Lost my reputation | B.E.

Chapter 2: it's all about what makes you feel good

Narrator: Someone

It feels good to feel alive.

This party is what everyone has been waiting for – at least, that's what it feels like. As if the entire world had been holding its breath up until now – perhaps in a state of shock or as a way to keep the germs away from one another, who knows. But reality is, it feels like everyone is alive and breathing again.

So does Billie: although she'd never been much of a partier in the past, her time off had allowed her to realize that, while she thought she'd chosen to live her life in the shadows, she'd in fact, traded normalcy for eccentricity – trapped in a life where going outside wasn't allowed, yet, having sexual encounters with grown ass adults was the currency of her world.

It wasn't that people didn't allow her to go out and kept her caged in. It was more so Billie herself, imposing limits on her own self, putting up barriers that she thought she had to put up because this famous persona had become her entire identity.

Billie Eilish wasn't supposed to be seen out eating in public, because eating means pooping and/or worse, putting on weight, and celebrities really don't do any of those things. God forbid she's seen buying tampons at the supermarket – what would that even mean about her humanity?

Popstars don't have blood between their thighs, they don't cry from menstrual pains and they don't get hormonal, either. They're reduced to silence, perfect in any way, every day of every month – every day of the year, even, always ready to put on a bra and a thong and be shoved on stage with a demeaning pat on their butt as a way of saying "you got this, baby girl".

Popstars are naturally gifted, born ready with goddess-like bodies and generous chests that, by some miracle, pop out randomly one day, as if nature hadn't intended to have teenagers wake up one day with bloody pajama pants and a foreign pain in their lower stomachs.

Billie is a popstar, but she's tired of being one and frankly, she is tired of thinking about what is expected of her – why can't she be a popstar, while being so much more than that?

So slowly, and over time (and with the help of a special someone), she's learnt to take back her own power, whatever that means.

Maybe it means sitting on the kitchen counter at her boyfriend's house while the first post-covid party is happening; if this was a real book, the author would typically say that the party is in full swing. And for the most part, it is.

All the elements are there: Billie sees sweaty bodies slip in and out of the kitchen, and it kind of feels like watching a movie. The lights swirl around bodies as they stumble past the room and the music is blaring, and so are voices – everything is too much all at once, so much so that her senses start to mingle, and she can almost taste the smell of vodka and feel the sound of laughter reverberating all over the room.

She loves it. It feels intimate, actually. Being able to drown in a sea of people to completely disappear. Here, she's only a body amongst dozens of others. She's not Billie Eilish – she's just a blond girl alone with herself, sitting atop a kitchen counter and whose breath smells like chips and cheap beer. She's just another girl, mindlessly listening to conversations and gazing at strangers, patiently waiting for the right time to disappear inside a room and fuck another equally irrelevant body.

Billie absent-mindedly plays with the bottle of beer resting between her opened thighs on the counter, twirling it between her manicured fingers as bodies and everything around them becomes a blur. She vaguely hears her boyfriend engrossed in a discussion with his roommate Daniel – who so happens to be Demi Lovato's best friend's twin – and she has to fight the yawn that threatens to spill out of her mouth.