by Julie Wright
“Lettie! Wow. You look amazing. You won’t believe the amount of press the exhibit received. They’re going to be running a feature article in the entertainment section of the Boston Herald. The whole exhibit got great reviews! And I received some commissioned work from it.”
“How nice for you,” I said, not able to keep how not-nice I felt out of my tone.
“Lettie? What are you doing hiding here in the trees?” He tried to take my hand. I tucked myself deeper into the shadows.
“It seems to be the only place I’m hidden.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“You’ve got a whole aisle dedicated to pretty much everything about me. And now you tell me they’re going to do a feature article? My whole life available for everyone to analyze. Yep. That’s nice for somebody who isn’t me.”
“You’re mad.” He seemed baffled by the realization.
“You think?” I snapped.
“Lettie, I thought you’d like it. I thought you’d—”
“That I’d what, Anders? That I’d jump up and down and clap my hands with the sheer joy of being humiliated publicly? Of having this available to an online source where it will go everywhere? Toni’s going to be furious!”
“Who cares what Toni thinks?”
“I care!” I’d stepped forward enough to know I was no longer covered by the safety of the trees or the shadows. “Toni has done a lot for me. You think I want it thrown back in her face? You think I want to ruin everything she and I have worked so hard to build? Did you for even a moment stop to think about how this will affect me?”
He seemed taken aback. “How can this affect you? It’s not like you’re putting it on your social media.”
“But other people will, Anders. Others will put it on their social media, and it will all come back to me. That’s the whole point of social media! It’s social!”
He stared at me, clearly mystified.
“You’re overreacting,” he said slowly—slowly but not carefully. “This isn’t going to be anything. This was a small exhibit. No one is going to connect this to you.”
“No one? Are you kidding? You used pictures you took as a favor to me for my social media? People know those pictures are me. They’re already on my social media pages. The Dreaming one has thousands of likes!”
“Yes, but your fan group isn’t going to know about my exhibit. It’s not like you’ve ever allowed your social media and mine to cross paths. Seriously, Lettie. This isn’t that big of a deal.”
I didn’t remind him that because he wouldn’t keep his social media private, our paths crossed all the time. “It is a big deal. It’s a big deal to me, Anders. You used me.”
Anders reached for my hands, but I swatted him away. “Used you, Lettie? How do you figure? You asked me to take those pictures.”
“But you used them to market yourself!”
He blinked and then put his hands on his hips as if to scold me. “You’re being crazy. You told me I could use them for my portfolio.”
“But not like this! This isn’t a portfolio!” The accusation hung in the air like a hiss.
“Really? Okay. What is this then?” His voice had grown cold.
“This—” I swept my hand toward the halls. “This is an exposé of my life. It’s you using those pictures to position yourself as a leader in the photography world, not caring who it hurts in the process.”
“You mean like you used those pictures to position yourself as a leader in the self-help world with a book that’s supposed to make other people feel better because they can’t get their crap together on their own? Like you giving life advice to people whose lives you don’t know and have no business butting into?”
I caught the way he’d twisted his lips at the word book. “Why did you do that?”
“What?”
“Make fun of my writing.”
He groaned. “Lettie! I did not make fun of your writing.”
“What do you think this book is besides my writing?”
He scrubbed his hand over his head and pressed his lips together. His groan turned into a growl. “It’s not a book. It’s a rant you wrote because you were mad at the publishing industry.”
I fell back as if struck.
His eyes went wide as if he couldn’t believe what had exited his mouth. “I didn’t mean that.”
But he did mean it. Anders didn’t say what he didn’t mean.
I blinked back the sting of tears searing my eyelids. “You sold me out.”
He shook his head. “No. You. You sold you out. You let a hashtag replace your humanity. You let these people tell you that you aren’t good enough without some smoke-and-mirrors nonsense of the right clothes and the right furniture and the right food and the right entertainment, and you actually believed them. You actually bought into the lie that you’re not good enough. They did this terrible thing to you, and you don’t have the backbone to stand up to them and tell them they’re wrong. Even now, after seeing my exhibit, you refuse to see. But maybe I’m blind too because I don’t think I’ve ever seen you as clearly as I do now, Charlotte, and I’ve never been so disappointed.”
I flinched at him calling me Charlotte and not Lettie. “Disappointed.” The word released from my lips as an exhale. It burrowed into my skin, between my ribs, and into my heart. “Did you hear that?” I whispered.
“Hear what?”
“The snap of climbing too high. Too high. The branches. And they’re too small to hold my weight. Every crack, snap, and splinter is running its way from my feet and through my body and into my heart. I’ve climbed too high. I’m about to fall.”
“Lettie.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know.” I sucked in a hard breath. “Look, I have an awards ceremony on the 27th. I actually bought this dress to wear to it, but then you asked me to go to Sweden so I decided not to go. But now that I’m thinking about things, I think it’d probably be a good idea if I went to that.”
“But—”
“Yeah. I think maybe it’d be best if you go to Sweden and I go to my awards ceremony and we both chalk up this whole thing between us to experience.”
Complete understanding registered on his face. “You don’t mean that.”
I lifted my chin, determined not to let it betray the scream of my insides. “I do mean that. The thing is, I don’t just do things because Toni tells me to. I enjoy a lot of the interaction I get through the people I communicate with online. I like who I am right now.”
Splotches of red crawled up his neck from the collar of his white shirt and onto his face. “Oh yeah? Did you enjoy telling people that you and I weren’t together? That we were just acquaintances, as if I was the janitor in the apartment building? Do you like being the girl who denies having me in her life?”
I should’ve seen that bite coming, but I was unprepared for the way it tore a piece out of my center. Not a single response came to mind as I stared into his eyes watching his emotions flicker through a range I’d never seen in him before. I don’t know how long we would have stayed like that if it hadn’t been for a security guard coming to tell Anders that they were closing up.
“You know what, Char. You go to your awards ceremony.” He turned to the security guard. “I’m leaving, Mike. You can lock up when the lady decides she’s ready to go. Merry Christmas, Lettie.” He walked away. I didn’t move until the soft thud of his shoes on the carpeted ballroom floors ended at the doors, which opened and slammed shut with a crack.
“Ma’am?” Mike the security guard said.
“Please give me a second,” I told him.
I walked back up the aisle filled with pieces of me and looked at each picture. The masked. The unmasked. As I walked down the middle between the two sides, I realized that I belonged right where I stood. I
wasn’t the peasant serving girl of the unmasked. I wasn’t the woman in the glass slippers of the masked.
I was me. The woman who was sometimes one and sometimes the other and sometimes both at the same time.
I was Charlotte Kingsley, and apparently the man who took those pictures didn’t know that woman.
“Thanks, Mike,” I said to the security guard. “I’m leaving now.”
I drove home and moved toward the elevator.
“Are you okay?”
I whirled to see Shannon standing just down from where the elevators were dinging open. Seeing her shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did.
“I’m fine. Merry Christmas, Shannon.”
She frowned without responding. I entered the elevator and made my way back to my apartment. I locked the door behind me.
And only then did I allow myself to fall to pieces.
Chapter Nineteen
“You are the writer of your own story. If you want the fairy tale, be prepared to fight for it.”
—Charlotte Kingsley, The Cinderella Fiction
(The “Make Your Own Magic” Chapter)
Anders left for Sweden the next day. He knocked on my door that morning. I recognized his footfalls, the way he shifted from side to side while waiting for me to answer. With the practice I’d had at avoiding the creaky floorboards during hours and hours of pacing, I made my way to the door in silence and put my hand on the wood. I could have opened it and opened up the whole mess again, the pain and humiliation. But the emails I’d received from Toni, along with screenshots of what had run in the Boston Herald and demands to know what was going on, saved me from the temptation of opening the door and falling into his arms to beg for forgiveness.
He’d stayed on the other side for a long time, the two of us as divided as the photos in his exhibit. This side and that side and no middle ground.
It hurt that he was there. It hurt worse when he walked away.
I watched from my window as the moving truck pulled into a space it didn’t really fit into at the front of our building. I watched the boxes we’d packed and the familiar furniture leave the building and my life for forever. I watched the familiar person, who owned that familiar furniture, standing at the edge of the sidewalk, his camera bag over his shoulder and his keys in his hands, point to the driver, giving instructions I couldn’t hear.
The driver nodded and closed the gate on the back of the truck before locking it into place, getting in the truck, and pulling away. Anders’s car was also parked out front. He’d loaded luggage into it, but no boxes, no furniture, no moving things. He was not going to wherever the truck was headed. That luggage was making a trip to the airport. A trip out of the country. A trip out of my life. I waited for him to turn and look up to my window. He had to know I’d be watching, that I would see.
He didn’t turn, ripping open the wound all over again so my emotions could bleed out.
Snow started to fall sometime that afternoon—too late to stop an airplane from taking off.
I stayed in my apartment and lived off the remnants of food in my pantry because even ordering from The Thai Guy or Bob’s Grocery felt like too much effort. Aside from doing the “cleanup” Toni had ordered me to do, I binge-watched a full TV series and had started a second when Anders wrote me a text saying he was sorry.
But then he sent another text saying that he was sorry the exhibit had hurt me, but that he wasn’t sorry that the exhibit had happened or that I saw it because being my best friend meant being completely honest with me. He called the exhibit the most honest work he’d ever done.
I didn’t write back.
I also did not throw my phone against the wall, which, to me, showed a great deal of progress. Instead, I went to my mother’s house. It was the Christmas season. She would need help decorating and cooking and serving in soup kitchens and volunteering.
I needed to volunteer, to work hard, to lose myself in something and someone else before I went completely mad.
My mother opened the door. She looked at me, peered hard into my face, and opened the door wider to let me inside without asking why my eyes were red.
Kat flew into me from where she’d been on the stairs, trying to see who’d come. “You’re here!” She nearly knocked me over in a hug before pulling away and saying, “Wait. Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in Sweden?”
My mom’s eyes met mine over Kat’s shoulder. “Not anymore.”
No one asked more, sensing the raw ache in me. Instead, we got to work finishing off all the details Mom viewed as being essential to a successful Christmas.
While Edward and Kat were out delivering neighbor gifts, my mom watched me while I made bows for her gift baskets.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
My broken heart had made me careless enough to ask, “About what?”
“About you and the situation you’ve landed yourself in.”
Don’t engage, I thought even as the words “And what situation is that?” fell out of my mouth.
“You could have been anything.”
“You’re right,” I said, imagining the fight that would follow the fact that I couldn’t stop myself from engaging. “I could have been. And I am what I want to be. We’ve been through this.”
“You could have cured cancer or been on the Supreme Court. But you did what you wanted in spite of my aspirations for you.”
“Right.”
She put down the bow she’d been working on. “Yes, you were.”
“What?”
“You were right. I wanted you to change the world for good, to make a difference—and you did, but you did it your way, not mine. I hated the pretend worlds you and your father lived in. I hated how he never understood that the real world was stability and honesty. But you grew up like him. You always dive into the make-believe thinking that everything will work if you just believe hard enough. But running away from a good relationship isn’t one of those things that works out no matter how hard you make believe.”
My hands froze. My eyes slowly raised to meet hers.
She shrugged. “Well, it won’t, Charlotte. You can’t throw pennies into fountains and wish on stars and think that life is going to just be what you want. You have to work for it. I didn’t work for it with your father. I got angry and walked away. I learned my lesson and vowed to not make that mistake with Edward. You sighing every ten minutes while helping me isn’t actually helping me. Why don’t you get on a plane and get to work?”
“Mom, you don’t understand what he did. You don’t understand why I can’t.”
“No, I don’t.” She refused to understand right up until the time I left to go home for the night.
I went home but didn’t go to sleep. The worst part of being home was knowing the apartment underneath mine sat empty. No one underneath me would care if I paced over every single creaky floorboard in my apartment.
Lillian’s phone call found me on the couch while I ate mango sticky rice and watched Sleeping Beauty.
I wished she’d been there in person and not just on the phone. I could have used one of her incredible hugs. How much I needed the contact of another human being. Anders had once told me that an embrace was a powerful tool for healing. He called it that exchange of energy where the giver loses nothing, but the recipient and the giver both gain everything.
I blinked away those thoughts. Who cared what Anders the Asgardian thought about anything?
“This is going to sound like I am busybodyin’ my way into your life, but I’ve seen some of the things online regarding that neighbor of yours and you and that exhibit he did and I wanted to check and see how you’re doing.”
I told her the truth. All of it. She had asked, and, unlike when my mother had asked, I couldn’t keep myself from giving a full confession.
She stayed silent long enou
gh it seemed we’d been disconnected, until she said, “Lettie, I’m going to be hurtfully truthful, and I’m not even going to say sorry because I’m not sorry. If a thing needs saying, it’s a smart person who says it. Your biggest problem, girl, is that you wrote one of the most beautiful books ever written.”
“That’s my biggest problem?” I wrapped myself deeper into the lap blanket I’d bought to give cushion to my couch.
“Well, no, not that. Your biggest problem is that you’ve never read that beautiful book you wrote. And so you don’t believe it’s true for you. You believe it’s true for the rest of the world but not for you. There’s a world of wisdom in those pages. A prescription from doctor me would be for you to draw yourself a hot bubble bath, crack the spine on one of your author copies, and get to reading. Call me if you need anything. Good night, Lettie.”
But it wasn’t a good night. The night was filled with restless tossing and turning until I finally reached for my phone, opened my reading app, and bought my book . . . so I didn’t have to get out of bed and get out one of my author copies. By the time morning came, I understood what Lillian meant.
I understood what Anders and his exhibit meant.
I understood what I meant when I wrote my book.
And I knew what needed to be done. Mid-morning, I sent Lillian a text with a link.
She texted back, “What’s this?”
“Two minutes inside my head. I’m owning my own fiction.”
By the time my suitcase was packed, Lillian was calling, which meant she’d watched the video I’d made.
“Hey, Lillian. What do you think?”
“Is this really what you want?” she asked. “Telling the world and taking whatever the world will dish out to you? I’m assuming you know what it will cost you?”
“I do know. I’ve already written to Jen and Melissa so they won’t be blindsided.”