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Best, Inspirelly
Ever since her acceptance into witness protection, Christine couldn't shake the feeling of being watched.
Well, duh – Meg laughed whenever she mentioned it.
Christine always hated being stared at, the blatant, half-hearted gaze of strangers sizing her up, taking her in.
Funny that she chose theater in high school.
Attention wasn't the draw – it was a con not a pro and something she tolerated for the beauty of the stage and the music. She was the awkward, spindly thing coming to practice in a pair of scuffed Converse and an oversized messenger-style bag where she kept her sheet music and a Ziploc with a crappy sandwich smashed inside. She was always eating pre-made lunches, mainly because she was too nervous to go with the other kids across the street to the gas station and get hot dogs, chips and soda.
Singing in front of an audience was hard enough, but it's like what they taught in her chem class – a little activation energy to get over the first hump and then you're generally in the clear. Once she joined her voice with the flowing strains of the piano, she was somewhere else entirely.
She stopped singing after her relocation, didn't see a point, could barely bring herself to talk let alone belt out some aria. Not that she was allowed to sing in public anymore – that had been one of the promises she made, bartering for her freedom, for an escape from the circumstances that had befallen her. Now she hated her voice, hated music even – but no… that was too far. She couldn't hate the music no matter the degree of misfortune it brought her.
Music only brought her sorrow now, reminded her of what was once, but could no longer ever be.
Only the kitchen light was on when she got home. The small, bungalow style house she shared with Meg sat in a quiet neighborhood close to the university, draped in clinging ivy, half-hidden under the hanging tendrils of a grove of weeping willows. The night air was still as Christine climbed out of her car.
A low humming filled her ears briefly, adrenaline coursing through her bloodstream as she gazed around the deserted streets, the pitch black interrupted here and there by the golden glow of a streetlamp. She waited – like she always did – for the blow to fall on her, for the hand to shoot out and clamp her mouth shut, drag her into the dense foliage of upstate Washington, but there was nothing. Crickets sang softly and she walked up to the house.
"Chinese for dinner," Meg called out as Christine kicked her shoes off and shut the sturdy, solid-oak front door behind her and slid the deadbolt into place. Meg was cross-legged on their tiny dining room table, hunched over a slew of tarot cards and gleaming crystals. Every so often she would reach over the grab a carton of take-out, spooning a dollop of lo mein into her mouth, eyes never leaving her cards. "I'll clean it up soon," she muttered. "I know how you Catholics feel about this," she said, waving a hand over the display.
"Witchcraft," Christine said, her voice playful as she grabbed a Sunny-D out of their mini fridge.
"I had some questions, and I needed some answers," Meg said simply. The top of her back tattoo peaked out from the scalloped back of her cami, the eye and top frill of a massive Japanese style carp bleeding across her skin in a riot of water-color ink. Farther down her back, there were dancing waves and even a dragon clutching a peal in its claws, but that was all covered tonight in their depressingly small enclave of a kitchen.
"Solve the world's problems with your readings?"
"Hardly. I keep getting the seven of swords though. Weird."
"Why's that," Christine asked, taking a swig of the Sunny-D and pouring some cashew chicken on a small paper plate for herself.
"Change on a massive scale," Meg said, looking up at last, a smile on her lips, the diamond stud nestled in her cupid's-bow sparkling faintly.
Christine just laughed, pulled a chair out and watched as Meg swept her cards together in one violent motion, jumping off the table to gather her crystals in a large hamper. Foster the People's Pumped Up Kicks was playing on Meg's small, portable speaker.
"This song is so violent, Meg."
"Oh, totally fucked up, I agree. But it slaps. Admit it."
They went back and forth for a while, Christine talking about her art classes, Meg complaining about being a barista at a local coffee shop. Meg made Christine show her the latest sketches from her leather-bound portfolio; she was not-so-secretly extremely proud of her best friend's accomplishments. She wasn't cultured or refined, couldn't distinguish between baroque and rococo style, but she knew Christine had talent, raw and unadulterated and playful – her drawings always radiated with a kind of energetic life that you couldn't immediately look away from.
Except now her pictures were darker, gruesome even.
Meg frowned, tugging out the newest sketch, sliding it out from behind the others in a faint scratching whisper of paper. It was a self portrait in pastels, Christine's warm hazel eyes were brighter in the drawing, red-rimmed and expressionless. Sallow skin and dark curls. There was a cruel twist to the mouth, a brooding intensity in the gaze – Meg imagined her friend trying to look scarier than her demons, hardened and cunning. Meg let the sketch slip from her fingers, sliding onto the table where her tarot cards and crystals had been scattered moments before.
"You don't like it." Christine, gave her a single look, tucking her sketches away again, retying the string on the portfolio.
Meg gave a one-shouldered shrug, taking a long drag on her e-cigarette. "I don't know that girl in the portrait is all."
She barely heard her friends reply.
"Neither do I, Meg."
Finally, they couldn't stall anymore. Meg let out a long groan, rising to retrieve the mail from behind the cat-shaped cookie jar where they kept their car-keys and random, junk-drawer type things. Meg divvied up the mail, three bills and a promo ad for her, two bills and a letter from the university for Christine. Meg tossed the hateful bills to the side, pulled a face looking at how much her car insurance had gone up since two months ago when she'd rear-ended another driver – it wasn't her fault being drove like trash in this crummy town.
When she looked back up, Christine had already opened the letter from the university. Suddenly she crumpled like papier-mâché left in a deluge of rain, her mane of curls fanning out across the table in a soft sheet. Shoulders shaking almost imperceptibly and noiselessly, she pushed the letter towards Meg. Meg took it grimly, scanned the words with a bleak but hardened resolve.
…sorry to inform you that the university cannot retain you as student after certain details of your situation came to light… a matter of student safety… unable to compromise on this…
"Bastards," Meg growled. "The justice department placed you here, they can't just –"
"They just did, Meg" Christine bit back, raising her head from where she'd let it fall into her arms, tears streaming down her pale cheeks. "And I can't really blame them, not after what I got mixed up in."
"It's all his fault," Meg seethed, her fingers itching to rip that stupid administrative letter to pieces and feed them into the garbage disposal. "That – "
"Don't even say his name. I don't want to hear it."
"What, so he's like Voldemort now?" Meg said with a snort. "He who shall not be named?"
To her disappointment, her usual lame humor which could bring a smile to her friend's tired face did nothing to alleviate the gravity there tonight.
"I hate him," Christine said, pushing herself up and moving towards the stairs.
"So do I, Chris. But take it from someone who knows all about that emotion, you've got to let it go at some point, or it's going to destroy you." Meg's dad had walked out on the family a long time ago, something she wasn't entirely sure she was over, and it had happened more than fifteen years ago.
"I have to figure out what I'm going to do. If I can't be a student anymore, I'll need to find work."
"We're going to figure it out together. I promise."
Christine smiled this time, faintly, but still, better than nothing. "You are a crazy lady. You know that, right? Who leaves their whole life behind to follow their friend across the country?"
"Bold of you to assume I had a life to leave."
"Ha. Goodnight, Meg."
"'Night, Chris."
Meg continued to sit at the table for a long time, blessing her crystals and going through her cards, trying to put a cap on the relentless anger that broiled just under the exterior of her baby-blue eyes and the blonde pixie cut that made people think of her like come cute sprite. She laughed silently, striking a match and igniting some sage to cleanse the house of all things malicious and evil.
Christine crawled into her tiny twin-sized bed in one of the two little rooms that made up the top-floor of the house. She stared up at the beams, the tiny dormer window that faced into their overgrown backyard. She thought about her immigrant parents, how much they wanted her to have an education; and reasoned that even if drama arts was no longer a possibility, she could get a degree in art, something her mother had loved and that she was reasonably good at. Now that art, and all other degrees offered by the university for that matter, were being wrenched out of her grasp she felt the weight of defeat pressing in on her chest, an anvil of disappointment weighty enough to crush her ribs, stamp the air permanently from her strong singer's lungs.
When she finally fell asleep, it felt inevitable that she would dream about him, the way she met him one year ago, all in black with an arrogant air and a disregard for human convention – like a lithe predator from Hades, slipping into the light of the overworld with a perverse enjoyment of the discomfort he automatically elicited from all around him. Burning cedarwood, clean and smoky shrouds him. He sits in the back of the auditorium, feet kicked up indolently against the seats in front of him. She can't make out his face, just the suggestion of a smile, the gleam of two eyes. Others like him huddle close, watching – and waiting.
She wakes up before dawn, like always, and goes for a run. It's all she can do to try to shake of the lingering darkness, but it's never enough.