Queens of the Underground

Chapter 3

How did you measure absence? Or numbness? Seth wasn't sure. He knew he felt better after going to The Fathoms and having Becky work on his memories, but it was hard to say why. Maybe it was the placebo effect: his mind figured he made an attempt to make things better and thus he felt better about the situation. At the start, he wished the memories could simply be banished, but he came to realize that Becky's solution was actually better. There was no way to remove the pictures and texts from the internet, so he would have to learn to live with them. This way he wasn't avoiding the truth, exactly, but learning how to deal with it—with some magical help.

Remembering Becky's missing-tooth analogy, Seth would try to conjure up the memories on his own or even look up the latest gossip online, but the old familiar frustration and despair never resurfaced. There was some lingering regret, more for Leighla and Zahra than himself—it all stemmed from his mistake, after all—and a bit of wistfulness for connections and time lost, but nothing that turned his gut. Sometimes he could even laugh at his own stupidity, which was something he hadn't been able to do in years; even when close friends tried to make light of it, Seth had tended to take it too seriously. Now he could look back it with the same distanced perspective he applied to his teenage years, and it made him feel curiously light.

If he doubted that Becky's magic was real, other people's reactions confirmed it for him. When he, Cesaro, and Bayley had gone out for coffee before an event, they decided who was paying in their usual way: everyone put their hotel keys in the middle of the table and whoever had the highest room number paid the for the order. "Really, dude?" Bayley raised an eyebrow when she saw Seth's key. The hotel, though fancy, was older and still used traditional metal keys, not electronic card readers. "Isn't that tempting fate or something?"

"What do you mean?" Seth was genuinely confused. He had checked in at the hotel in a hurry, dropping off everything but his gear bag in his rush to meet Bayley and Cesaro in the lobby.

"The number?" Bayley picked up his key and shoved it in his face, tapping the room number with the her nail. "605? You seriously picked that?"

Seth blinked in confusion. "What? No. I didn't ask for a specific room number. Why would—" Then he felt the sensation of a single hair being pulled, but gently, a ghost of the pain, and he remembered Becky's hands glowing. "Oh. Right. Never thought of that."

"Never thought of that?" Cesaro echoed, leaning back in his chair. "Well, that's... good." Then he gave Seth a shrewd look. "Are you okay, man? You seem... weirdly mellow lately. All the dirt sheets are rehashing your photo leaks and you haven't ranted about it once."

Thinking back to some of his ill-advised Twitter rants, Seth grimaced. Maybe I should have got Becky to work on those too, he thought, making a note to ask her about the next Fathoms gathering when he saw her backstage. "Just trying to keep myself out of trouble," he said simply. "It's a no-win situation, isn't it? If I fire back at them, I'm too defensive. If I don't say anything, they think it's a burn." Then he shrugged. "There's nothing I can do to make it go away, so...."

Bayley nodded slowly, clearly impressed. "Good logic." Then she tapped the number again and smiled. "But you still have the highest number, so you're paying. I'll text you my order so you get it right this time." She chuckled as she tapped away on her phone's screen, clearly making an obnoxiously difficult order just because it was Seth's turn.

Cesaro gave him a quiet thumbs-up as he stood, and Seth murmured his thanks before getting in the line. How had he not noticed the room number? The leaked texts had haunted him for weeks and spawned countless annoying memes. Had the desk clerk smirked when she gave him his key? He didn't recall anything out of the ordinary, but he had been busy thinking about Becky, so his mind was elsewhere. The scent of coffee helped him focus and when he got to the front of the line, he simply showed the barista the text from Bayley so he didn't have to try reciting it.