“What you guys doing?” he said.

Richard ignored him, looking away.

“I not police, lah,” the guy said, nodding toward Richard’s hand. “Ganja, is it?”

Seng stared at him and the guy stared back calmly.

“Can I have a puff?”

Seng half shrugged and nodded, watching carefully as the guy took the joint from Richard’s hand, put it to his lips, and sucked deeply. He had a quizzical expression on his face as he exhaled slowly. Then he took another puff.

“Oi! What you think you doing?” Richard shouted. “This one not cheap, you know!”

The guy ignored Richard, looking intently at the joint as he swirled the smoke in his mouth. Jackson could see Seng pushing up his shirtsleeves and standing up straighter.

Then, laughter. Not from Richard or Jackson and certainly not Seng. The wails of laughter were coming from the guy, who was actually stamping his feet.

“Kani nah! What the fuck is wrong with you?” Seng said, inching toward the guy.

“Me? What the fuck is wrong with you?” the guy countered. “This one not ganja, lah, you losers! This one just clove ciggies! What fucking idiots!” He threw the joint on the floor and walked off. Jackson could still hear the guy’s laughter as he receded, even above the Rick Astley medley that had just started up.

Seng removed the pouch of leaves from his pocket and opened it, taking a few deep whiffs. He handed it to Richard, who spent a long minute smelling it.

Jackson suddenly felt tired. He turned around and leaned over the railing, peering out at the dance floor, at the army of robots, feet planted firmly, bodies unmoving as each of them made the same hand gesture to, “Never. Gonna. Give. You. Up. Never. Gonna. Let. You. Down.”

He couldn’t remember what was funny about this. Or the army fucker who made his maid carry his rucksack. Or the government’s solution to the homeless problem. Or the rich guy getting mocked by ten-year-olds over his mistress whacking his balls. Or the guy who killed his wife by fucking her in her sleep.

It was all just sad.

A

MANDA

S

TERN

is the author of the novel

The Long Haul

, and the founder, curator, and host of the popular Happy Ending Music and Reading Series in New York City.

acting lessons

by amanda stern

The initial quantum fluctuation that burst forward to create this universe implanted particles programmed, in years nine to fourteen of a human girl’s life, to flood the neural regions and saturate her suggestible self with one single, rabid desire: to become an actress. Why this specific link, no one knows, although recent scientific studies suggest a congruity: both teen girls and actresses embody a multiplicity of personalities, expressing each through overt behavior in narrow windows of time.

It was the first week of eighth grade and school was a cauldron of odors: fresh carpeting, new varnish, paint fumes, recently opened reams of three-hole-punch paper, just-sharpened pencils, wet presses of highlighter across textbook pages, ground meat and canned vegetables from the cafeteria, polyurethane coating the gymnasium floor, and the commingling, lingering off-gassing scent of back-to-school packaging. The notice board was wallpapered in greed, a pyrotechnic display of bubble-lettered pitches, business cards, and flyers, hatched by opportunistic adults eager to capitalize on private school kids, each blocking the other like tall kids in a class picture.

Assemblies were overbooked with presentations, a cattle call of adults trying to sell lessons that no one wanted. From Judo to gardening, our collective interest held steady at their resting rates, until the appearance of the young married couple straight from the pages of Sweet Valley High. Two tall tow-headed stalks synchronized down to their split ends, walked onto the school stage. The angular pretty boy and his chisel-cheeked wife were the color palette of our dreams; the living, breathing incarnation of how we wished we looked, of the models we circled, tore from magazines, and brought to one hair salon after another, hoping each time, as we handed them the photos of Christie Brinkley and Carol Alt, that their salon would have the necessary supplies to cut off and bleach out our actual selves, providing us an opportunity which did not exist: to be replaced by preferred selves, now, specifically, the two expensive-looking fine-grain birch-totems on stage. Even their names sounded elite.

Ian and Caroline ran a theater company for teens; Caroline did most of the talking. She spoke fast and efficiently, like she’d not lost connection with her inner teen, but Ian was slower, he talked like he was inside a dream, and all the girls found him sexy. Three times a week the group met and wrote plays, performing them at the end of each semester. They were holding auditions and if we were interested, we should stay afterward and take a form. My friend and I exchanged knowing glances. We were going to audition for this theater company and we were going to get accepted because we were talented, damnit! Success was awaiting us; all we had to do was show up. Hell, I felt my future fame kicking from inside me like a drunken fetus. Had we known what “fee-based” meant, we would not have been so self-impressed.

My best friend Tea (as in Lipton, not Leoni) and I walked to the audition which was in a church basement on the Upper East Side, not far from our all-girls school. A curtain of teen stereotypes had staged themselves theatrically on the front steps. A cursory glance caught the stoner, the mean girl, the beauty, the gay boy, the fat kid, the metal head, the punk, the cut-up, the misfit, and the bored one. We knew these kids were the existing company, because they were intense; they smoked cigarettes with their souls. As we walked past them, Tea and I looked at each other; it wasn’t tobacco they were smoking. It was obvious who was auditioning and who wasn’t and Tea and I joined the other self-consciously asymmetrical faces, as we were assessed, surveyed, and scrutinized by the kids, willfully amnesic that they once were us—outsiders. No longer sandwiched between lady-suits and matching pearl sets, Ian and Caroline looked less different offstage. Embedded in their vow to serve as a platform for our fame was the promise that we’d become who they were—California and beachy-cool—but against the backdrop of the Lexington Avenue Christian Church, and Lexington Avenue itself, they didn’t clash with the passersby rushing home to their classic six, in time to frisk their maids for stolen loot before day’s end.

Caroline moved with the security of a rich girl; the swagger of knowing she could have what she wanted, and the entitled belief that she deserved it. Ian was the bad-boy pauper she spent her money trying to save. For a moment I was disappointed by what appeared to be a bait-and-switch, but that didn’t last long. Ian reached out for the non-cigarette, and instead of stomping it out, he took a couple quick hits before handing it off to Caroline, who followed suit, returning it to the original kid. Tea and I had tried cigarettes, but never pot, and we were relieved that trying it now wasn’t part of the audition.

We followed them inside to the atrium, where the regular company kids dropped to the floor in an automatic cross-legged circle we were urged to join. Tea and I shrugged. We’d never been to an audition before; we didn’t know what to expect. Ian and Caroline removed their expensive jackets and joined the circle wanting to know all about us. Who were we? Why did we want to act? Had we had any prior experience? How was our home life? Did our parents treat us well? What were our struggles, our troubles, our demons? What pained us, and brought us shame? Trouble, they wanted us to understand, was the source of acting. Pain was the wellspring from which performance rose. The more we suffered, the better we’d be, and we were here to become the best, right? We did want to become actors … didn’t we? The company kids stared at us and we nodded in the affirmative.