Scar Flowers by Maureen O'Donnell Read Free Book Online Page A

Leah as she got in line at lunch. “Lighting crew go first, so they can start setting up the next shot faster.”
    Leah stepped aside as men with walkie-talkies crowded to the steam table trays.
    “You ever worked on a film before? What a pretty skirt.” Celia smiled and fanned herself with handful of costume sketches.
    Leah smoothed her linen pencil skirt and sleeveless silk top. At least Celia, with her hoop earrings and brightly patterned head wraps, had a sense of style.
    “Cele,” cut in a wardrobe girl with a muslin mockup of a shirt folded over her shoulder. “Which has better costumes, Gone with the Wind or Magnificent Ambersons ?”
    “ GWTW , child!”
    “How ’ bout you?” the wardrobe girl asked Leah.
    “I haven’t seen Ambersons , and I fell asleep during Charlotte’s tea party.”
    Celia threw her head back and laughed. “It’s Scarlett, not Charlotte!”
    “. . . not even talking heads—it was all Kilroys and nostril shots,” the man behind them said as Celia and the wardrobe girl left with their trays. Leah wrote “Magnificent Ambersons” in her script. It must not have been by one of Simon’s favorite directors, whom she had taken notes on in preparation for this trip: Jacques Tourneur, John Cassavetes, Stanley Kubrick.
    A pair of interns passed her on their way to the lunch line: “What’s up with the Karen and Simon action? Have you seen how she looks at him?”
    “That’s not the only thing she craves—Little Miss Macrobiotic sent her assistant to the store at two in the morning to get her a pint of fudge ripple.”
    Gossip. Leah had been the target of whispers in school, a mixture of childish nonsense and full-grown hate in the form of slashed tires on her bicycle, rocks thrown at her back, “HORE” written on her book bag in indelible ink. Her name’s not Leah, it’s Lay-ya . . . Lay-ya Slutterson, skank of the school. A few years of this and she also saw the jealousy of the girls, the suppressed fear of the boys who shouted requests for blow jobs without knowing what oral sex was, let alone how to spell whore .
    She never learned the reason for the slur campaign . Perhaps it was being the first one to smoke or the way she looked boys in the eye instead of blushing at the ground.
    Leah returned to her hotel room that night with bags of new clothes—cotton sun dresses, T-shirts, track suits. Someone had shoved a revised copy of the schedule under her door, and it showed that the Julia–Blake fight rehearsal, her first one with Simon, had been moved to the day after tomorrow. Her breath seized in her throat, and she sat down.
    Was it possible that she would not get a chance to talk to Simon before then? And if so , then . . . what? Give up and go home to Seattle?
    Maybe she had finally gone too far . Delilah had warned her to never take too much at a time. To respect her subject’s limits even when he did not respect himself.
    Unnatural, that’s what she was. Maybe that was what her schoolmates had sensed when they started the whispers about her: Leah traded blow jobs for cigarettes, Leah took off her clothes and masturbated behind the playground fence for anyone who asked, Leah had sex with the whole football team after the homecoming game.
    Hadn’t she since learned that if people gave her a legendary reputation, legend was hers to grasp? Hadn’t she learned that archetypes manifested because they were real?
    And hadn’t she been sent Simon’s film for a reason?
    “What fools these mortals be,” she whispered, but her attempt at a smile faded.
    She could not go home. She still felt the reciprocal pressure of his tongue when she had slid her fingers in his mouth. Interest. He’d had that punch-drunk look in his eye, the sudden dilation of the pupils. There was something in him calling her, and he did not even know. Yet. He had awakened something in her, some alchemical hunger.
    Each time she had been called before, she had reached realization. Each time the rewards