“Ooh, baby, baby, love me like it was yeeeesssssterdaaaaaaay—”
Annabelle’s fist descended on her alarm clock. “Shut. Up,” she snarled, and rolled over.
Love. Ha. Pop songs. Ha ha. It was all a bunch of crap, a mountain of garbage. Love, friendship, divination, spells, dreams, ambition—bullshit. What was the point of it all, anyway, love and friendship especially. Half the time you got dumped by your lover, mocked by your friends, and rejected by stupid agents who didn’t realize she, herself, Annabelle Walsh, had written the latest hot historical fictional novel that was even better than the ones about those stupid paintings.
Annabelle flopped over onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Her hands fisted in the sheets, and she experimented with kicking her heels, tantrum-like. It felt good, so she did it again. And then again, harder, so her hips sprung up off the bed. This had definite possibilities, and she began kicking, steadily, bam bam bam, until the bed was a blur of bouncing sheets and blankets and limbs accompanied by a dangerous squeak of springs that threatened collapse until Annabelle, having broken a sweat, ended it all with a hearty, “Bleeearrghughaaaaaahhh!”
She rolled over yet again and curled up into a ball. Should have tried that in Lorna’s lame excuse for an office on her two-square feet of designer remnant carpet. Some friend, Annabelle thought sullenly. “Some stupid friend,” she said aloud, keeping herself company. And Maria Grazia! “Ha,” she said. Talking to me like I was crazy or something. Her heart was broken. “My heart is broken,” she reminded her pillow. “And they looked at me like, oh, what’s your problem, get over it already, we all hated him anyway, so what are you so upset about, ‘Anna’—or ‘Belle’—or whatever you call me!
“My name is Annabelle. I hate those nicknames. I hate them. I hated that Wilson called me ‘Annie’. Like I was a stupid orphan in a stupid play!”
She sat up, propping her six pillows against the wall, and crossed her arms over her chest. She kicked her sheets and blankets onto the floor, and pulled her ratty, over-sized nightshirt over her knees. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her clock tick over from 11:15 a.m. to 11:16 a.m. She shifted the blinds a bit for the weather report. Sunny, sunny, sunny by the looks of it, and the handful of pedestrians strolling up Union Street weren’t grimacing with cold—all the earmarks of a beautiful day.
Woo hoo.
Annabelle slumped back against the pillows and took stock. At least she seemed to have dried up: there had been no floods of tears for almost two whole days. The grumpiness and tantrum thing seemed like the heralds of a new phase. Maybe it was like those five stages of grief, surely Maria Grazia would know—not that she was ever going to call her again, ever. She wasn’t going to continue to foster a friendship with someone who thought she was a raving lunatic. And that went double for Lorna, that stuck-up bitch. What did she know about heartbreak? “Not like she has a heart.” I need to stop talking to myself, Annabelle thought, at least out loud. She pulled the already stretched-out collar of her nightshirt over her mouth.
Obviously, the statute of limitations, as regarded the public mourning of ex-relationships, had expired. Obviously, she was meant to adhere to some sort of schedule of recovery not of her making. Obviously, she was just a big baby and nobody cared about her, or about her feelings.
“Okay, Walsh, cut it out!” She leaped out of bed, then briskly made it up, threw yesterday’s clothes into her laundry bag—and then caught sight of herself in the mirror above her dresser. Still a little on the wan side, hair a bit lifeless, but it all showed in her eyes, eyes that despite the flashes of anger and the blur of activity, still looked like two little blue pools of hurt and sadness and despair. She touched her reflection, barely recognizing herself. Who am I, who am I, who am I?
She got back into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
If only she could sell her book. If only she had an agent. If only her blog would hit the big time. If only she didn’t have to pick up the odd sub-editing job, the occasional review, the random feature. She knew she was ridiculous, harboring dreams of a journalistic career, but she cared. She cared about history, not the dry, dull kind, but the kind that was about people who did interesting things in interesting times. If only her areas of expertise—artists, musicians, actors—weren’t so oversaturated. All she needed was the one break, the one subject, and she’d be minted. She cared about what people did, how they did things, and the things they made—
Maybe I just suck, she whined to herself. “Maybe I am, quite simply, a crappy writer and a crappy girlfriend and a crappy person.” Which is why I have friends that suck.
Lorna and her magical snickerdoodles. Bitch. Just to show her, Annabelle had gone and planted the hazelnut, liberating a long-dead fern from one of her prettiest pots, a hand-thrown, hand-glazed terracotta she’d picked up at a Celtic Arts Fayre. A beautiful bronze and green thingy covered in spirals and whatnot.
Ha. And MG! “Now, sweetie, maybe you could let us know exactly what you mean by the phrase ‘out of thin air.’ Do you mean it is made, possibly, out of air, air that is thin, right?” Annabelle mocked MG’s thick Italian accent, and then felt terrible.
“Okay, get up now, Annabelle,” she said, “Get up up up up up and out of this bed and send out a query, write a post, get some crappy freelance gig, think positive! Gogogogogogoooooo—Go!”
She lay unmoving, staring at her one true friend, the ceiling; Always willing to listen, always there. She closed her eyes, knowing that it wouldn’t be offended, and ran through her mental Rolodex, trying to come up with some names of people she’d worked for, trying to remember who might be busy enough to throw her a bone. She’d fallen out of touch with most of them. How’d that happened? Well… in the last year or so, if she were being honest, she had kind of blown off a few things, not returned calls, because, well… she and Wilson always seemed to be away whenever a gig came up. Or else they’d been busy with stuff… Then Wilson would talk her out of her self-chastisement and say it didn’t matter, and why should she take other people’s dregs. And what was the point of all this commercial stuff? She didn’t want to be a hired gun, he insisted. There wasn’t much of a future in that, and didn’t she want to be a serious writer? It was certainly a more legitimate cachet to be literary rather than commercial—
“Wait. A. Minute.” Annabelle sat up suddenly. Wait just one minute. That had been her idea, right? Literary historical fiction as opposed to straight biography. So much sexier and trendier and… She fisted her fingers in the hair at her temples. “It was my idea, wasn’t it? It was—oh my God. But. No, I said—I thought I decided—no way.” Whose decision was it?
Was she that far gone?
Annabelle finally got out of bed for the day. Shuffling her feet into her plush bear-foot slippers, she decided that she couldn’t possibly investigate that train of thought without a serious infusion of fennel tea to ensure clarity.
Wow.
Way too much excitement for one morning.
She opened the door that led to her living room—and gasped.