#mia stevens

"Another door, another question!"

Character: Mia Stevens.

Roleplay: Midnight in Manhattan.

Faceclaim: Shelley Hennig.

She always turns away. Regardless of what point she is at in the process—she’s gazing longingly towards the secret weapon which hides in the depths of her handbag. Her digits grasp desperately at the tiny capsules, drowning her fingertips in their unrelenting magnetism; and her tongue caresses each contour of the pill, a bitter taste filling her senses—she turns away, but she doesn’t get far. It’s a game of Adam & Eve, and the Serpent is winning.

Mia’s eyes critically examined the last paragraph of her short-fiction, before promptly hitting the backspace key until the Microsoft Word document was empty and all memory of her work was no longer. It was good, better even, than that of the other students at Constance, but it wasn’t at the same level as “John Smith”’s. Her prose was emotional and raw, but it wasn’t nearly as captivating as her ghost writer’s sought-out combination of honesty, clarity, and beauty. She couldn’t write like that. She had tried, but she didn’t have the talent or the drive to kick her writing into gear. Mia wasn’t sure about the former, but she knew that she once demonstrated the latter.

She had always wanted to be perfect, but it wasn’t supposed to be this easy: her grandmother gave her a hefty allowance, and what were a few twenties if it meant that her reputation remained untouched by the likes of Blair Waldorf and Nelly Yuki? The guilt ate her at first, but she had slowly rendered herself unfeeling to the shame of taking responsibility for someone else’s work. It was only a few months in, and she could already hand in a paper entirely of someone else’s creation—without even batting an eye.  She would say it was a talent, but there wasn’t a single thing admirable about cheating when it came to school.

“I don’t understand why anyone would use drugs to cheat at school,” Lydia had commented earlier that day, as she leaned over the brunette’s shoulder to peak at the honor student’s computer screen. In response, Mia had shrugged noncommittally. “It’s a solid plot line,”she returned easily, and that-was-that. Lydia rarely questioned anything, except perhaps the Archibald family; and despite being her best friend, Mia highly doubted that the girl could guess where her inspiration had come from.

No one knew the truth, after all. An argument could be made for Nick, perhaps, but he was just as at risk as herself if she was found out. To everyone else she was just the new girl, the new girl who had risen to the top of Constance’s class with her natural ingenuity. Mia couldn’t imagine what they would think if they knew the real story...what her parents would think if they knew the real story.

It had been enough of a struggle to convince her parents that private school would ultimately lead to better opportunities for her and her sister. She had thought that her argument would be an obvious, but her parents and herself didn’t usually see eye-to-eye, so it wasn’t abnormal that they saw private school through some wonky “artistic” looking-glass. Still, she doubted that they had expected her to land in this position. For all their faults, her parents had raised her with the right morals. “Don’t get drunk, don’t steal, don’t do drugs…” At the time of this particular lecture, Mia had to hold back laughter. To her, these “guidelines” were a given. She would never do those things: underage drinking, stealing, and drugs—they would be put on her academic record, surely ruining her chances at getting into Harvard Law School.

Besides, Mia didn’t have the time to go drinking or to go partying. Those were the types of activities reserved for the future garbage men and truck drivers of America, not the lawyers of the world. As far as she was concerned, that sort of reckless behavior was a non-issue. And taking credit for someone else’s work isn’t really stealing anyway, not if you paid for it, Mia mused, not for the first time. “John Smith” was running a business, and she was merely a customer. The payoff was equal for both of them, and if it was not, he was still the one with control over the price. Granted, she could leave his business and seek someone with an equal talent for writing, but she’d rather just stick with what she knew. She still had a plan, after all, and she didn’t want it to be pushed aside by additional changes to her already-revised ten-year plot.

“Adderall isn’t a real drug, anyway,” she defended herself, despite the lack of anyone present to question her intentions. Call it a side-effect of her high-strung-type-A personality, but Mia often found that she was constantly judging herself. The fact of the matter was that she wasn’t doing something like cocaine. She was merely using a study-aid, no different from reading a Princeton Review Book, except that it was decidedly more effective.  In her mind, there was nothing wrong with doing what you needed to get the results that you need.

“Mia?” The brunette looked over her shoulder when she heard her name being called. Despite not hearing her sister talk to her more than five times since they had arrived in the Upper East Side, Mia knew Zoe’s voice by heart. “What are you still doing awake?” the younger girl asked, prompting Mia to look at the clock on the bottom right corner of the computer display. 2:00. The older Stevens sighed, feeling quite torn. She still had a plethora of things to do before school started tomorrow, and as much as she would enjoy reuniting with her sister (Why Zoe had decided to initiate conversation tonight, of all times, Mia could never figure but…), she just couldn’t. “I’m going to bed soon,” she responded, regret lacing her voice before she stood up from her chair and made her way to her closet.

She waited until the lights outside of her room had been turned off, and until she sensed all movement outside of the room had ceased to exist, before deciding that she was safe. Suddenly her breath became labored. After all this time, it still surprised Mia how something so small could be so powerful. It had so much control over her, but she had control over it as well, didn’t she? Her hand fumbled behind her clothes for the pill bottle, like a blind person reaching for salvation—except, in her case, she knew it would only lead her to hell. I could give up now, if I wanted to. I could let go, Mia told herself, despite the sensation of the light-colored pills slipping down her throat. She knew that this would be her undoing, but it wouldn’t be that case as long as she wasn’t found out.