Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2017 1:16:21 GMT -5
San Diego, California
Tuesday
Tuesday
Maybe the show was still going on. Maybe it had been over for a while now. Maddie had found an unattended bottle of tequila in an open office—rather careless of the owner, really—and somehow found herself on the roof of the Complex. She had sent Braxton back to their hotel; she didn't want to see his perfect face anymore than she wanted to see Logan's smug one. She should have put her fist in his mouth, or his bitch's, should have given one of them a makeover with that stupid fucking case.
She pulled the cork from the bottle and had a long drink. She hated tequila and she drank more precisely because she hated it. As much as the stench of cigar smoke reminded her of her father, tequila reminded her of her mother. She choked on a sob somewhere in the middle of the second long pull. It burned in her sinuses and in her throat, practically in her lungs, but at least she could pretend it was the reason her eyes were suddenly pouring.
“Never been good at a goddamn thing,” the Devil on her shoulder reminded her. The Devil on her other shoulder joined in, “What was gonna make this any different?”
“Remember the cello?” Lefty prodded. She did. She remembered months and months of lessons when she wasn't any taller than the instrument herself. She remembered practicing for hours not because anyone insisted, but because she loved it and she wanted her parents to be proud of her when it came time for her first recital. She remembered taking forever selecting which piece she wanted, and choosing Brahms' Cello Sonata No. 1 because it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard at the time.
She remembered the deep green recital dress she'd adored and its velvet trim. She remembered the empty seat next to her mother when she took the stage. She didn't remember freezing under the spotlight, precisely. She didn't remember dropping the bow half way through the piece. All she remembered was the relief that her father hadn't been there to see it after all.
Righty wasn't there, not really, but she tried to shove him away anyway when he crooned in her ear, “Do you remember... dancing?” Of course she remembered dancing. It was the last summer before high school, and the last time she had tried taking on some extra curricular activity. She remembered everything about that. She remembered not getting new dance shoes with her mother because she had insisted her father take her shopping instead. Work had kept him too late, and she'd gone to the performance with her same old shoes. She remembered being relieved, again, that her father wasn't there to see when she'd rolled her ankle and two girls had to help her off stage.
“Just shut up,” she pleaded with her own mind as she tried to drown out the gleeful cackling of the Devils with another drink.
“Oh but we know you remember... gymnastics!”
That had come after the cello, but a few years before dancing. She'd had her own mats and her own balance beam in the back yard. She'd had bruises and calluses and sunburn because no one could could keep her from practicing every moment she could. She remembered him cheering her on from the sidelines, telling her how good she was.
“He lied!” Righty sneered. Lefty was quick to echo, “He liiiiiiieeeeed!”
“Of course he did!” she snarled at them both. “He lied about everything, he always did!”
She was staring at the parking lot, for some reason. Righty and Lefty had chased her right to the edge of the roof, and she stood looking out over everything around this wretched pit of violence. The breeze rustled her hair and her jacket, but she found herself unwavering. The raised ledge that skirted around the roof was four or so inches wide, just like the balance beam in her back yard had been.
The bottle of tequila shattered when she tossed it away and threw her arms out to the side. “Never any good at that either,” Lefty sang. “Never any good at all,” Righty made the chorus.
The competition was the one time that her mother hadn't been there, the one instance where she had been the one on a business trip. Her father had shopped with her, bought her everything she needed for her outfit. He'd even helped her pack her bag the night before. In the parking lot some creature of mercy had saw fit to call him up, and he had left her on the curb to go to an emergency board meeting. He hadn't been there to see her fail at gymnastics too.
“You fell!” the Devils wailed in harmony as she stared down at the concrete below. “One, two, three steps and down she went!” As if the image didn't play in her head clearly enough. “Never any good at much of anything, Maddie was.”
“I was too,” she muttered under her breath. A decade had passed, but she still remembered the routine her coach had put together perfectly. She rose up on her toes on the ledge, like she remembered. With her arms poised and a twist of her leg, she pivoted around a perfect 360 degrees, leaping forward to land gracefully on her right foot even as the tequila still burned with each breath.
A half turn, followed by a backbend, into a handstand. Her hair fell in her face and her jacket sagged around her shoulders as she stared down at her fingers, gripping the ledge. A controlled descent onto the right leg, left leg sweeping down off the beam—ledge—into a forward somersault up onto her feet once more.
Her heart was rushing in her ears. Someone might have been shouting at her from the ground. Another half turn, looking down the full length of the beam. A quick step forward, a second, the third launched into the handspring, twisting on the landing to face back the way she had come. Right into a second handspring, backward.
“I was good at this.” Somewhere in the back of her head she was consciously aware of the insanity she was perpetrating, but as her feet left the ledge again, she didn't care. Her arms remembered how to tuck just so as she executed the final backflip and the single footed landing.
Of course a decade without much practice and a few swigs of tequila didn't allow for a precise finish, and she wobbled a touch. She didn't have to worry about falling, not when a hand clamped on her arm and pulled her down. She steeled herself for the shouting from Braxton, but it wasn't Brax's voice that came.
“The fuck're you doing, girl?!”
“Bobby,” she gasped, immediately shaken back into the present. “What are you doing here?”
His sneer wasn't unlike Righty's and Lefty's. “Watching you lose again, apparently. You wasted a whole bunch of money on something you couldn't do to save your life.”
She wasn't in the mood, not for this. “Well I fucking paid you back for it, so what the fuck do you care?!” she screamed at him.
He only laughed, which was worse than anything else he could have done. “I've got the perfect thing for you, actually.” A chill ran down her spine at the tone in his voice. “Call that boyfriend of yours and tell him not to expect you for a while.”