Wait until the music's over

46. Ariadne, the bet and the bathtub

"COME IN!" Meg's yells for us to enter after we ring the doorbell of the girls' apartment. Grace and I exchange a perplexed look and a shrug before opening the door.

"Here we are!" I exclaim as I take off my coat while Grace closes the door behind our back.

"Help me, PLEASE" Angie asks in a loud but resigned voice, as she wasn't really expecting any real help from us.

"Hi girls! But where are you?" my friend asks after another exchange of questioning looks with me.

"Angie, don't move and stop complaining. Come here, we're in the living room!" that's where we are already instinctively going and we are met by a weird scene: Angie's laying down on the rug between the couches, looking up at the ceiling, or at Meg, who's towering over her, with one foot on the floor and the other one on the sofa, holding a pencil and a sketch pad in her hands.

"What the fuck are you doing?" I ask while Grace is doubled over laughing.

"Laura, please, call the cops, your friend here got crazy, she's been torturing me for half an hour" Angie turns towards me with pleading eyes, but soon after her roommate grabs her chin and forces her to look back up.

"If you stood still and quiet, we'd be done by now"

"Are you portraying her?" Grace prances around the two girls and from behind Meg looks first at the sketch book and then at the victim on the floor with an amused grin.

"More or less, I'm using her as a model"

"And this should be enough evidence that she's completely lost her mind"

"I'm working on a little pictorial study about how to portray the face of a woman laying down, I need it for a project of mine" Meg explains ignoring her roomie's remark.

"What project? I'm curious!" I ask her as I walk up to them too, from the opposite side, and steal a glance of her work as I lean on the back of the couch.

"I wanna paint a picture to put in the hallway, no I wanna paint three actually: a triptych!"

"Because one fuck face was not enough, let's make three" Angie grumbles.

"And what's the subject?"

"You, who are entering this place, lose all hope! That's why I'd rather put it outside the door instead of the hallway, to keep nuisance people away, what do you think Meg?"

"The subject is the myth of Ariadne"

"Ariadne? The one with the thread?" I ask curious.

"Exactly!" Meg confirms as she's rubbing out part of the outline of the lips.

"Exactly, Ariadne, the loser. And that partially excuses the choice of me as a model"

"Would you shut up? It's taking me an hour just to draw the mouth"

"Anyway, I wouldn't call her a loser, in the end she marries Dionysus" Grace points out alternatively looking at Angie on the floor and the sketch.

"Dionysus is hot"

"Dionysus is an alcoholic showoff dressed in leopard print with delusions of grandeur who's born from a thigh and spends his days in the forest having orgies with his groupies" Angie retorts with an extremely serious face.

"Hahaha pretty accurate description" I giggle just like the other girls.

"But I suppose that for the mentality of that period, getting married with someone like that was much more desirable than ending a spinster, ruined forever by that fucker called Theseus"