THROUGH MY EYES

Chapter 2 — Mirror Work

Chapter 2 — Mirror Work

The mirror in Rena’s room was not a thing of vanity; it was a ledger. It kept accounts of small betrayals and larger promises, the way a ledger keeps numbers until someone decides to balance them. She stood before it the morning after the audition and practiced the tilt of her head that read as both invitation and refusal. The tilt had to be precise: too much softness and she became a commodity; too much steel and she became a rumor.

She remembered the woman who braided hair in the kitchen of her childhood, the woman who said, “They don’t sell time, they sell forgetting.” That sentence had lodged in Rena like a splinter. She had learned to pare it down into gestures: a laugh that suggested a past, a silence that suggested a secret. The mirror taught her how to translate memory into marketable motion.

There were small rituals that preceded every performance. She would breathe in the smell of the bakery downstairs until the yeast and sugar steadied her. She would press her palms to the glass and imagine the town’s faces passing through her like a slow parade. Faces were currency; faces were maps. She had learned to read them the way other people read weather. The mirror, however, demanded a different kind of literacy: the ability to see yourself as others might, and then to choose which version to sell.

Tommina had left a note on the table: Call at noon. He had circled the time twice, as if the ink could make the hour more urgent. He was a man who measured risk in cigarette burns and late‑night phone calls. When he arrived he carried a thermos and a grin that had been softened by too many compromises. He sat across from her and watched the way she moved her hands over the cup.

“You practiced,” he said.

“Of course,” she replied. “You don’t get to be seen by accident.”

Tommina tapped the thermos with a knuckle. “There’s a producer who wants to meet you. Not the usual kind. He says he wants to make something honest.”

Rena’s laugh was small and careful. “Honest is a dangerous word in this town.”

“It’s a word that sells,” Tommina said. “And sometimes it buys you a different kind of life.”

She thought of the audition room and the man who had said, We’ll call you. She thought of the camera that had followed her for a block and then vanished. She thought of the scar at the base of her thumb and the way it caught the light when she braided her hair. The mirror had taught her to catalog these things: the scar, the story, the way a camera liked the angle of her collarbone. Each item was a token she could spend.

They walked to the meeting together, the city folding around them like a map that had been refolded too many times. The producer’s office smelled of citrus and old contracts. He was younger than she expected and wore a shirt that suggested both taste and calculation. He watched her as if he were reading a script he had not yet finished.

“We want to show the person behind the persona,” he said. “Not the scandal, not the spectacle. The person.”

Rena felt the mirror tilt inside her chest. The person behind the persona was a dangerous commodity. She had built a life on the careful omission of certain facts. To be seen without the armor of performance was to risk losing the very thing she had worked to obtain.

“And what do you want in return?” she asked.

“Your truth,” he said. “And your time.”

Tommina’s jaw tightened. He had learned to read contracts the way other people read weather. “Time is expensive,” he said.

“Everything is expensive,” Rena replied. She thought of the bakery downstairs, of the woman who braided hair, of the ledger in the mirror. She thought of the way forgetting could be sold in measured doses.

She agreed to meet again. The producer left with a card and a promise that sounded like a question. Outside, rain began to fall in a way that made colors run and names blur. Rena pulled her collar up and let the water map the city on her skin. The mirror at home would wait, patient and exacting. She would return to it and practice the tilt of her head until the version she offered the world was the one she could live with.

That night she sat at the window and watched faces pass. She wrote a line in a small notebook: I will be seen. The sentence felt different now—less a summons and more a negotiation. The mirror had taught her how to bargain. The documentary, she suspected, would teach her how to pay.