The Me You See Read online

  Actually, Stefia and I kind of had a thing about being watched. It was an inside joke that turned into a huge philosophical discussion. It was just after my sixteenth birthday and I had invited her over to my house after work to hang out, eat crappy food, and watch YouTube videos because I had faster internet. We tripped upon a video titled How to Make Hair Dye with Ketchup and discovered it was actually a ridiculously lewd journey through what the YouTuber wanted to do with each and every girl on his local softball team.

  “That’s a little far,” I said, as I clicked on the flag below the video to report it. “I mean, who makes this stuff?”

  “People with too much time on their hands,” Stefia said, dismissively.

  “It’s disturbing.” I closed my laptop and shoved it further back on my desk.

  “Oh, come on, Taylor Jean,” Stefia said, flopping back on my bed and flipping her feet up on a stack of pillows. “Everyone likes to watch.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Stefia grabbed a handful of butter spindle pretzels and shoved three in her mouth at once. She chewed slowly, and I could tell she was carefully choosing her words.

  “Why do guys go to strip clubs?” she asked. “Why do we watch talk shows where people freak out and fight with each other?”

  “I don’t think those two things are the same…”

  “Why not? What makes them different?”

  “For one,” I said, rolling my eyes, “guys are desperate perverts. That’s why they go to strip clubs.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Stefia said. “Okay, some guys are desperate perverts…”

  “Like Mitch?” I interrupted.

  “Like Mitch,” she agreed. “But I don’t think that’s why they watch. I think it’s something deeper than that. Something that everyone has inside. I mean, why do people watch a play?”

  “To be entertained.”

  “But what if it’s not an entertaining play?”

  “Then,” I said, grabbing my own handful of pretzels, “the actors have failed. Let that be a warning to you!”

  Stefia giggled and shoved her hand back in the pretzel bowl.

  “No,” she said. “What I’m saying is some plays are entertaining by nature. A love story, a story where the guy gets the girl, a story where everyone gets what they want in the end. But what about the stories that aren’t like that? What about stories about death and destruction? Certainly those aren’t entertaining…”

  “Not in the normal sense, no,” I agreed. “Let me ask you a question. Why do you act?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re up there on stage and people are watching you. And obviously you’re not uncomfortable or you wouldn’t be up there. So…why do you act? Why are you on stage?”

  Stefia thought for a minute, twirling her last pretzel in the air like she was writing on my ceiling.

  “Because now that I’ve started, I think I would die if I wasn’t on stage.”

  “That’s kind of dramatic,” I said. “Fitting, coming from an actress.”

  She giggled and ate her last pretzel. She put her hand back in the bowl and frowned, signifying the bowl was finally empty. Then, in true I-don’t-care-what-you-think style, she turned the bowl over and stuck it on her head, salt spilling into her hair.

  “I guess I just like to give people something to see.”

  “You’re a nut.” I laughed and flipped my hand at the bowl to knock off her crown.

  “But you’re watching,” Stefia said and laughed, catching the bowl to put it back on her head. “So which of us is really the nut?”

  “Stefia, get real. It’s kind of hard not to watch you,” I said. “You’re a natural performer.”

  “Indeed,” she said, and leaned backwards to flip off the bed. But she misjudged the distance, and as she went over, rammed her feet right into the full length mirror that hung on the wall.

  “Oh, crap!” she said. She jumped up and stared at the mirror that splintered into a million jagged pieces. “I’m sorry!”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “No biggie. Cheap mirror.”

  She crouched to the floor and checked for the few slivers of glass that had fallen out. Her heel had made a perfect bull’s eye in the middle the mirror, but luckily, most of the glass remained fractured inside the frame.

  “Everything okay up there?” my dad called from down the hall.

  “Yeah!” I yelled. “Stefia’s just up here trying to ruin my luck by busting mirrors.”

  “Need any help?”

  I opened my bedroom door and yelled down the hallway, “No. We’re fine. Really.”

  He didn’t answer so I closed the door. And when I turned back into the room, Stefia was still staring into the broken mirror.

  “Stefia. I said it was fine. Don’t worry about it. The mirror only cost like five bucks at…”

  “Have you ever noticed how the cracks in the mirror mess up the reflection?” she asked.

  “Um…yeah. That’s generally what happens when the glass breaks.”

  “But, like…look. The cracks are all you can see.”

  I picked up two pillows that had fallen on my lilac carpet and tossed them up on the bed.

  “Yeah? So? What are you getting at?”

  She kept looking at the mirror, brushing her finger lightly over her broken reflection.

  “It’s not like that with people,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “You know, with the cracks. There’s a lot of people walking around that are really cracked.”

  “Stefia, what in the world are you talking about?”

  “Most of the time with people,” she said, “you can see everything but the cracks.”

  I threw a pillow at her.

  “Stop being weird,” I said, brushing her off and pelting her with a second pillow. “You don’t have to impress me with your deep wisdom, you know.”

  I handed her the pretzel bowl.

  “What’s this for?” she asked.

  “Stick it back on your head. It’s getting way too deep in here.”

  She smiled and flipped the bowl back over her hair. She stepped up on the bed, blew me a kiss, curtsied, and sat back down cross-legged right in the middle of my comforter.

  “You’re watching,” she said, pointing a finger at me.

  “Stefia,” I said, grabbing a bag of chocolate and tearing it open, “shut up.”

  **

  For some reason, the whole why do people watch or oh look, you’re watching became a thing between us. We’d be working at the coffee shop and catch someone staring at the happenings of another table and we’d snort to each other they’re watching and quietly hum the theme from The Twilight Zone.

  Like, we had this regular customer named Heidi. She worked rotating shifts in labor and delivery at the hospital and sometimes stopped by for a pick-me-up before her shift started. One day she was sitting at her usual table in the corner, reading on her Kindle, and the only other customers in the shop—a teenaged couple—started sniping at each other. At first you could tell she was annoyed, because the nitpicking was distracting her from the book she was trying to enjoy. But the longer they argued, the less she looked at her Kindle and the more she looked at them. She just stared, totally sucked into what they were allowing others to overhear. Like it was a show she was watching. Like they were performing for her entertainment. She set her Kindle down and sucked off the straw from her to-go cup and only looked away from them when it seemed they might look at her.

  We did a lot of people watching during our shifts, and what we usually noticed was that lots of people were watching other people. But it took us forever to figure out the why in why people watch.

  And then there was the day of the crash in front of the coffee shop. It was the middle of the afternoon on a Friday and Old Man Rogers fell asleep driving his farm truck right down Main Street. He plowed into a little yellow VW Bug that had Marissa Jenkins and her twin toddlers inside. Right in fr
ont of our coffee shop.

  A few customers stood up at their tables with their hands over their mouths muttering Oh nos and Oh my Gods. One mother held her young son and put her hand over his eyes so he wouldn’t see the carnage, but she was looking herself. Two customers ran up to the full glass panels of our store front and gaped at the gathering crowd. I ran but stopped when my hand hit the front door. I wondered if I should go out. I wondered what I would do. I wondered if I could do anything at all.

  Stefia, of course, ran out and jumped into the middle of everything like it was part of a play that she’d been perfectly blocked for what to do. I mean, she was out there a full three minutes before the cops and firemen showed up.

  Old Man Rogers was all bloodied, his face smashed into his steering wheel, head snapped at some odd angle. I couldn’t even see Marissa in the puckered mess left of her little car. I noticed one of her kids in the back seat, motionless and staring blankly; the other had flown from the car and landed on the tar just two feet from one of the tables on our sidewalk. I knew neither one of them was still breathing.

  The shriek of the sirens announced the emergency vehicles were just making the corner. The sirens wailed and screeched, growing louder as they sped closer. It was so strange to me that the louder the sirens got, the quieter the air around us became. Except for Stefia, we all just stood there, suspended in time, rooted to the tile or sidewalk we were standing on.

  And all I could think was We’re watching. We’re watching and we can’t look away.

  **

  It was hard to talk about watching after that. It was hard to even talk to Stefia after that. I suppose it was a mixture of disgust and guilt and anger and disbelief. I kept avoiding Stefia because I didn’t want our “thing” to come up. But two weeks later as we sat in the choir loft and waited to sing for service, she passed a slip of paper down to me. It made its way across the music folders of Jeanie and Thomas and Albert and finally over to me.

  “This better be good,” Albert whispered, shooting a look that conveyed just how inappropriate it was to pass notes during the sermon.

  I opened it up.

  Taylor Jean,

  I know now why people watch.

  Stefia

  After church, when we’d put our music away and descended from the choir loft, I pulled Stefia into a corner by the church office.

  “What do you mean?” I hissed. “What’s this note supposed to mean?”

  She didn’t say anything, just walked out the front door of the church with a look like I should follow her. So I did. All the way across the street to Beidermann’s Ice Cream Shop. She ordered two salted caramel sundaes with pretzel topping, carried them outside to a table, and sat down.

  “Here,” she said, handing one to me. “I know you like pretzels so I ordered extra topping.”

  I sat down and took the sundae from her. After a minute of silence, in which I wondered what she was trying to do, I finally spooned a glob into my mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” Stefia finally said. “Why are things so weird between us now?”

  I didn’t say anything. Mostly because I didn’t have an answer to her question. I didn’t know why things were weird. They shouldn’t have been.

  “So, here’s what I figured out,” Stefia said, like someone had cut the scene we were in and started a whole new one. “I was thinking about our thing. You know, why people watch? And ever since that accident, I’ve been stuck on figuring it out.”

  “Stefia,” I started, but she cut me off.

  “No, it’s fine. I think sometimes we learn the most in uncomfortable situations. And that was definitely uncomfortable.”

  “You were uncomfortable?” I said, incredulously. “You? Stefia, you jumped in there like you knew exactly what to do! The rest of us just stood there like complete dumbasses, just…watching.”

  And at watching, I lost it. I stabbed my spoon back in my sundae, set it on the table, and sobbed into my hands.

  “Taylor Jean, stop,” Stefia said. “Don’t beat yourself up. Besides, it only looked like I knew what I was doing.”

  “Well, you’re pretty damn good at looking like you know what you’re doing.”

  Stefia took a bite of her sundae, putting the spoon in her mouth upside down and sucking the ice cream off the back of it.

  “I’ve been told that before,” she said.

  I rubbed beneath my eyes with the tops of my pointer fingers and said, “I’m such a baby. I bet I look stupid.”

  “Nah,” she said, and then added with a smirk, “do you believe me?”

  I smacked her on the shoulder.

  A chickadee sat in the branch above our table, sputtering out his call. I looked up into the leaves and wondered what it would be like to wing around over everything, watching people live their ridiculous lives. Had the chickadee been at the accident? Had he flown over Marissa’s car moments before Old Man Jenkins rammed its engine into the backseat?

  “So what did you figure out?” I asked. “I mean, about why people watch?”

  “Oh,” she said. “That. Well, like I said, after the accident I really started thinking about this whole thing. Why were people standing around watching? I mean, it wasn’t pretty at all. I think the top half of Melissa’s body was thrown about fifty feet from her car.”

  “Yeah,” I said, shaking the memory from my head. “I know.”

  “And I guess what I decided was that people watch so they can be involved without really being involved. They can part of something. They can say they were there, but at a safe distance.”

  “Wait a second. I did not keep watching because I wanted to be a part of the carnage,” I told Stefia. “You’re wrong.”

  “Don’t you get it?” she asked. “It was okay for you to watch. Everyone was watching and no one was judging anyone for watching. I mean, think about it. You can witness something like that, something you don’t normally see every day. You’re drawn to it. You’re part of the experience. You don’t have to look away. Everyone is gawking so it’s okay if you do it, too.”

  “I wanted to help, Stefia. I wanted to jump in there, but I just couldn’t…”

  “And that, Taylor Jean, is why you watched. You could have looked away, you could have ignored it, but you didn’t. You watched.”

  I watched.

  **

  I’m still wearing the Band-aid over where the nurse plunged that needle under my skin a month ago to suck out my blood. It’s a multicolored Band-aid that says “Give” and it doesn’t match at all with the dress I’m wearing to the funeral.

  And I really don’t care. Because right now I’m stuck on thinking about the things we see, and what we watch, and how it tells a lot about us when it’s all said and done. I’m choking on the bitter realization that in the end, the Stefia that everyone got to see was not the beautifully perfect, warm maple syrupy Stefia that they wanted, but instead a broken Stefia fallen in the middle of five of her fellow actors in a puddle of blood and piss.

  Not exactly what the audience paid to see.

  But, then, everybody likes to watch.

  -Kristopher-

  If people were honest, they’d all admit to being like an iPod left on shuffle. No one’s song fits in any single file.

  “Why is that, Kristopher? Why do you say that?” she had asked me that night.

  “Because we are all different people with every person we know,” I answered.

  “How do we know then who anyone really is?”

  “I guess we don’t. No…I know we don’t.

  My dad, James Harper, started up the little Crystal Plains Theater about four years ago with his old college buddy, Niles. My parents were wannabe actors with old money; Niles was a stage wizard with a penchant for collecting odd things. The three of them imagined that our little town needed some culture and figured community theater was the way to put Granite Ledge on the map. At first, everyone laughed. They said this isn’t New York and what’s wrong with the plays at the elemen
tary school?

  Stefia changed all that. No one would admit it, but I think she was a big reason people came to the theater. The other actors were good, but Stefia…holy shit. She seriously belonged somewhere else—like New York.

  I mean, just to watch her on stage? Holy shit. You know how someone walks in and you just know they’ve got it? That was her. My dad said so, Niles said so, the directors said so, and the audience said so—over and over again. It’s like the mighty gods of theater dropped her in this little town as an itty bitty present for all of us to unwrap and enjoy.

  Merry freaking Christmas. And Happy Hanukah, too.

  My mom and dad were all about theater. They were crazy hyper, in your face extroverts who aspired to be awesome actors but never quite got there. Because you know, you can either act or you can’t. That’s just the way it is. But they had passion—and money—so they opened a theater instead. How they ended up with an introverted, mandolin playing son is beyond me. They always pushed at me to bust out of my shell and pop up on stage with everyone else. But there were only, like, four people in the world who were ever allowed to hear me play.

  Stefia made five.

  I had watched Stefia from the audience since the first show she was in, way back when she was fourteen and I was just old enough to drive myself to the theater to watch her. I never talked to her. I made it a point not to talk to her. It was easier to keep my fantasy alive that way. It was easier to pretend the reason we never talked was because there was no time, not because she wouldn’t give the time of day if there ever was.

  I’m not stupid. Stefia could have anyone. So why would she have me?

  “How do we know then who anyone really is?” she had asked that night.

  We don’t, Stefia. We can’t.

  **

  I waited for her that night.

  I’d tossed dad some line about hanging out late at the theater to see if I could imagine myself on stage. He nodded, and then sighed like I’d finally seen the light.

  “Make sure you lock up when you leave,” he called after me as I walked out the door with my mandolin.