The Costume Shop Show

This is for Olivia's song contest. I wrote it about Of Montreal's "Wraith Pinned to the Mist". Kinda rushed... *whistles and walks away*

_____

The energy in the room was all sucked toward the last seat in the fifth row, next to the bookshelf, where Inez sat. Not everyone was aware of it, though some other students caught the change of frequencies in the air caused by her manic thoughts rubbing up static, and they fidgeted in their chairs.

Zip, zap, I could just feel her mental energy sizzling, forming a halo of anxiety around her.

I was sitting two rows over in our seventh period Chemistry class. There was little else I could do but watch her, my head tilted and my eyes focused; I had seen this happen before, and that wrench in my stomach was trying to inform me it was happening again. There was a need to react, and my muscles all hummed this fact to me.

She was folding up, like a bloom in reverse. Her hands had started off clinging to the far edges of the desk, and slowly, her fingers wavering like little leaves in a windstorm, crept toward her chest. Her needly arms wrapped up and enfolded her shoulders; her fingers brushed at the warm-colored skin of her face, the contour of her back arching as she slumped forward. Her forehead drew closer to the desktop as if she felt magnetized by the scratchy, mottled surface.

I was absorbed in her every movement, waiting to see if those brittle ribs of hers would draw in a rattling breath, or if she would become a catatonic doll slumped over her Chemistry lab work. My entire being was in tune with her own melody of motion. If the slightest note was off, then maybe I could catch her before she broke.

Our Chemistry teacher was mostly oblivious to Inez in the back as he buzzed on about assignments and expectations for the class. Expectations, always so clearly defined. He was a hideous background noise to my worry, and I forgot him completely as I watched the delicate surface of Inez’s features begin to crack.

Her hands, twining into her short hair, began to shake and I saw her face crumple as she buried it into the crook of her elbow. I could hear the high frequency of her upset, the shrieking high note of anxiety; there was a tenuous vibe of disorder, and a sound of a gurgling cry trapped behind sealed lips. And then I stood up before Mr. Heinsworth could stop his buzzing; I placed my hands on her arms and pulled her out of the uncomfortable bend of that classroom chair and I took her out into the hallway.

Inez, Inez, my Inez – of course I knew what had snipped at the fraying fibers that helped keep her being together. She had shown me in snippets on the phone last night, and other things I just knew. Her mother had contacted her last night, told her that, no, she didn’t feel like paying money for a train ticket to Philly so that Inez could stay with her for Thanksgiving. She had tried so hard to go see her mother. And she had worked so hard to find the right calculations for that lab write-up, but there was a D sitting on her desk back in the classroom.

I knew her well enough to see that all the wires of worth she strung herself up on to avoid the pit of anxiety beneath her feet had been cut. In the hallway, her quick breaths ricocheted off the walls and her palms were damp with sweat as I took her hands in mine.

It had been a while since her last panic attack. She was a misplaced child.

“David,” she murmured into the creases of her cupped hands, her forehead pressed against the corridor wall. “David, Mr. Heinsworth will –“

“Don’t bother thinking about him.” I stepped away, giving her space. She turned in her head in all directions, as if trying to find the right kind of air.

“I can’t,” she finally gasped, blinking her eyes and turning her face upward toward the ceiling lights. Her body was shaking; a wind was pulling her from her roots. “I can’t be here, I can’t do this anymore. Every effort, David - it’s all – all useless. I just don’t - don’t want to be here, I don’t want to exist anymore.”

Her body sank slowly, her knees bending with her thoughts. It put an image in my head, from when I stayed up at her mother’s house several summers ago, and she stood by the edge of the pool during the house party. Staring down into the water with reflective eyes, bending her knees slowly, she was nervous to jump into the water as her cousins gouged her. She had looked like a spying bird on a wire, teetering back and forth.

“I don’t – don’t-”

“Okay.” I grabbed her fluttering hands, pulled them down and away from her face. “We don’t exist. We’re not here, never have been here.”

Strands of loose hair floated across her face, and her cheeks were covered in mottled pink stars. But she let out a ghost of a laugh. “What? David-”

“I’m serious. Look at me.” It’s difficult not to smile when someone’s looking right into your eyes, but I managed it. She sucked in air and turned her head to and fro nervously, giggling. “Let’s pretend we don’t exist. This place can’t pick up on us. We’re so far removed from this that we’re not even in this realm. School’s not real to us; it’s like the Easter Bunny.”

“That makes no sense, David. We – we just, I can’t – can’t we just not talk about this? I’ll call my dad -” Her voice climbed higher as she spoke, and her throat cracked several words as they struggled to come out. She was top heavy, her legs not holding her up right, and I gripped her hands tight.

“We’re not talking about this.”

“Well, what -”

“We’ve forgot who, what, where. And how. All those. We’re pretending.”

“No.” Inez’s voice picked up a whining pitch and she began to sink into the ground again. I caught her and carried her back up. She teetered for a moment and then seemed slightly more collected, though her face still reflected a mess of concernment. “Okay. Okay.”

She closed her eyes, though there was a dance of anxiety passing over her lashes, and I imagined she was thinking of not being there. I closed my eyes as well, and tried to imagine her tumult of feelings, the downpour of anxiety I felt I could read so easily on the little movements of her lips and jerks of her chin. I imagined it painted all over the walls, and then pushing those constructs away, knocking away the drywall and chipping tiles with my hands.

School and town and world slipped away from me. Or so I pretended.

Thoughts tip-toed back and forth, and I tried to erase the ground from underneath me, and instead began to think about our feet, standing on nothing – and then my racing mind tripped over a memory and I was thinking of how silly our feet had looked in the no-slip shoes our boss had made us wear when we worked at Gally’s.

We had known each other before working together there, certainly, our fathers having worked at Sorento’s when we were smaller. But back then it was all tag, playgrounds and new Disney movies. After Gally’s, we were novels and philosophers and similarly shaped specks of dust.

Our boss hated the fact that we knew each other. When we worked the same hours, the other workers called that shift the “David and Inez Show”, I think because we sang while we cleaned and argued ethics. After eight months, Inez’s father made her quit and focus more on her studies. So the David and Inez Show was cancelled.

In future workplaces, or in certain classrooms, certain people would giggle all over the place and say, “This is so funny! This should be a reality show!” Then that would end because people moved on or schedules changed. Life is a series of cancelled television shows, it seems.

Inez giggled; I wondered what she was thinking of. I wondered if she no longer existed.

The idea of existence led my thoughts back around to school, but an area which no longer existed to the school, where we could possibly rejoice in our lack of existence until she felt better. Opening my eyes, I took her hand in mind and gave her arm a tug. She shook like falling confetti.

“What?”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Where?”

I didn’t answer, just folded her hand up and watched her glassy eyes wander as I led her down the hallway. “Where? Where?” she echoed, but her words were lost in my focus to find the secret place I knew of. I had heard about it before from the old theatre director, that bald man who had roamed the maze of dust-coated stage curtains, smoking cigarettes inside the school and watching students suspiciously. I had been sent to his office once, a few years ago, for ISD, and he had wheedled out lonely tales of our failing theatre program. No one appreciates, child, no one appreciates.

The theatre program was closed down entirely now. But the Costume Shop still existed, a pocket forgotten behind the auditorium, a forgotten box on the blueprint, our destination.

The auditorium doors sang a panicked song as I opened them, slipping inside the large and musty room with Inez clinging to my side. She gasped back at the hinges, and her noisy breath was caught up by the high ceiling of the room and carried. We stood there for a moment, peering at the false movements in the shadows.

“This way.” The stairs on the side of the stage creaked painfully as we climbed up, and we disappeared through the curtains in the back. The corridor behind the stage was dark, and I could feel Inez begin to pull away, her thin arm swinging like a wire. I found the light switch, but Inez was sinking and wrapping her arms around her knees again.

“We’re going to get in trouble, David,” she murmured, sinking back into the thick curtains. “We leave class, and then we come here – they’re gonna be so mad-”

“Nobody comes back here anymore.” I knelt down, face to face with her. “Not even the janitors. They’re gonna think we left, or went to the band room.”

“But-”

“Nez, please, just come a little further.”

She fidgeted a moment, sticking a finger into her mouth absentmindedly and chewing on the nail tip. Noticing what she was doing, she drew her hand away and sucked in her breath. I offered my hand out to her, but she unwrapped herself and began to walk down the corridor, her hand tugging on the curtain, kneading the fabric.

The corridor snaked further into the underside of the school, steps cracking and popping musically as we descended. She took my hand, her fingers twitching with anxiety, as I flicked up light switch after light switch until we found the sign.

COSTUME SHOP

There was a crack in the sign, filled in with fuzzy gray dust. The door itself seemed papery thin, and I pushed it open without any effort. The hinges squealed, and darkness opened itself up to us, drawing us in.

Inez and I fumbled into the room, our hands slowly roaming out in front of us in search of a switch or anything to aid our sight. A beaded chain slithered over my brow and I jumped back into her; she laughed, a sound the crackled through the nervous encasement she was trapped inside.

The swinging chain of beads was the switch, and I caught it in my palm. Before pulling down, I squinted at the curves of Inez’s face in the shadows, grinning wide.

“Think of something beautiful, and we’ll go wherever we can find it.”

Her anxiety cracked open a little more, and a giggle snuck out. Her sigh drifted around me. “Snowflakes falling on my front yard. At night, in the light of the front porch, they look like stars.”

“Alright. Let’s pretend we’re in Antarctica. Maybe it will look like outer space there.” I pulled the chain switch; the dimmest yellow light began to flicker, before a glow slowly grew until it enveloped the entire room.

A quiet moment passed, where the sleepy room awoke and stirred to shake off the shadows. “This is not Antarctica,” Inez said through a smile.

It certainly was some foreign place. The two of us were encircled by racks of hangers that sported every patch of color visible to the eyes, and textures hung from the ceiling in stormy billows. Lace and cotton circled by denim and leather, giving off lurid scents that were still overpowered by that of the mothballs, giving the atmosphere the thickness of tonic. All of these smells settled on the dresses, the jackets, the flared pants, the leather and shining plastic shoes.

Inez rose her hands up into the air, but they no longer trembled, though grasped out with excitement at the array of costumes and extravagant accessories. Tentatively, she touched the lacy frill of a dress, the likes of which I imagined would be worn by an ancient bride, or an unfortunate zombie.

“Bizarre,” she said, spotting a ruffled violet skirt, which she picked from the rack like a prize apple and held up to her hips. I noticed then the massive dust-spattered mirror on the end of the room, giving us a nebulous image of ourselves. “Imagine what we could do with all this!”

I noticed several hangers strewn with worn out fishnets. I was struck with images of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. Frightening.

“We can have bizarre celebrations.” I pulled out a massive polka-dotted jacket that clashed with every inch of my body. Sweeping it over my shoulders, I immediately was transformed into something atrociously flamboyant – and not me. Looking into the mirror, I saw a theatre star, my teeth pearly white and every role available for me to slink into and play.

“David.” Inez held the purple skirt away from her suddenly. “Up there, people are in their classes, learning their seventh period subjects.”

“So?” I dismissed that silly idea. Throwing a boa around her shoulders, pink feathers took flight in all directions, a mushroom cloud of dust settling into her hair. She captured several feathers in her palm and laughed, swept up in the absurdity of our surroundings.

She pulled a flowered cap onto her head, the orange and yellow flowers bobbing back and forth as, with a manic giggling here and there, she danced slowly to an imagined tune. I reached out into the sea of mismatched cloth to find more treasures, pulling out instead a massive plain white fabric. A shapeless shift, I held it out with outstretched arms.

“It looks like a sail,” she mused, tilting her flowered hat from side to side.

“We’re Tristan and Isolde,” I murmured dramatically, dropping the shift and yanking a leather vest from the rack, slipping it on over the polka-dotted coat and angling myself in front of the mirror. I turned to Inez with a clown’s grin, and she was whisking the horrendously lacy wedding dress up against her chest.

“But with a different fate? Will there be a wedding?” She lowered her face and puckered her lips. Spinning on her sneakers, she slipped the white frills of the dress over her head and repositioned her hat as she let the skirt sway around her. She seemed a different creature, on her tiptoes in this lair of vibrant colors, her hair clinging to the hat flowers and her small body swathed in old lace.

“You’ll just end up being the bride stripped bare.” She giggled as I grabbed at the lace of her dress; it tore with surprising ease. We both froze in a passing panic as we looked at the torn delicate cloth swinging from her sleeve, like a destroyed spider’s web. After the surprise passed, we laughed at the costume, at all of the costumes, and we dived back into them.

A bonnet was tied around my head, a curling ribbon under my chin; Inez found some ruby slippers that were stripped of all their glitter. We put on thick black belts with gleaming buckles. It was surprisingly easy to push aside the dark thoughts inside one’s self; Inez put on a blonde wig and she was no longer tipsy, gasping Inez but a vivacious star teetering with stylistic dare down a runway.

Like a stitch in my side, I began to feel how childish we were being. I announced this to Inez, as a passing speculation, some trained part of me denying the wearing of polka dots and lace, but she turned to me with a face that was hers, and yet carried an expression I would have seen years before.

“Of course we are,” she answered, her tone dreamy and far removed from the anxiety that had been controlling her limbs earlier. She took a lab coat down from the rack, draping it over my shoulders. “We’ve figured out how to never die. We get older, but then when we get too old we start growing younger together. We go through this immortal cycle.” She paused a moment, pulling the flowery hat over her blonde wig. “That sounds too good to ever be true, doesn’t it?”

“The best things always do.”

We stood together in disquiet for a moment, the silly dream having cracked open our silly fantasy. The room became a dusty old costume shop again, and I turned around to see the paper-thin door was ajar, inviting us back out into the dark corridor.

“It’s time to go,” she said, sighing in time with me.

“Let’s go to my dad’s house and order Chinese.” I took her gloved hand. The idea of school flitted by in the back of mind, but it buzzed along quickly like a fruit fly and was out of sight before I could capture it.

Inez and I climbed back up to the auditorium, teetering blissfully on plastic ruby shoes and combat boots. There was no one in the hallways to see us as we meandered slowly out of the school, Inez in her wig and wedding dress, me sporting my polka dots and lab coat.

It was only a short walk to my dad’s house, but our outfits attracted more notice on the sidewalk. Cars beeped their horns, but Inez and I began to talk about our old workplace and our old show, and we didn’t pay any attention to them.