The Courage To Love

  ***

  “That didn’t take long.” Mia sat with her legs, tucked under her on the couch, a magazine in her hands.

  Seated in his makeshift living room with its mismatched furniture, she looked out of place. Like something he’d dreamed up. “It was an easy problem to solve.”

  “Do you really enjoy reading this?” She held up the scientific magazine in her hands.

  Sean grabbed the remote from his desk before sitting next to her. “Yeah, why?”

  Mia glanced down at the magazine as if it were an alien object. “I got a headache trying to figure out what the first article was talking about. Something called string theory. Whatever that is.” She tossed the magazine onto the side end table causing a paper to float down.

  He grabbed the paper from the floor and stuck it under a stack of magazines. “In very simple terms it’s a mathematical model of theoretical physics. According to it everything in the universe including energy can be constructed by hypothetical one dimensional strings.” He stopped when he saw the glazed over look in her eyes.

  “Okay, if you say so. Where the heck did you learn about that anyway?”

  “MIT. I finished my master’s degree in physics this semester. I should get my diploma in the mail in a month or two.”

  “You won’t get that at the graduation ceremony?”

  He switched on the television and searched for the baseball game. “I’m not going.”

  “What do you mean you’re not going? Not everyone earns a master’s degree from MIT. I bet your mom wants you to go.”

  “She doesn’t know.” Not for a second had he considered attending the graduation ceremony. He had better things to do with his time than listen to speeches and wait for someone to call out his name.

  Mia yanked the remote from his hand and turned off the TV. “What do you mean she doesn’t know?”

  The outrage he heard in her voice seemed out of place. Why should she care?

  “She doesn’t know when the graduation is?” She eyed him with suspicion. “Or she doesn’t know you earned a degree?”

  “Ma, knows I take classes. She doesn’t know I’ve been working on a degree.” It had never crossed his mind to tell her. It didn’t affect their day to day life.

  Mia grabbed his chin and turned his face toward her. “Are you serious?”

  “What? Do you tell your family everything?” The way she acted one might think he’d kept proof aliens existed from the entire world.

  Her hand dropped away. “Well, no, but something like this is impressive. If I’d earned a master’s degree from MIT, I’d make sure the whole world knew it. That’s one of the top schools in the world.”

  “And you went to Harvard. Do you broadcast that to everyone?”

  “I studied history and that’s not exactly the same thing. Besides I didn’t graduate, remember?”

  “It’s a waste of a whole afternoon. I’ll get my diploma in the mail.” Finished with the discussion he took the remote back and turned on the television. “Looks like the Sox are down by four runs already.”

  Mia leaned against him and turned her attention to the game. From time to time though he caught her throwing looks his way. At any moment he anticipated another argument from her regarding his graduation. He had no clue why it mattered so much to her. They’d known each other less than two full weeks and in about one more she’d check out of The Victorian Rose anyway.

  “My dad would have given anything to see me graduate from college. Even now he urges me to go back and earn a degree.” Mia reached for his hand.

  In the short time they’d known each other, he noticed how much she liked physical contact. Never one to be outwardly affectionate, the constant contact threw him off kilter.

  “What about your mom?” He followed the movement of her fingers over the tops of his hands. Next to his, her hands, with their perfectly manicured pink nails, looked small and feminine.

  “My mom never saw any reason for me to go. She said if I took time off from acting it might hurt my career.” She traced a path from his knuckles across his wrist and up his forearms. “She encouraged my sisters to go and would have had a fit it they hadn’t gone to their graduations.”

  Single-minded determination came in handy in some situations, but in this case it wouldn’t change his mind. Rather then state his reasons again, he latched onto something else she said. “What about you? Did you go because you wanted to or because your father wanted you to?” In his opinion far too many people attended college because their parents’ expected it rather than because they had a clue as to what they wanted out of life.

  Mia’s hand stilled on his arm and she tilted her head to one side. “A little of both. By the time Family Life ended I was eighteen. I’d been on the show for eight years and had done two movies. I needed a break from Hollywood. Don’t get me wrong, I loved doing the show, but growing up on television was hell. I wanted something normal again. College seemed like the logical choice, but it just wasn’t for me.”

  “How could growing up while making more money per episode than most people make in a year be hell? Compared to what some people deal with, it seems like a walk in the park.”

  “Most people only see the fame and fortune associated with Hollywood. Unless they’ve experienced it, they don’t know about the pressure and the abuses. Drugs and alcohol are everywhere. A lot of the friends I made early in my career got addicted and their careers tanked. One really good friend from the show overdosed and died halfway through season six.”

  Though not a huge fan of Family Life, he remembered when the actress she referred to died. The media had portrayed her as a party girl who had let her fame go to her head. “You survived it though.” He couldn’t recall any negative media attention attached to Mia. Rather, the media portrayed her as the perfect Hollywood sweetheart.

  “I had my own struggles, trust me, just not with drugs,” Mia answered. “In Hollywood there is no such thing as too thin. When I turned thirteen I had this birthday bash. Some photographer took a picture of me eating this huge slice of cake and it appeared on the cover of The Inquisitor with the headline ‘Someone’s going to need a new swimsuit soon.’ After that I started dieting like crazy. Eventually, I only thought about food and exercising. I weighed myself every day. The writers had to make up a new storyline for several episodes because I ended up in the hospital. That was my first bout with anorexia.” Mia paused to take in a breath. “I kept it together for three years. When I turned sixteen, I had a sudden growth spurt. The media swooped in and I became obsessed with how I looked again. I spent three weeks in the hospital and months in therapy after that. Somehow it all stayed out of the media. Outside of my family and a few other people, and now you, no one knew about any of that.”

  Her willingness to share such personal information touched him. In fact he’d only had one relationship develop enough that he’d even considered sharing such intimate details. At the time he’d thought he’d met “the one.” She’d been a woman he’d met while taking a college night course. He’d discovered just how wrong he’d been when she let him know she could never make a permanent commitment to someone still living with his mother. She’d given him the ultimatum: either her or his mom. After all his mom had been through, he couldn’t up and leave her. She depended on him, and with his sister in the Navy, he was all she had. So ever since that one relationship, he only dated women from the area. Women that knew up front that his life would always be in North Salem and at The Victorian Rose.

  “I have kept a handle on it since then, but it’s hard sometimes even now. Every once in a while I catch myself starting to slip into old habits, like when that magazine claimed I was pregnant.”

  “You have nothing to worry about. You’re gorgeous. You know that, don’t you?” Society’s obsession with image baffled him.

  Mia shrugged, her eyes back on the game. “Sometimes demons are hard to keep under lock and key.”