Free The Me You See by Shay Ray Stevens Page B

desperate perverts…”
    “Like Mitch?” I interrupted.
    “Like Mitch,” she agreed. “But I don’t think that’s why
they watch. I think it’s something deeper than that. Something that everyone
has inside. I mean, why do people watch a play?”
    “To be entertained.”
    “But what if it’s not an entertaining play?”
    “Then,” I said, grabbing my own handful of pretzels, “the
actors have failed. Let that be a warning to you!”
    Stefia giggled and shoved her hand back in the pretzel
bowl.
    “No,” she said. “What I’m saying is some plays are
entertaining by nature. A love story, a story where the guy gets the girl, a
story where everyone gets what they want in the end. But what about the stories
that aren’t like that? What about stories about death and destruction? Certainly
those aren’t entertaining…”
    “Not in the normal sense, no,” I agreed. “Let me ask you a
question. Why do you act?”
    “Huh?”
    “You’re up there on stage and people are watching you. And
obviously you’re not uncomfortable or you wouldn’t be up there. So…why do you
act? Why are you on stage?”
    Stefia thought for a minute, twirling her last pretzel in
the air like she was writing on my ceiling.
    “Because now that I’ve started, I think I would die if I
wasn’t on stage.”
    “That’s kind of dramatic,” I said. “Fitting, coming from an
actress.”
    She giggled and ate her last pretzel. She put her hand back
in the bowl and frowned, signifying the bowl was finally empty. Then, in true
I-don’t-care-what-you-think style, she turned the bowl over and stuck it on her
head, salt spilling into her hair.
    “I guess I just like to give people something to see.”
    “You’re a nut.” I laughed and flipped my hand at the bowl
to knock off her crown.
    “But you’re watching,” Stefia said and laughed, catching
the bowl to put it back on her head. “So which of us is really the nut?”
    “Stefia, get real. It’s kind of hard not to watch you,” I
said. “You’re a natural performer.”
    “Indeed,” she said, and leaned backwards to flip off the
bed. But she misjudged the distance, and as she went over, rammed her feet
right into the full length mirror that hung on the wall.
    “Oh, crap!” she said. She jumped up and stared at the
mirror that splintered into a million jagged pieces. “I’m sorry!”
    “It’s okay,” I said. “No biggie. Cheap mirror.”
    She crouched to the floor and checked for the few slivers
of glass that had fallen out. Her heel had made a perfect bull’s eye in the
middle the mirror, but luckily, most of the glass remained fractured inside the
frame.
    “Everything okay up there?” my dad called from down the
hall.
    “Yeah!” I yelled. “Stefia’s just up here trying to ruin my
luck by busting mirrors.”
    “Need any help?”
    I opened my bedroom door and yelled down the hallway, “No.
We’re fine. Really.”
    He didn’t answer so I closed the door. And when I turned
back into the room, Stefia was still staring into the broken mirror.
    “Stefia. I said it was fine. Don’t worry about it. The
mirror only cost like five bucks at…”
    “Have you ever noticed how the cracks in the mirror mess up
the reflection?” she asked.
    “Um…yeah. That’s generally what happens when the glass
breaks.”
    “But, like…look. The cracks are all you can see.”
    I picked up two pillows that had fallen on my lilac carpet
and tossed them up on the bed.
    “Yeah? So? What are you getting at?”
    She kept looking at the mirror, brushing her finger lightly
over her broken reflection.
    “It’s not like that with people,” she said.
    “Like what?”
    “You know, with the cracks. There’s a lot of people walking
around that are really cracked.”
    “Stefia, what in the world are you talking about?”
    “Most of the time with people,” she said, “you can see
everything but the cracks.”
    I threw a pillow at her.
    “Stop being weird,” I said, brushing her