“Please tell me you aren’t following me like some kind of leech.” Sally squared off her shoulders and straightened up to glare at me.
“Oh please, do I look like I want to be attached to your ass? I just so happen to like plays too,” I replied, straightening up in the same manner she had.
Shock washed over her face in response to my tone and my words.
It wasn’t the way I wanted to address a woman who’d been such a great role model to me, but that was what she got for treating me like shit when I’d done nothing wrong.
Her assistant looked shocked too.
“Right, so you just so happened to be here at the same time as me?” She tried to regain her composure.
Of course me being here at the same time was planned, but she didn’t need to know that.
“Wasn’t everyone else?” I motioned to the people around us who were filtering out of the reading room.
She wrinkled her nose. “I suppose so. I guess I thought you may be trying to grovel your way back in on the story, which I quite bluntly told your boss I won’t conduct with you.”
“Look lady, I don’t grovel. Look at me—do I look like I need to grovel?”
Oh she did not like that one bit, and I used it to my advantage.
I cleared my throat and smiled. “Apart from being beautiful and having the world at my fingertips, I am smart. I went to Yale. I can get whatever job I want, and I can go to whatever reading I please, too.”
She looked me over. “So, grew a pair of balls overnight, huh?”
“No, this is what I’m like normally, but guess what?”
“What?” she asked with a smirk.
“I blame you.”
Sally laughed. “That is ridiculous.”
“No, you know what is ridiculous? You. You are. I must have been seven years old when I decided I wanted to be just like you. What a waste of time. What a façade and a lie.”
That completely threw her.
“What do you mean?” She blinked several times.
“You present this strong character to the world, a person women everywhere can look up to, women of all ages. Young women, young girls, older women—everyone. People admire you as a symbol of strength and hope in the face of adversity. I admired you, and you were a symbol of hope for me.” I had her just where I wanted her.
When I thought about this little plan of mine, I honestly didn’t know if it would work. I felt I could end up accelerating my demise even quicker, but it was a wild shot, a risk I thought worth taking.
Looked like it was working.
My next card would pull on my own heart much more than I wanted a stranger to know.
“My mother left me and my brother when I was ten and it devastated me. My father and my grandma were all I had left. The year after, my dad took me to the Olympics in Atlanta and I watched you carry the flag. I never forgot how you looked as you carried it, what you said. You said to be strong is to see the goal you want in sight at all times and make nothing impossible to you. I based my life off that because you said it. I became who I am today because of you, or at least who I thought you were. Damn was I ever wrong. You’re just a bitch—a bitch who decided she didn’t like me before she even gave me a chance.”
I cut my eyes at her and turned on my heel to go back the way I’d come from. That last part hit a little too close to home. It hurt more to say it now than when I’d told Ryan, probably because of all that had happened to me and the raw emotions it stirred.
“Brooke,” Sally called out before I reached the doorway.
I stopped, but I didn’t turn.
It was her who rushed up to me now.
“Wait…” She moved to face me and looked at me like she wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what. “Can we go somewhere and talk? If I may appeal to the part of you that used to like me. Please…”
