by Harper Bliss
For all of those reasons, Lou didn’t attach much importance to beauty. It was the most subjective thing, anyway. Back in school, everyone thought Mia was the most beautiful girl in their year, but Lou knew how ugly she really was. And sure, Jared had described Mia as hot, and maybe to him she was—because he had entirely different standards for beauty than Lou had—but Lou was sure Mia ceased to be anything remotely related to beautiful after she had told Jared about their history.
“There you are.” Amber’s voice came from behind her. “I’ve asked Mia to stay behind for a minute. Told her you had something to ask her. She’s upstairs. Micky and I are just packing up and will be out of your hair in five minutes.” Amber came to stand next to her and looked at her in the reflection in the mirror. “If you need to come see me afterwards, I’ll be home.” She put a gentle hand on Lou’s shoulder. “Remember, you are not alone.”
“Thanks.” Lou took a deep breath, wondering what stories Mia was making up in her head right now about why Lou had asked her to stay. Maybe she believed her feeble attempts at flirting had worked. Or that Lou wanted to apologize for giving her the cold shoulder at the open mic last Friday. Or perhaps she did have a clue. Perhaps she did know. Either way, the time to stop guessing had come. “I’ll be in touch later,” Lou said and watched Amber leave. They had agreed not to tell Micky—the fewer who people knew, the better. So when Micky walked past Lou on her way out, she surely had very different ideas about the conversation that was about to occur, and shot Lou a big fat wink, accompanied by a heartfelt, “Have fun.”
Mia was sitting in Amber’s chair, but had swiveled it around so she was looking out the window.
“Hey,” she said when Lou walked in.
Lou didn’t close the door, afraid it might have a too suffocating effect on her.
“Thanks for staying,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
“You’ve got me intrigued.” Mia painted on one of her crooked grins. When she smiled, everything about her lit up—which Lou thought an infuriating quality. “I was convinced you didn’t like me very much.”
Lou tried to remember Amber’s words and remain calm. She sat down in Micky’s chair, leaving a good distance between them. When she tried to speak the first time, the words died in the back of her throat. She had to swallow hard and try again. “You really have no idea who I am?”
Mia narrowed her eyes. “Of course I do. You’re Louise, known as Lou by everyone around here, and you teach yoga in this very studio.” She tilted her head. “What am I missing?”
Lou took another deep breath, then finally said the words. “I’m Louise Hamilton of the graduating class of 2003 at Queen Mary’s College For Girls.” Lou willed herself to study Mia’s face. To observe what happened to it when the penny dropped.
“We went to the same school?” Mia asked innocently. “I really hadn’t recognized you. Were we in the same class?”
Lou had to deploy every single tactic she had ever learned in yoga and meditation training to stay calm and not lash out and start shouting. All she did was shake her head and say, as evenly as possible, “I’m the half-breed you and your gang waited for just behind the gate every single morning. The girl you thought so little of, you didn’t think twice about calling her names and insulting her on a daily basis. The girl who made you feel superior and feared by everyone else. Your so-called friends included.”
“What?” Mia’s face was starting to sink. “No.”
“Oh, yes.”
Mia’s shoulders slumped and she looked away. She said something but because her face was turned away and she mumbled it so quietly, Lou couldn’t understand.
“I didn’t quite hear that,” Lou said.
Mia turned to her, her knee bopping up and down. “That was a long time ago,” she murmured.
“I remember every minute of it.”
Mia glanced at her, then quickly averted her gaze again, looking at her hands which she had gathered in her lap. She seemed to have shrunk a few centimeters and there was nothing left of the self-confidence she carried herself with around the Pink Bean—and which had annoyed Lou greatly.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Mia said. “I—I don’t know what else to say.”
“There’s nothing you can say. You did your damage a long time ago, that much is true, and nothing can change that now.”
“Have you, er, told anyone?” Mia asked.
“Amber knows. She’s the only one.”
“And those two guys you came to the Pink Bean with? The ones who treated me like dirt,” Mia said. It wasn’t a question. She was putting the pieces together in her head.
Lou nodded.
“Are you going to tell Kristin? Is that what this is about?” She cleared her throat. “I would understand if you wanted some sort of payback. If you would want to get me fired.” A tear trickled down Mia’s cheek.
“I don’t want revenge,” Lou managed to say. “I just wanted you to know who I was and remember what you did.” As she had done quite a few times over the weekend, she pondered again whether it would give her any kind of pleasure to inform Kristin about who Mia really was. But Lou knew it wouldn’t. This wasn’t about any sort of revenge. The tears that ran down Mia’s face in ever bigger streams didn’t give her the least bit of pleasure. This was the kind of situation in which not an ounce of pleasure could ever be derived. “Because it seemed to me like you had chosen to forget all about your former ways and present yourself like an entirely different person.”
“That’s because I am.” It came out as more of a howl than a string of words. “I am not that person anymore. I loathe the girl I was then. I’m ashamed of her—of myself.”
“As you should be.”
Mia shook her head while wiping some tears off her face. “I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do? I’ll do anything.”
“There is no penance for your crimes. There is no absolution.” The tone of her own voice was beginning to scare Lou again. “You’re just going to have to live with what you did for the rest of your life. What you did to me and the others. Reduced us to toys for your cruel, cruel games. I cried myself to sleep for a long time after I left Queen Mary, just because of you. Because you existed and our paths crossed and you were so fucked-up you could only express it by being mean. It took me a long time to realize that it was not me who was the screwed-up one, the one who deserved to be called names like that, but it was you. The kind of person you must have been to have to resort to that sort of brutality every single day. A vain narcissist who got off on other people’s tears. A control freak who couldn’t stand the slightest word of criticism aimed at herself. In fact, I feel sorry for you, Mia. I hated you for a very long time, but now, I feel genuinely sorry for you. The kinds of fucked-up you must be.”
“What do you want me to do?” Mia seemed to be gaining back a bit of her composure. “Do you want me to leave the Pink Bean?”
“I’m not here to blackmail you. I’m just here to remind you. And to finally say what I’ve wanted to say to you forever. And I will remind you of who you truly are every single day, you can be sure of that. There will be no more carefree prancing about the Pink Bean when I’m around, or when Amber is around. I will always have my eye on you, because I want you to remember.” This was starting to sound a lot like the revenge Lou had said she didn’t want.
“This may mean nothing to you, but I have changed. That angry young girl has nothing to do with who I am now. I’m so sorry for what I put you through. I really am.”
“I don’t care who you are today. You could be volunteering at a homeless shelter and feed stray cats and participate in anti-bullying programs every single day for the rest of your life. In my eyes, you will never be redeemed. Because I don’t believe that sort of inborn cruelty can ever leave a person.”
“It’s your prerogative to believe that. I won’t try to change your mind. I will keep my distance from you.”
“And you won’t come to any of my yoga cla
sses.”
Mia nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “If it’s all right with you, I would like to go now.”
“Go.” Lou watched Mia as she tried to gather herself and stood up, steadying herself against the table. She watched her walk out of the door and waited for a sense of relief to set in, for her own limbs to relax and a weight to drop off her shoulders, but none of that happened. Instead, she started shaking uncontrollably and burst into tears.
Chapter Eight
The one thought Mia couldn’t get out of her head was that the woman who had just decimated her, confronted her with all the wrongdoings of her youth, was really Louise Hamilton. Spindly Lou with the long arms and legs that always remained motionless whenever Mia unleashed one of her vile attacks on the girl. And they had been vile and vicious and as much a cry for help as any of the other things Mia got up to back then, but no help ever came.
She felt deeply ashamed, but more than that she felt flabbergasted, taken aback by the harshness of Lou’s words. A harshness she surely deserved, still now. Just as much as Mia turning up in the Pink Bean must have felt like Lou’s past coming back to haunt her, it felt like that to Mia now. A past she had long forgotten, even though snatches of it turned up unbidden in nightmares in the middle of the night when she woke up in a sweat and didn’t know what to do with herself because of the shame that engulfed her.
Was she still that narcissist Lou had described earlier? Was she still, underneath the veneer of good cheer and will, so cruel?
No, no, no. As she made her way to the bus stop, and realized she’d just missed one and had to wait twenty minutes for the next one, Mia told herself no. She was no longer any of these things, had perhaps never been them. Not that there were any excuses for how she had behaved, but she, too, had had to expel a few demons from her life to get where she was now. Or, put more accurately, her mother had to leave her father before life got any better for Mia.
Mia could kick herself for not recognizing Lou, but she looked so different. She had confidence now, not the brazen kind, but the subtle kind of confidence that comes from true self-acceptance. Not the overbearing kind Mia tried to display in her teens, when she was just as insecure as the next girl in her year. But she had inherited a brazenness from her father. The ‘gift’ to shoot down any critic before they could even open their mouth.
How could she ever make this up to Lou? And to think that before Lou had treated her so cold-heartedly last Friday she had entertained the notion of asking her out.
Mia paced around the bus shelter, trying to come up with some sort of action that could adequately convey how sorry she was for what she had done, for the person she used to be. Then it hit her that Amber also knew. Amber, who had just invited her into her office and asked her a bunch of questions about online advertising and had acted as if Mia was doing her a big favor. Amber, who would now always see the girl her employee, Lou, had described to her instead of the woman Mia was now.
Mia had felt so good after her first week in the Pink Bean. A few days later, there was nothing left of that ecstatic feeling that comes with finding a job that really suits you and working with the kind of people who make you feel like you’ve found a new home as well as a place of work.
And it was all her own damn fault. Nothing would be the same again now. Maybe she should quit and start over somewhere else. Or get the plans for the Newtown branch rolling as quickly as possible. Only Amber knew—and Lou, of course. Would that be a tenable situation? There was only one way to find out. By going to the Pink Bean every morning and facing the music. After all, that’s what she had made Lou live through every morning when they were seventeen.
Mia inhaled deeply. If the slabs of the sidewalk would be so kind as to open up right then and swallow her whole, Mia would gladly sink under the ground and never set foot above again. She was guilty. She had done all the things Lou had said she’d done. She was a bully. Had been a bully. But the adage once a bully, always a bully didn’t hold up. Not for her. Mia flinched whenever someone raised their voice impertinently at someone else. She always spoke up if she noticed someone was being treated unfairly, because she couldn’t bear someone lording power they didn’t have over another person. She couldn’t stand inequality—one of the reasons she loved the Pink Bean so much—and disagreed with everything her father had taught her when she was a child. Not that she saw her father anymore. That chapter of her life had been closed a long time ago.
Her bus finally arrived and she got on, finding a spot at the back the way she always did. It had started to drizzle and she looked out over the wet Sydney streets and the way the lights of the traffic and billboards reflected in the small puddles left everywhere. At one point, she’d contemplated leaving, getting a fresh start somewhere else, in another country, where she would never run into anyone from her past, would never need to be confronted with it ever again, until she realized that hoping for no confrontation, for no comeuppance was ridiculous, because all those feelings lay within her. She would always see herself when she looked into the mirror, no matter how much she had changed and tried to do right by others, tried to make up with good deeds for the bad ones she had committed, as if it was a simple credit-debit balance that needed to be evened out. She would always be the person who had said and done those things—and now Louise Hamilton had turned up to remind her of that.
What did she think anyway? That she could progress through her life without ever meeting any of the girls she had called the most ghastly things? Mia had always known that life was not that kind of fairytale, and now she had the proof. She would find a way to deal with Louise, with that side of her past, of herself, and live with it in a more aware way than she had been doing. It was the only way.
“Is everything all right?” Jo asked. “You seem a bit flighty today. And if you look at that door one more time, I’m afraid it might come off its hinges just from the sheer intensity of your stare.”
Mia was dreading the moment Amber and Lou would walk in. And she was sure she looked a lot worse for wear. She hadn’t slept a wink, kept tossing and turning in bed, trying to come up with ways to make things better. Things were already better for Lou—how could they not be?—but if she couldn’t make things better, then she wanted to make up for the time Lou had lost because of her. For the hours she spent crying because of Mia, hours of her life she would never get back.
“Rough night,” Mia said.
“Hot date? And is she about to walk in?” Jo joked.
“If only,” Mia said. She could not confide in Jo. After leaving Queen Mary, she had never told anyone about what she had done. She had started fresh, gone to university. She lived at home her freshman year until her father had been removed from her family’s daily life. She was never going to let her mother live alone with that man. Then she’d moved to Newtown and had fallen in love with it.
Nobody she had gotten to know after high school knew the first thing about the vile acts she was capable of. Nobody must know. Mia had rebuilt herself one day at a time, had distanced herself from the influence of her father and the girl she had allowed herself to become a little bit more every day as time progressed. And now there she was fifteen years later. Perfectly capable of not thinking about her past for days on end. Until now. It had come back as hard and sudden as a slap in the face.
“Come on, Mia. A girl like you. The admirers must be lining up,” Jo said.
Mia huffed out a laugh. “No one is doing any such thing.”
“What about Lou? Do you still have the hots for her?” Jo pursed her lips together.
The sound of Lou’s name shot another jolt of shame through her. Mia shook her head. “No. That’s never going to happen.”
“Why not? What happened?”
Mia feverishly wished someone would come into the café right about now. She wouldn’t even mind if it was one of Lou’s friends who would pretend she didn’t exist. But the door remained closed and the customers who were present seemed perfectly content
nursing their coffees.
“Nothing.” Damn it. Mia had clearly said too much already.
“Did you make a move on her at the open mic night?” Josephine didn’t let up.
Mia shook her head. “Nothing like that.”
“Because Caitlin and I were talking the other day and, provided that Lou bats for our team, the two of you would make a pretty stunning couple.”
“What? No.” Mia had to keep herself from raising her voice.
“Okay, okay. I get it. You’re not interested, but I sure thought you were for a minute there,” Jo said.
Finally, the door opened and someone walked in. Before Mia could get a look at the new patrons, her heart skipped a beat. But it wasn’t Lou. It was a woman whom she had seen at the Pink Bean almost every day and who had flashed her a few smiles that could hardly be misunderstood.
“Hi Daisy,” Jo said. “I’ll let Mia take care of you today.”
Hackles fully up, Mia served Daisy her coffee, reacting as neutrally as possible to her mild flirtations.
“Okay, if it’s going to be like this whenever it’s your time of the month, you’re going to have to be very honest with me,” Josephine said. “You nearly stared poor Daisy out of here with that ominous glare of yours, and we both know she has the hots for you.”
“I’m sorry. I’m having a massive off day. I don’t feel much like flirting or talking for that matter.”
“Hey, we all have them. No need to explain yourself to me. Just a heads-up, that’s all I ask.”
Mia had to laugh at Jo’s earnest face, but she couldn’t say anything else. She had made her own bed years ago, and she would have to lie in it alone.
“Feel free to take your break.” Jo actually put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll even pour you some coffee and bring it over to you. Put your feet up for a bit.”