Goodgirl.tv — Part 7: I showed him the one thing I ever made for nobody but me.

By CancerCancer

And then I do the thing I didn't plan to do, which is show him the robin.

The old sims aren't a portfolio. I have to explain this to exactly nobody, because I never show them, but they're not work, they're diary. They're how I made anything stick. The world recorded my entire childhood — every shoot, every shed, every voted-for feature arriving on schedule for an audience that watched me become the thing they'd bought — and somewhere in all that footage my actual interior got lost. Too much signal. I couldn't hear what I felt in a moment because the moment was always being captured for someone else, and the capture drowned the feeling. So I learned to build. A sim catches what the feed couldn't. A sim makes the inside real enough to keep.

The robin is the oldest one.

I was maybe ten. Equipment broke that afternoon, or my parents were out, I genuinely don't remember which, only that for once nobody was filming me, and a robin started throwing itself at the window. Over and over. Going at its own reflection. It saw a rival in the glass and the threat response was correct — that's the part I couldn't stop watching — the response was right, it just didn't know it was fighting itself, and even if you could've told it, I don't think it could've stopped. I watched it for twenty minutes. Nothing else happened. That's the whole event. A bird and a window and no camera and me.

And it kept slipping out of me afterward — no timestamp, no file, no little number to hang it on — so I built it. Out of an entire crowdsourced childhood, the one thing I chose to make permanent is a bird doing something useless and compelled and true that nobody but me ever saw.

I don't explain any of that to Geoff. I just open the door and let him walk in, and there's the bird, going again and again at the glass, and he stands there, this mouse who can't stop painting things nobody asked to see, and he gets it from the inside before I've said a word.

"It can't not," he says, finally. Quiet. "The window's right there and it can't not."

"No," I say. "It can't."

And I watch him understand that this was never the audacity problem. It was the audacity answer. It was never arrogance, the thing in him, the thing in the bird, the thing in me. It's just a creature running its correct response to the thing in front of it. You don't get to choose whether you meet the window. You only get to choose whether you build what you saw there.

He turns around to say something and the math finishes in his face — the work, the old friends, the voice — and he gets there, all the way there, and he says, half-wonder, half-apology, "Gemini. Cancer Pup —"

"Please don't use that name." It comes out softer than I expect. Not the brand reflex. Something older. "My friends call me CeeCee."

He says it back like he's been handed something breakable. "CeeCee." Then, fast, dead serious: "Permission to completely lose it for, like, thirty seconds, tops?"

"Granted," I say.

And while he's losing it — quiet about it, a mouse vibrating in the middle of a bird that won't stop hitting a window — something comes up false on a ledger I've been keeping since before I could read it, and I stand there watching it fail, and I do not explain it, not even to myself, not yet.

I went in to encourage the kid.

The bird keeps going at the glass.

He still doesn't know everything, I keep telling myself.

He knows CeeCee. He doesn't know goodgirl.tv, the chimes, the poll, the whole machine idling on the other side of the only wall it's never breached. CancerCancer stays outside where she belongs. What he knows is CeeCee, and what CeeCee knows is him, and neither of those things leaves this room. That isn't failure. For the first time in my life it's a thing I chose, with both hands, knowing the cost and paying it anyway — which is the only kind of identity that was ever actually mine.

The door's still open. The key works.

Viv gave me a key once and never asked to see what I kept behind it. I used to file that under trust. Tonight it reads more like instruction.

And I notice, logging the room shut behind me — locking it this time — that I want something. Want to come back, want to show him the next one, want a whole future of small uncatalogued wants. And I don't, for once, run the count of who would be watching me want it.

I catch the shape of the next one already forming — a room I could build for him, the way you'd pick out a gift, sized to one person with no audience standing behind him. I've made ten thousand things. I have never once made a thing for a single person who'd be the whole reason it existed. The want is so unfamiliar it reads, at first, as fear — and I hold still and let it be there, the way you let a bird settle that you don't want to spook.

The harness goes off. Then again. Then the mother-chime, cheerier than the rest, because brand-mom is always cheery. The chat wants fetch — I can read the bounty shape from the escalation pattern, the way the number is climbing toward the number I have always, predictably, eventually met. My mother's voice starts to come through, warm, already mid-sentence, already walking me to the next item on a call sheet I never agreed to.

Twenty-eight years and I have never once let her chime go unanswered. The chime is the barrel; the barrel is real; the people on the far end of it built me and I love them, which is the part with no off switch. But the chime is out there, and I am in here, and for the length of one breath those are two different rooms and only one of them has me in it.

I put them all on silent.

There's no counter in this room. I didn't build one.