’m not even a student anymore, it’s weird for me to be hanging out with freshmen.

“I’m fine.”