This time, Chelsea can already hear the crowd. Instead of the back of the semi, they have a real greenroom, nothing fancy, all concrete blocks and bright lights, and she can hear the audience laughing and booing and screaming from down the long, dirty-gray hallway. She stares at herself in the mirror, her eyes alight with the round bulbs lining it, and can’t help remembering that night in high school when she gave up one thing for another, not knowing how permanent it would be. Not knowing that maybe she was giving up the wrong thing.
And it’s not just that she gave up theater and chorus for David. It’s that she gave up her friends, her interests, her passions, all for the idea of David. She wouldn’t trade her daughters for all the world—she’s doing this for them, after all—but if she could go back in time and stand in that greenroom, before that mirror, surrounded by those lights, she wouldn’t choose David.
She would keep her Phantom mask and her borrowed vampire cape.
She would choose herself.
“You ready?”
TJ appears beside her. They’re one of the last matches, but they have to be ready for anything. She’s wearing an official Florida Woman T-shirt, artfully torn, plus her ripped jean shorts and boots, and she looks like an actor, whereas TJ looks like some sort of elemental spirit. It was his idea, The Killer Cuban. He thinks it’s hilarious because luchadores are Mexican, not Cuban, and he’s personally half Brazilian. His eyes are heavily surrounded in black because they have him fighting in that glittery mask so they can do a big reveal one day, and his head is always shaved down low. He brought his own clippers with him, Matt told her once, and treats shaving his head like a religious experience; not the loud church kind, but like a monk going through a holy ritual. The black around his eyes makes their brown pop, and he’s got a loosely zipped hoodie over his shaved chest, per Harlan’s pronouncement that somebody’s got to wrestle topless and it might as well be the guy who can fight off anyone who has something to say about it.
“Ready as I’ll ever be. You?”
He cocks his head and considers her, side by side in the mirror. “My last match went a little cattywampus, as my grandmother would say. I don’t even know what I did to set Joy off like that, but I guess I’m just hoping that—”
“I won’t screw up your career permanently?”
He smiles and nods. “Something like that.”
Chelsea leans in to unclump her eyelashes. “We’ll be fine. I think she’s one of those people who’s always looking for a fight, you know?”
“Hm. I would say she actually sees everything as a fight. As a threat. That happens when you grow up without enough.”
“Enough what?”
He shrugs. “Enough of whatever you think you need. You scrabble for what’s there, defend what you have, and see everyone else as the enemy. If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But if you’re a starving bird, every bit of plastic looks like fruit, and you’ll fight to the death for it.”
Chelsea’s breath catches. What he’s saying rings so true—but not about her. David is the hammer, her mother is the bird. “Yeah, I’ve known people like that. Do you think they’ll ever be able to change? Because they seem miserable. Both kinds.”
A smile tugs at the corner of TJ’s mouth, a rare sight. He’s always serious, always aloof, like a cat. “The thing about changing is that first, you have to want to change. And change is uncomfortable. To decide to change and then follow through with it and then maintain it is the work of a lifetime.” He nods. “But I do think it’s possible. More for the bird than the hammer. See you in the ring.”
“Oh my God,” Amy says from the other side of the mirror where she’s been quietly eavesdropping while pretending to scroll through her phone. “He’s like the freakin’ Dalai Lama, right?”
“Then I guess it’s okay that I have to lose to him.”
Amy chatters on about her first match, how glad she is that she gets to win, how she’s already getting fan mail even though she’s never been out in public yet, but Chelsea spaces out. What TJ said—it’s scratching at the door of her mind.
The thing is, she always thought that David’s cruelty arose from her, from the fact that she wasn’t what he needed or wanted, that she wasn’t doing her part in the marriage, that she wasn’t enough. After growing up with a single mom who was rarely home and when she was, spent most of her time sleeping and reading and making it clear that her daughter was an annoyance, she decided early on that she would fully commit to her marriage and her children, that she would succeed where her mother, she always assumed, had failed.
Those years in student housing, David was gone a lot, in class or studying or partying with friends or doing—well, he never really went into detail about all the time he spent away. College stuff. She didn’t see him a ton, and when she did, he was tired and always in a bad mood, and she assumed he was working so hard—and, yes, partying so hard—that he didn’t have any energy left for her. And then she got pregnant, and he was always annoyed because she was the tired, grouchy one, and because, as he put it, she was ballooning up. He said pregnant bodies were gross on purpose, to protect the baby, and that was the end of their physical relationship, a dry stretch that lasted until after Ella was born and Chelsea had shrunk back down almost to her regular size. Then he grew hungry for her again, which was a relief. She felt loved and cared for again.
The first few years of a marriage are hard; everyone says that. Pregnancy and babies and toddlers are hard; everyone knows that. But she thought it would get easier after those speed bumps, that once he had a good job and they were in their first little house and he no longer had twenty college demands but one work demand, things would be sweet.
But they weren’t.
He was still gone from dawn to dusk. He was back to partying with his friends. He didn’t want to spend time with Ella or help with feeding or diapering or middle-of-the-night crying jags.
“That’s your job,” he told Chelsea sternly. “You chose this. You have your job, and I have mine.”
She kept stretching herself to take care of everyone, to do everything David asked, memorize how he liked things, and keep the house nice so that when he came home the daily tornado was all tidied up and it didn’t even look like they had a child.
He started erasing Ella when she was a baby, Chelsea sees now.
He started erasing Chelsea even earlier.
The realization crashes down on her like hot summer thunder:
She could’ve been anyone.