Sea-Fey Abysmal

I used to think dying would be dramatic. A final line. A beautiful image. Music rising at exactly the right moment. The sort of death people write about because they need death to mean something. I should have known better. My name was Marabelle Veyontz. For twenty-eight years that name belonged to a woman who could walk into a room and make millions of people believe whatever she wanted them to believe. I was an actress. Not merely famous. Famous does not quite describe it. My face lived on four inhabited worlds. My voice traveled farther than I ever did. Children knew my smile. Strangers knew the exact way my eyes widened when a script demanded heartbreak. People who had never met me held opinions about who I was, what I loved, what I feared, who I should marry, what kind of person I became when the cameras stopped. They knew Marabelle. They just did not know me. I did what famous people are expected to do. I smiled. I waved. I remembered names. I laughed at the right jokes. I cried at the right moments. I stood beneath lights bright enough to make the stars outside look dull. I learned every lens, every angle, every pause, every breath. I learned how to make a lie feel more honest than the truth. And eventually I became very, very tired. Not of acting. Never that. I loved acting. I was tired of being watched. I wanted something embarrassingly small. A quiet room. A morning nobody photographed. A meal nobody reviewed. A life where my face belonged only to me. I was beginning to wonder what I would become if there were no audience left to impress. Then the fire came. I remember heat. I remember alarms. I remember light. I remember people shouting my name. And then—nothing. I thought that was the end. It wasn’t. When I opened my eyes again I was staring at a ceiling I had never seen. People were crying. A man was holding an engagement ring. Someone was screaming that they were finished with me. Someone else was talking about adoption papers. I remember thinking, absurdly: What film is this? That was the first problem. The second was that everyone in the room expected me to know exactly what had happened. The third was that the woman they hated was not me. At least—I did not think she was me. Her name was Evangeline Marisol. Nineteen years old. Minor noble. Disgraced daughter. Failed Awakening. Broken engagement. Adoption dissolved. Future destroyed. A girl everyone had already decided was no longer worth keeping. And somehow, impossibly, I was inside her body. I should have panicked. I didn’t. I performed. What else was I supposed to do? I watched the room. I found the strongest person, then the weakest. I found the frightened ones, the angry ones, the ones pretending not to care. I listened to what nobody was saying. I smiled when smiling was safer. I lied when the truth would have killed me socially. I made them think I understood. I made them think I was stable. I made them think I was still their Evangeline. And for the first time in my life, the fact that I was an actress had nothing to do with cameras. It was survival. Then I heard something outside the window. A voice. A completely ordinary voice. Except there was no human being speaking. It was a bird. And it was complaining about the weather. I remember staring at it for a very long time. The bird stared back. And then it spoke again. Words. Actual words. Not intuition. Not symbolism. Not some magical feeling I was supposed to interpret. Language. The world was talking. And nobody else could hear it. That was when my second life truly began.

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