Loaded, p.22
Loaded, page 22
He did. I hadn’t really thought about it like that, but probably every person at that place was hired by him, or at least, hired by someone who was hired by him. The whole company is literally a thing that he built. It’s his song equivalent, only he’s not entering contests and hoping. He’s already won.
Again, I wonder why he likes me.
MAYBE I CAN BRING LUNCH BY FOR YOU TWO WHILE YOU WORK.
I do want to see his face. I’m just a little worried that the more time he spends with me, the more likely it becomes that he’ll realize I’m a loser and give up. I need to get over myself. If that’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. Even so, I wave him off this time. WHAT A NICE OFFER, BUT I DON’T THINK WE’LL HAVE TIME.
IN THE FUTURE, IF I DID BRING FOOD BY, WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE? THAI? SUSHI? PIZZA?
YES.
He sends me laughing emojis next.
I’M NOT SUPER PICKY, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT’S FREE.
PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY IT IS.
The next morning, I wake up way too early, because the Gorgeous Monstrosity song keeps repeating over and over in my head. Before Octavia arrives, I’ve cleaned up the messy transition, added a harmonic uplift, and made all the changes on paper.
Which means, once we record, we’ll be ready to submit.
I’m not sure why that’s so scary, but it really and truly is. I was nervous about the jingle, but this might give me an ulcer. When Octavia knocks at the door, I’m relieved Jake’s not home. He left to meet his trainer twenty minutes ago. He makes most things harder.
I open the door slowly, but Octavia looks even more nervous than I do. Her eyes are darting around like she’s afraid she’ll be attacked. “Come on in,” I say.
“This isn’t what I expected.”
“What did you expect?” I raise my eyebrows.
She shrugs. “It’s just really. . .normal.”
“I’m a pretty normal person,” I say.
“But isn’t Jake your roommate?”
I laugh. “You know, Jake’s high profile, and he makes a lot of money, and he drives a flashy car, but down deep, he feels way happier here than he would anywhere else.”
“Because it’s normal.”
I nod slowly. “Jake doesn’t welcome people easily, but yes. He’s with family here, and I’m comfortable in this place, so he is, too.” I point at his door and Emerson’s. “Even so, I’d recommend you stay out of those two rooms. One is his room, and one is now his closet, and both of them are disastrously messy. He pays for a cleaning lady to come once a week, and I swear, she spends half her time in there washing, folding, and putting things away. The man is a pig.”
“I wonder how many views a video of Jake Priest’s messy room would get me on TikTok.”
“Quite a lot, I’m sure,” I say.
Thankfully, Octavia doesn’t seem like the kind of person who has a salacious TikTok account. I should keep an eye on Uncle Bentley and Aunt Barbara’s girls, Ricki and Nikki, though. I could totally see them posting something like that on theirs to boost their engagement.
After doing a few vocal runs to help her warm up, we actually try the song. She has a few suggestions, which are all good, and it’s more fun than I anticipated working with someone on a song instead of doing it myself. My piano teacher sometimes works with me, but more often than not, I’m either writing it myself or just cleaning up her messes. This is more collaborative, even more so than when Jake helps me with words, and I love it.
“Alright, so with those word shifts, and with the change to the harmony here—”
“You need to sing the melody, though.” Octavia’s smiling now.
“I told you. I’ll play, but I don’t want to sing.”
“It’s the only way it works. It needs the complexity to elevate that line.”
I wish she was wrong. “Fine.” People rarely really listen to the alto line. It’ll mostly just blend in underneath hers, so it should be fine. “If we make it to the finals, I can sing from the back, in front of the piano.”
She doesn’t argue with me about that, thankfully, but it makes me think.
“Are you dreading it?” I ask. “Having all the eyes on you?”
She shrugs. “I used to spend half my life on a stage. I’ve been performing since I was a child.”
“But?”
She inhales slowly. “The shock and horror from every person who looks at me, it wears on me. I have to kind of prepare myself for it.”
“Shock and horror?” I can barely believe what she’s saying. “Who’s shocked and horrified?”
“Who isn’t?” She shrugs. “I get it. The first time I saw myself after it happened. . .” She shakes her head. “It’s not comfortable to look at something like my burn. People cringe. I think it makes them realize that all of us are vulnerable, fragile even. Our lives are not guaranteed.”
Holy wow, she’s right.
I did cringe a little inside when I saw her. Not because I didn’t want to see her. Not because I thought she looked awful, but because I thought about how much it must have hurt, and how glad I was that I’d never had to endure something like that. “I’m really sorry.” I don’t know what else to say.
“Thanks for caring, and for being honest.” Her half smile feels like forgiveness. It must be tiring having to forgive people all the time for their own inadequacies.
“Alright, I think we may be ready to record it,” I say. “Feel up to it? Submissions are due this Saturday at midnight.”
“Sure,” she says. “Let’s go.”
But when we try to start, the batteries on my mic are dead. I groan. When I rummage around in the battery drawer, none of the ones in there seem to work either. “Jake puts old ones back in sometimes, the idiot.”
“He sounds like a real joy to live with.”
“His strengths outweigh his weaknesses. If I messaged him, he’d stop and pick up anything I needed, but he’s not great with the organization.” I glance at the clock. “I can just run to Balducci’s around the corner and grab some. It’ll take two minutes.”
“Maybe not literally.” Octavia smirks.
“Probably not literally,” I agree.
“I’ll come with. I need to get some tape. I’m all out at home.”
She hops in my car—one of the best things about Scarsdale over New York City is that stores have actual parking spots, and I can drive right over to them. “Tape, huh?”
“And chapstick,” she says. “I wear lipstick for work—need every little boost I can get—but I’m a chapstick addict otherwise.”
“Me too,” I say. “To both. I look super washed out without lipstick, but I hate bothering with it unless I’m working.”
“We’re basically twins,” she says.
“Other than the angelic voice, and the height, and the amazing physique.”
“And the unburned, perfect skin on your face and shoulder.” But she’s smiling. It feels like, somehow, we’ve passed most of the awkwardness.
“Do you mind me asking what happened?”
“I was eleven. I was in My Fair Lady—like always—and I had to wear this wig for it.”
“What role were you playing at age eleven?”
“It was through the community theater, and they cast me as Eliza.”
“Because of your voice.”
She shrugs. “Most of the actors were children, actually. It was going to be all children, but they wound up filling Hugh Pickering’s role with an adult. There were a few more.”
“And the wig?” It’s easy to get sidetracked when the topic’s one you’d rather avoid. We’re already at the store, so I wait for her to climb out and lock the door.
“Well, it kept coming off during rehearsals, so Mom and I were trying things to get it to stay on. We braided parts of it into my hair, and it was staying much, much better. I’d been dancing all around, wearing it from morning til night.”
This isn’t going anywhere good.
“Anyway, Mom was making my favorite food—french fries. But we didn’t have a frier, so she was making them in a wok over the stove. She asked me to check on them, the oil popped and hit the burner, the fire caught the edge of the wig, and then.” She swallows. “We couldn’t get it off.”
We’ve just walked into the store, but she stops for a moment and I wait. She’s staring off at nothing, almost like she’s remembering it.
“It only got my face and my shoulder, which was lucky. It could have been much, much worse.”
“This may be a bad thing to ask, but don’t they do skin grafts? Could that help?”
She nods slowly. “We did a lot of grafts on my shoulder, which was ironically the worst part of it. For some people, they work great. For me. . .they didn’t heal well.” She shudders. “It was painful. And at the end, instead of a burn, my shoulder, well.” She shakes her head. “I could show you sometime, maybe. It looks like, I don’t know, like Frankenstein. I’ve thought about trying more a few times, but when I turned fourteen, I just stopped. I was done.” She shrugs. “No one has even been able to promise that they would make things better, and I’m used to my face like this. It’s almost artistic.”
She’s right. There are no strange ridges. It’s smooth ripples from her forehead down around her lips. Her neck’s mostly clear, and then the rest is covered by her shirt.
It takes me two minutes to grab the batteries, which are annoyingly at the very back, but I see her looking over the nine million lip glosses on the toiletry aisle on my way back to the front. “Ready?”
“What do you think will look better with my hair color?” She purses her lips, which are entirely unburned. I hadn’t really noticed that before. “Rose Frappe.” She holds up a gloss. “Or Champagne Honey?” She holds up another.
Before I can even answer, a little girl pops around the end of the row and starts to cry. “Mom!”
Her mother’s right behind her, thankfully. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”
“Look,” she says. “It’s a monster. A monster.”
I’m horrified. The little girl’s pointing right at Octavia.
“Don’t look at her, sweetheart. Mom won’t let her hurt you.” The woman grabs her little girl’s shoulder and starts to steer her away.
“Excuse me,” I say. “How dare you—”
But Octavia’s hand drops on my forearm, and she shakes her head. It’s small. It’s tight. But her eyes don’t even look distressed. They look resigned. “Kids say stuff. It’s fine.”
“But that mother should not have told her—”
“Bea, I love that you care, but really. It’s fine.”
My heart’s racing so fast that I can hear a ringing in my ears. “It’s not fine.” And then, like a big, fat baby, I’m crying in the middle of the store. “How could she say that?”
Octavia tilts her head, her eyes welling with tears, probably in response to my own. “It happens a lot. It’s really okay.”
But it’s not.
It’s really, really not.
The world is such an ugly place, but not because of Octavia.
Because of mothers who say the wrong thing. Because of children who are taught the wrong things. Because of people who only look at the superficial. Because of beauty standards that don’t recognize anything but the ideal.
Then I remember what I said to Easton when those women made fun of my pajamas. Maybe, like I felt then, she’s just too tired to address it. Why should it be her job to fix all these ugly people?
But I feel the need to make sure she knows it’s not her fault. I have to make sure she knows that she’s not the problem. “I love your face,” I say. “I love it so much, I could marry it.”
A single tear rolls down Octavia’s cheek, but she swipes it away so fast, it’s almost like it was never there. “Thank you, Bea.”
Then we walk to the register, pay for our batteries, and leave. We’re all the way to the car when I realize that she didn’t buy her lip gloss. I almost suggest we go back in, but I think that maybe, just maybe, she had lost her interest in it.
What kind of person rubs salt in that wound?
I leave it be.
When we get back, the microphone works just fine, thankfully. If it had been some other kind of problem, it could have derailed everything. When Octavia sings the words—
All the joy inside of me,
All the hope for a brighter day,
The monster consumed it all,
I became beast and also prey.
I start to cry all over again. Luckily, it’s not time for my part yet. And when that time comes, I’ve gotten myself together enough to do my lines. Octavia’s voice singing the harmony rises, higher, higher, higher, so high in parts that I’m not sure how she can sound so gorgeous at such a high pitch, but the words ring truer to me than ever before after one tiny moment in what must be the entirety of her life.
The world is dark and terrifying.
That much, at least, was true.
But those who spoke of beauty,
Were the villains, not me and you.
It’s not my face at fault here
It’s those who glare and jeer
The real beast lives inside of them,
They get back what they give.
So stop looking to slay monsters,
And start working on yourself.
The gorgeous monstrosity you should fear
Is the one staring back at you in the mirror.
Work on the beast you have some hope to tame,
And when you see the ugliness,
Call it out by name. Oh, call it out by name.
“I thought we’d need to do this over and over,” I say, shutting off the machine.
“That was. . .” Octavia shakes her head.
“I’m sure we could probably improve it,” I say.
“But I have no idea how.” Her smile is light and joy and peace. Five minutes later, we’ve made the changes to the sheet music, scanned it, and hit ‘submit.’
“Thank you.” Octavia inhales sharply, and I realize she’s trying not to cry again. “Thank you for wanting to do this.” She swallows again. “With me.” She stands up abruptly and grabs her purse. “I should let you get ready for work.”
Two seconds later, she’s ducking out the door.
I don’t try to call her back, in part because I do need to get ready for work, and in part because it looked like she needed some time to process.
If Dave and Seren have taught me anything, it’s that the world around us may be ugly. It may be dark. It may be full of yuckiness and misery. But the only way to make the world into what we want it to be is to change it, one small thing, and one small person at a time. I like to think that working with Octavia is in some small part like their work with me. With Emerson. With Jake.
She has some damage, just like we did, but good people can heal that damage better than any graft ever could. She just needs to know that we all see the beauty inside of her, just like Dave and Seren saw it in me when I didn’t see it in myself.
When Seren calls me on the way to work, I pick up with a happy heart. “Hey, you.”
“Hey, Mom.”
She pauses for a second, and I wonder how many times she’s heard me call her mom. Not many, I imagine. That’s a darkness I intend to change. “I just wanted to make sure you and Jake are coming to Barbara and Bentley’s wedding a little early. They want to go over placement and whatnot.”
“I’m bringing someone,” I say.
“Is it Elizabeth’s brother?”
“How do you know everything?”
“Emerson and Elizabeth came by yesterday, and she mentioned you were dating.”
“He is. . .”
“Handsome?”
I laugh.
“Brilliant?”
“Mom.”
“Super, duper rich?”
“I was going to say he’s amazing. I think it kind of encompasses all of that.”
“I’m happy for you,” Seren says. “I’m not a huge fan of Elizabeth’s parents, all cards on the table, but if she came from them, there’s hope for Easton too.”
“Yeah, what are the odds that two such greedy, selfish people would wind up with two amazing children?”
“Luck plays a role, but I imagine those two kids helped one another to be good,” Seren says. “Synergy works like that sometimes.”
“I guess.”
“And how long has this been going on?”
“Not long,” I say. “But I think it’s real.”
“Sometimes you know pretty fast,” Seren says. “And sometimes people know each other twenty years and are too stupid to see it.”
“Uncle Bentley and Aunt Barbara.”
“If we’re laying blame, I put it on him,” Seren says.
“I’m sure you do.” I pull into the work parking lot. “But, Mom.”
“Your grandfather’s coming,” she says. “I just wanted to warn you. We put him clear on the other side of the ballroom, but he takes up a lot of space.”
“Why did Bentley have to invite him?”
“Well, back when we were planning this, we didn’t realize it was a problem, and he’s been helpful to Bentley in a few business deals.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “It’ll be just fine.”
“If it’s not, let us know. We’ll figure out a way to keep him out.”
Grandfather? I really doubt it. I feel like he could break into Fort Knox if he had to. “I appreciate it.”
“I’ll see you soon, beautiful Bea.”
“And hey, Mom?” I inhale and exhale slowly. Even saying it out loud is daunting for some reason. “I entered a song contest today with a friend. If we make the final round, I’ll have to perform the song live.”
“Oh, that’s amazing. When will you hear back?”
“Not sure,” I say. “They didn’t have that posted.”
“Well, win or lose, I’m so proud of you for trying.” Seren would be proud of me for dancing terribly in a flash mob while wearing a trash bag, but it’s still nice to hear.
“Thanks.”
“You’re one in a billion,” Seren says. “Never forget it.”
