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Two hours after dinner, and Lydia hadn’t heard a word from anyone in the lodge. The last she’d seen from either of her sisters was the back of Lizzie disappearing into the room she totally, definitely, absolutely, no way, no how, was not sharing with Darcy. Disappearing with a promise of, I’ll see you later, talk to you before you go to bed, I’m just going to go unwind. Unwinding, undoing William Darcy’s — that was so not ever going to sound normal — zipper, winding up his freaky hipster body, whatever.
Unwinding. Yeah, right.
It’d been two hours since that. Lydia still hadn’t left her room for fear of hearing something going bump and grind that she really didn’t need to hear. Not now. Not ever. Not with Darcy. (Did he even know how- and there was Jane, chiding her and telling her to be nice to Darcy, especially after...)
She’d left her door open just enough to see anyone going past. She was hopeful, doubtful, that she’d see anyone now; Jane and Bing were probably watching some sappy romance and staring into each other’s eyes or something until the other fell asleep in that dopey ‘hold me while I sleep because you love me’ way.
Why had she agreed to come on this couple’s getaway, anyways? Lizzie’s pitch had sounded convincing: get out of the house after the Incident, get some fresh air, socialize, blah, blah, blah. It’ll be fun.
Yeah. Fun for them. More often than not they vanished not-so-subtly for hours while Lydia was left squashed awkwardly into a ski lift with Darcy’s younger sister and two sweaty strangers gawking through their ski goggles, left to make awkward conversation about the weather and their lovey-dovey siblings.
Strangers, Lydia was used to. Gigi Darcy was something else entirely.
Lizzie and Darcy had shoved them together a few weeks back at Netherfield during some party Bing had thrown to celebrate his return ‘home’. Lydia hadn’t been sure what to expect from her, honestly; pity, certainly — Lydia had been made a fool of, embarrassed even moreso than she had. Gigi Darcy, who had grown up and forgotten him. It was like he didn’t even matter anymore. Just some skeleton in the back of her huge, perfect closet.
He didn’t mean to you what he meant to me.
It was a terrible thought, but Lydia knew it was true. She’d seen the video where Gigi talked about him, about them. It was nothing, nothing-
Like she’d said, Gigi Darcy was something else. What was weirdest of all about her was that she didn’t even seem to see Lydia, not like the rest of them did. She didn’t look at her with sad eyes, or even jealous eyes. (Not even jealous. Why wasn’t she jealous?) She just sort of... Lydia didn’t know. It was like she was waiting for her to say something about the elephant in the room. She wanted to talk, to help, because she was so over him — so over George, because she could say the name without feeling like her heart was being ripped into a million damn pieces and she could just talk and-
Lydia didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to think. She certainly didn’t want Georgiana Darcy picking at her mind.
She’d thought that it would be better up here, in the mountains, away, away with her friends and family, but it was so much worse. Separated from everything, she felt more open than she had since the Incident, harsh wind ripping the wound wide open. And sitting in her room being a total bore and doing nothing wasn’t helping. Damn it, if anything could help, it wasn’t this. She’d come here to find some semblance of happiness.
Happy. Lydia could do happy. She’d done happy for years and no one had taken a second to guess she was anything but. Bright clothes and countless parties had masked that she could feel anything else. If there was anything Lydia was good at, it was doing happy.
Being happy after the Incident seemed impossible. But doing happy — that was possible.
Strings tugged her into a sitting position from her crash-spot on the floor, and in a flurry of red, Lydia was on feet already carrying her halfway across the room in pursuit of somethingness. She dug around in the bag she’d unpacked enough to turn her room into a hurricane, her fingers picking past halves of bathing suits and dresses (because who knows) in pursuit of the crappy iPod she had inherited from Lizzie as a sort of ‘oops I forgot you were graduating’ present. It took long enough for her hands to find anything solid that she thought it must have been eaten by the monster who lived in the bottom of her bags, but, no — ha! — her hand hit something and she pulled it out with such vigour that she very nearly knocked herself back onto the ground.
What she pulled out, though, wasn’t the iPod she’d been hoping for, but a cracked plastic CD case with an unlabeled disk glinting inside.
It took Lydia a second to figure out what she was looking at — who listened to CDs anymore? They were so last decade — but the memory came back, trickling with the viscosity of syrup. Lydia was surprised she’d forgotten it at all.
It had been Lizzie and Charlotte’s joint twenty-fifth birthday party, just a few weeks after the Incident — and that’s how Lydia catalogued her life these days: the Before and the After — and things had felt almost normal. Or, at the very least, Lydia had tried her hardest to make it that way. Something in the glances of Lizzie and Charlotte told her it wasn’t working, but she’d just pumped her fist harder and screamed a little louder.
It had been during a rare moment of downtime that Gigi had attacked. Lydia had barely figured out what was going on before the little black-haired girl had taken her hand in a brief gesture, said something Lydia hadn’t caught at the time, and pushed the CD she held now into her hand.
Lydia had stared at it for a long time that night, long after her sisters had gone to bed, until her eyes went bleary. By the time she had gone to bed, it was laying against the wall opposite her bed, casing shattered.
She didn’t know what had possessed her to bring it, only that she had picked it up in some whim and shoved it into the bag.
In a moment of insanity or obligatory kindness or something, Lydia found the room’s sound system and jammed the CD in, jabbing the play button with a ferocity something else. She sat back on the bed, her eyes feverish waiting for the first song to play.
From the first note, Lydia recognized the song. She should have expected it; she knew enough from kind-of-sort-of Twitter-stalking Gigi that she was a Florence + The Machine fan. Lydia had listened to Shake It Out more times than she could count in the last few months. It sounded no different to her now.
The song ended, and Lydia hadn’t moved a muscle. She wasn’t sure she so much as breathed until the playlist had scratched and begun its loop again.
She breathed then, but didn’t move. Didn’t wipe her sweating palms on the comforter, didn’t close her eyes to shut the glaring fluorescent out of view. The tracks played over and over, and all of them said the same thing.
It’ll get better.
You’re better than this.
You’re better than him.
All of it the same things she’d heard parroted at her by Lizzie, by Jane, by Charlotte, by her father, over and over. Meaningless. She’d barely ever spoken to Gigi, but she got the intended message loud and clear.
I understand.
But she didn’t. It had been stupid to hope — so so stupid, why are you so stupid? — that she could. Like it was even possible for her to get it when she had been picked up from where she’d fallen by her rich brother, set on the right track and pushed on her merry way. An easy recovery, like setting a broken bone.
Lydia didn’t even bother stopping the player when she went for the CD, snapping it into the cracked case and shutting it without so much as sparing it a second glance. One minute later, a crack echoed through the quiet house and the CD slid under Gigi’s door.
Lydia and Gigi did not speak on the ski lift the next day.