Page 81 of When the Lights Come On
I’m fine.
Instead, I start telling her the truth.
“It wasn’t one guy.” My voice is low and hollow. “It was a lot of guys, over a lot of years. I...When I was growing up, my mom used to take me and my sister to all these music auditions, even some acting ones too. We did a couple TV episodes, played at a lot of events, but nothing major. There were...I mean...My sister and I have always been really pretty.”
I don’t worry about sounding vain. To me, being pretty has always been much closer to a curse than a compliment.
“My mom is very good-looking too. I guess since her whole big star, beauty queen dream didn’t pan out, she wanted us to have it instead. Or something. All I know is that show business put us close to way too many men who had some fucked up ideas about the way to treat pretty young girls.”
“Paige...”
DeeDee lowers herself until she’s sitting in front of me, her back against the side of the bathtub and her knees tucked up under her chin. She reaches for my hand, but I shake my head. If I move, I’ll stop, and I need to keep going.
“Nothingreallybad ever happened, but it was just one guy after the next, always staring at us, hugging us a little too long, telling us we’d grow up to drive guys crazy. You know, the usual gross stuff. One day when I was thirteen, my vocal coach gave me a...shoulder massage, as he called it, when we were alone together.”
“That fucker,” DeeDee says under her breath.
“Yeah,” I agree. “I told my mom about it, and she went off on the guy. She actually got him to shut his whole business down, but when I told her I didn’t want to do auditions anymore, it was out of the question. We couldn’t let them win, apparently. My mom was all about beating guys at their own game using whatever she had, and I guess her daughters were just another tool.”
I pause, grinding my teeth together.
“What about your dad?” DeeDee asks.
I let out a dry laugh. “My dad...My dad’s kind of oblivious. I think that’s why she married him. He stays out of the way.”
“So you had to keep auditioning?”
I nod and steel myself with a breath.
“When I was sixteen, my sister and I had a small part playing sisters on some teen show. I didn’t even have any lines, which made sense, because I can’t act for shit. They mostly just wanted two girls who could play piano. Anyway, one of the stars of the show was...interested in Isabella. He was kind of famous, at least to people under the age of seventeen, and my mom thought it would be great for publicity if the teen magazine paparazzi interviewed them while they were on a date.”
I grind my teeth so hard my jaw clicks, but I force myself to continue.
“She was way too young for him. She was way too young for any of that shit. I went along with a lot of stuff my mom wanted, but I was not putting up with that. I was so upset about it I was, like, threatening to call child services on her, so on the day of she was finally like, ‘Well, why don’t you go instead?’ So I did. I went, and he...he put something in the juice I was drinking.”
DeeDee lets out a sound between a gasp and horrified groan.
“I called my mom as soon as I started feeling weird. By the time I blacked out, she was there.”
I still remember how it felt. I can remember losing control of my body. I can remember the sluggish confusion and dull panic of trying to move and not being able to.
I still have nightmares from time to time.
“Thank god she got there.”
“You would think.” I chuckle, but again, there’s no humor in the sound. “You would think that after all that, she’d finally be done, but no. She wanted to press charges so we could use the news coverage for exposure for our careers.”
DeeDee stays quiet. You know it’s bad when not even DeeDee has something to say about it.
“I was sixteen. I didn’t want to go in front of a court who probably would have sided with him anyway. I just wanted it all to go away. So I tried to run away from home. I had been friends with Youssef for a while by then, and I asked him to skip school with me and take the train to Toronto for the day. I wasn’t planning on coming back, but then...”
I can still remember it, that perfect day after one of my darkest. I can remember his lips on mine for the very first time, the way it made my knees shake. I remember the warmth of his arms around me and the way his promises lit me up and made me believe that if I just made it to the end of high school, things would get better.
Things would get better, and he’d be there.
“What happened to you guys?” DeeDee asks. “You and Youssef? Why did it end?”
“It just...It turned out to be a big misunderstanding.” The word tastes sour; misunderstanding is too polite a term for what my mom did. “He went away to university after that, and we never talked again.”
