Free Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman Page B

see into my soul. He puts them on,peers into my eyes for about thirty seconds, and says, “You look like Kathy Bates.” Takes his glasses off and sits back in his chair, looking around the room to see what everyone else is doing.
    I want a new partner. That is not what my soul looks like. That is what I look like when I don’t put enough contouring blush on. If Emile can’t at least pretend to be deep, there’s no way he has what it takes. I wonder if I should alert Nico.
    Every once in a while I catch Hans glaring at me. As skinny and pale and bald as he is, there’s something about a six-foot-seven lapsed Catholic Dutchman glaring at you from across the room that’s unsettling. He’s constantly judging me as a madonna or a whore. It’s like he knows I made out with that Dutch bartender last night. I also bought flowers, recognized the existence of synchronicity, and read an Allen Ginsberg poem. Why doesn’t he sense that about me?
    After a smoke break we jump into “wound work.”
    I have my journal and my pen poised to write down every word Nico says, so I’ll do well on the test. Nico tells me to put the pen down because I’ll remember what I need to remember. She doesn’t know how much pot I smoke. Or I bet she does.
    â€œDeep inside each of us is a wound where we carry the knowledge of our death. If we are brave enough to do the work, we will eventually be able to cut through all the layers of resistance inside of us and have full access to that wound.”
    I don’t get it. Is she saying that inside of me at this moment I know that one day I will be drowning in darkness but I won’t notice because I’ll be a corpse rotting away as people I love live on? Ouch. Found it.
    Nico starts rolling herself a cigarette. She’s already so European. What’s next? Neon orange shirts tucked into tight white jean shorts and hairy armpits?
    â€œTouch that wound and you will cry like you have never cried and laugh like y’all have never laughed. I’m not gonna lie. It’s a long road to get to this place. Not all of you are gonna be able to make it. But those who do, get ready, because the power that will be released onstage will be magnificent.”
    On our fifth smoke break, Nico walks over and puts her arm around me. “You didn’t think you’d be here, did you, girlfriend? Let me tell you something. You are supposed to be here. I have no doubt and I cannot wait to see what you can do.”
    Uh-oh.
    She’s got high expectations for me.
    Just like the 950 graduating seniors before I delivered the commencement speech at my high school graduation. At the audition I’d beaten out bright young speech team leaders with messages of hope and “Gandhi said unto Martin Luther King Jr.”–type quotes simply because I had a lot of energy and didn’t mind large groups of people looking at me. In fact, I preferred it.
    From the podium I could see row after row of my fellow students filling up the floor of Market Square Arena, with big, hopeful smiles, hands poised over gown-covered thighs, ready to slap. “Oh, this is going to be funny,” all their faces said. “That’s the crazy girl I sit next to in algebra who pretends to smoke tampons like a cigar. Didn’t she do that Weight Watchers monologue that Kristin Chapman’s stepmom loved so much? Oh, we are gonna
laugh.
”
    Speeches like “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth” do well in large arenas meant for major sporting events, their impact made more powerful by the echoing and tinny reverb quality. Not so much with lines like “You know how
Grease
was a musical about a group of high school kids in the fifties. Well, maybe they’ll have a musical about high school in the eighties and call it
Mousse
.” By the time I got to my closing line, “Remember,whether you’re flipping