Feel the Beat

I don’t just hear the beat- I feel it. Much like the name of this 9PM audition show, Feel the Beat. 

But seriously. I can both hear and feel the beat to Miley Cyrus’ wrecking ball as audition number 451 belts out a ridiculously high note just on the other side of the wall. I wrinkle my nose as she wavers at a particularly long note. Poor girl. 

One less person to compete with, I guess. I keep my eyes closed as I listen to her sing. She has a nice voice. Her voice is precisely ‘nice.’ Not extraordinary, not spectacular, not unique, not astounding. Just nice. Still, she’s really not bad. If she had performed this at my high school talent show, I might have given her a clap or two. Not three. Two, at most. I hum along to her increasingly watery voice; she must have gone through a tough break up. 

“Are you here to audition?” A light, feathery voice cuts through number 451’s warbling. 

I open one eye and glance to the left. A girl looks back at me with nervous eyes as she wipes her hands on her leggings. I look down at her battered sneakers and back up to her highlighter yellow hair. The number on her chest reads 457. Right after me. She drums her fingers on her thighs anxiously.

I throw her a smile. “I am.” 

“With what?” Her eyes are so big they take up half of her face. 

“I sing,” I respond simply. I keep the smile on my face, even though the shaking leg is starting to get to me.

“Cool,” She sounds breathless. It makes sense, considering how much her leg is moving. “That’s cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.”

She continues with the ‘cool’ for a bit, until she adds, “I dance.” 

“Cool,” My cheeks begin to tug. 

“So, are you nervous?” Her legs have stopped and the movement has now transferred back to her fingers. She tugs mercilessly at the strings escaping her sweater.

“No.” 

“Really?” My response must have shocked her, because her fingers have stopped too, and she is finally still. “Wow. You must be experienced with all this audition stuff, then.”

“This is my first audition,” I glimpse at her eyes. They might as well take up two thirds of her face now. 

“Huh,” She mutters and stares at her knees. Suddenly, she’s very still. The abrupt lack of movement is startling. 

She looks up at me hastily with a determined look in her eyes. “You want to become a singer, right?” 

“No.”

She looks so incredibly perplexed I almost feel bad. I smile nonetheless.

“Then,” She speaks slowly as if I’m a deranged maniac on the verge of losing it. Maybe I am. “Why are you auditioning?”

I stare at her in a way I am sure makes her uncomfortable. Strangely, she doesn’t look away. I notice the pattering of freckles on her left cheek. I decide to respond. “My mom is dying.” 

There is no way to describe the look on her face. Aghast, maybe? Shocked? Disgusted? Maybe a droplet of excitement in there. 

I get it. If I had heard this from someone else, I would have had a similar look on my face as well. But knowing my mom, I can guarantee that I am very much sane and that this is in fact the only way. 

My mom will die. It may be in a few weeks, a few months, perhaps a year if lucky, but she will die. I recognized this when I came to see her in the hospital and she lied there, pasty and thin, looking at me with tightly closed lips. That was the first time I’d seen her in 8 months and she was dying. The last time we had seen each other had been during Thanksgiving. She yelled at me across the dinner table and called me names. She told me that my pursuit of a career in writing was just a cover up for a meaningless life dawdling in past traces of youth. I got up and drove 800 miles to California, where I spent the next 3 months drawing beaches and writing in parks. I promised myself I would never speak to her again. Then she started dying. 

I feel bad. I think that sums up this torrent of emotion nicely. I feel bad. I feel bad for my mom because she’s dying. I feel bad for my dad because he always tried to make us play nice. I feel bad for my brother because he’s spending all his time with mom instead of his seven-month pregnant wife. I feel bad for myself because I never had a mom I could call at night to cry to. I feel bad for myself because I never knew how to talk to my mom. I feel bad for myself because sometimes it feels like I didn’t really have the kind of mom I wanted. But most of all, I feel bad for my mom because she never really had a daughter either. And she’s dying. 

I gaze at the wall across from me blankly until a pair of hands turn me around forcefully. Alarmed, I stare at the now flushed girl, who is almost huffing with what I would guess is anger.

“Okay, so your mom is dying. That sucks. I mean, it really, really does,” She takes a deep breath as if she is acknowledging just how much this sucks. “But what are you doing here?” 

“I’m trying to make her proud. I’m going to be her daughter,” I reply automatically. 

She rolls her eyes and throws her hands into the air. “You think auditioning for a mediocre 4pm talent program will magically make you her daughter?”

“That’s my best bet,” I snap, folding my arms across my chest.

“No, it’s not!” She very nearly shouts. The flush from her cheeks has crawled up to her eyes. “Talk to her. Tell her how you feel! Tell her what you’re thinking! If you don’t tell her, how will she know? How will she know?”

With these last words, she starts bawling. I gawk at her silently. When she shows no signs of stopping, I reach out a tentative hand and give her a pat on her shoulder. She looks up at me briefly, with pink streaks running down her cheeks, until she buries her face in her hands again and continues to wail. 

“Why are you crying?” I whisper reluctantly with an awkward hand paused on her shoulder.

She takes in a stuttering breath. “I can’t dance.” 

Her eyes are so hopeless as they look at me that I almost don’t know what to say. And then I realize that I really don’t know what to say. “Me neither?”

“No, I’m supposed- I’m supposed to be good, I’m supposed to be talented,” She blubbers, scrubbing at her eyes fiercely with balled-up fists. “Do you know how much dance lessons cost? They cost a lot. Do you know how long I’ve taken these lessons? Ten years. Do you know how much that costs? That costs a lot.” 

She sounds like a broken record. A bedazzled lemon glitters sadly from her neck; it trembles as she suddenly begins to laugh. 

“I mean, I’ve been dancing for ten years, but I just can’t- I just can’t audition. I can’t audition for anything,” She’s laughing uncontrollably even as the pink continues to stain her cheeks. I start to feel pity for this sad, potentially deranged girl. “I can’t audition for anything. I can’t compete. That’s why I thought I would come here, to audition for this stupid TV show, and I can’t, I can’t-” 

“I would think,” I cut in with determination. “That if you’ve been dancing for ten years, you must be good.” 

She glares at me through teary eyelashes. “You don’t know that. Passion doesn’t mean talent. Do you understand that? Passion. Doesn’t. Mean. Talent.” 

I think of the thousands of stories on my computer, some half done and some only a few lines long. I smile bitterly. “I do.” 

She looks at me for a moment and smiles cautiously until she sighs again. “And it’s not as if my mom cares. You know, if I told her I couldn’t dance, she would just say ‘okay,’ and be done with it. And that would be it. She would be okay with it. She’s so sweet, right? But I’m not okay with it. I’m not okay with letting her down. I’m not okay with letting my friends down. I’m not okay with letting Aydin down.” 

“You’re not okay with letting yourself down,” I say simply. “Because you love dancing.” 

Her smile is watery. “Yeah.” 

 We sit in silence for a moment, until she murmurs gloomily. “Sorry for all the mom talk.” 

“It’s okay.” 

Another song begins to thump at the back of my head. I look to the TV screen at the far wall and realize that I am next. I hear the girl sniffing beside me. I wonder if I should start practicing my song. The girl continues to sniffle. I look at her; her hair is a mess. Her face even messier. She seems to not even notice my staring as she gazes blankly at the wall across from her. 

“Let’s go,” The words leave my mouth before I even register them. The girl turns to face me so slowly that I shake her by the shoulders. “Let’s go.” 

“Go where?” Her voice is trembling.

“Waffle house. We’re getting waffles,” I stand decidedly. I extend a hand towards her; she stares blankly.

“We have to audition,” She argues indignantly, but I can hear in the strength of her voice that she desperately wants to leave.

“Face it,” I begin, feeling the words gather stormily in my chest. “We can’t audition for this crappy TV show.”

She bites her lip; I’m right. 

“I need to go talk to my mom because- because if I don’t talk to her, she’ll die, and she’ll never know that I love her even though she yelled at me at Thanksgiving and made me feel bad about my writing,” I speak rapidly in one breath, staring at a certain stain on a chair to keep me grounded. I inhale slowly and consider the girl in front of me. God, she’s so pitiful. I bet I am too, standing here with dirty hair and dirtier sweatpants with flushed cheeks and a pale face. 

“You love dancing. You’re probably good, but you’re scared that you aren’t. You’re scared of what will happen if you realize you aren’t.” 

She looks at me wearily.

“You can’t audition for this show. Did you hear that girl singing Wrecking Ball? I mean, she was awful,” I’m rambling now with my hands moving wildly in the air. “You audition when you want to and where you want to. Not for anyone else, and not because of some false sense of obligation. Tell you what, we go get waffles, and you can show me your dance. I’ll tell you if you’re good or not” 

My hand is still stretched out towards her. She hesitates. 

“Waffles sound good.” Her hand falls nicely into mine and I pull her up with a flourish. We are a sweaty mess of grinning emotions. 

I walk with her down the hallway, past number 460 and 471 and 490, towards the sliding glass doors and the promise of waffles.

“So, what’s your name?”