Except Effie. She was anything but content.
With the events in Amsterdam weighing heavily on her conscience, for miles and miles, all she could do was replay her past. Which part of her history did Elias need to know?
If it were up to her, none of it. But if Elias grew up with a drug addict mother, he needed to know. And if she didn’t tell him, someone else would. And that pill would be a lot less bitter to swallow if it came from her.
Act I—Overture
“First, she dreamed about little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers—she could hear the very tones of her voice...”
At age three, Effie and her twin, accompanied their pianist mother to the music store. While Callie tore everything off the shelves and ran around destroying the store, Effie admired a pretty instrument perched on a shelf. She plucked the strings and the most beautiful sound spilled out—like a breeze blowing through a crack in the window, or like crickets in the nighttime, or bird wings in flight.
The gorgeous melody muffled her mother’s bleating, screeching, and scolding, as well as her sister’s banging, stomping, and screaming.
The woman at the counter, who looked like an actress on Sesame Street, recognized a potential sale and sidled up to her. “That’s a violin,” she said in a condescending baby voice. “Let me show you how to play it.” The saleslady tucked the instrument under her chin and ran a stick across the strings. What flowed out sounded even better than before.
“Can I try?” Effie switched the instrument to her other side, because it felt more comfortable, then imitated what the woman had done.
After that, she never watched Sesame Street again because practicing her instrument was more important. Nor would she ever play the violin left-handed again.
Act II—Ensemble
“‘Oh, how I long to run away from normal days,’ thought Alice. ‘I want to run wild with my imagination.’”
From the age of six until the age of nine, Effie and Callie’s lives were mapped out in advance. In fact, their mother wrote their routine on the kitchen chalkboard in white paint.
The schedule was TBD on the weekends, because they were usually traveling and performing in recitals.
The strict routine didn’t bother Effie at the time, because she and her sister were a team. And everyone knows misery is more fun with someone else.
Unlike Effie though, Callie was allowed to try a range of instruments. But when her sister’s musical giftedness never appeared, her focused solely on her.
Greta put a second mortgage on the house and bought her an outrageously expensive violin from one of her German relatives.
“I don’t want it,” Effie told her. What if she accidentally dropped it? Then what? Would they end up homeless?
“Don’t be ridiculous,” her mother said. “A violin is as important as a violinist. Our lives are dependent upon your success now. You cannot fail.”
By that point, their parents were divorced, so Greta Murphy devoted her life to making her child prodigy daughter into the next star. And if Effie dared deny her mother that role, there was hell to pay.
“Don’t eat with your left hand,” her mother would say at the dinner table. “You are no longer left-handed in this house.”
“If I catch you playing with your sister again, you’ll lose your outside privileges.”
Her sister became such a distraction that Greta let Callie attend public school just to get her out of the house.
The night before her sister’s first day of school, Effie snuck into her sister’s room and stole a brand new box of crayons out of her backpack. Once Effie had broken every one of them in half, she then threw away the box and went back to bed.
Act III—Solo
“‘What a curious feeling!’ said Alice. ‘I must be shutting up like a telescope!’”
“Your daughter exhibits a few symptoms of ADHD,” the first doctor said. “But most teenagers do. Exercise and a little fresh air should do wonders for her attention span.”
The next shrink wrote a prescription for Ritalin without asking a single question. He also prescribed pain medicine to help with her stiff arms and neck.
Both pills helped her cope with her mother and made for a blissful barrier, which quickly dissolved once the doctor refused to renew either one.
Act IV—Ritornello
“Luckily for Alice, the little magic bottle had now had its full effect, and she grew no larger: still, it was very uncomfortable, and, as there seemed to be no sort of chance of her ever getting out of the room again, no wonder she felt unhappy.”
“I need the competition, or I’ll never improve,” Effie told her mother one night at dinner. The truth was, since she’d weaned herself off the drugs, she couldn’t care less about violin. “At the School of the Performing Arts, I’ll excel. I promise, Mother, it’s the best thing for my career.”
That fall, at the age of seventeen, Effie escaped her mother’s regime and spent her senior year in a different sort of internment camp—high school.
For ages, she’d longed for a normal life, with normal friends, and normal teenaged problems, but once she started school, she soon found out she was far too abnormal to have that kind of life.
Socially awkward and culturally unaware, she repelled the cool kids, as well as the uncool kids. No one wanted to hang out with a loser who couldn’t comprehend basic teenage trivia, like what brand names were in fashion, what TV shows to watch, and which parties to attend. She was a helpless mess.
No one spoke to her for months, until one afternoon, a popular boy from the drama program sat beside her in the cafeteria. His first words to her were: “You’re weird.” Then he said, “Wanna get high?”
Unlike her controlling mother, Brandon’s wealthy parents neglected him. Instead of showering him with attention, they threw money at him. Nannies replaced his parents when he was a baby, video games replaced them during his elementary school years, and drugs replaced them during high school.
And with his parents’ endless supply of money, Brandon supplied an endless amount of drugs.
Regularly, he and Effie skipped school and went back to his place in Malibu, where he lived alone because his parents lived on an island somewhere.
The first time they tried to have sex, Brandon was so high he couldn’t get it up. The second time, he got it up, but couldn’t come. The third time, he came so fast she didn’t even realize what happened. The fourth time, they opted for a line of coke instead of a roll in the hay. After that, Brandon admitted he was asexual, most likely because of his antidepressants and drug and alcohol abuse.
Yet, he still made Effie his arm candy, and as long as he supplied the nose candy, she didn’t mind.
Brandon wasn’t her boyfriend or even her friend, really. He was more like a drug buddy, or a partner in crime. But at the time, he was all she had.
Act V—Encore
“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”
Despite bombing her audition, Effie received a full-ride scholarship to Juilliard at the end of her senior year, most likely because her mother knew the head of the violin department from her days as a concert pianist back in Germany.
“I want to take a break from school,” Effie announced after she opened the school letter. “I’ll go next year.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Greta said. “You’re going, and that’s final.”
“I’m eighteen. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“As long as you live in my house, I can.”
Before their argument, Effie had done a fat line of blow off her hand in the bathroom, so without considering the consequences of her actions, she told her mother: “I’m moving the fuck out.”
That night, she moved in with Brandon, where she stayed for the next four years.
In high school, Brandon focused on drama, and after high school, he thrived on it.
Even with his pa
rents’ Hollywood connections, he couldn’t land a bit part. He’d developed a reputation for showing up on the set high or drunk, or worse, not showing up at all. Not to mention, his acting was so over-the-top, even soap operas wouldn’t hire him for bit parts. He couldn’t win over anyone in LA.
Instead, he became a sycophant, a back-slapper, and a parasite. He glommed on to anyone with a modicum of popularity or fame. He lived for the spotlight. It didn’t matter if they were B, C, D, or Z-list celebrities, as long as they flicked a look in his direction, he was happy.
Because his parents paid for everything she did, including the drugs, she never questioned him. And he demanded nothing in return, not even sex, just her attendance at parties. Rather than stroking his cock for drugs, she stroked his ego.
Her new daily routine no longer included violin. Instead, she slept until noon, did a bump on the way to her waitress job, snorted up in the bathroom during her shift, and then came home and partied with Brandon until the wee hours of the morning.
Sometimes they danced all night at raves. Other nights, they went to sex parties and spent the night doing drugs, fucking random people, and never having orgasms.
Occasionally, they went skiing in Aspen and stayed in his parents’ cabin or jetted off to the Caribbean to stay in his parents’ island home when they weren’t there.
With his parents’ credit cards, Brandon bought her clothes at high-end boutiques and meals at swanky restaurants and massages at his elite country club. They lived like rich hedonists.
But even with all that money at her disposal, she’d never felt so empty. If money and drugs didn’t make her happy, what was the point?
Then Brandon started dabbling in heroin. She had absolutely no interest in killing herself at the time. So instead, she watched him slowly fade away.
Eventually, his parents showed up one random night for an intervention and told him it was rehab or bust. He chose bust. And his parents brutally cut off their drug supply.
After that, they moved in with another rich Hollywood brat, as well as twenty other junkies, and started a life of petty crime. That’s when she’d stolen her sister’s ID and drained her savings.
Brandon broke into his parents’ house and loaded up a moving van full of everything he could hock for drugs.
He’d also threatened to steal her violin from her mother’s house, but she told him her mother had already sold it.
That instrument was the only thing tethering her to a drug-free future. Because she would quit tomorrow.
And the next day. And the next day after that.
But then the next day became the next month, and then the next year.
There weren’t many salvageable memories from that time in her life. But a few cobwebs remained in the attic. For instance, she could still smell crack cooking and feel her body rotting away like it was yesterday.
Many times, when she was high, she’d composed symphonies in her head, but she’d never cared enough to write them down. The only thing she cared about back then was the instant zap of dopamine from crack
It wasn’t long before Brandon became a vegetable. During that time, she wandered around Hollywood, begging for money. Once she had enough to buy a few candy bars and a couple of rocks, she’d hightail it back to the house, or over to the beach, and spend the rest of her day high as a kite.
One day, the police busted her for loitering and found her crack pipe. She’d already smoked everything, so they couldn’t haul her in for possession. Instead, they called her father, and he hauled her into rehab the next day.
In rehab, she went through the harrowing stages of withdrawal then spent the rest of her three months in endless group therapy sessions with the other fuck-ups. After they shared their sob stories, they shared their drug connects.
And then she moved in with her father.
Act VI—Fugato
“And in our darkest hour before my final rhyme, she will come back home to Wonderland, and turn back the hands of time.”
With Skip’s generous help, she entered the experimental drug program in San Diego.
For six months, she’d lived in a private facility, where she received daily drug injections and attended cognitive therapy sessions.
Counselors also taught her basic life skills, like how to open a bank account and get a job.
After that, she lived in the clinic’s halfway house for another six months and attended weekly therapy.
No one ever mentioned whether she’d received the placebo drug or not. It was possible. But in her mind, it was the therapy that had helped the most.
Though her therapist had uncovered a lot of issues, many she opted to bury instead. For instance, she never confronted her parents. Why bother? They didn’t care.
Also, she never told Callie how much she resented her. There were two daughters in that household, and one of them was tortured, while the other one went surfing all day.
But since Callie had more or less forgiven her for stealing her life savings, and because she was the only family she had left, she never brought it up.
“‘It’s no use talking about it,’ Alice said, looking up at the house and pretending it was arguing with her. ‘I’m not going in again yet. I know I should go through the Looking-glass again—back into the old room—and there’d be the end of all my adventures!’”
Which of these scenes should she divulge to Elias first? Was it better to go backwards, or forwards, or just sprinkle little anecdotes here and there? After twelve hours of thinking about it, she decided the best way to tell him was through music.
So she took out her music journal and let the story bleed out of her pen onto the staff lines.
When she’d finished Act I, Elias plopped down next to her. “What are you writing?” he asked.
“A symphony, I think.”
“Can I see?”
She passed him her notebook.
“How do you write for all these instruments?”
“I don’t know.”
He shook his head. “You’re gifted.”
She slammed her journal shut.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“I don’t like being labeled any more than you like being called a rock star.”
His brows lowered. “But why? It’s a compliment.”
“Because it separates me from normalcy.”
He scooted closer. “What do you mean?”
In vivid detail, she described Act I. At the end, Elias grabbed her hand and brought it to his lap. “Go on,” he said. “I’m listening.”
She took a deep breath and continued. “I won my first violin competition, then the second, then the third. After that, my mother became one of those beauty pageant moms you hear about, dragging me all over the place, forcing me to practice until my body ached. I just wanted to be a kid.”
“You don’t like playing violin?”
She shrugged. “It’s the only thing I’m good at.”
“You sell yourself short.” He massaged her hands. “What about your father?”
Act II came next. “My dad left when I was six and married another woman. They had two daughters together. He wanted nothing to do with me after that.”
Then she recited Act III and select bits of Act IV. “When my mom finally let me go to school, everyone made fun of me and said I was autistic. They called me ‘Special Effie.” She put finger quotes around the phrase.
“But you are special,” he said.
“They thought I was mentally disabled.”
“Ridiculous.”
“But it’s true. I hear things others don’t. And feel things others don’t. I’m not normal.”
“What’s normal? Is anyone normal? Normal is boring. I don’t like boring. And you, mi vida, are anything but boring.”
He gave her a reassuring smile. “People made fun of me in school, too. For being shy.”
“Who cares if you’re shy?”
“It’s not normal.”
“You seem n
ormal to me.”
“And you seem normal to me.”
“Maybe we’re both abnormal,” she said.
“Absolutely. We’re both freaks.”
“Super freaks?”
“Ay!” He gripped his forehead. “Never say that again.”
She rested her cheek against his shoulder. “I’m crazy about you, Elvis.”
“I’m crazy about you, too, F-bomb.”
39
Bel Canto
Madrid, Spain
“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”
Soundtrack “Desperada,” B-Tribe
At sunset, it was still a hundred degrees in Madrid. Giant mushroom-shaped shade structures sprouted up around the music festival and showered mist upon the melting masses, giving everyone an oily glow.
While Elias dealt with the sound guy, Effie watched a Spanish musician play on the side stage. It was a small band, only a DJ and a guitarist, but their sound was immense. Sensual and erotic.
A burning desire for sex engulfed her. If Elias were there, she would have given up her good-sex virginity right there out in the open.
Yeah, right. Like that would ever happen. He wouldn’t even kiss her in front of Annie, let alone a huge crowd.
A bunch of loud Americans shoved next to her and destroyed the moment.
In the center, stood Tina, Elias’s groupie. She snorted blow from a plastic bullet then passed it around the circle.
Head-Tripped: A Sexy Rock Star Romance (Ad Agency Series Book 2) Page 18