by Tara Ellis
Vanessa Medina walked back into her shanty of a motel room, she plopped two cell phones on a table and waited. She was anticipating something. After two or three hours one of her cell phones rang. She picked it up and said. “Hello you’ve reached Mrs. Milham.” The voice on the other line replied “Hi Mrs. Milham. I just had an interview with a former student of yours, Selena Santana. She seemed like a very intelligent girl and we would like for her to be on our team. I just have to ask, what type of student was she?”
Vanessa began to gush over the phone in a high pitched voice. She started out a little cartoonish but she became more convincing as the conversation ended. She gave a good impression. And that’s meant in two ways. She left them feeling good about their interviewee and she created a believable personality.
Twenty minutes later her other cell rang; she picked it up and became somebody else once again. “You’ve reached Selena.”
She had gotten the job.
After the phone call ended she collapsed on the old spring mattress squealing like a pig. The moment was absorbing into her. She bounced up and down screaming “I actually pulled it off. I can’t believe I actually pulled it off.” But she did. The job was hers.
She had her luggage packed before midnight. She stored everything she needed in two garbage bags. Daddy initially paid for three weeks at the Knights Inn Motel but Vanessa skipped out a week and a half early. Her plan was to leave her old life behind and start a complete new one.
She didn’t want a job in Detroit for a few reasons. The city was in shabby shape, even before the economy sunk. The only jobs that were hiring were mainly fast food. And she wanted to be someplace her family didn’t know. She disliked that Daddy still supported her; even though she felt technically on her own.
A part of her missed being with family, but another part still held a great deal of animosity towards them; the angry part was the one she normally listened to. She resented her parents even her siblings. Even though her brothers and sisters had little to be blamed for. She felt that Jorge didn’t do anything to help the situation and Julio had walked out on her.
“They all could have worked harder,” she thought. “We should have built a steady family. But no one chose to. A wife and a husband can separate. I think I should have the same right. A divorce from my family.”
She wondered if her siblings would ever follow suit of emancipating from the family name. She began thinking about her home and if one day she would ever visit the clock tower again.
“It sucked that the core of my existence was based on a rip off.” She threw the vision away, she never wanted to go back home.
The excitement had her laughing in an empty room. Then she stopped herself, thinking she sounded silly. She twirled and twirled until her head got dizzy. Full of excitement ready for this new life; a life of a person she created in her head. Selena Santana, a twenty one year old college graduate who was ready to take on the world.
Her dreams were more prevalent within her than air in her lungs. She felt like she was evolving; evolving into a newer better person, one with more opportunities than the old self. She hopped toward the mirror, she pushed her cheeks together with her fingers trying to resist smiling. After she wiped it away, she said the name of her new personality Selena Santana and the reflection gave a beaming smile right back at her.
Closing Night
