I used her old, black-fist plastic pick to get all the knots out of my hair. Then I switched to her hard-thistle brush to gather it all up into a sophisticated-enough Afro puff.
Mama Jane didn’t have any makeup, so I just had to let that part go. Still, when I pulled the yellow dress up over my shoulders, I thought I looked good. Real good. I could almost see what Mama Jane was talking about when she said I was cute.
But backstage at the club, Nicky looked me over and said, “What’s up with your makeup?”
“I don’t own any. I’m only—” He gave me a warning look, and I caught myself. “I’m only twenty-two.”
“Most girls I know been wearing makeup since they were thirteen.”
Same here. In fact, some of the girls at my school had started in with the lipstick and eye shadow when they were ten. But I wasn’t going to tell him that.
“You need makeup,” he said.
“Okay, I’ll buy it after I get my first paycheck,” I answered. It would have to be cheap makeup, I decided, since I still had to figure out an apartment. I only had two weeks until Mama Jane got back from her trip. And before she’d left, she had warned me that I probably wanted to find my own place before she returned and “things got funny.”
“Un-uh. You need to do it after this show. This is L.A. Only hippies don’t wear makeup here.”
“But I can’t really afford to spend money on makeup right now. I’ve got to find an apartment.”
“You need a apartment? I got a empty apartment above the club.”
“You do?”
Nicky pulled out his clipboard. “Yeah. Upstairs. It’s a studio. But it got a stove. You smoke?”
“No. Like I said, I’m only twenty-two.”
“A lot of teenagers smoke out here because all the actors do it.” Nicky pushed the curtain-open button for a second to see if it worked. Then he checked that off his list. “Don’t start smoking. It’s stupid.”
“I hadn’t planned on—”
“We’ll see how you do, and then we’ll revisit the apartment rental. Because if you fuck it up tonight . . .” He pushed the curtain-close button and made another check on the list. “Well, you know wards of the state don’t need they own apartments, right?”
Then he walked away.
We didn’t have foster care in Glass, but I figured it couldn’t be a good thing if Nicky kept on threatening me with it.
I hid in my dressing room, which was really just a large converted closet, and stared at myself in the vanity mirror. Unlike Cora’s vanity, this one had large lightbulbs all around the frame, so that every imperfection on my face was illuminated. The extra light made the small space hot, and I could feel the sweat around my temples and at the back of my neck.
I put wads of tissues under my pits, and squeezed my arms to my sides to make them stay. I looked ridiculous, but this dress had to last me a week.
It was hard not to feel small and alone at that moment. The optimism that had allowed me to truly believe that a guy like James Farrell could ever be interested in a girl like me had completely abandoned me. I wondered if life would always be out of control like this, if I would have to live in fear for the rest of my days, my heart in my throat, my body tensed and braced for what was to come. And most of all, I wondered if I’d always have to force myself to go against instinct and be brave.
The door opened, and I turned to see Leon standing there with his large hand on the knob. “You’re on in five,” he said.
. . .
I walked out onstage to the most sophisticated and diverse audience I had ever seen gathered in one room. There were white people and Latinos and blacks, all turned out in designer dresses and colorful suits. I had never seen anything like it. Even television didn’t have the level of diversity that a California nightspot had back then.