Safe If We Stand Close Together: chapter three
Title: Safe If We Stand Close Together
Author: setepenre_set
Summary: AU. Roxanne attends 'Lil Gifted School.
Rating: K+
Warnings: none
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“What would you like to do,” Roxanne’s mother asks at breakfast, “for your birthday party, this year, sweetheart? It’s still a while away, but I thought we should start planning early. I know it falls on one of your father’s weekends, so I was thinking you could have something here the weekend before.”
Roxanne shrugs and stirs her eggs with her fork, mixing the yolk with the white. Her mother takes another drink of coffee.“You could have a sleepover, would you like that? You could invite those girls you told me about. What were their names? Laura, Meredith, and-what was the other one?”
“Lisa, Miranda, and Annie.” Roxanne makes a face at her eggs. “We aren’t really friends any more.”
“Oh.” Her mother turns her coffee cup in her hands. “Did you have a fight or something?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, I’m sure they’re just as tired of fighting as you are, sweetheart. Why don’t you try talking to them about it?”
“Maybe,” Roxanne says.
“It’s no fun not having any friends,” says her mother.
Roxanne puts down her fork and takes a breath.
“Well, I have made a friend,” she says in a rush. “His name’s Syx, he’s in my class, and I was wondering if I could have him over for my birthday and maybe his-” she stops for a moment, stuck for a word to describe Minion. He’s certainly not a pet, and he’s not a servant either, even if he does call Syx ‘sir’; Syx and Minion both made identical expressions of distaste when she asked them that. They’re more like…family of some kind?
“-cousin,” Roxanne finishes, “too.”
Her mother frowns, looking down into her coffee cup. She taps her fingernails against the ceramic handle of the cup one at a time: pointer, middle, ring, pinky.
“If this friend of your is a boy,” she says warningly, “then you won’t be able to have him over for a sleepover.”
“But we could do something else?”
Her mother takes another sip of coffee.
“If that’s what you decide you want to do,” she says. Roxanne grins, bouncing a little in her chair. “But you should still talk to your other friends, you know. I’m sure they’re ready to stop fighting, too.”
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Roxanne frowns at the still blank paper clipped to her easel. She swirls her paintbrush in her cup of water and frowns some more.
They’re covering watercolors in art class now. Roxanne had been excited for that, but she is very not excited about what they’ve been assigned to paint.
It’s supposed to be a picture of their home.
Roxanne isn’t sure what to put in her picture. Her mom’s apartment building? She does spend more time there than she does at her dad’s, but, somehow, that just doesn’t seem fair, leaving him out of the picture like that. But she can’t paint her dad’s apartment building, either, because that, also, clearly isn’t right.
What she really wants to paint is her old house, the one with the yellow paint and the rickety porch and the screen door that was always banging. She can still picture it in her head.
But she can’t paint that house because she doesn’t live there any more. Her dad moved out two years ago and Roxanne and her mother moved out six months after that.
Somebody else lives in that yellow house now. Some other kid jumps on the porch steps to make them creak and goes to sleep in Roxanne’s old room and climbs the tree in the backyard that was just the perfect size and shape for a treehouse (Roxanne’s dad always promised that they’d make one together someday, but they never got around to it).
Roxanne chews on her lip and sneaks a look at Syx’s easel.
He doesn’t seem to have made much more progress than her. His paper is mostly blank, too, except for his name, written in the lower right corner, and, below that, a weird little scribble.
Roxanne looks thoughtfully at the scribble. She’s seen it before, of course; it’s the same one Syx always scrawls on his papers, beneath his name: a spiky, uneven M shape flanked by two curved, jagged lines, sort of like lightning bolt-parentheses.
“Syx,” Roxanne asks, gesturing to the mark with the dry end of her brush, “what is that?”
Syx, who has been regarding his paper with a fierce gaze of concentration, blinks and looks over at her, sees her pointing, and glances briefly at the mark.
“Oh,” he says, “that’s my-that’s how you write ‘Syx’ in-my language.”
Roxanne feels her eyes go round. She scrutinizes the mark-Syx’s name-even more closely.
“How can it be, though?” she asks. “It starts and ends with the same shape.”
“Ah, no,” he says. “You’re reading it left to right? Or-right to left? It doesn’t read like that, it, um, you read it from the center out.”
Roxanne tips her head.
She points at the ‘M’ shape.
“This is the ’S’ part?” she glances at Syx. He nods. She points at each of the lightning bolts. “X’’?” He nods again. She frowns. “Where’s the ‘Y’?”
“There isn’t any ‘Y’ in the original,” he says. “My language doesn’t have the same syllable-vowel requirements as English.”
“Syllable-vowel requirements?”
“Yes, you know, ‘one vowel per syllable’? That was difficult to get used to, let me tell you! Almost as bad as the illogical alphabet!”
Roxanne blinks at him.
“What’s wrong with the alphabet?” she asks.
“So many things are wrong with the alphabet!” he gestures with his paintbrush. “Take the letter ‘C’ for instance-it’s a completely unnecessary letter! It has no sound of it’s own; it either sounds just like ‘K’ or just like ’S’. So why is it there at all?”
“Well, you need it,” Roxanne points out after a moment of thought, “to make the ‘ch’ sound.”
“But why? Why isn’t ‘ch’ it’s own letter? It has a distinct sound! And yet it’s entirely missing from your alphabet, along with ‘sh’ and ‘th’-and don’t get me started on ‘th’-why, in the name of Occam’s Razor, are there two variations on how ’T-H’ is pronounced? And ’S-C-H’-that’s got five different variations! Why, I ask you, why! And ‘G-H’ and ‘P-H’-why do those even exist? What’s wrong with ‘F’? And what’s with the confusion between ‘J’ and ‘G’? And double letters and silent letters-never mind all the sounds that English doesn’t even bother to include, like-“ he makes a strange, sliding sound somewhere in between ‘j’ and ‘shh’ a, “or-” he clicks his tongue, “or-” he makes a rolling-rrr noise. “And then! People tell you to ‘sound it out’ as though that’s a method that’s ever going to yield anything but highly unsatisfactory results in a language with shoddy phonetic construction and inconsistent rules for pronounce-iation!”
He waves his paintbrush one last time for emphasis, scattering droplets of black paint on the carpet, then drops the brush onto the table and collapses into his chair, putting his hands over his face.
“Sh, sh!” Roxanne says, because Miss Simmons is looking over at them with an expression of annoyance. “It’s okay; I didn’t realize you-felt so strongly about the alphabet.” Minion swims around in his ball, looking distressed.
“And then,” Syx says lowly, face still hidden by his hands, “everybody acts like you’re some sort of imbecilic-alien-for not being able to say their ridiculous trick-question words correctly.”
Roxanne, who has been hovering by Syx’s side, her hand on his back, sits down in the chair next to his. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t take his hands from his face. “It-bothers you,” Roxanne says slowly, “when you pronounce words wrong?”
“Yes,” Syx says quietly. He lets out a shuddery breath. “I mean, sometimes I say them like that as a-protest against the sheer ridiculousness of this nonsensical language, but there’s a difference between being wrong on purpose and being wrong because you’re too stupid to get it right.”
“Syx,” Roxanne says, “Syx, you are definitely not stupid.” He doesn’t answer, just continues to breathe, uneven around the edges like he’s trying not to cry. “It worries me, sometimes,” Roxanne continues in a small voice, because she thinks maybe he needs to hear this, “how smart you are. I worry that you’ll get bored with me because I’m not as smart as you are.”
Syx looks up from his hands at that, green eyes fixing on her face in an expression of disbelief.
“Bored with you?” he demands. “Bored with you? I could never get-and you’re not-” he stops and puts his hands down on the table. “You’re the smartest person I know,” he says seriously.
Roxanne makes a skeptical face.
“No, but really,” he says. “I mean, you-just as an-you don’t have any trouble pronouncing words correctly.”
“Everybody has trouble pronouncing words sometimes,” Roxanne says. “If you haven’t ever heard a word said, if you’ve just read it, then it’s really hard to-” she considers. “Is that-”
“-part of my problem?” Syx finishes. He looks thoughtful. “Possibly? I hadn’t considered-I-my uncles are very-important to me, but an extensive vocabulary is not really a quality given much weight at home.” He pauses. “Except for in certain, very specific areas of language that Warden says I’m not supposed to copy, ever.”
“Okay,” Roxanne says, “okay, so.” She takes a breath, feeling strange about this, but Syx had said that it bothered him, and he’d called her the smartest person he knew, so-“Would you like me to, you know, tell you? When you’ve said something wrong? I won’t make fun of you,” she continues in a rush, “and I won’t try to make you say something the right way if you’ve decided to say it wrong because you want to, and I won’t be right all the time, maybe, and you can say no, but I just thought it might help.”
“I-” Syx bites his lips. “Yes, I-I would like that, please.”
Roxanne lets out a breath that she didn’t know she was holding.
So it seems she isn’t just the one who knows about shoulder pats and remembers lunch time; she’s also the one who knows about pronunciation. Which is-probably a good place to start.
“All right,” Roxanne says. “All right. So. Um, the first thing-it’s ‘pronunciation’, not ‘pronounce-iation’. I’m not really sure why, since you do say ‘pronounce’, not ‘pronunce’; I think maybe it’s one of those things you were talking about, the ones that just don’t make sense-”
Syx listens to her intently.
________________________________________
“Can I sit with you?”
Roxanne pauses in the middle of biting into her bologna sandwich. Syx, who has been using his strawberry jelly and marshmallow fluff sandwich mostly to gesture with, stops waxing lyrical about the new power source for Minon’s suit that he’s designed. Minion, who has been darting at the animal crackers that Syx dropped in his ball, snapping them up and gulping them down, also stops. All of them look up.
Annie is standing next to their lunch table, leaning on her crutches and looking generally unhappy.
Behind her, Roxanne can see Lisa and Miranda whispering together. As she’s looking at them, Lisa catches her gaze. She turns and says something to Miranda, and the two of them laugh.
Annie’s cheeks flush red.
“Um,” Roxanne says. She glances over at Syx, but he’s still staring at Annie with an expression of surprise. She looks back at Annie (that cruel twist of satisfaction at Annie’s dismay when everybody ganged up on her in gym class, the sick guilt that followed, her mother saying ‘ready to stop fighting, too’.)
“Um,” Roxanne says again. “Sure.”
“Thanks,” Annie says, and sits down next to Roxanne. She opens her lunchbox, takes out her own sandwich, takes out her carton of apple juice, punctures the box with the straw, takes a drink.
“Are you-” Syx breaks the silence, “going-to be friends with us now?”
Annie shrugs.
“I guess,” she says.
Roxanne feels a rush of irrational jealousy. Syx is her friend. She fights the feeling down. Syx can have more than one friend. Syx deserves to have lots of friends.
She already has a place with him, she tells herself. She is important. She is the shoulder-pat and pronunciation guide. Syx said that he wouldn’t get bored with her. He said.
“Are you going to be friends with Minion, too?” Syx asks.
Annie takes another sip of her juice. She glances at Minion’s ball.
“With your fish?” she asks. She raises her eyebrows. “Yeah, okay, whatever.”
It’s not a very enthusiastic response by any means, but Syx looks terribly pleased nonetheless. Roxanne fights down another pulse of jealousy.
Syx smiles at the tabletop for several minutes until Roxanne nudges him and gestures to his sandwich. He blinks owlishly at it, as though he’s forgotten that he’s holding it in his hand, dripping strawberry jelly and marshmallow fluff all over everything, and then he takes a bite.
________________________________________
Annie sits behind the supply shed with them during recess and Roxanne is probably a bad person for wanting to scream GO AWAY at the top of her lungs the whole time.
Minion doesn’t talk at all during recess, just keeps swimming around and around in his bowl, pretending to be a regular fish, like he does during class.
Syx frowns at him, but Minion pretends not to notice.
Roxanne’s probably a bad person for how much better this makes her feel, too.
________________________________________
Syx tells Annie that she can sit with them during gym class, but Annie says she doesn’t want to risk getting in trouble for refusing to participate.
Roxanne’s’ definitely a bad person for how relieved she is to hear that, especially since Annie still gets picked last for dodgeball.
“So are you going to start building the new power source tonight?” Roxanne asks Syx, and he turns towards her, and they pretend that they can’t hear what’s happening on the other side of the schoolyard.