Thank You for Listening(75)

“I can see the Oscar campaign for best makeup already–”

“It had nothing to do with–”

“Who got the part, A?”

Adaku sighed. “They found this, this girl, Amber Something. She’s a YouTube celebrity, influencer, TikTok personality, whatever. When she was seventeen, her arm was bitten off by a shark.”

Sewanee choked down the last of the burrito. “Missing arm beats out missing eye.” She snapped her fingers sardonically. “Every time.”

Adaku shook her head. “You gotta stop. It’s about followers. She has like forty million followers. You think talent used to take a backseat? Now it’s in the trunk. She has a meditation app and cookbooks and shit. But they wanted you!”

Sewanee couldn’t contain it anymore. “So what happened to ‘I can do this’? What happened to ‘star power, babe’?”

Adaku put her hand out, like a crossing guard trying to slow Sewanee down. “I tried, I really did. I was as pissed as you, believe me. But their loss! We’ll find something else. Something better! You’re back in the saddle now! It was just one audition. This happened for a reason, okay? Everything’s meant to be! You’ll see.”

There was a moment in every argument where it could end. Nothing irreparable had been said, no major boundary had been crossed. There was a natural point of no return.

Sewanee blew past that moment.

She flailed her arms like one of those inflatable tube-men outside a car dealership. “Stop it! Just shut up! Everything happens for a reason?! You know the last time I thought everything happened for a reason? When I had two fucking eyes! Everything’s meant to be?! Was this meant to be?” She jabbed her finger at her eye so fast, so hard, she didn’t have time to recall that she wasn’t wearing her eye patch. She hit her scarred eye socket and the wave of pain bent her in half, raised her gorge.

“Swan!”

She felt Adaku race toward her, and she pushed her back, one solid shot to what she thought must have been her hip. “Back off!” She touched her face gently. Saw blood on her fingertip.

“You’re bleeding,” Adaku gasped.

It wasn’t gushing. The scar was long-healed, it wouldn’t have opened. She must have caught her fingernail on it. There was a rational part of her brain still working, that could process all of this logically. But the other part kept looping through the unfairness of all the shitty things that had happened and her inability to accept them because they never should have happened in the first place. Not to her. She had never thought, not once, poor me; but she could never escape thinking, why me?

She lunged back into the kitchen, to the freezer, whipped the door open, grabbed a handful of ice, and slapped it to her face, muttering the whole time, “This is all on you. You want me to act again. You need me to be whole again. You need me to win. Because for you, if it doesn’t all work out in the end, then you’d have to admit that everything doesn’t happen for a fucking reason.”

“Swan . . .”

Great, Adaku was crying. Well, so was Sewanee. It took her a moment to realize it with the ice starting to drip down her cheek, but that tightness in her chest, Adaku’s blurriness, her inability to draw a full breath? That was tears. And they made her furious.

“You can’t fix this. You will not make this better. No matter how much positive-thinking horseshit you sling at me.”

Adaku stepped toward her. “Tell me what to do.”

Sewanee met her toe-to-toe and screamed, “Let me hate the world and what it’s done to me!” At Adaku’s stricken face, she spun away and sobbed, “And leave! Please!”

She was crying too hard to hear Adaku’s own sobs, her footsteps walking away. All she knew was within a minute, she heard the front door close softly. She made it to the sink just in time to throw up.

SHE DIDN’T KNOW how long she stood there at the counter, looking out at the view of the city, slowly coming back to herself. She just knew she had no idea what to do next.

She turned on the faucet and washed her torment down the drain. It nearly made her throw up again.

Tea. She should hydrate. A manageable first step.

She opened a cabinet and reached for the Tea-For-One gift from her mom.

The moment it slipped from her hands and onto the tile floor, shattering into, conservatively, a billion pieces she knew she would be finding months later, felt, in hindsight, preordained.

She continued to stand there.

What do you want to do, Swan? she thought. Should she pick up the larger pieces, at least? Should she get a broom? Should she try crying again? Should she scream her throat bloody?

In the end, she did none of those things. Instead, she left. She walked out of the kitchen. She stepped on a few pieces, their crunch having no noticeable effect. She walked into her bedroom, grabbed a duffel bag out of the closet, snatched up arbitrary pieces of clothing, and threw them inside, zipped it up, walked back into the living room, picked up her phone, ordered a ride, took one last look at the shattered pieces, and said, aloud, “I want my mom.”

AS THE CAR made its way to LAX, Sewanee sat in the back gazing out the window. She felt good about her spontaneous decision. There was even a sense of righteous relief. She wasn’t exactly sure from what, but it convinced her she was doing the right thing. This was necessary.

It was also exciting. She’d never done something like this, just gone on her phone and booked the cheapest seat on the next flight out while in the backseat of a car already heading to the airport. The destination hadn’t mattered, but when she’d texted her mom to find out where she would be for the next few days and her mother had replied, “Venice” . . . well. Maybe some things were meant to be.