The CHS drama people seemed similar to their Hillmont counterparts, but they were faux mod rather than faux hippie, and that’s a vast, vast improvement. It seems to me if you are going to express your individuality by adopting the costumes and accessories of a long-vanished youth subculture, you’re better off with mod. At least you get some cool-looking boots and short skirts out of the deal, and the music is a whole lot better.
Sam Hellerman stood in line for the keg, then came back and handed me this big red plastic cup of beer.
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“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Put cup to mouth at slight angle. Swallow contents.
Repeat,” he said, demonstrating. But he knew what I meant. He recommended trying to “act normal” (yeah right) and mentioned that there was a TV room downstairs if all else failed.
Then he went off to talk to some of those old friends who, for whatever reason, still felt they could afford to be seen talking to him.
Clearview really was Freedom.
The music on the stereo was all Small Faces and the Who and the Kinks and the Jam. Not too shabby. The mod thing was a bit much, though. There was a guy running around wearing a British flag as a cape, and several people were speaking in unconvincing English accents. They, and their hilarious asymmetrical haircuts, were trying too hard. But that’s the thing: trying at all is trying too hard. I granted them an indulgence on account of the fine, fine music and gave them absolution for their lapses in taste. I was in a generous mood.
I slouched around quietly, checking everything out, trying to stay away from situations that might erupt into a sudden ridicule/torture session and blow my cover.
Despite the civilizing influence of the unusually numer-ous drama people, there were a lot of these situations brew-ing. I mean: clumps of normal guys horsing around and asking each other “Who you lookin’ at, homo?” And gaggles of normal girls, any one of whom might suddenly decide it would be fun to put her arm around you and pretend to be hitting on you to see what you would do, with everyone laughing at you the whole time.
That is one of life’s most trying and irritating situations.
Sam Hellerman and I have given it a catchy name: the Make-out/Fake-out. I don’t know if it has a real name. The object of the game isn’t actually to make you think they’re sincere 67
and go for it, which no one would be stupid enough to think, but just to watch you squirm and see how you’ll try to get out of it. You can’t win. You might as well just bite down and break open the cyanide capsule concealed in your false front tooth. If you’ve got one of those. It was fresh in my mind because there had just recently been a Make-out/Fake-out attempt on my dignity during PE class, and I could still feel the pain of having no cyanide capsule to make it all go away.
The danger zones were easy to avoid, though. Steer clear of the schools of sharks and flesh-eating piranhas. Avoid the sirens. Drift toward the playful mod dolphins, who are so busy being entranced with their own wonderfulness that they don’t even notice your ungainly boat paddling in their midst. “It’s quite a lagoon you’ve got here,” I said, to no one in particular.
Eventually, I drifted into a little basement room down some stairs at the end of the hall. This was presumably the TV room Sam Hellerman had mentioned. It was quite dark, and almost totally empty. There was a turned-off TV and a sofa, and on the sofa was this girl. She was staring intently at a candle that was burning on top of the TV and holding the smoking stub of a joint in a mall head-shop roach clip. You know, with feathers dangling from it, and I think maybe a pentagram or an ankh.
She didn’t have a full-on mod costume, but I could tell she was one of the funky CHS drama people because she had a Maximum R & B T-shirt underneath a crazy-looking denim and—what? Yarn?—yeah, it was a yarn ’n’ denim jacket that looked homemade. She had on this black soft cap that looked kind of military. And these little black glasses. I was pretty sure she was older than me, a junior maybe. The Who shirt was tiny and didn’t go down all the way and her belly looked really good, what I could see of it. I mean really good.
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She waved me over and said, “I’m trying to make the candle go out with the power of my mind.”
I walked over, unsure of what to do. She said I should sit down and help her. Concentrate, she said. I sat down next to her and stared at the candle. It didn’t go out.
“You call yourself a hypnotizer?” she said after a while.
No. I’m quite certain I had never said I was a hypnotizer. I hadn’t said anything. Part of me was off in the corner thinking, Maybe these are my people? Eccentric and funny and weird with good taste in music and off-the- wall hobbies, I mean. Another part of me realized that I was so self-conscious that I wasn’t exactly radiating Good Eccentric around here. But the biggest part of me was just staring at her bare stomach, which was, like, the nicest thing I’d ever seen in person, though I was trying to do it kind of sideways, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She didn’t seem like she was in much of a noticing mood, to be honest.
She asked me if I wanted the roach. Now, the thing I said sounds really stupid and goofy, but I know from having watched people smoke pot all my life that it’s the thing you say. I still felt like a big ass saying it, though.
“I’m cool.”
Never in the history of the world had there been a less accurate statement.
She shrugged and popped the roach in her mouth—
reminding me, weirdly, of my mom—and grabbed my half-filled cup and drank it all in one long swallow.
“Fiona,” she said after a lengthy grimace. “I’m in drama.
I’m an actor and I also do costume. What’s your story?”
Wow, a female actor. Just like Mrs. Teneb. I guess she could tell my jumpy brain was mulling over the concept of the female actor, because she quickly added, in a slightly lecturing tone: “We don’t say actress. Everyone is an actor. It’s unisex.” Then she said, carefully, “Actress is diminutive.”
