I had to put my phone on silent.
Notifications were raging over it—news about my upcoming move to the US had traveled fast. Eric kept me busy with a schedule fit for a minister, and I had to focus on Ever After; this project, as much as I didn’t want it, would be a new beginning in my career. Work had kept my mind away from thinking about Aurore and her lack of notifications. She had bluntly ghosted me. Maybe it was for the best. I didn’t insist. I wouldn’t be selfish with her.
Here, there was that void again that could only be filled with work.
I arrived at the address of the theater, hidden in a small alley in Paris. I stepped inside, and the overwhelming noise of people talking and laughing stung my ears. It was not my place. I took it upon myself and continued my way through the crowd, already feeling my fingers tingling with the need to get out.
It was filled with the kind of people everyone would instantly love: ones with cheerful outfits, radiant smiles, loving other people with ease for a reason that was unknown to me.
“Are you coming here to see your kids, sir?” A group of ladies, probably in their fifties, eyed me with an intrigued expression.
“No, I’m here to see—” The one dressed in a black cape like the evil godmother in the back. The one who’s rushing from corner to corner in the middle of the stage with a skull wand. “Someone.”
“Someone? Are you family?” one of them continued, blocking me with a creepy smile.
A knot formed in my throat, and I readjusted my suit, clearly uncomfortable by this interrogation. “No, I’m—” Desperate. Needy. Conflicted. “Just watching.”
I didn’t charm the group of housewives. They stared at each other as if they had encountered a pervert they wanted to get rid of.
“If you’ll excuse me.” I edged away from them and the crowd for what mattered.
I found a corner, exiled from the seats at the front of the stage, near the backstage and bathroom entrance. I would be free to be alone and still be able to watch my Aurore on scene. I had made a note on my phone that today was the day she was giving the spectacle with the kids from the hospital.
So I came to see her in a desperate and psychotic act.
She wasn’t informed I was coming, and it was better this way.
“You’re hiding too,” a frail voice came from next to me.
I looked down and peered at the teenage girl sitting on the floor with something that looked like a notebook in her hands. Her fingers were blackened with charcoal, so I deduced she was probably drawing. A messy kind of drawing.
“Indeed,” I replied, even more uncomfortable with kids than adults. They always looked so glowing and joyous, like they expected you to create fireworks just for them. “I’m not good with people.”
That surplus of information wasn’t necessary on my part, but that was meant to warn her: please don’t interact with me, or I’ll scare you.
“Me neither,” she chuckled, and my plan backfired. She continued her pencil lines in her sketchbook. “I’m actually terrified of them. I’m afraid to look stupid or uninteresting. That’s why I’m hiding here.”
“People aren’t that interesting anyway.” The kid was the feminine, younger version of my old self. “You shouldn’t care what they think. It’s their problem if they don’t like you. It’s their loss, not yours.”
“I want to fit in.” She gave me a look with piercing green eyes before getting back to her drawing. “I’m supposed to be part of the spectacle, but I didn’t say a word to the other guys. They probably think I’m a freak.”
I took a look at her. She was wearing some kind of armor on top of a long, white, creepy dress, and a sword prop was on the ground next to her.
“A knight. You chose to be a knight or a ghost.” I scowled. That teenager was weird, and she was probably the second most interesting person in this room.
“I’m the ghost of the first woman to be knighted, but I was obviously a princess before because who doesn’t like a crown?” She chuckled, and I surprised myself by not being bored by this conversation.
“You remind me of someone I know.” And my fucker smile was on again. “She’s much older, obviously.”
“See, you’re good with people.”
She gave me a look, and I leaned forward to see what she was drawing. I was expecting to find some doodles and had already prepared a polite smile, but this was surprisingly decent. Very good, even. She was doing a manga about some girl arriving at a new school full of what looked like vampires.
“Hey! It’s not nice to look at it before it’s finished!” She clutched her notebook to her chest and frowned. “Plus, it’s terrible—it looks so bland. I’m bad at this, and—”
“That’s because you’re not focusing on how your final drawing will look. You want to make it pretty and perfect, but it shouldn’t be. Each character has their own unique facial expressions that shape their personality. Use it to tell a story.”
She went a couple of pages back and squinted at me as if she was processing whether my advice was that good or stupid.
“You’re right, I didn’t think of that. That’s why they all look the same. But it’s so hard to paint expressions.” She gave me some weird puppy eyes. “Do you draw?”
“A bit.” I felt uneasy, her eyes on me. “Do you want me to show you?”
She nodded. “You can try, but I’m not sure I’ll succeed. I’m not good enough.”
“Looks like someone made you believe a lie,” I said, pulling up my trousers to squat next to her on the ground. “You’re good.”
She handed me her sketchbook and lifted a brow. “You’re just being nice.”
“If you knew me, you’d know I’m not known to be nice.”
She drew a full smile as I sketched some facial expressions for one of her characters and showed her how to work with them. I used her and the info I gathered from her personality as an example. My little student did the same afterward, progressing really fast. She had the same ability to see the world in a unique way, giving birth to a whole new universe, just like Aurore.
“I got it!” she screamed, looking at her sketches as if she was holding a masterpiece. “It’s so much more powerful now. This is the best advice someone has ever given me! You’re actually good at drawing. You should do that for a job.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Her eyes bulged as if she had just come up with some crazy idea. “Perhaps now you can show me how to—”
“Luna? Where are you?”
We both recognized that voice coming from the scene, turning around at the exact time. My fairy. Her gaze roamed the stands.
Wait. Does that mean—
I took a step back and parted away from the ghost knight teenager. This was her sister. Although they didn’t look exactly alike physically, I should have known. I’d been talking to her sister. Fuck.
“Shit, that’s my sister, who probably wants to include me in the group or is worried because she thinks I’m still eight.” The girl rose, and I was probably staring at her like a freak.
“Better not be late, then,” I managed somehow to say. “And, Luna, you’ll fit in—they would be stupid not to accept you. You’re the second human or, more likely, ghost knight in this room I liked having a conversation with.”
“Thank you.” She gave me a beaming smile. “You’re not as boring as the other adults. You’re fun.”
Fun? I’d never been described as fun.
That little ray of sunshine waved at me before she went away to meet with her sister. “See you, Ajax!”
Ajax? I froze. All this time, she knew who I was, and she hadn’t said a thing. I must have looked like a fool. I let out a sigh and a small laugh despite everything—Bardot girls were resourceful.
From afar, I saw Aurore introducing her to the others. In just a matter of time, they were all interacting together. I kept myself busy until the beginning of the show, with my fairy rushing from corner to corner as the seats were getting full, and with Luna, who was showing her drawing to the other kids. All was going well, thank fuck.
At the sight of her sister fitting into the group, Aurore, dressed up as the evil queen, was getting out of character by giving a tender look to them. It made me think of her story. The moment I had Aurore’s manuscript in my hand, I decided to have a sneak peek at it and ended up reading the whole thing. Twice. I even added annotations and had it formatted like a full-size book. Although she hadn’t attached the whole story; the ending was missing. I had never been so involved in a story as this, and there were a million odds to finish this tale. It was an impossible problem to solve.
The play began, and a horde of princesses, princes, villains, and heroes embarked on a story that only Aurore could have written. I freed myself from my place against the wall when the little girl in a wheelchair was secured with strings. She had an outfit with wings. She recited her text, and suddenly, the cables made her fly into the false sky. She was lifted into the air. Aurore applauded, jumping in her corner. She did it. She had kept her promise.
“You made me fly!”
I heard tears could mean someone’s happiness was so overwhelming it couldn’t be managed. This was what was happening to the girl who flew in the air and came to hug Aurore the first moment she landed. The parents were moved, and some had tears too. As for me, I had nothing. Not a single tear.
My phone beeped again.
New emails came in, including my plane ticket for my upcoming departure. My schedule was full with potential collaborations with huge brands for the future—if I didn’t fuck up with Ever After and showed I could indeed produce more than gloomy and blank canvases. It was everything I believed I wanted.
But as I walked away in the middle of the theater show, under the eyes of the ladies gossiping about me and my rudeness, I missed the unknown and the unplanned.
I missed the mess she was making in my empty life.
“I can’t believe you did all this.” Eric roamed into my emptied atelier with a cryptic gaze.
His nostrils flared, probably from the aroma of oil paint that wasn’t completely dry, and he faced my latest artwork positioned on tarps. This time, they weren’t blank canvases.
The fact I hadn’t slept for a week had helped my productivity, to the point that on the last stroke on the canvas, every fiber of my body was revolting. My body was as stiff as after having done intense training for six hours in a row.
“This one’s my favorite.” Eric craned his neck to look at the piece. “It somehow made me remember The Sad Girl. She looks like Aurore.” Of course, she looked like her. It was her, despite the fact that I had played with contrast and was hiding part of her face from the public. “It has a Mexican gothic inspiration. Her heart inside her thoracic cage is ripping, and birds, the ones that are flying away from her dress, try to sew off her heart with some fairy dust or something. You even worked with gold paper for contrast.”
“I did.” For all I knew, Eric was explaining better than I my own artwork. Words weren’t my strong suit.
“It’s excellent.” He brought a finger to his chin as if he was already thinking of how he’d be able to market the series. “Each of your pieces is part of a story, so each piece is priceless. It’s like holding a fragment of a story.”
They all thought I was dead, so I’d give them enough to raise the dead from hell. “You can contact the exhibits, but I want them together. The highest bidder will win.”
“Of course, of course.” He stopped in front of the following painting. The woman was sitting like a regal queen, her skin ashen, on a throne of veils. She had chains around her, imprisoning the birds. “Huh, interesting.”
I didn’t bother to ask what was when his eyes stopped on what was essentially a self-portrait: a man, devoid of color, was living in a world of black and white and was being offered a four-leaf clover by that same woman. She was glowing in the dark like an angel, the birds waltzing around them in some sort of dance.
“I’ve never seen you paint anything like that.” The following piece was the apparition of a hint of color on the man’s heart at the contact of their touch, despite the barriers of thorns growing close to the woman to separate them.
In the next canvas, the man had ripped out his heart, the only colored part of him, to give it to her. She had accepted it, but the man became a statue. And the last painting was my own personal favorite. The woman hugged the statue, cracks appearing where she made contact as if the man wanted to break out from this curse.
I believed I had painted every shade of what Aurore and I were.
“For the first time in my life, I did something impulsive in contrast to my meticulous personality. You should celebrate,” I said.
Eric wrote down the information about the size of the canvases on his phone. “You never party, Ajax.”
“That’s why I said you.” I crossed my arms. The idea of a celebration was torture to me.
He chuckled. I’d never made him this content before. “This is great! It’s your best work. But wait, if we send these for exhibitions, what about Ever After? This is not your project?”
“No.” My tone was dry.
His smile disappeared as fast as it came. “No? Please, tell me you have something.”
“I do.” I paused. “I have something planned for Ever After. Something you’ll strongly disapprove of.”
He exhaled, shutting his eyes closed for a moment. “I knew that it seemed too good to be true. Why do you have to make my job harder than it is?”
“Don’t worry.” I readjusted my suit and walked out of my atelier, knowing what I had to do. “I’m taking care of everything.”
