Chapter 3 1957
A sick feeling curdles in Aria’s belly as she follows Calliope and Flitter to the elevator.
She tries to make it go away by reminding herself that she just made two friends and has met the King of Hollywood.
Perhaps that’s a sign that she isn’t falling through an endless void, but has landed on the solid ground of a place where goodnight kisses are given out by loving aunts.
She refuses to acknowledge the rat-a-tat memory of her father’s eyes on the few occasions he spoke of his sister, an expression like the one everyone has directed at Aria over the past fortnight.
Not sadness. Something that hurts more than ordinary tears.
Like people thought that all Aria had ahead of her was the graveyard of buried hopes that Anne of Green Gables talked of, an idea Aria had struggled to grasp when she’d read the book a few months ago.
The elevator attendant pulls the metal grille shut behind them, jolting Aria back to the present. Flitter and Calliope kiss his cheeks.
“You girls,” he says, his smile so hearty you could warm your hands on it. He bends down to Aria’s level, gloves starkly white in comparison to the dark brown of his cheeks, like his hands don’t really belong to him. “What’s your name, sweetie?”
“Aria Jones.”
“A beautiful name,” he says. “Means ‘air’ in Italian.”
The sick feeling vanishes as Aria marvels at the potency of a name she’s never thought belonged to an ordinary girl like her.
“I’m Isaiah,” the attendant continues. “How old are you, Miss Aria?”
“Thirteen and three-quarters.”
Those extra months are important. She needs Calliope and Flitter to know that she’s bigger than she looks.
“The right age for candy.” Isaiah pulls a bag of Tootsie Rolls from his pocket at the same time as Calliope says, “On the cusp,” and her eyes have a conversation with Flitter that Aria doesn’t understand.
“Cusp of what?” she asks.
“Of when the fairies die,” Flitter says grimly, but Aria’s more interested in what Isaiah’s telling her—that he has a son around her age and will introduce her, meaning that maybe now Aria has four new friends in her life.
“How old are you?” she asks the girls.
“I’m eighteen,” Calliope says. “Flitter’s nineteen. We’ve been best friends forever.”
“We came to LA last year,” Flitter adds.
“We work nights here and we persuaded the manager to rent us a tiny room nobody ever stays in.” Calliope picks up the story. “It fits a bed—”
“Just!” Flitter grins. “You can’t open the door the whole way.”
The elevator pings. The doors open on the fifth floor. Nobody steps out.
Flitter points along a dim corridor with red-and-black carpet patterned with snakes. “Room 53.”
“Room 53,” Aria repeats to herself as she drags her suitcase behind her. She taps on the door.
No response.
The snake carpet writhes beneath her feet. The void opens around her again.
What if Miss Devine Rey doesn’t really exist?
Then a sonorous voice calls, “Enter,” and the intensity of Aria’s relief has her bursting through the door, not knowing that all her hopes are shining like tears in her eyes.
The room is so dark. She slows, puts out a hand to feel her way.
A woman stands on the other side of the room. She’s full-figured, wearing a fitted black dress whose scooped neckline shows off her skin all the way to her breastbone. Her blonde hair is chin length and her bearing is as majestic as Bob’s, the man from the pool.
Aria inches forward, her suitcase banging against her legs too loudly in this whisper-quiet room.
Miss Devine Rey’s eyes travel from Aria’s brown hair to her green eyes to her hastily purchased black dress to her skinny, bruised calves.
“Plain,” her aunt pronounces. “If your hair was lighter, you might at a pinch have been able to play the role of an orphan in a Dickens adaptation. Have your monthlies begun?”
Aria gapes. The monthly visitor is like a disgraced cousin—something only ever spoken of in whispers.
“Perhaps then you’ll at least grow a bosom.”
Aria’s arms fly up to cover her chest, tears scalding her eyes.
Why, when she’s just one small, unimportant child in the vast scope of the world, is God trying so hard to break Aria Jones’s heart?
So that she doesn’t cry, not in front of this woman, Aria explodes.
“I hate you!” she screams. “I hope that one day you’re standing in a room wishing for one bit of kindness and all your clothes fall off and everyone laughs at you.
I curse you right now,” Aria shouts like she’s a sorceress and, by god, she feels like one, like her rage could fire out of her fingers, straight into this woman’s heart. “I curse you with that future!”
“Go to your room!” her aunt shouts, pointing in the direction of a door.
Aria runs to it, lets it crash shut, trapping her in a salmon-colored bedroom where the vomity feeling returns because the walls make her think of the food she used to put out for her cat, Rosie. But now Rosie lives with Aria’s five-year-old neighbor back in Manhattan.
She flings the window open, searches for a drainpipe, imagines climbing down five stories, and never coming back. But in her pockets are only three used tissues and the melted candy Isaiah gave her. She won’t get far with that.
But one day she will. Because for the first time in her life, she has a wish: to escape from this life she’s been put into.
This is not her story.