Chapter Text
By now, Cocoa had a system.
She could have described it, if asked, in the same brisk, laminated tone as the safety posters in the staff corridor: wake, dress, feed, toilet, stage, toilet, undress, wash, sleep. A loop wound neatly around Bassie’s fragile days. The trick, Cocoa had learned, was to keep moving, as if motion alone might keep things from slipping further.
That morning Bassie sat on the green room bench like a misplaced display, legs parted a little, hands resting on her knees. Her arms twitched now and then, twiggy fingers opening and closing with a small, pointless rhythm.
Cocoa perched in front of her with the spoon and the plastic bowl of porridge-thick oats they pretended were “breakfast.” The oats had been microwaved into a warm, bland thing.
“Big crowd today,” Cocoa murmured, guiding the spoon toward Bassie’s mouth.
Bassie’s eyes tracked the spoon with some difficulty, visibly focusing and unfocusing, her jaw working in small circles. At the last second her head jerked, a sharp little tremor, and the spoon bumped her chin. A slow trail slid down the painted wicker, fat and beige.
“Whoops. That’s okay,” Cocoa wiped it with the cloth already draped over her arm. The cloth had once been white; now it held overlapping ghosts of past meals in faint beiges and pinks. She did not let herself dwell on that. “Let’s try again.”
Second attempt. This time the spoon reached its destination, but Bassie’s lips did not close in time. The mush sat there, half in, half out, until gravity decided for her. A portion went in, thickly, the rest fell, joining yesterday’s constellation of spots on the apron.
Cocoa inhaled, exhaled. She imagined herself as one of those mechanical rabbits that could hop indefinitely so long as the key in their back kept turning. “No problem,” she said. “That’s okay.” She said.
She finished as much as she could reasonably pretend was “breakfast,” then set the bowl aside. The next step in the sequence weighed on her, heavy and undeniable.
“Okay,” she said, tapping Bassie’s knee. “Bathroom time, all right? Before we go on stage.”
Bassie did not answer, of course, but she allowed herself to be lifted. The routine of it all: Cocoa’s paws under Bassie’s arms, Bassie’s weight pressing down with an obedient passivity. Wicker body light, but not weightless; she always surprised Cocoa with how solid she felt, how insistently there. Together they shuffled down the corridor, past the poster of last year’s promotion, now curling at the edges.
In the little staff restroom—too small for the grandeur of Bassie’s costume, too bright for Cocoa’s taste—Cocoa locked the door and turned to her charge. The tile was cold and clean, clean in the way of surfaces that have been stripped by chemicals over and over.
“Okay, Bass. Remember what we do.” She spoke softly, as if the walls might report her to Delilah for any hint of impatience.
Undressing Bassie was a series of practiced maneuvers: unfasten the apron, gather the layers of pastel cloth, guide wicker hands to hold on to the bar for balance. Bassie’s fingers did, in fact, curl around the bar, but there was no sense of choice in the gesture; they were merely following the direction of Cocoa’s paws, like magnets settling to metal.
They managed, barely. Cocoa held her breath through the sound, through the awkwardness of positioning, through the sharp hiss and the muted, thin little trickle that followed. It was not perfect—there was a spill, a damp patch on the inside of Bassie’s thigh where the stream had gone astray when her legs twitched—but Cocoa cleaned it quickly, hands steady, jaw tight. She told herself this was good, this was success, because it had happened here and not later, out there.
“See?” she said, voice falsely bright. “No problem at all. You’re a champ.”
Bassie gazed over her shoulder, at the empty corner of the room where an emergency mop was stored.
Hours later, the day betrayed them.
The line for photos was long, snaking between scattered baskets of styrofoam eggs and inflatable chicks that bobbed gently with the air conditioning. Bassie sat on her bench, flowers adjusted, apron fresh. Cocoa stood beside her, one paw on Bassie’s shoulder, the other gesturing at children, parents, cameras. She heard herself tell the same jokes she had told all week. Her voice had become another part of the backdrop.
“Bassie thinks you’ve got the best bunny ears,” she told a little boy in a paper headband. “Don’t you, Bass?”
Bassie’s smile, such as it was, hovered in place. Her head tilted obediently toward the boy. For a moment Cocoa allowed herself to believe they were getting away with it again, that the loop would hold.
Then she felt it: a subtle change in Bassie’s posture, a sag under her paw, as if some silent internal string had snapped. Bassie’s fingers, which had been resting politely on her lap, curled inward, then spread wide, an odd, helpless flexion. Her eyes did not close, but something in them went further away.
“Bass?” Cocoa said under her breath. “Stay with me, okay? We’re almost done.”
The boy’s mother counted down to the camera. “Three, two—”
It happened somewhere between two and one. There was no dramatic tell, no gasp, no cry. Only the slow, unwelcome warmth seeping through cloth and wicker, the way Bassie’s skirt darkened in an irregular, blooming pattern. Cocoa felt the first damp touch against her own ankle a second later, a thin line finding its way down the front of the bench onto the floor.
For a heartbeat she simply stared. The photographer’s flash went off; a white square of light pinned them all in place like insects on velvet. The boy grinned, oblivious, his paper ears askew.
Then Cocoa moved.
“Okay, everybody, Bassie needs a little break!” Her voice went up half an octave, cheerful and tinny. “We’ll be right back, promise! Take a bonbon on your way to the craft table!”
There were murmurs, the rustle of disappointed children being redirected. Someone from staff arrived with a plastic tub of candy, bless them, and the line diffused like sugar in water. Cocoa turned back to Bassie, whose face had not changed at all, whose body still sat perfectly straight despite the spreading wetness beneath her.
“Up we go,” Cocoa whispered, digging her paws under Bassie’s arms again. The wet fabric clung. There was a faint sound when it pulled away from the bench, a sticky kiss that made Cocoa’s mouth dry.
The walk back to the green room was longer than any parade route. The corridor seemed to have doubled its length, each fluorescent tube drawing a white underline beneath their progress. Cocoa could feel the dampness soaking into her own costume where Bassie leaned against her. She did not look down. She kept her eyes fixed ahead, jaw set, ears rigid.
Once inside she shut the door with more force than she intended. The room, small and familiar, seemed suddenly hostile, cluttered with the evidence of this new fragile life: extra aprons folded in hurried piles, a stack of plastic bags, packets of wipes. She guided Bassie to the bench. When Cocoa took her hands away, Bassie sat where she was put, legs slightly apart, skirt ruined.
The smell arrived then, sour and unmistakable, filling the corners. Cocoa pressed the back of her paw briefly to her mouth. She had not thought herself delicate; she had seen backstage messes, makeup smeared and worse. But this carried another weight. This was not a stray child’s accident; this was her colleague, her rival, her almost-friend who had once hissed backhands through gritted teeth in this very room.
“I told Delilah you were doing better,” Cocoa said. It came out small, almost conversational. She knelt, paws already reaching for the hem of the apron, for the wipes, for the bin liner. “I told her you had it under control. Look at us, huh?”
Bassie did not. Her gaze hovered somewhere above Cocoa’s head, fixed on a crack in the ceiling paint.
As Cocoa worked, she found herself narrating under her breath—not for Bassie, but for the sake of sound. Her paws were deft and gentle, stripping away soaked fabric, dabbing at wicker that had absorbed more than any basket should.
It took longer than it should have. Each layer revealed another small failure: a damp line here, a spot there, places where the earlier success in the bathroom had not been as complete as she’d convinced herself. By the time she bundled the last of it into the bag, her own paws were trembling. She tied the top in a hard knot.
When she finally sat back on her heels, breathing hard, Bassie was exactly where she had left her, naked of costume from the waist down, legs angular and thin. There was a childlike vulnerability to the way her feet dangled above the floor, toes not quite touching.
Cocoa felt something hot climb behind her eyes.
“You used to hate me,” she said quietly. The words surprised her; she had not planned to give them form. “Do you remember that?”
She laughed, a short, ugly sound. “You’d die if you could see me now, you know that? Maybe you’d tell me what was on your mind. ‘Oh, look, Cocoa, you’ve finally gotten what you wanted. Center stage and a baby to mind.’”
Bassie blinked, slow, uncomprehending.
Cocoa pressed her fists to her thighs to stop them shaking. “Say something,” she whispered, to the seam on Bassie’s temple, to the hollow place where something had been taken. “Tell me you hate this. Tell me you hate me. I could work with that. I knew what to do with that.”
Silence. The hum of the lights. The soft, intermittent creak of Bassie’s fingers as another stray signal passed through them, opening and closing, opening and closing on empty air.
At last Bassie’s hand lifted, in that hesitant, misdirected way she had now, and came to rest on Cocoa’s sternum. There was no pressure in it, no clear intent. It felt like being touched by an automaton, like a blessing scripted in advance.
Still, Cocoa froze. The contact burned through the layers of costume, through chocolate and fabric and whatever lay beneath. For a moment she let herself lean into it, just a fraction, as if the dead weight of that hand were the only thing keeping her from falling apart entirely.
She sat there until the lights dimmed on their automatic timer, the room sinking into a gray that softened the stains on the floor, blurred the outlines of basins and bags. In the dark, with Bassie’s limp hand on her, Cocoa could almost pretend they were simply two coworkers who had stayed too late, resting their eyes before the next show.
“Okay,” she said hoarsely. She reached for a clean apron. “Okay. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
The system, after all, demanded continuation. Wake, dress, feed, toilet, stage, toilet, undress, wash, sleep.