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MALLORY FIVE YEARS LATER…
Hollywood or Broadway. That seemed to be the only thing people wanted to know. Which one of those two choices was I going to pursue while I was ‘young enough.’
I hated that. I hated that the entire industry of Hollywood was seen as preying on the youth of actresses while men could work until their seventies as leading men. Supposedly the object of desire as buxom young women who often didn’t have a thought in their head according to the script other than how to please the geriatric gentleman. I didn’t care for it. I didn’t want to be taken advantage of and portrayed in such old-school ways. Broadway was much more beautiful.
That’s why I was leaning heavily toward the stage. The pressure to stay young was prevalent everywhere, but it was a lot easier to maintain under stage makeup and the distance afforded by the physical makeup of the audience’s seats in relation to center stage. HD cameras made things a lot different in film. Besides, plays had the drama, the depth, and the variety of roles for women that Hollywood could only dream of.
Or steal, if it sold enough tickets for long enough.
Still, I had just graduated from college, majoring in theater with every intention of making a go of it. But that was going to take some doing, and after three years of intense scheduling and a lot of rehearsals, I just wanted a little bit of time to decompress. Maybe spend some time back home with my friends and family. Brag a little.
The fact that I could live there much cheaper and use that time to save up for the big move to New York was totally unrelated, as far as I would tell anyone listening. I figured a good solid year back in Murdock would be all I needed. I started to think of it like a prison sentence, albeit in a very minimum-security joint.
Tessa and Kat met me at a diner before I even went home, and we had a mini celebration. They had been two of my best friends, both a year older than me and having lived on the same street growing up.
Tessa snuck in a flask, which seemed silly but at the same time delightfully fun. It was my twenty-first birthday, and they had been twenty-one for a year already. Ideas abounded about how much they were going to celebrate now that the third member of our little crew was finally old enough and was home to imbibe. It all began, apparently, with taking shots from a metal flask in the diner on Broad Street.
After a quick lunch, they made me bring the car back home and park it. I got to say hello to my parents, give them a kiss on the cheek and change into clothes that had less ‘bus-musk’ on them, and we were back out of the door.
It felt a little exhilarating to leave my parents’ home like that, with no indication of when I would be back and the full-on knowledge that I was planning on drinking. Before leaving for college, I never really went out, except the occasional movies or dinner with Tessa and Kat. Once I was gone, well, I was gone. They had no idea what I was up to. Not that it was terribly different, but occasionally there was a party I would go to, have a single drink, and then feel so awkward that I would leave. Some parts of my shy self from high school still existed in me.
Not today. Today was about me, and Tessa and Kat made sure I knew it. A sash went over my head and rested across my chest with a big two and one on it. A cheap plastic crown with my age was also put on my head as if I had no say and then I was shoved into the back of a rideshare.
Setting aside that our tiny town had never had a rideshare service before I left for college, the big shock was that its only real bar, Big Danny T’s, now did karaoke. Why was beyond me, but apparently it was so popular they did it every night now. Murdock, Texas was filled with people who fancied themselves a small-town Johnny Cash or Dolly Parton, and they had just been itching for a way to prove it.
As I walked into the bar, I was shocked at how modern it looked. For some reason, I had it in my head that this bar, which had been in Murdock for decades, was going to be an old, grimy, beat-up cowboy bar. In some ways, it looked like it on the surface. But it was clearly an act. It was sleek and modern and weirdly well lit, so everything looked kind of sexy and dramatic.
“We have been dying to bring you here,” Kat said. “Ever since we turned twenty-one and were able to come and found out it was a karaoke joint, we both thought of you.”
“Both of us said, ‘Oh, Mallory wouldlovethis place’, didn’t we?” Tessa said, getting a nod from Kat. “Come on, let’s get you a drink. Is there anything you’ve been dying to try?”
“Not really,” I said. “I mean, I have had alcohol, you know.”
“Yeah, but it was other people’s. Now it’s yours and you can order it yourself, and that makes it different. What do you want?” Kat asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t really like fruity drinks all that much. They’re too sweet.”
“So, what? A martini?” Tessa asked.
“What about a beer?” I asked.
Tessa and Kat looked at each other and then to me.
“You are out for your freaking twenty-first birthday, and you want a beer?” Kat asked incredulously.
I shrugged. “You pick then.”
“Look, if she wants a beer, get her a beer. But also get her a Liquid Cocaine. Because tonight should be full of bad decisions,” Tessa said.
Kat laughed and stood, heading toward the bar. I didn’t know what a Liquid Cocaine was, but I wasn’t going to ask because it sounded awful and was sure to mess up. I assumed the entire purpose of tonight was to mess me up so I just went along with it.
It turned out to be surprisingly not terrible. The effect was like having a shot of espresso that also made me feel really warm and tingly inside and had the dual effect of loosening me up. Enough so that I made my way to the DJ table and perused the book of songs he had available. Currently, an old man was on the stage, singing a tune that seemed to hit all the country music clichés, including the wife leaving and the truck being stolen.
I picked a song and wrote it down on the slip of paper, passing it over to the DJ, who nodded in acknowledgement. I was pretty sure he was wearing earplugs under the giant headphones that covered his entire ears. It was the only way being that close to the shrieking would be tenable, other than just simply being deaf.
There was a line of slips of paper already there, but I watched as the DJ pulled mine to the front. It wasn’t that much of a surprise. College had been good to me in more ways than one. For one thing, I did let go of some of my shyness as I found my voice in the theater. I loved to sing and had found out I was pretty damn good at musicals. I had suspected it for a while, but there was a big difference between singingEvitain the shower and doing it in front of a live crowd.
