When Colleen and Chelsea had fled Terrance’s house they had taken as much as they could carry. They had managed to grab Colleen’s clothes, jewelry, cosmetics, laptop, and whatever else would fit into the car. But a lot had been left behind. Standing in the remnants of her childhood home Chelsea dropped a box on the kitchen table and looked around. Even though she and Blue had been crashing here the last few days, she still felt like a squatter.
The house needed to feel like a home again. She had grown up in that house, learned the guitar and piano (keyboard, actually, they couldn’t afford a piano) and this was where she had spent a lot of time with Blue. So while her mother locked herself away in her bedroom, Chelsea got to work.
She started by dusting and vacuuming the living room, even going as far as picking up the couch and cleaning between the couch cushions. Then she started unpacking. There were boxes stacked everywhere and Chelsea started with the one titled: knick-knacks and mementos. She dusted off old pictures of her and her sister. There were pictures of them smiling in front of Grand Canyon and laughing with Goofy on their Disneyland trip when Chelsea was fourteen. She was all bad hair, braces, and awkward angles in those old pictures; it made her smile.
She hung the pictures back on the wall and replaced the knick-knacks on the shelves. She found and rehung her mother’s floral curtains. Chelsea looked at the unpacked living room and smiled. It looked like people lived here again; it looked like home and, more importantly, it felt like home.
But unpacking her childhood home also made her unpack so many memories she thought she had put away. She remembered a time when Blue had been tutoring her in Algebra. They had been sitting on the living room couch with MTV playing TRL in the background. They had been sitting together, but not touching. Chelsea had ignored all of Blue’s tips for faster math problem solving and was instead focused on their almost touching knees. They were so close back then, hanging out every day and telling each other everything, but nothing physical had ever happened between them.
Chelsea moved on to the kitchen, putting the glasses and plates back into the cabinets and the silverware back in the drawers. She cleaned off the table and the countertop until finally the main part of the house was back in order. She looked over the house and couldn’t help but smile, every inch having some memory attached to it.
There was the height chart on the wall in the kitchen that measured her and Jamie’s growth. There was the large dent in the wall near the kitchen table from the time Jamie had tried to perform a skateboard trick only to find herself falling into the wall. She and Blue had done their homework on that table every day after school.
Chelsea had just finished putting away her cleaning supplies when her phone rang. She groaned when she saw it was her manager, but she forced herself to answer it anyway. “Hello,” she sighed into the phone.
“Hey Chels, it’s me,” Lauren replied. “What’s the deal with your family emergency? Where are we on that?”
“I’m still working on it,” Chelsea said. “Nothing has changed since the last time we talked.” She tried to keep her annoyance out of her voice. “I just need a few more days to sort it all out. But it will be over very soon, Lauren, and then I’ll be back and hard at work.”
“Sweetie, you and I have very different ideas of soon. My idea of soon is you leaving your hicktown, getting on a plane, and coming straight to my office. If you did that you could be here in four hours; that is soon to me. Soon to you is a couple of days, but this isn’t the first time you’ve said that to me. You’ve been saying a couple of days for more than a couple of days.”
“Like I said, Lauren, it’s an emergency. Believe me, I would love nothing more than to have this all be over with. I would love to get on a plane and go back to LA right now, but it’s not that simple. There’s a lot that’s not under my control right now.”
“Well, here’s the thing: there’s a lot I don’t have control over, as well. The label is pissed, Chelsea. They want you to come back to work. They need you to come back to work. We’ve reshuffled some promotional stuff, but they aren’t happy about it and the longer you stay away the more worried they get. They haven’t signed a deal for your next album yet and if things keep going like this, they might not.”
Chelsea closed her eyes and sighed. She had the sudden urge to tell Lauren everything that had happened – her sister’s kidnapping, the fighting pits; then she would ask Lauren how she would handle it. Chelsea didn’t know how else to explain to her manager that she was doing everything she could possibly do. “I want them to sign me for a second album,” Chelsea said forcing her voice to remain calm. “I am ready to work and I will be back soon. I’ll just asking for a little bit of time and some understanding. I am not a robot. I’m a person under a lot of pressure. Being a singer is my dream and I’m willing to fight for it, but I’m not willing to abandon my family over it. But I need you to have my back, Lauren. I will be back soon, I promise. I just need you to keep the label off my back for a few more days.”
“I like you, Chelsea, and I’ll do what I can. But you need to realize that every day you spend in Snowbird is another reason for the label to not sign with you. You skipping town like this makes you look kind of flakey, like you can’t handle this.”
The call ended and Chelsea scoffed at the implication that she couldn’t handle a record deal. It was nothing compared to what she’d been dealing with at home. After fighting pits and the horrors of Terrance DeMarco, Chelsea was confident she could handle just about anything.
She didn’t want to handle it alone, though. It was hard not having a friend she could really trust. She knew a lot of people in LA, but they were all party friends. They were social climbers and none of them could really be trusted. They would have thrown Chelsea under a bus if they thought they could get a reality show from it.
She needed a source of strength in her life; she needed Blue – Blue with his disdain for the LA scene and general apathy towards the Hollywood machine. Blue didn’t want to be famous; he wanted to be an engineer and she liked that about him. She liked the idea of the boyfriend who could actually fix a broken outlet instead of calling someone else to do it. She liked the idea of a boyfriend who would defend her to the paparazzi like Blue did the other day. He hadn’t hit them or verbally abused them. He had simply told them to back off and they had.
Blue had a commanding presence, people got of out of his way, they did what he told them to do. He had been in the Army and now he was going to college. Blue Demarco was no child anymore; he was a man now.
Then there was nothing left for Chelsea to do. The house was clean and unpacked. She walked to the bedroom and knocked quietly on the door. She waited a few moments, but there was no noise on the other side. Chelsea opened the door and peered inside where she could see her mother fast asleep in bed, a half empty box of tissues next to her.
Was this all that love would get you: a bed alone filled with tears and discarded tissue? No, Chelsea couldn’t believe that. Her mother had put her faith in the wrong man, a mistake she had made many times. Chelsea closed the door and left her mother in peace. Colleen would bounce back, she always did. There was a routine after every breakup. Colleen would spend a few days in bed and then one day Chelsea and Jamie would come home from school to find their mother dancing in the living room, her man troubles forgotten.
But this nastiness with Terrance was no normal guy trouble. It was illegal and dangerous and Blue was wrapped up in it. Did that make him dangerous? In a way, but it wasn’t his fault. Blue didn’t want to fight in the pits, his father made him. Blue was nothing like his father and once Chelsea had him back she was going to tell him that every day.