Details about The Bounce Back by Addie Woolridge
The harsh whisper shattered Neale’s concentration. Looking up from the photo she’d just lit on fire, she searched the sparse crowd for the whisperer but saw only a few boredlooking patrons over by the bar. Objectively, she knew not everyone was going to like her art, but did they have to whisper so loudly about it? Her piece had just started. They could at least give her five minutes to warm up.
Hell, everyone had given Sarah’s giant papier-mâché dog’s head in the next room nearly an hour, and that didn’t even have a multimedia element to it. Flames from the photo in her hand licked her fingertips, and she dropped it into the burn bin she’d painstakingly lugged into the gallery earlier that morning, belatedly realizing that she hadn’t recited the line from Return of the Jedi before she’d let it go. Picking up another picture, Neale waited for the flash of pink light from the projector overhead to tell her that it was time for the next photo. When the mutilated makeover scene from Grease began playing, she seized the image of the March for the Equal Rights Amendment, clicked her lighter, and said, “Upgrade yourself. He’s a stud.”