Trapped in Forever

21 ~ Dissipated into Silence

The drive to the modeling agency was only supposed to be ten minutes, but in between the sounds of my mother switching radio stations every time she came to a STOP sign or a red light, rolling the dial past the country and pop stations, and eventually landing on one after the fourth station change that seemed to only play music from the 80s, and her jiggling her knees as she cranked the station knob, running the dial across the stations, neon blocks forming numbers flying past us in blurs, and how she would sigh every now and then, as if she would rather be doing anything besides driving me to a modeling agency, it felt like the longest car ride I ever took, stifling down the are we there yet.

As we drove, I turned my gaze away from her, seated in the driver’s seat and drumming her fingers to the beat of some 80s song I’m sure I heard her hum before as she did the laundry, and settled out the window, watching as other cars, variegated houses, telephone poles, and plastic kid toys littered throughout brown yards sped past us, coming and leaving in a blur, and I slumped against the firm material of the car seats. The closer we got to the agency, the more erratic my heartbeat grew, possibly to the point where it could be heard over Mom’s 80s station. As I played with the hem of my shirt, running my fingertips over the seams, I kept thinking in my mind how this was my last chance—that whatever Henry Wallis saw today had to be something he wanted to have strutting down runways and competing in modeling pageants. He couldn’t see regular, plain, old Amanda Rose with straight, boring, brown hair and boring brown eyes, and freckles dotted across her nose.

He had to see Mandy.

Mom reached her freshly manicured hand, dark red nails gleaming in the ending sunlight that shone through the tinted windows of our car, warm light landing on our lands and over the console, where two Starbucks coffees sat, untouched, and smelling of mocha, and adjusted her sunglasses, large and jeweled on the black, thin arms, a streak of white light falling down over the lens, reminding of the kind that celebrities had poised on the bridge of their nose, blocking their eyes, as they did something mundane like grocery shop or something. And then it reminded me of Orion and his pair of cracked lenses, shielding his hazel eyes, as if they always held something that was meant to go unseen, and I realized that I hadn’t seen him wear them once since they broke up.

“Well,” my mother said, heaving out a lengthy sigh through this word, drowning it with her minty breath, as when I crawled into the car, strapping on my seatbelt, and focusing on the throbbing of my heart trapped beneath my skin, she was brushing her teeth, shouting something indecipherable through her toothpaste, in the bathroom. I heard the tire wheels crunch beneath gravel as she turned the wheel, bringing the car into a parking lot, nearly empty, and rolled the car towards the entrance. “Here we are.”

As Mom drove the car down the center of the parking lot, seeing the odd, gleaming and sleek sedan and the dull, deep purple hunchback parked on either side of our car as the wheels rolled down to the front of the parking lot, close to the empty handicap signs and spaces, and a baby blue convertible parked beside the bright, yellow strips on the light colored pavement, I couldn’t help but feel like the building Mom kept driving us closer and closer to wasn’t what I imagined it would look like. In a town as small as Shiloh, I probably shouldn’t have expected granite skyscrapers or anything close to the Stark tower, but when I gazed upon the one story building, barely stretching out the length of the parking lot, with black gleaming windows and a double seat of doors that looked similar to the kind at school, and an arched rooftop, I felt disappointed.

I was still staring out of the window as my mom pressed her foot slowly against the brake, pulling back her other foot, clad in a pair of worn sandals she’s had since I was at least ten, on the gas pedal, and as the sound of her unbuckling her seatbelt rang out just as the 80s music abruptly ended, in the middle of a Jon Bon Jovi song, his wail cut short, and I turned to glance at her, dark hair obstructing her profile as she leaned back in her seat, fingers still clasping onto the material of her gray seatbelt, and then, after a moment, she turned to me. She swallowed, released her hold on her seatbelt, and pressed her lips together as she flipped up the sun visor, two rubber bands holding a picture of me and Mikayla in place over the fuzzy, grayish visor.