Women of Fox Way #3
Orla was not born in Henrietta. She was one of the small children brought along to 300 Fox Way when Maura and Calla had invited their relatives, including Orla’s mother Jimi, to join them in Virginia. She had not been happy about the move. Though she had been only three years old, she had already decided that she didn’t like change. After a few years had passed, she decided she was an enormous fan of change but that she didn’t like Henrietta because there wasn’t enough ice cream there. Over the course of the next decade, she found better ways to procure ice cream but found that she didn’t want to live in Virginia because it wasn’t a very good place to be a lesbian. But if she had to be in this state, 300 Fox Way was as good a place to be as any. Given that all the women there were psychic and a healthy number of them were Sapphic, she didn’t have to worry about judgment of lack of acceptance at home. Her coming out at sixteen to the entire population of the house at once when they were gathering for dinner was greeted with friendly nods, a slap on the back from Calla, and a brief and slightly confused burst of applause from Persephone. Later that evening, Orla’s mother thanked her for being open about it, and that was that.
It was difficult to find women in the immediate area, but the golden age of Orla’s love life began when she discovered online dating. Orla was perfectly capable of capturing her considerable beauty on camera, and her psychic abilities helped her steer clear of creeps. Mostly she just flirted and would occasionally drive a little way out of town for a date, but she also had an undeniable allure that brought moonstruck women flocking from miles away to bring her flowers and candy and favors of other sorts. But, she said, she was waiting to move out and start her own practice before she started looking for a serious relationship. She was grateful, in the end, to have been brought up at 300 Fox Way, but she didn’t want to stay here forever. Her dream was to save up money and move out, start up a little storefront place with a phone line and online service – she wanted to be a truly modern psychic. In the meantime, she could use her charms, which appealed to both men and women despite her complete lack of interest in the former, on the psychic phone line which she had not so much convinced her family to allow her to install as conned them into allowing her to keep it. Blue made endless fun of what he called her “phone sex voice,” but she found there was a certain pleasure in using it on men who were paying for the sound of her on the other end of the line while she painted her nails and thought you don’t even understand how unattainable I am for you.
Orla did not hate life at Fox Way. There had been long stretches of her adolescence when she had, but had outgrown this. She loved her family, even if she and Blue were in constant spats. They would never be bosom friends, but she would always watch out for him. She had developed a fondness for this odd old house and she knew that if she left (when, she told herself, not if) she would miss the community of it, but she knew with just as much certainty that her ambition would never let her stay in Henrietta. It wasn’t ambition like Neeve’s – she didn’t care all that much about being famous or even really about being well-respected, but she did want to be independent. She wanted to live in a big city and have her own life and a girlfriend. She wanted the money she earned to be her own. She wanted to decide how to spend it. It was just a matter of saving enough money to move out, which was no simple matter in a home like this. But Orla was patient, and she was tenacious, and she had a good feeling about her plans. Unlike most people, she could actually trust that this meant something.
It was strange to watch Blue growing up, dreaming of going to college, of becoming a biologist, of travelling the world. She wanted much smaller things than he did, and part of her wanted to warn him that if you started to want a thing it was a lot harder to stop and go back to being happy with what you had than if you never wanted it in the first place. But she knew she couldn’t tell him to stop wishing for a world bigger than Henrietta, especially since that was exactly what she wanted, if on less grand of a scale. She watched him making friends with Aglionby girls and she tried to tell him, as kindly as she could, that he was chasing after heartache. Of course, he didn’t take advice from her – he never had. She couldn’t really blame him. He was more like her than he realized – independent, determined, and insistent on choosing a future instead of accepting the one laid out by a deck of cards or the lines of the palm or the stars. She knew, though, that if she tried to tell him this, he would make a variety of indignant noises and say something along the lines of “I am not like you.” She let him believe that. It was hard not to be afraid for him, though, because she often did readings for everyone at Fox Way, and she could read terrible sadness coming for him, drawing near now. But there was always a little glimmer of hope at the end, which was why she never did much to interfere. That and a lifetime of being told by the older women that trying to change a bad fate could often just bring it about faster. It was comforting to be find signs again and against that somehow – whether by changing the course of events or by finding unexpected strength within himself, or maybe both – Blue was going to end up happy.