excerpt from American Thighs

At this point in the novel, in American Thighs, the protagonist, Anissa, AKA Tatum, has left her home in Hollywood, run away from her family there, to live incognito in Elkheart, Indiana, posing as a 15 year old, entering high school. She is a former child actor, but one like Samantha Mathis (River Phoenix’s last girlfriend who was with him when he died, though she is rarely mentioned in his story), who can blend in in normal society. Someone who never had a huge persona in Hollywood. Who doesn’t have much face recognition. So, she is able to “pass,” as a normal teenager. Like other child actors, she never had a real childhood. Grew up on film sets with a stage mother/manager. So, she is eager to live out this fantasy of a normal American teenager in the Midwest, going to prom, trying out for the cheerleading team. She has had one true love, Quinn, a troubled actor similar to River, who died young, abandoned her. At this point in the novel, she is doing her best “method acting,” to fit into the high school scene, to *become* a teenager, to befriend the popular girl, Taylor Ragner.





I’d been teaching and coaching at Dobson High about ten years. I taught English and History and every now and then they let me teach acting too. Every once in a while they let me put on a school play. Neither was in our permanent budget. Our permanent budget was shit. It allowed for football and basketball and that was about it, as far as “the arts” goes. A long, long time ago I fancied myself an actor. I thought I would make it out of Elkheart, find my way to Hollywood, sign into the movies like signing in at the DMV. Believe it or not, I’d been semi-good looking once. Before all the alcohol and cigarettes. The years of living alone and drinking myself into oblivion because Hollywood, it turns out, didn’t want me. It took about two weeks to find this out and years to recover from the realization, all the I wasn’ts. I wasn’t good looking enough. I wasn’t talented enough. I wasn’t charismatic enough. I wasn’t driven enough. The best and worst part was, my best friend who went out there with me was all of those things. Of course, that didn’t stop his self-destructiveness, it just fed it. Now he had the money to feed his self-annihilating heart all the meth and heroin and coke it wanted, demanded. It was painful to watch— both his success and his deterioration—from back here in Elkheart. That was where football came in handy. I’d watch the boys I was coaching pummeling the shit out of each other and remember his and my better years. The summers we spent drinking beers and smoking cigarettes out on the football field in the middle of the night. The autumn nights we pummeled boys like us from neighboring shithole towns. Luke Perry was from one of them. Luke Perry was from the tiniest little shithole town, that was how we’d gotten the idea to go to Hollywood, following Luke Perry. Goddamn, motherfucking Luke Perry, may he—and my friend— rest in peace.




The first day of school I just kept thinking about what Taylor had said in her video about smiling. Taylor had the best smile. That morning before school I stood in the apartment bathroom practicing my smile for two full minutes. I wanted to make a good first impression on my new classmates, on the faculty and administration. I wanted to come across as a peppy and energetic person like Taylor. I tried to do the exercises some actors like to do on sets. I asked myself, what’s my motivation? That was easy. Live the life I was never allowed to live the first time around. Make the cheer team, go to prom. Have a popular best friend like Taylor Ragner. Make a nice, sweet, good-looking football player like Chase Whiting fall in love with me. It was the American dream. That’s what I wanted. I wanted my slice of teen-aged American pie. I wanted what Michael Jackson never got. What Drew Barrymore missed out on. Michael made sure his daughter Paris went to high school, was a cheerleader, at least.



I think one of the reasons Taylor was so popular was because she was one of those early bloomers, shall we say, who basically looked like a grown woman in eighth grade. Which isn’t exactly a good thing. I think it can kind of be a curse. People assume things about you when you’re fifteen and look like Taylor Ragner. It was similar with the new girl, Tatum Grant. She wasn’t built like Taylor but she had a maturity to her, poise, the way she carried herself. To be honest, if I saw the two of them at a gas station—Taylor and Tatum—I would think Taylor was about twenty-six and Tatum was maybe twenty. The world works on what it assumes about a person based on her looks. For a long time my grandma believed Mariah Carey was white. I remember the day I walked into her house and she said, “Mariah Carey is marrying a black man.” She was lying on the couch in her quilted housecoat and she pointed a finger at the TV. I looked at the TV and looked at my Nana and I said, “Nana, Mariah Carey is black.” You should have seen my Nana’s face. That’s the face a lot of teachers and students had later, myself included, when the news started reporting about Tatum.



I’d watched and studied all of Taylor’s YouTube videos. I watched them and then watched them again, taking notes, preparing, as I used to, for a film, for a movie role. I practiced all her cheers and stretches and makeup applications and hair tutorials. But also I practiced smiling. In some ways this was much harder than the stretches and cheerleading moves. Remembering to smile is really hard, especially when you’ve been a recluse like me for fifteen years. It honestly felt good to have a role to play again, someone else to be besides boring me. Most of the roles I’d taken in the first sixteen years of my life had been girls and young women not too unlike me: serious, introverted females. Awkward and shy girls. Loners. Losers. The ones others pick on. Smiling wasn’t required much for most of my roles. Even in my last film, The Westerners, the one with Quinn, we were playing teen runaways during the Old West time period. We were serious as a heart attack. Young lovers surviving together in no man’s land, fighting off rogue cowboys and Indians and wolves and so forth, together. How many times do you see Juliet smile or laugh? In Romeo & Juliet, I mean. I mean, does she ever? I don’t remember if she does. I don’t remember Claire Danes smiling all that much. Or whoever that actress was in the 60s version, either. So, anyway, smiling was something I had to practice. As much or more than I practiced cheers. As much or more than I practiced applying makeup, doing my hair. I was used to being very serious like Juliet. My young Romeo had died, like he was supposed to, and somehow I’d survived, when I shouldn’t have. It was hard to smile knowing you shouldn’t have survived, that you shouldn’t be here, that you should be dead and buried in a grave next to your Romeo.

I’d heard how actresses who had once been pageant girls put Vaseline on their teeth for auditions, to make smiling easier. I bought a jar of Vaseline at Walgreens, applied a line of it across my top front teeth. Then I hit “play” one last time on Taylor’s face. It was at the end ofher “How to Make Cheer Team” video. It had a lot of views. Like twenty-thousand or something, I forget, and it’s way more by now, of course, since everything that’s happened. I clicked on her perfect peppy face: “DO SMILE A WHOLE LOT. Make sure you’re never NOT SMILING, Show you’re a peppy energetic person, be very happy, introduce yourself, show you’re confident 24/7! WHAT CAN YOU BRING TO THE SQUAD? Volunteer to help the coach at all times. Project your voice. DON’T COMPLAIN don’t talk back. Don’t be gossipy. don’t be late.” I stared at Taylor, then, I stared into the mirror. Taylor was smiling and I wasn’t. I looked at Taylor again, then back in the mirror: tried to will my mouth into the same sort of effortless grin as hers, but mine was full of effort. Stiff. Unnatural. I practiced this multiple times a day. I filmed myself talking, “DO SMILE A WHOLE LOT.” pretending to be Taylor. I filmed myself smiling. “SHOW YOU’RE CONFIDENT 24/7!” I smiled. “BE VERY HAPPY!” I smiled into the mirror, tried to project happiness, even if I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t yet know how unhappy Taylor was. I didn’t know yet she was just faking, too.





Elizabeth Ellen is the author of many books including Person/a, Fast Machine, and her new novel American Thighs (Clash books, 2025). She is the editor of Hobart and the founder of SF/LD books. A couple years ago she had fiction in Harper's Magazine.