chapter nine: time flies
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Previously: Full of a newfound resolve to go after the Marvel role that will bring her career to new heights since her argument with Nil, Tally sends her final audition tape and gives her relationship with Benjamin another try.
The sound of a scream.
The bedside lamp is still on and the room is bright, though outside the night lingers, the window frosted and damp as if coated in ink.
She didn’t want to be in the dark as she fell asleep; she kept believing Nil was beside her, searched for his chest with her unconscious fingertips. She didn’t want to see the Christmas lights through the curtains either, red and green and gold, reminding her of how one should feel at this time but doesn’t, in a house full of people she loves, in the warmth of their presence, the warmth of this cold time of year.
How cold indeed, the road she’s chosen.
And the one she’s forsaken.
Again: the scream.
It’s only Victoria on the stairs, having spotted the presents stacked at the foot of the Christmas tree. Her elementary school-aged cousins have taken over Tally’s sister’s bedroom in her absence and slept in a heap on top of the queen-sized bed. Now they storm the landing past Tally’s bedroom and zoom downstairs: Boom boom boom.
Tally turns the light off, throws a pillow at the half-opened door of her room to shut it. Pressing her eyelids together hard against the incessant merriness crowding her windows, she ignores her mother when she enters to demand Tally come down with everyone, and falls asleep again.
“Tally!” Luke jumps on her bed what feels like a minute later, his voice accompanied by a crackling sound. “Your presents!”
In his hands is a flat rectangular box, and a bulging stocking from which a number of individually wrapped chocolates have spilled out onto her covers.
“Hey little one,” Tally yawns. She tries to make herself sound cheerful, as if refusing to go down for the present-opening ceremony earlier had been an accident.
Bitch smile, she tells herself. Smile.
“Are you sick?”
She ignores the question. “What’s that?”
He gives her the box, glistening red from the shiny wrapping paper. “A surprise.”
“From you?” She says, arching an eyebrow. “I hope you didn’t spend money on me.”
Luke shakes his head. “I made it in art class.”
She rips up the paper and unglues the repurposed Amazon cardboard sleeve. Something hard and curved is nestled inside. Grazing it she feels a rough layer of glitter on its surface.
“It’s a Venetian mask”, Luke explains as she pulls it out.
Curved in a half-moon shape covering the right side of the face, the eyes and the nose, a blue ribbon has been tied to each temple to secure it around a skull. The cheekbone is shiny with galaxy-colored glitter, the eyes unevenly cat-lined with blood-red and silver crystals riding the backs of thick drops of hardened glue; the nose, spray-painted in midnight blue, is framed by whiskers made of stiff fake feathers.
“Wow,” she says, actually touched.
“Do you like it? I wore it for the school carnival. Mrs Libek said it was her favourite thing I’d done this year.”
“I love it. It’s too much.”
He shrugs. “I’m not gonna wear it anymore. It was for actors in Italy in the Middle Ages. Or maybe prehistoric times, I’m not sure. Anyway, you’re the actress, I just like painting them.”
From downstairs, Victoria calls him for a Just Dance tournament.
“You’re coming?” He asks with the polite air of someone who already knows the answer will be negative.
But Tally balls up the wrapping paper and ties the mask around head.
“In a minute. How do I look?”
He laughs. “Like an actress. It matches your hair.”
She had forgotten about her hair and the memory of Nil’s fingers around her ears instantly punctures the brittle bubble of calm Luke put her in.
Once he’s gone Tally shuffles to the long mirror leaning against the corner of the room to inspect herself. She looks garish and beautiful, she thinks. And funny, and wounded. With her messy purple roots, in her underwear. It’s nice, this hiding place: behind the haunting, empty eyeholes, no one can see her cry.
…
Eventually she does go down. Apologizes and makes hot chocolate on the stove and heats up plates of leftovers for everyone at lunch.
Just one more day of this, she tells herself.
Tomorrow at this exact hour, she will be back in LA, on her way to a party with her so-called friends, and her life will carry on as if none of this had happened.
One more day.
After lunch, they play a never ending game of the newest version of Monopoly Daisy got for Christmas and eat more food until everyone’s so full and worn out they all topple over the long corner couch in the living room, having only enough energy left to passively absorb the images on the flat screen. Clicking from one streaming platform to the next with the remote, Tally’s dad flicks through the list of Christmas movies.
“Love, Actually?” He suggests.
Tally’s heart squeezes painfully. She snaps: “No.”
He arches an eyebrow. “Hello there, princess. Nice of you to join us. Why not?”
“I saw it recently,” she lies. “Like, last week. Besides, it’s not for the children.”
But the real reason is she knows it’s what Nil will be doing right now only a few miles away from her, stuck between his mom and his grandma on the small couch, hating the movie and especially Hugh Grant but going along without saying so because it’s his mother’s favorite.
Victoria suggests The Grinch; Daisy retorts it’s too old and too scary and they should watch Home Alone instead.
“That’s just as old.” Victoria says, pinching Daisy, at which points Tally loses track of the fight.
With her eyes she follows her aunts and mother as they slip out to admire the snow as it falls and chain smoke on the tiled terrace, gripped by a vicious urge to snatch their cigarettes and smoke them herself. But there is a little one on either side of her, plump hands firmly slotted inside hers, large eyes checking she is watching the movie with them though she is distracted by the clouds outside, their colors of ripe bruising.
Like the last time she was here. Her last day in Roses.
August sipped away in an almost manic frenzy by Tally and her friends: all of them eager, all of them terrified to find themselves at the starting line of the beginning of their lives, for one last moment enjoying the vertigo of standing on its threshold.
It was dusk and the sun cast its dying beams at a low angle through the leaves. The sounds of their high school end-of-summer party were audible in their backs as Tally pulled Nil deeper into the woods, her other hand on a half-full bottle of peach wine. She wore a denim skirt and a silk blouse, and in the purple evening her skin was awash with goosebumps. Stopping by a tree she dropped the bottle to the soft ground, pressed her back against its trunk and pulled Nil to her, guiding his fingers to the buttons of her shirts while her mouth searched for his. He laughed against her lips.
“What?” She asked.
“You’re drunk.”
“So?”
“I don’t want to take advantage of you,” he said, a wink in his amber eyes.
“Oh my God,” she exhaled, full of longing for the weight of his body on hers. “Please do.”
She brought her half-opened blouse to his chest, parted his lips with her tongue. A point deep in the cup of her hips throbbed with a dark, hungry heat as she tasted him. Pressing herself against his crotch, she knew: he wanted it too. She let go of his neck to hitch up her skirt, her body warmed by lust. He pulled away, breathless, licking his lips.
“Nil,” she moaned. “Please.”
“Don’t you want to enjoy the party?”
“No.”
He smiled, picked up the bottle from the ground. “You’ll regret it.”
He wasn’t wrong. She had already planned on going back to his place early to soak up every ounce of him before her early flight the next morning. But that was also the thing: she was on the verge of getting everything she’d ever wanted and the prospect was so exhilarating she couldn’t just sit on one of the camping chairs to watch the boys play at jumping over the bonfire. She needed to put all this heightened energy somewhere, and where better than in the enjoyment of Nil’s body, which she would not be able to do again until she came back at the end of the semester, months from now?
He took a sip of wine and she hugged his chest. Smelled him: pine trees, warm stones. Heard his heartbeat slowing down after the rush of making out with her. His body, steady and calm, always. There he was: the only thing in the world that could have made her stay all her days if only he’d asked, which he would never do.
“I love you,” she said, her mouth pressed against his shirt.
“I love you too.”
“No, Nil. I mean I love you.”
He ran his free hand through her hair, tangled around small shreds of bark.
“I know.”
They stayed like this for a while, not talking. Her mind took her to the following morning. She would sit on the plane, alone, put many miles between them. She had established during their year together that a week was the maximum she could go without seeing him if she wanted to stay sane. Now her next flight home wasn’t until Christmas – three months away.
“You won’t forget me will you?” She asked, suddenly anxious.
“I should be asking you.”
She scoffed. LA was exciting, yes, but it could not compare. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
He planted a kiss on top of her head. “Well you don’t need to either.”
In the distance, she heard laughter and happy shrieks as friends enjoyed their last moments together.
“Do you think I’m making the right decision?” She said, hoping against hope that, this close to her departure, Nil would give her a straight yes or no, which of course he didn’t:
“Do you not?”
“Yeah, no. I want to go.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
For a flickering moment before UCLA offered her a space on their program she had turned over another option in her mind at night, Nil curved around her in his sleep.
“Nothing.”
Her drama teacher, who had convinced Tally she should ignore her father pressuring her to study engineering to pursue a career in acting instead, had told her of the small groups of independent filmmakers in Seattle shooting ocean-lashed DIY movies on the coast, and Tally had felt more than intrigued by the prospect; small budgets requiring her to be many things, director, writer, actor, sometimes not acting at all, just unrolling cables, loading up trucks, doing her own makeup, surrounded by people happy to be only one of many cogs in this absurd art machine – making movies for no reason but the pure love of it.
But when the UCLA offer came it was too good to resist. Tally could multiply the pleasures of her high school fame by hundreds if she made it in Hollywood. And though her teacher, who so believed in the alternate path, warned Tally she might burn her wings out there, like she herself had done once upon a time, Tally knew it was only because she was not made for it like Tally was.
Tally loved her teacher, but she could see her armor was frail, her ability to fake emotions in order to be liked nonexistent. Tally, on the other hand, had captured the essence of her assured, magnetic persona and could deploy it at will, so well and for so long she sometimes lost touch with how she truly felt.
In her final year she had many times been ambushed in the corridors by other students wanting to tell her how much they loved her; she stayed every time, and she smiled, and she remembered their names, even those of the ones so eager to get close to her they were almost rude, even when it made her late to class, even on days she felt bone-tired and anxious and all she wanted was to go home and lie down next to Nil in complete silence until she fell asleep.
Tally could fake it in a way her teacher, who often cried in class over obscure matters, could not. But equally, her teacher, with her emotions so raw, so unmistakably themselves as they pulsed right beneath her skin, was perhaps better suited than Tally to work on these independent sets, where it mattered how deeply and truly you felt things. In comparison,Tally needed to work hard to find in her the authentic strain these places required.
And sometimes she worried: what if it wasn’t there at all?
She spent another moment picturing her life in LA – the ocean, the glimmer, the unending sets.
It was the right call.
She lifted her head and Nil dipped his to kiss her, then she took his hand: “Let’s go back to the party.”
Tally’s dad exclaims he wants more Yule log, and where are the women anyway, chatting as usual, a bunch of smoking songbirds, and the little ones agree they are hungry and call for turkey.
The movie is paused and Daisy, her hand damp and hot inside Tally’s, pulls her to the kitchen:
“I wish you were my twin,” she says, casting provocative glances over her shoulder at her sister following behind.
Tally scrapes the last morsels of flesh from the bird’s carcass and makes a pile on a plate for the kids to fight over. With a ring of finality, the words “one more day” echo over and over in her mind. After this day she will step back into her golden cage and shut its door on herself one last time.
Never again will she be the girl she was with Nil.
“Have some!” Daisy shouts to Tally, batting Luke’s hand away as it descends upon a juicy-looking leg.
Inside Tally’s chest, her heart begins to pound with rapid, suffocating beats. Imperceptibly to a child’s hungry, distracted eye, she begins to back out of the room:
“I need to pee,” she apologizes, entering the hallway now, where the door is so near and Nil is somewhere in the world behind it.
When Daisy looks away, Tally snatches her car keys from the rose-shaped bowl. In the same sweeping movement she swings the door open and throws herself out into the wintry air, her heart pounding, aching, splitting.
Thank you for reading <3
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So so so good aaaaaaaah!!! I keep forgetting this is based on a Taylor song but every time I remember I feel like I have access to this secret dimension!
i’ve been curious about how you chose character names, specifically tally and nil. they’re so unusual and i always struggle coming up with names lol