𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐲𝐧 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 is far from perfect. Before starting her senior year of college, she's already guaranteed her position as the black sheep of her once prestigious family. To make matters worse, she took up bedding the rival family's eldest...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
𝑰𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔𝒏'𝒕 𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒈 before Evelyn's dread started to taste and feel like the vomit her body used to purge her in the past week. With nothing but an eerie calm from the distance and separation of the dressing room from the main basement, she had nothing to focus on but the slow build of the saliva in her mouth and shallow pains of discomfort in her chest. At this point, she wasn't sure if it was her newfound stage fright or remnants of whatever drug she had ingested still moving through her bloodstream.
She stared at her illuminated reflection until her features looked foreign, then until her body no longer felt like hers. Mariah had decorated it quite prettily; with just a couple thick layers of mascara and a chocolaty mauve hue on her lips to match the stripes on her clingy halterneck dress, she was all ready for her performance. At least on the outside.
"I know you're not about to throw up again," Mariah tsked, dropping her hands from the fluffing they were doing to her best friend's hair.
Evelyn blinked twice at her reflection as she returned to consciousness inside her body, then she pivoted on the vanity stool to glare at Mariah. "I'm not," she snapped. "Are you almost done?"
"Yeah, yeah! Turn back around so I can be." Mariah tapped the cold metal prongs of the hair pick against Evelyn's shoulder impatiently then pursed her lips as she returned to stabbing at her curly roots. "You been crabby all day. Are you sure you're not p-word?"
Evelyn shot her another glare, this time through the mirror. "Menstruating doesn't start with a 'p', but no, I'm not. And can you shut up 'fore you jinx me?"
"I'm just sayin' 'cause I ain't ever seen you throw up that many times in one week. And we been to some crazy parties."
Evelyn couldn't resist the way her expression softened to a smile. She and Mariah had been to manycrazy parties, the longest streaks of their attendance taking place all the way in freshman year. Young, unsupervised and just happy to be out of the depressing environment of her home, Evelyn remembered bouncing back from any cocktail of drugs and alcohol she would take down during them with no issue. Then she met Jackie Jackson. Her party attendance dwindled as she carved out more time to spend with him, he disagreed with her "lifestyle" and she found herself relying on him for all her recreational fun.
She wanted to laugh at how viciously it all backfired.
Mariah was none the wiser of what really transpired over the beginning of the week, but she was a witness to the disaster that Evelyn was during rehearsals. After she had eventually gathered the strength to drive herself home around noon on Tuesday, she left Michael's company and promptly began a very slow, painful ego death. And by the time she had picked up her missed schoolwork and integrated herself into rehearsals, she had all but lost her sense of self—or rather, she realized that she had become an extension of Jackie and barely formed an identity to begin with.
So much time and so much of what little care she had left to give was poured into him only to be poured down the drain. And that was how she felt. Drained, completely devoid of anything relatively close to happiness. She didn't know if she would be able to be the shell of herself again, let alone take up being the fearless performer she had never been in the first place.
