February
Standing at the curb, just outside the doors of Jet Blue’s arrival terminal at the Los Angeles International Airport, I gripped the handle of my suitcase and took a deep, fortifying breath.
“Do you feel like Miley Cyrus getting off the plane at LAX with a dream and…” my best friend, Frankie, started as she ran her denim blue eyes over my tired frame from tip to toe. Her pretty face scrunched up as she tilted her head and continued with, “Well, no cardigan, but you get the point. Ah! Are you glad to be back?”
There was my Frankie girl, giving me her million-dollar smile over the hood of her white Porsche 911 as cars whizzed by in the background, even at the late hour.
But the question she asked was a loaded one—one I wasn’t sure she’d like the answer to, but still, I plastered on my practiced and perfected, fake as fuck smile and confirmed, “Yeah, Franks, I’m glad to be back.”
Except, I wasn’t sure that was true.
I left California four years ago in favor of moving to New York City to attend college instead of enrolling at the University of California, Los Angeles with Franks. I had my pick, we both had trust funds, and her parents even bought us a nice little home in West Hollywood as a high school graduation present.
At the time, they thought I would stick around after high school, so I felt like a total asshole when I informed them of my plans to move to the East Coast. My worries were irrelevant though, because Douglas and Ruth Skyes were not the most…observant people on the planet. Frankie’s parents didn’t think twice about the move. They accepted my wish to leave without even a pause in thought.
“Good, get in,” Frankie responded, winking at me before pulling open the door and slipping in the car. I followed her lead, getting in on the passenger side, tucking my carry-on in between my legs, and trying to get as comfortable as possible with the insignificant amount of room I had to work with. The luxury car was beautiful, but too fucking small.
“Jesus, Franks, if I had known you’d traded in the SUV for this fucking thing, I wouldn’t have bothered with the carry-on.” I pulled the seatbelt across my body, wiggling back in the seat and sitting up straight to create room on my lap for my tote bag.
“Shhhh.” Frankie held a perfectly tan pointer finger to her lips. “Wait ’til you hear her purr, it’ll be worth it.”
Will it? I didn’t think so.
Still, I smiled and glanced over at her, taking notice that even after eleven PM on a Monday night, she looked everything like the model she was. Beautiful.
“All right, let’s do this,” she said, shaking her hips a little in the seat as she turned the car on. “The 405 has been a real slut at this hour lately, so we might be in for a longer drive than normal.”
“Figures. We’re coming up on spring break, aren’t we? People are vacationing,” I offered, looking out the window at the too-familiar sights as she lit up her blinker and pulled into airport traffic.
The palm trees, the Hollywood Hills in the distance, hell, California even had a unique smell. It was all specific to the reason I rarely came home over the last few years. I stopped loving California the day I stopped loving everything, and I was just now, ten years later, trying to turn it all back on.
“Yeah, I’m already over it,” Frankie supplied with a lazy roll of her eyes as she fucked around with her phone, trying to drive and hook up the music all at the same time.
“Give me this.” I tossed an affectionate smirk her way, grabbing the phone from her hand.
“Thanks, play anything,” she said distractedly, not looking away from the road. “So, how long before you start working under Kenji?”
Nerves got tangled in my stomach at the mention of starting work. “I’m not sure. I have to call him and double check when he wants me to start. I told him I’d reach out to him about a week after I got back. I want to unpack and all that.”
In other words, I wanted to spend time alone for a week before I was slammed back to reality and was forced to talk to people. That would take some serious getting used to after four years of the exact opposite.
“Perfect, I didn’t take any events this week and told Julia I’m off, so it’ll be just us.” Julia was Frankie’s agent, and my best friend’s tone was only cautiously excited, like she wasn’t sure how I’d feel about spending so much time with her, so she didn’t want to appear overly enthusiastic.
She was a smart girl. Too smart for her own good sometimes. I didn’t want to hurt her.
“Sounds good, Franks.” I smiled as best I could in her direction before returning my attention to the music. After a minute of scrolling, I gave up on her songs and searched TheColt instead, pressing play on his You’ve Been Uninvited album once it came up.
Immediately, that deep as fuck, pained as hell voice swooped through the car and began to settle my anxiety.
Closing my eyes, I tried my best to get lost in the sounds, the lyrics, the dirty bass, and visceral emotions. My flight from the East Coast was long, over five hours—and the three-hour time difference always kicked my ass the first few days, but I couldn’t pretend like my internal mood was only because of travel exhaustion.
I was simply…numb.
By moving to NYC right after high school, I isolated myself. Ran the fuck away from everyone who loved me because love wasn’t something I could afford, and at the transformative age of eighteen, I didn’t understand it, didn’t want to try to figure it out.
I saw a plane ticket and a cross-country move as the only way to address the wounds I couldn’t figure out how to close. Except, moving locations changed nothing. In fact, everything got worse.
New York allowed me to turn up the volume on my numb. The city and the people within it were not always kind—you’re expected to be an asshole on a mission if you’re a true local—and I was down with that. For the first three years, at least. In that time, I stopped seeing reason, stopped setting goals—even sealed my fate immediately by seeking out the party scene as soon as I made it to campus my freshman year. It wasn’t hard to find other miserable people, so from that moment on, I did it all—took every drug offered, fucked in every and all positions, I was one hundred percent that girl. So fucking broken, she couldn’t see she was driving herself into an early grave all on her own, without the help of everything she had trapped in her head.
But that was the point, wasn’t it?
Yeah, well, my senior year was when everything got really fucked.
I was graduating early, after the winter semester instead of spring, and somewhere along the way, I couldn’t handle even the most basic of emotions. My peers were too excited for the upcoming graduation, for Christmas right around the corner, and I couldn’t escape the taste of hope that constantly lingered in the air around campus.
It was all too much for me—the jealousy, the back and forth with my demons. Rather than trying to go after the happiness I felt in the quad, in the cafeteria and dorm room hallways, I did the opposite. I tried to make it all go away.
Right before I was set to graduate, just two months ago, all the hiding, burying, and rushing to forget led me to nearly take my own life. I wanted it to stop—the overthinking, over analyzing, dissecting every decision I made, being wary of every person I met. I wanted to clear my head of all the bullshit and just cease to be.