Maybe my stepbrother isn’t all that good of friends with Hoyt. Is that too much to wish for? Maybe Lee secretly hates him too, but can’t possibly dream of admitting it out loud. Lee isn’t all that high on the Spruce Football Food Chain. Saying the wrong thing to his teammates could get him eaten alive—socially or physically speaking. If I had to guess, that’s probably why he prefers totally avoiding me at school; he wouldn’t need to play both sides of the popularity fence that way.
I’d believe it more if he treated me more civilly here at home and less like an unwanted growth on his toe.
“So?” prompts my mother after finishing her story—and after we’re nearly finished with our plates, too. “How’d y’all’s first day back go? Senior year is going to be a breeze, huh?”
Lee gives me a challenging look, then puts on that friendly reserved-for-only-my-mom-Marly voice. “Yeah. I like my classes.”
“You think the football team’s gonna go all the way this year? All the way to state? Win the championship? Take home the cup?”
“I sure hope so,” he agrees mildly, chewing and nodding and staring at his plate while he does so—and apparently politely not correcting my mom in saying the trophy isn’t a cup.
Then she turns her gaze onto me, smiling warmly. “And how about your first day back, sweetie? You’ve been so quiet. I hope you’ve changed your mind about auditioning. I think it’d be just the most wonderful thing to see you on a stage this year.”
People always assume that’s the ultimate goal of anyone who does theatre: to be the glorified, spotlighted actor. It’s as if they willfully forget the dozens of people responsible for lighting up that actor, creating and painting the very set they stand on, and for guiding them through a complex set of educated choices and thought-work to render the very performance the audience sees.
But I set aside the tedious lecture and just give her a shrug. “I think I’d rather stick to painting the sets and the props. I like art.”
Stepdad Carl picks now to contribute to the discussion. “Some men aren’t made for the spotlight.” He takes a slurpy sip of beer—yes, beer during dinner, paired with spaghetti casserole—then sets it down with a smirk. “Some men are better for the menial work.”
I glare across the table at him. My grip tightens around my fork to the point of inducing palm sweat.
My mom, in her usual fashion, giggles at Carl’s words, as if deliberately missing their cruel intent. “I wish Spruce High hadn’t cut funding to the Arts. You had so much fun in that painting club. Oh! Why not start one of your own??” she suggests excitedly, like it’s the most brilliant idea. “Don’t you still have your easel? Isn’t it in the garage someplace? I never see you use it anymore to—”
“It’s in a landfill by now, I’d imagine,” I cut her off, then eye my stepdad, “ever since it was destroyed over the summer.”
Silence falls over the table. My mom stares at me cluelessly, the recent memory having eluded her. Is she just pretending not to recall the fateful day my stepdad “accidentally” drove his truck into the garage too deeply, crashing right into my easel and ruining not only over a hundred dollars’ worth of art supplies, but also two of my most precious, irreplaceable canvas paintings?
It’s a very difficult relationship we have here, Carl and I. And that difficulty is further exacerbated when I can’t tell genuine accidents from direct attempts to hurt me. Yes, even I can admit it might have been an accident. Maybe my stepdad drank too much and had a depth perception problem that night. But it supports the ongoing narrative that he despises everything about me, is embarrassed by my soft and arty side, and wishes I would just man up—like his big, manly son.
His big, manly son … who appears to be daintily picking a hair out of his casserole right now, an empty expression on his face.
“Oh.” My mom’s eyes retract. She puts on a smile. “Well, I … I guess I forgot about that. Seems like a long time ago. We ought to get you … a new … well …” Then she loses her train of thought as she quietly resumes eating, digging for the rest of her sentence in what remains of her casserole.
It’s just as well, because the dinner table conversation is dead after that. A moment later finds me in the kitchen rinsing off the plates and loading the dishwasher, alone. With the dog Winona and our other dog called Stepdad Carl on the couch watching TV and my mom donning an apron for her evening shift, I head out back. Lee is doing some kind of exercise in the yard, so I just circle around him on my way into the shed, armed with a can of Pringles and an ice-cold soda, ready to close up for the night.