Smarty Pants, page 12
Hailee shut off her recording software just as a series of messages from the group chat came in. She peered inside, noticed that none of the messages were from Rebecca. She hadn’t participated in a long time, either.
Has anyone seen Spud around? Hailee asked. I need to talk to her.
Yessina continued on with a conversation she’d been having about a show she’d found online, ad how she wanted to try out the stunt. Indie and Dom were also participating in this conversation, and neither one responded to her question about Rebecca.
Ladies, please, Hailee wrote again. I just need some help for a minute. Anyone know where I can find Spud? You know, Rebecca? I’m at this conference right now, and I just need to check something with her before I present. Hit me up when you can.
Hailee exited the group chat, hoping that one of her friends would private message her. When her phone buzzed, her excitement bloomed—but it turned out to be Kit. A different type of excitement replaced it. She’d been sending Kit salacious texts in between angry rants about her dissertation. She’d skimmed all her rambling, wincing slightly, before she read Kit’s latest message.
Boxes all packed and ready to go. I have my keys from the super, and just so you know, I will be on the exact same side of the building as you, but three floors down. That sort of sounds like a band from the 1990s, doesn’t it? Three Floors Down? I could croon outside your window like Lloyd Dobler. Or Frank Drebin if you prefer.
Woman after my…well, you know. Hailee smiled for what felt like the first time since she arrived at the conference. Her fingers flew over the keys as added, You are learning the wisdom of the 1980s movies well, grasshopper.
You can blame—or thank?—Rae for that. She insisted we have a marathon before I moved. So now I have all of John Hughes’ songs stuck in my head.
Amazing. Good luck today! Hailee wrote. She wanted to keep talking all day, but her presentation time loomed in front of her. Kit seemed somewhat taken aback by the short conversation, but eventually conceded.
I should get ready. Yessina will be by soon. But I’ll call you tonight, after your paper?
Yes, that’s perfect.
Hailee set down her phone to give herself a chance to breathe. She felt the low burning hatred for conferences flare inside of her. Sure, the hotels were fun. The first thing she did every morning was explore the free breakfast, the pool room, and the work out area. Since this was in downtown Toronto, she had earmarked a couple good places to shop later on, too. Sometimes the socials the night before were also fun. But the talking, the presenting…she wasn’t into it. Not as much as she wanted to be. Or maybe this tiff with Rebecca, or whatever it was now, was making her research feel more like a millstone.
Hailee’s phone rang. She half-expected to hear Kit’s voice on the other end, but it was Indie. “Hey, you rang?”
“You called me,” Hailee said. “What’s up, Indie?”
“Yeah, but you’ve been harassing us all about Rebecca. So I have been elected to have The Conversation, since Yessina is helping Kit move and Dom is…well, Dom is too close to Josie to do anything else other than play possum.”
Hailee swallowed hard. “Oh, God. What’s going on?”
Indie sighed. “I love you, you know that, right?”
“Sure.”
“You usually say I love you back,” Indie corrected. Her tone was light, but there was also a harsh edge to her voice. “You need to…damn, I don’t know how to say this. Use your words better?”
“What?”
“I know, forgive me, I am not a conflict negotiator. Though I have helped organize a lot of Indian weddings. Anyway,” Indie said, and Hailee could clearly see her flicking her hand in the air as if she was batting away a bug. “Rebecca is mad at you, yes, because yo—”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You interrupted me! You did that to her!”
“What? No, I…” Hailee bit her lip. She could hear Indie’s annoyed sigh on the other line. She cooled her focus. She breathed deeply. “I’m sorry, Indie. Please continue.”
“Thank you. See? You know how to speak in a nice manner.”
“I’m at a conference. All of this is glad-handing in order to get a job in the future.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“When you put it that way, it sounds cold. But you need to talk more like that to us.”
“What?” Hailee pressed her lips together again. She was talking over Indie. She could hear it clearly now. She breathed in and out again. “Please continue, Indie.”
“See? It’s nice. We all talk like this to one another, too, you know. We wait our turns. We have basic elementary school knowledge.”
“Elementary school sucked for me. I didn’t talk then.”
“I know, sweetie. Elementary school—and high school, thank you very much—all sucked for us. Why do you think we all make jokes now? Life was hard. So we found ways of making it funny.”
“Okay. We were all the underdogs. Good for us. Why am I suddenly the only underdog now, then?”
“Sweetie, you’re not the underdog,” Indie said slowly, “you’re the bully.”
“What?”
“Shhh.” Indie hushed her with an expertise that Hailee didn’t know she possessed. When the silence lingered between them, Indie spoke again. “I do not mean to say that you are deliberately doing this. But you talk over us. You say whatever you want and don’t think about the consequences. You get fixated on an idea, and then you won’t let it go.”
“Like what?” Hailee demanded, then added snidely, “or am I not allowed to speak right now?”
Indie sighed. “Please. Don’t shoot the messenger.”
“You’re not just the messenger. You’re telling me I do this to you, too, right?”
Indie seemed to shrug on the other line. “I’m used to a bunch of my cousins talking over me. I can assert myself.”
“Yes, exactly. I’m just assertive. After being shit-talked for not being able to talk for so long, I just want to speak. Why is that bad?”
“It’s not. I’m the same way in a lot of cases. That’s why we get along. But,” Indie added almost the moment Hailee thought she was on her side again, “I also grew up with a bunch of ladies who told me how exactly to speak when I did speak. I know how to couch things. I know how to…I don’t want to say be polite because it’s more than that.”
“What is it, then? I didn’t think I was a bully. I wasn’t trying to do anything. I was just—”
“You told Rebecca that her book didn’t deserve to be on the Blue and Pink Awards,” Indie said slowly. “You then called her and called her, telling her you wanted to know more about her story for your dissertation.
“Conference presentation—”
“Whatever,” Indie said, keeping them on track. “It sort of seems like you’re just using her story to further her career. You’re not actually treating her as a person.”
“That’s not true. I love her. I…” Hailee sighed. “I talk about her all the time to Kit. How much fun she is, what cool things she’s done.”
“That’s great, sweetie. Kit seems great, too. But Rebecca doesn’t hear that. She just hears flak and flak and gossip. She thinks you hate her right now.”
“What? I don’t!”
“I know. We’ve been telling her that. But she’s a little gun-shy after all the stuff with her channel.” Indie reminded Hailee about the doxxing attempt on Rebecca’s channel, how much of her own flak she received for coming out as bi when everyone who had followed her for a long time thought she was straight, because the ex she spoke about from her car crash had been a man. “It’s just hard for her right now.”
“It’s hard for all of us. We’re all dealing with bad YouTube comments in some form or another,” Hailee said, and then expanded on the garbage comments she’d received on some of her research. She also included the strained responses from her lack of dissertation defence date last night, and how something as simple as Olive not responding to her emails was going to screw her networking chances this weekend.
“Hmmm,” Indie said. “I think I see the issue.”
“What?”
“Academia. It is the perpetual YouTube comment. There’s no feeling there.”
“There shouldn’t be,” Hailee insisted. “I am a critical observer.”
“Not of your friends. Not of your own life. You have to live that, sweetie. Otherwise you’re just a bully, constantly interrupting us.”
Hailee sighed. She hated this conversation—yet it felt like the most honest one she’d had in weeks. She needed to hear everything because at least now she understood what Rebecca was doing, why she was hiding. She still thought she was wrong, but at least now she knew. it was like when her speech therapist realized the problem letters for her. They had found the issues, huzzah. Now they could strategize to fix them.
“What do I do?” Hailee said. “She won’t talk to me.”
“She might now. But let that be in her court, okay? Stop calling her, stop harassing her, and let her come to you.”
“What about improv? What about—”
“Why do you think we got new people?” Indie said. “We needed them to absorb our own conflicts.”
Though Indie went onto explain that Dom now sometimes felt left out from the Josie and Rebecca party, Hailee still felt like the auditions were now all about her. She’d fucked up. she’d become a bully, no better than an insult comic. She blinked as she flashed back to all the bullies in her youth. The names they’d called her, how her speech had been mocked. God, she didn’t want to become like any of them. She thought back to the people she’d met at the conference the day before, and wondered if they, too, were bullies now.
She shook her head. No, it was possible to be a nice person in academia. She remembered Professor Browne in stark clarity. She recalled some of her first-year profs, and her profs from her masters. It was possible to be a good person. She just had to practice more, like she had to practice her hard consonants more.
“Is there anything else I can do?” Hailee asked Indie after a while. “Maybe an apology tour?”
Indie chuckled. “Nothing that extreme yet. Just…slow down a bit, you know? maybe get laid. That usually makes me feel better.”
Hailee let out a low laugh, which she wanted to turn into a moan. “Trust me, I’m working on that one.”
“Good. Good. If you need some help though, call me. Stay out of the group chat for a while.”
“Are you all shit-talking me?” Hailee meant for her comment to come off as a joke, but it sounded flat and harsh. She sighed. “Sorry, that’s really narcissistic, isn’t it?”
“A little. But I get it. No, we’re not talking about you. We’re talking about nonsense things, but they’re fun nonsense things. We just want to do that for a while.”
“I can talk nonsense,” Hailee said, but realized that was not the point, tier. She had to just…stop talking for a little while. Indie seemed to confirm as much when she made an excuse to get off the phone. They said their goodbyes, Hailee’s an octave softer than before, and then hung up.
Hailee ran a hand through her hair. She stood from her desk and wandered into the hotel bathroom. Her conference outfit was hung over the door. Right now, she wore her basic jeans and a T-shirt. Soft clothing, the kind that made her look like she had in school when she was both tomboy and stuttering freak. She took off her outfit and switched into her professional clothing. She looked at the A-line skirt and the shimmery fabric in the mirror. It was pretty and made her feel like some of the prettiest girls in high school. Did that make her a bully? Or did it make her a professional now? She remembered the lines from her student review. Being a bully and being a professional weren’t mutually exclusive, apparently.
She shook her head and tried to shake away her nerves. She spoke the first line of her presentation. Her voice warbled and warped.
She sighed again as she set her hands on the counter. “That is not what I want to say at all.”
She walked back into the hotel room and sat down at the desk. She opened up the recording app on her phone and turned on the transcription service. She was going to write a new paper write now, as she spoke it aloud, and who cared if it didn’t match her abstract anymore? It would still be about stuttering, trauma, and sexuality—it would just be her story.
“Hello, all,” she began to speak. “I want to talk to you about how inter-family trauma, like that of domestic abuse, can cause stuttering in early age children. My research deals primarily with the correlation between childhood stuttering and queer sexuality, especially among women. I found this correlation because I stuttered from the ages for four to fourteen, and it only ceased when my father, a domestic abuser, was put in jail. My research also finds a correlation between…”
Hailee kept speaking, all the words flowing out of her truly coming from the inside. There was no need to pause, to look anything up, because she’d already done that. She’d spent years of her life doing that. Now it was time to talk about herself. She watched in the corner of her eye as the words she spoke aloud turned to a transcribed paper. She smiled. Everything was falling into place, a bit like magic she could finally control.
Chapter 16
Hailee flopped down on her bed that night, utterly exhausted. The presentation had gone well. Even as her face turned red, and she was worried she’d looked like a radish, the crowd had been receptive. She got through the twenty minutes and then listened intently to the other papers.
The Q and A session, though, that had only reminded her of what Indie said over and over. You are a bully. You interrupt people. Every time someone stepped up to the mic to ask a question, that was what it felt like—only it was others interrupting her, others being a bully. She did her best to remain calm and cool, but the setting provoked her. The only way she could prevail in all of this was to interrupt or bully back. Hailee wanted to be seen as smart. She wanted to talk, and talk, and talk. She just wanted to defy her early roots, in so many ways possible.
But it still felt like shit. Had she always felt like this after a conference? She wasn’t entirely sure but had a feeling that her penchant for drink tickets related in some way. So she’d skipped the social mixer afterwards and went right to her room. She was on her bed, staring at the ceiling for five minutes, when her cell rang.
Kit’s number ran across the screen. She let out a low breath and answered it right away. “Hey.”
“Hello,” Kit said, her voice bright. “I was so hoping I’d catch you. I know it’s early, but I have far fewer things that I thought I did. My place is practically empty. Can you hear the echo when I talk?”
Hailee chuckled as Kit walked into a room and called out echo several times. “See?” she said. “Do you hear how empty this place is?”
“We can find you some furniture at a thrift store.”
“Hasn’t everyone died in that, though?”
“That’s the clothing,” Hailee corrected playfully. “Or we can just be semi-adults and go to Ikea. We’d need to rent another van, though.”
“Hmm. Good thing to keep in mind. For now, this is home.” Kit seemed to flop on a couch—or her bed—on the other line. “How’s your conference going?”
“Oh, don’t remind me. Tell me more about your place. The walls. The kitchen. The bed…”
“Ah, well, it’s exactly like your place. Except I’m here. And I’m alone.”
“Tell me more,” Hailee said. She could hear the sultry tone in her own voice. She hoped Kit could hear it, too. When the silence lingered too long, Hailee sighed. “I really need to help you break in that bed.”
“This bed has seen some times,” Kit said. “But yes, I’d like you to christen this place. The first night is always so hard for me.”
“I should have let you watch Tootsie,” Hailee said. “I put him in a kennel for the weekend. But dogs always make a place feel that much more like home.”
“Hmm. Would you mind if I got him early tomorrow, then?”
“Not at all. In fact, I insist on it.” Hailee gave Kit the information, and soon, she heard her settle back in on the bed. She gave her some more details about the move, like how the van rental place had screwed up the time, so they were only able to get it at four in the afternoon, which meant they were moving until nearly eight at night. “Yessina is a ninja, though. She was the quietest mover I have ever seen. She’s convinced it’s another job opportunity now.”
“Probably is. I should look for another job.”
“That bad today, huh?”
Hailee sighed. She hated to dwell on negative elements, but she told Kit as much as she could. The call with Indie. Rebecca’s cold shoulder. “And apparently, I’m a bully.” She sighed. When Kit didn’t respond, Hailee felt her chest tighten. “This is usually the place where you reassure me in some way.”
“I don’t know well enough to determine whether or not that’s all true,” Kit went on, “but I can tell you that I think bossy is sort of hot.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Kit said slowly. “I think you’re hot. And if you’re bossy, then—”
“I’m a bully,” Hailee said, “a very different thing.”
“But you’re still hot.”
Hailee huffed. She wanted Kit to prove Indie wrong, not subtly agree and then turn it into a kink. She was about to argue, yet again, but she remained quiet. Kit was the first to speak.
“you’re telling me you haven’t come across a bossy minx in your erotica reading? Someone who is all Devil Wears Prada and is super hot in doing so?”
“Maybe. But that’s not me.”
“Sure, and I’m not a little virginal lamb,” Kit said, her tone serious and surly at the same time. “But it’s a fun role to play, yeah?”
“Maybe.”
“Yeah. So you should treat me like that. I’ll treat you like that. And it can be a nice erotica fantasy together.”
Hailee shuddered. She shifted on the bed, crossing and uncrossing her legs. “Are you saying we should be writing partners?”
