by Skye Grace
“Aura!” he exclaims as she blinks back tears and puts her most convincing smile on. He is one of her favorite New Yorkers, after all. “I heard you were back here and I just couldn’t wait to come say hi!”
She opens her arms and he gives her a giddy hug. “I just got to watch the premiere episode! Damn girl, I know we’re supposed to talk about your birthday party but-”
“We don’t have to, really,” she interrupts.
“But there’s a guy, right? You and him at the party?” Jonny winks with a laugh.
“Yeah, no. Not so much, could I maybe plead temporary insanity on that part, Jonny?”
His eyes widen, “No guy?” She can tell he’s surprised and likely a little disappointed. The other appearances she’s done were always a little gushy regarding whomever she was dating, lately it’d been Sebastian, and Jonny had clearly been excited to get the latest scoop on her breakup and possible new coupling. Old Aura, Inner-Aura, was never one to hold back or glaze over juicy details, which she appreciates, usually, but not today. She shakes her head no and he quickly understands.
“Oh, yeah, of course. No problem. Focus on the girls?”
“Yeah, the girls, the show, how much I miss them, maybe even missing New York a little?” She attempts a smile, knowing he’ll eat that up. “The Malibu Barbie beach house, the fact that I currently have enough time to, I dunno. Maybe be that girl that takes her top off in a slasher flick and gets sliced and diced?” She laughs dryly, “Hollywood is really my oyster at this point.”
Jonny chuckles. “Got it. Don’t worry, Aura,” he says, touching her on the arm reassuringly. “I’m sure that someone actually worthy is gonna see you tonight and be amazed.”
After the show, Aura slinks out of her emerald green wiggle dress and back into jeans and all black everything. She starts to tell the driver the address of her favorite midtown bistro but can’t stomach the idea of eating with anyone right now, let alone Liam, and peeks at the new watch he’d bought for her this morning to find that it’s too early anyway, even if she did want to go. The buzz of being with Jonny and the audience wears off as she wonders why she brought Liam along in the first place. She requests to be brought to the hotel instead, and insists on not having anyone help her with her things as she heads upstairs, her chest compressing tighter with each floor the elevator rises.
It’s difficult for Aura to tell who she’s more mad at; herself, for not listening to the signs, to her inner voice, or Liam for ditching her on such an important night. She shifts bag after bag to get her hand free to wrap around the doorknob. Her blood runs cold and then hot and then cold again, heavy door slamming against the wall. The clang and bang of the door break the passionate kiss of Liam and a handsome blonde stranger. The noise startles them, making the two shirtless men spring away from each other as if that will somehow undo this baffling betrayal. They’re both off the bed in a flash and Liam is quickly coming towards her to explain. Stunned, she drops her bags where she stands, blocking the door, as she swivels around and runs.
Chapter Nine
Her eyes blurred, her throat twisted, thick with knots, Aura runs past the elevator as if it’s painted with plague and slides into the stairwell instead. She flies down flight after flight until she’s out of breath and pushes through a heavy door she assumes will take her to the lobby. Instead, she stumbles into an expansive empty room with plush, red velvet couches and elaborate cushioned ottomans. All thoughts of the startling scene upstairs fall away as she takes in the rest of the elegant room.
An ancient looking bar looms large on one side of the room, and the delicate tinkling of keys seems to come from the grand piano in the corner, but no one is there to play it. It feels as if she’s in a vacuum, all oxygen sucked from the space and yet she doesn’t feel suffocated but rather, mesmerized. She is positively drawn to the back wall of the mahogany clad and burgundy shaded room, where an ornate, gilded oval mirror twice her size looms over everything.
She cannot take her eyes off of it, approaching with her fingers outstretched over the gold frame, breath held in tight. Her hazel eyes can’t focus on the mirror, as hard as they try to, as the glass flickers in a haze of every color she’s ever seen. It appears to be moving, a white noisy entity awash with vivid hues, one color bleeding into the next. Her fingers hover over the shimmering light and she sucks in a sharp breath as she feels the energy pulsing from the mirror. She can only feel, but not clearly see, the hot tears running down her cheeks.
Her hand reaches to gently touch the glass and suddenly it feels as if it’s going through, and her awareness is awash in the glimmering light. Her body feels transparent, barely there, as her senses are flooded with what at first she thinks might be memories but quickly realizes are things that are happening to her back in the 2000’s, or would be happening to her now, if she hadn’t fallen down the rabbit hole.
She gets a flash of learning to make kimchi her parents for the first time, a vision of writing her own play for the fall one-act festival with Rowan and Ethan acting as her sounding board and inspirations. She can see herself imagining kissing Ethan under the big willow tree and feels as though it would happen, that summer. Would come true, if she just went back. If I hop through this mirror, I could be back there. Close with Rowan, creating with Ethan, back where things were sane, where things made sense. All I have to do is go through. Just go back home.
Her breathing becomes shallow as she realizes how simple it would be. How easy it could be to go back. Realizes that this isn’t really a mirror, but more like a portal. She wishes she’d paid more attention to the sci-fi movies her dad would watch when she was younger.
This must be a portal, a worm-hole. A black hole? Something like that. Everything is so messed up here, she panics to herself. It’d be easier to just go back. No Liam. No pressure from the whole world watching me. No embarrassment when people find out I was just used to cover a teen heartthrob’s sexuality.
She moves her hand away from the mirror and sucks in a deep breath. She feels her knees give out and falls backwards onto an old fashioned fainting couch. How fitting, she thinks, but is far from finding humor in this situation.
Her head is spinning but she tries, while lying down, to weigh the fun and success of her girls, her fame, with the deeply depressing state of her love life. I seem to be loved, here, by everyone except the men that I want to love me, she wallows, falling further down into her ever expanding pit of despair, until she decides it must be a curse.
The idea of curses bemuse her temporarily, until she thinks of the stupid quote of her mother’s that she would always bemoan. The one Melissa would always spout when Aura complained about her lack of a boyfriend. ‘You can’t find love until you love yourself first.’
“That’s what this really is,” she whispers to herself. “I hate it when she’s right.”
The reasoning behind her failed relationships begins to dawn on her, Sebastian, Liam, and all the faceless, nameless boys before that. They can’t love me, respect me, if I don’t first. It’s so obvious. She fumes at her mother but knows she’s mainly mad at herself. She can feel her inner voice seething too, but it’s a revelation for them both. She decides that the curse must be more of a quest, and worries that if she gives up and goes back now, she’ll never meet Whit, or Monroe, or Alexis, never make the name that she’s made for herself. It’s like a Back to the Future with no Doc, she pouts. If I back out now, I could do one thing differently and everything will change. No fame, no friends, no show, no mansion in Malibu. She knows that’s not really what’s important here but she doesn’t think she can give it up, she loves it too much. Practically the whole country seems captivated by her craft, it wasn’t something she could just say goodbye to.
She stands up and attempts to will herself towards the mirror again. She can’t bring herself to touch it again, see the visions, feel what she felt. It’s her life, if she wants it. She knows it, it’s familiar, but it feels intrinsically like giving up, and she
realizes that she loves her life here, despite all the hiccups. Loves it too much to run away now.
She bolts out of the elaborate room and down many more flights over stairs, only stopping to take a breath and text Monroe. A reply shoots back seconds later and she gets the feeling that they’ve bailed each other out many times before, no questions asked. ‘My manager has a private jet at LaGuardia, just get your ass over there now and we’ll get you home. I’ll be waiting at LAX as soon as you text.”
The Xanax Aura popped on the plane mixed with the surrealness of the day and night has her in a milky haze as Monroe rolls up at the airport, this time in a car of her own, an enormous and over the top Bentley from the 60’s.
Monroe smiles gently, for her anyway, as Aura climbs into the passenger seat and says what she always says when Aur looks like crap, “You look fabulous.”
She rolls her eyes in response and Monroe is about to pop out the clutch when Aura throws herself around her friend’s shoulders, grasping her tightly until cars around them begin to honk noisily. She finally breaks the embrace reluctantly and Monroe speeds out of the arrivals zone, picking up an incredible pace as she races towards the freeway.
“Traveling light, huh?” her friend, dressed in a sequined pajama shorts and tank top set asks, noticing Aura’s distinct lack of luggage.
She stays silent.
“That bad. Okay, wow. Was it really mild mannered mama’s boy? What’d he do, Aura? Are we allowed to talk about him yet?”
“Not even close,” she responds before popping her phone out of her purse to text Alexis, ‘Took a red eye private, anything to get away from L. Don’t ask me, ask him. Have him send my bags. DWTAI. I’m staying at Monroe’s.’
The early Tuesday morning DWTAI, ‘Don’t wanna talk about it,’ text to Alexis on the ride home from the airport had worked for the most part, and she’d been tiptoeing carefully around Aura ever since she returned home two days ago. Alexis peeks carefully into the bedroom and finds her in exactly the same spot, curled up in a mass of white comforters with the curtains still drawn, in the middle of the afternoon, and has had well enough of tiptoe.
“Klotch!” Alexis screams, which Aura somehow knows means she better be listening. “You need to get out of bed! Stop feeling sorry for yourself!” Alexis yells, yanking the blankets off Aura, who has on baggy black sweats and her hair piled high in a messy bun. Even in relationship mourning, she looks gorgeous, as if her eyeliner was smudged like that on purpose.
“I’m not! I love myself, enough to shield myself from Liam and every little LIAR he associates with!”
“Oh, and that means me? You think I’m a liar now? Because I didn’t know that Liam liked guys? He never told me!”
“Like I believe you didn’t know! The fact that he was pretending to like me so the little teenage brats that watch your show wouldn’t find out he’s not into girls and stop watching… You didn’t pick up on that even a little?”
“No Aura! I can’t believe you’d even think that about me. You didn’t know, so I didn’t know. It’s a pretty harsh accusation for someone who obviously left their gaydar at the shop.”
Alexis sounds hurt but Aura couldn’t care much less at this moment. She pulls the blankets up around herself and falls back down onto the bed, doing her best to ignore not only Alexis but also herself.
“That’s it! I swore I’d keep this stuff hidden but it’s the only thing that works when you’re like this. I’ll talk to you when you’re done watching and you’re not a such a slurvish little brat anymore,” she hears Alexis shout, muffled under layers of down.
After the sounds of Alexis’ angry stomps, she lies still for several minutes until she hears a frustrated clomping back up the stairs followed by the clank of the door being thrown open, a tremendous thud, and then the door being slammed once again. Drama queen.
She waits to hear Alexis huff down the stairs again before flipping off the covers to reveal a giant, brown cardboard box labeled, ‘CRAZY FANGIRL,’ in hot pink Sharpie. Alexis’ handwriting, of course.
She’s suddenly launched out of bed, seemingly by no will of her own, and all the air rushes from her lungs as she opens the box. Tears slip from her eyes despite the fact that they’d been dry for hours now as she sees the t-shirts, sweatshirts, Monopoly games, mugs, shot glasses, and, of course, the DVDs. She can hardly control the salt water rushing down her face as she wonders how she could’ve left it all in the garage, locked away, for any amount of time, or how she possibly could’ve forgotten it was there. Didn’t remember what had been her love, her obsession, her fandom, for the last ten years. She stares breathlessly at what she can’t believe is really, ‘The Protectors - Season 12.’
The show, and my love for it, has stood the test of time, she sobs to herself, 15 once again, clutching the boxed discs to her chest. She remembers, now, how much she loved it, how much it meant, and how it always made her feel better. She spies Season 2 at the bottom of the box, where she remembers the show leaving off, and breathes a sigh of relief that it wasn’t cancelled, not ever. Heart thumping, she is also quick to note from a cursory view of the Season 3 through 12 covers that her beloved Blaise was not killed off, but alive, and if anything sexier than ever; he’d been on the series all this time.
She fishes around for Season 3 and ecstatically rushes over to put it in her DVD player before jumping back into bed, this time with her feet on the pillows, propped up on her elbows at the foot of the bed.
She knew it way back then and it proved true, Brody would never let his brother Blaise just curl up and die, and instead enlisted the help of a dark witch to bring him back to life. The consequences of the witch rule, ‘A life for a life,’ hit them full force; if you bring someone back from the dead, someone you know will soon have to die. The long lost teen sister they never knew they had was struck down by lightning just days after bringing Blaise back from the beyond.
The tragedy fueled the men to kill the evil crone, with the help of a once dark spellcaster named Graylan, and the good warlock brothers continue to fight dark forces, season after season. There was always a new entity to overthrow, and it was constantly thrilling for Aura, despite the similar format each season. What really thrills her, other than the take-no-shit general heart-throbbery that is Blaise and how perfectly kick-ass Jacksen plays him, but also the bond between the brothers, as well as the bond they had as actors with their fan base. The boys – now men! Aura realizes excitedly with a flush –, along with the rest of the cast and crew, refer to themselves and their fans as, ‘The Coven,’ and everyone is still so invested, after all these years, Aura included. The show is dramatic and intense, but doesn’t take itself too seriously and often had Aura laughing out loud, almost more frequently than it has her in tears.
A giggle escapes her lips somewhere around Season 5, when she realizes the world thinks she’s so cool, magazine articles, photo shoots, talk show appearances, yet she’s been an obsessive Protectors nerd this entire time. She rolls around the bed laughing, having pulled off the ultimate scam, before noticing she really has to get up to pee and order a pizza. Maybe some chicken wings, oh, and possibly one of those dessert pizzas with frosting in lieu of cheese. She finds some delicious looking berry beer concoction in the fridge and decides to leave it there; she doesn’t want anything to interfere with this magical feeling of getting to rewatch her favorite show as if she’s never seen any of it before. At some points, it does feel like serious deja vu, but mostly it all feels wonderfully new to her.
Not far into Season 6, she feels a pang unusually close to her heart as Brody gets particularly close to a new female character so beautiful that the unmistakable sensation of jealousy settles in next to another gnawing pain in her chest that feels eerily like longing. I was never in love with Brody, or Jameson for that matter, was I? She is quickly distracted from her confusion, though, as this Graylan guy becomes more and more of a main character. He’s a powerful spellcaster, though not born a witch, but is instead
part human, part fae. She forgets about Brody and even Blaise for a while as she learns everything about this new character. As he continues to be a part of the show, his role growing and expanding each season, she searches the back of the boxes for the name of who plays him. She discovers Graylan is played by an actor named Wesley Armand, and her voice weakly calls for Alexis to ask about this beautiful, mysterious creature. Of course, it’s dark and could be 4 a.m. for all she knows, so Alexis obviously doesn’t answer.
It had been five days since Aura had spoken to Alexis, or anyone else for that matter, and that includes little miss doom, Inner-Aura. She muses that the lack of alcohol in her system could be the reason the voice had gone so mute.
Alexis finally creeps up to Aura’s room to see if she’s still alive. She’s relieved to find the TV, for the first time in almost a week, is finally turned off. She walks up cautiously to the lump in the covers, unsure of how Aura would react to the Season 12 finale, the ultimate cliffhanger.
Alexis begins to pat her hand over the blankets slowly, “You in there babe?”
“Urghhhhh,” is the only muffled noise Alexis can make out.
“Huh? You dead?”
“I wish,” she answers, instantly droll. “Kill me?”
Alexis pulls the covers back slowly, herself fearing impending death, and assumes by the state of Aura’s hair and blurry eyes, ringed with purple and black, that she has hasn’t showered in days, but has never smelled anything but wonderful in all the years she’s know her., “It’s a wonder you don’t stink, Aur.”
“I don’t care if I do. It’s over, I’m done. That’s the end isn’t it? Twelve seasons and it’s all over. I can’t go on,” she emotes dramatically.
“Babe, have you bothered to do any research on that phone of yours?”
“Screw that thing, every time I turn it on it’s one of your little-”
“Watch it!” Alexis interrupts, throwing blankets and pillows everywhere until she finally finds her friend’s cell and turns it on. She’s instantly flooded with texts from her co-stars, mostly Liam, sending their apologies or condolences. She realizes that, if she was Aura, she wouldn’t want to turn it on either. She’d been alternating between freezing Liam out and reaming him all week. She promptly deletes the texts, the ones from Liam first, and then opens the web browser, types quickly, and hands the phone to Aura.
