Attack of the Theater People Read Online Free PDF Page A

graduating class just did their presentations for agents and casting directors. Marcus didn’t go over as well as he would have liked.”
    Willow nods as she sticks the paper umbrella from her piña colada in her hair. “Some agent said he had a face like a sea sponge.”
    The party breaks up from there, and I immediately mourn the demise of the evening. I don’t want to leave my friends—not yet, not so soon. My petty neuroses aside, I never feel more like myself than when I’m with them, and I feel desperate to hang on to that feeling. I wish we could go everywhere together, like wolves or Japanese tourists. Not only are my friends a safe harbor in which to dock, they’re the lighthouse guiding me home across storm-tossed seas.
    But I have to make a duty call—at a port I have no desire to visit.

Four
    It’s after two when I stagger down the hall to my old room, swaying back and forth with my bag of laundry as if I were dancing with it. I don’t know how my dad can stand living in a four-bedroom split-level ranch all by himself. Actually, I don’t know how anyone could stand living in a four-bedroom split-level ranch period, particularly if you could afford any of Wallingford’s many charming Colonials or Tudors. As always, Al’s got financial reasons for keeping it—something about capital gains and a onetime exertion. (Excursion? Excretion? Whatever.) But it’s a sad place, the house my mother walked out of when I was twelve, and the house I walked out of shortly before my eighteenth birthday, slamming the door on the Teutonic nightmare that was my evil ex-stepmonster. Plus, it’s a four-bedroom split-level ranch, which just sucks.
    I slip in the door to my old room as quietly as is possible when your body is do-si-doing against its will, unzip my pants, shimmy across the room, and flop onto the bed face-first.
    Onto a sleeping body.
    I’m not sure who screams first, me or the woman. I scramble to get off of her, a task made easier when she knees me in the groin. While I cringe on the floor, she yells, “
AYUDA! AYÚDAME!
”
    The door flies open, and I see the silhouette of a caveman with a club.
    “
POP! IT’S ME! IT’S ME! IT’S ME!
” I yell, suddenly sober. Life-threatening terror can do that to you.
    “Eddie?” He flips on the light to find me sprawled on the floor, my pants around my ankles, while a plump young woman sobs in Spanish.
    “What the fuck’s goin’ on?” Al says, putting down the baseball bat. His furry frame is covered only by a towel, giving him the unfortunate appearance of a skirted dancing bear.
    “I don’t know,” I gasp. “All I tried to—”
    “Milagros, you okay?”
    “Spanish Spanish Spanish Spanish,” Milagros says.
    “THIS. IS. MY. SON,” he shouts, like she’s retarded instead of foreign.
    The woman pulls the neck of her oversize T-shirt up over her face, hiding her head behind the word RELAX . She looks to be in her late twenties.
    “
Esto es mío
…Shit. Eddie, how d’ya say
son
in goddamned Spanish?”
    I have no idea, having studied French because it seemed more elegant.
    “Spanish Spanish Spanish Spanish.”
    “Milagros,
esto es mío…sol. MÍO SOL
.”
    I may not know Spanish, but I believe my father just informed a hysterical Latina that I am his sunshine.
    Milagros seems to get the idea. “Your son?” she says.
    “
SÍ. SÍ. SÍ,
” Al and I both shout.
    When I woke up this morning it never occurred to me that I would need to know the Spanish word for
rapist,
so it requires a dictionary to explain to Milagros that she sleeps in my old room and I am not
el violador.
    In fact, once she calms down, she’s as warm and sweet as the delicious doughy cheesy thingy she heats up for me. I’m not hungry—well, that’s not exactly true; I’m always hungry—but I shouldn’t be, having just gorged on mozzarella sticks and chicken strips. Since I left school I can’t seem to stop eating. It’s like I’ve got a giant hole inside me I