Starr woke herself up from a truly terrifying dream in which she had thrown herself at Rick Powers out of some toxic combination of self-loathing and heretofore undiscovered slutiness. Oddly, she felt deliciously relaxed rather than tight with fear.
Eyes still closed, she stretched out her arms. Her perfectly manicured green fingernails brushed against a warm, solid body.
Her entire being contracted in revulsion. It hadn't been a dream.
She nearly fell out of the bed in her haste to escape. Luckily the streetlights beamed resolutely into Rick's room at the Minute Man and it wasn't hard for her to find her clothes.
If her singing career hadn't been over before, it was now. She certainly wasn't going to have anything else to do with this man. The only singing she was going to do was to Hope, or maybe to herself. Safely inside her own head.
One step, two steps
Counting tiles on the floor
Three steps, four steps
Guess this means that I'm a whore…
She didn't look at Rick's prone form as she left the room. If he was quietly awake and watching her, she didn't want to give him the satisfaction.
She did, however, look the few people she passed on the street straight in the eye.
She was Starr Fucking Manning and they'd better not assume that she was making a typical college student walk of shame. She did things to scare other people, not things to scare herself. She was anything but typical.
I'm wearing last night's dress
And I look like a hotass mess…
When she made it to her car, she began to sing aloud, more for purposes of punishment than pleasure.
Please, God, don't let anybody see me.
Please, God, I'll do anything you ask of me…
If no one saw her, it didn't happen. She just had to be careful not to admit it to anyone—no one would believe Rick Powers, after all—and it wouldn't be real.
She parked her car and slunk through the back door of La Boulaie into the darkened kitchen.
No one had seen her. It wasn't real.
"Starr? Are you all right? You didn't stay with Susie?"
"Susie?" asked Starr, because right at that second her defeated, addled brain didn't remember the lie she had told her mother the previous afternoon.
"Yeah," Blair continued. She was sitting in the dark eating tomatoes and chocolate ice cream. She had craved that when she was pregnant with Jack, too, as Starr recalled. "You said that you were going to spend the night at the dorm with someone named—"
"Susie, right," Starr recovered. "I thought she was going to be there and she wasn't, and I got caught up talking to other people, and—"
"I don't know if I like you driving home at four thirty in the morning. Maybe we should see about getting you a room on campus if you want to stay over and you can't hook up with someone."
The bottom dropped out of Starr's stomach. It was no surprise that her mother could look at her and realize what she had been doing- Blair had certainly done similar things in her own life- but did she have to comment on it in such a blasé way? Just because Blair wasn't ashamed of herself for dealing with grief by throwing on a red dress and having the nearest man throw it off didn't mean Starr felt the same way.
"I wasn't out hooking up," Starr growled. "I'm not you."
Blair looked so surprised that Starr knew immediately that she had misinterpreted something. She was too tired to figure out what. Rage at her mother felt better than anything had felt in days, though, so she decided to go with that. "Starr-"
"This baby is Dad's, right?" Starr interrupted. "You weren't hanging out with Spencer Truman?" Nothing and no one Blair had ever done had made Starr as angry as Spencer Truman.
"What's going on?" Todd demanded, and Starr cringed. She should have known that he wouldn't be asleep in the middle of the night like a normal person. Of course he would have been floating around her mother and her midnight cravings. Blair had that effect on people.
"We were just talking," Blair said, ready to smooth everything over.
"Talking about Spencer Truman. The guy mom was hooking up with when Walker was on death row. Did I ever tell you that at my very first high school dance, this bitch named Brittany made a slideshow about that? So everyone at the dance could make fun of me for having a slut for a mother. Everyone except Cole. That's why I always saved that cat costume, the one you put the computer chip in."
"Apologize to your mother," said Todd calmly.
Starr wasn't going to do that. She had changed the subject; no one was talking about or thinking about how she had turned out to be a slut, too, no matter how many times she had sworn she would never be. She needed to get upstairs and get changed and go anywhere that wasn't here.
Once she had locked herself in her room, she frantically scrubbed the remnants of yesterday's makeup off her face. The bottle of tinted moisturizer automatically fell into her hand to start the process anew.
"Not enough people understand how much a concealer- or with your good skin, just a tinted moisturizer- can do. You put it on before the corrector. You might not need the corrector, even if you think you do. Not even for the circles under your eyes. Blend in the corrector later if you have to. Blending, not layering, for an everyday look."
Starr had been getting makeup lessons from her mother and Aunt Dorian and their "consultants" since almost before she could talk. No one had ever much objected to her wearing makeup. When the other girls in school had been fighting with their mothers about whether they could wear bright red lipstick, she had been fighting with Blair about accusing Walker of rape or about Spencer Truman.
She had never been normal, no matter how much Cole had let her pretend.
Her hand froze above her face and then fell to her side, the dollop of moisturizer wasted, as she stared at herself in the mirror.
"Who are you?"
Suddenly she loathed her hair, currently dyed a popular platinum shade that looked nothing like the butter-yellow color she'd had naturally as a little girl. It had offended her that just as she had decided to be "normal" and care about her reputation, her hair had darkened from popular-girl blonde to a thoroughly uninteresting light brown. Of course, Blair hadn't given her an argument about dying her hair, either. Blair barely remembered what her own natural color was. Come to that, even Todd changed his hair color and style more often than any other man Starr had ever met.
Starr quickly changed her clothes and ran out of the house, car keys in hand. She ignored her parents' calls.
Blair and Dorian's preferred exclusive salon wouldn't be open, but the SuperCuts near L.U. was ready for customers 24-7, in case a college student needed a drunken makeover after an unfortunate frat party.
Starr wasn't drunk, and she hadn't exactly been at a frat party, but she was grateful to have somewhere to go where she could flash a picture of herself at the age of thirteen and ask that her hair be returned to its natural state.
She closed her eyes during the the twisting and setting and washing and trimming and drying. She might even have slept.
When she opened her eyes, she gasped in delight. She looked washed out and tired, but she looked like someone she hadn't seen in years. She was not someone who put control of her happiness in the hands of Rick Powers and then used him to destroy herself.
She looked like someone who could walk right back into La Boulaie and ask for a do-over and get back to her life.
What life? Cole? Markko? Langston? James? Dani? All gone.
She tipped the hairdresser five times the price of the cut-and-color and decided that a cup of coffee from Hallowed Grounds would help get her mind running.
She almost backed out of the shop when she saw Jessica and Natalie happily ensconced in the corner booth. Then she remembered that she was Starr Fucking Manning and she didn't run away. If she didn't want to talk to her fucking cousins, she would look them in the eye and blow them off. They looked too engaged in their gossip- no doubt about their parents' impending nuptials- to notice her, anyway.
Starr had been wrong about a lot lately, and she was wrong about that, too. Jessica not only noticed Starr as she stood at the cash register but jumped out of her seat and grabbed Starr by the arms.
"Are you all right? You look terrible," said Jessica bluntly, and that sort of ruined the re-energized buzz Starr had going. If anything, it made her want to crumble and cry. Jessica hastened her back to the booth and pushed her into the farthest, safest corner. "What happened? What's wrong?"
"Nothing," Starr managed.
Natalie sniffed at Starr's hair. "No one gets a new haircut at seven in the morning when nothing is wrong. Especially not a color change."
"Where do you get your hair cut this time of day, anyway?" asked Jessica.
"SuperCuts," said Starr, happy for something that was almost like a change of subject.
"SuperCuts?" asked Jessica dubiously.
"People have gone there and survived," muttered Natalie in the way she did when she thought someone was looking down on her for having been raised away from the Buchanan-Lord riches.
"I know that!" returned Jessica. "It just doesn't seem very Starr. You had personal stylists and one of a kind designer dresses when you were Bree's age."
"Is this some kind of college years rebellion?" tried Natalie. "Because what I did was find my long lost twin sister- except then I thought we were switched at birth- and pretend to be her friend while I was actually-"
"We all know this story," said Jessica.
Natalie shrugged. "It has a happy ending."
Starr almost smiled, and that was lost on neither of the twins. "Is your family okay?" Jessica tried again, gently.
"They're fine."
"Did something happen with Cole?"
Starr snickered inwardly at the irony. It was a natural guess, though; for most of the past five years, if she had been upset, it had been about Cole. "Still in prison. Still not allowed to have visitors until Hope is old enough to go down there by herself. Still doesn't want to see me or talk to me, anyway."
"He just wants you to move on with your life," said Jessica generously. Starr buried her head in her hands. "I never thought I'd fall in love after I lost Nash, but I found Brody."
"So you didn't go have sex with someone you hated?" asked Starr. "Good for you."
"I have a whole other personality that does that," said Jessica, nonplussed. "I did get drunk and lose my virginity to my stepbrother, if that helps. And everyone knew about it because I got pregnant." She paused. "You did use protection, didn't you?"
"Star Wars condoms," Starr said as the memory came flooding back with a mixture of relief and horror. "They glowed in the dark." She buried her head in her hands again.
Jessica wisely didn't pursue that line of inquiry further. "This man you don't like- can he threaten you? Can he hurt you?"
"Does he have a girlfriend you do like? Or one who might throw you off a roof?" That was Natalie, of course.
"No."
"So the worst thing about this is that-"
"The worst thing is that it felt good. It isn't supposed to feel good when you don't love him, right? Just him knowing a lot about what he's doing isn't supposed to be enough."
Jessica and Natalie glanced at each other in a silent argument over who was going to take this one.
"You're very young," tried Natalie. Starr glared. Ever since she had given birth to and lost Hope, she had little patience for anyone telling her that she was young. "And Cole was very young when you were together. So of course he was still learning things, and you were learning things, with no one to teach you very much. Sometimes you don't know what works until you feel it, and you can't tell your partner what to do if you don't know."
"But I'm not even attracted to this other person. He's horrible."
"Are you sure? There's a difference between not liking someone and not being attracted. There were times I hated Jared and I was still attracted. It's weird. Not as weird as still being attracted to someone when you think he's your uncle, but weird."
"You can... climax even when you're being raped," said Jessica very, very quietly. "It doesn't mean you wanted it. It doesn't mean you liked it. It just means that your physical response and your emotional response got a little out of sync. My therapist talks about that a lot."
Natalie stroked Jessica's arm softly. "Did this guy force you, Starr?"
Starr couldn't believe that Natalie and Jessica were talking about rape and tragedy while she was talking about making a fool out of herself. She felt more out of touch with the world than ever. "No. I told him I wanted to see where he lived and when we got there I took off my clothes."
"He's still supposed to stop if you say stop," said Natalie severely.
"I didn't. I didn't want him to. Why does everyone always think that I've been raped when I have sex?" Starr pictured Walker punching Cole over and over while she frantically covered herself with a sheet, seconds after losing her virginity.
"We just had to be sure, because you're so miserable," said Jessica, the one who'd spent half her life in therapy.
"There are things you have to do right away, before you lose the evidence," said Natalie, the one who worked forensics at the police station.
"This is not about me being violated. This is about me being stupid."
Jessica patted Starr's arm and pushed a plate of pastries at her. "We all do that from time to time."
"Not me. I spent my whole life being mad at my mom every time she did something like this."
Natalie laughed darkly. "Whatever Blair did, I can promise you it was nothing compared to the parade of drunken one-night stands Roxy had in and out of our house. It didn't make me think that that was okay, but it didn't completely stop me, either."
"I yelled at Mom this morning and it wasn't fair. What I said was awful."
"We wouldn't know about that," said Jessica.
"Neither one of us has ever said anything awful to our mother," agreed Natalie.
"Especially not about the whole how do you forget you had twins? thing."
The twins laughed.
Starr almost wished that she had a sister.
Disclaimer: Starr's song is Pink's Walk of Shame. I don't own it, much like I do not own the people and situations of Llanview.
