“Okay, then. This way.” He hops off the side of the stage and heads down the aisle to the faculty lot. I hurry after him, slipping through the door. Outside, the wind grasps at my hair, clutching it. García stops by a tiny white two-door that looks about an inch from collapse. It makes a clunking sound as I slide in. Still, getting out of the wind is an instant relief.
“So, where am I headed?” García asks, reversing out of his spot.
“Left here. And then a right up at the light.” I glance around the car, which smells like Windex. The seats are bare, every inch clean and empty. A long row of CDs, stacked between the driver and passenger seats, are preserved in spotless plastic cases and alphabetized.
“Good rehearsal today, huh?” García says.
“Decent.”
He smiles. “You’re tough to impress. I’m guessing you want to do theater in college? Maybe a conservatory or something?”
“Yeah.”
García turns right. “Well, they’ll be lucky to have you.” We accelerate down the widest road in Paloma, which runs through the entire city, top to toe. We pass a strip mall on the left. “I did a drama double-major in school,” García says. “English and drama.”
“Oh. Did you want to act?”
“No, I was a stage manager, mostly.” García grimaces. “I got exactly one part in college, and I had two lines, and I messed both of them up opening night. So that went well.”
I bite my tongue. I can’t imagine college. It feels so far away—not even a distance in time so much as a physical distance. As if I’m trying to cover thousands of miles on foot.
“Left on Cypress Street,” I say. García slips into the turn lane and rounds onto a narrow street filled with potholes.
“Out of curiosity,” García says, “do you have a sister? Olivia?”
“Yeah. We’re twins.”
“Ah, okay. I was wondering. She’s in my honors class.”
“Of course,” I say. “She’s the smart one.”
“Hey, you’re just as smart. A different kind of smart,” García says. “Believe me, Kat, it takes a lot of intelligence to show a character like you do onstage.” He considers for a second. “I guess you can’t put it on a scale, but in my book, it means more than a couple points on the SAT. It’s definitely going to mean something to the audience on opening night.”
I sneak a glance at him. He looks unconcerned, as if those words weighed nothing at all, but they settle and fasten themselves somewhere deep inside me. I’ve never felt smart beside Olivia. She’s two math classes ahead of me. Even in the subjects I actually like—history and English—schoolwork never feels effortless, not like it seems for my sister.
These days, my grades are circling the drain. I don’t have motivation anymore, just exhaustion. I don’t care anymore, about anything besides the play, anyway.
I sink in my seat, resolving not to answer anything else. This shit’s getting too personal.
Mr. García seems to sense me fortifying my walls. He stays quiet.
He probably thinks I’m jealous of my sister or that I hate her. I’m sure that’s what Olivia thinks, but it’s not true. I’m not going to braid Olivia’s hair and make daisy chains with her, but God knows I don’t hate her.
We used to be close in middle school, back before she blossomed out and I shrank in, before high school sent us down different roads. I guess we were close up until the second Mom let the door slam on her way out. That did something to Olivia: she got all bright-eyed and optimistic about Mom coming back, but I knew it would never happen. The first time Olivia talked about calling Mom back up, trying to stay in touch, I walked out of the room. Fucking delusional. Sometimes she still seems to be in denial, as if we’re still some happy family with anything in common besides living under the same roof.
These past two years, I’ve gotten so exhausted with everyone, including my sister. It’s so much simpler to fall into computer games and solitude, where, sure, nobody offers consolation, but nobody’s going to hurt you, either. And at least the enemies there are clearly labeled.
I watch the houses outside my window shrink, the yards dwindling to small green-gray rectangles. The houses here on the western outskirts of Paloma are tiny and dilapidated.
“Left here,” I say as we clunk over the eight hundredth pothole. “I’m on the right. Number 243.”
“Great.” A minute later, he pulls up our concrete driveway. Our house waits to the right, flat-roofed and beige. The sight of it fills me with resignation.
“I’ll see you in class,” Mr. García says.
“Yeah,” I say, getting out. “Thanks for the lift.”
“Sure.”
I shut his door and head inside, already aching to collapse into bed.
IT’S 10:00 PM ON A THURSDAY, SO OF COURSE MY PARENTS are yelling at each other down the hall in the kitchen, and I have more homework than I want to admit, so of course I’m dicking around on the Internet. There’s a point where procrastination turns into resignation that you will never do what you need to do, and I hit that point, like, two hours ago, after opening a Word document in a short-lived fit of optimism. At this point, anything I write will seem like one hundred percent bullshit when I read it over tomorrow morning, so is this even worth it? Signs point to no.