It's Been a While

“You ever tell your family what you do for a living?” Nina asked me as she started wiping off her makeup. “Took me a year to tell mine. Told them I’d gotten a job at a flower shop.”
 
“It’s not like we’re strippers,” I replied. “But no, I haven’t. I haven’t talked to anyone in years.”
 
“You want to talk about it?” Nina was only temping as theater actress. She wanted to be a therapist.
 
“Not really. I left with one of my dads and then he went back to work and I came here.”
 
“Both of your parental figures were fathers?”
 
“Both? Try five. It didn’t help that my sister was sucking face with one of them.”
 
“God, you’d be a perfect study for my final paper.”
 
“You don’t know the half of it.”
 
No one did. I’d opted to take Roger and Ginny’s last name (they got back together after he came to see me and finally got married. I had a half sister called Harmony somewhere in Oklahoma) because Frost was a lot easier to explain than Ierotorowaybryar. With a face covered in stage makeup and my hair cut short, no one could recognize me as the adopted child of My Chemical Romance.
 
Jillian and Natalie kept in touch with me for a few months after I escaped with Bob to Chicago, but then Jill stopped writing all together and Natalie was busy becoming a doctor of engineering or something. The guys did try, but I was a teenager obsessed with being independent.  I finished high school no problem, but college was a scary option so I started working musicals. It got to the point where I was getting gigs like Roxie Hart and most recently, Columbia from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
 
This meant that I’d come home at about three in the morning and sleep til noon before finally dragging myself off the shoddy apartment floor to wash off the last evening’s coat of body glitter and eyeliner.
 
I missed them, sometimes, but everyone had adjusted to a semi-normal kind of life.
 
Or so I thought.
 
The letter came just as the showing cycle ended (quite literally, because Tito, our very own Dr. Frank n Furter did a mail run for me when he knew I’d be staying late to help the tech crew move everything back into position for the next day) and it announced something I wasn’t sure I’d read correctly.
 
“Nina?” I asked, not bothering to take off the Columbia costume. She made a brilliant Janet. “What does this say?”
 
“Family reunion? Sounds fun.” Yeah, fun. I’d miss two months worth of work and lose the apartment because rent was due. Then I’d have to move in with a cast mate or go searching for someone who’d be willing to let me crash on their couch.
 
“No, no. At the bottom.”  It was weird that they’d even managed to contact me, so it must’ve been pretty damn important.
 
“Natalie’s getting married? She’s one of your sisters, right? Oh, looks like this was delivered late. Oh!” Nina was really good at changing moods fast. It was part of what made her such a good actress. “They gave you a plane ticket! That was nice, right?”
 
I took it from her and looked at it.
 
“Shit! That leaves in an hour! Won’t even have time to freaking change,” I muttered, grabbing my change of clothes from the floor and pulling the sweat pants I’d taken on over the shorts I was wearing before shoving everything else that belonged to me into my bag.  “Tell Tito to start looking for a replacement, doesn’t look like I’m coming back for a while.”
 
“What about my paper?”
 
“I’ll tell you everything when I get back, I’ve got to go watch my sister get married.”
 
The taxi driver looked at me a little strangely but I handed him the money up front so he drove me to the airport without asking questions. I had forty five minutes to find my plane, and my seat, and figure out why the hell I was going back to Jersey. I left six years ago. I hadn’t felt any sort of need to go back for long, even when the guys got married. I flew down for the ceremony, then packed up and went back to Chicago. This would be two months of my life, shoved into some strange box of memories.
 
I had only one thought, though, as I settled into my plane seat next to a glaring old lady and an obnoxious teenager blasting death metal and sending sappy texts to his girlfriend.
 
Cupcake’s going to be so pissed.