Skinny(44)

In the memory, in the hospital cafeteria, people are eating and talking and trying to be as normal as possible. Even though there are wheelchairs and IV poles and lots of hats covering bald heads. And there is the tidal wave — cancer — coming toward the big sunny windows outside. Every family in this cafeteria will be washed away, including mine, will be turned upside down, torn apart by this huge, random tidal wave, and there is nothing any of us can do to predict when it will hit. We can’t stop it, either. So everyone eats their Jell-O cups and drinks their juice through plastic straws and ignores that huge looming wave right outside the window.

I squeeze my eyelids shut tightly. Not relaxing.

Thankfully, Ms. DeWise interrupts the moment with a new shouted command. “Now think of a happy moment. What was going on during that time? On the count of three, shout out one word to describe that happy moment.” I can hear Ms. DeWise marching around the room now, confidently yelling out her questions. “One . . . two . . . three.”

I think of Jackson and I whisper the word, “Snow.”

A male voice next to me shouts, “Party.”

“Wonderful!” Ms. DeWise claps her hands. I hear the noise of people stirring around me and open my eyes a peep. Everyone is getting up off the floor. Evidently, I survived the opening exercises. I slide back into my desk and watch Ms. DeWise warily for her next move. She pulls chairs to the front of the room. There are three chairs facing the rows of students.

“Gigi.” She motions for her to sit in the first chair. She calls Chance Lehmann up for the second chair, and he saunters up to the stage smiling and waving to the class. Then, horror of horrors, she calls my name.

“Ever.” She picks the chair up and moves it up a little closer to the audience. “Take the last chair here.”

I shuffle up to the front and sit down in the chair, staring down at my feet and feeling a little like I’m going to throw up.

Ms. DeWise rests her hand on my shoulder. “Everyone give a round of applause to our volunteers!”

I didn’t volunteer. Everyone claps politely.

“This semester we’ll be using familiar folk and fairy tales for our exercises. Today we’re going to work with Sleeping Beauty.”

Ms. DeWise puts her arm around the back of my chair and squats down between Chance and me. “In just a few minutes, when I give the signal, all three of our volunteers are going to transform themselves into Sleeping Beauty.”

Chance sweeps pretend hair back from his shoulders dramatically and bats his eyes. The class laughs. I sit there and swallow and swallow.

“In this scene, Sleeping Beauty has been left alone in the woods.” Ms. DeWise brushes a red curl back from her forehead and it immediately springs back into place. “She’s deserted. Lonely. Dejected.”

I glance up at the audience and then back down at my feet.

“How are you going to be the star of the musical when you can’t even do this? You’re going to blow it and then everyone will think you’re totally, completely incompetent,” whispers Skinny, “and you are.”

“When I clap my hands, I want each of you to look like Sleeping Beauty at this moment. Ready?”

We all nod and she slaps her hands together.

I frown and try to look as sad as possible. I throw in a little bit of scared, too. That part isn’t very hard.

“No! All wrong!” Ms. DeWise slaps her hands together again, and I almost jump out of my chair. She’s addressing all of us, but I feel like she’s only talking to me. “You all look like you are acting sad, not like you are really sad. Actors can’t just make up emotions. In life, feelings are the result of something that happened that affected you. Feelings don’t just happen without something causing the reaction.”

My stomach churns.

Ms. DeWise puts her hand on my shoulder again. “That something is what you think of when you’re onstage — the something that causes you to feel a certain way, when the audience was not there to pressure you to perform. Let’s try this again.”

Groan.

“So think about a time when you felt left out and rejected. When everyone had turned their backs on you . . .”

When did I not feel that way?

“Think about exactly what was happening when you felt that way,” Ms. DeWise says, stepping in front of the three chairs and scrutinizing each one of her volunteers.

A day comes to mind with a stage and a chair crashing to the floor. Blood rushes to my cheeks. I feel caught, a deer in headlights. A slow familiar panic takes over my body. There is nowhere to hide. I push the memory away. I don’t want to think about that.

“Wait, Ever.” I’m startled by Ms. DeWise’s voice. “It was there on your face for a minute. You were remembering something, right?”