PEARL

TWENTY-TWO

TRACK 22
EXIT MUSIC (FOR A FILM)
RADIOHEAD

this one is very confusing.

tw - i can't say what without spoiling but be warned it gets intense VERY fast

🚬

IDA's writer was being quite clever, she had to admit.

Either that, or they'd confused themselves, or their plot was still waiting to be fully woven.

Take what she'd said the night (or rather, the poorly hidden excuse for a recap of what had happened to Lily on Wednesday for readers who had skimmed or forgotten) before, about not caring whether Nate slept with other girls.

Putting that cold, cutting comment in her mouth had left Ida's character dangling like a pendant between two clichés, and had left the audience gaping at the tear-silver screen and clutching their shiny hardbacks, wondering which she'd swing and conform to.

Would she stick boringly to the predictable path of purely having sex with Nathan Gold for a distraction, with no character arc curving in the distance and a genuine disregard for whether he fell into bed with Lily Rose or not, or would it turn out that she'd begun the tedious, seen-time-and-time-again process of masking her newfound and no doubt "weird, inexplicable, never felt before" feelings for him because she – unlike the eager audience – hadn't yet realized them herself?

(If the writer – whose work, whether for script or Simon and Schuster, was getting sloppy and far too complex to keep up with in both Ida the Cynic and Ida the Author's theoretical opinions – had wanted to stretch their frequently-used seashell metaphor until it came closing to breaking point, they could've slipped into Ida's mouth at that moment that their tactic of teasing at some jealousy in her had created the same effect as when one peers into a seashell to decipher whether they just saw a scuttle of life inside it, or a small piece of lodged stone.)

If Ida had had any agency, she would've said that she'd said such a comment solely because – like resting her head on Nate's dew-drenched shoulder in the dregs of a Friday dawn, and asking if they'd slept together beside the star-spangled lake and their semi-comatose friends – she could.

The fact that what she felt for him was nowhere near to fondness but, despite her cynicism being there to stay, had definitely flowered somewhat wrote off the possibility of her taking the predictable path, and the fact that she had recognized said protocol-floutingly slow flowering wrote off the possibility of her being stuck in every suffering, swooning rom-com Romeo's self-denial.

In other words, both clichés were off limits for her to swing to, hence Ida would've said that she'd said the corridor-cold comment because she could – because she'd wanted a reaction as well as a distraction, rolled into one, purple and white to make her a lilac burst of momentary...achievement?

Amusement? Feeling?

Whatever the answer, it wouldn't have been the first time she'd tried to get it – the second, rather, seeing as the first had been cueing Paul Anka with Nate in the grove behind Highgate. Evidence for this lay in a handful of scenes that had either been snatched fresh from the printer and ended up crumpled in the wastepaper basket or been scrapped from the script or deleted after filming – all for the sake of plot pace (alias audience interest) and production costs – in which Ida had lain in Nate's bed half-dressed, panting post-distraction, and felt like she'd needed something more to fight futility's mattress-tearing talons for long enough to wander into a wave of gunmetal-grey dreams.