Chapter Text
“I feel like a Barbie doll,” Samira complains weakly as Victoria dots glittery golden highlighter on her cheekbones.
“That’s kinda the point, yeah,” Victoria says, finishing up by dabbing her middle finger across the tip of Samira’s nose before turning to the mirror to touch up her own makeup.
“You really think I’ll have fun at this?” Samira takes in her reflection, seeing herself in what feels like a Halloween costume Victoria’s dressed her in. Frilly black mini shorts over sheer tights that make her legs look like they’re glowing from within, a black corset top Victoria laced her up into, knee-high platform boots. Victoria did some five-step something to her hair that has her curls fluffed and waved into a bouncy, shiny, deliciously fruity-smelling coiffure around her head.
She looks nothing like the Samira she has known herself to be; it’s like she’s looking at another face of the prism she’s never thought to examine before.
“If you have literally no fun tonight,” Victoria starts, catching her eye in the mirror, “I will pay you back for your entire ticket.” She spins around to face her, a pinky finger outstretched. “Promise,” she adds as Samira locks their pinkies together.
When they get on the T, already packed with other young people in Pinterest-board outfits with brightly-blushed cheeks, Samira already feels her worry waning somewhat. They’re not even at the arena and she finds she’s already enjoying herself, looking forward to each station they pull into that will inevitably pour more giddy girls wearing go-go boots into the train car.
Samira hasn’t been to a concert since undergrad — a standing room only affair that she was also coaxed into attending by her friends — so she doesn’t really expect this to be the whole production it is. The air vibrates with anticipatory energy. Merch lines wrap and weave around a hallway, friends pose for pictures before pop-up stands and twenty-foot banners hanging from the rafters. Nothing’s even begun yet, but glee floats through the air like polychrome bubbles.
When they get to their seats with strawberry-pink mixed cocktails in hand, Samira feels a little pocket of something glowing deep in her chest. She didn’t realize she could be having this much fun. She wants to keep having this much fun. She wants to know — if this is another side to herself she’s uncovering — what else resides within her.
Samira listens as Victoria schools her on the opening act in the moments before the house lights start to dim. A singer she’s never heard of named Olivia Dean, very fun, feel-good soulful pop, blew up over the past year in advance of her latest album — You have to listen to it, Samira, it’s soo good, you’d love it — but has been releasing great music for a good while. Samira takes in the information the way she always does, storing points away based on potential future utility.
The lights finally darken, a lone spotlight appears on the stage, an upbeat piano starts up a tune. Excited shrieks erupt throughout the arena.
Talk to me, talk to me
Talk to me, talk to me
Olivia saunters around her stage, full of a self-assured confidence Samira’s not sure she’s ever possessed. But as she continues singing words she has probably spent months honing, her voice clear as a bell in Samira’s ears, Samira sees in her a true, deep devotion to her art, a love for these songs she chooses to share with other people. It’s not unlike what she feels sometimes in the ED, on a good day.
Victoria nudges her with an elbow, ducking her head to urge close in her ear, “Stop thinking so much.”
So Samira tries. Olivia Dean makes it easy with her unabashed joy, with how evident it is that she has so much fun performing.
Tell me you got something to give, I want it
I kinda like it when you call me wonderful
Whatever the type of talk it is, come on then
I gotta know you’re meant to be the man I need
Samira feels — something. That pocket of glowing inside her chest, it feels weightier now. Like an ache with no origin.
You say no need to look behind me
That I can keep you here beside me
To make a mess of it, then make the best of it
It isn’t perfect, but it might be
Samira is fine. A bit tachycardic, but fine. A little something starting to tickle at the back of her throat. A prickle behind her eyeballs. She’s fine. There is no medical etiology for what she is feeling. There is no history of this condition in her personal file. This is entirely new.
It’s so crazy, lately
You just understand my feelings, make me
See I’m capable and fine
Samira thinks about hands in gloves passing her a surgical tool, the dip of a chin in an affirming nod. Thinks about a mask being pulled down as a nearly-breathless voice says that was good, really good, or about smile lines creasing a freckled cheek as a low voice tells her that she’s kind of unbelievable, or about her own (inevitable, maybe predestined) smile after he tells a patient you’re in great hands, Dr. Mohan’s sharp eye misses nothing.
She thinks about scribbled notes in slanted script on blue sticky notes pasted inside her locker or on the front page of a journal left on her workstation. Heard about your save w/ that globe rupture, bet it was gnarly or Thought you’d like this old issue, hope my notes are somewhat legible. Thinks about the half-cursive curve of an ‘S’ scrawled on a to-go cup from her favorite café she never treats herself to.
And feeling beautified tonight
I’m ready to dive
Maybe it’s the loving in your eyes (I’m here, see through)
Samira thinks about the Pittsburgh skyline at seven a.m., and about hazel eyes that glint with green in the autumnal morning sunlight, and bursts into tears.
“Oh my god.” Victoria jumps in her seat, rifling in her tiny purse for a tissue. “Are you okay, what’s—”
Maybe it’s the fact that every time I fall, I lose it all
But you got me from my head to my feet
And I’m ready to dive
Samira can’t get the words out. I’m ready to dive. Some days it certainly feels that way, but right now it feels impossible. There’s no way. Has she, this whole time—?
Samira plucks the tissue from Victoria’s fingers, blows her nose messily, and then flicks Victoria on the shoulder.
“Was anyone gonna tell me?”
“Samira, you’re kind of scaring me. What the fuck are you talking about?”
“That I’m in love with Abbot?”
“Oh.” Victoria relaxes her shoulders from where they were pinched up by her ears. “You’re just realizing that now?”
Samira can’t help but laugh through the tears that won’t stop. She cries — and, perhaps more importantly, she thinks distantly — she lets herself cry. These are different from the tears that fell the night of PittFest. They’re accompanied by a warm glow inside her; she knows the origin now. It’s somewhere a few miles away.
In the interim between the opening act and the main show, Samira adds all of Olivia Dean’s songs to her library. She angles her phone, brightness lowered as much as she can bear, away from Victoria as she looks up directions from the arena to West View — okay, no way she’s spending over an hour on two different buses, she’ll just Uber — as Victoria tells her that Sabrina Carpenter is literally so much fun, I don’t think you’re gonna cry anymore for the rest of the concert.
Victoria’s right, she doesn’t cry again.
But a newfound pang makes itself known, low in her belly, when Sabrina starts singing my clothes are off, I’m comin’ over to your place, about cartwheels in her stomach, about How you’re looking at me and I know what that means.
She thinks about hazel eyes, their gaze held with hers, aglow in the low light of the bar near the hospital the ER staff frequents, and she does not burst into tears. She feels like unzipping herself out of her skin with want. It only grows as the concert goes on.
Samira does have fun, but Samira also wants to take the discoveries she’s made about herself tonight and rip them out of her chest. She wants to hold them in her hands — beating, alive — and ask Jack Abbot if the same feelings can be found in the safe haven of his ribcage.
On the brief walk from the arena to the T station, Samira feels like the comedown is crystallizing something within her. She and Victoria are silent but pleasantly, quietly content. They reach the escalator leading down to the platform and Samira stops.
“I think I have to—”
“Yeah, I know.” Victoria gives her a small meaningful smile. “Go,” she encourages, her hands making a shooing motion as she steps onto the escalator.
“Text me when you’re home?”
“Yeah, go, Samira,” Victoria repeats. Samira grins and feels like her whole body is shining with it. She pulls out her phone and orders the Uber, ready to dive.