Re: log: joey & ella, gatsby
The blue dress would go real nicely in a museum or a gallery, some kind of retrospective of the kind of fashion made out of fantasies, of looking some way that suggested what it would be when the clothes came off. Ella knew the way that worked when it was her time and her world, how it felt to be exposed. The blue dress, the one she was working real hard on wrecking sitting on the dirty step but that no one cared about as it wasn't a priceless antique but something hung up backstage so anyone could wear it, it felt like the days before all of that, like Gatsby made everything outside the snowglobe a bad dream that could be woken up from.
She smiled starbright at the jolted denial and the statement that came coupled on after. Ella didn't think he knew why she liked it, that sleepy and small and slow, even all the living Gatsby folk tried real hard to do was smaller, somehow safer than the world beyond. It was hiding, and it was playing pretend and she'd found a little more of herself in here than she had outside, enough she'd started carrying it home.
"I like it for what it is," she said, braiding fringe over her knee, and looking at the dusty tips of her silver, buckled shoes. There was a spot where the paint had rubbed off and you could see the plain brown underneath. Ella figured that would happen for the rest of it but she couldn't see all of the holes just yet, Gatsby was still new. "It's safe. Nothing bad happens here. Maybe someone gets a little drunk," she shrugged a bare shoulder as if to say so what? "But the girls are nice, and I sing a little, and it's like day-dreaming a little, I guess. It doesn't make home any different, but it's nice to take a break. To play pretend a little. Did you ever, when you were little?" Her chin rolled over on her shoulder, the hair was falling out of its pins but she didn't care if her own silver was rubbing off, she'd go home after.