Georgie, All Along (21)
“Right.”
“I remember she told you that you shouldn’t take another job right away,” Bel says, her voice laced with disdain. She’s certain Nadia only said that because she wants me free as a bird for when she remembers she doesn’t know how to make a doctor’s appointment by herself and has to beg for me to come back. But I know Nadia better than that. She’s different from the other principals I’d worked for; she didn’t make it in the business until she was in her early forties. Before that, she was a public school teacher in Bakersfield, writing short stories and screenplays at night after her two kids from her first marriage went to bed. She knows how to run her own life—she wants to run her own life again—and she’ll do fine now that her time is her own. The fact that my phone has stayed silent is proof.
“I mean the part about me. The part where she said working as a PA for as long as I did meant I never had to think about myself, or . . . what I truly wanted for myself. That I never really got to do things I wanted to do.”
Bel’s got algebra-is-a-scam face again. “Well, maybe she shouldn’t have texted you fifty times an hour. Then you could have had time to think about it!”
I laugh. “It wasn’t fifty times an hour,” I say, though I silently add a qualifying mostly to that. Then I prepare to say the hard part. I take a breath, and Bel waits.
“She wasn’t wrong about that,” I finally add. “I don’t even think she knows how right she was. I’ve never . . . I don’t like thinking about what I want for my own life, because I don’t think I’ve ever known. My job was always a good distraction from that problem.”
“Georgie,” she says softly.
“In the fic, I thought about it, you know? I was making plans to do things I wanted to do. Plans for myself. And when did you ever know me to do that?”
“Of course you make plans for yourself!” I swear, this woman would defend me for literally anything. Of course you didn’t mean to murder him! I can practically hear her saying.
I raise an eyebrow at her; it says, give me an example. And in the silent communication I can see that she can’t. She can play a reel of my life for the last decade and a half and see the same stuff I do. I’m going from one thing to another, half lucky breaks and half pure grit. I’m living in hotels close to sets or, eventually, in a guest cottage I never even had to decorate. I’m flying by the seat of my pants, available whenever, to do whatever. I’m making a life for myself by making other people’s lives for them.
“You’re very successful.” You murdered him cleanly, she’s saying.
“I’m not saying I haven’t been.”
Given my background, it’s fair to say I’m more than successful. Unlike a lot of people who work as PAs, I didn’t grow up anywhere near the business, and I don’t have a college degree. I also didn’t have any of my own ambitions in the industry—wasn’t interested in acting, wasn’t interested in screenwriting, none of it. While that sometimes meant a steep learning curve for some tasks, Nadia always said my disinterest in these things was an asset for the kind of work I did, not a liability. I have a reputation for my commitment to the job, and only the job. And Nadia paid me well, because her wins were, in small ways, facilitated by me and the work I did—the way I made it possible for her to keep her eyes on the big picture.
“My job let me . . . stay distracted,” I continue. “It made it so the only future I focused on was the one that mattered for the people I was working for. And right now, I have this slice of time where I don’t have to do that.”
I don’t mention that I was fully prepared to wholly sublimate myself to the project of helping her get her house ready.
“So maybe this is my chance, too. To figure out who I am, and what I want.”
To not be such a blank, I add silently.
It’s not easy, explaining this to Bel, who’s always known exactly who she was. In school, she was a rare kind of popular—president of the student body, homecoming court, whatever. But it wasn’t because she played by anyone else’s rules, or because she did the kind of tribute-paying to other popular kids that would ensure she’d always get invited to the right parties. It was because she was fully herself, and completely immune to bullshit. She didn’t keep her head down, but she didn’t stick her chin up in the air, either. She looked straight ahead.
“Who you are is wonderful,” she says, and of course I love her for it. But I don’t want a murder defense at this moment. Sometimes, someone loves you so much that they can’t quite see you clearly. Right now, Mrs. Michaels might be more right about me than Bel is, and that’s a bummer, since Mrs. Michaels truly sucks.
I blink up at the ceiling fan, and after a second, she pokes me in the shoulder with her finger.
“The fic,” she says, and I can tell she knows she put a foot wrong, can tell she’s trying to get back to where I want to be. “What do you want to do with it?”
“I want to do it. Some of it, at least.”
I turn on my side, too, so we’re facing each other.
“Not Evan Fanning?” she says.
“Correct,” I say, but the mention of him has set off a ping in my brain, and I take my phone from my back pocket, for once not thinking of Nadia at all.