Let Me Be Your Star Read Free

was my younger sister’s birthday, which, as you can imagine, was already a
difficult day for me. I remember putting on one of my favorite outfits: a blue
sweater with a border of French Provincial windmills knitted around the hem;
black velvet capri pants, and for the first time, my black leather synagogue dress
flats with no socks — a gamine look I hoped would help me glow with Audrey
Hepburn-like serenity as I watched the smaller, cuter, blonder organism my
parents had decided to spawn tear through her mountain of presents, opened the
jigsaw puzzle or paperback book my grandmother would have wrapped up at the
last minute for me so I “didn’t feel left out,” and did my best to ignore my
mother’s frantic gestures to me to ferry the frosting-smeared plates back to
the kitchen, like I was some kind of fucking scullery maid.
    The party had dwindled down to just family when the phone
rang. My heart started thudding against my ribcage, as it had been doing all
week. I cowered in the furthest corner of the living room in a state of almost
erotic terror, waiting for the news. Hours seemed to pass before my mother put
down the phone and appeared in the doorway.
    “We didn’t get in,” she said simply. The entire family had
auditioned, as part of a misguided and quickly aborted attempt to find a hobby
we could all enjoy together. The bowling hadn’t worked out very well either.
    “Yeah,” I said, “but what about me?”
    “You didn’t get in. None of us did.”
    “What?” I felt like the skin was literally being pulled away
from my face, like somebody had put a giant version of one of those Gwyneth
Paltrow cupping things over my entire head. “What do you mean?”
    “I guess they didn’t want us, honey.”
    “But why?” I gasped. “ Why ?”
    “I don’t know why. I guess that’s just show biz.”
    “No.” I shook my head. “You don’t understand. Ask them why .”
    “What? What do you mean?”
    “I mean, call them back and ask them why. Now.”
    Maybe it was the terrible desperation in my voice, or the
horrible finality of my words, or the fact that my eyeballs had rolled back in
my head and bubbling black tar was suddenly dripping from every orifice in my
face. Maybe she just loved me, who the fuck knows. No matter the reason, she
made the call.
    “Um, hello, is this Andrew?” she asked. Her voice was about
an octave higher than usual. I’m not sure who she was more afraid of, him or me.
“This is… yes, that’s right, we just spoke.…Well, I’m sorry to bother you, but
it seems I have a very disappointed little girl here…” I glared at her. How
could she make me sound so desperate? Everyone knows that’s the show biz kiss
of death.
    “Yes,” she continued, “and she was just wondering, well, why… you know, just in case there was something she could do better next time.”
I hovered anxiously as she waited, tapping the end of a pencil against the
block of rainbow-colored paper she kept next to the phone. “Uh huh… yes, I see.
Mmm. Yes, I understand. Thank you for telling me.”
    “Well? What did he say?”
    She sighed. “He said it really just came down to numbers.
There were just a lot more girls that auditioned than boys. He also said that
he thought about picking you, but there weren’t roles for the rest of us, and
he hated to think of me spending my life in the car driving you back and forth
from rehearsals for the next three months.”
    “Then call him back,” I hissed. “Call him back and tell him
it’s not a problem.”
    Levelly, my mother met my gaze. “No. I’m not going to do
that.”
    Here’s what I remember happening next: I let out a
bloodcurdling scream that rattled everything in living room, from the pictures
on the walls to the tiny crystal panda I had bought the faithless matriarch for
her birthday with thirteen dollars I had saved up in change; then I ran onto
the back patio, dug an enormous clump of rosemary out of the herb box with my
bare hands