Here in front of these girls, she has to perform. She has to be that person they love, the one they put on a pedestal. The singer suffocating under the invisible, impossible weight of expectation.
They’ll compare photos afterward, maybe remark that she looks different than she used to, the way the tabloids did a few months after her retirement. DeeAnn had texted her when those first photos hit the internet, telling her daughter she hoped they’d just caught her at a bad angle.I’m only saying this out of love, because it’s going to be so much harder to get back to a healthy weight if you decide to come back.
With a shaky hand, Ramona reaches for one of the phones, crouches down, and holds out her arm for a selfie with the much shorter girl. Her smile feels like plastic.
“Did you really retire?” a girl with blond pigtails asks.
“Is there going to be aGreta Life!reboot?” asks one with a smudge of blue sparkles on her nose.
Ramona’s heartbeat pounds in her ears, her lungs tight.
She has to be smiling.
She has to be charming.
She has to be perfect.
“Excuse me, sorry, I just—I have to—”
And she backs away from the crowd, escaping down a narrow corridor.
—
Five things she can see…
The hexagon-tiled floor. The toilet. A Dyson hand dryer. A bronze trash can and a dwindling roll of toilet paper.
Four things she can touch…
Her forehead to the cold wall. Her knees on the floor she hopes was recently cleaned. The ends of her hair. The handle of her purse.
Three things she can hear—or is it smell?
She can’t even have a panic attack correctly.
“Couldn’t have just smiled and posed for a few pictures,” she mutters, suddenly full of self-loathing. “Would that really have been so fucking hard?” Those girls and so many others like them—they’re the reason she has this career. The reason she has the privilege to break down in a bathroom in the middle of the day.
She should have left LA. She should have moved to a farm in Montana, fallen for a moody cowboy, and learned to ride horses, even though they scare the shit out of her. One bad experience with the music video for “Regret Me”—a horse named Houdinithe director swore wouldn’t buck but reared up the moment she was on his back—was enough to put her off them for life.
What she really needs right now, what she craves, is other people. Not that gaggle of glitter-soaked girls and not any of her new classmates, but people who truly, deeply know her. She considers herself a bit of a black cat in that she’s never had many close relationships, and while she’s not exactly seeking out a massive friend group, just a handful of people who don’t hate her would be nice. People who care if she’s locked herself in a bathroom at a Westfield shopping mall because she’s not sure she can make it to her car without tripping and/or throwing up. And yet this life she’s created for herself has loneliness threaded into it.
That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? To be free from all the expectation?
Every night of her tour, a whole team made sure she looked flawless. Even if she was lonely then, at least people wanted to be around her. Yet she gave it all up, certain she’d be happier without it.
Maybe only now is she seeing it for the foolish, shortsighted decision that it was.
She takes out her phone and hovers over her therapist’s contact before remembering she’s on vacation this week.
“But of course, call if you need me,” Emily said at the end of their last session, but Ramona doesn’t want to be that person disturbing her while she’s lying on a beach somewhere.
So she scrolls to Betty. Texts, then calls, getting her voicemail. She’s probably with a client because damn her, she’s successful, and sheshouldbe; she deserves it. Still, Ramona calls again, gets the chirpyHey, babes, it’s Betty, please only leave a message if this is important!Hangs up. Tries to breathe.
She has no idea who to call next. Not Petra, who sent Ramona a couple follow-up emails asking if she’s sure she doesn’t have a statement. Not her parents, though her thumb lingers overDeeAnn Wilderlonger than she’d like. She saw inVarietythat they’ve taken on a few new clients, other young musicians trying to make a name for themselves amid all the noise. She wonders if they’re as hard on them as they were on her.
If they’ll send her some generic Chrismukkah card this year.
If they miss her.
