three times ana saved simone's life
It happens gradually, then suddenly. There's a heated debate going on behind her, something about Woody Allen films, when Simone feels tightness blooming in her chest and a sudden rush of heat on her face. Her hands are shaking as she clamps one over her mouth, her breathing picking up speed and a sharp pain cutting through her abdomen. Someone leans over to ask if she's alright, and she can just barely shake her head as she feels the tears in their earliest form, welling up at the corners of her eyes and spilling over without hesitation.
Ana comes back from Starbucks to find a small crowd around her seat. It takes her a moment to shove her way through, only to find Simone at the center, all hyperventilation and running mascara. She's shrieking like a feral child at everyone who bothers to touch her, and pretty soon Ana is yelling too, slapping away strange hands and passing their drinks off to a scrawny security guard with strict orders to "hold these and back the fuck up." Everyone in the immediate vicinity is smart enough to comply.
The tone she takes with Simone is much softer, all sweet words and a barely-there Southern accent. The crowd collectively flinches when Ana reaches for her hands, awaiting a wail that never comes. What they get instead are actual, intelligible responses, words like "plane" and "can't" cutting through her cacophonous sobs. The boarding call rings out over the intercom, but Ana doesn't budge and neither do the people around them, far too enthralled by the taming of the wild, anxious animal. Ana's eyes are wide and unblinking as she encourages Simone to look at her and match her breathing, comically long inhales and exhales that she repeats again and again until Simone's hysterics are reduced to shaky breaths and the occasional whimper.
It's with a broken voice that Simone finally explains how she forgot to bring her prescription, how she absolutely, positively cannot fly without it. Ana only nods, pets her hair in that maternal way that Simone usually finds bothersome, but doesn't seem to mind today. The crowd finally disperses, frazzled security guard included, until they're the only two left sitting in the boarding area, until Simone has stopped hiccuping on every third breath. The final boarding call rings out, the attendant reading both of their names in a sickeningly sweet voice, and Simone drags the backs of both hands across her eyes.
"You gotta go," she says, chewing on her thumbnail and waving her free hand dismissively. "I'll go get my meds and catch a later flight, it'll be fine." Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the way Ana is staring at her, and she already knows that her plan's been rejected, vetoed, thrown out the window in favor of something a little less sensible.
"But then I won't have anyone to get airplane wasted with," Ana whines, and she's careful not to hug Simone too tight as they both stand to their feet. "Come on," she bargains, "we'll go get your pills, and then we'll get ice cream, cause I think that security guard took off with our Starbucks."
Simone's giggle is weak, but it's enough of a laugh to make Ana smile, too. She buries her face in her hands, takes one last deep breath, then drops her hands to her hips and looks at Ana expectantly. "Alright," she says, face still red and covered in mascara, "how do we get the fuck outta here?"
Ana comes back from Starbucks to find a small crowd around her seat. It takes her a moment to shove her way through, only to find Simone at the center, all hyperventilation and running mascara. She's shrieking like a feral child at everyone who bothers to touch her, and pretty soon Ana is yelling too, slapping away strange hands and passing their drinks off to a scrawny security guard with strict orders to "hold these and back the fuck up." Everyone in the immediate vicinity is smart enough to comply.
The tone she takes with Simone is much softer, all sweet words and a barely-there Southern accent. The crowd collectively flinches when Ana reaches for her hands, awaiting a wail that never comes. What they get instead are actual, intelligible responses, words like "plane" and "can't" cutting through her cacophonous sobs. The boarding call rings out over the intercom, but Ana doesn't budge and neither do the people around them, far too enthralled by the taming of the wild, anxious animal. Ana's eyes are wide and unblinking as she encourages Simone to look at her and match her breathing, comically long inhales and exhales that she repeats again and again until Simone's hysterics are reduced to shaky breaths and the occasional whimper.
It's with a broken voice that Simone finally explains how she forgot to bring her prescription, how she absolutely, positively cannot fly without it. Ana only nods, pets her hair in that maternal way that Simone usually finds bothersome, but doesn't seem to mind today. The crowd finally disperses, frazzled security guard included, until they're the only two left sitting in the boarding area, until Simone has stopped hiccuping on every third breath. The final boarding call rings out, the attendant reading both of their names in a sickeningly sweet voice, and Simone drags the backs of both hands across her eyes.
"You gotta go," she says, chewing on her thumbnail and waving her free hand dismissively. "I'll go get my meds and catch a later flight, it'll be fine." Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the way Ana is staring at her, and she already knows that her plan's been rejected, vetoed, thrown out the window in favor of something a little less sensible.
"But then I won't have anyone to get airplane wasted with," Ana whines, and she's careful not to hug Simone too tight as they both stand to their feet. "Come on," she bargains, "we'll go get your pills, and then we'll get ice cream, cause I think that security guard took off with our Starbucks."
Simone's giggle is weak, but it's enough of a laugh to make Ana smile, too. She buries her face in her hands, takes one last deep breath, then drops her hands to her hips and looks at Ana expectantly. "Alright," she says, face still red and covered in mascara, "how do we get the fuck outta here?"
Simone is terrible at math. She can spit out historical dates and statistics as easily as she can take a breath, but expressions and equations only swim in her head until she feels like she's going to drown. She has never been one for integers and calculations, but nothing brings out your inner Pythagoras like leaning over porcelain, heaving up water and the last bit of your hope.
See, Simone knows that it's been approximately 15 days since her phone cheerfully reminded her to embrace her inner goddess on the first day of her period. She knows it's been 10 days since she left a drunken, angry review for the tracking app, her caps lock letting readers know she meant business when she said it was "WILDLY INACCURATE." Eight days since she started to sweat, seven days since she reinstalled the app, hoping for some kind of technical difficulties, and something like five days since she, apparently, found God. She's not sure when the nausea started, but she knows it's been three days of occasional vomiting, and if you add all of that up, multiply it by her rapidly increasing panic, and divide it by the amount of time she's spent praying for this exact thing to not happen, what you get is a girl sitting cross-legged on a marble floor, lighting a cigarette and hoping for the smoke to swallow her whole. What you get is the reflection of her smudged lipstick as she rinses her mouth with handfuls of tap water. What you get is Simone picking up her cracked iPhone and doing the only thing she knows how to do.
Ana arrives in record time with her hands full. She dumps no less than ten boxes onto their bathroom floor, puts her hands on her hips and says "well, get to work," her accent peeking out in every vowel. She uses one hand to pull a mostly-catatonic Simone into a standing position, the other clutching a book of crossword puzzles that neither of them will ever do.
Simone decides to wrestle open all of the boxes before she takes on the real task at hand, and whether it's for organization's sake or to waste time, no one's really sure. She's reading the instructions on the fourth box when she finally lets out a frustrated huff and tilts her head toward the sky. Her tired eyes eventually fall on Ana's, and she tries to ask the question telepathically before saying it aloud. "What if-?"
"Then we gotta start Googling either chop shops or beauty pageants."
They both laugh, a kind of rueful chuckle that eventually takes on a life of its own, bounces off the walls of her bathroom and makes it sound like they have an audience. Like none of this is real, like someone will call "CUT" on Ana and Simone sitting in a pile of pregnancy tests.
The silence makes her anxious, so she asks Ana to talk while she shuffles around, frantically attempting to keep every stick with its original box. They talk about upcoming auditions, their plans for dinner, the asshole who cut Ana off as she was leaving the drugstore. They both chainsmoke their way through it, and they talk about that, too. They talk and they talk and Simone almost forgets what exactly she's doing before the alarm on Ana's phone drags her gradually-lifting spirit back down to reality.
When every test comes up negative, they celebrate in the only way that they know how: stripping down to their underwear to twirl around their living room, clutching wine bottles like tribal sacrifices. They sweep the boxes into the same bag that brought them home, double-knot it for good measure, and stuff it into the deepest recesses of their garbage can. It goes without saying that they won't ever talk about this day again, that it'll be one of few scrubbed completely from the historical accounts of their friendship.
It's not until later, when they're curled up on the couch watching Match Game and cackling wildly at every word that comes out of Brett Somers' mouth, that Ana looks over and asks, "what would either of us even do with a kid?"
"Probably," Simone starts, stretching out the last syllable as she ponders the question. "Probably forget to feed it."
"Yeah," concedes Ana, and they both turn their attention back to Gene Rayburn and his sepia-toned three-piece suit. "But it'd be really well-dressed!"
See, Simone knows that it's been approximately 15 days since her phone cheerfully reminded her to embrace her inner goddess on the first day of her period. She knows it's been 10 days since she left a drunken, angry review for the tracking app, her caps lock letting readers know she meant business when she said it was "WILDLY INACCURATE." Eight days since she started to sweat, seven days since she reinstalled the app, hoping for some kind of technical difficulties, and something like five days since she, apparently, found God. She's not sure when the nausea started, but she knows it's been three days of occasional vomiting, and if you add all of that up, multiply it by her rapidly increasing panic, and divide it by the amount of time she's spent praying for this exact thing to not happen, what you get is a girl sitting cross-legged on a marble floor, lighting a cigarette and hoping for the smoke to swallow her whole. What you get is the reflection of her smudged lipstick as she rinses her mouth with handfuls of tap water. What you get is Simone picking up her cracked iPhone and doing the only thing she knows how to do.
Ana arrives in record time with her hands full. She dumps no less than ten boxes onto their bathroom floor, puts her hands on her hips and says "well, get to work," her accent peeking out in every vowel. She uses one hand to pull a mostly-catatonic Simone into a standing position, the other clutching a book of crossword puzzles that neither of them will ever do.
Simone decides to wrestle open all of the boxes before she takes on the real task at hand, and whether it's for organization's sake or to waste time, no one's really sure. She's reading the instructions on the fourth box when she finally lets out a frustrated huff and tilts her head toward the sky. Her tired eyes eventually fall on Ana's, and she tries to ask the question telepathically before saying it aloud. "What if-?"
"Then we gotta start Googling either chop shops or beauty pageants."
They both laugh, a kind of rueful chuckle that eventually takes on a life of its own, bounces off the walls of her bathroom and makes it sound like they have an audience. Like none of this is real, like someone will call "CUT" on Ana and Simone sitting in a pile of pregnancy tests.
The silence makes her anxious, so she asks Ana to talk while she shuffles around, frantically attempting to keep every stick with its original box. They talk about upcoming auditions, their plans for dinner, the asshole who cut Ana off as she was leaving the drugstore. They both chainsmoke their way through it, and they talk about that, too. They talk and they talk and Simone almost forgets what exactly she's doing before the alarm on Ana's phone drags her gradually-lifting spirit back down to reality.
When every test comes up negative, they celebrate in the only way that they know how: stripping down to their underwear to twirl around their living room, clutching wine bottles like tribal sacrifices. They sweep the boxes into the same bag that brought them home, double-knot it for good measure, and stuff it into the deepest recesses of their garbage can. It goes without saying that they won't ever talk about this day again, that it'll be one of few scrubbed completely from the historical accounts of their friendship.
It's not until later, when they're curled up on the couch watching Match Game and cackling wildly at every word that comes out of Brett Somers' mouth, that Ana looks over and asks, "what would either of us even do with a kid?"
"Probably," Simone starts, stretching out the last syllable as she ponders the question. "Probably forget to feed it."
"Yeah," concedes Ana, and they both turn their attention back to Gene Rayburn and his sepia-toned three-piece suit. "But it'd be really well-dressed!"
"You need to find better ways to express yourselves," says the man in blue, and, of all the things that happen that night, that's the only event that makes Simone flinch. She can actually feel the adrenaline leaving her body, like a rapidly deflating balloon, like the collapse of a great structure, like the melting of an ice cream cone in the oppressive Brooklyn heat. He pushes her into the squad car, aching wrists and all, and she wills the burning sensation in her eyes to kindly vacate the premises.
This is not the story of a reckless actress with a DUI or another Hollywood statistic facing a possession charge. This is the story of a girl who knows firsthand that the long arm of the law is not always kind to her kind. This is the story of a girl who has a brother, a girl who has screamed herself hoarse watching him tossed around by privileged hands, a girl whose heart stops every time another story comes down the pipeline. This is the story of 200 strangers marching across the Brooklyn Bridge, arms linked as they peacefully protest the killing of innocent black souls.
So the man in blue says that they need to find better ways to express themselves, and Simone finally finds her voice in the back of his car, where she's packed less-than-comfortably between two other girls. One can't stop crying and the other is practically vibrating with rage, and Simone, she just seeks out the officer's eyes in the rearview and spits out, "well, what other way is there?"
He never answers.
The process is agonizing- the fingerprints, the photo, the repetitive questioning about her personal information ("It's A-d-e-l-i-e. No, i-e. A-d- oh, my God."). By the time she gets to where they're being held, corralled into a couple of cells like outspoken cattle, they've already made up a mountain of quarters and formed a line for the phone. Normally, she'd make a joke about them forming a new nation with its own economy and direct democracy, but she's just exhausted enough to keep it to herself as she shuffles to the back of the line and wonders who she should call. She thinks about her mom, her brother, even her raging cunt of an older sister, but when she steps up to the payphone, the number she dials doesn't belong to any of them. She frowns when it goes to voicemail, leaves a message that she knows will probably never be heard, and decides to try again when it's not the dead of night.
She's not sure how long it's been by the time they call her name, but she hears something about a shift change and, if her memory is serving her correctly, she thinks that means the sun should be coming up. A short, red-faced man hands over her belongings and a slip of paper that she thinks is called a DAT, but the truth is that she's not listening while he drones on about her court date and her right to an attorney, because there, down the hall, is her savior, live and in living color. Ana is carrying her favorite sweatshirt and a pack of cigarettes, and in that moment, Simone is pretty certain that she believes in God.
Every cliche dictates that they should hug at the end of the corridor, that one (or both) of them should cry. What happens instead is that they kind of stare at one another, green and brown meeting in a place of equal exhaustion, and have a full conversation about the yellowed, peeling paint on the walls without saying a word.
"You look like shit," says Ana, finally, once they've stepped out of the thick, musty air of the precinct and into the first rays of the morning. What she means is... well, a lot of things. What she means is, "I'm proud of you," and "I was worried," and, yeah, "you look like shit." And there are a million things that Simone wants to say as she lights her cigarette, savors the nicotine in her lungs and blows smoke toward the aging metal door. That burning sensation creeps into the corners of her eyes again as she remembers the man in blue and her aching wrists (not that she's forgotten either for even a second). She links one arm with Ana's, takes another drag, and runs her free hand through the mile-high mess that is her hair.
What she means to say is, "I know." What she means to say is, "thank you." What she means to say is, "I was terrified and feeling fucking hopeless and I've never been happier to see you in my entire life." What she actually says, with a confidence that they both know to be false, is, "I think I took a cute mugshot."
As they depart to face the new day, Ana loops her fingers through Simone's and gives a reassuring squeeze.
This is not the story of a reckless actress with a DUI or another Hollywood statistic facing a possession charge. This is the story of a girl who knows firsthand that the long arm of the law is not always kind to her kind. This is the story of a girl who has a brother, a girl who has screamed herself hoarse watching him tossed around by privileged hands, a girl whose heart stops every time another story comes down the pipeline. This is the story of 200 strangers marching across the Brooklyn Bridge, arms linked as they peacefully protest the killing of innocent black souls.
So the man in blue says that they need to find better ways to express themselves, and Simone finally finds her voice in the back of his car, where she's packed less-than-comfortably between two other girls. One can't stop crying and the other is practically vibrating with rage, and Simone, she just seeks out the officer's eyes in the rearview and spits out, "well, what other way is there?"
He never answers.
The process is agonizing- the fingerprints, the photo, the repetitive questioning about her personal information ("It's A-d-e-l-i-e. No, i-e. A-d- oh, my God."). By the time she gets to where they're being held, corralled into a couple of cells like outspoken cattle, they've already made up a mountain of quarters and formed a line for the phone. Normally, she'd make a joke about them forming a new nation with its own economy and direct democracy, but she's just exhausted enough to keep it to herself as she shuffles to the back of the line and wonders who she should call. She thinks about her mom, her brother, even her raging cunt of an older sister, but when she steps up to the payphone, the number she dials doesn't belong to any of them. She frowns when it goes to voicemail, leaves a message that she knows will probably never be heard, and decides to try again when it's not the dead of night.
She's not sure how long it's been by the time they call her name, but she hears something about a shift change and, if her memory is serving her correctly, she thinks that means the sun should be coming up. A short, red-faced man hands over her belongings and a slip of paper that she thinks is called a DAT, but the truth is that she's not listening while he drones on about her court date and her right to an attorney, because there, down the hall, is her savior, live and in living color. Ana is carrying her favorite sweatshirt and a pack of cigarettes, and in that moment, Simone is pretty certain that she believes in God.
Every cliche dictates that they should hug at the end of the corridor, that one (or both) of them should cry. What happens instead is that they kind of stare at one another, green and brown meeting in a place of equal exhaustion, and have a full conversation about the yellowed, peeling paint on the walls without saying a word.
"You look like shit," says Ana, finally, once they've stepped out of the thick, musty air of the precinct and into the first rays of the morning. What she means is... well, a lot of things. What she means is, "I'm proud of you," and "I was worried," and, yeah, "you look like shit." And there are a million things that Simone wants to say as she lights her cigarette, savors the nicotine in her lungs and blows smoke toward the aging metal door. That burning sensation creeps into the corners of her eyes again as she remembers the man in blue and her aching wrists (not that she's forgotten either for even a second). She links one arm with Ana's, takes another drag, and runs her free hand through the mile-high mess that is her hair.
What she means to say is, "I know." What she means to say is, "thank you." What she means to say is, "I was terrified and feeling fucking hopeless and I've never been happier to see you in my entire life." What she actually says, with a confidence that they both know to be false, is, "I think I took a cute mugshot."
As they depart to face the new day, Ana loops her fingers through Simone's and gives a reassuring squeeze.