DEMI. My coconspirator. My first true friend. A spirit made of equal parts ambition and razzle-dazzle. A big baritone that slides easily into falsetto. And a future as bright as the lights on 42nd Street. Demi believed that the Wildewood Summer Institute would be heaven. Believed he would be king there, and I would be queen, and we would live all summer in utter fabulousness. And he was right—about himself, at least. IN BRENTON , Ohio, where I’m from, committing suicide would be redundant. It’s a nothing town, as lacking in character as Cream of Wheat.
Before I met Demi, the only time I ever felt alive was when I took tap and jazz at Miss Delilah’s School of Dance in Cleveland twenty miles away— three weekday afternoons plus Saturday mornings. At Miss Delilah’s there was music, pizzazz, glitter. Show tune medleys and old Miss D. with her feather boa and varicose veins yelling “Five, six, seven, eight!”—beaming when we nailed a tap routine. When the music ended and the ninety minutes were up, all the kids from dance class would throw on sweatshirts and run outside to waiting cars.
They lived in the city. But I’d stay after class and wipe handprints off the sticky mirrors, listening to Miss Delilah and Mr. Trocadero (the jazz teacher) talk about shows they’d done when they were young, or plays they’d seen on Broadway. Eventually, they’d shut off the lights and lock the studio doors— and I’d be forced to go wait on the street corner for the last bus back to Brenton. My home life wasn’t awful. It was just dead. Seriously razzle-dazzle deprived. I am an only child and my father is old. Sixty-six. Retired. My mother is his second wife, and she’s not old at all, comparatively. But she’s deaf. She speaks pretty clearly, and reads lips, but she also uses ASL—American Sign Language. She works for a kitchen supplies catalog.
So our house is quiet. No one yells from room to room. People rarely talk when they can sign. There’s hardly ever any music or television on. My mom works, thinks about work, and talks about work with occasional forays into cooking; my dad, who used to be a banker, prunes peony bushes and mows the lawn, belongs to a golf and tennis club, and reads books on the Civil War. Me, I don’t fit in. Not in my family. And not at school