Page 54 of With Stars in Her Eyes
“I have time… if youwantto talk about it. I’m not actually working today. Just had a staff meeting. I’ll just be working on this for the rest of the day.” Thea swept a hand over the piles of boxes.
I organized my potato chips in two piles, whole chips and pieces. “My family’s sort of fucked up. It’s a little embarrassing.”
“Whose isn’t?” Thea frowned. “I don’t mean that in a way to minimize your shit. I just mean… well, you spent a day cleaning out a giant storage closet because I clearly have some baggage from my family.”
My eyes darted over the tall stacks of boxes.
Thea chuckled. “Sorry. Pun not intended.” She seemed to need to do something with her hands, because she reached behind her and took her hair out of a bun and then twisted it back up again. “Imeantthat I’m not going to judge you for it, if that’s what’s stopping you. But sometimes… sometimes I get the feeling someone needs to talk about something. It happens when I read tarot cards for people. I used to do that sometimes on the side while I was in college. Oooh…” Thea lit up like an idea had come to her and gave the mass-market paperback in her pocket a tiny tap. “If it’s easier, pretend it’s a book.”
“What?” I snorted.
“Once upon a time…”
After a long look at Thea, partially getting lost in her chocolate-brown eyes and partially trying to gauge if she was serious, I spoke. “Once upon a time, there was a little girl her parents called Little Dove who might have been pathologically small for her age according to one pediatrician. In Little Dove’s bio years later, they said she could play several instruments before she learned how to read.”
“Really?”
I shrugged. “That’s what my bio said.” I had no idea whetherany of that was true. “She also learned how to pack a suitcase efficiently before she learned how to ride a bike. That part I remember.”
Thea nodded.
“One day, the little girl’s aunt told her she was smarter than either of her parents. A five-year-old doesn’t really understand what that means, but she still filed the fact away in case she needed it later. But she always thought about it any time her parents told her there was something she couldn’t do.” I paused. There were so many memories of dragging my small suitcase and tower of instrument cases through an endless succession of short-term rentals or rooms lent out by church members.
Thea didn’t tell me to hurry up or get to the point. She listened. She also didn’t seem fazed when I needed to avoid eye contact in order to think. My parents had hated it when I avoided eye contact. They said I was either being disrespectful or lying.
“So Luke, Diane, and their Little Dove performed across the US at conferences and revivals and ‘wherever the Spirit led them.’ TheSpiritbeing a convenient euphemism for the large amount of money megachurches in the nineties were willing to spend on putting on a show. The end.”
“What would you tell Little Dove right now if you could tell her something?”
This was not the question I expected.
“What would I tell her?”
Probably something cliché like “Stop being afraid to be yourself. To be Courtney.”
I spent years with everyone around me forgetting my name was Courtney at all, and never acknowledging that the little girl they were controlling had a whole self beneath the costume they were forcing me into. Little Dove was “discovered” at age eight. She wore bubblegum-pink dresses and pigtails and released two studio Christian albums and one Christmas compilation with a large gospel record label before she was a teenager. She had been told the albums went gold but never saw a dime of that money.The songs hadn’t been hers. That life hadn’t been one she had chosen.
Even in my memories, Dove felt like an automaton, not a person.
Every memory of my overchoreographed performances made something inside me shrivel. Despite how hard I worked to be what they wanted me to be, reviews called my preteen solo performances stiff, robotic, and uncanny-valley-like. One reviewer wrote,Despite her obvious prodigious musical talent, anyone at a Dove Starling concert is left wondering if she believes anything she’s singing about. What worked when she was performing with her parents as a child starts to feel a little stale as she’s approaching womanhood. There needs to be more maturity there if she’s going to transition her career.I was thirteen.
No matter what my parents or my old agents said or that reviewer wrote, Ialwaysfelt things. I felt everything. I just felt things so deeply that my feelings were an inconvenience to everyone around me.
“You okay, Courtney? You spaced out a little bit. I’m sorry if my question was too personal.”
I shook my head, partially to say no, but partially to rid my brain of the memories. “I’m fine. All this reminds me that the first time I told Sam this story, she asked why I described my childhood like an episode of VH1’sBehind the Music,which I didn’t understand at the time because I had never seen it, obviously. Not a channel I was ever allowed to watch. So, I think your suggestion to tell it like a story in a book was a good one. I shudder to think what a therapist would say about that.” My eyes followed the ink lines along Thea’s arms. She had a tarot card tattoo on her forearm.The Star. A shadowed silhouette of a woman with a night sky behind her. I sucked the salt off the biggest of my chips before swallowing it.
“Maybe making it into a story makes it easier to work through it? I feel like all this reading has been therapeutic for me.” Theaflicked the cover of a mass-market paperback perched on the arm of the futon.
“Ohh… if it weren’t for books I probably would have stayed a much more sheltered person.”
“Really?”
“Not sure how embarrassing it is to reveal that I mostly learned about sex from the collection of romance books Sam brought to college.”
“Wow. I’m sure that was quite an education.” Thea laughed and patted my thigh. We both froze. The gesture was friendly and comforting, but as her touch lingered there… it felt like so much more. Thea held my gaze a fraction of a second longer than necessary.
An alarm went off on my phone, interrupting the moment and signaling that it was time for me to get back to the bookstore.
