chapter eight: the holidays
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Previously: Tally and Nil argue about the choices they’ve made, and Nil asks Tally to leave.
With her hair still icy and wet, he parks by the church, turns the engine off.
“I don’t think we should do this again,” he says, eyes fixed to the school ahead.
She thinks of the audition she must pass, pictures it with a sharp, clinical focus, long enough to be sure her voice is steady when she answers: “You’re right.”
The drive back home right after a kaleidoscopic nightmare of irreconcilable images: a camera’s eye, Nil’s toothbrush, brittle Californian brush, the zip of an opening tent and Nil emerging in the green air, a mic, blank faces in a casting agency, a blue pill in the palm of her hand, Nil pushing her against a tree after school to breathe her breath and steal it, Nil and Nil and Nil.
Two lives she never managed to hold together.
The gravel driveway crunches under her feet as she walks from her car to her house and she looks up at the lit window in her mother’s study, a lonely bright rectangle in the suffocating night.
Tally wants to shower, but it would mean rubbing off his scent from her skin, and then how will she know it actually happened? She turns on the space heater in her bedroom instead, undresses, goes to bed.
A long line of notifications crowd her screen as she plugs in her phone. Eve wants to know if she’s had time to read her draft. Her manager wants to know if she’s sent her tape. Benjamin wants to know why she hasn’t texted at all. She hides the phone under her pillow. Mentally rehearses lines for her upcoming audition to fall asleep:
You can’t do this. Tally will say to the handsome demigod about to plunge into an inferno of impossible dangers. I won’t let you.
The handsome demigod will wink through his handsomely dishevelled hair: Watch me .
So fucking boring.
But it works: she’s about to fall asleep. Senseless images fuse and break apart before her fluttering eyelids, but she’s pulled from them by the click of her door.
“Tally?”
Her mother.
“Yeah?”
Delilah stands with one foot in, her backlit silhouette looking taller than in daylight.
“Where have you been?”
“Around.”
Her mother shifts her weight from one leg to the other. “Your dad is sad he doesn’t see you more.”
“Dad can tell me about his feelings himself.”
Ignoring the jab, Delilah comes to sit on the edge of Tally’s bed. “You went to see someone, didn’t you?”
“No,” Tally says, rolling away from her. “I was just around. I haven’t been home in a long time.”
Delilah says nothing and Tally almost believes she will leave, but instead she asks:
“Was it Nil?”
“Mother.”
Tally’s voice is imperious, making her feel even more like a teenager, which in a way she is: pursuing big-shot dreams of fame and fortune while remaining painfully, defeatedly in love with the boy back home.
Delilah does not push. She rests her hand on Tally’s back, and the feel of her mother’s perpetually cold palm through the fabric of her top makes Tally feel worse. If Tally admits to the fresh splinters in her heart, Delilah will say what she has always said. You don’t have to go back.
Little does Delilah know the example set by her life – small, stunted by marriage and domesticity – is one of the ghosts keeping Tally from ever truly coming back.
“Have you eaten?”
“Yes,” Tally says. A giant Lindt Santa in Nil’s car, but still.
“Good. You’re getting too skinny.”
“I’m eating, mom.”
“Good.” Delilah’s answer to everything: pretend it’s okay, for if your ears are shut to the noise of a complaint does it make a sound? “Your aunts will be here before breakfast. Do you think you can get up early?”
She used to love hanging out with her younger cousins, who must all be nearing the end of elementary school by now, but the thought of putting on a fake cheerful Christmas persona makes her want to be sick. “Yes,” she says.
Whether her mother does not notice Tally’s aversion to the prospect or is only pretending not to is impossible to tell.
…
Tally rises with the sun and sets up her camera on its legs in front of a white wall to tape her lines. She does this fifteen, twenty times. Bites off the inside of her cheek by accident during one, tears it with a disgusting crunch. Then she loads the recordings on her laptop and spends another hour pondering their merit, her heartbeat loud and steady in her chest, her fingers moving with icy determination over the trackpad.
What happened with Nil should not have happened, but it has, and now she must make an opportunity out of the fresh wound it has carved in her, deep in the pine’s shadow; she must remember why she left and why she’s not coming back.
Her phone buzzes in her back pocket. A text from Benjamin.
Why are you ignoring me?
She doesn’t answer. When the doorbell rings downstairs she has just uploaded her best take to Casting Networks. Her tongue slides over the gash in her cheek, the taste of blood bright like she’s just made a kill.
…
It is late in the afternoon when they go to church for the Christmas Service. A faint but persistent headache rings in the back of Tally’s sleep-deprived brain, and she braces herself against the music played by the brass band as they enter. Its echo throughout the hall is almost as painful as the lighting, coming from everywhere to pierce the stuffy air: the instruments glinting hard as knives, the candles’ fire soaring around the pews, the blinding chandeliers above the chatty heads, the spotlighting in the corner of Tally’s eyes wherever she looks – shining on the pulpit, shining on Jesus who dies over and over on his cross, shining on the Nativity scene cradled in a nest of golden gift wrap by the huge Christmas Tree. All this light rising into the vaulted ceiling to touch the stained glass windows as they watch the congregation from the church’s highest corners, mute, red, dripping like wounds.
All this light: Tally’s skull is on the verge of splitting.
“I’ll be right back,” she whispers to her mother who hears nothing above the noise.
Outside, the winter air slams into her. She retreats to the back of the church, taking care to avoid the path by the parking lot that would lead her to her old school. Her heart pulses steadily in the dip below her sternum, as loud as it was last night in Nil’s arms. His skin’s heat. His molten eyes. His lips damp from kissing her.
She shakes off the memory and calls Benjamin, who picks up on the first dial to say nothing.
“Hey,” she whispers.
In the ensuing silence, she lights the cigarette she stole from her aunt’s purse.
“Sorry,” she continues. “It’s been a bit hectic here. My family has arrived. I was baking with the kids if you can believe it.”
“Have you sent your tape yet?”
Anger rises in her throat like bile. But she does not hang up on him. Does not throw her phone in the hedge so she doesn’t have to read a single one of his vapid texts ever again. She brings the cigarette to her lips. Even its dim red glow is painful in her sleep-deprived haze.
“Yes.”
Benjamin sighs, relieved. “Can I see it?”
“I’m not at home. Later though.”
“Sam sent me hers. Just to be perfectly transparent, I think she has a very good shot at it. But my money’s still on you because—”
“I know,” Tally interrupts. Snow starts to fall again as she breathes in her smoke and she tightens her coat around her. “Thanks.” Relaxing the muscles of her jaw, she changes the subject: “How’s home?”
“Nice. I went surfing with my dad this morning.”
“It wasn’t freezing?” She asks, though it must have been a lot warmer than the pond she’s just been in.
“We had our wetsuits.”
It’s always been so easy with him, keeping to the surface of things. She used to like that about their relationship.
“Cool,” she says. She wants him to know just by the sound of her voice that she feels alone. But he does not.
He never does.
“And you? How is home?” He asks.
Nil blazes again in her mind. Hits her like a sucker punch, takes her breath away – his sunset eyes, his irises of melted glass – but she answers: “Good.”
“You sound tired.”
I’m not tired, she wants to say, I’m lonely.
“Really?” Easily, she modulates her voice, as a test. “I’ve slept so well recently.”
How much can she lie without him knowing? How many more years can she pretend to be someone else – the girl Benjamin knows, the girl Nil doesn’t recognize – before the real Tally disappears beyond reach?
“Nice!” He sounds only happy for her. “That’s unlike you.”
“Strange, right?”
From somewhere in the distance, his mother calls his name.
“Okay babe,” he says. “I gotta go. Don’t forget to send me the tape when you get home.”
“I won’t.”
She is suddenly struck by the realization she’s been with him for much longer than she was with Nil. Four years is a long time to spend with someone who doesn’t know you at all. And this she deserves. Another drag, breathing through the next painful thought: Nil is wrong.
Willingly or not, Tally has made her choices, and their silken webs tighten around her lungs as she smokes. For the first time ever she would cut them, right now, if only she could find a blade. But her bindings are too thick, and if the knife ever existed she threw it a long time ago, somewhere she can’t touch or even remember.
It’s too late.
She opens her fingers and the cigarette bud dies in the snow with a hiss.
“I’m glad you’re doing good. I love you,” Benjamin says, and waits for her to say it back.
It’s too late not to.
So she does. Of course she does.
Thank you for reading <3 If you have any thoughts or questions on the story, the characters or how I wrote it, please leave a comment, I read every single one <3
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Why, Tally? WHY??? I just want to slap her haha it's so obvious she's unhappy but her pride gets in the way...
I'm loving this!
Yayyyy! Another great chapter. I’m always so excited when I see them in my inbox!