Diana was my foster mother and the guardian that the court appointed when I was in and out of mental hospitals, which meant she was still in control of my finances even though I was old enough to access my trust fund. I’d considered petitioning the courts to have the guardianship formally rescinded, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Diana was the closest thing I had to a mother figure, and it felt like a betrayal to go around her when she tries so hard to take care of me. She made sure that my bills got paid on time when I would have otherwise forgotten, set up grocery deliveries because I would go hungry instead of leaving the apartment if I was in a mood, and managed my inheritance so the money would last for my entire life.
I slung my bag onto the table next to the door. “What did you tell her?”
“The truth. Your bottles are all almost empty, which is a good sign.” She casts me a sly glance, her gaze taking in the crooked neckline of my shirt from when I hastily pulled it back on in the costume room. “But for all I know, you’re taking pills out and flushing them down the toilet every day.” She picked up the remote and flicked the channel, smiling when some foul-mouthed cartoon came on the screen. “What else was I supposed to say?”
“That, I guess.” The kitchen cabinet next to the fridge was full of enough bottles to stock a pharmacy. I sincerely doubted that Cleo took the time to go through them all. “I’m sure you’d tell her if you thought something was wrong.”
She snorted without looking away from the screen.
Cleo was a doe-eyed senior in the undergraduate theater program with a body out of a dirty magazine and a scary ability to read people. When we first met, I assumed she’d end up using her expensive education to give situationally believable hand-jobs on some porn set in the San Fernando Valley. But for as beautiful as she was, Cleo knew that all the magic happened behind the camera, and she was way too smart for anyone to take advantage of her.
Diana let her live in the second bedroom of my fancy high-rise apartment rent-free in exchange for spying on me. But Cleo and I had a decent arrangement. As long as I didn’t give her any obvious reasons to sound the alarm with my guardian, then we could mostly stay out of each other’s hair. I didn’t exactly love that Diana picked someone younger than me to be my mother hen, but apparently no one my age was hard up enough for cash to take the offer.
I knew Cleo thought I was weird as hell because she said something to that effect on a daily basis. There was always a gentleness to the observation, so I tried not to take it too personally.
She giggled at a poop joke but then craned her head over the couch as I passed behind her. “Hey, the condo association sent some maintenance guys to look at the plumbing. I had to let them into that cave you call a room. If you don’t straighten it up, Diana is going to freak when she visits next week.”
The visits were supposed to be a surprise, so Diana could make sure I wasn’t “decompensating” again, but Cleo always warned me when they were imminent. But I had no plans to change anything about my room. Diana could freak out if she wanted to, but I had everything set up the way I needed it to be.
“Thanks for the heads up.”
But she didn’t turn back to the show. “A few of us are going to the Taphouse tonight for drinks. You should come.”
I got the feeling that she was only offering the olive branch because she felt guilty about spying on me for Diana. It wasn’t like I blamed her for it. If Cleo had refused the job, Diana would have just found someone else to do it. But even though we got along okay in the apartment, Cleo and I ran with very different crowds.
Hers was an actual crowd. Mine was me and sometimes Adonis, but mostly me.
I forced myself to smile in a way that I hoped looked normal. “Maybe next time.”
“You could bring Adonis.”
So that was her angle. If Adonis stood out in the graduate program, to the younger students, he was a glorious god among mere mortals. “Have fun. Don’t stay out too late.”
With a shrug, she turned back to the television as I hurried for the safety of my room and shut the door behind me.
As I surveyed the space, I could only imagine what a stranger would think if they saw it. It wasn’t much different than when movies depicted the room of a disgraced cop hunting a serial killer.
Drawings and paintings of dark and deathly landscapes covered every inch of the walls, some ripped out of sketchbooks and others done on actual canvas when I felt compelled to take the time. Imaginary creatures, many of them sinister, sculpted out of clay or paper mâché crowded each surface. Some of the work was good, and in another life, I might have made a career of it. I could be the H.R. Giger of twisted fantasy.
But to have it all here like this looked more than a little crazy.
Or like the space of a person with an overactive imagination and entirely too much time on their hands. I’d never seen Diana madder than when one of the dozens of psychiatrists I saw in the hospital first suggested that I translate the things I saw in my waking nightmares into art and then made the art therapy part of my treatment plan. She’d called him the worst sort of quack.
She probably wasn’t wrong, looking at the results of his advice.
When I didn’t create to get the persistent images out of my head and into some other medium, I read. Bookshelves dominated one wall, overstuffed with volumes of every type even though I felt drawn to the fantasy stories that I both loved and despised.
They felt like reading someone else’s memories, both intimate and voyeuristic. As I grabbed a book off my shelf at random and collapsed onto the messy bed, Diana’s nagging voice echoed in my mind from the last actual conversation we had weeks ago.
“I hope you’re not spending all your time daydreaming in your room or creating those . . . things. People will think you’re a snob, or worse. You’re in college, for heaven’s sake. This is the time when you should be living your life to the fullest. Meeting men! You’re so lovely, plenty of boys would fall all over you if you just put in a little bit of effort. I’d rather discover you’ve had a string of one-night-stands a mile long than spent every waking moment outside of class by yourself. I want to see you fall in love, even start a family.”
Diana was the old-fashioned type. I didn’t think she’d be happy taking a step back from me until she knew there was a husband with traditional values in the picture to keep me in line. Sometimes I wondered if I would ever be able to prove to her that I could take care of myself.
I knew she meant well by encouraging me to date. But when I went out in the world, all I could think about was how little it seemed like I belonged there. That didn’t really make good conversation for a romantic dinner. And Diana acted like being single and without children at the ripe old age of twenty-four meant my biological clock was moments from running out.
Ignoring the specter of my lovably nagging guardian, I opened the book and relaxed back against the pillows. With a little frisson of pleasure, I realized that I grabbed one of my favorites.
Lament of the Underworld was probably the work that most influenced my fevered imagination. I found it among my parents’ things when I was a kid, and I treated my copy like gold because, as far as I could tell, it had gone out of print years ago. I’d never run into another copy, no matter how much time I spent in used bookstores.