Faking It

Portia Pim sits alone at Motel 67, chipping the paint off a yellow mini-fridge. She is crying. Portia’s make-up has smudged, her crystalline glamour turned raccoon gothic. She no longer looks like the shimmering starlet her team had primped her to be. She looks lost, afraid, a child that irrevocably jammed their hand against a light bulb against all discretion. The drapes around her look like skinned stuffed animals. Something about that seems tragic. Portia’s tanned chest is convulsing with sobs, her chiseled ribcage rattling.

Portia’s toothpick fingers stroke the mini-fridge, teasing its latch. She gives in. Portia snaps it open and feels her rosy-cheeks flushed, stark with florescent light. Something about opening that fridge unsettles her. The light bulbs glow a harsh white, cheap glass encasing Chinese rudiments. It’s the kind of light you in a school. In a hospital.

Portia reaches blindly for the pretty little bottles inside the fridge. She is positive the motel will charge her for this, but she doesn’t care. Once they see her name, they’ll be happy. Ecstatic. They’ll ask for her picture, her autograph, and a note to their niece Deena which is spelled with two E’s, actually, E as in elephant. Portia will smile and nod, morphing into whatever they want her to be. It’s what she does, isn’t it? Change to meet the expectations. When Portia was little her mom called her a little chameleon. Her teachers called her well-adjusted. Her current boyfriends called her “baby” and her ex’s called her “slut.” Portia bent to their needs, just like those acrobats that can crunch their bodies into little boxes. That was what Portia was. A social acrobat. She smashed her spine and ignored the sound
of a vertebrae snapped, squeezing into perfection.

Portia chooses liquor, eeny-meeny-miny- mo style. She snatches it out of the mini-fridge, its cap snapping off with a wheeze of condensed air. It smells like nail-polish remover. The teary starlet considers the fact that she’s never drank anything but champagne, and furiously takes a noxious gulp. Something seems wrong. Oh God. It tastes like acid. Portia feels the slimy eel of alcohol slither down her throat and curl up, warm in her organs. She takes another swig. It’s painful, but something tells her she wants to do this. Whether it’s atonement or plain masochism, Portia isn’t sure. She only knows she needs to feel something.

The drunken pop-queen is on the floor, her liquor seeped into the ground. She is sitting on shag carpeting—shag carpeting that has just acquired a new stain. Portia warbles out a few slurred notes. She cringes, not used to the sound of unaltered human voice. Her sour chords resonate in the air and diffuse into musty bed sheets. Silence. Portia shuts up and closes the mini-fridge. She’s suddenly struck with an intoxicating idea. Portia fumbles around, grasping for an object inside her Gucci purse. Her collagen-pumped lips tremble as she snags a card swathed in the silken lining. She stares at the laminated surface, seeing a foreign face and name. Billie Thorton. A girl with crooked lips and freckles on her nose.

Portia strokes the surface of the driver’s license. She whispers the girl’s name, a slurred mantra of questions. Billie Thorton? Billie Thorton? Billie Thorton? She wonders if Billie ever misses her home town, that place of specters and unknowns. That place of sunny afternoons and cement abused with chalk. Portia knew that girl, once. Billie had a bit of an overbite and a tendency to stutter. Underneath all her hormones and awkwardness, there was something cute about her to be salvaged. Something marketable.

Portia remembers the day Billie skipped school to hang at that Chicago club. It was an act of rebellion, something to make her distinguishable from the other B- students. She didn’t want to be a prototype of teenage conformity. Billie wanted to be wild, lethal. Like those heroines in the novels she read. Billie choked her body in a skintight dress, stuffing her bra and painting on voluptuous lips. She danced under strobe lights and ignored her mind’s whispers of caution. Billie felt freed. Men bombarded her in the club, chanting about her prospects of modeling. She smiled and listened to them praise her. She took their business cards with glee.

A week later, Billie called one of them from a payphone. Said she was eighteen. Lied about all her modeling jobs, and an old pop band she was in called the Kawasaki Dolls. She fabricated an entire life of rock star glamour and modeling finesse. The man was intrigued. Billie convinced her parents to let her get a modeling portfolio. She showed up early to photographer’s sessions, doing what they said without question. “A natural” they purred, asking her to push her skirt just a little higher. Billie was attacked with modeling offers, agencies, and designers. Someone offered her a recording session. She released a heavily synthesized EP. Everything happened quickly, loudly, people scheduling new things without her consent. Billie’s parents hired an agent named Darlene. Darlene always wore wobbling heels and Botox-smoothed skin. She chirped about celebrities and gossip, always rattling on about the next big thing. “Billie Thorton,” she mumbled unhappily, gagging on the syllables like poison on her tongue. “Billie Thorton…Now that just won’t do.”

When Billie finally made her big singing debut, she wasn’t herself. Billie Thorton had become Portia Pim. It was a ridiculous stage name, but Darlene and the rest of the team insisted. It was memorable, bubbly, and undeniably euphonious. Portia sounded like a celebrity, the kind of beauty who donned pink lipstick and lavish cocktail gowns. No one would ever love Billie Thorton. Billie was the kind of nobody who had turtlenecks from Goodwill, chipped nail polish, and spotty acne. Billie had a mole on her cheek. Billie was a B- student. Billie was unsellable.

***

“Oh my God, are you who I think you are?”

Portia Pim is suffering from a hang-over, barely conscious and coherent. The teenage girl in front of her works at the Motel. The girl has pink-streaked hair and mangled braces, so everything she says is plagued with a lisp.

“Who do you think I am?” Portia slurs.

The teenager’s smile fades slightly, but her chipper demeanor remains. She refuses to be unhappy. Portia relates.

“I think you’re Portia Pim, that chick from MTV. Oh my God, is it not you? ‘Cause then I would be so embarrassed…”

“Do you want an autograph?” Portia mumbles.

“Oh my God! I would love that so much, I mean, I’m like you’re biggest fan.”

The Motel clerk furiously fumbles around for something to write with and retrieves a little ballpoint pen, a rainbow flag painted across it. The pen has a tiny inscription. It reads “Gay/Straight Alliance 2011.” Portia is quickly handed the colorful writing utensil, matched with a crumpled receipt. She stares at the receipt, flips it over, and signs her pseudonym with flourish. She thinks about how funny it is that when she’s buzzed, her handwriting’s sloppy. Like a child autographed the receipt. Like Billie Thorton autographed the receipt.

The teenager squeals as she accepts the signature. She checks Portia out of the motel, telling her that she’s now signed out of room two fifty-six. Only, the girl has a lisp. So it truly sounds more like “two fifshy-shix.” Portia leaves the motel’s entrance swiftly, silently, the florescent lights beating down on her sequined back and carving ridges into her spine. As she slams the exit doors, Portia can’t help noticing that the sound of metal against glass sounds just like fracturing bones. She waves goodbye to the girl at the desk. Her fan has already walked away.