Layla

“You can’t be the former nowadays without also being the latter.” She posts the picture with the hashtags.

“They used to say MTV was the death of the ugly musician,” I mutter. “Not even close. Instagram is the new grim reaper.”

“It’s a good thing you look like you do, then,” Layla says. She kisses me and then puts her phone back into her purse.

I turn my cell on airplane mode and drop it into the back pocket of the seat in front of me, dreading the inevitable pictures Layla will force me to take before my head hits the pillow tonight. I know I should be more grateful to her for wanting me to succeed. It just all feels dirty now. Our story made a few headlines and circulated in the Nashville scene, so it gave me a small bump in sales and a huge bump in followers—I’m over ten thousand now. But I can’t help but feel like I’m capitalizing off her injuries.

I feel like a sellout who never really had anything to sell out.

The plane begins to taxi, and Layla starts twisting the hem of her dress nervously. She’s already downed both bottles of our water.

The attack changed a lot of things about her. It changed both of us.

A lot was taken from her because of me. Months of her life. Her confidence. Her security. She was left with anxiety, dependency issues, night terrors, panic attacks, memory loss. The carefree and confident girl I fell in love with no longer sits next to me. Instead, I sit next to a girl who seems like she’s fighting not to crawl out of the skin she’s in.

It’s like all her resilience is buried beneath layers of scar tissue now.

Maybe that’s why I’ve let her basically take over as my manager while she recovers. I do what she says because my career is the only thing that seems to give her a sense of purpose. Keeps her mind off everything that’s happened.

And maybe that’s how she deals with it—by turning the one thing that caused all of this into a positive thing. Every aspect of our lives other than my career has suffered. Layla says it’s good we have that small sliver of positivity to hold on to. I don’t want to deprive her of that, but I kind of miss the days when she didn’t take my career as seriously. I miss it when she encouraged me to quit the band in order to preserve my own happiness. I miss how she used to pull my guitar out of my hands so she could crawl on top of me. I miss it when she didn’t care about what was posted to my Instagram page.

But mostly, I miss just being myself around her. Lately, I feel like I’ve been inching away from the person I was so that I can become the person she now needs.

“Is the seat belt sign off yet?” she asks. Her face is buried in the sleeve of my shirt. She’s gripping my hand. Honestly, I hadn’t even realized we’d taken off. It’s like I live inside my own head now more than I live in reality.

“Not yet.”

She must be extremely nervous right now if she can’t even lift her eyes to look for herself. I bring my hand to the side of her head and press my lips into her hair. She tries to hide it, but anxiety is not an invisible thing. I can see it in the way she holds herself. In the way her hands twist at her dress. In the way her jaw hardens. I can even see it in the way her eyes dart around when we’re in public, as if she’s waiting for someone to come around the corner and attack.

When a ding indicates the seat belt signs are off and it’s safe to move around the cabin, she finally separates herself from me. Her eyes flitter nervously around the cabin as she takes a mental note of her surroundings. She lifts the shade and gazes out the window at the clouds, absentmindedly bringing her hand up to the scar on the side of her head. She’s always touching it. Sometimes I wonder what she thinks about when she touches it. She has no memory of that night. Only what I’ve told her, but she rarely asks about it. She never asks about it, actually.

Her knee is bouncing up and down. She shifts in her seat and then glances back into coach. Her eyes are wide, like she’s on the edge of a panic attack.

She’s had two full-on panic attacks in the past month alone. This is how they both started. Her touching her scar. Her fingers trembling. Her eyes full of fear. Her breaths labored.

“You okay?”

She nods, but she doesn’t make eye contact with me. She just blows out several slow and quiet breaths, as if she’s trying to hide from me that she’s attempting to calm herself down.