Chapter 6 #2
“Stop making weird faces,” she said, cracking up. “And, sorry, I know you’re doing this whole image overhaul. I guess I didn’t think using your superhero status for an arts camp no one knows about would threaten that.”
“People know about Silverlochen!”
“Ugh,” she said. “You’re so hard to stay mad at even when you’re full of shit.”
“Yeah, that’s actually my primary skill.” I grinned at her while wondering if that was actually true.
After dinner, I walked back uphill toward home.
Rosie’s dogsitter had picked her up from doggie daycare—I missed my parents but I also felt like the knowledge that their daughter’s dog had her own daycare, driver, and thriving Instagram following replete with influencer income, might have killed them anyway—so Rosie was waiting inside the garage door when I made my way in.
I sat down on the floor in my front room and scratched the top of her head, just how she liked best. When I was alone with Rosie, it was so easy to let go of everything else.
She loved me for existing and I loved her for keeping me company, for looking at me like I was the greatest thing in the universe, for making snorting noises that sounded like bad sound effects, for keeping me in little moments right with her instead of all the other places my brain wanted to head off to.
We’d been in each other’s lives for the last four years.
I’d just come home from shooting the second Vindicators and it had quickly become apparent that something had shifted in my life.
If my career deemed that my social circle had contracted to mainly only Andy and Aisha and I couldn’t just go out anymore, I needed to figure out how to be less lonely on my own.
Of all the unexpected side effects of my career, this part had caught me the most off-guard.
People had surrounded me my whole life! I was the youngest of four kids, and once I’d gotten to school, I’d inherently understood that people wanted to be around me.
Back then, I’d never questioned it. It just was.
It was gauche to know you’d been popular in grade school, in middle school, in high school.
The biography of America’s Girl Next Door was supposed to ring out with relatable tales of how, as a misunderstood artsy misfit, I’d struggled to fit in.
But there was no getting around the fact that I’d been prom queen two years in a row, despite that the first time it happened I’d been a junior and wasn’t even qualified to be on the ballot.
(It was a surprise write-in-vote victory.
Andy and his then-girlfriend, seniors at the time, loudly booed my coronation, which only made it more legendary.) I’d rolled into college in New York, not knowing what to expect in a city only about a thousand times bigger than anything I’d ever seen before, but my luck had held.
The first time I felt something slip was before anyone knew who I was.
The summer after graduation, sun-dappled and shot through with my first taste of getting paid to do what I loved most—even at a non-acclaimed summer stock theatre—started off as everything always had, the blonde girl in the center of everything.
But then I’d fallen in love so hard it shook something at my core.
Between our assigned menial tasks, performing, and Rebecca, I barely had room for anything else.
I didn’t want room for anything else; I wanted to stay up all night with the girl I loved, talking about our favorite playwrights and the places we were from and our first visits to New York and the meals our moms cooked that we missed most since moving away and and and.
It would have been different if anyone else could have known.
I’d told Rebecca that what we had was too special, too fragile, too new, let’s keep it just for us for now, and all she’d done was give me more—more time stolen away together, more snacks swiped from the mess hall and waiting for me on the rickety nightstand we shared, more whispered conversations late at night, more more more.
Which meant that she didn’t know that I was lying, that in a world where no one would have batted an eye that we were together, that I wasn’t straight, I would have screamed it from every rooftop of every vaguely crumbling building at Applewoods. I would have followed her anywhere.
“I’m actually a terrible person,” I told Rosie, who barked as if she was excited to agree. “I’m lucky you feel that way and still love me.”
She hopped up to lick my face, and it became tougher to stay mired in my self-pity.
Ever since the day we’d met—practically a meet-cute walking through the Sunday farmer’s market in Larchmont.
I’d squealed with a delight I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even felt when the tiny pug hopped in my direction.
The rescue organization volunteer gave me Rosie’s bio, a purebred pug who’d been dumped by a family who’d deemed her too high maintenance.
Only minutes before, Andy had griped when I’d asked for a dairy-free nonfat decaf cappuccino—What’s the point?
—so I felt an immediate kinship. Before long I was filling out an application promising to love her forever, and I could tell even Andy approved of my choice.
(Until I’d referred to him as Rosie’s uncle, which he hated even more than my decaf nonfat almond milk beverage.)
Rosie didn’t care that it was tough for me to do normal-person things out in the world.
She loved it when I stayed in! She didn’t think I spent too much time cooking elaborate meals for mainly the same two people; she sat politely at my feet hoping for spills.
She definitely didn’t care that I was basically always single because it guaranteed that the spot next to me in bed was reserved for her.
Even though my family always had dogs growing up, I’d been unprepared for the shock of love I felt for this snorting little goblin.
“Wanna take a walk?” I asked her, and she scampered toward the door so quickly that she wiped out on the hardwood floor.
Before long we’d looped around my favorite hilly section and were headed back toward home, and I was so in the moment that I wasn’t thinking about the article that was hours away from dropping or the way Rebecca had disappeared into Neil Bryant’s office.
Which was obviously a boldfaced lie to myself, but over the years I’d gotten really good at those.