Trapped in Forever

35 ~ A Heartbeat's Lullaby

Roxanne had told me once, during one of our many slumber parties where we popped at least two bags of Ultra Butter popcorn, painted all forty of our nails, and watched episodes of sitcoms she had stolen from her mother’s bedroom collection, snickering during the nude scenes, and reacting our favorite scenes dramatically—and she was always the girl, drenched in the rain, sobbing that she couldn’t get hurt by him, me, again, and I would melodramatically whisper the words he had said before, before we both burst out giggling, forgetting our lines, and doubling over in our sleeping bags—that slumber parties were made for telling your deepest secrets, that this was the ultimate test of a friendship. So she leaned in close, close enough to catch whiffs of her coconut shampoo and to smell the acrylic from her freshly painted nails, usually some sort of shade of pink, and whispered that modeling was her mother’s idea. Her eyes were earnest and a darkening shade of a blue when she said that she modeled because she didn’t want her mother to forget her for her then fiancé. I asked her why she never told her mother this and she rolled her eyes, smoothing out the wrinkles in her sleeping bag, and said, “Because. That’s just not how it works.”

For years, I had thought that Roxanne couldn’t stand her mother, despising each moment she spent with her on the weekends, counting down the seconds she could pack up all of her designer clothes, heels, and make-up, and go back to what she really called home. I never thought that maybe, just maybe, Roxanne was staring out at the audience, finding her father, me, and for a brief summer, Orion in the back row, his thumbs clicking on the digits of his phone until he heard them call out Roxanne’s name, but never the person she was searching for. I asked her once, backstage, while I fiddled around with one of the thick, round brushes, faintly dusted with pink powder, why she didn’t just ask her mother to come, and she paused, a ruby lipstick clutched in her fingertips, pressed to her lips, and then she sighed, smoothing out the creamy substance on her lips.

“She doesn’t care anymore, Amanda,” she finally said, exasperated, and she forcefully pushed the cap back onto the black lipstick tube in her hands, plucked eyebrows furrowing slightly. “She’s too busy with her new husband, and why would I even want her here? It’s stupid. All she ever does is nag me about what I’m doing wrong, which is, by the way, everything.” She clenched her jaw then, her lips pursing slightly together, and her eyes fell away from her reflection in the mirror, as if there was something there she didn’t want to see, lingering in her echo. “I want to win the Braverly . . . so she can just see that I’m finally doing something right . . . that I’m not that screwed up kid she thinks I am, you know?”

I could barely hear her nearly inaudible words as she spoke them, her eyes directed for the black tube of lipstick she had pushed over with her fingers, with a muffled dink, and was now rolling it across the smooth, painted wooden surface of the vanity, but I nodded, pretending for that second she needed me to that I actually understood what it was like to be thought of as screwed up. I didn’t have pica, or sneak out of the house to go see my boyfriend, or even have a boyfriend that made my mother sulk up the stairs in her Terry Cloth bathrobe, and because of Mikayla, the attention was never on me or whatever I had done. Whatever I could do would always fall under the shadow of Mikayla’s doings.

But somehow, I had managed to do something even worse than eat a couple thick pieces of Crayola chalk, or slip out of my window and shimmy down the Escape Tree, holding my heels in hand as they knocked together, or even see a guy that my mother disapproved of, or manage to step out from underneath Mikayla’s shadow.

I had failed.

I had failed her.

Those were the only thoughts in my mind as I slowly trudged across the parking lot, alone, holding my heels in my fingertips by the straps, feeling the smooth, silver material of the heels and the buckles brushing against my skin, and the gravel was sharp beneath my bare feet but I didn’t care as my toes brushed against the dark purple hem of my dress, slowly dirtying from the gravel and dried slabs of mud imprinted with shoe impressions, and the one lock of hair that tumbled out of my bun was grazing against my ear. Failure seemed to be all I looked, that one simple but poignant word slipping into my eyes, camouflaging itself into my surrounding, and building pressure in my chest as I walked, keys dangling from my fingertips, and all I felt was a surmounting sensation of disappointment.