Elliot Allagash (20 page)

I sat at the foot of my bed and took out my notebook. In just a couple of weeks, my time at Glendale would finally be over, and I’d be able to incinerate the entire sordid volume. Feeling nostalgic, I flipped back to the very first page:

I skipped to the last page of the book and wrote down my last few reminders.

It was a relief when I found Elliot’s wax-sealed letter, planted (somehow) inside my locker. I
had
said some cruel things. And even though I was glad to have stuck up for myself, I couldn’t help but feel guilty about what I’d said. Still, I must have been somewhat in the right; otherwise, there’s no way Elliot would have forgiven
me. There was a new tone in his note, something almost like respect.

My mother knocked softly on my door.

“Seymour? If you’re hungry, there’s dinner.”

“Okay.”

“Are you going to join us?” she asked.

“Just give me a minute,” I said.

I flipped through the pages, marveling at the volume of frenzied, scribbled text.

“I’m almost done.”

• • •

I was standing by my locker, trying to smooth the knot in my necktie, when Jessica sidled up next to me.

“I heard you’re going to be on TV,” she said. “Is it true?”

“Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “It’s going around.”

I nodded. Elliot had probably leaked the rumor on my behalf.

“What are you going on for?” she asked.

What was I going on for. It was a good question. If I was going to live more independently and rely less on Elliot’s influence, why not start now? I pictured James waiting downstairs, robotically scanning the lobby for my face. And I pictured Ashley on the roof, checking her watch and waiting for the bell. I still hadn’t apologized to her. Wasn’t the choice obvious?

“I think it’s pretty cool,” Jessica said. “I mean,
television.”

She arched her back against my locker and the bottom of her shirt inched up, revealing her bejeweled belly button. I was
putting a book away and her light-brown hair fell gently over my fingers.

“It’s exciting,” she said.

“Oh…well…you know. It’s no big deal.”

Ashley wouldn’t care if I skipped one day. I could apologize some other time. I smiled at Jessica and headed for the lobby.

“Break a leg,” she said.

• • •

Little Miracles
was hosted by a married couple named Mike and Suzie. It had started as a segment at the end of the news but had gotten so popular that eventually the network had no choice but to make a full show of it. The first segment was usually devoted to a person who had accomplished something unusual, like a housewife who had invented a new kind of sponge, or an old person who had climbed a mountain. In the second segment, Mike and Suzie found somebody who was poor or sick and gave them something they needed in order to survive, like expensive medicine, or a new roof for their house. In the last segment, they gave stuff away to the audience. It was usually makeup, since their sponsor was a cosmetics company (owned, of course, by Allagash Industries).

I had never been interviewed before, for any reason. But I wasn’t particularly nervous. If I could handle four years of Elliot Allagash, I reasoned, I could handle thirty minutes of anything.

• • •

It was the first time I had ever ridden in Elliot’s limo without Elliot. I was proud that I had stood my ground and convinced him to keep his distance. But it felt awkward to ride alone with James. The truth was, in four years we had never actually had a real conversation. Halfway to Times Square, I decided to reach out. After all, it could be my last chance.

“Must be a pretty fun job,” I said, “traveling around with the Allagashes.”

James didn’t respond, but he looked at me in the rearview mirror. His eyes were craterous, black, dead. I decided not to ask him any more questions.

When we got to the studio he stated my name to a woman with a clipboard. I tried to thank him for driving me, but by the time I turned around he was gone.

The lady led me into a small, green room and sat me down in front of a mirror, framed with light bulbs. There was a gigantic fruit basket on the table, with a card stapled to it that read
SEYMOUR HERSON
. I hadn’t had lunch yet, and I was about to unwrap the cellophane when another woman came in to put makeup on my face.

“Don’t eat anything,” she said, when she was finished dabbing me with powder. “You’ll mess it up.”

Both women left, and I sat for a while staring at the fruit and nuts and chocolate.

There was a knock on the door, and Mike strolled into the room. He was wearing a bib and his face was caked with a layer of pink makeup.

“Don’t you fucking tell me this,” he said. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

I panicked for a moment, until I realized that he was talking into a headset phone.

“Sorry,” he whispered to me. “I have to deal with this.”

He looked older than he did on television, and his voice wasn’t as gentle.

“Fuck you,” he was saying. “No, no—you can’t book another retard. We’ve already had two this month.”

He rolled his eyes at me apologetically.

“Down’s? Light or full-blown? Okay, fine.”

He took off his phone and removed a stack of note cards from his pocket.

“Seymour Herstein!” he said.

“Herson,” I said.

“Fine,” he said. “So, I give a signal, you come out, we ask a few questions, and you answer them. It doesn’t matter what you say—Suzie’s going to interrupt anyway. But you have to smile. You got that? Here, let me see you smile.”

I smiled.

He leaned back and squinted at me for a moment.

“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Just keep doing that until the charity segment. When that starts, make sure to frown. Like this.”

He frowned.

“Who’s coming out after me?” I asked.

“Some French guy with heart problems.”

“What’s his name?”

He shrugged.

“I should really have learned it by now. He’s on all the time.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, they keep patching him up, and he keeps falling apart. We’ve gotten nine segments out of him in three years. He’s the gift that keeps on giving. Here, let me see your frown.”

I frowned.

“Not bad. Okay, then you smile again at the end, during the makeup giveaway. So it’s smile, frown, smile. Got it?”

I nodded awkwardly.

“Holy shit,” he said, flipping through his note cards. “You’re some ambitious kid!”

He laughed.

“Well, congratulations,” he said. “You made it.”

• • •

The studio was smaller than I had pictured—just five or ten rows of seats. And when the woman with the clipboard took me backstage, I actually felt relieved. The Glendale auditorium had more than forty rows, plus a balcony, and I had been on that stage plenty of times.

But then I noticed the cameras. There were three of them: one on the left, one on the right, and one in the middle. They were all aimed at the stage, like three monstrous eyes.

“Our first guest is a painter, musician and amateur scientist…”

In commercials for
Little Miracles
, the announcer said, “Find out why a million New Yorkers wake up each day with Mike and Suzie.” A million New Yorkers. That was a lot of people.

“…a
linguist
, a community
activist…
”

If the Knicks sold out Madison Square Garden, it meant 20,000 New Yorkers had shown up to the arena. Going onstage would be like visiting
fifty
Madison Square Gardens, each one packed to the brim.

“…and he’s not even old enough to vote!”

The lady with the clipboard shoved me on the shoulder, and I wandered out onto the stage. The lights were so bright, I couldn’t see the audience.

Suzie shook my hand and handed me a coffee mug filled with water. She was wearing so much makeup it looked like a mask of clay and her teeth were the color of bone. Mike came over and patted me on the back, grinning broadly at the audience.

“Smile,”
he whispered, through gritted teeth.

I smiled.

Mike started to ask me questions about all of the things I had supposedly accomplished. I didn’t really know how to respond to most of them, but luckily, Suzie did most of the talking. At one point, Mike asked me why I wrote my lyrics in French, and I mumbled something about existentialism. I was terrified that Mike would ask me a follow-up question, like, “What is existentialism?” but after a brief pause, Suzie stood up and pointed at me.

“Do you have a date to the
prom?”

The audience burst into laughter, and Mike cut away to a commercial.

I couldn’t believe it: It was over. I stood up excitedly, but Mike clamped his hand on my shoulder.

“Where are you going, kid? There are still two segments left.”

I sat back down.

“Existentialism,”
he said. “My God. You must be rolling in high school pussy.”

He glared at Suzie with undisguised revulsion. Her eyes were closed, and two old men were dabbing at her face with cotton balls.

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” he said.

He turned toward the camera, grinning just before it clicked back on.

Suzie introduced the next guest and an elderly man walked out onto the stage. She described his heart condition, and it sounded horrible. He’d had nine operations and none of them had fully solved the problem. He still had attacks all the time, Suzie said, and if he didn’t take a pill right away, he would die. These pills were expensive, though, and he couldn’t afford to pay for them much longer. Mike handed him a novelty-sized check—enough for a lifetime supply of heart pills—and the audience applauded. The old man said something in French and Suzie made a joke about how she should have studied harder in high school. The audience laughed and Mike cut away to another commercial. There was only one segment left.

The French guy sat down next to me on the couch, awkwardly avoiding eye contact. His scalp was bald and spotted, and his face was almost cartoonishly wrinkled. For the first time all day, I felt truly guilty. For me, this TV appearance was a lark. For him, it was a matter of life and death. They’d shown footage of him and his wife walking hand in hand across their vineyard. His heart condition had made it impossible for him to work more than an
hour or two a day, and they would almost definitely have to sell their patch of land. We sat in silence as a couple of workers wheeled a mound of eyeliner pencils onto the stage.

The few times I had seen
Little Miracles
, I had been amazed by how excited the audience got during the third segment. Mike and Suzie gave away lipstick or mascara at the end of every single episode. But when Mike finished dealing with the needy person and Suzie unveiled that giant stack of merchandise, the crowd always lost it. Suzie would try to talk about the product—its softness, its smoothness—but you could barely hear her over the sounds of women screaming. Eventually, when Suzie was finished describing the product, Mike would give some kind of signal and the women would rush the stage, grabbing at the pile with both hands until it was gone.

If that’s how they responded to makeup, you can imagine how they’d react if something
truly
shocking were to happen.

Suzie started reading her lines off of the teleprompter, but before she had finished the first sentence, I heard a loud gasp. I looked over—and the French man was clutching the table with both hands.

“It’s his heart!” someone shouted. “He needs his pills!”

A woman in the audience screamed, and all of the cameramen started shouting into their walkie-talkies.

“Where are your pills?” Mike shouted. “Where are they?”

The old man grabbed Mike’s note card, scribbled something down and handed it back to him. Mike stared at it in horror.

“It’s French!”

Suzie pointed at me from across the room.

“Seymour! Seymour can translate!”

Mike handed me the card as the three cameras swiveled toward me.

“Kid, what’s he saying?”

The studio went silent as I looked down at the card. The old man had printed a few French words, underlining each one for emphasis. They were meaningless to me.

“Damn it, Seymour!” Mike shouted. “What does it say?”

The old man grabbed his heart, let out a scream, and collapsed onto the pile of eyeliners. The makeup scattered noisily across the stage.

“Does anybody speak French?” I shouted.

“Don’t
you?”
Suzie said.

I looked up at the camera, still holding the card in my hands.

“Jesus, kid,” Mike said, shaking his head in disgust.
“Jesus.”

The audience fled the studio as the old man writhed in agony on the ground. His arms were shaking spastically at his sides, but as soon as the cameraman yelled, “Cut,” they stopped. I took a step toward him. Somehow, his eyes looked familiar.

“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“James?”

He pressed a single finger to his lips.

“Jesus Christ!” I shouted.

He hopped to his feet and brushed himself off. The studio was so panicked, no one seemed to notice he had stood up. I could hear a siren in the distance. He took out his cell phone and pressed a single button.

“It’s done,” he said.

“Wait!” I said. “James—you need to explain this to the ambulance! People are going to think I—”