Cast Party - Part I
“The signs were all there. By the spring of their freshman year Edie had joined student government, been invited to the junior-senior prom, and was wearing a C cup from Victoria’s Secret. Cat still had her braces and wasn’t allowed to wear thongs (Edie already had three). And while Edie printed her name, neatly, on the sign-up sheet, checking off an extra-curricular box, Cat, unknowingly, was finding her place in the world, a place that would take her further from the person she loved the most.”
Cat and Edie have been friends since birth, bonded to each other even as they began to transform in opposition in high school. Now seniors, they’re preparing to say goodbye to each other and the lives they’ve known in their small town in North Carolina, but the sands of their relationship are shifting beneath them. How well do they still fit together? What has what they want from each other changed as they’ve evolved?
“Cast Party” is at once tender and incisive. Gabi Stephens holds these characters with powerful narrative control, effortlessly dilating time to reach into the future that lies beyond the lives they’ve known on their school stage.
-Michael
There were two things Cat Hastings dreamed of as a little girl: the first was to be a star, and the second was to be loved, truly, wholly, deep-down loved by another person. And when Cat was in high school, there was no time of year she loved more than spring. Really—she loved it more than Christmas, Halloween, and the Fourth of July, more than all of them combined, because spring meant the school musical.
There wasn’t much she was good at that time in her life, in her own estimation. She was in AP literature, but got Cs in math, and didn’t get her driver’s license until the month before she left for college. She was holding on tight to that last little bit of baby fat and had never had a boyfriend (though she had gotten laid). But she was good in those musicals, good enough to think she could go to college for theater, and God, did she love being in them.
She loved the costumes and the makeup and the choreography. She loved telling freshmen to shut the fuck up while they were waiting in the wings. She loved standing in the wings, heart pounding in the shadows, just about to take that crucial step into the blinding light of a different world—a world where she was adored.
And for most of her life there was no one she loved more than her best friend Edie, who’d convinced her to audition for that first show their freshman year. The two girls had been friends since they were in diapers, before even. They’d met in utero while their mothers sat side by side in a creaky wooden church pew. Their older sisters were friends before them, but not like them. The girls were inseparable from the moment their mothers held their chubby, diapered bodies in front of one another, proud. They were meant for each other.
The two of them learned to sing together in the church choir. Edie cited the experience when cajoling Cat to audition for their first show.
“Come on, Kitty,” that’s what Edie decided to call Cat when they started high school, thought she could use the rebrand. “You should audition with me—you’re such a good little singer!”
Edie wanted to do the show to make herself more well-rounded for college applications (which she was of course already concerned with, while Cat hadn’t given it a single thought), but she didn’t want to do it alone. She often expressed her anxiety about being without Cat, how she needed her to feel comfortable, even as she grew to be quite popular. Cat didn’t always mind it, belonging to Edie in this way. There were places she certainly wouldn’t have been invited were she not a part of that package deal, but it wasn’t always a comfort to her either.
The two of them couldn’t have known then—two freshmen standing at the back entrance of the school auditorium where the audition sign up for Fiddler on The Roof was taped to the metal double doors—just how much they’d change over the course of the next four years.
The signs were all there. By the spring of their freshman year Edie had joined student government, been invited to the junior-senior prom, and was wearing a C cup from Victoria’s Secret. Cat still had her braces and wasn’t allowed to wear thongs (Edie already had three). And while Edie printed her name, neatly, on the sign-up sheet, checking off an extra-curricular box, Cat, unknowingly, was finding her place in the world, a place that would take her further from the person she loved the most.
*****
It wasn't until their senior year that Cat realized she might not want to belong to Edie anymore, that perhaps she’d outgrown her. Well, it wasn’t a realization so much as it was told to her by a newer friend. They were on the last leg of seventeen, in the little upstairs dressing room of their public school auditorium—the star dressing room, they called it—when Nick De La Cruz told her that everyone outgrows their first love at some point. It’s possible that neither of them realized what he was really saying, that Edie might have been more to Cat than just her oldest friend, but that understanding wouldn’t come until later, after the cloudiness of childhood had passed and they were on the other side of young adulthood’s growing pains.
They did Sweeney Todd that year—their last show as high school thespians—and it was cast party night, which was arguably Cat’s favorite part of being in a show. Adrenaline was high from the performance, and hormones raged with thoughts of sweaty bodies cooling off in someone's backyard pool, spin the bottle, and vodka in their plastic cups when the freshmen left. She almost missed the little basement dressing room where all the ensemble girls got ready. She could see them now, sitting cross-legged on the dank carpeted floor in front of a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, peeling off their strip lashes and brushing the hairspray out of their hair. It was always so hot in that room, full of a quivering sort of excitement, and when it was full with costumes and girls, being in it felt like a sort of belonging. But a chair upstairs was a coveted position, and as the only girl in her graduating class who was going to school for theatre, a part of Cat felt she was owed the spot.
Nick sat on the vanity, his back to the mirror and the big bulb lights behind him like a hot halo, while Cat attempted to untangle her hair from the two buns she’d tied them into to play Mrs. Lovett. After years of ensemble alto lines and supporting roles, the theater teacher, Mr. Funaro, had finally made her one of the girls upstairs. She was sharing the dressing room with Edie, who’d been cast as the much sought after Johanna, but Nick had taken up a sort of residence in the room as well. It happened organically. On the first night of dress rehearsals, he changed in the boys room as fast as he could and then scurried up the stairs to borrow an eyebrow pencil from Cat. He ended up sitting and talking with her while she did her makeup. By the time they opened, his bag sat under the vanity next to hers.
“Are you drinking tonight?” Nick asked. He’d put on an air of nonchalance, scrolling through his phone, instead of looking at Cat when she tried to meet his eyes.
“I can’t decide,” she said, fretting. She let the comb she was using to untangle her hair drop to the counter with a clatter. Maybe she would just leave her hair up. “I’m kinda worried about saving my voice for tomorrow.”
They had one last show to do, a matinee. It was famously low stakes, but Cat still wanted it to go well. She was nervous about what lay ahead of her in art and life—slipping through the cracks in a bigger talent pool, failing completely. She worried this might be her last chance to feel like a star. Nick was the one other senior going to school for theater, but he was going to a much fancier school than anywhere Cat had been accepted. He’d be in New York in the fall, at Syracuse University. “Where Taye Diggs went,” he always tagged on.
Their experiences at college auditions that fall revealed a chasm between the two friends that Cat wasn’t sure how to explain to Nick, whose mother had hired a coach for audition season. While he’d jetted around the country auditioning at all the best schools and getting accepted to several of them, Cat’s mom had filmed her singing in the room where she’d rehearsed for church choir and driven her across North Carolina a couple times for some in-person auditions. She had only barely been accepted to East Carolina—a state school that was closer to a swath of tobacco fields than the coast—helped by the recommendation of an older summer theater friend who attended the program.
She needed Nick. He would get to leave North Carolina before she did, and had promised she could come visit him, stay in his dorm, make friends with his friends.
Nick was naturally less concerned with the quality of the Sunday matinee. He was already over the high school theater scene, and its capricious ringleader, Mr. Funaro, who’d cast him as Adolfo Pirelli, who dies in the first act, instead of as Sweeney Todd, which Nick believed he deserved.
“Do you already have alcohol or…” Nick trailed off, his real question lingering.
“Uh, I think Edie was gonna get some for us,” Cat admitted.
Edie was still out in the auditorium lobby in her costume, taking pictures with her family. Her mother had come to the show that night, her sweet, sick mother on her second go round with breast cancer had insisted on seeing the Saturday night show. It was the best one, she insisted. Cat felt guilty that she hadn’t spent more time in the lobby with Edie’s mother, but she couldn’t bear to be around her like that. Something about her indomitable hope or the hollows under her eyes made Cat wonder what the point of trying was, and she wanted to live in the afterglow of her performance for just a little longer. She’d had to excuse herself but worried that Edie would be angry with her when she found her back in the dressing room with Nick. She could still sense her presence in the room with them; brown bobby pins strewn about the counter, and the green Vera Bradley duffle Edie’d had since she was twelve underneath it. And it smelled like her, Lady Speed Stick and vanilla.
“Oh,” Nick sighed, obviously disappointed. He and Edie had been fast friends when they first met during that freshman year production of Fiddler on the Roof, both of them beautiful and outgoing, quick on their feet. They matched. Cat had been jealous of the way they giggled together during rehearsals, tucked away in the wings, their hands cupped around each other’s ears—had they ever been laughing about her?
“Don’t worry, I’ll share with you, if she even ends up getting any,” Cat assured him, knowing full well there was no way Edie would get through the cast party without drinking. She had always been their source for illicit fun. Cat didn’t have the same resources or cash flow to supply them. Without Edie, Cat’s partying would have never extended past sleepover sipping of the shittier liquor her parents kept stocked for special-occasion cocktails, triple-sec and schnapps shots that reminded her of children’s cough medicine. Edie got them vodka.
“If she’ll let you,” Nick sighed, letting his cell phone drop into his lap.
“I’m sure she’ll share with you if you just ask.” Cat often pretended there was harmony between the three of them, even as she secretly loved that Nick thought of her as “better people” than Edie.
Nick and Edie’s friendship had been irreparably damaged when someone told Nick that Edie had called him “over the top” in the girls dressing room during rehearsals of Once Upon a Mattress their sophomore year. “Love him,” she’d said, “but he can be a little over the top sometimes. I can only take it in doses.”
“What did she mean by that?” he’d asked Cat at that year’s cast party, backing her into a proverbial (and literal) corner. She didn’t want to tell him. Telling him meant both ratting out Edie and hurting Nick’s feelings. But she could tell by his eyes, by the way his arms were folded so tightly across his chest, that he already knew what she’d meant by “over the top.”
Nick was the only out gay boy at their school. Surely there were more—queer people who would come out later in life, in college, or when they were financially independent of their parents—but Nick didn’t feel he had anywhere to hide. He couldn’t hold out for safety that way. The accusation had been both spat at and whispered about him since the third grade. Popular girls loved him, or acted like they did, and later he would say that he felt like he was one of those girls on good days. But there was always something to remind him that he didn’t fully belong. Edie was one of those reminders. They’d played at friendship afterwards (Edie never knew that Nick had heard what she’d said about him), but it was tense, surface level.
“Nothing’s free with her.” Nick raised an eyebrow. “You know that. I think I’ll just get my own.” He picked up his phone again and scrolled with intent. She knew he didn’t have anyone that would get alcohol for him, not anyone he wanted to talk to anyways. And she didn’t want him to have to talk to those men—older, like the men she talked to. He’d shown her some of the conversations he had with them on Grindr. They made her nervous, but she never let him know that. She didn’t want to seem unsupportive.
Cat was torn by her desires old and new—her childhood devotion to Edie and her new need to please Nick, who helped her feel more adult, more evolved, something she desperately wanted to be. They both knew there was so much more out there for them, beyond football tailgates and boys in wrinkled polo shirts. They needed there to be more. They needed space to let out the steam that built in their chests when the ginkgos bloomed, the both of them wanting so much, eaten up by desire they didn’t know what to do with.
They fit into each other’s lives with less effort than Cat had ever known in previous friendships, both understanding the other’s choice to pursue a life of performance. When Edie had asked Cat if she had a backup plan, a second-best sort of life should acting fall through—real estate, teaching, or retail management—she asked Nick what his was.
“Why would I have a backup plan?” he responded. “My only plan is to make it.”
He emboldened Cat, but Edie’s doubting voice was always in her head. She knew Cat too well, knew her family, their financial situation, knew she’d be fending for herself in any city she escaped to. She could almost see the specter of Edie behind her in the mirror, bringing her down from her post-show high, when Nick asked if she wanted to ride with him to the cast party.
“I don’t know,” she had to tell him. “I’m not sure what Edie wants to do.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked with an eye roll.
Cat knew what she wanted but was ashamed to say it. She didn’t want to spend the evening with her oldest friend, or the friend who understood her the best, but with a boy she wanted to have sex with.
Luke was a lanky baritone with a thick head of wavy black hair who played soccer in the fall and performed in the musical each spring. He’d started their sophomore year when Edie encouraged him to audition (nothing like a push from a pretty girl, an assertive girl). He’d always been a good singer, had done choir all four years, but had developed into a passable actor as well. Plus, he was tall and had an enviable jawline for his age. He was playing Sweeney Todd and, through the rehearsal process, Cat had fallen in love with him (she’d always had a thing for him). He was also, unfortunately, Edie’s ex-boyfriend.
Edie didn’t know—couldn’t know—that throughout the rehearsal process for their very last show together, Cat and Luke had been corresponding near constantly through Facebook Messenger. Cat had started it innocently enough, pretending she had some question or another about something that had happened in a rehearsal but it had quickly evolved into the two of them dumping their every thought onto the other, baring their souls at two or three in the morning. WYD, What’d you eat for dinner, Look what my cat just did, lol, Dude, I can’t wait to get out of this town, I’ve never felt pretty, I don’t know what I want to do with my life, What if I don’t get into school anywhere, I don’t know if I can trust someone again, My mother, My father, I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep. Sometimes I want to kiss you, But we can’t, I know.
She hadn’t expected how that first anxious message would blossom into what it was, a feeling that she’d known Luke his whole life, that he’d been witness to hers. Boys her age didn’t usually give her that kind of attention. They reserved it for girls like Edie.
But it made Cat nervous—how good it felt to keep something from Edie, to have something that was just her own. The closer she became with Luke, the less Edie owned some part of her. The two of them decided, together, that Edie didn’t need to know how close they’d become. Luke kept a professional, but friendly distance from Cat in rehearsals. She’d feel the whole time like she was vibrating next to him, so sure that people could see it. She could almost feel Edie’s eyes on them, like she knew that Luke was Cat’s now.
Nick blinked his eyes at Cat, waiting for a response about how she’d be getting to the party. After too long of a pause, he rolled his eyes at her and went back to scrolling through his phone. He still looked so young then with the fake mustache he wore for the show glued to his perfectly smooth face, the thick dark eyebrows he’d drawn on with that pencil he’d borrowed from Cat. And he was so thin. Boyish. It would be years until he filled out.
“I wonder if Luke needs a ride to the party,” Cat said, going back to work on her hair. She felt, urgently, that she needed to make herself pretty. “I didn’t see his car in the parking lot on my way in,” she ventured.
“Absolutely not. No ma’am.” Nick shook his head and frowned. “You know how I feel about him.”
When Cat had tried to tell Nick about her messages with Luke, in hopes he’d encourage her to take the romance outside of the realm of the internet, he’d scoffed. “That boy is gay,” he’d said, rolling his eyes. “You should see the way he primps in the dressing room. I’ve never seen someone comb their hair so much. He’s obsessed with himself.” There was also, according to Nick, a rumor from a secret, but trusted source about Luke and a friend from the Catholic high school down the road watching porn and touching themselves next to each other at a sleepover.
“Even if that was true, it doesn’t mean he’s gay,” Cat had decided then. She was shocked at how black and white Nick had been about it. Weren’t they supposed to be experimenting at this age?
Cat swiped a makeup wipe across her eyelid, revealing her pink skin underneath all that pale show makeup. “I should probably ride with Edie anyways. She asked me first, before the show.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t just assume you’d follow her like a good little duckling,” Nick said.
“No, she asked,” Cat sighed. Then more quietly, “I think she’s feeling sentimental about it being our last show together.” Edie would be going to Chapel Hill in the fall, where she’d be just three hours away from Cat, studying journalism. This was her last show for the foreseeable future, she’d told Cat.
“She doesn’t seem sentimental,” Nick said. He hopped off the vanity and sat in Edie’s chair. “Can I use one of those?” he asked, pointing to the blue pack of makeup wipes on the counter. Cat pulled one from the plastic package and handed it to him with a pleading look, big downturned eyes like a basset hound.
“What?” Nick bristled. “She’s being kind of a brat. You know I heard her complaining during dress rehearsals that she only really has two songs?”
“Didn’t you complain that you only have two songs?” Cat countered.
“Yes, but I am going to be a professional,” he said, “and we all know that I was robbed. Mr. Funaro only cast Luke as Sweeney, because he thinks he’s hot.”
They all suspected that Mr. Funaro, the theater teacher, was gay, even though the only evidence they had was that he was a forty-something bachelor who wore cardigans and owned a storage unit full of costumes. It wasn’t something he was open about. Their parents were all good, progressive people on paper, but they still lived in the south, Nick had pointed out to Cat.
Nick pulled off his fake mustache with one quick rip, leaving behind a patch of pink where it had been glued to his face. He looked at Cat with a certain sadness. It was his mouth that gave it away, she thought, so small and pink.
“Well, I guess I should get out of here,” he sighed.
“What? Why? Stay here with me while I get ready!” She grabbed his hand. She didn’t want to be alone when Edie came in. She was so full up with her secret about Luke, with guilt about not being more for Edie—for not being able to truly acknowledge what was happening to her mother. Cat felt that with just one look from Edie, everything she’d had been hiding from her friend would just tumble out.
“I’ve gotta get out of here before Miss Thing blows back in.” He raised his eyebrows and gave Cat an evil little smile.
“Edie doesn’t care if you’re in here. Stay!”
Nick looked at Cat like she was a child, which she unfortunately was and would be for many more years. He always knew more than she did—he saw more. He paid such close attention to everything. Cat could never understand how he knew so many people’s secrets, but she always imagined it’s what made him such a good actor. He was always listening, but he was also just a child then. He didn’t know how to carry the weight of all that knowledge, how to process all the mean and hurt he saw, all those things people worked so hard to hide.
“You know she doesn’t like me hanging around in y’all’s dressing room,” Nick said, looking at himself in the mirror. “And I don’t know that I, like, love being around her either.”
“She’s been through a lot,” Cat tried.
When her mother’s cancer had returned, Cat had noticed a shift in Edie, more drastic than the sadness and anxiety that had accompanied the first diagnosis. She was drinking more and eating less. Her ambition was dulled. Something in her had broken, and Cat could see that piece that was sharp and loose.
They’d all seen it that spring break when she’d cheated on Luke at a party. It was the reason they’d broken up—right before rehearsals started. Cat could still remember his face when he turned and saw Edie out on the deck making out with that private school boy. She and Luke were both in the kitchen getting another drink (a rare moment when they were alone together) when someone across the room yelled his name and the crowd of drunk faces parted so he could get a better view. He didn’t move to confront her, but silently left the party house, and walked the beach all night. Maybe that’s when she first fell in love with him, Cat thought—something about his sad, handsome face and his quiet strength. She wanted to follow him, but knew better. She went to Edie, who laughed when Cat told her that Luke had seen what happened. She was drunk. “It literally doesn’t matter,” she’d said. “Nothing matters, Kitty.”
“Oh boo hoo!” Nick cried. “Hurt people hurt people. Whatever. I get it, but it’s not a good excuse,” he said, digging through his bag. He sprayed himself with some cologne from a little blue bottle.
“I know. We’ve just been friends for a long time,” Cat said.
“I don’t know if she really is your friend,” Nick said, not looking at her.
“She is, though. I know her better than you do.” Cat secretly worried what Nick knew, if he’d heard Edie say something about her. Edie had seen parts of Cat no one else could know about.
“But I know you, and I think maybe you’ve just, like, outgrown her. Like, your lives are about to be really different next year,” Nick said.
Cat suddenly imagined what it would be like to be at Edie’s wedding, beautiful Edie, who was still a virgin at eighteen-years-old. She was surprised when she couldn’t also imagine herself in a white gown.
“I’ll see you at the party,” Nick said as he pulled his bag onto his shoulder, “and I’ll be in the lobby for a minute if you end up needing a ride.”
There was a knock at the door and Nick rolled his eyes. “You can just come in, Edie. It’s your dressing room. I’m leaving.”
“It’s Mr. Funaro,” said the voice from the other side. “Is everyone decent?”
“Come in!” Cat called.
The door cracked and Mr. Funaro’s massive head peeked around it. “You’re not who I was looking for,” he said to Nick, the expression in his wide eyes suddenly darker. “What are you doing in here? Cat honey, is he bothering you girls?”
“No, Mr. Funaro, he’s just—”
“I was just seeing if Cat needed a ride to the party on my way out,” Nick cut her off, “but I’m leaving.” He walked up to the door, but Mr. Funaro didn’t move out of his way. “Well, good night, Mr. Funaro,” Nick said as he stepped closer, his chest out.
“Good night, Nick,” said Mr. Funaro with a furrowed brow. He conceded to opening the door just enough for Nick to slip out into the hallway and his body came into view. He was a compact man with a barrel chest and a belly to match, but he still had a dancer’s legs. He often reminded his students of how many iterations of A Chorus Line he’d been in before he moved back home to take care of his mother and took up teaching. Summer stocks, dinner theaters, even once on a cruise ship. That little gold top hat was his claim to fame.
“Where’s our little Edie?” he asked Cat and his face brightened again. He only had a wisp of hair on the top of his head, but his skin was still incredible. His smile made Cat think that maybe, just maybe, he could have been famous once.
And like a cat who’s heard a can opener, Edie slipped past the stout man into the little dressing room. “Mr. Funaro, I was just looking for you,” she said with a hand on his shoulder. “This is from my parents.” She handed him a card and a single sunflower.
“Oh, thank you sweetie,” he said, tipping his chin down and smiling. Cat could tell he wanted to hug her, but he was always so careful about not touching students.
“I know all the parents will give you a big gift and a bunch of flowers tomorrow, but my mom just wanted to make sure she said a personal thank you since this is my last show and all.”
“Your last show with me, you mean,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“Mr. Funaro, you know I’m not going to school for theater.” She looked at Cat for the first time since she’d come into the room.
Edie’s plan had always been to become a journalist and move to New York with Cat. She thought it was a perfect idea—she could work at a newspaper or a magazine and Cat could audition. They’d be roommates and wear high heels and drink cocktails and live glamorously. As she thought about what Nick had said, it occurred to Cat for the first time that that particular dream would probably never come to fruition. Just like she couldn’t imagine herself getting married, she couldn’t imagine Edie in New York. She couldn’t imagine them liking the same people, or neighborhoods, couldn’t see Edie tromping, day after day, through the dirt and the noise.
They’d visited the city together, once, after their sophomore year of high school. Edie’s mother had brought them, footed the bill, and planned a picturesque trip. Edie had wanted to have tea at the Plaza and see Wicked, shop on Fifth Avenue, so that’s what they had done. It wasn’t what Cat would have chosen, but she smiled and was grateful. Without Edie and her mother, she wouldn’t have even gotten close to the part of the city she wanted to be a part of.
“I know, I know,” Mr. Funaro surrendered. He was always telling Edie what a good little actress she was, encouraging her to pursue the art further. “You know I think you should skip school all together and just go to New York. Start auditioning.” He threw his little hands up.
As he’d coached Cat that fall, through monologues and songs for her college auditions, Mr. Funaro had never said anything like this. What had he told her? That she was funny, that she should lean into character material.
She was not beautiful enough to be an ingénue, she thought, to be seen and adored in the way that she so desperately wanted to be in her own life. It was just a reality of the industry.
Cat watched Edie giggle and wave goodbye to Mr. Funaro, Miss America smile spread across her face, and wondered what she could change about herself that might make an audience believe she was lovable.
Oh, but Edie loved her, Cat thought as her friend’s eyes locked with her own. When the door closed, Edie kneeled behind her chair and wrapped her arms around Cat’s shoulders, pressing their cheeks together. They were truly alone for the first time that night.
Cat looked at their faces in the mirror. Her nose was longer than Edie’s, and maybe her eyes were closer together. She had a bigger body, but no tits, which Edie did have. She was doomed, she thought. She dreaded the moment when Edie would let go.
She wanted to feel close to her, yes, but letting go also meant Edie getting undressed, slipping on whatever little something she planned to wear to the cast party. When Cat saw Edie’s body, she couldn't help but notice her own—couldn’t help but notice Edie’s. She looked grown up already, while Cat was left feeling chubby in all the wrong places, wondering when she would finally look the way she’d imagined she would when she was a little girl, like one of the women she saw on TV.
“I can’t believe tomorrow is our last show together, Kitty,” Edie said, squeezing Cat tighter.
Cat watched Edie’s eyes scan the vanity, then peek underneath. “Is Nick already gone?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, thank God.” She sighed and gave Cat one last squeeze.
“He’s still in the lobby if we need a ride. I didn’t know if you’d want someone else to drive, if you were drinking, so, um…”
Edie’s gaze had turned away from her friend. She was focused now, getting out of the little sailor outfit that was her final costume, performing some business with a clothes hanger. “I’ll probably need a minute to get ready, so maybe he should go ahead and go,” she said. She was only in a bra and underwear now, beads of sweat still on her lower back from the wool sailor pants. When she was done, she sat down like that, half-naked, in the folding chair at her vanity station, leaning her bare shoulders against the cool gray of the metal chair, and closed her eyes.
“Do you want me to wait for you?” Cat asked.
“I don’t know, Kitty,” Edie sighed. “I miss you. I’d like to actually hang out with you before this show ends.” It was so easy for her to ask for what she wanted, Cat thought. Edie started on the pin curls that had been hidden under her sailor hat, pulling out bobby pins and tossing them onto the vanity with the others, her collection growing.
“We’ve been together every day. How could you miss me?” Cat asked with a nervous little laugh.
“I don’t know,” she sighed and tipped her head back to shake out her hair. “You seem distant or something. You’ve been with Nick a lot.”
Cat wasn’t sure what to focus on—Edie’s fingers in her dark brown curls, just like her mother’s, or her smooth, open throat turned towards the light.
“Do you not like Nick?” Cat asked. Even though she thought she knew the answer, she’d never gotten Edie to be honest about it.
“I like Nick fine,” she said, folding over herself to dig through her bag. She pulled out a white string bikini and a blue, cotton floral babydoll dress, throwaway clothes that she would still somehow like a supermodel in. Cat couldn’t think about her legs, the length of them, and she still didn’t know what to do with her hair. She’d managed to comb it out, but it was now just a frizzy mess, still somehow greasy at the root.
“Can you braid my hair?” she asked Edie quietly.
“Of course, Kitty.” Edie dropped her clothes on the counter and grabbed Cat’s comb. “Do you want one or two?”
Cat closed her eyes as her friend set to work sectioning her hair, the scrape of the comb’s teeth and the scratch of Edie’s fingertips lulling her into a trance. She realized she was tired.
“Are you mad at me?” she asked Edie, her eyes still closed. Her heart caught in her throat and she could feel her eyes well up. She hated that Edie had this effect on her.
Edie tied an elastic around the second braid and sat down next to Cat.
“I’m not mad at you. I just don’t want you to like him more than me.”
It felt good to hear—a reminder that Edie belonged to Cat the same way Cat belonged to her, that the flow of Cat’s affections mattered in the world outside of her chest. It always surprised her that it could happen that fast, that coming together. Cat wondered if anyone else would ever need her that way.
“I could never like anyone more. I love you most. Forever,” Cat told her. She scooted her chair closer and wrapped her arms around Edie’s neck. The skin on her back was still cool from leaning against the metal folding chair.
“I love you most,” Edie said, tucking her chin into Cat’s neck. “I’m gonna miss you so much next year.”
“I’m gonna miss you, too.”
“Can I tell you something?” Edie asked. She pulled away but kept her hands on Cat’s shoulders. Cat nodded.
“I’m thinking about apologizing to Luke tonight,” Edie said. The change in subject came so fast that Cat felt, suddenly, like she might be sick.
“He just, like, came up to my mom after the show and talked with her for so long—you know his little brother had leukemia when we were younger, right?”
Cat did know. They’d talked about it in some of their many Facebook messages, which now that Cat thought about it, had become more sparse in the last couple of weeks of dress rehearsals and performances. Did Luke have Edie on the brain, too? Was he falling for her again, as he watched her trill on about wanting to be free night after night, her boobs pushed up to high heaven in her corseted first act dress?
“I think I remember that,” Cat said. “I’d forgotten, but yeah, I remember that happening in, like, middle school, right?”
“Yeah, so anyways, he talked with my mom for a really long time—told her how grateful he was for her, even though things didn’t end super well between us. And I didn’t even realize he’d gone up to her, I was across the lobby talking to Mr. Arrington about the AP Chemistry exam.”
“Oh, wow.” Cat worried that Edie was commenting on the brevity of her own interaction with Edie’s mother by telling this story.
“Yeah, he just spent time with her because he wanted to. She was, like, really touched by it. He’s a good person. I think maybe I owe him an apology. We never really talked again after spring break. I never got to tell him that I wasn’t myself when that happened, but seeing him with my mom tonight… I think he might understand.” She had the look in her eye that she got when she wanted to win, to score the highest on a test, or get the choir solo—far off, but focused—and it was rare for her not to get her way.
“Oh,” Cat started.
“What’s wrong? You think it’s a bad idea?” Edie asked, grabbing Cat’s knee.
“No, I just—” she wanted to tell Edie that maybe Luke wasn’t as good as she thought he was, that his being polite didn’t mean he still loved her, but Cat’s phone dinged, thankfully, cutting her off. She picked it up off the counter. “It’s Nick. He’s just checking again to see if we need a ride before he leaves.”
Cat watched something shift in Edie, the sharp thing showing itself. It came just as quickly as love did. She got up and stripped off her sweaty underwear and bra, started tying the strings on her bikini at each hip bone.
“If you’re ready, you should just go with Nick,” Edie said.
Cat looked at herself in the mirror again. With her hair pulled away from her face, she looked too red, too round, but her bag was packed, and she was dressed. The fat from her boob, or her armpit (she couldn’t tell what it belonged to) hung over the smocked elastic of the strapless Target dress she’d begged her mom to buy her for the cast party. It all seemed silly now.
“I can wait if you want me to. Maybe Nick can wait and we can all ride together,” Cat tried.
“No, no,” Edie brushed her off. “You go ahead. Maybe I’ll catch Luke on the way out and get things over with before the party. It might be less awkward that way.”
Cat did not like this idea.
“I’ll see you there, Kitty,” Edie said matter-of-factly.
Cat trudged off to find Nick.
To be continued…
Gabi Stephens is a former actress who lives on the North Carolina coast, where she got her MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and served as the designer of Chautauqua literary journal. Her story, "Where I'm Supposed to Be," was a finalist for the Doris Betts Fiction prize and she has publications in the North Carolina Literary Review and Strange Hymnal. She is currently a waitress at work on a novel.
Follow her on Instagram and read more of her work here.