Where You End and I Begin by Leah McLaren

Author:Leah McLaren [McLaren, Leah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

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Drama, my major and first class, runs for two hours every morning. It is held in a large underground studio with heavy soundproof curtains that can be drawn across to divide it up into rehearsal spaces. The first day I slouch on the side of a sloped riser waiting for the teacher to arrive as my fellow drama students wander in. Most of them already know each other from the feeder school.

At lunch I avoid the cafeteria and eat my cheese bagel on the concrete ledge in front of the school. I watch a guy with a long blond ponytail sneak up on a group of ballerinas and slip an ice cube down the back of the prettiest one’s leotard. She shrieks, and then the dancers laugh and kick him with their flat pink slippers. I resolve to start smoking.

A girl with an unusually long neck sits down beside me. She’s tall and lean, broad at the shoulder and hip. She wears violet lipstick, so dark it’s almost blue, a battered tank top and army pants, and a long silk scarf, printed in floral, is wound several times around her neck. Her hair is dark orange, long but shaved at the sides, and a banjo is slung around her shoulders on a thick canvas strap. She rolls her head around twice then touches her toes, humming to herself. When she raises her arms to stretch, two thatches of ginger hair appear, licking the air like flames.

“Hiya!” she says, and sticks out a hand for me to shake. I miss the moment and instead give an awkward little wave. She laughs and drops her hand with a shrug as if to say, Suit yourself. Her fingers are slender, rounded at the ends like a tree frog’s, glitter-painted nails chewed to the quick. She has a long, thin head and wide-set eyes.

“I’m Joni,” she says, then looks down at the banjo as if she’s just noticed it. “I’m actually a visual art major. Sculpture mostly. But I’m way into bluegrass. Probably a phase. Anyway, has anyone ever told you that you have the perfect nose?”

“No.”

“Yeah, it’s like Elizabeth Taylor’s. A cute little ski jump,” she chuckles, as if at a private joke. “My aunt got the same one for her sixteenth birthday. My mom’s family’s from L.A. Nose jobs are a family tradition.”

“That’s insane.”

“You’re telling me. The California clitorectomy. Anyway, she regrets it now.”

“Why?”

“It’s perfect, but it’s too narrow and upturned for her round, chubby face. A bit like yours. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“I’m assuming yours is natural?”

I laugh in disbelief. “Yeah.”

Joni explains to me that noses are problematic. She’s thought of getting hers done—tastefully, not in an Elizabeth Taylor way, no offense—but she’ll have to wait till she’s at least eighteen because her mother doesn’t believe in cosmetic surgery. She’s a feminist filmmaker, divorced from Joni’s father, a modernist composer who doesn’t believe in binary thinking or monogamy, which is a fancy way of saying that despite being nearly sixty and on his third wife he reserves the right to do what he wants.

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