Cast Party - Part II
Last week, we met Cat, who’s wrapping up her final high school musical before heading off to college in the fall. She’s in the show with her best friend, Edie, but little does Edie know that Cat’s been talking to her ex-boyfriend, Luke, on Facebook through the whole production. Cat chats with her new friend Nick while they get ready for the cast party.
-Michael
Chloe’s parents had been hosting the cast party since the kids were sophomores. They had the perfect home—a mid-century split level over by the good mall, with a lower level living area that led straight to the pool deck through a wall of sliding glass doors. Chloe herself was a dedicated ensembleist and an only child. Her very thin, very beautiful stay-at-home mother, who often boasted about her own time as a dancer and a model (she’d done a couple catalogue spreads in the eighties) generously gave her time and money to the costuming effort each year. She was a nice enough woman, never raised much of a fuss, but as they’d gotten older, Cat realized just how much Chloe’s mother hated that her daughter was chubby. It made Cat wonder what Chloe’s mother thought about her own disappointing body.
Chloe never talked about it, but always got really excited to eat without her mother’s supervision. She was unendingly upbeat, a real clown type, and honestly could have made a career as a little comedienne. She had a big brassy voice like you wouldn’t believe could live inside a seventeen-year-old girl and was great at impressions. That year, she’d finally made her way out of the ensemble and was playing the Beggar Woman, Sweeney’s long-lost wife who's been so transformed physically and mentally he cannot recognize her. She is, in other words, ugly, and he kills her thinking she’s just collateral damage before finally realizing who she is.
Chloe’s mother sent her to school every day with salad and SlimFast, but she was otherwise a good woman. Involved. Cat’s mother had never helped Mr. Funaro with anything, and she’d never provided Cat’s friends with any sort of fun. She was a workaholic, in Cat’s father’s words. Chloe’s mom let them romp through her house in their wet bathing suits every spring and bought them dozens of pizzas to boot. Chloe would hang close to the table with the crudité.
Cat stood there with her, and with Nick, who she’d ended up riding with. They were without alcohol—not that Chloe cared—and there was no sign of Edie, or Luke, for that matter.
“Where is everybody?” Chloe groaned, almost stomping her foot in toddler-like protest. “We needed to start brown bags like yesterday.”
“Yeah, Cat, where’s Edie? I could use a drink,” Nick whispered over his shoulder. He had a death grip on his diet soda.
“But you already have a drink,” Chloe said, flustered.
Cat intervened, “It’s still early for brown bags isn’t it?”
Brown bags were the special awards written and given by the production’s seniors each year. There was one for every single member of the cast, and they were mostly a way to poke fun at each other. Nick and Cat had both received brown bags in the past about taking a public high school show too seriously. “The Method Actor” award they called it. During Crazy for You, their junior year, Edie got the “Romantic Lead,” which was a joke about how she made everyone fall in love with her, onstage and off.
“It’s almost ten o’clock!” Chloe flashed her phone. The background was a photo of the university she’d be attending in the fall to study elementary education.
“I’ll text Edie,” Cat said. The truth was she wanted a drink too. She cared about singing well the next day, but she’d grown anxious waiting for Edie and Luke. Were they together somewhere?
At that point in her life, alcohol was the only thing that made Cat feel like she could be sexy. She wanted to be tipsy enough to believe that someone might want to hook up with her, like Luke might want to. She imagined that while everyone was splashing in Chloe’s backyard pool, singing along to whatever music was blaring on the deck, Luke would lift her up on the bathroom counter and finally touch her. Or maybe everyone would be inside, doing karaoke, while they were hiding somewhere outside, in the dark, their breath hot and hushed.
Cat had been obsessed with sex forever. Sex on TV, in magazines, in shitty paperbacks. As a middle schooler, she’d devoured issue after issue of Cosmo before anyone had even kissed her. But eventually, someone finally did kiss her. It had felt for so long like an impossibility, especially in the shadow of Edie’s great beauty, that someone would want to, but it happened. At the end of their freshman year, she was kissed by an older boy—a graduating senior who was friends with one of the boys who was obsessed with Edie. He wanted to be around her all the time, at all hours of the night, but she wouldn’t go anywhere with him unless Cat could come too. He started bringing a friend, “So Cat doesn’t feel like a third wheel.”
“You’re the third wheel,” Edie had told him.
Edie would sleep over at Cat’s house (it was easier to sneak out of) and in the middle of the night they’d climb into a car with those boys and just drive. That’s when they’d started drinking, too. It made Cat feel so cool. No, she wasn’t being invited to the same parties Edie was. The boys in her grade didn’t think she was pretty—they barely even talked to her—but there she was, drinking beer in the back of someone’s grandpa’s hand-me-down Mercedes with two soon-to-be college boys, being kissed, braces and all, with the windows open, R&B blaring.
She learned how to give a blow job that summer. She remembered asking that boy over Facebook messenger what she could do to be better at it. She remembered he told her how. Faster, more tongue.
Edie had been curious about the whole process. She and the other boy had a recurring fight throughout the summer about her not doing the same for him. On one of those humid blurry nights after the girls had drunkenly crawled back into Cat’s bedroom window, they fell into bed with unbrushed teeth and Edie asked Cat what it was like.
“What is what like?” Cat asked.
“Giving a blow job.”
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “Kind of… hard?” They would laugh at stuff like this until their stomachs hurt those nights, making fun of those boys, how desperate they were. “It’s weird, I guess,” Cat continued. “Sorta gross, to be honest.”
“You don’t feel, like, powerful, or sexy when you do it?” Edie asked.
Cat paused, thinking. “Not really,” she decided.
“Then why do you do it?”
“I guess because he wants me to? It feels nice that he wants me, even if I don’t actually like doing it.”
“Hmm,” Edie rolled onto her back, away from Cat’s gaze, and stared at the ceiling. Above them, faded glow in the dark stars were still stuck from a time when Cat was scared of the dark. “I don’t think I could do something like that just because someone wanted me to.”
“Well you’re different. Everyone wants you. You don’t even have to try. It’s not like that for me.”
“Not everyone wants me.” Edie got quiet, thinking about something, then turned her head towards Cat’s. “Do you think I could taste it?” she asked.
“Taste what?”
“Taste how Ben tastes.”
“You mean you want to go down on him too?”
“No, ew. I mean, like if I just taste your mouth won’t I be able to taste him too?”
“Maybe?” Cat giggled. “I’m not sure that’s how it works.”
“Ugh, sure it is. Come here.” Edie wiggled closer and pressed her mouth against Cat’s. It felt wet at first, and childlike, but then Edie’s tongue pushed its way into Cat’s mouth. It wasn’t like kissing Ben, who always seemed hungry. It was more curious, exploratory. It felt different in Cat’s abdomen, like a pulling up of all the strings that kept her connected to earth. She was lighter. Edie pushed her pelvis against Cat’s leg, and Cat let her hands move around Edie’s body, under her pajama shirt and the waistband of her shorts. “Gross,” Edie scoffed, scooting away from Cat.
“W-what?”
“He tastes gross,” she’d said, and they’d never talked about the kiss again.
Edie never did anything but kiss the boy who was obsessed with her that summer. She still hadn’t by the time they were seniors. She’d barely even touched a boy between the legs. Cat had been touched, a hundred times over it felt like, mostly by boys older than she was.
“You’re kind of a slut,” Edie had said to her, when Cat told her she’d slept with a twenty-five-year-old she was in a community theater show with the summer after junior year.
“I’m just a sexual person,” Cat had replied, wanting to sound adult.
Sometimes Cat felt gross, because she wasn’t a virgin like Edie. But sometimes she felt like she had something over her, and even though she knew it wasn’t nice, she wanted that.
*****
Chloe decided to start brown bags without everybody there. “The freshmen will start getting picked up by their parents soon. Let’s go.” She motioned for Cat and Nick to follow her out onto the pool deck and yelled at all the other kids, “Lunch bags! Lunch bags on the deck in five, y’all!”
“Thank you five!” someone yelled back.
Chloe was the master of the lunch bag ceremony, because Chloe cared more about it than any of the rest of them. God bless her. That’s what Cat’s mother would say about Chloe and her mother. “The two of them just have so much energy,” she’d say. It was a lot for Cat’s mother—driving her around to college auditions, buying her expensive dance shoes and voice lessons Cat knew they couldn’t afford. The other mothers, especially, were a lot for her.
Cat thought Chloe and her mother were a lot, too, but they were the kind of people who kept things going. They needed to be busy, to be needed to feel valuable. She wondered if Chloe ever thought about sex, or if, secretly, she was some kind of fiend who was having sex all the time. It was a possibility—she played flute in the marching band, after all. But Cat couldn’t think of Chloe as someone who even thought about sex, and she realized it was because she didn’t think of Chloe as beautiful. She didn’t think Chloe was ugly—she had big brown eyes, a spray of freckles across her nose—but something about her made it wrong. The camisole she wore under v-neck lines, or the way her nails had been chewed to the nub. She was too childlike. It would be wrong for someone to touch her. Cat felt disgusted at the thought.
She looked down at her own flattish chest, as everyone gathered on the pool deck to get their awards. She ran her hand over the two French braids Edie had twisted her hair into. Was it disgusting to Edie that Cat had sex? Edie was so beautiful. Everyone wanted her, but no one was allowed to touch her. That’s how pretty girls were, Cat thought. They were allowed to reserve their bodies for someone perfect, while the rest of them got passed around like a bowl of mixed nuts. Did Cat’s being touched and touched and touched mean she wasn’t pretty? Was Luke disgusted, too, about the things she’d told him she’d done in their messages? She’d thought he’d seemed impressed, or even excited, but now she wasn’t sure.
“Finally!” Chloe’s voice shook Cat from her anxious thoughts. “We’ve been waiting on you Luke!”
There he was, finally, walking towards the group of seniors who’d gathered by the sliding glass doors, his hair still sprayed gray at the temples from the show. He was alone. Cat could exhale. She’d been imagining them together, Luke and Edie, in the back of his black Jeep Cherokee, their perfect bodies pressed together, sweaty. It made her jealous and horny but mostly confused.
Luke tucked in next to her and Cat thought her uterus would fall out when their shoulders brushed.
“Hey, great show tonight, dude,” he said, rubbing his elbow against hers.
“Hey, thanks. You too, that last scene felt really—” she replied.
“Okay, but where’s Edie,” Nick interrupted. He was desperate for malted liquor, as lonely people that age often are.
“Oh yeah,” Luke whispered to Cat. “You, uh, might want to go check on her.”
“What do you mean?” Cat asked.
Chloe looked like she was going to explode. “Can you please just go get her, so we can get this show on the road?”
“Woah,” Luke started, “Let’s not, uh, make a big deal out of it.” He turned to Cat. “She was just a little upset about something. She—well she’s out front.”
Cat was frozen.
“Well?” Chloe pleaded. “Go get her.”
“Y’all start without us,” Cat said, heading toward the gate. She watched Luke exhale and smile to himself but couldn’t read his demeanor. He looked relaxed all of a sudden. Relieved.
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.