Annie was high. Not literally, of course. With her family history, drugs were a hard no. That music, though? It had been a hit of euphoria injected straight into her veins. She closed her apartment door, still vibrating. She was restless, wired. Even at 3:30 a.m., sleep couldn’t be further from her mind. She eyed the dirty dishes in the sink, the laundry she hadn’t put away, the craft supplies littering her coffee table and purple carpet.
If Wes were here, he’d take one glance at the controlled chaos and say her apartment looked like a garage sale. “How do you even find the couch?” he often asked, familiar judgment lacing his words. The same tone he’d used when criticizing tonight’s wardrobe.
She could use her excess energy to tidy up. Get her place ready for tomorrow’s piano delivery. Or she could pull out her secret Weston Aldrich scrapbook and add a new page.
Scrapbooking won out, obviously. She grabbed her laptop and clicked on the most serious, stuck-up, holier-than-thou photo of Wes she could find. Once the grim picture printed, she maneuvered her secret book from below her floral couch.
She’d started this treasure on her sixteenth birthday. That fateful day, she’d been invited to a Lil Wayne concert and had shared the awesome news with Wes while out to lunch, too excited to keep it bottled up. The self-righteous dictator had said, “No.”
He may not have been her official guardian, but he’d insinuated himself into that role. At twenty-one, he’d seemed so much older than her sixteen years, and she’d been too afraid of losing him, controlling or not, to push him away.
He’d told her she was too young to go to the concert, that it wasn’t safe, droning on while looking down at her from his ivory tower, clueless to how valuable those concert tickets had been. Normally she’d have told him to screw off and gone anyway, but he’d taken it upon himself to call her friend’s mother. The ticket had been given to someone who didn’t have a tyrannical pseudo-brother/father controlling her life.
Thus began the Weston Aldrich secret scrapbook.
Some of his photos had been defaced with horns and mustaches, the backgrounds tastefully decorated with colored paper, butterflies, and flowers. One special page had cutouts of dog poop shoved into his mouth, with the tagline: Weston is full of shit.
Defacing Wes pictures had become a soothing hobby. She hummed as she cut his face from the new photo and pasted it on a fresh page. She then gave him long pink hair, a sexy dress, and thigh-high boots like the ones she’d worn tonight. She even added a sparkly purse.
The caption read: The dress makes the man.
Scrapbook closed and hidden, she got ready for bed. It was insanely late, or crazy early. She still wasn’t tired. She was excited about the piano arriving—the idea of playing again and working toward a new job. She also kept reliving the thrill of the club, the beat moving through her as she’d danced. She wasn’t sure why she’d tried to catch the DJ’s attention afterward. To thank him maybe, ask him what it felt like to pilot the crowd, fill hearts with happiness and the club with intoxicating energy. Maybe to know how Leo would have felt if it had been him.
Too jazzed to stay horizontal, she picked up one of her Sudoku puzzle books. She had twenty-odd books scattered around her apartment, their various states of progress another point of contention with Wes. Every time he visited her, he’d pick one up and shake it in the air, hollering, “Why don’t you finish these? You don’t get points for giving up.”
“Simple,” she’d say, loving his irritation. “Hobbies are supposed to be enjoyable. When I get stumped, I get frustrated and probably look like you with your resting brood face. So I move on. I keep the hobby fun.” Knowing the half-finished pages annoyed Wes was an added bonus.
He wasn’t here to annoy her tonight, and the math puzzles weren’t making her sleepy. She retrieved her laptop from the living room, sat on her bed, covers pulled up to her waist, as she powered up her Punchies page. She signed into her online scrapbooking group as Harley Quinn—badass comic book aliases for the win—and scanned the screen for her favorite online friend. Pegasus’s icon was lit.
Harley Quinn: Surprised you’re up at this hour.
Pegasus: Working different shifts. Nights are days and days are nights.
Harley Quinn: No rest for the wicked.
Pegasus: Wicked as in we’re super cool or perversely evil?
Harley Quinn: Let’s go with cool.
Pegasus: BORING
Harley Quinn: Perversely evil?
Pegasus: Now you’re just unoriginal.
Harley Quinn: I’m trying to remember why we’re friends, but I’m coming up blank.
Pegasus: It’s my winning personality. And my embossing skills.
They chatted about Pegasus’s new matting technique for framing her photos, but Annie’s mind kept snagging on tonight’s wild club, the music, how it felt like another piece of herself had clicked into place.
Harley Quinn: What makes a person fulfilled?
Pegasus: Since when do we do deep thoughts?
Harley Quinn: Since I’m overtired and overthinking.
Pegasus: I hear you on overtired. As for the question, I think fulfillment is different for everyone. I’m good at my job. It fulfills me in many ways, but it’s not all about financial success.
Annie had no clue what Pegasus did for work or if Pegasus was a man or woman. She assumed woman, but like with all her online friends, they didn’t ask personal questions. They talked shop and joked. Kept their interactions light and easy. Tonight, as she relived the energy in the club, the music and all the memories it had unearthed, she couldn’t resist delving deeper.
Harley Quinn: I don’t mean jobwise. I’m not even sure I’m talking about fulfillment, exactly. Have you ever avoided something for a long time, but when you actually did it, you realize it’s not as scary as you thought it would be?
Pegasus: Are we talking about laundry?
Annie laughed while eyeing the mountain by her closet.
Harley Quinn: Not laundry. Something bigger you thought would make you sad, but it actually made you happy. It made you realize you need more from life.
Pegasus: Thinking about things can be more intimidating than doing them.
Harley Quinn: Exactly. But this thing I did, it feels different, like a turning point. Like I’ve opened the door to Narnia and have to choose to stay in this life or walk into another.
Awareness struck Annie as she wrote, just how deeply tonight’s DJ had affected her. The piano purchase was one thing, but the club scene had been something else entirely. Another way to feel closer to Leo. She’d never been to clubs with him. She’d been too young, but he’d get back from a night out, glowing, full of energy, talking nonstop about how alive he felt. She finally understood. The buzz in her chest hadn’t relented since she’d gotten home. She’d loved those beats, had wanted to jump into the notes and let them explode out through her limbs.
Not just as a dancer. On stage. Being the power source for everyone’s joy. Doing what Leo would have done.
Pegasus: I guess you have to decide which you’ll regret more, missing the world you know or never exploring the one that scares you.
Fear was there, all right, under the slight tremble in her fingers. Many events had defined Annie’s life, most of them on the devastating side of unfortunate. Still, she didn’t consider her current life bad, and her foster homes had been better than most. She’d moved through three of them, none rough or dangerous. The other foster kids had been decent enough, everyone keen to keep their heads down and power on. There had been one girl in particular she’d loved. Clementine: cute pigtails, freckled nose. Older than Annie, but so shy and scared she’d seemed younger. Annie had made it her mission to make Clementine smile, chatting about comic book characters and acting silly.
They hadn’t kept in touch in the end, but Annie didn’t need close friends, not with her online communities and coworkers. She also had Wes for company, even though he could drive a teetotaler to drink. She waitressed enough to support her various hobbies and vintage clothing obsession. She dated sporadically, though not recently. She liked living in Queens, even with her tiny apartment and not-so-tiny commute. She was happy in her day-to-day life.
She just wasn’t sure she was fulfilled.
Harley Quinn: I think there’s a side to myself I haven’t explored.
Pegasus: The first step is recognizing it. The second is going after it, no matter what the people in your life think. If this is something you want, don’t let anyone or anything stop you.
She hadn’t mentioned wanting to be a DJ. She hadn’t entertained the notion before tonight, but the prospect was suddenly all she could see. Like there was no maybe or we’ll see or I could try standing in Annie’s way. Life was short. She didn’t need to ponder and research to decide if DJing was a viable option. That wasn’t how she rolled. She was the sort who quit jobs when they didn’t suit her. She breezed through half-finished Sudoku puzzles, bought used pianos after avoiding music for thirteen years. If she was any good at DJing, she could even quit waitressing. Teach piano during the day, DJ at night.
The first step to making this a reality was taking DJ lessons, which required cash, and only one bank would never turn her away. The Bank of Weston Aldrich. But the request would have to be covert. If he caught wind of her piano and DJ plans, his head would explode, epically, loudly. He’d berate her for buying the piano and then hopping to another pursuit.
He’d call her Squirrel.
He loved that nickname, always joking that her shifting attention span was like a dog whose mind blanked at the sight of a running squirrel. This wasn’t her sometimes-flighty behavior, though. In her mind, teaching piano and DJing were linked. Different expressions of the same goal. And Wes was on a need-to-know basis. He had offered to help pay her rent. She simply had to convince him she needed a few months’ buffer, use the excess money for a DJ course or equipment, then pay back every penny.
Her second step was finding Falcon.
Taking a class was one thing. She wanted to learn from the best, and Falcon had set the bar high. She’d figure out where he was playing next. Flag him down or ambush him and plead her case. Ask to be his apprentice. As Pegasus suggested, she wouldn’t let anyone or anything stop her.