Trapped in Forever

31 ~ Void of Emotion and Eyeliner

Debbie wouldn’t stop glancing over at me.

After each bright, white, momentarily blinding flash that ejected from the camera propped on a tripod in front of the doubled over photographer, one eye pushed closed by his skin, wrinkling around his socket, and a finger planted over the shutter button as it clicked, I could feel her azure gaze flickering away from him, as he shouted directions at us (Howard needed to move more to the left, Alicia needed to smile a little more, I needed to tilt my head higher) and her eyes would narrow, but not exactly in an aggravated fashion, almost more like she was trying to size me up, seeing if I was still avoiding her or if it was a coincidence that when she approached the water cooler, I walked away, half-filled cup in hand, or that in the dressing rooms, I wouldn’t meet her eyes because we were facing two different directions.

We were all seated on a picnic bench, with a red and white checkered vinyl tablecloth laid out over the surface, the sides dangling over the edges of the picnic evenly, and there were multicolored bowls on top, all neon, and inside were grapes and salads, which we had been instructed not to eat repeatedly by Henry as he ordered someone to fix our ponytails or apply more powder to someone’s nose. It was an ad for a retail cooperation somewhere a couple towns over, sending us the bowls, tablecloth, and packages of uncooked hotdogs with the price tags still remaining.  We were supposed to be a group of teenage friends, laughing, taking sips from Diet Cokes with colorful straws poking out from the oddly shaped hole, but as Howard laughed, Diet Coke can grasped in one hand, I realized that these people were anything but my friends. Alicia couldn’t stop talking about the newest gossip of celebrities whose names I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember and Howard gave a vacant expression to practically everything someone said to him, including hello.

And Debbie was, well, Debbie.

Now, as I gripped the sides of the silver, still full Diet Coke placed on the table in front of me, I could feel Debbie’s gaze trailing away from Howard’s face—where she had been instructed to look as she laughed, dimples produced, and blue eyes slightly obscured by her grin—and over to me, smile slowly falling, and her eyes almost looked sad. I wondered, just as I heard Henry’s voice telling me to look up (“Head high, sweetheart! High!”) if she was dejected because of what she said a few weeks ago, or because she was the only one here who knew who I was. That I wasn’t just some hopeful model, that I was the Great Roxanne’s best friend. Or, at least, I was supposed to be.

Instead of focusing on her traveling gaze, flickering between me and Howard, expressions altering from jubilant to disheartened in a heartbeat, I thought of the last night as I laid on my bed, my neon socked feet propped up against the sill of the ajar window beside the side of my unmade mattress, my navy duvet rumpled into a wrinkled snake at the foot of my bed, feeling the chilled night breeze graze against my ankles and flutter the ends of my sweat-pants, and one of my earbuds was nudged into my ear, playing nothing but silence that seemed louder than the music it was playing moments earlier, and the other earbud laid on my chest. The CD had stopped a minute or two ago, the cellos’ slowing their strum and the drums dimming down to a muffled thump every other beat, and then it all ended, dissipating into a steady silence I didn’t care to remove.

My fingers were grazing against the smooth, but fingerprint smudged, screen of my iPod, its chill tingling the pads of my fingers for a brief nanosecond, and I rounded my touch to a circular motion, eyes closed, and exhaled. It was simple, so simple, in that moment—there weren’t thoughts swirling around in my mind, glimpses of words that repeated themselves in my train of thought, bringing a new question and nagging feeling with it. The words felt heavy, weighing down ton by ton as each letter constructed that word, or sentence, or even name, flashes of faces blurring together like a collage. But now it was quiet, the countenances of people had stopped, their faces gone to haunt someone else, and I could think of the things I used. My mind wasn’t a constant mantra of words that eighteen year old girls shouldn’t have permanently placed in their minds, like suicide, death, and guilt.