Chapter 4: Secrets Had Been Suppressed
After talking to an operator, the phone finally rang on the other end of the line.
"Hello?" Edna's voice crackled.
"Edna? It's me, Rhoda." She paused. "I hope I'm not bothering you and Doris."
There was a huff. "I don't always bring Doris here to break the bed."
Rhoda reddened. She had always planned to get intimate after she got married. But in their fifth year together, she caved in under the the pressure of not wanting Jared to stray.
Sometimes it felt like it's the only times I've pleased him, she exhaled.
In their rounds of intimacy, Jared would lay, satisfied and smirking. "I guess it's true what they say about rabbits."
Rhoda had always been bothered by his words. But it was one of the few compliments that he would give her. Making love to him was exhausting in a way that made her emotionally empty. It didn't matter who was at the top or in the bottom. Jared would just take and take and take.
"Don't you mean, 'make the bed'?" she joked over her queasiness. "How else would Doris sleep there if there's only one?"
"Why're you calling?" Edna asked. There was some shuffling as though tugging the phone out from under the papers.
"I," she hesitated. "I think I got something about Jared." She took a deep breath and anxiously twirled her rabbit ear. "I maybe wrong though."
The sky rumbled, but it was muffled by the closed door of the phone booth.
"Do you or do you not trust yourself?" Edna asked. Despite its bite, there was an air of patience in her tone.
Rhoda closed her eyes. Edna was right. Jared isn't here anymore to tell me that he's right and I'm wrong.
"There have been fans who would do things for him." She bit her lip. "Even without his asking to."
She looked out of the booth's glass, too distracted to see the light rain.
"His creator is one of them, Lancy Lupin." She sat down on the booth's dirty floor, huddled up in one corner. "She was the one who introduced me to Jared."
Lancy Lupin. She and Rhoda met in a whodunit club. While Rhoda loved the heroic appeal of detectives, Lancy liked the noir narratives for them.
She put a hand over her eyes. "She would always do things for Jared. Like drawing him a car." Rhoda gave an exhausted laugh. "Once, she even wanted a key to our home because she said she specialized in background design."
Her fingers entwined tighter on the phone cord. She could still remember how Lancy would wrap her hand intimately on Jared's arm. Lancy would cling to him while talking down at her as if to remind Rhoda to whom Jared really belonged to.
A long time ago, Jared won Rhoda's sympathy when he confided that his creator was obsessed with him.
Her eyes widened in a flash of insight. If Jared never wanted to be with anyone and if Lancy couldn't have him, Lancy would still want to control his choices. By introducing him to someone that would give him an edge but wouldn't love.
"Rhoda?" Edna's voice broke with static. "Are you there?"
She snapped out of her excruciating insight. "Y-yes." She took a deep breath, getting a feeling she was about to rock the boat. "Remember when someone vandalized my trailer?"
After she had broken up with Jared, he spilled his "broken heart" to the press. Rhoda found her trailer splattered with words that would make her mother take out her rifle. One of the slurs was calling her a horned hare. Rhoda was pretty sure they meant horned.
Edna said they were probably toons to be able to paint that fast without the security noticing.
"Well… something else happened after that."
Rhoda took a deep breath before taking a plunge, the sound of falling downpour becoming a comforting lull.
She washed her hands in the sink.
It had been days since her trailer was taken away for repairs.
Looking at herself in the mirror, Rhoda tried to straighten up her wilted ears. Another bag of hate mail just came in. One of the envelopes had a small packet of paint remover. She could have opened that by accident.
After that incident, CB had human employees screen toon fanmail.
She looked up when the door of the comfort room closed with a click.
"Hello," Rhoda said with a friendly smile. The newcomers were human girls. Which was odd, because they were in the segregated bathroom for toons.
"Are you lost? I'll be happy to show you to the john for humans," she said.
One of them stopped. But the other walked forward, the third one following suit.
"Rhoda Rabbit, right?" said the girl who had walked forward.
"Yes?" she asked, puzzled. There were posters everywhere in Maroon Cartoon Studios, showing everyone who they were.
She felt uneasy when they surrounded her, blocking the door.
"You're the one who dumped Jared," one of the girls said.
They stepped forward, too close for comfort. Rhoda stepped back.
"What? Enjoying married Mr. Ash too well?"
"Whore."
Rhoda flinched when the girl pushed her back. One of them took out a pail from the closet and put it under a running faucet.
"You're a whore, aren't you?"
"Now, wait a minute-" she didn't realize she had walked backward into a stall. They slammed the door close.
"Hey!" she cried, trying to get it opened. It was jammed. Her heart raced. If she tried to zoom out to escape, she might hurt them by accident. "P-p-p-please!"
She heard the faucet stopped. Then whispering.
"1...2...3!"
She yelped when water cascaded down at her.
"Ow!" she yelled when the bucket followed, bouncing off her head.
Their laughter echoed in the tiled room, loud and cutting. The door of the comfort room opened and slammed closed again.
Bewildered, she wrapped her arms around herself, water dripping down her ears. No, people couldn't be that-
Her vision blurred and trembled with her. She felt her face twist and she fought for control, willing for her heaving chest to even. Her ears felt like leads. But they swept for sounds, making sure they were gone.
She crawled out from under the stall door and shook the water out of her fur. Her hands squeezed her ears dry. Then the hems of her dress. The hand dryer roared while she stood underneath it.
Rhoda faced the mirror, leaning against the sink. She continued to breath in and out, similar to what actors would do in case of stage fright.
Getting out of the comfort room, she returned to the set with a smile that she barely felt at all. If she told anyone, the filming would get delayed and they were already behind schedule because of her.
The filming that day was practically a flop because Rhoda couldn't focus.
She sighed, dragging herself to Mina's trailer. Since she couldn't stay in her own trailer, she had no choice but to trouble Mina. If Mina found out what happened, she would go berserk. Rhoda didn't want that.
She suddenly hid when she saw Jared appeared out of an alleyway.
"Thanks for the lovely surprise," he said, straightening his suit jacket.
Rhoda watched someone else come out after him, arranging back her disheveled hair. Her eyes widened when she recognized the leader of the girls back in the comfort room.
She zoomed off, not caring if they saw her.
"I've always told myself it's not real as long as I didn't see it," Rhoda said after she had told her story. She could hear the wind howl from afar.
There was more to it. But she didn't think Edna needed to hear it.
That evening, since she was still staying with Mina, she had to walk a long way to a phone booth.
She finally spotted one, dusty from neglect, surrounded by mansions who had no use for it.
Locking the booth's door, she dialled the phone and told the operator where to connect the call -the place where the Disney princes were staying while doing their tour.
Her lips were already trembling by the time someone answered on the other end.
"Hello?" Ash's familiar voice spoke, excruciatingly comforting.
She gritted her teeth, trying to control her breathing around the lump in her throat. Her shaking hands clenched the phone tighter, gripping it like a lifeline.
"Hello?" Ash asked again.
Warm tears dripped down her cheeks, finally free.
"A-Ash, hello." Her nose itched and she pinched it before she could snivel.
"Rhoda?" he asked, surprise. "What…? Are you crying?"
She shook her head hard even though he couldn't see her. Yet her sob broke out at his concern. She was already bothering Mina by her need for shelter. She couldn't bother more people like Ash. It was why Jared hated her. He was right. She was taxing and onerous.
"I'm so sorry," she wiped her eyes. "I-I'm fine."
"Rhoda..."
She could hear the pain in his voice that told her they both know she was lying.
Gripping the phone, she sat into a corner of the phone booth with her knees pulled close to her head. Her rabbit ears covered her and the phone, shielding them both from the world.
"Can we just talk about something happy?" she strained, feeling the seams holding her together fray and tauten . "P-p-p-please?"
After a pause, Ash obliged. Rhoda sat curled into the grimy floor of the phone booth as he recalled happier times in the dim cover of lamplights.
Rhoda straightened up from where she sat in the booth's corner. She looked around, realizing she was in the same position as she had been in the night she had called Ash.
"Edna?" she asked, when she realized that the other end got quiet.
"Are you out of your mind?!" Edna burst out.
Rhoda extended the phone away from her, dumbstruck.
"You could've told Maroon! You could've told the security! You could've told ME!"
"I'm sorry!" Rhoda said, pulling back the phone. Lightning struck. "They're just young women who wanted to prank me-"
"You were assaulted!" she roared. From afar, thunder boomed.
Rhoda quailed in the corner of the booth. "I'm sorry!" She could feel herself beginning to hyperventilate, Jared's eyes looking at her with contempt.
"No, I-" Edna sighed, deflated. "No, Rhoda. I'm not angry at you." There was a popping sound of a jellybean container being opened. "I'm angry for you."
"I'm sorry," Rhoda murmured again, feeling weight at how much she had affected Edna. Everything she touched, she hurt. Jared. Mina. Ash.
The rain thundered harder than before. She hoped it would stop soon.
"If I hadn't broken up with Jared-"
"If he stopped his liaisons, if he wanted your relationship to work as much as you do, then none of this would've happened," Edna bit, tough and hard. Then she huffed, her voice softening. "Not all of this is your fault, Rhoda."
Rhoda was too struck at her rare tone to respond.
"It's not too late to report what they did to you," she continued.
"It's just a few fan girls, Edna."
"Doesn't erase the fact that there are people out there who are willing to hurt you."
Rhoda felt the phone booth shift. "Edna, I- whoa!"
"What? What happened?" Edna's voice crackled as Rhoda finally look around.
The phone booth was floating underwater. Everything was underwater. She stepped back as water leaked through the door.
"Just a little rain, Edna! I got to go," she said before hanging up.
Taking a deep breath, she opened the door.
Water rushed in. Rhoda was slammed back by the force, feeling the ache that she couldn't shake off.
Author's Notes: The good thing about holidays is that I can post frequently. New year's eve is almost here, everyone. Hope you're enjoying your vacations.
To the guest reviewer: That would be funny. But we'll never know ;)