High School for Dummies by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne

The first day of my sophomore year of high school, I signed up for theater club. In three years, I would be eighteen, and my plan was to pack my belongings and ride a bus to L.A., where I would audition for roles in movies. By my twentieth birthday, I was going to be famous. I walked into my high school’s auditorium, hoping the club manager was going to be someone I could really look up to: a retired actress with platinum blonde hair and a name like Aquamarine who’d decided to move to San Diego after her glamorous years in Hollywood. The club manager’s nametag read Carol. Her brown hair hung in a limp ponytail.

I sat in the front row, figuring I still had a lot to learn from Carol since I knew nothing about acting—all I knew was that I’d recently seen Van Helsing and I wanted to be the next Kate Beckinsale, and once I was the next Kate Beckinsale, I would never have to see my parents again. Instead, they would be the ones seeing me on TV, feeling crushed by inferiority and stupidity, realizing that I had once been their daughter, but now I was the new award-nominated female lead in all the action films and romantic comedies, who would never call them again.

Carol passed out our scripts, High School for Dummies. I flipped through it, skimming cringe-worthy scenes: girls applying lipstick and wiping it off before going home so their mothers wouldn’t yell at them, football players teasing each other over B.O., a fumbling first kiss on the bleachers. My stepmom, Brenda, would never approve of the play. She hated anything related to sex. I wasn’t allowed to have a phone because she thought I would “sext” and I wasn’t allowed to watch TV because it would give me ideas of promiscuity. She only bought me sports bras, and I wasn’t allowed to use tampons because they were an act of penetration. Brenda’s daughter from her previous marriage got pregnant in high school. Now, Brenda saw sex everywhere. I slipped the script between the pages of Hamlet, next to my secret homecoming dance ticket, in case Brenda decided to do one of her random bag-checks.

After club dismissed, I went to the bathroom and wiped away my eyeliner, like the character in the play’s opening scene, except her punishment would’ve been a scolding while my dad would beat me with a paddle. Last year, he’d beaten me for wearing Brenda’s earrings, which I’d intended to put back after school, but she stayed home sick that day and I was caught. “We can’t have a thief in this house,” she said. Then please kick me out, I thought, send me to the orphanage. But I got my usual punishment: my dad came home and made me hold my ankles while he hit my butt with the paddle. He called it “spanking” even though it left bruises. I didn’t always wallow in self-pity over Brenda and the paddlings, but I was annoyed by the play’s flippant treatment of secret makeup wearing. That shit was high stakes.

I slipped the eyeliner into a hole in the fabric of my backpack, then stared at myself in the mirror, studying my physical assets and flaws. My eyes were nice: light brown with flecks of green. My hair was long, dark, and curly. My nose was a bit too wide at the bottom, like my dad’s, but after my first few acting jobs, I would be able to afford having it narrowed. I could definitely be the next Kate Beckinsale. I was pretty. Beautiful, even. I deserved to be. If I were ugly and had to go home to Brenda, life would be too cruel.

I left the bathroom and waited for the bus at the front of the school. I held up my theater club form for the bus driver’s approval. I sat alone, eavesdropping on the conversations between the football and volleyball players: a girl had an infected bellybutton piercing; a boyfriend was in another girl’s Myspace photo; someone’s mom was going to jail, but despite the chaos in our lives, we were all excited for the upcoming homecoming dance. I just didn’t know how I was going to be able to attend, yet. The bus took us from our high school’s affluent community and to our neighborhood across the freeway.

When we first moved into our house, the windows were barred, like all residencies on our street, but Brenda had our bars removed because she thought they were ugly. We were robbed once a year, twice in 2009. They only came when no one was home, which was lamentable. A Panic Room experience could’ve been just what Brenda and I needed to bond. Before marrying my dad, Brenda had been a cashier at Ross and lived in a trailer park in some small California town no one’s ever heard of. My dad met her on eHarmony and married her when I was eight years old, so I could have a mom because my actual mom used meth for weight loss. I spent one weekend a month with her in a Motel 6.

After marrying Brenda, my dad started spending most of his time at his cabinet shop, basically living there, which didn’t seem to bother Brenda. It wasn’t my dad that she actually loved, but the house. She decorated and painted every part of it: the living room walls with Jackson-Pollock inspired splatters of brown and green, a mural of vines and grapes on the ceiling. The bathrooms were jungle themed. She painted the kitchen red and her bedroom purple. She painted tiger and tree-frog portraits, which were surprisingly good, and hung them on her painted walls. My room was baby blue with a rainbow rug and a pink dresser. I always hated it. When I turned fifteen, I asked her if I could have an update, but she said, “No. It’s a room for a child.” When she ran out of things to paint inside, she painted the outside: a beach mural with a pirate ship on the back of the house. In reference to Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, my English teacher had said, “Think of the home as a reflection of the narrator’s mind,” which had only made me think of Brenda and how she must’ve been manic depressive.

I walked home from the bus stop and into the house, passing the various chests, baskets, and potted plants. Brenda sat on the couch, wrapped in a purple blanket, watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the hundredth time. She released her long red hair from a claw clip, then turned the TV down.

“How was ‘theater club’?” she said, pronouncing it as though it was only allegedly where I’d been.

“Good.” I handed her my attendance form with Carol’s signature.

“And what will you be performing in ‘theater club’?”

“Hamlet.”

In my bedroom, I listened through the door to make sure Brenda had resumed It’s a Wonderful Life, then pulled my cellphone out of my bra. It was a secret gift from my biological mom. The blockiness of the sports bra turned out to make for a useful hiding place, and it was safe there since Brenda had never gone as far as strip searching me. I texted Eli, my boyfriend, to come over. Brenda’s removal of the bars was her greatest gift to me. It only took Eli twenty minutes from the moment I sent the text for him to climb through my window and into my bed. He was tall and had long greasy hair like most San Diego boys and he wasn’t particularly attractive or smart, but he could play Led Zeppelin’s “Over the Hills and Far Away” on his guitar and he was the only person in my life who said he loved me.

Beneath my sheets, Eli stroked my hair. “Have you figured out how you can make it to homecoming?”

I nodded. I’d been mulling it over for days and finally had a solid plan: I’d have my mom schedule her visit with me for homecoming weekend, then she’d take me to the mall for a dress and give me a ride to the dance. Brenda would never even know about it. The only problem? I had asked my dad for the money to get the ticket. He knew I was going. The whole operation depended on the lack of communication between Brenda and my dad, which was an astounding gap and functioned like this: I do something bad, Brenda calls my dad, he comes home with the paddle. The communication never went backward down the chain, so the chance that Brenda would find out about the dance from my dad was miniscule.

I nuzzled my head into Eli’s chest. I often wondered how I’d gotten away with so much for so long. Eli had been coming over for a year, several times a week. I decided it was because Brenda believed all her tactics had worked—she believed she’d scared me and subdued me into obeying her. But I was the one who’d created this illusion and held the power of maintaining it. I kept everything hidden, spoke to her in a meek voice, wore what she gave me, did whatever chores she asked of me. I hadn’t been in trouble since the earrings incident. I’d mastered lying. I’d mastered fake feebleness. I would never give Brenda any reason to question her reality.

I was a true actress.

Carol cast me as Becky, a small role and possibly the worst one with my major scene being this exchange:

Paul: You’ve been my girlfriend for so long now.

Becky: I know. The big three weeks.

Paul: I like you. And you like me. So, I was thinking… it’s time for second base.

Becky: I don’t know anything about football.

Paul: What? That’s baseball. And that’s not what I mean. Let’s just say our relationship is like make-up. So far, all we’ve done is lip gloss… and now, it’s time for some mascara.

Becky: (Gasps) My mom would kill me!

I wanted to quit, but I supposed this was the role I deserved since I was the newest member of the club and the other students were returning from the previous year. For rehearsal warm up, Carol had us stand in a circle and roll our heads around, ten times clockwise, ten times counterclockwise. “Release…your…neck. Releasssse,” Carol hissed at us. We did forward bends and side bends all while repeating “red leather yellow leather” and rolling our eyes.

“All the best actors do this,” Carol said.

She was probably right—Kate Beckinsale was probably doing this warm up in her dressing room 120 miles north of me right now. Maybe she and Hugh Jackman did this together on the set of Van Helsing. I circled my head around, imagining that the boy in front of me who was salivating and biting his tongue while saying “red leather yellow leather” was not Collin Byars, but a young Hugh Jackman, and I was still me, but we were not in the Kearny High School auditorium but on the set of a film in Hollywood and these were the minutes before I’d perform my breakout scene. When it was time for my part, I performed my Becky lines with confident inanity while tugging my sleeves down and giving Paul’s character longing glances, which I hoped suggested nuance and a dark backstory. The crowd would think, that girl playing Becky—she’s destined for something great.

The homecoming dance was only a week away, and I was consumed by the details. Should I wear my hair up or down? Long dress or short dress? High heels or wedges? It was such a nice, normal obsession. When I wasn’t daydreaming about my actress career, I was obsessing over whether or not I was pregnant. I feared any headache or hunger or pimple as a sign of pregnancy. I filled my schedule book with random symbols and arrows and numbers to throw Brenda off the fact that I was meticulously tracking my periods. I worried that if I got pregnant, I would end up like one of those girls I’d heard about on the news, the one who gives birth in the bathroom stall and throws the baby in the trash and goes to jail. But at the same time, it didn’t worry me too much. I was smart enough to get away with it. I’d wear baggy clothes, eat more so Brenda would think I was fat, throw away pads to make it look like I was having periods, then eventually birth, smother, and bury the baby in the backyard. Years later, while planting flowers or whatever new housework she would’ve picked up, Brenda would discover the tiny bones. Homecoming was a healthy, tangible thing to look forward to. 

After the play rehearsal, I gathered my books to head to the bus when I heard Andre, the junior cast as the jock character, say to his friend, “Bro, if I’m not home by eight, my mom will whip my ass up and down our house with a belt.” He continued with details, how he’d had welts before, how sometimes she wouldn’t make dinner if he really pissed her off. He said this all nonchalantly, like I would. I froze and listened, my heartbeat steadily climbing. Was it worse than the paddle? What if most teens were paddled in some way, but no one talked about it? And I had the worst realization of all: what if I only thought my life was bad, but really, it wasn’t?

I’d been so convinced that my life was awful, that I was mistreated and therefore justified in every action I took against my parents, but if they weren’t that bad, then what was I doing? And if Brenda and my dad weren’t bad people, then my plan was futile. In case I was caught with Eli or the phone and everything blew up in my face, I knew my dad would paddle me, horribly, and my plan was to report him and be taken away. This scenario was what I feared most, yet what a small part of me hoped for. But if beating your kids was more normal than I thought it was, would anyone care? What if I had to keep living with them after reporting them? That’s why I hadn’t yet—I was unsure of how bad they really were, especially since my dad told me that he didn’t beat me, he “spanked” me, that Brenda fulfilled her parental duties by feeding and clothing me, that “real” abuse was burning and raping your kids.

I hurried to the bus, sat in my seat, and took deep, slow breaths, thinking of all the shitty things Brenda had done: making me stay in my room unless I was invited out, insisting I only speak to her if she spoke to me first, allowing me to heat one, maybe two (“but no more than two!”) Michelina’s frozen meals for dinner. I bet Andre’s mom loved him and he loved her. That feeling didn’t exist in our household.

The morning of the dance, I found a new comforter folded on the kitchen table. I held it up and realized it was a dress. Magenta, floor-length, puffy-sleeved. My stomach sank. How did Brenda find out? And how did she find this dress? It was so her, like she’d conjured it from her mind and spun it from her own silk. I flipped it over. It still had an $11 Goodwill tag.

“My husband told me you’re going to a dance,” Brenda said from behind me. “I’ve known for weeks,” she added smugly.

“Oh, thank you for this dress,” I said politely while vowing to never speak to my dad again. “But my mom is taking me shopping today.”

“She’s not, actually. I just cancelled her visit. You’re wearing this. It’s cute and age appropriate.”

My pulse climbed. “You know, maybe I won’t go,” I said calmly. “Dances are overrated.”

“Oh, you’re going. The ticket was forty dollars.”

I twisted a piece of the dress’s fabric between my fingers.

“You know, there are kids whose parents don’t even have $40 to go to a dance,” she said. “You should be grateful.”

There were options. I could sneak scissors and trim half the dress away and maybe be left with something cute. But she would see the dress when I returned home, find it in my closet, and have me paddled. She might even think I was trying to impress someone and increase her surveillance.

I trudged back to my room, pulled the dress over my body, then stared at myself in the mirror, cry-laughing. The dress originally had a low neckline, but Brenda had sewn a patch of pink fabric over the front, and it was off center, which made me cry-laugh harder because Brenda was a skilled seamstress and had made her own flawless wedding dress when she’d married my dad.

I stood in the bathroom, wondering if I should even bother doing anything with my hair. I pulled a section of my hair up and clipped it into place, but it looked lumpy and frizzy. I ripped it out, pulled another part up, ripped that out, then another, and another, until I looked like I’d been in a monsoon. I eyed my dad’s clippers, considering a Britney Spears-like shaving meltdown, but Brenda walked by.

“You can’t go to a dance with your hair like that,” she said. “Come here.” She pulled a dining room chair into the hallway and gestured for me to sit.

She ran a comb through my hair, but it kept getting stuck.

“Do you ever brush your hair?”

“Yes. I just did twenty minutes ago.”

She set the comb aside and worked her fingers through my hair. Her nails skimmed across my scalp. I gripped the edges of the seat—we’d never been this close. I didn’t like her behind me, standing over me, my neck exposed. Was she looking at the sides of my throat? Maybe she was thinking how easy it would be to ram scissors in and end me now, which was how I so often looked at her. But as I sat there imagining her imagining killing me, I saw her reflection in the glass of a frog painting on the wall. Her brow was furrowed, her lips pursed, and her eyes seemed genuinely focused on the braid she was pulling my hair into.

Her hands weaving my hair back and forth felt surprisingly soothing, but I resisted enjoying it. She had an ulterior motive. She was trying to soften me. She wanted me to slip up so I would reveal one of my secrets. 

Brenda was terrible and I needed it to be true. 

It was my identity. I had to be the next Kate Beckinsale, so I could make sure she knew. Soon, I would be mailing my movies to the house and she would open them, and for a fleeting instant she’d want to be proud but would instead be consumed by sorrow and regret.

Brenda would stand in the living room alone, holding my box of movies. She’d look at the dining room table and remember braiding my hair before homecoming, how it was our first and only tender moment. She’d wonder what our lives could have been like if we hadn’t shared just this one moment, but many, during all those years in the house together. 

Who could we have been, and what might we have become.

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Iowa. She has essays published in F(r)iction, Emrys Journal, and Dogwood. In her free time, she lifts weight and plays Magic: The Gathering. Find more of her work at tatiana-schlote-bonne.com and on Twitter at @TatianaSchlote.

7 December 2021