Though Luan's primary role in theatre club was as an actress, practicality dictated that she, along with every other member, fulfill multiple tasks, which of course she did not mind in the slightest.
As a child in a family of thirteen, she was used to putting aside her own personal preferences for the sake of a larger group.
When Mrs Bernardo, the school's head theatre director, announced at the start of the semester during a drama club meeting in the school's band room that they would perform, as a choir, 'Masquerade' from The Phantom of the Opera at their annual fundraiser concert, Luan gladly volunteered her services towards designing and crafting Venetian masks for them all to wear.
"Just mask and you shall receive!" she had quipped.
Benny had to throw his hand over his mouth to keep himself from giggling aloud. Nobody else had found her joke to be so amusing, not least of all the teacher, who audibly groaned as soon as the pun left Luan's mouth. Benny noticed this, and once he managed to get himself under control, he chimed in with a joke as well. "Aw, don't be like that, Mrs B," he said. "You know what they say; mask a silly question and you'll get a silly answer!" Grinning much too widely, he looked around the room in near-desperation, hoping to find at least a smile from any of his peers. Instead, the only thing staring back at him were unimpressed faces that were mannequin-esque in their blankness.
All except for Luan's. No, Luan's face was scrunched up and contorted as though she were fighting back something powerful. It only took a few seconds for the dam to break free and for merry laughter to escape from her lips. "Good one!" she proclaimed, not caring at all that she was alone in her opinion.
Benny, immediately afterwards, offered to lend her a hand in her mask-making project.
There they sat at four o'clock after school side by side at a black table in the art classroom, a plastic bowl of papier-mâché mixture and a pile of empty balloons on a bed of newspapers sitting between them. If there was one thing that Luan, the professional party clown, was never in short supply of, it was balloons. Together they inflated one after another until they were both out of breath and dizzy and each one was the approximate shape and size of her head, then proceeded to tear pages of the business section and Sunday funnies into ribbons, submerged each strip into the paste, and coated every balloon in several layers of stock market headlines and black and white images of Charlie Brown.
"You sure this is gonna work?" she asked, her tone halfway between skeptical and teasing.
"Trust me; never underestimate the power of papier-mâché," Benny said. "I've been doing drama since middle school, and you'd be surprised how much of what you see onstage is made from the stuff. I was a set decorator for a production of The Hobbit back in the sixth grade, and we had to build a giant dragon entirely out of papier-mâché and cardboard. It moved its mouth up and down and everything!" His eyes took on an almost faraway gleam as he wistfully remembered those days, and Luan smiled. It did her heart good to see him so happy. "I'm pretty sure that dragon's still in the middle school prop closet, now that I think about it…" he said, more to himself than to Luan. "One of these days we should go over there and see if we can find it."
Luan's heart skipped a beat. Though he had suggested it so casually, she still allowed herself to pretend that he was asking her out on a date. "If we're gonna be looking for a dragon," she jested, "I'll be sure to pack my sword and suit of armor." Benny, predictable as ever, chuckled.
Working in tandem, it was not long before each balloon was covered in newspaper. The end products resembled eggs that were laid by some gigantic and long extinct bird. Or perhaps, rather, by a dragon.
"Okay, so what now?" Luan asked.
Rather than verbalize an answer, Benny smiled conspiratorially and went to his bookbag hung on the back of his chair, undoing the zipper and pulling out a large scarlet book that had a school library sticker on the spine but no dust jacket. "Here, check this out," Benny said as he laid the book on the table, flipping to a random page and waving his hand in Luan's direction, inviting her to come closer.
Luan accepted his invitation without hesitation. She went to stand by his side, staring down over his shoulder at the contents of the book, which displayed on its open page a Baroque painting that depicted a bustling township, at the center of which stood a massive wheeled wagon that seemed to function as a sort-of makeshift stage.
Atop this stage were eight dancing figures dressed in colorful clothing.
All but two of them wore elaborate masks over their faces.
"It's called Commedia dell'arte," Benny explained. "It was an early type of improv theatre in sixteenth-century Italy. Troupes would travel from town to town, putting on shows and performing skits, making up all of the dialogue and stories on the spot."
"Ah," Luan said, nodding sagely. "A sort of Renaissance-era version of Whose Line is it Anyway?"
Benny beamed widely at the reference. "Yeah, kind of!" he agreed. "Notice anything about the actors?"
"Well, yeah; they're all wearing masks."
"Correctamundo!" he said. "See, each mask represents a different stock character, so whichever actor wears the one with the hooked nose and exaggerated brows, for example, plays Pantalone, the wealthy merchant." In order to illustrate his point, he helpfully pointed out Pantalone in the painting on the page. "There are loads of different archetypes; Il Dottore, Il Capitano, Colombina… each one has a part to play, and each one wears a mask."
Luan found all of this fascinating, though a closer look revealed that Benny was mistaken. "Well, all of them except for these guys," she said, pointing out the two characters on the stage in the painting whose faces were uncovered, as though they were the only ones who were allowed to truly be themselves. The duo consisted of a young man and woman, both dressed in lavish silk clothing and staring into each others' eyes with intense longing; more of a fit for a soap-opera than a play, in her opinion.
'Oh, those two are Innamorati; 'the lovers,'" Benny explained, sounding almost bored. "They just wear lots of makeup instead of masks. They're whole schtick is that they're madly in love with each other. Not very interesting when compared to the others. Kinda like Zeppo in the first five Marx Brothers movies…"
"Hey, Zeppo had his moments," Luan playfully protested. "Remember the 'take a letter' scene in Animal Crackers? That bit had me dying the first time I saw it!"
For a second Benny allowed the scene to replay in his head before he conceded her point by snickering. "Yeah, you're right, that scene's great! 'Take a letter, Jamison…'"
"'Which one?'" she asked, finishing the quote from the film. "'There are twenty-six of them!'"
They giggled for a moment before Benny managed to compose himself, staring at Luan with the same sort of emotion that the two lovers who made up Innamorati reserved for each other. Or, at least, that was her interpretation at the time. "Can I just say, Luan," he began. "It makes me so happy that I can namedrop Zeppo Marx, of all people, and you'll know exactly who I'm talking about." Honored beyond words, Luan just smiled while her cheeks went flush. Benny did not seem to notice. "Anyway," he said, snapping the book closed, "I figured it shouldn't be too hard to make some of these sorts of masks ourselves."
Once the newspaper eggs were all dry, Luan and Benny each took a safety pin and stuck them through the spheres' paper shells, popping the balloons that were inside though the structures did not collapse. Following Benny's lead, she took a pair of scissors and a boxcutter and cut out from each one simple shapes which they then crafted together into crude, but recognizable, Venetian masks like those that were in Benny's book.
Within the hour, each mask was painted in gaudy shades of red and green and gold and left on the windowsill to dry. Luan, her hands coated in flakes of dried papier-mâché and paint, did a quick headcount and was momentarily alarmed to find that they were one short for there to be enough for each member of the drama club. A tapping came to her shoulder, and Luan breathed a sigh of relief as soon as she turned around; there stood Benny behind her, extending his arm and holding a special mask in his hand, one that had a stub nose and a carbuncle erupting from its forehead. "Here," he said, pressing it into her clasp. "This one's for you." She inspected its craftsmanship, finding it to be of much higher quality than the others. Benny must have taken great care in making it. While still slightly damp, it almost looked like something that could have been purchased from a high-end costume shop. "It's the mask of Arlecchino; the harlequin," he explained. "He was kinda like the Groucho Marx of his time; witty, resourceful, hilarious…I thought if anybody should wear that mask during the fundraiser concert, it should be you."
Her lips quivered and she nearly felt as though she were about to cry, but she managed to contain herself. Instead, she threw her arms around her friend and hugged him tightly, then tied Arlecchino's visage over her face with a length of black ribbon, breathing in deeply the robust scent of newspaper and flour. "It's a perfect fit!" she happily exclaimed.
Benny and she then left the art room behind, and as they walked through the school's empty hallways on their way to the parking lot where her parents waited to drive them each to their respective homes, they sang 'Masquerade' from The Phantom of the Opera. "Masquerade, paper faces on parade, masquerade, hide your face so the world can never find you…"
On the afternoon that she returned home following Benny's rejection of her love, Luan stared into the medicine-cabinet mirror above the sink in her family's bathroom and wished with all of her heart that becoming beautiful was as simple as putting on a mask.
Aside from slathering thick coatings of white paint onto her face as part of her clown and mime performances at birthday parties, Luan never really had much experience with applying makeup on her own, which was why she thought that it would be a prudent exercise to practice a bit on the night before her trip to the Opera House with Benny. She had the idea in her head that she should look her best before visiting such a touchstone of culture, but was rapidly coming to terms with the fact that her best simply was not good enough.
As she gazed at her reflection with faint tears stinging her eyes, she saw her many flaws drawn in sharp focus under the bright vanity lights, and a single thought crossed her mind; that no matter how hard she tried to look beautiful, she would only ever succeed in resembling a clown. Raccoon-like mascara encircled her eyes and splotches of rouge colored her cheeks in a garish shade that resembled the permanent blush found on her ventriloquist dummy, the only thing redder being her thin lips that were caked over in a waxy gloss. Sloppy as she was while applying it, her front teeth were similarly stained with a few streaks of crimson.
Her teeth; suddenly she was overtaken by a powerful urge to look upon them. Though she did not feel much like smiling, she still forced the corners of her lips to curl upwards and opened wide her mouth, which was cramped and crowded with teeth and metal. A boarding house without enough space to fit all of its tenants. She remembered being so excited when she first had her braces put in all those years before. Finally, she had thought giddily to herself, no more would her mouth resemble a long forgotten cemetery full of alabaster tombstones that jutted every which-way at strange angles, her gums the rocky and uneven soil in which they were planted. Alas, while her teeth now were undeniably straighter, the braces that crisscrossed like railroad tracks throughout her mouth only added, in their own way, to her overall ugliness. Not much of an improvement, all told, as far as she was concerned.
Worst of all to her was her overbite, which even her braces could do nothing to help. Some parts of herself were just unfixable, she supposed. Benny had told her that she would have looked wrong without them, but he must have just been too nice to tell her the truth of their hideousness.
The kids in elementary school, back when she was in the second grade, used to call her Bugs Bunny. While at first she was naive enough to assume that it was merely a compliment designed to pay tribute to how funny she was, she quickly realized that they were only calling her such a name to make fun of her massive incisors that stood like twin monoliths at the front of her mouth. She remembered a day when her eight-year-old self stood on her tippy-toes, crying, in front of a mirror in one of the school restrooms, pushing upwards at her overbite with her thumb in the vain hope of shifting it back into her gums, but gave up as soon as it started to ache and the faint taste of blood met her tongue. Six years later and Luan still felt, at heart, like that same little girl who stared at her reflection with tears torturing her eyes. She thought that she had moved on from such things; apparently not.
Wasn't she supposed to have become beautiful by now? At least, that was what she had learned from watching the high school students go through their dress-rehearsal of Honk! so many years ago; that her body, in all of its ugliness, was nothing more than a transitory form that would one day grow into a shape that matched her spirit, much like how the Ugly Duckling turned out to be an elegant swan by the end of act II.
That was where her passion for acting was first ignited, there in that dark auditorium with her eyes transfixed by what was transpiring on the stage, to the point where she didn't even realize in the moment that one of the other girls in her class was leaning close behind her with a pair of safety scissors to cut off her ponytail, and while comedy would always remain her first and greatest love, there was something about the idea of pretending to be other people that held a certain appeal to Luan from that day forward.
Something else that the musical had taught her, through the use of an impossibly catchy song entitled 'Warts and All', was that there was somebody out there in the wide wicked world who would love her in spite of her imperfections, and that all she had to do was be patient and wait for that special someone to find her and give her the validation that she had so desperately craved. As the lyrics went, 'Just think whenever you need boosting, One day you'll be roosting with a mate, Though it may take some time to find 'em, When you do you'll have a ball, 'Cause out there somewhere, Someone's gonna love ya, Warts and all!' She had thought that it was Benny whose love would transform her, but if not him, then who?
She had already been patient for such a long time already, and was growing truly tired of waiting.
With a sigh, Luan turned on the faucet and pooled ice-cold water into her cupped hands before splashing it over her face, letting her makeup run down in streaks that fell onto and stained the porcelain sink's surface with a rainbow's assortment of colors that swirled together. After grabbing a towel from off of the rack behind her, she dried herself off to the best of her ability and made a half-hearted effort to clean up the mess.
Staring back now at her in the mirror was Luan as she truly was, with her freckled and pockmarked face framed by dampened strands of stercobilin hair; a far more disgusting shade than Benny's auburn locks that were the color of oak wood. She felt truly stupid to have ever thought that he could love her in that most powerful way in which she longed for.
She collected the bottles and tubes and palettes of makeup that she had set aside along the rim of the tub and exited the bathroom, the sink still smeared with red and black and blue, as if it were bruised and bleeding.
Ordinarily, Luan would never have dared to enter into her two eldest sisters' bedroom without Lori's permission, as the seventeen-year-old girl could become dreadfully angry if any of her siblings were to interrupt any of her texting sessions with Bobby, but seeing as neither of them were anywhere to be found from the moment that Luan returned home from school that day, she saw no harm in lingering for a moment in the space after she returned the makeup that she had borrowed (stolen) back to its rightful place on her sisters' vanity desk. Taking in the many wonderful sensations that came from standing on their soft carpeted floor, Luan allowed herself to briefly pretend that the room belonged to her.
Wires of white Christmas lights hung in arches down from the ceiling, as if her two eldest sisters were constantly in a state of celebration, and the sweet scent of lavender perfumes hung in the air, a far more pleasant aroma than the pungent glue-like smell of papier-mâché. So bright and cheerful; a sun-dappled meadow that stood in stark contrast to Luan's own bedroom. She wondered if she would become like Lori, so mature and worthy of love, if she were to spend a few nights sleeping in her oldest sister's bed.
From out of the open door of the closet that stood next to the vanity table, a navy-blue arm extended, reaching out and beckoning for Luan to walk closer. She recognized it immediately as the sleeve to Lori's most prized possession, the sweater that Bobby had given her when they had first started dating, and she answered its siren song by going towards the closet and picking it up. The sight of those howling wolves embroidered on its front brought to the forefront of her mind every phone conversation between Lori and Bobby that Luan had ever overheard through the house's thin walls. It was as if their 'I love you's' were still echoing in the room; ghost whispers in late November.
She buried her face into the chest of the sweater and inhaled a lungful of the static electricity that crackled amongst the fibers, hoping that it would spark some sort of positive emotion in her soul as it did for Lori's. It did not. Perhaps if it were one of Benny's clothes, such as the black-and-white striped shirt that he wore when he, dressed as a mime, freed her from an invisible box on the first day that they had met, then it might have meant something. As it stood now, the sweater only served as a symbol of how much farther ahead in life Lori was when compared to her younger sister.
A single loose thread jutted out from the collar, and Luan took to twirling the tuft around her finger, briefly toying with the idea of unraveling the sweater until it was completely undone, though she quickly decided against it. Just because she was miserable, she reasoned, that did not mean that Lori should have to suffer as well. Instead of destroying the garment, she pulled at the yarn only enough for it to reach a length of around six inches and cut it between her teeth, thankful that there was at least one thing that they were useful for.
For reasons that were unclear even to her, she tied the resulting thread into a bracelet around her wrist, resigning herself to having to settle for mere scraps of Lori's happiness.
She returned the sweater back to the closet, glimpsing at all of the other elegant clothes that hung on the racks within. It would have been so easy for her to take one of Leni's dresses from off of a hanger and slip it over her frame, but much like the makeup, she knew that she could never have pulled off such an elegant look for herself. No, it was better that she stick with her itchy tartan skirt and sagging knee-high socks and white blouse with an artificial flower blooming on her chest. More of a costume than an outfit, really. Perfect for a girl who was still so childish.
Deciding that she had spent enough time jealously staring at all of the things that she could never have for herself, Luan left her sisters' bedroom and travelled across the hallway to her own, feeling like Alice (though perhaps, with teeth like hers, the March Hare was a far more appropriate character to compare herself to) stepping through the looking glass into a sideways world that was like a funhouse mirror version of Lori and Leni's space. Her room was of the same dimensions as theirs, yet it felt much smaller; rather like her mouth, it was all cramped and cluttered with detritus, such as all of the comedy props that littered around the floor. She was growing so tired of sleeping each night in a circus, so tired of being Arlecchino instead of Innamorati, and as she made her way to her bed she was forced to sidestep the various gag toys that were strewn about, successfully maneuvering around her pair of Groucho glasses only for her foot to land upon a whoopee cushion that had a single small pocket of air left inside, barely enough for it to let out a single pathetic gasp like a dying animal as her show pressed down upon it.
Benny had once told her that he did not much care for the sort of crude humor that such devices provided, though he had also, in the same breath, flattered her by saying that she was the only person he knew who could pull off such jokes. Had he been lying then as well, just as he did when he later told her that there was nothing wrong with her? That must have been the case, because when she placed an inflated whoopee cushion on his chair earlier that week, he did not laugh after he sat upon it and the resulting raspberry sound reverberated throughout the room. Instead, he only cast an awkward glance in her direction with an embarrassed blush on his face. Her hope was to remind him, in her own not so subtle way, that nobody could make him laugh quite like she could, but she had only managed to make him uncomfortable.
Perhaps she had just misjudged his appreciation for her humor just as badly as she had misjudged his love for her. He might have been more correct than he realized when he had said that she was like a sister to him. All of her other siblings thought of her jokes as annoying, groaning with every pun that she delivered, so why should he be any different? Benny was just better at hiding his distaste than they were; nothing more.
She felt imprisoned as she lay on her bed, staring up at the wooden crossbars that supported Luna's mattress on the bunk above her. Her head ached with a pain that rested at the base of her skull, like sand-grains that had sunk to the bottom of a pool of water. More than anything, she wanted to sleep, though she could not help but dread whatever nightmares a day like this one would surely inspire in her mind as soon as she closed her eyes. She thought of Tevye's dream from Fiddler on the Roof, a sequence that used to send her running terrified behind the couch whenever the film version came on the Loud family television on rainy nights when she was younger. The eerie faces of all of Tevye and Golde's ancestors, returned from beyond the grave all pale and decaying to sing a song about Tzeitel's upcoming marriage (so much of the conflict in Fiddler on the Roof's story revolved around who was marrying whom), in particular used to frighten her so.
She wondered what her own ancestors would say to her if they were to see her now, laying loveless on her bed. No doubt they would have been awfully disappointed in her.
Before she could consider the question too deeply, she felt her phone vibrate from within her pocket, and her trance was broken. After digging it out, she saw that Benny had sent her a text.
'Wanna go get dinner somewhere before the show tomorrow? My treat!'
She sighed, unsure of whether or not she even still wanted to see the play at all. There was a time, before she knew that Benny did not love her as she loved him, that the thought of the two of them both dressed in formal wear and sitting side by side in red velvet theatre seats with their hands weaved together conjured up the feeling of butterflies in her stomach. It still did, though now it was more akin to how she felt whenever she was sick and on the verge of retching. Rather than text back with an answer, she simply rested her phone screen-down on her chest as it continued to vibrate every few seconds with new messages, thinking to herself that this must have been what heart murmurs felt like.
Suddenly a shadow was cast over her, and Luan turned her neck to see a figure standing by her bed, silhouetted against the ceiling light with the fan spinning 'round and 'round behind their head in a halo.
It was only after the shadow began to speak that Luan realized who it was. "You're lookin' all tangled up in blue," Luna said in a voice that was so kind and concerned. "You feelin' alright?" Luan had to smile, albeit weakly. She could not help herself; it was like Luna was the human equivalent of a dreamcatcher, capable of ensnaring whatever nightmare Luan found herself in at any given moment within her net and dissipating it. There was nobody else in the family to whom she was closer. Sure, she and the rest of her siblings had their moments; Lincoln and she shared many a laugh together with him as her assistant in Funny Business, she had always seen herself as something of a mentor in the performing arts to Lucy, and Lori-
Well, Lori was usually too busy doing mature, grown-up things like shopping at the mall with Leni or talking to her boyfriend over the phone to pay much mind to a girl with whom she had little in common, but still there were certain rare occasions now and again when Luan would miss the bus after school, and if her parents were unable to give her a ride home then it would fall to Lori to pick her up in vanzilla. On such occasions, their ten-minute drive back to the house would be filled with idle chit-chat about how their days went. Once, Lori had even offered her, with minimal prompting, some helpful advice on a particular line reading that had been giving her a tough time during that day's rehearsal.
Not exactly the most substantial of interactions, but pleasant enough, and it was not as though Luan expected that she should have a deep and meaningful bond with every member of her family. One out of eleven was not such a bad ratio, all told. If Luan were a prism and her siblings each a different source of light waiting to be refracted by her many surfaces, then Lori was a single small Christmas bulb like those that hung on wires in her room, its glow undeniably weak but nevertheless present.
Luna, ironically, was a sun. If there was anybody who could surely make Luan feel better, then it was her roommate. "Not really," Luan admitted as her sister sat by her side. No longer silhouetted against the ceiling lamp, Luan could see that Luna's face was etched in compassion and that a pair of white earbuds were hung around her neck. She must have been in the middle of listening to her MP3 player, as she often did, before noticing that Luan required her full attention. "I told Benny how I felt about him today, and, well, he still wants to be friends, but…" She sighed and sat up, gathered the inner strength necessary to forge ahead, and pressed on. "He kinda rejected me…" With Luna, she did not feel the need to sugarcoat her words with any forced jokes, like she might have if she were speaking with anyone else in her family.
Luna's reaction was swift. "Aw, dude, I'm so sorry," she cooed, pulling Luan into a tight hug and stroking comfortingly at her hair.
Inside of the warm embrace of her sister's arms, Luan felt so safe and warm and loved, if only for a moment. "I made such a fool of myself," she continued, speaking into Luna's shoulder. "And for once, I didn't mean to."
"Hey, c'mon now; I'm sure it didn't go as badly as you think," Luna sympathized. "It takes a lot of courage to do what you did, laying all your feelings out on the line." She was already well aware of the lengths that Luan had gone through to confess her feelings to Benny. The previous night, Luan had disclosed every detail of her plan a hundred or so times to Luna as the pair of them laid awake in their beds, with Luan much too excited to sleep. At the time, Luna shared in her sister's belief that nothing could have possibly gone wrong, and encouraged Luan to follow her heart wherever it led. "At least now you know where you two stand, and you don't have to live with any uncertainty. I never could have put myself out there like that, that's for sure…"
Luan broke away from the hug to stare her sister straight in the eye. "I thought you were gonna confess to Sam today too?" That was, at least, what Luna had told her the night before.
"I'm still sorta working my way up to that," Luna admitted, sounding a bit ashamed of herself. "I mean, I left a note in her locker, but I didn't sign it or anything. Baby steps, you know?"
"What'd it say?"
Luna shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "Just some lyrics from an old Queen ballad. They seemed appropriate at the time…" By this point, her face was a fiery scarlet color, redder even than Luan's own cheeks were not even a half-hour beforehand.
Even though Luan's own musical tastes did not usually stray too far outside of old showtunes and novelty artists like Doctor Demento, she had still picked up enough about rock n' roll from her sister over the years to have an educated guess as to which song she was referring to. "'Somebody to Love?'"
Luna shook her head and gave a small laugh. "Nah, too obvious; I went with a deeper cut," she said, then began to softly sing. "Let us cling together as the years go by, oh my love, my love, in the quiet of the night, let our candle always burn, let us never lose the lessons we have learned…" Upon finishing her chorus, she glanced to Luan's face, blank aside from a faintly pensive glimmer in her eyes. "That's from 'Teo Torriatte,'" Luna explained. "Funnily enough, it's actually off the same album as 'Somebody to Love', A Day at the Races."
While she was not sure of its significance, Luan's eyes went wide at the mention of the album's title, which was shared with a Marx Brothers' comedy. It was another one of Benny's 'absolute classics,' though, as he had once pointed out to her when they watched it together weeks prior, it never quite achieved the same beloved status as some of their other pictures, like Duck Soup or Horse Feathers. The movie was always something of a black sheep in their filmography; under-appreciated, undervalued…
Benny was adamant that he loved it just the same, however.
"I should have done what you did, taking the slow and careful approach instead of spilling my heart out and letting it bleed all over." What Luna had called 'courage,' Luan, upon further reflection, had come to think of as brazen stupidity. Perhaps if she had merely slipped her note anonymously through one of the slots on Benny's locker, she could have spared herself the empty feeling in her chest. "I was just so, so sure that it would go perfectly," she said with a sigh. "In my head, everything unfolded like the setting on a stage. Benny and I clicked together so well, and I guess I just assumed that he was my, I dunno…" She trailed off, not quite at a loss for words but unsure if she should vocalize what she was feeling, but ultimately she figured that she had already laid herself bare far too much to turn back now. "My other half, or soulmate; something like that…"
Luna closed her eyes and gave an infinitesimal, yet solemn, nod, as if she were at last coming to understand exactly the full extent of her sister's predicament. "There's a soulmate out there for everyone, Luan," she gently told her. "Just because Benny's not yours, that doesn't mean they're not still out there somewhere, waiting for you. You just have to be patient in the meantime is all." As she spoke, she began to fiddle absentmindedly with the two earbuds around her neck, rolling them between her fingers in the same manner that a young child might have with a smooth glass-stone picked up while walking along a beach. It was something of a nervous habit of hers, most often done while she was in a state of deep contemplation, though what, exactly, she was contemplating was not immediately clear to Luan. Finally, after turning the earbuds over in her fingers one final time, something seemed to click within Luna's head, as she donned a lighthearted smirk and cast a sly glance in Luan's direction. "You know," she began as she reached into her pocket and pulled out the small white MP3 player that the headphones were plugged into, "this little guy has taught me more throughout my life than fifteen years of school combined. 'Seems like anytime I'm feelin' down, there's a song on here by an artist who knows exactly what I'm going through, and who has the exact right words of wisdom to make me feel better." She looked down at the device and click-clacked at its little scrolling wheel, bringing up a long list of musical artists on its bright display. "Here," she said as she pressed one of the earbuds into Luan's palm. "Put this in, and let's you and I listen to some tunes for a bit." Confused, though at the same time hopeful to hear whatever 'words of wisdom' Luna had in mind for her, Luan obliged, fitting the tiny speaker into her inner ear as Luna did likewise with its twin. "I know a song that's so bright and poppy and fun, it's impossible to feel sad while listening to it. Just make sure to pay extra close attention to the lyrics, okay?" With that final bit of introduction out of the way, Luna hit the play button.
For the first five seconds there was nothing but the simple beat of a drum, a bass, and a tambourine thumping against Luan's eardrum. Then, like a burst of adrenaline, a single horn blast sounded, followed by the stunning voice of Diana Ross circa 1966…
"I need love, love
To ease my mind
I need to find, find
Someone to call mine
But mama said~
You can't hurry love
No, you'll just have to wait
She said love don't come easy
It's a game of give and take
You can't hurry love
No, you'll just have to wait
You got to trust, give it time
No matter how long it takes…"
As rare as it was for Lori to provide Luan with so much as the time of day, let alone with any sort of reassuring word, it was rarer still for Luna to fail in her attempts at cheering her little sister up whenever she was feeling upset. Her judgement was usually spot on when it came to matters of comforting her roommate. However, there was one thing that Luna had woefully misjudged; it was definitely possible for this song to elicit sadness. Luan was living proof.
The music, though bouncy and cheerful in tone, echoed and rebounded throughout the empty cavern of Luan's hollow form like scraps of a popped balloon rattling around inside one of the newspaper eggs that she had crafted so many months ago. Was that all that she was? A papier-mâché girl; amusing to small children, perhaps, but not really worth all that much in the long run, and in need of a fresh coat of paint, or, in her case, a romantic partner, in order to be considered finished?
All of this she already knew. As a matter of fact, 'You Can't Hurry Love' didn't really tell her anything that she hadn't heard six years prior while listening to 'Warts and All' from Honk! It was amazing to her how so many songs, even those separated by decades, seemed to carry the same message; that all she could do was sit still and stand by until her soulmate found her, and that until such a union happened she would remain a work in progress, existing only in the half-light.
These were the lessons that Luan had learned, and that she would never lose.
"It's like I was telling you, dude," Luna said suddenly with a huge grin on her face and a carefree chirp in her voice, bopping her head to the beat and speaking over the music, encouraging Luan with her body language to do the same. "It just takes a little time is all! Diana said it best; 'you can't hurry love!'"
Six years of waiting for her other half to come along was hardly what Luan would have called 'hurrying love,' but by this point she was starting to feel a bit guilty for taking up so much of her sister's time. "Yeah, you're probably right," she said, sounding more resigned than comforted even as she too began to rock back and forth to the rhythm. Her lips felt oh so strained as she mentally donned her Arlecchino mask and stiffly smiled back at her sister, though the grin faded as soon as she saw through her doorway Lori and Leni laughing and talking together as they entered into their bedroom across the hall, their arms weighed down with heavy paper shopping bags from the Royal Woods Mall, each one adorned with a different clothing store logo and each one no doubt brimming with more beautiful garments to overflow their closet with.
AN: Thanks so much to anyone who's reviewed, favorited, followed, or even simply read this story so far! It really means a lot to me, and I hope that you enjoyed this chapter :')
