The Understudy

n. a performer who learns the role of another in order to serve as a replacement if necessary.

“She wouldn’t have listened” Justine muttered to no one in particular as she put on her boots that evening. The zipper got stuck halfway through, she yanked, and yanked ‘til it broke. “Shi—!“.

She burried her face on her hands then glanced outside her window. The moon was full and proud. It was shining like a spotlight on every grey shadow in her bedroom, and for the first time, she didn’t find it comforting. It was quiet, too, she thought, as if the crickets were an audience waiting for her to speak, and she had nothing to say. Nothing that would have mattered now, anyway. She took off her boots and settled for sneakers. Once out, she felt the quiet, and scoffed. She mounted her bike, and headed for the studio.

On the way, Justine passed the antique store on the corner of 25th street where the Big Man worked everyday at three. A few days ago, she would have waved at the Big Man as he closes up his store, but not today. 

The store was a modest place at best. Mud-colored bricks, and two victorian styled windows to showcase the antiques mostly from Southeast Asia, she thinks. The sign upfront read “KeepSakes”. Yesterday afternoon its doors welcomed the most number of people the place had accompanied at a single time. They weren’t interested in the vases and the buddha statues, though. Sometime around 3pm, uniformed men wrapped the store with long yellow police tapes, and Justine ran to her home before they brought something out.

 Justine reached the studio, and everything was as it were, and that didn’t feel right, either. Dianne, her sister, was at the stage rehearsing Act Three of the play. Being the understudy for Dianne, their stage director said ’What luck! You guys look like twins‘. They hear that alot, although they aren’t.

Justine tried to take as much notes on her index cards without drifting into her own thoughts — I’m the most unimportant character in this story. Realizing that she wrote those lines on the cards, she stormed out and threw the purple notes in the garbage bag full of pizza boxes and something sticky — ‘What good would these do?’

Later that evening, Dianne, Justine, and a couple of their friends headed for the bar. “Mixin’ it up Tin?” Dianne said as she noticed Justine asked for a Pineapple Schnapps rather than their usual margarita. “I guess” she replied.

“Can we not talk about him? He got what he deserved. He was creepy.” Dianne said, in between sips of margarita. Genevieve and Justine nodded. Dustin, however said “I kinda liked the big guy”, and Justine felt a ball forming in her throat. She did, too, but for some reason she still found herself nodding with the other girls when Dianne spoke. ‘What difference would it make?’

“Weren’t you friends with that guy, Tin?” Dustin asked. Justine replied with a nod, “Sort of, he was pretty nice.” As soon as she said it, she thought to herself, ‘You coward’, and took it back “I mean, yeah, yes. He was my friend.” Then again, she thought, ‘What difference would it make?’ Nothing, not a damn thing.

“You were friends with that guy?” Genevieve said, a little too loud. She looked disgusted, too.

“Good thing he didn’t stick around too long, right Tin?” Dianne said, ordering fries for the four of us. Justine knew she wasn’t expecting a reply. “So, Greg and Tina, huh?” Dianne said, changing the topic. Genevieve squealed, and just like that, they forgot about the Big Man. 

A week before the incident, Justine visited the big man, Gus, in his store. “Hey there TinTin, you finally buying something?” He said. Gus stands 6 foot 4, and had a bald head. He was one of those men who spoke as if he had always just finished a marathon, perpetually breathless. He looked like it, too, since he was never seen without a towelette over his shoulder. He looked less like a man who owns an antique store, and more like a man who should be fixing motor bikes with a dad-bod. His smile, though, was a different thing — it was gentle, as if he just finished baking cookies. Gus told Justine that he’s getting less and less customers lately, that’s why he’s taking two jobs now. Justine talked about her trip this summer to Miami.

When Dianne and Justine’s parents died in a car crash, both of them inherited the lot on the corner of 25th street. They decided to rent it out, and a man named Gus moved in. Gus paid late almost all the time, and always said “Oh Dianne, you know nothing yet.” whenever they got into an argument. This infuriated Dianne. Needless to say, they were not too fond of each other. 

Dianne was a complicated woman, Justine thought. She was good at making stories come alive, and she wanted a story she could accept. At this time, she was just too lost to think straight, Dianne thought. Gus came in the picture, and as she knew nothing about the Big Man, so she found herself focusing on him. She began piecing things together. Little, isolated incidences she took out of context, she began forming a story — A story she shared with everyone who’d listen. Justine saw this as it happened, and she did nothing. In the end, nobody saw it coming but Dianne made herself believe that Gus had a history of abusing children. Nobody saw it coming, but Justine did. She hoped, however, that it would die out. It didn’t.

Dianne continued to plant the seeds into people’s minds, although she never really said ‘he sexually assaults children’, she was more subtle with it. ‘Don’t you find that he’s a bit too close with the kids?’, ‘Nobody’s that gentle’, or ‘Just saying, I’m not trusting him to look after my little cousins’.

A group of young men from town got hold of this idea. One night, after a bottle too many, they broke into the shop as Gus was closing up. They tied him to a chair and beat him up. The police don’t think they had any intention to kill Gus, but during the attack, Gus got an asthma attack. When the boys found the inhaler, it was empty. They panicked and left. Gus, the gentle giant, layed on the floor until sun-up.

That night of the incident, Justine passed by the shop, and thought it was weird he didn’t see Gus close up. She just assumed he closed up early, despite the four bikes she saw in front of the shop. 

Back in the bar, Justine’s friends were still talking about Greg and Tina when Justine snapped. “He was a decent guy, he didn’t deserve this. All of you who believed those lies had as much to blame for his death as those boys” and left abruptly. Funny, this is the first time she stood up for her friend, the Big Man, and it felt too empty — like a punch line to a joke told 3 days too late. It means nothing now.

That night, Justine kept thinking ‘It wasn’t my fault, I didn’t do anything’, hoping it would let her sleep. Everytime she said it, she believed it less and less. “She wouldn’t have listened, anyway” It feels worse, and she doesn’t believe it.

I’m the most unimportant character in this story. That, she believed.