Free Gulliver Takes Five by Justin Luke Zirilli Page B

train ride back to Astoria. It isn’t every day that a group of five exhausted casting directors and producers ALL tell you how beautiful your voice is. (Trust me—I know.) In fact, it’s the first time I’ve heard such accolades since Stanford first heard me sing, the day
he
brought me in to audition for him.
    Gulliver.
    I guess I CAN stop smiling. Thinking of him is a surefire way to dampen my spirits—and sure enough, now those spirits are sopping. I thought I was done with this—it’s been over a month! Butno, fifty days is clearly not enough time, because the ache is still as raw as it was on day one, a wound that refuses to scab over.
    I stare out the window and, when that doesn’t work, try reading the many ads covering the interior of the subway car: Dr. Zizmor will help me clean up my face in time for the beach! My career doesn’t have to end here; I can take it to new heights with summer classes at the School of Visual Arts! It’s considered good train etiquette to give up my seat for a handicapped person or a senior citizen!
    This isn’t working, either, so I close my eyes and rewind back to my amazing audition. Close-up on the smiles. Replay the audio of their applause. A reenactment of the light-headedness I felt.
    And Gulliver. Gulliver, Gulliver, Gulliver. Suddenly, he’s sitting in the panel of casting directors. He’s also playing the piano. He’s rolling around on the floor laughing with those boys who were unknowingly mocking my song choice. Gulliver is my judge, jury, and executioner. Never mind that it was the best audition I’ve had yet; no matter that those catty gays ridiculing “Lost in the Wilderness” undoubtedly earned much fainter praise than I. Where there’s joy, there’s Gulliver, bent on crushing it. The real Gulliver is—well, who knows? Surely he doesn’t know I had an audition today, and probably wouldn’t care if he did. But the figment-of-my-imagination Gulliver? He’s always here, always watching. And he really has it in for me.
    Fail. I’m running out of options. Normally, just leaving the chaotic, crass city for my tranquil home base in Astoria is enough.Its quieter streets, diverse neighborhoods, and actual view of the sky soothe me almost instantly. But not even that works this time.
    I plug my headphones into my iPod and hit shuffle. If anything can take me away, it’s music. It HAS to be music. My last resort.
    The song that comes up is Beyonce’s “Halo,” which I only have because Gulliver gave it to me on a “Summer Love” playlist. Which I thought I deleted.
    There are no more ads to read. The audition happened too long ago. Beyonce can see my halo, halo, halo. The countdown to yet another Gulliver meltdown begins. That boy has taken up residence in my brain, and if history is any proof of the future, he’ll stick around for another few hours, at least. It’s always when I should be feeling high as a kite that he manages to pull me back down to these trenches.
    Now I’m regretting doing so well in today’s audition. Because when Gully fever sets in, I am overcome by the idiotic hope that he might come back from the ether. And what if he did? What if I weren’t here? What if I were on tour? In my mind, he returns at night in the pouring rain, like it’s a classic movie. He’s outside my apartment, hitting the buzzer over and over, screaming my name. Then I rush outside, and he takes me in his arms, kisses me long and hard, and begs me to give him one last chance. I say, “But of course, you fool!” (In this fantasy, I sound like Katharine Hepburn.) And while none of this is very realistic, it’s a much more definite impossibility if I’m in San Francisco or Charleston or New Orleans with a show rather than at home, waiting for him.If it weren’t for Gulliver, I wouldn’t even have had an audition today. I wouldn’t have Stanford as the quarterback for Team Marty. On the other hand, I also wouldn’t have contracted my first case of