One of them had to be lying.
I just didn’t know who.
I left the cafeteria. The sun scorched my shoulders. I fanned my face, twisting my hair into a ponytail before letting it drop down my back. I wished a storm would break this heat, that fall—or an air-conditioning unit—would arrive. When the weather became stubborn like this, there was nowhere to go to escape it.
I opened the back door to Rebecca’s house and took a right. In the laundry room twelve baskets of clothes and towels waited on the floor to be washed, dried, and folded. I opened the doors to the four industrial washers and loaded the tubs. I measured the detergent, trying to distract my thoughts.
I would’ve shared the stories in class or during a one-on-one anyway. So what if someone had gossiped and gotten carried away? I told myself it didn’t matter, vowed to forget the whole ordeal. The unease in my stomach lingered.
It wouldn’t hurt to branch out, to make some new friends. I’d been so preoccupied with April and Georgina that I had paid little attention to the other guests. It was time to stop worrying about everyone else—what Nat would think of Wisewood, what Rebecca thought of me. I needed to focus on what I thought.
I closed the four washer doors. The drums spun. I sat on the tiled floor and leaned against a dryer. I glanced at the ceiling—all that separated Rebecca from me. I wondered how she spent her lunch hour. I’d never seen her in the cafeteria. What was she doing at this moment? What had she meant when she said I was exactly what Wisewood needed?
Absentmindedly, I touched my hair. I’d wrapped my fingers around the first strands when I realized what I was doing and reached for the rubber band. I studied my hands, the small patch of angry brown skin with pink edges.
I ripped off the scab.
22
GABE STRAIGHTENED THE coffin’s black silk lining for the third time. I smacked his hand.
“Enough fussing,” I said. “The room is sublime.”
We inspected the gallery that had become our second home. The roof, twenty feet above us, was made of skylights and exposed wooden beams. Columns the size of ancient tree trunks supported the ceiling. Single lightbulbs, hanging from long wires, were scattered about the space. The night sky with stars for eyes peeked in through the roof, twinkling with curiosity about the impossibilities rumored to take place here.
Per usual, the immaculate white walls had been cleared of all sketches, paintings, and photographs. For this performance we had created six-foot-tall letters from black masking tape, sticking a single word to each gallery wall.
FEAR
WILL
KILL
YOU
He clapped, beaming. “This is all because of your genius.”
I took his face between my hands and rested my forehead against his. “Where would I be without you?”
It was no longer enough to swallow glass or spiders as I had throughout the Fearless tour. Such feats had become humdrum by the mid-eighties. There wasn’t enough risk involved; I wanted to push further. I wanted my life on the line. That was how Madame Fearless Presents . . . Suffocated was born. What better way to demonstrate fearlessness than by holding a plastic bag over my head until consciousness deserted me?
Gabe helped me plan that first show in ’85. He found this Brooklyn gallery, which would go on to serve as our locale for nearly every performance. The monstrous movie screens on two of the walls had been Gabe’s idea, a way to cram my brand of uncomfortable intimacy down our spectators’ throats. It was also his idea to turn my work into onetime events instead of something I replicated in theaters across the country. I tried to put on a new show annually but sometimes two or three years slipped by before I could perfect a feat.
After that first performance, I fretted that only a dozen spectators had attended. How was I going to transform the lives of the masses if the masses didn’t show up?
Then I met The Five.
Gabe’s smile disappeared when his focus returned to the center of the room. “Are you sure about this?”
I clucked my tongue and let go of his face. Gabe did this before every show: agonized about my safety, brooded that perhaps this was the piece where we had pushed too far. The wrinkle between his eyebrows warmed my insides, though I’d never admit as much. Encouraging worry was the antithesis of what I stood for.
“Dearest, I love you, but we don’t have time for this.” The audience would file in ten minutes from now. The cameraman had set up his equipment.
“But—”
“Gabriel, how can we preach the importance of fearlessness if we don’t exemplify it ourselves?” It was best to cut him off before he gained momentum. If he sensed his argument had legs, he would run it into the ground.