session #1
Regulus Black woke up that day with a head-splitting hangover. It was the type of hangover that made you feel like there was a gaping wound going right through the middle of your skull, that made you feel like someone stuffed cotton wool right behind your eyeballs or turned your brain into slush. Dorcas knew exactly how it felt because, apparently, it was also the type of hangover where you never seemed to shut the fuck up about it.
They were sitting in the common room, Regulus sprawled over the wooden table with his head in his hands. Periodically he would look up in order to dispense another lovely little description about his pain before dropping his head back down again.
Dorcas liked to consider herself a patient person, but she endured what amounted to twenty minutes of straight whinging before she decided she couldn’t take it anymore.
“You know, every time you talk about your hangover it makes me less and less sympathetic to the reasons as to why you decided to drink yourself into a coma yesterday.”
The night out had been triggered by a sweet and thoughtful phone call by none other than Walburga Black, who had somehow found out where they all lived and had the wonderful idea of reaching out. Since Regulus left the black family, Orion had had the good sense to disown him and never speak to him again. Walburga, on the other hand, seemed unable to leave well enough alone. It happened less and less often, but she would sometimes leave horrific phone calls or messages for Regulus. She wondered if Sirius had to deal with the same problem.
“Fuck you.” Regulus replied, emotionless. His voice was muffled by the fact that he hadn’t lifted his head up from his hands, “I think it’s actually quite insensitive of you to say that. Most people don’t take abuse that lightly.”
Despite the fact that he couldn’t see her, Dorcas smiled at that. It had taken a very long time for Regulus to be able to call what he had suffered under his parents abuse out loud. He could register it, but saying it was a whole different story. He only started doing so last year and he only really used the term when he was making a joke. But still, small victories, Dorcas supposed.
Because she knew he preferred when people didn’t make a big deal out of it, she replied: “Oh I never take abuse lightly, especially since it’s so similar to what I’m currently experiencing every time you open your mouth.”
Regulus’ shoulders shook from laughter.
It had surprised her when Regulus turned up at his doorstep during sixth year summer, soaked head to toe from the rain. He looked awful; gaunt face, eyes a watery blue instead of his usual deep grey. His whole face looked muted, slack, like he didn’t have the effort to provide any facial expression. Except for his eyes. They just looked terrified. When her mom opened the door, he had just smiled politely and made pleasantries. Looking back, Dorcas found it somewhat hilarious that the other boy had gone to such lengths to keep his manners - he wasn’t a particularly polite person in general. It was just that he practically fell in love with Dorcas’ mom the moment he met her in third year and did absolutely anything to appear like a good guest whenever he was around. Eventually, he cracked.
“I’m sorry, I really don’t mean to disturb you, it’s just that I - well I think I may be losing a concerning amount of blood.”
That was when her mom noticed the wound. Everything after that was a blur in Dorcas’ memory. Her mom was a nurse, so she was able to pull a few strings and get him treated at the hospital without his parents being called.
He had hitchhiked for two hours in order to get to her house.
Dorcas had tried to spend every second she could since then keeping an eye on him whilst simultaneously trying very hard not to make him feel smothered. It was a difficult balancing act, to say the least.
Dorcas took a sip of her (pathetically weak) coffee as two figures walked into the room.
“You look like crap. Doing okay?” James gestured to Regulus as Marlene made her way to the kitchen counter.
Dorcas hadn’t really seen her since the party last week. Her hair was messy and spooled down to just below her shoulders in thick curls. She looked tired. Her loose and oversized t-shirt was wrinkled and she was wearing grey boxers which revealed her tanned legs - almost like she’d just rolled out of bed.
“Gee, thanks.” Regulus drawled sarcastically, “Good to know I look as shitty as I feel.”
“That’s not what I meant-” James’ eyes went wide.
“It’s fine.” Regulus cut him off, his voice softening just a smidge, enough for Dorcas to notice, “I’m good.”
“Mint tea always helps me with hangovers.” James supplied, eager to help.
Regulus looked at him slightly horrified, “Let me guess, that and a 10K run?”
“More alcohol helps with mine.” Marlene interjected rather unhelpfully from her spot on the counter where she was pouring coffee.
“Hey,” James turned to Regulus again, smirking, “I brought the Les Paul. I know how much you were dying to see it.”
“Well, dying is a bit of a strong word…” Regulus started, with a look that Dorcas knew meant that he absolutely was dying to see it.
James rolled his eyes, still smiling. He turned around to leave the room and Regulus got up and followed him wordlessly.
Just before leaving, James threw a warning glance over his shoulder at Marlene.
“Play nice.”
“Aye, Captain.” the other girl replied cheerily.
It dawned on Dorcas quite suddenly that she was now trapped alone within the same four walls as Marlene Mckinnon. For some strange and unimaginable reason, it made her want to jam a fork into her eyeball. It would probably cause less pain than the conversation the other girl was clearly gearing herself up for.
Behind her, Marlene cleared her throat.
“So…uhh… how have you been?”
Dorcas had to cover up her laughter. Sometime between this morning and now she had been abducted and taken to a parallel universe because there was no way the Marlene she knew was trying to make small talk with her.
“Good.” Dorcas replied as the other girl slipped into the seat in front of her where Regulus was previously sat. Dorcas gave her a once-over, struggling not to mock the way in which Marlene looked slightly uncomfortable.
“Cool.”
Marlene took one sip of her coffee and then grimaced, wrinkling her nose. “Fuck, this coffee is basically water.”
“What do you want?”
Dorcas wasn’t in the mood for awkward chit-chat.
The other girl sighed before starting again, “We've just written this new song that we think we’re going to release as a performance at the MTV awards this year - sellout, I know, but apparently it’s contractual or something and breaking a contract in this industry is akin to asking God himself to come down from the heavens and smite you - so we’re going to play it live. Unfortunately, the really sick melody we’ve worked out requires two electric guitars.”
The other girl paused.
Why was she being told all of this?
“Now,” Marlene carried on, unperturbed by Dorcas’ lack of a response, “I am generally quite good on instruments (you know, music school and all that) but there’s something about the electric guitar that I simply cannot hack. Believe me, I’ve tried. At some point after the band started blowing up I got it into my head that my performances would look a whole lot cooler if I was playing the guitar at the same time as I was singing. In the end I ended up just holding it because I was literally that bad at playing.”
In that moment, it was hard not to understand why Marlene became so popular so quickly. Even in a situation that she clearly didn’t want to be in she didn’t have it in her not to be… charming. Unfortunately, that was the only word Dorcas could really come up with. As soon as the other girl started talking for a long time it seemed to unconsciously spill into her words. Just effortless charm. Dorcas kind of hated that. But she also couldn’t help but finding the idea of Marlene holding a guitar and not touching it at all during gigs, simply because she thought it was cool, to be… just… well, just that: charming. She decided not to give Marlene too much credit for that, though.
“Besides, the melody is difficult and I probably wouldn’t be able to learn it in such a short time.”
At this point, Marlene took another deep breath, “Luckily, Remus can play the guitar really well. That leaves the bass part, which we’ve all decided it would be more efficient for me to learn. To do this, though, I would need a teacher…”
Marlene left the rest of the sentence without finishing as she bit the corner of her bottom lip and observed the other girls’ reaction quite closely.
Dorcas could almost feel the moment she understood everything, like a light bulb turning on in her head. Nope. No way. She had shit to do that didn’t involve teaching Marlene Mckinnon how to fumble her way through a bass guitar part.
“Can’t Remus teach you?”
“He’s too busy learning the guitar part. And besides, he’s an awful teacher. He tried to help me with my math homework once and I almost cried.”
Marlene looked at her with wide eyes. Luckily, Dorcas had grown up with Barty, Evan, Regulus, and Pandora, all of whom liked to do puppy eyes when they wanted something. It didn’t affect her much.
“Well… can’t you use playback?”
Marlene gasped in offence, “I would rather go on stage with a broken limb.”
“Start throwing yourself down the stairs, then.” Dorcas suggested.
Marlene sighed again in frustration, “We can’t use playback because MTV won’t let us. Last time they invited us they forced us to use it - when we didn’t want to - and we spent the whole performance swapping instruments and playing them stupidly. They didn’t find it as funny as we did.”
Dorcas actually remembered that. She had laughed when she saw the headlines in the papers, a snapshot of Marlene sitting on Lily’s lap on the drum kit, faces trying to look serious in concentration but the corner of Marlene’s mouth breaking into a smile anyways.
They sat in silence for a bit. Stalemate. Dorcas looked at the other girl, assessing the situation. Maybe she could gain something out of it. She wracked her brain for something that Marlene had that she wanted. It came to her quite suddenly, and she opened her mouth before her brain could even think it through.
“I’ll do it but on one condition.” She leaned forward on the table, eager to let the other girl know that she wasn’t someone she could just berate and then ask favours of whenever she felt like it. Marlene was the one asking for something here, not the other way around. “I’ll teach you the bass guitar if you help me with my songwriting.”
“Songwriting?” the other girl frowned.
“Yep. I’ve been in a rut. I blame LA.”
“Oh! I can fix that for you. Don’t blame non-sentient cities and blame yourself instead. Are we even now?”
Dorcas just gave a self-satisfied smile and remained silent. She was the one with the power here.
The other girl rolled her eyes, “Do I really have to? It’s just that I don’t want to spend more time with you than strictly necessary.”
“Look, from where I’m standing it’s not like you’re really in a position to ask for anything. You’re desperate. The MTV awards are in, what - five weeks? I’d pipe down if I were you.”
Dorcas was really enjoying her position right now.
Marlene fixed her with a hard glare.
“That’s the only way I’ll do it.” Dorcas leant back, taking a sip from her coffee with a smile.
They stayed silent for a while, Marlene clearly doing some difficult negotiations in her brain with her patience tolerance as she frowned in thought. Dorcas could see exactly when her resolve snapped.
She rolled her eyes, “Deal.”
Just to rub it in, Dorcas smiled sweetly, “See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Fuck you.”
The other girl got up, spun around and started making her way towards the door.
“Meet in room three at eight.”
She didn’t even bother to look back.
Dorcas smiled to herself. She was starting to realise it was actually quite fun to annoy Marlene.
She went back to the practice room shortly after and the rest of the day went by relatively productively. At some point Peter popped his head in and asked if the others wanted any help on their songs. When he mentioned he was willing to produce them for free (“I lucked out with a bunch of rich friends so I feel like I have to keep doing nice things otherwise karma's gonna get me.”) Regulus almost stuttered when he replied, which was about as explicit as he got with his emotions. Dorcas could tell that inside his head alarm bells were ringing off. It was funny how much of a celebrity Regulus considered Peter, especially given the fact that when he met Kate Moss and Christy Turlington the other day he barely batted an eye.
By the time the afternoon came around, Dorcas was craving a proper cup of coffee. She went to the kitchen a few minutes before she and Marlene were supposed to meet and started making a large pot. The proper kind. She poured it into her travel mug and set off towards room three.
She didn’t really know where it was, but she refused to ask anyone because her wandering would probably make her late and annoy Marlene, who was almost surely waiting for her there - as Dorcas’ mom had always said, the Meadowes family ran on spite and spite alone. She used the extra time to reflect on how far along they were in Dorcas’ internal schedule to having a proper album in the works. They had a bunch of songs written already, ones which they performed time and time again, but they all wanted to find a proper angle into it. They wanted their first proper album to work on a conceptual level as well as a musical one.
So far, the only proper idea they had come up with was ‘Posh teens struggle on the streets of San Francisco in the wake of being disowned by their mega rich parents’, which wasn’t really a selling idea - Barty and Evan had come up with it, of course.
It would have helped if Dorcas was able to write better. She was the only one who did it consistently. Regulus only wrote when he felt like it and the songs he produced - while brilliant - were too personal for him to want to share. Pandora also wrote, although her talent seemed to be in building on other people’s lyrics and making it into something incredible. It was different in San Fran, because Dorcas hadn’t really realised just how many other bands exactly like them there were. Sure, there were a lot of musicians there but it was more of a music scene, whereas LA was a music industry. It had strict rules of its own that no one seemed to want to tell Dorcas.
She tried to ignore the way that last fact seemed to burn into her chest. Dorcas never particularly minded rules; she could follow them to get exactly what she wanted or twist them and use them to her advantage. So long as she knew what they were. She felt like she was in quicksand, trying desperately to get out but only making herself more stuck. If she could just get some sort of crash course on how everything worked she would be able to get rid of the ball of stress in her stomach that tried to claw its way up her throat every time she thought about the fact that they didn’t really know what they were doing.
She turned a corner to see the hallway passage come to a dead end, save for a large metal door with the words ‘Room 3’ spray painted in purple. Dorcas was spiteful, but she also wasn’t going to do Marlene the favour of making Dorcas’ life more difficult, so she walked towards the door instead of making another loop of the building.
Inside, the room was essentially a series of couches and arm chairs and music stands. The walls - exposed brick - were covered in pictures and posters much like the common room. It was as if someone had projectile vomited the contents of their brain all over the walls. It was fascinating.
“You’re late.” Marlene bit out harshly
It wasn’t a question, so Dorcas didn’t respond. She just shrugged her shoulders and fell into the armchair that looked the most comfortable.
The other girl sighed, “Here’s the music.”
She handed her a piece of paper without looking and turned around to do something else.
Dorcas had thought about it long and hard today and realised that she had ultimately made the right call. Would these sessions leave her with a strong stabbing pain in the back of her head? Yes. But it was a well-known fact that Marlene Mckinnon was one of the best lyricists of all time. How she managed that with such an apparent lack of deep thought, Dorcas didn’t know, but she was willing to find out. She was going to suck it up, take the other girl’s advice, and write a song so good it would pay for an entire studio for herself.
Dorcas looked down at the sheet of paper in front of her. Below the notes, she could make out the small printed lyrics of the song. It was called ‘Take Me Out’ and it was… well, it was good. The lyrics had that self-mocking charm Dorcas liked so much about Marlene’s music. It was full of contradictions and just pure messiness. She felt a small stab of jealousy. Her own writing was never that free, that open. It was always too neat.
Dorcas looked up to see the other girl sitting down opposite her, cupping a glass of water with both hands, staring back at her.
“So, do you own a bass or are we just air-guitaring it for now?” Dorcas teased.
“Very funny.” Marlene smiled humorlessly as she turned around to fish something from behind one of the couches. “You know you laugh now but studies have actually shown that air-playing and even just thinking about playing an instrument can actually help you quite a lot.”
“Are you willing to provide sources for these studies?” Dorcas countered.
“I’m a musical genius. I know about these things.” Marlene lifted her head up from behind the couch to smirk, her face slightly red from being upside-down for so long. Dorcas just raised an eyebrow.
“I also read quite a lot.” she clarified.
She pulled her arm up to reveal a wooden bass guitar covered in stickers and small writing in marker. She was sure Marlene thought it was the epitome of cool, but Dorcas was ready to call child protective services in order to get the instrument a new home.
“That should be illegal.” Dorcas stared back, horrified.
“What do you mean?”
“I can practically hear the guitar screaming in pain.”
A smirk crept on Marlene’s face, revealing a small dimple. She moved her hand to her back pocket and pulled out a marker. “And what about now?”
“Don’t you dare.”
Marlene just smiled, eyes innocent as she flipped the guitar around to write on the side of the neck. After she had finished, the other girl angled the guitar so that Dorcas could see what she had written.
“Chances on the poor guitar recovering from this?” Marlene’s eyes were wide with feigned concern.
On the guitar, Dorcas read the words ‘Marlene Mckinnon unfortunately couldn’t give less of a fuck about what Dorcas Meadowes thinks’ in scrawly handwriting.
“Wow,” Dorcas replied calmly, “I really must mean so little to you for you to permanently write your feelings towards me on an instrument you’re going to be playing non-stop for the next five weeks.”
Marlene stopped and then started again, ultimately taking it in her stride.
“I like to keep my anger close to my heart, you know.” she nodded sagely.
Dorcas put a hand to her heart, “I’m touched.”
Marlene looked at her with vague irritation.
“Okay let’s start the lesson.”
Dorcas didn’t do anything to hide her smug smile.
She decided it would be better to focus on simple hand position and notes for the first session. There was a bit in the music that Dorcas actually quite liked, a slow breakdown of the first melody into a complete switch into a second one. It would be musically quite challenging, especially to play live because it required all of the band members to be completely in time with one another as they shifted to a different tempo slowly and in unison. It was clear a lot of thought had been put into the instrumental.
Unfortunately, if Marlene didn’t get better quickly all that work would have been for nothing. She really hadn’t been lying when she said she had no experience on the bass whatsoever.
“Why do you even own a bass guitar if you’re never going to play it?” Dorcas asked, genuinely confused.
“It was a gift from my friend Alice.” The other girl defended herself, although somewhat weakly. She looked a bit like a scolded child.
“Did Alice know you were going to desecrate her heartfelt present?” Dorcas was still not over the fact that it looked like a scrapbook.
Marlene stood up a bit straighter, “She put the first sticker on. And the first message.”
“But didn’t she know you can’t play the bass?” Dorcas repeated insistently.
Marlene just sighed in frustration. “She’s the only manager we’ve ever had and she was around during my whole ‘stand with a guitar and never play it’ faze. She thought it was hilarious. She bought me it so I could (and I quote) ‘move on to not-playing the bass instead.’”
Dorcas huffed a laugh which Marlene mirrored in a more reluctant manner.
The session continued. One moment Marlene would pick a fight over the smallest, most insignificant details and the next she would stop the practice to share a funny anecdote she had just remembered. It was giving Dorcas verbal whiplash. At times she could almost forget that they hated each other. But it would always come crashing down the next second as they devolved into a competition of who could irritate the other person more.
She supposed they had just reached a comfortable level of mutual hatred. One where it was always understood that they would never really be anything more than two people who were forced to share the same environment. It gave them a sort of ease. They didn’t have to spend all their time jibing at one another because they knew exactly where they stood - spending extra effort in reminding the other person that they didn’t like them was exhausting and not necessary. Towards the end of the session, Dorcas had found some sort of comfort in the exact transparency of their feelings.
“You willing to stay another hour? I can help you with some songwriting now if you’re not too tired.” Marlene asked, packing up the guitar.
“Sure,” Dorcas lied, preferring to stay and work even if it meant she lost out on a bit of sleep, “ if you’re not too tired yourself.”
“I don’t really fall asleep quickly, it usually takes me until like two am so I’m good.” the other girl replied with a smile slightly tighter than usual.
Before Dorcas could ask further, the door swung open revealing James, brow furrowed in concentration as he attempted to push open the door with his foot whilst carrying two mugs.
“Made… some… chai.” which were the only words he managed to get out as he tried to get through the doorway. Deciding to put him out of his misery, Dorcas walked over to the door and helped him.
“No!” Marlene gasped in what could only be described as pure delight.
Dorcas tried to hold back the smile that threatened to overcome her face as she was reminded of the conversation she had with Lily last week. If Marlene’s expression was anything to go by, Lily hadn’t been lying when she said that they had been suffering chai-induced withdrawals for the past few years.
“My knight in shining armour.” Marlene smiled brightly as she grabbed one of the mugs and held it with both hands.
“You didn’t have to.” Dorcas smiled as she took hers with a grateful smile of her own.
“It’s no problem. I knew you guys were gonna be working late so I thought why not?”
“Are you going home soon?” Marlene asked, relaxing into one of the couches.
James sat down next to her, “Maybe. Might work on some new songs though.”
Marlene looked at him sternly, “James, you’ve been working all day. Go home.”
“I had a power nap like three hours ago.” James grinned innocently.
“You’re sick in the head.”
“Oh please, I can’t even count the amount of times I have gotten here in the morning to see that you worked here all night until you broke from exhaustion and fell asleep on one of the couches.”
“But isn’t that the point?” the other girl asked gravely, looking into his eyes and grabbing James’ shoulder with both hands, “aren’t sick people supposed to help each other?”
James just rolled his eyes, switching the topic of conversation entirely.
“Hey Dorcas, we’re doing a movie night on Thursday at mine and Peter’s. You should come. And bring Regulus… and, you know, the rest of your friends. It’s my turn to pick a movie.” James smiled at her through those ridiculously large glasses of his.
“Sure.”
“I swear to God if you choose Steel Magnolias one more time…” Marlene started.
“I haven’t chosen it the past three times!” James defended himself.
“Isn’t that the movie with Dolly Parton?” Dorcas interjected. Both of them turned to look at her, James with a look of unbridled glee and Marlene with a look of unbridled horror.
“What? Barty and Regulus went through a faze in fifth year where they really liked that movie.”
James gasped, “Perfect! It’s literally fate.”
“Please, please say you don’t want to watch it again. Please take it back.” Marlene looked over to Dorcas, eyes wide.
If only Dorcas didn’t enjoy watching the other girl get upset. The corner of her mouth curled upwards as she began, “You know, I’ve been wanting to rewatch that movie for a while…”
James’ cheers were cut short by Marlene unceremoniously forcing him out of the room. James chuckled, shooting a conspiratorial wink at Dorcas which she returned, as he was pushed through the door. It closed with a loud slam.
Marlene glared at her, “I hate you.”
“What, you don’t like Dolly Parton or Sally Field or Julia Roberts? What’s not to like?”
The other girl turned and started searching for something on one of the coffee tables. “James watches Steel Magnolias at least once a month. After a while it loses its charm.”
Dorcas gasped, “I’m sure that’s not true.”
Marlene picked up a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and moved over to another coffee table in the corner of the room. Whilst she was doing this, Dorcas looked closer at the photographs stuck on the wall. Some of them showed them as teenagers, fresh-faced and still as messy and uncontrollable as they seemed today. Various pictures of nights out with huge smiles littered the walls, and morning-afters with everyone hunched over a table and a cup of coffee, or else still asleep with various profanities drawn in sharpie on their faces. In one of them, James and Remus are smiling, thumbs up, either side of a deeply asleep Lily on what looked like a coach journey. In another, Marlene is asleep on a couch, one arm curled around the waist of a blonde who is very much awake and shooting a warm smile at the person behind the camera.
Dorcas was distracted by movement from the other side of the room. Leather-bound journal in hand, Marlene started heading towards a small door which Dorcas had only just noticed.
“Bring the Chai and a pen, we’ll work outside.”
As she came through the door behind Marlene, Dorcas wasmet by a small balcony with white plastic patio furniture. A round white table with an ashtray was surrounded by four small chairs, one of which Marlene was currently sitting on. Dorcas sat down on the one next to it, so that they had both their backs to the wall, looking out at the view in front of them. She passed Marlene’s chai over to her, keeping her own close to her chest to warm her up. It wasn’t particularly cold, but a small breeze was picking up. Dorcas hadn’t realised the height of the studio before, but it stood a good storey above everything else around it. The tops of streetlights and palm trees poked through the rows of warehouse roofs, into the night sky.
Beside her, Marlene lit a cigarette, “So, what do you need help with?”
Dorcas tried to think of a way to put her current predicament in a way that made her sound like less of a failed writer and more like someone plagued by a much cooler, much more existential form of writer’s block.
“Okay, nevermind, I know what it is.”
“How can you know-”
Marlene waved a hand dismissively.
“Look,” she paused as Dorcas took one of her cigarettes from the pack and lit it with the lighter, raising an eyebrow but ultimately deciding not to comment on it, “I’m going to be blunt with you: you won’t write any good music if you’re afraid of being vulnerable.”
Dorcas took a drag from her cigarette.
“Do you know what people do when they’re afraid to be vulnerable?” Marlene carried on, “They rely on silly little cliches in order to make it look like they are speaking from the heart without ever having to do it. It’s one of the scariest things ever. It’s an awful process. Once the words are out there there’s nothing you can do, it’s all out of your control. But it’s what you have to do in order to write good lyrics. I don’t just mean that you have to write about the most traumatic parts of your life; being open to vulnerability can be as simple as sharing an opinion others may disagree with. The fact of the matter is that you will never produce good songwriting if you’re too afraid to put yourself out there - you may make good music, but not good lyrics.”
Dorcas didn’t know how to respond, so she didn’t. She had grown up thinking that the best she could be was protected. Strong. She had grown up a black woman and working class in a school built for the elites of the California tech boom. To be emotional was to be weak, it was to be hysterical, it was to not be taken seriously, your words dismissed without anyone even listening to them. She had worked her whole life to create exactly who she had become, and she was not sure if she was ready to knock it down for the prospect of a few chart-topper hits.
From the corner of her eye she could sense Marlene watching her.
“What’s your fatal flaw, do you think?”
“What?” Dorcas turned to her, surprised at the question.
“Not ‘what you’re most scared of’, but your fatal flaw. You know, some part of you that you think could ruin your life if you gave it the chance, something that you think will always be a part of you.”
Dorcas just stared back at the other girl as a small breeze pushed a few baby hairs into her face. Her brown eyes smiled playfully.
“Come on, if you can admit that to someone who you think will almost definitely use it to their advantage later then you can admit it to hundreds of unnamed strangers.”
Dorcas didn’t even know where to begin. She thought that if she started, she would never stop.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours…” Marlene smirked suggestively, raising her eyebrows.
Dorcas rolled her eyes, “Fine. But I have to think about it first.”
Marlene nodded, and the other girl turned to look back out at the view. She thought that if she had a balcony like this, she would never leave it.
Dorcas had so many ‘fatal flaws’. Sometimes she stood in the mirror and wondered how she looked so solid. How she was all one piece. She felt like an ancient ruin that had decayed but been put together again by archeologists. Shitty archaeologists. Like, instead of using glue they just duct taped it all together and expected it to function as usual. Sometimes she was tired of holding it all together. Sometimes it seemed like that was all she ever did; making sure everything was in place and it all looked seamless. Sometimes she wondered what it all was for. And then, someone noticed a crack and Dorcas remembered. Like a bucket of ice cold water.
She didn’t want to do it, but she knew deep down that Marlene was right. She thought, out of anyone outside of her close friends, she was probably the person she would most like to admit something like this to. It was not like Marlene’s view of Dorcas could worsen. She already hated her.
Dorcas took a deep breath, “If I was given the choice between being envied and being loved, I think I would choose the first option.” She continued looking forward, refusing to look at Marlene who she knew was watching her. She tried to ignore the pit at the bottom of her stomach. She tried to ignore the fact that it felt like none of these things were true until she said them aloud, “I want people to look at me and think that I’m everything they want to be. I don’t want people to see my flaws and say some stupid shit like they ‘love me in spite of them’-”
“But that’s what literally happens-”
“I don’t care.” Dorcas stated simply, “I want people to see me and want to fucking strangle me with how jealous they are. I want to be absolutely worshipped and I will choose that over genuine love every time.”
Slowly, she looked back at Marlene. She was watching her with kind, gentle eyes. She looked like a painting in the glow of the orange lamplight, features absolutely still.
“That’s one hell of a flaw, Meadowes.”
“Don’t I know it.” the other girl grumbled.
“I get it, though.” Dorcas refused to acknowledge the way in which the tightness in her ribcage lessened at those words, “I think that being in and around the industry since I was, like, thirteen has given me a really fucked up sense of what praise and self-worth is.”
She turned her head to the side to take a drag of her cigarette. Her fingers looked delicate as they flicked ash into the ashtray.
“Thirteen?” Dorcas echoed. She knew they had all been around seventeen when Gryffindor Tower skyrocketed to fame, which was young, but thirteen? Dorcas looked at her then and couldn’t help but seeing something had changed. She didn’t look as whiny and temperamental as Dorcas had thought before. It was admiration, Dorcas recognised, that had made her appear stronger now.
Marlene just shrugged, “It was disgusting. There were so many things that happened that I registered as normal when I really shouldn’t have. We all did.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
Dorcas tried not to wince at herself using the therapy-speak that she has perfected over the years after having to support her friends through their shitty childhoods. Still, Marlene looked genuinely thankful, so she supposed she was doing something right.
“I was completely alone for most of it, too. I only met James when I was sixteen. He’d been going out for a while, too, but not as long as I had. We met Remus and Lily after, and they had only started going to the clubs and stuff because of the band they used to play in, so they never really experienced it like James, Sirius and I did.”
“Sirius?” Dorcas repeated, confused.
Marlene laughed, but it was devoid of any humour. She looked forward, her profile looking soft in the dim light. “He doesn’t really talk about it much. When we met him he had been by himself in LA for like a week. This city’s not great for people who are young, desperate, and on their own.”
Dorcas pried her eyes away from Marlene and looked at the landscape in front of her. She felt oddly proud of herself for telling the other girl her most fatal flaw. It gave her confidence. It solidified her fears into nothing but a simple fact, something outside of herself that she could interact with as she pleased.
“You know, I always find it easier to look at yourself and your fears in the same way that you would view a book character’s” Marlene commented, “Like something that’s interesting or makes you more complex. That way it doesn’t feel as scary to let everyone know, it just feels like you’re writing something good.”
Maybe these sessions wouldn’t be so bad.