It’s OK! I’m lucky. I’m from a small town so I was always placed with the same foster families. After a while my parents and I made it a permanent thing. My birth mom struggled.
With gambling. With men. With being a mom.
With mental health. She was the forever optimist that got crushed by real life.
I look at those texts that summarize sixteen years of trauma, then send it over. I’m starting to feel bad, vulnerable. Stumbling into a conversation I wasn’t fully prepared to have.
My phone vibrates.
I can see why you like your job then. You get to be a professional realist.
Something presses against my ankle and my eyes jolt up. It’s Arthur, of course. The lights swing over his face, swirls of silver circles. He’s searching my eyes to see if he’s offended me.
I don’t know if he has.
The first few notes of “Space Oddity” cast a hush over the bar. So when Arthur leans over the table and into my personal space,I actually hear him say, “You’re really good, Lilah. You could keep working in F1. Be a videographer. Do social media. Any of it.”
He’s inches away. I can see the dark circles buried beneath his eyes. Get a hint of fizzed florals. A single bergamot.
“I don’t know about that,” I say. “I’m pretty sure ‘failed documentarian’ won’t get me hired here.”
“Failure only sticks if you let it.”
“Not everyone is so…” Resilient. “Bouncy.”
His eyes narrow. “Why can’t you bounce back?”
Maybe it’s the now-empty glass sitting in front of me. Or the feeling of Arthur’s eyes, heavy on my skin. But I say, “I was in high school when I started making documentaries—my social worker’s idea. But that’s when my birth mom had her worst episode yet, too. She was silent for weeks. Didn’t eat. Just slept.” I press my fingernail into the glass. “I’d already been taken away so many times, it was the last straw. And I knew it wasn’t my fault, her depression. But when she signed me over, it was like, okay. Iamweird. Iaman alien. I could never give this person the happy daughter she wanted, and I didn’t need to try anymore. The day I packed up for the last time, she was on the porch, and you know what she said?” I wrap my hand around the locket around my neck, the cold metal, the memory. “Nothing. At the very end, at our real ending, my fairy-tale-loving mom didn’t have any more empty promises about happily ever after. Honestly, I think she was relieved, too.”
“She…” Anger sweeps over Arthur’s face, but he stops himself. “Okay.”
“It’s okay. I had my camera. That’s the real therapy trick—you can’t screw up life if you’re filming it,” I joke. “If there’s always going to be a wall between me and everyone else, at least it’s the glass of my camera lens.”
Transparent. A window and a cage.
Arthur’s eyes dart to mine. He does that before he wrenches conversations apart—gets nervous, looks too soon, waiting for a reaction that doesn’t exist yet.
“Do you still feel like an alien?” he asks, and I feel wrenched.
I don’t know what to say. Yes. No. How does someone become a person after all that? There isn’t an easy trick to breathing air after a lifetime in outer space. “I don’t know,” I admit. “Maybe?”
The lights dip away, and it’s dark again. Arthur hasn’t moved his ankle. I don’t want him to, either.
His eyes light up gold. “I’d visit you. After this.”
Then it’s black. “In D.C.?”
Lights again. “In space.”
Then the disco balls illuminate the doorway nestled in a corner—and there’s the last person I want to see, standing next to Sarah.
Max walks in with what has to be half of the Ignition staff. Orange T-shirts take over the David Bowie costumes immediately, swarming the crowd, walking to Arthur and I’s booth. And as for me, I’m stuck in time, paused.
Sarah looks at me, and she isn’t smiling, and sheknows.
I see it in the way her knees almost buckle mid-step, guilt as clear on her pretty features as wiped-down glass. She starts to weave toward me quicker, abandoning Max to do so, and I’m not ready for this. The future, leaving this bubble.
So I grab Arthur’s hand and yank him from the booth, away.
