Don't Touch (2 page)

Mandy never knew about my “games”: See if you can hold your breath as we take the next curve or the car will fly out into nothing; try not to blink while you're looking at Mom or she might get cancer and die. Touch another person's skin and Dad will never come home.

The danger
feels
even bigger than that. Touch another person's skin and Dad will
evaporate.
We'll never see him again. Mom will die of a broken heart. I'll have panic attacks, a complete and total breakdown, and get carted away to a hospital for crazy people. My brother will hate me forever and ever for failing him.

And I will be alone.

Every little thing in this world that has fallen apart will stay broken.

It's a lot, I know.

Dad would tell me to stop catastrophizing. Mom would tell me to drink some herbal tea.

There's a name for these imaginings: magical thinking. It almost sounds nice, but it isn't. The weirdest part is that I
know
my stupid games shouldn't have an effect on real life. But when I try to stop, the doubt creeps in—what if it
does
matter?

Dad left in June. I haven't touched a single person since.

“You okay?” Mandy asks.

“What? Yeah, I'm fine.” I force a smile.

Mandy squints at the freshmen. “Let's find someplace more private.”

Birmingham Arts Academy sits on the long ridge of Red Mountain, overlooking the city. Mandy leads me across the drive, past a row of flowering hydrangeas to the sloping woods. We're in the foothills of the Appalachians; I should be used to steep hills, but it makes me anxious to see the tops of trees angling downward so sharply.

Luckily, there are steps, a small amphitheater built into the side of the hill. If we sit on the bottom round of seats, we can't be seen from the courtyard.

The woods seem to close around us, a tangle of light-dappled leaves, mossy bark, and climbing vines. It reminds me of how Mandy and I used to build hideouts in the woods behind my house.

Mandy leaves space between us. My skin doesn't feel so
on edge
if I have room to maneuver, but the way Mandy keeps her distance makes me sad, too.

“I'm glad I got you,” I say.

Mandy nods without looking at me. “Sorry I was late. Boy drama.”

Always, with Mandy.

“What happened?”

She makes eye contact, so briefly, like she's checking if it's okay to share. Then, just as fast, she looks away, through the trees toward downtown.

“Nothing worth talking about.”

We used to tell each other everything.

Mandy lights a cigarette.

“Does your mom know you smoke?” I ask.

“Where do you think I got the cigarettes?” She absorbs my surprise with a flat smile and goes on, “She's convinced that it helps with my weight.” She blows out a long stream of smoke, and I turn my head.

The sound of a slamming car door makes me jump. Mandy holds the cigarette low between her legs in a practiced way and twists over her shoulder to check the tree line. Getting caught might make me the first person in the history of the academy to get expelled at orientation. I want to grab the cigarette, grind it out on the seat between us, and bury it under a mountain of leaves, but Mandy just waits. No one comes.

“I was sorry to hear about your dad,” Mandy says, picking up a shiny yellow leaf from the amphitheater's stage and twirling it by the stem. Her eyes stay on the leaf as if it holds more interest than my reaction, but I know better.

My mom must have told hers, and that makes it more real somehow, that other people know. I pretend I don't mind. I want Mandy to be my friend again. It's supposed to be okay for your friends to know what's going on with you.

“They're just trying it out,” I say. “It's not like they're getting divorced.”

Not yet.

I feel like I have to defend Dad. “One of his mentors from the University of Virginia wants his input on a study. It's a big honor. Might be really good for his career. But you know, it's temporary.”

Mandy nods, but she still looks pitying.

“Or we might all move there,” I say.

“Your mom would never leave Birmingham,” she says. “Her whole life is here.”

“She went away for college.”

That's how Mom and Dad met. But Mandy knows my mom almost as well as I do, and I'm pretty sure she's right. When my parents moved here, Mom bought two rocking chairs for the back porch. When things were good, they would sit out there to watch the sun set behind the woods, have a drink, and chat. Mom always said she hoped that was how they'd spend their “twilight years”—in those chairs, side by side.

I don't want to leave Birmingham either, especially now that I'm at the academy. I want us all to stay happy in our same house, for Mom to get her “twilight years” wish. It seems like such a simple, small thing to ask.

Mandy goes back to twirling her leaf.

“Is your dad so pissed you're going here?” she asks.

I shrug.

My parents fought about the academy—a lot. They fought about other things, but there was that one night in March . . . Mom had let me audition for the academy in secret, and when Dad found out—that was brutal.

Months later, when Dad said he had to go, Mom told him, “If you're leaving, you don't get to argue with me about Caddie's school,” and I guess he agreed. I still worry he'll hold it against me—that even if he does come back, things will never be the same.

But I can't say that to Mandy.

“Do you still take dance?” I say. Friends ask each other things.

She purses her lips like she swallowed something nasty. “On the weekends. Mom thinks the studio's program is better. But here, I just do acting. She's got me taking voice lessons too. I'm supposed to be a triple threat.”

“What's that?”

She smiles at my ignorance, not in a mean way, but it's a reminder of how much more time she's had in this world. “It means you act, sing, and dance. You have to be a triple threat to be on Broadway or do regional theater even and have a career. It's all musicals. . . . Here, watch me do a smoke ring.”

The smoke comes out a shapeless mess and Mandy laughs at herself. “God, Caddie, I don't even like musicals.” She inhales, then talks through her exhale. “They say movies are all waiting around, but I still think it'd be cool.” Her eyes go misty.

“So go be in a movie. Tell your mom she can be her own triple threat.”

Mandy laughs. I made Mandy laugh.

“I'm scared I don't have the look for it.”

I've never known Mandy to be scared of anything, but I like her for saying it. “You're the best-looking person I know.”

She laughs again. “No,” she says. “I mean, even if I look all right here—and I think I look all right—this is Birmingham. We're tiny.”

I follow her eyes to the city proper, just visible through the tree cover. Our tallest buildings hardly scrape the sky, but they form a decent-sized grid stretching north and south of the train tracks. Most cities form around water, a lake or a river, an ocean port, but Birmingham's river was a railroad.

On the edges of the city are the smokestacks and furnaces. Now, a lot of these have been shut down. Graffiti artists have outdone themselves tagging the highest pipes. At least they chose good colors, jewel tones that complement the rust.

Most of what people call Birmingham is miles and miles of little towns with names that play on nature words: “ridge” and “valley,” “crest” and “dale,” plenty of “red” for the iron. Toss in “Cahaba” and “Cherokee,” the occasional “English” or “Avon,” and you've got it covered.

Up here in Redmont Park over Avondale, the cicadas sing louder than the downtown traffic.

Mandy's been still for a long time, but it doesn't feel wrong being quiet with her. Then she looks to me. “Caddie, why did we stop being friends?”

She doesn't seem worried by what I might say. It's a fact that we're no longer friends, and she says it like that, no emotion attached.

“I stopped taking dance; we went to different schools . . .”

We both know there's more to it than that, but Mandy doesn't contradict me.

I think
I
might have wrecked it with Mandy. I was jealous when she got the academy and
I
got panic attacks, afraid of her seeing how jealous I was and how strange I'd become.

Mandy's stopped twirling the leaf, and she studies me like she's making a decision.

“You're going to like the theater people,” she tells me, and I feel like I've passed a test.

She holds her leaf out to me, but if I take it, our fingers will touch. I wave it away like she's handing me a milkshake and I'm watching my weight. I'm worried I failed that one, but she says, “Let's go,” and the leaf falls down between us as we stand.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

As we climb the amphitheater's steps and cross the drive, words pour from Mandy faster than I can follow. “You have to get into
Hamlet
so we can go to Mountain Bard in January. We compete at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery. It's like the fifth largest one in the world and the only one that gets to fly the flag of the
Royal
Shakespeare Company. They've got this pond with
royal
swans—like
the queen's
swans—and they give out scholarships, and scouts from college programs come. We could share a room. I mean, we have to get screened, but we almost always win the whole thing. The only time I know of that we haven't made it was like five years ago when some kid got an asthma attack in the middle of playing Macbeth.”

“Poor guy.”

“Why? He wrecked it. I mean, take your medicine, right? Or don't be Macbeth if you maybe can't breathe all the way through a soliloquy.”

“But people are still talking about it?”

“You don't bother going to a fancy arts school to not be the best at your art. He messed it up for everyone.”

And years later, they still hate him for it. Getting cast in a small part sounds better with that in mind, but Ophelia's not small.

It feels unwise to confide in Mandy that I've been dreaming about Ophelia, that I have all her speeches memorized, that Ophelia has a place on the wall by my bed. I printed a copy of this painting by John Everett Millais. Ophelia is lying in a pool of water, surrounded by leaves, a crown of flowers in her hair. Her back is arched, palms open, eyes staring. She's either dying and doesn't know it, or she's letting herself die. Her dress hangs heavy around her legs. Soon it will drag her down.

Mandy's still talking. “. . . And you have to try for State Thespians in the spring. Last year we went international.”

“Whoa. Where does ‘international' mean?”

“Lincoln, Nebraska, but it still sounds like fun. We can go together!” She squeals—actually squeals—about the two of us going on a trip at the end of the school year because she thinks we might still be friends then.

“And this is the real coup,” she says. “The juniors have half a chance at some good parts because this year's seniors got into a whole drinking debacle in Lincoln, and they're banned from competing. Usually they
choose
the competition plays specifically
for
the seniors, but this year it's all up for grabs.”

As sad as that is for the seniors, it's good news for me. But that's not the best part. The best part is Mandy's excitement at having me here.

We tour the entire school: the giant lounge called the “green room,” the visual arts studios, the special classrooms for dance and orchestra, and Mandy's favorite—the rehearsal rooms, which are completely unsupervised.

“I hooked up with Drew for the first time in here,” she tells me. “He stood behind me, and I put one leg up on the barre while we were facing the mirror so I could see everything he was doing—totally hot.”

I smile, but my stomach twists. Even if I could touch and be touched, I'm not sure I could handle that.

Our tour ends at the academy's theater for a talk from the department head. The space has that rich, dark glow that old theaters give off. Deep red carpets in the aisles match the velvet curtains around the stage, which is black, shiny, and flat, a blank canvas to hold whatever a designer imagines. But what makes the space feel endless are the lights. A whole world could fit under those lights. I could walk and walk and never fall off the edge of that stage.

The department head is Nadia, no last name. She doesn't need one.

Nadia's tiny with a pixie cut to match. Her clothing's . . . unique. She wears a weird apron dress over skinny jeans and lime-green heels with rubber straps. She was at my audition, but I mistook her for a student assistant. She'd been knitting, not paying attention, I thought.

Standing center stage, she still looks like one of the stranger students, but there's nothing “assistant” about her. As small as she is, she fills the whole stage. She pushes the microphone out of the way. Her voice doesn't need help to reach us, reach into us.

“Acting is about action,” she says, “taking action on needs. What do you
need
more than anything else in this world? Need as much as you need air?”

My throat tightens, and I tuck my hands under my arms. I know what it means to need air.

I
need
to not feel that way. I
need
to not touch anyone.

That's not really a need, that's a fear, but maybe if I'm lucky, Nadia won't be able to tell the difference.

After Nadia's talk, Mandy and I head back to the junior corridor. Banks of multicolored lockers—lavender, mint, and rhubarb—hug the halls, and murals fill the spaces in between.