According to the monitor, my blackout ends at the thirty-five-second mark of the Amazing! Liz! silently white-knuckling the microphone. The bar is frozen in the spectacular badness of this moment.
I wish my eyes wouldn’t swing to Tobin, but they do. He’s tense, mouth flat, muscles bunched. He looks this close to sweeping me into his arms and carrying me away from this peril.
I’ve spent years trying to get Tobin to see our failures, both separately and together. To seeme—not the perfect me he wants, not the all-wrong me I am at work, but the real me. And now that I don’t want that anymore, here he is. Watching me fail in real time, when he can’t even bear to hear about it secondhand.
In a horrible haze of panic, I turn to the improv table. Jason looks like he ate a bug; Béa shields her eyes. I manage a faint smile when Sharon throws double horns of the devil, like this is Norwegian death metal instead of eighties power pop.
Over at the bar, David swirls amber liquid in a highball glass, wearing the mean smile I know too well. He sported that smirk the day he happened to be standing at my desk when Craig scoffed, “Catearrings, Liz?” I loved those earrings, with their sparkling peridot eyes. They felt likeme. But after that, they were always tainted by Craig’s judgment and David’s pleasure in my embarrassment.
I could step down from this stage. But if I go, I’ll have yet another painful memory to tuck away next to my lucky earrings, among the crowd of thin-edged moments that pop up whenever I get the urge to give myself a mental paper cut.
I have to sing.
AND I—I—I, prompts the screen as the softly plucked guitar notes swell.
I reach far, far inside, looking for Lola.
There’s no one down there but a pair of black cats with green eyes, sealed in a plastic bag and forgotten.
When I open my mouth, what comes out is a weak, sad “Meowwwwww,” to the rhythm of “And I…”
My voice dies fast and the song is slow. A century passes in plinking arpeggios over a blank screen.
Someone lets out a high, nervous laugh. My non-performance has them on the edge of their seats, squirming, desperate for this to stop.
Comedy is about tension,McHuge said. So much the audience almost can’t bear to look.
But they also can’t look away.
I have the audience. Ihavethem.
I let in a breath I didn’t realize I was keeping out. Everyone inhales with me. David’s smile gets 3 percent smaller.
Pure green spite flows straight to my heart. This is the worst possible motivation to succeed, and I don’t care. That’s a problemfor future me. Current me needs anything that will get her going. If that’s spite, so be it.
“Meow meow meow meow meowwww,” I trill to “Will always love youuuuu.”
Liz Lewis is in no way fit to sing Whitney Houston. But a lynx sings whatever she wants.
I stalk around the stage—no, Iprowl. The bar goes bananas, as much as a bar with eighteen patrons (I counted) can. The more I meow, the more everyone dies laughing. And the more they laugh, the more I ham it up.
When I trip over the microphone cord, I yowl angrily, and people have to mop their eyes. With thirty seconds to go, everyone starts screaming and pointing at the screen, where the DJ has switched the video feed to a YouTube supercut of cats miscalculating ambitious jumps.
As I purr the last note, everyone’s on their feet—even David, who didn’t sit down in time. I take a sloppy victory leap off the stage into the arms of my classmates.
I’m alive. I’m alive, and I killed. I fall into the empty chair next to Sharon, ears ringing with adrenaline.
I can’t help myself; I look over at Tobin’s table. The shock of finding it empty buzzes through my body, scrambling my heartbeat.
I didn’t want him to see me. Guess I got my wish. All the same, my winning smile weebles a bit.
The DJ, keen to keep the energy going, calls Jason’s name. I fade into my seat, grateful to be out of the spotlight. And also… a little envious?
Jason head-bangs convincingly through “Crazy Train,” hair flying. Sharon goes extremely torchy for a Lana Del Rey number whose melody and rhythm she obviously does not know in the slightest. I hate to see it, but David’s good, too, even though McHuge made him sing a BTS song made for an ensemble all by himself.
But the star of the night is Béa. And it’s not because she’s good. The song is a softball: “Islands in the Stream.”
From the very first note, she ruins it. She sings her off-key heart out, and she’s gorgeous, and she’s grinning. She sticks the landing 100 percent.
