19. Piece of Me #2
Once again, the fabric started to tighten and constrict, hardening into sheet metal around her frame.
“What?! No… no! That’s not fucking fair! I did everything right! UGH!”
As Chloe found herself in the rack labyrinth yet a-fucking-gain, swatting the rapidly crumbling clothing off her body, she found herself dangerously close to crying.
But she was NOT going to cry. She didn’t do that. Crying didn’t get shit done. Action did. She just… needed to think. She could find a way through this. Chloe Renee Li always found a way through everything, no matter how difficult.
That’s why she’d always been confused when therapists expected her to have some sort of fucked up feelings about her dad not being around, or her mom being pre-occupied with her career and image all the time.
Why would she be upset when she could just shift her focus elsewhere?
On the things she could actually control instead of shit that was way beyond her?
Action, not sentimentality. That’s what she’d always done, and she’d always made it through… so why wasn’t it working now? What the fuck was she doing wrong?
She sat down with her back against the craft table, staring at the endless expanse of fabric, wondering if she’d ever figure out how to get out of this personalized hellhole. How do you pass a challenge where everything you can think to do is apparently fucking wrong?
She chuckled a bit; dark, unamused.
She kind of sounded like Chris.
Lovable, annoying Chris. Who thought he could burn his way through any problem.
It annoyed her like nothing else when they were dating, but maybe it’s what drew them to each other in the first place.
His tendency to use his charm like a torch to light the way forward when things felt uncertain, and her ability to force social structures to work for her in a world that was not designed with girls like her in mind.
But just like she’d been trying to get him to understand that some obstacles couldn’t be razed into submission, maybe the garden was trying to get her to realize something similar.
Maybe she couldn’t style this. Couldn’t coordinate it.
Just the thought was enough to make her heartbeat kick into overdrive, and her breath catch in her throat.
If she couldn’t do that, then what the hell could she do?
The logical answer was to just… stop. Stop trying to force everything into a mold that she could control.
But emotionally that felt like stepping on a landmine.
Ever since she was a little girl, she’d been at the mercy of systems much larger than herself.
At the intersection of racism, sexism, and privilege; who the fuck wouldn’t wear armor when every god damn day was a battlefield?
But what she’d never asked herself, no, what she’d never been allowed to ask herself, was who she was without the armor.
When she thought of herself, the first thing she thought was “Kochiyama High’s number one It Girl”.
That title she’d worked so hard to secure for herself; the kind of armor that doesn’t dent easily.
But that wasn’t her. Not the real her. The one that she’d been slowly getting back in touch with since she ended up with this band of lovable losers.
She didn’t have an answer for the question of who she really was beneath all the armor.
It was possible she wouldn’t have that answer for a long, long time.
But she needed to step out on faith; unguarded for possibly the first time in her life if she was going to get out of the garden in one piece and evolve into a woman that wasn’t terrified of things beyond her control.
Chloe stood to her feet and closed her eyes.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this. But it’s the only thing left to do,”
She unhooked her bra. Dropped her underwear to the floor.
The clothing racks receded into the ground once more, and she stepped through the doorway slowly and tentatively, completely unsure of herself and what she was about to do.
Her legs were trembling so intensely that she could barely make it down the runway.
She had absolutely zero confidence in what she was doing, but she was absolutely steeled in the realization that it was necessary.
It was a strange feeling for her; usually she not only knew that she was doing what was correct, but she also felt completely self-assured in that fact.
So this dissonance was… new. To put it mildly.
She stepped into the spotlight, her hands covering whatever she physically could as her naked frame was bathed in the luminance.
She had no idea what was going to happen next, and that terrified her in ways that she didn’t even have the vocabulary to describe.
Her heart was pounding, breaths uneven, and body shivering like she was in subzero temperatures.
But after several torturous moments, the spotlight went dark, replaced by house lights as it was revealed that she’d been standing in a huge auditorium the entire time, surrounded by empty chairs.
It wasn’t exactly comforting, but for the first time in her life, she’d taken a step into the unknown.
And while she certainly wasn’t going to make a habit out of it, she could at least say she survived.