Chapter Text
“ Gina Porter?”
Gina pauses, hands folded over her suitcase before slowly looking over to her open door.
She’d made the mistake of leaving it open— just for a second— and is now paying the price for it as she studies the girl in front of her.
She can’t be more than thirteen, braces and blonde hair pulled back into a freakishly tight ponytail— looking at Gina with the kind of shell shocked expression she thought she’d have a little more time to get away from.
“Oh my God. Oh my God .”
Here we go , Gina thinks– forcing a smile as the girl steps in, looking shell-shocked and as she motions to her up and down.
“I thought I saw you in the lobby and I didn’t know if– oh my God, I can’t believe it’s you.”
“It’s me,” Gina says half-heartedly, the girl in front of her beaming as she squeals, watching as the girl digs her phone out of her pocket.
“Can I take a selfie?” She asks, Gina nodding and smiling for the camera– an instinct now as she leans in with a practiced smile. She’s learned now, in a way she hadn’t in that first year, of what this kind of attention is like.
She knows what kind of attention is better to avoid. She knows, usually within the first five seconds, if she should decline or find her exit.
She knows that sometimes it’s easier to just let people take their pictures and have their moment so that she can get back to the rest of hers.
Gina knows, from having moved from place to place for as long as she could remember, that when it came to making memories– it was all fleeting, forgettable, a slip through the fingers.
Of all the things she’s learned in her life— that’s something she’ll always remember.
Gina knows what it’s like to be forgotten.
“This is perfect,” the girl says, mostly to herself it seems as Gina’s smile grows tight– now pushing her patience as she keeps a protective hand over her suitcase.
“Good. I’m… going to finish unpacking.”
The girl doesn’t even respond, now fully immersed in editing her picture and walking out without a second glance– an old pang of insecurity coming back to her that she quickly shoves down.
She moves to close the door behind her, softly so it doesn’t draw attention– using the lock and hearing her mom’s voice in the back of her mind, warning her of moving into an apartment by herself.
“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” she’d said, helping her load her things into her car as Gina had shoved yet another box into the back of her trunk. “It could be dangerous.”
“I’ll be fine,” Gina had passed off with a wave, seeing the frown on her mother’s face and ignoring it all the same.
She’s regretting it now, just as she’s regretting convincing her mom that she was “totally fine” to move for college on her own considering she’s twenty-one and an adult now and knows what she’s doing.
In her mind, Gina reasoned that it couldn’t be that much different than moving to a new city every year for most of her life– the year that she lived at East High being the most stable, the most normal blip of ordinary before everything else changed again. She lived her life on the road for fifteen years and then did the same for the last five.
Moving to college, the most normal of things— even if her life was anything but normal.
Gina locks the door, then does the deadbolt for good measure.
There aren’t many things that Gina isn’t capable of handling.
Half her life was lived out of a suitcase or out of a box, moving from town to town in the midst of literal disaster zones teaching her more about how fleeting life is than most people can even begin to imagine. She got her first aid certification for her thirteenth birthday and knew how to do stitches before she could even drive. She taught herself to dance through YouTube videos and from the classes she was able to take before she inevitably moved away– raw talent that was always celebrated by her teachers and hated by her peers.
Gina’s used to change, more comfortable with being able to slip in and out of a new skin– a new her – each place that she goes to because that’s all that she’s ever known.
Until East High.
One year and everything changed for her, the one year of stability and of living in one place– one year of thinking that she might actually have friends and a place to graduate from, only for it all to blow up in a way that any of them could have ever expected.
All her life, all she had wanted was to find her place— find her people and feel like she belonged somewhere. Not just because she was the best but because of her , because the people she chose to be friends with actually wanted to.
For a few months, she had it— Salt Lake City, Utah being the most unlikely of places to feel as if she’d finally found a place to call home.
Gina pushes away those memories as she unpacks her apartment in silence– the one quirk that Ashlyn had teased her relentlessly about in the semester that she lived there sticking with her despite how long it’s been since she’s talked to her.
Music was a part of her life just as much as breathing is but silence is what Gina craves– silence away from the constant thoughts that swirl around in her mind, peace and quiet from the way that her goals and dreams seem to want to make her skip two, three paces ahead.
Silence is where Gina does her best thinking and as she unpacks her living room–laying out her blankets, putting her shoes away, hanging up the polaroid pictures that she’s accumulated in the last few years.
Pictures of people and places that a part of her wonders if she should forget. She’s in a new place now, a new person if she wanted to be– only to be reminded of how little that was the case now as she picks up another photo.
It’s one of her, Ashlyn and Kourtney, taken in their cabin the night after the show– still giggling, still with their stage makeup and hair, still fully unaware of how much their lives would change.
The show changed everything for them, even if in hindsight none of them knew just how much. Memories all swirl around in her mind then, blinking back the pinpricks of some memories that she’d rather not dwell on as she takes a deep breath.
Gina’s thumb passes over the edge of the polaroid picture, ignoring the lump in her throat and of the regrets that she can feel crawling up her spine as she exhales slowly before pressing the picture up on the wall.
If there’s one thing that Gina’s learned in her life, it’s that there wasn’t enough time to live with regrets.
If you can’t be number one at something, it isn’t worth doing .
Gina was going to prove, if only to herself, that this was something that she’d be good at too.
It doesn’t take long to unpack, ordering in food so she doesn’t have to venture out and risk even more people finding out where she lives— a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach of granting that girl her selfie and how much that’ll cost her.
She fights the urge to doom scroll or search her own name on twitter, at least for now— having learned her lesson about having to find out what people thought about her and what she did the hard way.
Instead, Gina takes the evening to text her mom and let her know that she’s okay, unpacks and cleans up the little studio that she plans to call home. She looks up where her first class will be in a few days, that same wave of jitters washing over her that felt as old as time as she bobbed her knee up and down.
You got this. You got this. You got this, she tells herself as she scrolls through her schedule— intimidating and yet no different, she reasons, than all the times she’s done this before.
The past five years of her life couldn’t undo the lifetime that she’d spent working to find some stability in her life. She still had dreams and had ambitions, the entire reason that she’s here now in an apartment in New York and not still on the circuit auditioning for pilots because she wanted this.
She wanted normalcy, she wanted freedom – the omen of having some random girl come into her apartment hopefully being nothing more than a blip in her idealized view of what she wants this experience to be.
“Darling, you don’t need college,” her agent Carla had said, voice constantly teetering on the edge of wheezing when she’d first told her the news of her plan. “You’re a star. World’s your oyster.”
But how long will it be turned around in a loop in her mind as she’d made her case— never forgetting that Carla was on her payroll and not the other way around despite how much the latter tried to make it seem.
The breakaway success of the documentary, the fame and the infamy of having a viral moment had launched her and her friends into the stratosphere— getting calls from agents and pushes for auditions that in any other instance, in any other universe, would’ve made her feel as if all her dreams would come true.
They did, in a way— auditioning for a network pilot and spending the last few years in Los Angeles,, surrounded by the daily kind of fame that had all but consumed her life since she was sixteen years old.
She sang and she danced and she learned a hell of a lot in the few seasons of her show, a sort of college of its own that left not just her agent but more than a few of her cast mates puzzled that she’d leave it to go to an actual university.
“Just audition again. You’re right at the start,” her director had said and she’d seen the proof of it— seen and understood that she could be making one of the biggest mistakes of her life and her career by choosing to “throw it all away”, in Carla’s words, for the sake of some printed words on a piece of paper.
But what she didn’t tell Carla, or her mom, or Jamie or any of the cast and crew was how unbearably lonely it was to be an actor in the real sense— long set days and early calls with people that weren’t her friends first, but coworkers.
She missed theater , missed community— missed even more the connection she’d felt for the first time in her life only for it to be taken from her.
Gina taps her fingers against the table she put together herself, looking at her schedule before forcing her laptop shut.
There was no use in dwelling on the past.
Not when Gina only planned on looking to her future.
Gina wakes up the next morning with two things on her mind: cupcakes and coffee.
While her kitchen is clean, unpacked and ready for her to stress bake as much as her heart desires, her fridge is empty— stomach grumbling as she considers her options.
She could just order something in again until she gets her bearings, but that defeated the point of what this whole thing was supposed to be. No normal person wondered about whether paparazzi were going to follow you to the grocery store.
No normal person wondered if it would be better or worse PR for the world to find out you only ever had food delivered.
Gina knows she’s not famous enough to warrant the paranoia she feels, not anymore at least but the encounter with the neighbor girl the day before has her on edge— choosing bravery or maybe just good old fashioned stubbornness as she grabs her keys and heads out the door.
She scrolls through the map on her phone, looking for the closest coffee shop to get a caffeine fix and maybe some breakfast before she decides to actually shop for some groceries— passing by a few people who don’t even look up from what they’re doing as she leaves the lobby.
It puts a kick to her step and a smile on her face, taking that as confirmation that she was right to choose Columbia over UCLA or anywhere else on the West Coast.
“City’s full of celebrity darling but all the wrong kind,” Carla had told her but Gina had been insistent— the New York of her dreams giving her the kind of invisibility that she hadn’t realized how much she wanted until she didn’t have a choice.
Gina feels like it’s a fresh start all over again as she checks her phone, using it as a guide towards a shop called Pour Over two blocks away.
People pass her by without even looking back, Gina deftly avoiding getting run over by a biker as she crosses the street and smiling even more at the feeling of finally doing something on her own, for her own self, in years.
The jingle of the door of Pour Over rings out as she steps in, seeing a line and a busy string of baristas at the counter. She clicks her phone off, putting it in her pocket and stepping right behind the person standing in front of her.
They turn to look at her, likely out of politeness or just because they’re aware that’s someone coming up behind them— the polite smile on their face instantly dropping just as Gina’s stomach sinks when she realizes who it is.
His mouth drops, eyes widening in a look that’s so familiar it’s painful— all of Gina’s good feelings about her brand new start coming to a screeching halt when the one person she never expected to see locks eyes with her.
Ricky Bowen, standing in front of her looking just as shocked as she feels.
“ Gina ?”