The girl met my eye again. “The instructor. Molinere.”
Who the hell was Molinere? At least this time, I didn’t have to lie. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”
“You are sure?” She leaned a little closer, lowering her voice. “You arenotthe chosen one?”
“What?” I reared back, confused. Then, finally, realization dawned.
They were still cosplaying. This was probably some sort of YouTube prank, one of those ones where the prankster approached people in the street, pretending to be on a quest, giving strange instructions, and waiting to see what the confused victim said or did.
I cleared my throat. “Oh, no, indeed not, my lady, I fear I amnotthe chosen one.” I tossed my hair back dramatically for the benefit of the hidden cameras. “Nay, but if the chosen one you shall seek, you shall find her in her abode, yonder, directly across here.” I pointed in the direction of my bathroom. “You must traverse down, step foot on the hallowed ground, and enter the domicile next door. Rise near to the sky, to, er, apartment forty-two, and seek the one which you call the ‘chosen’—the Songbird of Nob Hill, the Fair Lady Audrina.”
Audrina would get a kick out of this. She loved all those angsty teenage fantasy novels. I often saw her out on her balcony, reading something with a bare-chested pointy-eared man on the cover. And, if these beautiful idiots were cosplaying hard enough to follow my instructions and find Audrina’s apartment, it would cheer her up a bit. Nobody deserved a pick-me-up more than my teenage neighbor.
The beautiful girl in front of me frowned with her whole face. “You are sure? It is not you, Susan, the chosen one?”
“Nay.” I frowned just as deeply, shaking my head forlornly. “Go henceforth, young company, and find she who you seek.”
“Cress,” the tall man at the back growled. “I warned you this is a waste of time. Come.” He strode off down the hallway, out of sight.
My eyes mourned the loss of him.
Then, immediately, I told my eyes to go fuck themselves. We did not spend time mooning over gorgeous men, no matter how good they looked in black battle leathers.
What the hell was wrong with me? Oh, yeah, that’s right. Menopause-induced paranoid schizophrenia, intermittent explosive disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, acute psychosis, and rage.
The other three models followed him immediately, without another word.
Chapter
Three
Ishut the door, chuckling to myself, hoping that they’d keep doing their crazy cosplay and find Audrina in the building next door. She’d looked so sad this morning; she could use a little fun pick-me-up. Although, if her evil mother answered the door, the cosplayers' fun would end very quickly.
I moved around my apartment, doing the last of my tidying-up, putting my folding table away, making room for my armchair, and arranging the cherry blossoms on the windowsill. I walked into my miniature bathroom, took the armchair out of my shower, put it back underneath my window, and walked back into the bathroom to wash my face and do my skin routine.
Without even craning my head, I could see Audrina from the tiny bathroom window. As usual, she was sitting on the balcony, strumming her guitar, singing too softly for me to hear, sadness emanating from every pore.
My heart just about broke every time I saw her. I watched her for a while, listening as she worked on a beautiful new song, while I cleansed, toned, moisturized,retinol-ized, and waited to see if Audrina would be summoned inside.
After twenty minutes, I gave up. If the cosplayers had found the right place and knocked on her door, Audrina’s mother, Jessica, wasn’t letting them in to see her.
I opened my bathroom window wider, stuck my head out. “Good night, Audrina,” I called out. “I love the new song.”
She looked up. “Thanks, Sue.” She brushed her bushy orange hair back and smiled a very crooked smile. “See you in the park tomorrow afternoon?”
I nodded. My heart clenched again. Audrina smiled like that because her top lip had a very pronounced bow, and her mother hated it. Jessica herself had lips that looked like car tires, over inflated with too much filler. And Audrina’s hair was naturally a very light wavy brown, but in her yearly bid to try and mold Audrina into something that she would consider attractive, Jessica had taken her to a celebrity hairdresser, who had bleached it, aiming for a caramel-blonde balayage. But after just one shampoo the toner had washed out, leaving her with a wild mess of frizzy orange Koko the Clown hair. Jessica had gone back to ignoring her.
Audrina was only seventeen, and her self-confidence was already ruined. I was forty-five, and my own had only recently been destroyed. At least Audrina had time—and collagen—on her side.
I sighed into the mirror and told myself sternly I still looked great for my age. My face hadn’t collapsed just yet. I was lucky to inherit my mother’s complexion—an odd creamy-tan combination of her Greek, Portuguese, Danish, Malawi, Brazilian, and Japanese heritage—and not my Australian father’s ruddy pale-and-pink freckled White-Colonizer-turned-Convict skin. My lips had thinned slightly, which wasn’t a bad thing; they’d been almost too full when I was younger. And thanks to a strict application of sunscreen twice a day, every day, for my entire life, I only had a light spider web of laugh lines at my temple and around my eyes.
I went back into my living room and changed, exchanging my dress for my nightgown, brushed the wall curtain aside and pulled down my bed, trying to keep the sadness at bay. This time—the moments before I took my meds and lay down to try and sleep—they were the worst for me.
I couldn’t stop the loneliness. It ate into me, taking little bites out of all the things I’d done in the day to try and fill my cup, like a starving dog escaping a cage, desperate for happy mice to eat. Too late, I regretted finishing the bottle of wine; the alcohol dulled my mental armor.
I could feel the depression snapping at me. My beautiful dinner with Bart meant nothing when I was forced to hold it in a shoebox apartment where I had to suck in my tummy to get into my seat. My sexy black lacy nightgown was useless because I was all alone, with nobody else here to appreciate it. My clean, shiny skin meant nothing when it was likely going to collapse soon, like the dried-up old bag I was. Nobody would ever love me again. Not like Vincent used to love me.
Goddamnit, the memory of Vincent hit me like a gut punch—handsome, shambolic, helpless, talented, so warm, sexy, and so unintentionally funny. Vincent, who would forget to wear a shirt down to the corner store and wander in, covered in paint, blissfully unaware of the women gaping at his beautiful, lithe body and his messy, tousled dirty-blond Christ-like hair.
