Parker

Chapter 2: Aggie

Aggie's life was like a merry go round.  She sat in a seat, and it moved around on it's worn hinges slowly and lazily.  Sometimes she would slip and nearly fall.  Sometimes, she would stand up in the saddle, trying to feel the wind hit her face face, but it never did.  She managed to hold on as it moved forward.  Until she would pass by that same child with an ice cream cone and realize - she wasn't moving forward at all.  She was only going in a circle.  Over and over and over again.

She tried to think about when it started-or rather, when she had realized it.  Because her plastic horse was never off that carousel was it?  Not really.

She looked up and suddenly noticed two sets of eyes on her.  One pair a deep brown that belonged to a portly woman who wore a pair of glasses that were far too tight for her face.  The other pair, an all too familiar icy blue surrounded by a perfect matte smokey eye.

And she realized, suddenly, that she had just been asked a question.

"What?", Aggie asked.  Her voice was deep and tired nowadays.

The two of them exchanged glances.

"I said, have you lost weight, dear?", Aggie's agent Priscilla Baetman, said.  Her poorly drawn on eyebrows were raised with concern and she frowned in a way that made the lines around her mouth all the more prominent.  Priscilla's sympathetic impression was well-rehearsed, but Aggie didn't believe that she was truly concerned about anything when it came to her well being.

"I don't know", she replied honestly.

Priscilla's frown deepened.  "Well when was the last time you've weighed yourself?"

Aggie tried to remember the last time she had stepped onto a scale.  It had been a while.  She had been avoiding scales, mirrors and anything relating to her physical appearance recently.

"I....don't know", she said again.

"But at the gym?", Priscilla pressed on, "Your personal training sessions.  Surely your trainer makes you do a weekly weigh in?  That's what we are paying him for anyways-"

"She hasn't been going to the gym", Aggie's mother interjected, blue eyes darting to Priscilla.

"Why not?", Priscilla asked, looking from Aggie to her mother and then back again, "You know, the other girls going for these parts are at the peak of physical fitness.  You can't just be thin, they want you to be toned."

"I've told her!", her mother said, throwing her hands up in the air as if all was lost, "I've told her again and again.  But it's impossible to get her out of her room now a days.  She just sits in there watching old movies and reading.  It's as if she doesn't care anymore."

"Aggie, honey", Priscilla said, "You know how many girls would kill for these parts you are being considered for?  Most girls have trouble transitioning from modeling to acting.  You can't model forever you know.  You've got to work hard if you want to make it in this industry."

Aggie had heard the speech so many times that she could almost say it along with her.  All those cliched words of encouragement she'd soon recite.  All those stories of actors that struggled for years before they were discovered.

Aggie tried to care, she really did.  But all the stories and quotes no longer inspired her.  Instead they numbed her.  Like a pin stuck over and over again in the same part of her thumb until all the nerves died, and she no longer felt anything.

The numbness wasn't entirely new.  It had begun about a year back. At first, it was just a slight feeling every time she would step outside, leaving a callback or photoshoot and see a group of girls walking by her, giggling, showing each other something or another on their phones sipping giant frappuccinos.
Or when she saw a couple holding hands at a movie theater.  They were awkward and timid, but happy.  And that one time that she was at the library with her private tutor, and a girl had been crying.  The girl's friend was hugging her and murmuring 'It's all going to be alright."  The girl's hair was falling out of her loose ponytail, and her face was red with emotion, and mascara was trailing down her face like two waterfalls.