Two Stories
By Maeve Barry
Showstopper
Stefan’s adopted mom told him I got into Showstoppers cause I’d have no problem wearing the skanky outfit. Stefan’s adopted mom told him this to make him feel better because he didn’t get in. He told me. I am eight and three quarters and I don't care. All stars are skanks at one point or another. I know this because Stefan lets me read his subscription to Tiger Beat magazine. I’m not there yet in my celebrity. There’s a black space where my front tooth should be and my hair is bright blonde and I know these things will serve me.
Me and Stefan lay on our stomachs on his Red Sox duvet. He pulls Tiger Beat out from beneath it. My favorite photos in Tiger Beat are of teen stars volunteering. They’re so skinny and pretty in their big t-shirts. Especially compared to the normal sad people that they are hugging. Teen stars have really good posture while they hand out bags of chips. When they bend to hug an old person in a wheelchair, or hand a doll to a baby. I ask Stefan if his first parents are dead and if they were old. Stefan is adopted from Romania and has behavioral issues. He doesn’t answer. He asks to see my boobs and I say yeah, if he gives me his Hillary Duff and Britney Spears albums as well as his Unofficial Biography of Zac Efron and Ashley Tisdale. Stefan isn’t gay yet.
I stare at the unofficial biography once I’m home in my bed. The book is two-in-one: You flip it one way and it's green and Zac Efron. I flip the book and on the back is Ashley Tisdale wearing layered tank tops. She has side bangs and a hair straightener. The stars behind her are pink.
I used to read the New Testament until I had all my favorite parts memorized. Bees buzzed in my underwear whenever it mentioned Judas. I thought a lot about how it would feel to be Mary Magdalene. How if she had worn a blue veil and knelt kissing Jesus’ feet while he hung dead and said, “I’m his girlfriend!,” she could have been bible-time famous. Now, every night, I read Ashley Tisdale’s unofficial biography. She is nineteen. I memorize her life’s every detail. She was discovered as a kid at the mall. She wasn’t blonde yet.
I stop praying to God that I don’t die in my sleep. I stop asking Him to keep my lumpy guinea pig from getting bad cancer. I lay on my back with the Bible and a binder balanced on my belly. I watch them all rise. I breathe out and they lower. I pray to be famous. My belly rises and my diaphragm grows and I don’t see beyond it to my bug-bite knees. When I’m Ashley Tisdale’s height and I sing at nursing homes people will take my picture. I’ll roll down the band of my Soffe shorts three times. I’ll tie the bottom of my big t-shirt. My ears will be pierced. I’ll hover my arm over a gummy-man in his wheelchair and he won’t touch me. People will call me an angel.
***
I’m the loudest singer in the tri-town area. Maybe that isn’t true. I sing in a group that calls itself Showstoppers. I’m so loud I don’t need my own microphone. The other girls and two boys all have to use handhelds and I get to move my hands where I want like a mime.
If there’s an event that needs singing the Showstoppers are at it. Everyone in the tri-towns and probably some other towns know who we are. We sing at three Fourth of July parades and two tree lightings a year. Thanksgiving through Christmas we sing at the mall every Saturday. We sing the National Anthem at little league and high school and one minor league ball games. We sing every time there’s something having to do with a veteran.
The tri-town area has no connection to any real famous people. It’s not near Hollywood or Vegas or New York City. The tri-town area is full of girls who want to be singers. They will become nurses. 16,000 people live in the tri-towns and at least one of them is on every season of American Idol. The three towns stay up and face busy signals. They dial in their idol votes. We all hang lots of posters. The girl on the show gets her name in LED letters on the big sign over the highway. The sign with moving horse legs, kicking out and in, Paul Revere riding her name. The tri-town newspaper reports on its own local idol. They interview the girl’s high school teachers. They always say they knew that girl would make it. She never makes it.
I’m worse than the other Showstoppers at tap dancing and harmonies and I know I’m the one who will make it. The big girls have braces and bellies and sometimes pimples. They’re already aging. They wedge themselves into the matching outfit. Little blue skirt, white tank top with a sequin music note stitched on its pocket. Bra straps digging red dents in their shoulders. I know I’m different cause I started singing without making noise. I played Stefan’s Hillary Duff and Britney Spears CDs on my boombox. I matched my lips to their lyrics and swung my hips. I put on small sparkle outfits. I lay on my stomach. I figured out how to move my lips while I lay on my stomach. After some months I realized I could lie on my stomach and swing my hips and move my mouth but with noise coming out of it. I realized I could make my voice go really loud. I became a singer.
***
Showstoppers are good about giving back to the community. Even if Stefan’s adopted mom says we’re just skanky. She is old which is why she could not birth him. She doesn’t understand that Showstoppers sing at nursing homes even though they are not a place where you can become famous. The elderly make me uncomfortable. When I walk up the stairs with my grandma, sometimes I sprint ahead really fast so she won’t ask me to help her. If I am stuck behind her, or if she’s holding on to my arm, I think really hard about tripping her. It’s not even cause of the stuff with my grandpa. I look at her, never famous, and I think of fat ankles. Droopy chins and gout and dirty sheets. I pretend I’m in Tiger Beat when we sing at hospitals. When we sing to bald little kids, to the almost-bald elderly. It is all just a photo. I smile big and make my voice sweet. I don’t look at anyone.
Usually to become a Showstopper you need a connection. I had no connection. I saw the square ad announcing auditions in the tri-town paper. I didn’t drink dairy for a week. I didn’t eat. I held the splits and stretched up my eyes. I smiled so big I could see the pit of my throat in the mirror. I couldn’t stop crying. My mom said, “Why don’t we skip the audition and go apple picking?” I told her that she was a terrible mother.
The audition was in the basement of a Catholic church. My freckles were out. I wore this little cross necklace even though my parents aren’t Catholic. Showstoppers are. Two women watched while I sang into their recording camera. Its lens was an eye and I knew that it saw me. I pretended to be surprised when I got in.
***
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas Showstoppers get to wear red. Shimmery tops with big bows in the middle. Our shirts go past our spandex. I wear this fake-diamond choker. I sing extra loud at the mall cause that’s where they found Ashley Tisdale. I’m not sure who They are, the powers that make a normal girl famous. I sing ‘Santa Baby’ and swivel my hips. When the saxophone solo comes on the CD I blow into a plastic candy cane. Because I am small this is precocious and sweet. At our Christmas nursing home show I switch my solo to keep Christ in Christmas. I sing ‘Away in a Manger.’ Old people prefer God to the saxophone. At my grandparents’ house, Jesus was everywhere. One statue of him as a baby where his young mother held him. Everywhere else he was bleeding. Ribs shoved through his skin in pictures where they hung him. Blood wept through the holes in his hands. I don’t know if my grandma is allowed to hang him now that she’s in the Home. I never visit.
I stand in front of rows of paper skin. It drips down their wheelchairs. Bodies bent, cracked lips: it smells how my grandma smells, which my mom says is the smell of not washing. It smells like computer. It smells like after my mom squirts a white snake of bleach from the tube so it coils inside our toilet. Old people open their mouths when I stand. They make these happy donkey moans. I pretend I can’t hear them. I pretend I don’t see them.
Today I use a microphone because of their lack of hearing. I hold it between my hands in a prayer. I stretch my eyes wide so I look like an angel. The old people’s eyes are just their black pupils. They are the mouth of a camera. Their dead blinks are it snapping.
You can’t hear their grunting as loud when I sing. I sing in my sweet voice; you can still hear this one person moaning. The moaning is louder than I am, swallowing up all the music. I make myself look at the old people’s faces. A woman, at the front, her eyes on me and her mouth hanging open. Her hair is blonde. This is her singing. She grips the hands of her wheelchair. She shoves out her neck and her chest like she’s being lifted up away. I forget what I’m singing and start swinging my hips. I sing about baby Jesus and shove my spandex crotch backward and forward. I shimmy my nipples. The woman gets louder. She gasps up all her air so she can out-sing me. I stretch out my belly. Pregnant, I sing as loud as my voice will hurl. The woman stops singing. Her jaw drops and her eyes bug. She turns really red. She turns white. Like a candy cane, and then she’s just snow. Her head drops to her chest. She isn’t singing cause she is not breathing. I keep my voice loud but no one can hear me. No one is looking. The standing men and women don’t clap. They run around in their one-color outfits. They peel up the woman’s eyes. They yell to each other. They yell into their walkie-talkies. They lift the woman out of her chair to lie her down on her back. The director turns off the music. I stare into black floating cameras and sing.
The Mall
I groan the whole way there. Past the tight houses then the spread houses then the cornfield that looks like someone ran a comb through it. We’re in my mom’s Subaru. I call the mall stupid. I call my mom stupid, and same with all the other kids in my class. I pretty much like the mall. The field trip is mandatory and I know groaning won’t make a difference.
We’re seeing An Inconvenient Truth which I’m not excited for. What I am excited for is seeing my first movie in IMAX 3D technology.
“What’s inconvenient is taking you all the way to the mall and then picking you up again at 9:30 on a Wednesday,” my mom says.
She blows her bangs off her face with puffy lips. She’s all cranky cause she got a procedure to make her boobs smaller then stopped taking the pain killing medicine. I took the medicine tube from her cabinet so it would make noise in my pocket. It’s in my hoodie now. I sound like a rattle.
“I thought what’s inconvenient was the fact of our burning planet,” I say to my mom cause that’s what Mrs. K wrote on the board.
“Well that too. Obviously, Jake.”
My mom leaves the car running while I get out of it.
“Call me when it’s over!” She hangs her head out the window.
“Mooooooom,” I say and roll my eyes extra long in case Matt or Moss or Jean Paul II are looking. I kick a trash can. Nobody sees me. I’m twenty minutes early and the first kid here. Mrs. K is here. She stands by the entrance holding hundreds of bags. Bags that say Big Y and Walmart and K-Mart. Red-denting her arms and dangling off all her fingers. I don’t know what she always carries so many bags for.
“And hello Sir Early Bird Jake,” Mrs. K says in her screechy voice that gives me a headache.
I want to say I’m eleven and not a bird. I say, “Hey Mrs. K.” I keep my voice quiet to set an example.
I stand with Mrs. K at the entrance and wait for other kids to show up. I have trouble just standing so I swing my arms and jump with both feet up onto a trash can. “Get down Sir Early Bird Jake,” Mrs. K says in her stressed out voice, like a scared bird. I jump down off the trash can. The pills sound like a snake and I scrape my shin. It’s not even worth it cause neither Matt or Moss or Jean Paul II are here to see it. I scuff my feet on the concrete and drag them to make lots of noise in the way Mrs. K hates. There’s a dead patch of grass where the sidewalk breaks. An ant hill wiggles around on that grass and I step on it. I don’t know why I step on it.
I actually kind of like ants because they are basically everywhere, unlike butterflies or special poisonous beetles, and this makes me like them more. I crouch down and watch the apocalypse unfold. I tell myself these are Mall Ants, so maybe they’re used to dying, that maybe in their next lives they’ll come back as Forest Ants or ants on a farm.
Jean Paul II told me that when he dies he’ll come back as a falcon. He likes falcons a lot and has many pictures of them saved on his parents’ computer. They’re not pictures he took. He downloaded them from the internet. I’m always looking for alive falcons so I can tell him. I never see any.
There’s blood on my hand from where I held my shin. I want to lick it. Instead I spread it around on my neck and limp a bit like I’ve been injured in a more severe capacity. Mrs. K doesn’t notice. Not that I wanted her to. Her not noticing was part of the joke.
It was Matt who showed me all those pictures of wartime neck injuries but it is Moss who is now climbing out of his mom’s Honda Fit.
I stop the limp when I see him but keep the blood on my neck. Moss is wearing a cast on his wrist. Unlike a neck injury, a cast must be acknowledged. “Cool cast,” I tell him. I keep my voice casual.
“I broke my wrist doing archery,” Moss tells me and I wonder if he actually broke it for a less cool reason.
“There are ants over there,” I tell Moss to redirect his attention.
Moss squats by the small apocalypse. Swarming red specks spill all over the pavement. You’d think Moss to be the nature loving sort. Really Moss is the most technological of the group. When he dies and comes back it will be as a PlayStation.
“Well what even happened to them.”
“Something similar to what happened to your wrist.”
“What does that mean,” Moss asks.
I don’t know what this means. Moss picks up a handful of dirt and ants and shoves it up inside of his cast. I can’t tell if Moss hopes to prolong their suffering, suffocating any mutilated ants left breathing, or if he thinks of the cast as a sort of a coffin.
Moss thinks of lots of things as coffins but hasn’t actually seen one. “They’re not even trying to bite me cause they know I’m already so itchy,” Moss says with a sad kind of snarl. It’s a face caught between the feeling he is trying to show me and the one he is actually feeling, which might be nothing. A face maybe caught between a feeling and nothing. I’ve seen a coffin. I could tell Moss but I don’t, partly because I don’t know if he is thinking about coffins or if it is just a thought I have put in his head.
I saw the airborne coffin one time when I was staring out the window. All of a sudden I saw it, this black floating coffin. Just hovering there, like the one I saw my grandpa in but this time it was closed. My mom came up behind me and she said, What a sweet little family, which freaked me out cause what I was looking at was a coffin. But then I squinted my eyes closed and counted to thirteen like my therapist told me. I opened them and there was this family of cardinals, and we just watched them eat, and I didn’t say anything to my mom about the coffin.
Other kids show up while I watch Moss and the ants. Mrs. K runs around with her hundreds of bags thumping on her like tumors. Or, like my mom says, a bird with its head chopped right off it. She always gets that saying wrong and I don’t know why this makes me miss her. I kick the trash can really hard but instead of hurting my foot it just tips over. Giant foam cups and balled Auntie Anne’s bags roll all over the sidewalk.
Mrs. K’s helper lady comes over. We call her Miss Tessa even though she’s still in high school. She was my babysitter a few years ago, but now she walks over and says, “Wow Jake. Seems like you really need this movie to get through your thick head.”
Miss Tessa is really into the environment and having long healthy hair. She wears tie-dyed tank tops and rolls her Soffe shorts down so her bellybutton shows. She’s dating an environmental history grad student. When Miss Tessa babysat me she’d sit at the table and paint her nails with her fumey red polish. She’d smoke and then ash all over. One time she told me recycling was for pussies.
I’m about to remind her of this when Matt and Jean Paul II show up. Miss Tessa backs off. She always tries to act really casual when Matt’s around. Asking him about his big brother and tickling her pale fingernails all over his head.
Matt has an older brother and he’s twelve already. He’s the biggest kid in our grade. He has hair in his armpits that I’ve seen and hair on his balls which he’s told me. I believe him. Matt just glares and sees the leftover ants me and Moss missed. He stomps his big Timberland down over the ants and they crunch. His face looks like a face that is stuck between nothing. I look at Jean Paul II and the loopy hairs by his face. He reaches over to wipe the blood on my neck and I push his hand off me.
***
The mall smells like chlorine which is weird cause we’re not near the pool. Heat presses down dry on my nose, like my skin could just rip open bleeding. I keep on my hoodie. Moss smushes his face on the glass of the closed GameStop and it turns really foggy.
Our mall doesn’t get a real Santa so we have one that’s mechanic. It waves its arm up and down like those plastic cats that are lucky and Chinese or something. When my dad left my mom bought about 10,000 of those cats so our house always waves. The mechanic Santa waves at me. He’s missing his hand. Santa’s arm waves and Christmas was five months ago. I wave back really low so no one sees.
The mall has a mechanical Santa and a living easter bunny. A giant man stuffed into his white, furry suit with a pink stomach and black holes where his eyes should be. He’s packing up his stuff, shoving Gatorade and a dirty t-shirt into his backpack, but he sits back on his big chair when we walk by with Miss Tessa.
“Come sit on my lap little lady,” the Easter Bunny says in his croaky voice.
Everyone keeps walking but Miss Tessa says, “Matt, take my picture.” She wiggles back into the bunny’s hairy lap.
I stand there while Matt looks bored and Miss Tessa giggles. The Easter Bunny smells like old vomit. I try to seem like I’m not looking so I stare at a poster. Two giant rectangles shoot out from the foggy ground. I close my eyes and try counting. I open my eyes and the rectangles are still there. It’s just the Twin Towers. If You See Something, Say Something, it says above them in big angry letters.
“I want popcorn,” I say so I can say something that’s not what I’m seeing. My voice comes out like broken chirping.
***
The girls make their own row in the theater. That’s where Mrs. K sits. Us boys sit in the row behind. Miss Tessa says, “Matt sit by me,” so we all fill in the other side of them. I eat Jean Paul II’s popcorn and drink his MEGA CUP Fanta. His parents send him places with money. We put on our glasses. The movie starts and I’m less excited by its IMAX 3D technology. It’s just Al Gore talking. I already know about him cause my mom sobbed for a week when he lost the election. My friends’ parents were all really happy. A man in a green bandana slaughters an enormous pig. Something bubbles low in my gut when they split the pig’s throat and the blood sprays right at me. I stop eating popcorn. The pig’s gone and there are these red birds. They look for trees that are turned into houses. They want to stop flying.
One time while I waited outside school for my mom I saw a baby bird splat there on the pavement. It lay there, pink, like a chopped off finger. There was all of this squawking which didn’t make sense, cause I was looking at the bird and it was dead. I looked up and there was another bird and I figured it was the dead one’s mom, cause who else would be squawking so loud. Stuck there, flapping over the dead bird on the sidewalk, with her beak open. She screamed and screamed down at her baby. The baby is dead, I wanted to tell her. There’s nothing you can do. I moved the baby bird with my toe so the alive bird could see that the dead bird was dead and stop crying. The mom squawked even louder.
I whisper but it comes out like regular talking, “Why would we see a movie like this in IMAX 3D technology anyway?”
“So we can visualize our proximity to our planet’s death and feel her heat on our flesh,” Miss Tessa says in a loud angry whisper.
She lifts up her hands in her floaty hair. She scrunches it like I’m a moron who should know this already. There’s hair in her armpits. It’s all weird and red through my paper glasses. She didn’t have any armpit hair when she babysat me. White deodorant clumps balance at its ends. I wanna tell Matt but he’s sitting right next to her.
Really close to her, actually, and the armrest between them is lifted. There’s a carton of popcorn on Matt’s lap but it’s floating. Tilting toward his stomach like it’s on a hill and I look past the popcorn and I see Matt’s arm. Then I see his wrist and when he moves it leaves tracks of itself in the air. Like wolf prints, when the ground’s hard and snowy.
I can’t see Matt’s hand cause it’s up Miss Tessa’s Soffes. She wore those same shorts when she watched me, the night my dad visited. I was telling my dad all about beetles and my new friend Jean Paul II. We started playing Hungry Hungry Hippos and after twenty minutes he got bored and called Miss Tessa. Before he left he kept whispering about how those shorts were too short and were real inappropriate. I watched him look at Miss Tessa and her Soffe shorts. His lips got all wet.
I twist in my big IMAX seat so I can see Jean Paul II. He’s looking at Matt and Miss Tessa. Then he looks at me, and his face is red cause of the glasses but I imagine it’s really green. Either way he looks nauseous. Al Gore says how much time we’ve got left and I don’t believe him. Me and Jean Paul II look at each other. Through my plastic lenses his face shimmies like an oil slick. It’s more and less time than I’ve ever wanted.
The IMAX 3D technology hovers these sad looking birds right in front of my face. I pull down the glasses. I can see Matt and Miss Tessa really clear. I can see in real focus the sick-sad look on Jean Paul II’s face. I put my paper glasses on and the sad birds are still there and it’s not any better. I scrunch up my eyes and try counting.
If Matt saw that dead baby bird on the sidewalk with its squawking mom he would step on it. It would all be over, and it would be better, cause the mom would see that her baby was really dead. She wouldn’t have to watch me toeing around its little body. I sit there and scrunch my eyes and try to make my face nothing. I vomit. Yellow popcorn clumps and clear dripping Fanta splatter like mostly-crushed insects on the back of Mrs. K’s seat. On the back of Mrs. K’s frizzy head.
***
In eight years Jean Paul II will play the piano. At the front of the church, looking out at the boys with scraggly face hair and nervous pimples. Wearing too-big suits that they took from their fathers. He’ll look out at girls hiding behind messy hair, picking their tights, huddling together on the pews trying to make their small bodies smaller. My mom’s hair will be messiest and lots of people will touch her. Moss will stare down at his knuckles and they’ll be bruised from the wall that he hit. He won’t look at the coffin that I’ll be in. He’ll stare at the coffins tattooed on his knuckles. He’ll want to crawl up inside them. Matt’s eyes will be bright red and shot and he won’t be able to sit straight. And while Jean Paul II sits there on the bench playing, he’ll look out at my screaming mother and he’ll bang the keys louder. He’ll wish he could just shut her up.
***
I sit on the curb outside the mall. Dead ants are lit blue from the awning. Jean Paul II follows me out and asks if I need anything. I need his cellphone. Jean Paul II sits and waits with me for a bit. We stare straight ahead and he swears he sees a falcon. Perched on the gray skinny trees across the lot. I pretend I believe him.
Then Jean Paul II goes inside cause we don’t want Mrs. K to come looking. I sit by myself. I take the orange tube out from my hoodie. I roll it up and down the side of my face. I hear its beady sound. My head spins and I close my eyes and I count. I know my mom will be here any minute. I know she’ll come fast. I’ll hear all the birds while they sing, and my mom will pull up, and she’ll yell “Jakey!” through her open window.
About the Author:
Maeve Barry is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can read more of her stories at maeve-barry.com.
Illustrations by Jake Longstreth (@streth)
First illustration: The Galleria, 2021, 16x20”, oil on paper
Second illustration: Strip Mall Karate, 2009, 36x36”, acrylic on canvas
