empty space - the shadows hit by streetlights
Note to self: writing at 2 am makes me mug my characters. Despite the fact that the muggers are incompetent, still. Oy.
HALFWAY.
25466 / 50000
(50.93%)
Chapter Five: An actual rolling plot! Possibly even with a well-thought-out problem that needs a resolution! Plan is to introduce at least one more problem-to-be-resolved here, and see where we go from there.
Em pulled out her watch once again. Jerry was late. He had always blown into a room just a little late during school; he would never actually be on time. But he would always stop by before anybody started to worry about him. This was worrisome.
It wasn’t as if Esmerelda’s was hard to find. If anything, it was one of the easiest places to find in the world. She smiled to herself, secure in the knowledge that no one really knew where her place actually was, but people could get to it from various different places. The clientele gawked at each other, sure, but they also were able to get what they had come for and enjoy themselves as they did so.
Though Jerry was also one of those people who overthought everything. So a ‘date’ for today could be construed in at least 8 different ways in his mind, and might end up with him chickening out. She watched the time, and when he was twenty minutes late, gave up on him coming, at least that day. It wasn’t as if she had any way to contact him - he had called her, and her phone was old enough that it didn’t do caller id.
And as she had predicted, there was a lull right now. The 4-5 hour was always super-slow to the point where no one came, and those people who had been enjoying themselves, found a sudden need to go somewhere else. It gave her a lovely nap-time, just about when she needed it.
Em grabbed a nice hot cup of coffee and blew on it for a bit, then drank it down and put the cup in the kitchen sink. One of the nooks had really comfortable couches, and she could crash for a bit before the caffeine kicked in, and then she would wake up ready to help out whoever happened to stroll in. She’d be ready to go for another 6 hours of so, until the next lull. Another nap, and she would continue on.
She settled herself on the more comfortable of the nook’s two couches (she had learned from long experience which one was better for quickly falling asleep - they were both nice couches, but one was a lot more cozy than the other, helping her to sink right into it) and closed her eyes, knowing that the buzz of the caffeine would kick in as soon as she needed it to.
Jerry walked up and down the city street, scowling at his map. He had followed the directions, several times, and the place just didn’t seem to be there. There was a nice blank wall where there could have been a storefront, and a couple of sketchy alleyways that he had wandered down, hoping that he didn’t get mugged - it was 4:45 pm, but the alleys were dark and narrow, and there was one of those sketchy feelings to the alley that made him feel weird about wandering down it wearing a really nice shirt and slacks.
He wandered down one of the alleyways again, feeling the same creeping feeling on his shoulder blades, and wondering where the light had gone. It wasn’t deep enough in the fall for the light to have completely have vanished already, and it could just be that the buildings got higher and closer together and the alleyway just felt cramped, but he turned himself around nonetheless. Didn’t see anyone behind him, didn’t see anyone in front of him. But then again, Jerry wasn’t really a city boy at heart. He enjoyed the intellectual life that he could have in grad school, and grad schools - the good ones for psych, anyway - tended to be near big universities, and the good ones were in the middle of cities. And of course he wanted to go to the best grad school he could - otherwise what was the point?
But carrying a ceramic pot of basil while dressed like he was well-off did make him a pretty easy target, and he was unhappy with the image he presented to the shadows.
The shadows shifted, just a bit, and he felt his body bolt into fight or flight. The little part of his brain which was still intellectualizing wanted him to note how quickly he felt the textbook responses: accelerated breathing and heart rate? Check. Flushing skin as he walked out the alley with that same creeping feeling on the back of his neck? Check. Loss of hearing and peripheral vision? Partially. He wanted to say that his senses were on hyper-alert, but he felt like the alleyway had transformed into a tunnel: he could see in front of him, but couldn’t seem to see anything to either side. Shaking? Check.
Jerry walked down the alley as calmly as he could, feeling he was being followed, knowing that he was being followed, and hoping that he could find Em’s place sometime soon, preferably before he got mugged and they took his basil.
He spared a thought to think of how ridiculous it was that he was only worried about them taking the basil. Still, she had asked for it. And Em wasn’t one to ask for anything, much less something for herself. He wanted to be able to pass it along.
The alleyway seemed to have stretched out longer than it was before he had walked in. He wished that he was able to be less of a moron and not walk down sketchy alleyways.
Jerry heard someone clear their throat behind him. The flight bit of fight or flight kicked in, and he sprinted down the alley. He could see the streetlight at the end of it, and felt hope that he could at least end up somewhere where civilization might be able to help him out.
A dark profile stepped between him and the light. “This one trying to run away from you?”
“He might be. What’s it to you.”
“Well, you gave my friend a ride outta town last night. I figure I might be ableta help you out here.”
“tit for a tat? How polite of you. What are your plans for this one?”
“I ain’t had a trespasser down my alley for quite a time now. What do you think I should do with him?”
Jerry felt his tunnel vision recede, and he looked up, to either side, down, feeling a bit like a rat caught in a trap, unable to figure out how in the world he managed to get himself into these situations. He had just wanted to see if Em was ok, and having a good life, and if he could maybe bring himself back into it, and give the girl some basil, because she wanted some! Getting mugged had not been part of the deal.
He looked to the right and immediately had to do a double-take. There was a monstrous creeping shadow looming over the wall, from the man coming up behind him, who appeared to be armed, if the shadow was to be believed.
But under the shadow, in the wall, there was a door.
It was freshly painted in the midst of all the grime, and had a faint stenciling that said “Exit only” showing through the thin coat of paint. The man behind Jerry seemed to be coming up from the left, and the man in front of him had only moved forward a coupld of steps, and Jerry thought that he might have one try. He threw himself and his basil into the door, and to his complete astonishment, the door opened with only a minor squeak. He stumbled over the threshold, setting off a little bell chime as the door swung calmly closed behind him, and he managed to put the basil down on the counter in front of him, but wasn’t able to keep himself from falling off of the sill of the door and onto the floor.
Jerry completely expected the muggers to come bursting in after him. He had no idea why they would choose not to follow him, as he didn’t think that muggers had a very large view of trespassing and the consequences thereof.
He stared at the door, confused as to how it was still closed. There was no lock, but it very firmly was not moving. There was no knock, no booming irritation at a door that refused to move. Could it be possible that he was safe here? Where was here, anyway?
There were countertops, a fridge, what amounted to a sandwich making counter and what appeared to be an oven, and a full set of barista’s equipment.
Jerry picked up his pot of basil and went to explore what was past the door, hoping that what he found when he moved past the swinging door would provide some extra space between him and the thugs on the other side of the door, and that it might give him an idea of where he was.
The lights in the building he found himself in were low. It wasn’t as if they were turned off and it was dark, but they were quite dimmed. He looked around in the dim light, looking for clues as to where he was. He saw that the opposite wall glistened, as if it were made of glass, and that the walls of the room seemed wavy and curved back in and out around themselves.
He saw a likely looking corner and made a beeline for it, hoping that if the people following him were able to make it inside, they wouldn’t search every single one of the little nooks and crannies.
Jerry found himself in a little space with a low table, couches lining both walls, and throw pillows lying around the floor.
And a person he knew quite well, who lay still as death on one of the couches.
Meg nearly ran from German to the ceramics studio. There was something so spectacular about getting to go and play with clay after a day in school that was minorly insane. Or perhaps majorly insane, but it was the end of the week and she got to play with clay, and could probably grab a pass to go eat if she wanted to, but she really just wanted to check up on what she had been working on, and see how they were going.
She had made little squid as a random filler project while other things were drying, but they were kind of adorable and she found herself wanting to play with them, so she determined that making more squid and deciding what to do with them was a good idea.
It wasn’t as if they were difficult to make - the people at her table certainly weren’t impressed by the caliber of the work or anything - but they were pretty adorable and just a lot of fun to hold. Each one was a separate chunk of clay, rolled into an oblong shape and then hollowed out, given legs by pulling the clay on the outside down towards the base and then stenciling in the legs however the clay seemed to be turning. They usually got the suggestion of eyes and more well defined tentacles on a second pass, and she was working on seeing how many she could make before someone yelled at her for taking up too much space on the cart.
She started with little ones, about an inch and a half, and then made both bigger and smaller ones. The little ones looked positively alien, while the bigger ones got to have bigger tentacles and stretch out all over the table. The big ones would be a pain to keep an eye on as they dried, as they plotted to leap off the table to their deaths - or at least their brokenness - on the floor, while the little ones would behave and stay where they were put. It was just something Meg had noticed - the more time you spent on something, the greater the possibility that it would break into a million pieces. And that was, in general, really frustrating.
Still, she was running at twenty-six squid at the moment, and hoped that she could get to 30 by the end of the class period. She could come in after school, after she stopped by Esmerelda’s, maybe?, and work on throwing some more bowls. She wanted to have enough for Christmas presents this year, but she wasn’t sure that she would get there. Too many of the ones that she had spent hours inscribing and patterning had cracked when she put them through the bisque, and she was starting to get a little annoyed at the people watching the kilns. If it wasn’t dry, they shouldn’t grab it and put it in, and it if it was dry, there wasn’t really a good reason for it to crack, much less crack badly.
It was probably her fault, but it was easier to get irked at everyone else. And it wasn’t as though everyone who worked the kiln knew what they were doing, which was also irritating. Course, that meant that Meg wanted to be the one on kiln duty every single time it was fired, and though her teacher appreciated that, it wasn’t what she wanted - she wanted every person in the class to get a chance, even if they were rather incompetent.
But. Squid. Meg was a little amused at how jumpy her mind was at the moment. She patted the biggest squid’s legs down in place, making sure that it had the right number (her classmates giggled at her a little bit, but they were squid! That meant that they had to have 10 legs.) and smoothing down the bumps in the clay so that it evened out just enough to look like a real creature.
Meg was experimenting with a dark-chocolate colored slip. She knew that there were a bunch of things that she could do, but drawing with it seemed to be the best idea. So she grabbed a teeny tiny paintbrush and started to sketch out designs on the squid. She knew by the time she finished the first one (a good half hour after school had let out, but hey, who was counting?) that she was going to spend a good portion of the next week obsessing over these, and would still be interested in making more. The slip was a beautiful consistency so that it would draw across a clay surface like oil paint if she asked it to, but also would stay put and not roll over the smooth slanted surface.
She finally got up, as she had a crick in her neck from sitting still so long, and was a little irked to realize that, while the slip had not gotten all over the pieces, she had managed to drip it all over her pants. Lovely. Little brown drippy spots.
Luckily slip, like clay, would come off without too much of a hassle if she just let it dry. But she wanted to go visit Em before Kerry got out of practice, just to see if she needed any help in the early afternoon like she clearly had that morning.
Meg’s stomach growled at her, and she realized that not only was it late, she hadn’t had lunch yet. Yet another good reason to go down to Esmerelda’s, because if Kerry wanted to eat with her later, she would still be able to swipe into the dining hall.
So Meg cleaned up her area, wrapping the squid up in plastic and placing them on the cart, and then grabbing a sponge and wiping down her area and the floor underneath it. She left some brown smudges from the slip, but she knew that her teacher appreciated it when you at least tried to clean up after yourself. Her teacher was long gone - she had given Meg the code to the door back in junior year, and trusted her to make sure that everything got put away, and clean, whenever she left the room.
Meg took a glance around the room, realized that someone had left the wedging boards encrusted with clay, so went over to wipe those off, brought some more recycling up from the trash can and placed it on the plaster table that would bring the recycled clay back to a useful consistency, and checked that all the wheels were off. She killed the lights and headed down to Esmerelda’s.
Kerry let Sarah pass her and threw her kickboard up on the wall. She switched over to kicking without a board, on her back. After a 25 of that, though, she was back on her stomach, just popping up whenever she needed air. Getting enough air, being able to breathe whenever she wanted to with swimming, made her stomach turn flip-flops. Kicking on her stomach was preferable, though Coach Mac frowned on it - she wasn’t keeping a streamline and she was okay with looking like superman for part of the set if it made her stomach settle down.
Finally, the kick set was over. One more set before he would let them go. Kerry hoped that it would be something easy - or if not easy, something that she could do, at least. This constant state of not quite being able to do anything that he asked them to do sucked.
He wrote the next set up on the board, and she pulled herself out of the water to see what it was. 10 x 50s. okay. Short, at least. They were all supposed to be fast, and the interval would go down as they kept going. Alright. Not fun, but at least they weren’t 300s?
Kerry pushed off at the end of her lane, but happy, as 50s were these wonderful things where it was impossible to get lapped. Sure, someone could finish before you began, but they wouldn’t be able to actually pass you and squish you against the side of the lane to get there. It was super helpful. For the first time all day, Kerry felt motivated to really try to get the pace times that she should be aiming for: the 500 was, in effect, 10 50s. Kerry wanted to break 5:20, had wanted to break 5:20 for 4 years, and to do that, needed each 50 to be about 32 seconds. So she aimed for 32s, or below, for each 50.
One and two were no problem, and then they started to hurt. Or at least, the motivation and adrenaline rush backed off a bit, and she was left scrambling to try to get something under 35 seconds.
Coach Mac had a lot of people to keep his eyes on. But when she ran to the bathroom after the ninth 50, he stopped her on the way back and asked if she would stop by his office after practice.
Kerry’s first idea was to refuse. She didn’t really want to talk to him - he was a wonderful person, but she was pretty much miserable and had to force herself to come to practice every single time. Chatting with the person who instigated that pain didn’t seem like a good idea to her to try to ameliorate it.
But she agreed, as she knew she would, and jumped back in for warm down, hoping that she could actually relax for once. Not sure if it would happen.
Warm down helped a bit, though getting out of the pool was still exhausting and she really just wanted to climb into the super hot shower and cry for a bit. But Coach Mac was waiting, so she grabbed her towel and came back out on deck. His office was tucked into the corner of the pool, and completely plastered with pictures and newspaper articles of his successful swimmers. (Kerry was not on his walls, which she was a little disappointed about.)
Coach Mac wasted no time. “Kerry. I’ve seen you hop out of the pool twice now today. How many times in the past week have you hopped out of the main set?”
“I… probably six or seven times.” Kerry could feel her eyes start leaking. She hated hated hated it when she knew that she was disappointing people. Not staying through the main set was one of those things that was expected, that you did, that if you didn’t do, there was something seriously wrong or you were being a lazy bum.
“Can you tell me why?”
Kerry shrugged, trying to put on a good front, and knowing that she was not doing so. “I figure it’s better to hurl in the bathroom than on the pool deck.”
There was a flicker of distaste, of worry, of fear, that ran across Coach Mac’s face in quick succession. He ended on concern, though, his brow furrowing and his eyes locking onto her face. “Kerry, that’s not good.”
Kerry bit her tongue. No, really? I would never have guessed. Was NOT an appropriate reaction to this situation. “I know.”
“How long has this been going on?”
Kerry dug her fingernails into the palm of the opposite hand. Scrapping the what, have you really not noticed that this has been happening all season? Bitter response, she went with “Pretty much all year”, instead.
“Have you talked to your doctor about this? Why haven’t you told me? I can work with you to try to make it happen less, if you like?”
Kerry knew that he was just concerned, but she felt like he was talking down to her. She was in charge of what she did, even if her digestive system seemed to have a mind of its own, and not one that she liked, and she had a pretty strict mental image of what she wanted to be. “I don’t want special treatment.”
“And I don’t want to be responsible for you having something serious going on and not getting it checked out. I’m sorry to be annoying about this, Kerry, but you need to talk to someone about it. I don’t mind - much - if you don’t want to talk to me, but I need a doctor’s signature telling me that you’re okay to swim before I’m going to let you back in the pool.”
Kerry felt herself stand up, thank Coach Mac, and walk out before she completely lost it. There were still a couple of the freshman boys on deck, pulling in the lane lines and chatting about everything. One of them called over, asking if she were ok, but she waved him off and dove into the locker room, where there was at least hot water to soothe sore muscles, if not anything to soothe Coach Mac’s ultimatum.
It just wasn’t fair that she had to follow this - there were girls on the team who had eating disorders, who just didn’t eat, who ate too much and then barfed it up on purpose - and Coach Mac was, in general, pretty clueless. So just because he noticed - and didn’t really even notice, but wanted to talk to her about getting out of the pool early, he thought that he could dictate her life! And it wasn’t that she didn’t want to have someone tell her how to make it better, how to make the nausea stop, but she really didn’t want to have to explain swimming until she was sick to a complete stranger - especially one who didn’t understand swimming.
The school nurse might sign off on it, but Coach Mac knew that she would sign off on almost anything, so it had to be a real doctor. Kerry could call her Mom, but then Mom would completely freak out, and she would prefer not to see that. Again.
Best way to go about it would be to go figure out where people went to the doctor’s around here… and she had no idea who she would ask about that. The locker room was empty by the time that she got out of the shower, and she dressed slowly and knocked out the lights before she trudged up the hill to her dorm room. She would maybe check in on Meg, and maybe just go to sleep for a million years.
Jerry saw Em shift, just a little bit, so that she was curled up sideways rather than lying on her back. Two points in favor of the shift: she no longer looked dead, and he didn’t have to freak out about her being dead. And a few more points in favor, actually. This must be her place. It was completely deserted and the lights were down; he wondered if she closed normally during this time, or she had just gotten fed up waiting for him and decided to take a nap. He guessed that it was probably the latter.
She needed the sleep, so he decided to wait until she woke up on her own. He settled on the couch across from her and pulled out the work he had brought with him. If he let his eyes adjust, he might be able to read by the dim light. Or he could grab his computer and work on the paper that he was supposed to be writing.
Jerry pulled out his laptop, shifted the pillows on the couch so that he could put his feet up and still have his back supported, and went to work on his paper. He was writing about the psychological impact of scotophobia in Asimov’s Nightfall… or in layman’s terms, writing about the fear of the dark. It seemed appropriate, somehow, surrounded by this strange ambiguous space, across from a comfortable, sleeping woman, to work on a paper about the dark.
It was also nice to know that when she did wake up, he would look slightly less like a creeper while working on a paper rather than just staring at her creepily. There may have been a bit of the creepy staring, but he tried to limit himself. Something about her, though, that made him want to watch. She looked so calm, so comfortable, so radiant. Long, dark hair spilling out of whatever she had tied it back with, dark clothes, tucked into the pillows, only one hand visible. Still, no ring.
Em opened her eyes and took a couple of moments to start moving again. The caffeine either hadn’t kicked in, or she had slept through the buzz. She needed coffee, and got up to find some. Finding a person sitting across from her gave her a little jolt. “Wha--?”
She had never been particularly articulate when she woke up.
Jerry was silhouetted by his computer screen, his face taking on the eerie glow of the screen as he registered that she had woken up. His glasses glinted in the computer glare. He sat the computer to the side as he saw her try to recognize him, and said hi.
Em recognized him about the same time he started to talk, and felt a bit like a fool for the momentary panic. “Jerry, I’m super glad to see you, but give me like two minutes? I need to put on some coffee and get ready for people to start coming in again.”
“Sure, no problem. I put your basil on the kitchen counter.” Em staggered towards the kitchen, trying to convince her legs that they wanted to start walking again, and Jerry remembered the craziness of coming in. “Wait a sec. Let me go in first, okay?”
Em looked bemused. “Sure, but why?”
“I was almost mugged outside of your place, and somehow got in the kitchen door. I couldn’t be sure if it locked behind me somehow or not - there’s no reason that it would, but I didn’t see anyone follow me in.”
“That’s really strange. You all right?”
“Yup. Shaken a bit, but the basil and I made it in alright.”
“Good. Feel free to scout it out if you want, but that door should have been locked. If it closed behind you, it probably locked as well.”
Jerry was a little confused as to why Em didn’t see the possibility of one - or more - muggers in her kitchen to be a big deal, but figured that he would adopt her calm attitude. It wasn’t as if he could have held his own agains the muggers anyway, but he would have liked to get to play the knight in shining armor to Em’s fair maiden in distress. Granted, that probably wasn’t going to happen.
And it didn’t. The kitchen was clean of any undesirables.
Em twiddled a couple of dials on an imposing-looking machine that Jerry assumed made coffee and then paused a moment. “Would you like something? We’ve got a couple kinds of coffee, lots of tea - you were a tea person, yes?”
At Jerry’s nod, she opened one of the cabinet doors. It was chock-full of more types of tea than Jerry had ever seen lined up in one place, including supermarket shelves.
“Ooops, give me a sec.” Em flicked the lightswitch, and the building woke up, lights flickering on throughout the ceiling and walls, and, Jerry was surprised to find, from the back of the tea cabinet. It made the bounty much easier to identify, and he pulled out a tea bag that smelled good to try.
Em grabbed a mug and filled it with hot water from the mysterious coffee machine, handing it to Jerry as the machine squirted out her coffee into a handy mug.
“So how much coffee are you drinking these days?”
“Do you really want the answer to that question?”
Jerry paused. “Maybe?”
“I think I’m on about an 8-cup a day schedule. More when things are crazy, less when things are normal.”
“Yikes. And I thought that I was succumbing to grad school with four cups of tea a night.”
“Yeah… no. Sorry buddy, you don’t fit into the overly-caffeinated no matter how much tea you’re drinking.”
Em moved back to the corner where she had been sleeping, fluffing up the pillows and making it look perfect again. She sat down on the throw pillows, setting her mug on the low table.
“So what have you been up to? How’s life been treating you? What are you working on?”
“So much curiousity from someone who disappeared from the face of the earth for a million years!”
“It wasn’t a million. It was six. There is a substantial difference - though a million does have six zeroes!”
“Really, Em? It’s a long time to disappear, even so.”
Privately, Em agreed with him, but it had been necessary. But she hedged, and flirted a bit, and Jerry eventually moved from showing what he had been working on with his laptop on the couch, to sitting next to her on the floor, comfortably slouching against the same wall, side by side.
She left him there, when the first customers of the evening rush trickled in, and tried to stop by as often as she could without ignoring her customers. On about her third trip back to see if he’d like anything, if he was okay in his corner, he stood up and walked with her to the kitchen.
“Em, I’m going to head out. I’ll try to stop by sometime tomorrow, if you like?”
“Do, please! Oh, and if you’re planning on hanging out in the area for a while, feel free to come down for the dance I’m holding this weekend? Just whoever happens to be in the area, dress up if you like, there are fliers out front.”
“Sounds lovely. Are we talking more folk or ballroom?”
“Well, if I told you it would spoil all the fun! Grab a flier and I bet you can figure it out.”
Jerry turned to leave, but remembered that he didn’t have any idea where the front door actually was. “Em, how do I get out of here? I came in by the kitchen, and I don’t know where the front door is.”
Em laughed at him, showed him where the front door was, and shoved him out the door back onto his city street.
HALFWAY.
25466 / 50000
(50.93%)
Chapter Five: An actual rolling plot! Possibly even with a well-thought-out problem that needs a resolution! Plan is to introduce at least one more problem-to-be-resolved here, and see where we go from there.
Em pulled out her watch once again. Jerry was late. He had always blown into a room just a little late during school; he would never actually be on time. But he would always stop by before anybody started to worry about him. This was worrisome.
It wasn’t as if Esmerelda’s was hard to find. If anything, it was one of the easiest places to find in the world. She smiled to herself, secure in the knowledge that no one really knew where her place actually was, but people could get to it from various different places. The clientele gawked at each other, sure, but they also were able to get what they had come for and enjoy themselves as they did so.
Though Jerry was also one of those people who overthought everything. So a ‘date’ for today could be construed in at least 8 different ways in his mind, and might end up with him chickening out. She watched the time, and when he was twenty minutes late, gave up on him coming, at least that day. It wasn’t as if she had any way to contact him - he had called her, and her phone was old enough that it didn’t do caller id.
And as she had predicted, there was a lull right now. The 4-5 hour was always super-slow to the point where no one came, and those people who had been enjoying themselves, found a sudden need to go somewhere else. It gave her a lovely nap-time, just about when she needed it.
Em grabbed a nice hot cup of coffee and blew on it for a bit, then drank it down and put the cup in the kitchen sink. One of the nooks had really comfortable couches, and she could crash for a bit before the caffeine kicked in, and then she would wake up ready to help out whoever happened to stroll in. She’d be ready to go for another 6 hours of so, until the next lull. Another nap, and she would continue on.
She settled herself on the more comfortable of the nook’s two couches (she had learned from long experience which one was better for quickly falling asleep - they were both nice couches, but one was a lot more cozy than the other, helping her to sink right into it) and closed her eyes, knowing that the buzz of the caffeine would kick in as soon as she needed it to.
Jerry walked up and down the city street, scowling at his map. He had followed the directions, several times, and the place just didn’t seem to be there. There was a nice blank wall where there could have been a storefront, and a couple of sketchy alleyways that he had wandered down, hoping that he didn’t get mugged - it was 4:45 pm, but the alleys were dark and narrow, and there was one of those sketchy feelings to the alley that made him feel weird about wandering down it wearing a really nice shirt and slacks.
He wandered down one of the alleyways again, feeling the same creeping feeling on his shoulder blades, and wondering where the light had gone. It wasn’t deep enough in the fall for the light to have completely have vanished already, and it could just be that the buildings got higher and closer together and the alleyway just felt cramped, but he turned himself around nonetheless. Didn’t see anyone behind him, didn’t see anyone in front of him. But then again, Jerry wasn’t really a city boy at heart. He enjoyed the intellectual life that he could have in grad school, and grad schools - the good ones for psych, anyway - tended to be near big universities, and the good ones were in the middle of cities. And of course he wanted to go to the best grad school he could - otherwise what was the point?
But carrying a ceramic pot of basil while dressed like he was well-off did make him a pretty easy target, and he was unhappy with the image he presented to the shadows.
The shadows shifted, just a bit, and he felt his body bolt into fight or flight. The little part of his brain which was still intellectualizing wanted him to note how quickly he felt the textbook responses: accelerated breathing and heart rate? Check. Flushing skin as he walked out the alley with that same creeping feeling on the back of his neck? Check. Loss of hearing and peripheral vision? Partially. He wanted to say that his senses were on hyper-alert, but he felt like the alleyway had transformed into a tunnel: he could see in front of him, but couldn’t seem to see anything to either side. Shaking? Check.
Jerry walked down the alley as calmly as he could, feeling he was being followed, knowing that he was being followed, and hoping that he could find Em’s place sometime soon, preferably before he got mugged and they took his basil.
He spared a thought to think of how ridiculous it was that he was only worried about them taking the basil. Still, she had asked for it. And Em wasn’t one to ask for anything, much less something for herself. He wanted to be able to pass it along.
The alleyway seemed to have stretched out longer than it was before he had walked in. He wished that he was able to be less of a moron and not walk down sketchy alleyways.
Jerry heard someone clear their throat behind him. The flight bit of fight or flight kicked in, and he sprinted down the alley. He could see the streetlight at the end of it, and felt hope that he could at least end up somewhere where civilization might be able to help him out.
A dark profile stepped between him and the light. “This one trying to run away from you?”
“He might be. What’s it to you.”
“Well, you gave my friend a ride outta town last night. I figure I might be ableta help you out here.”
“tit for a tat? How polite of you. What are your plans for this one?”
“I ain’t had a trespasser down my alley for quite a time now. What do you think I should do with him?”
Jerry felt his tunnel vision recede, and he looked up, to either side, down, feeling a bit like a rat caught in a trap, unable to figure out how in the world he managed to get himself into these situations. He had just wanted to see if Em was ok, and having a good life, and if he could maybe bring himself back into it, and give the girl some basil, because she wanted some! Getting mugged had not been part of the deal.
He looked to the right and immediately had to do a double-take. There was a monstrous creeping shadow looming over the wall, from the man coming up behind him, who appeared to be armed, if the shadow was to be believed.
But under the shadow, in the wall, there was a door.
It was freshly painted in the midst of all the grime, and had a faint stenciling that said “Exit only” showing through the thin coat of paint. The man behind Jerry seemed to be coming up from the left, and the man in front of him had only moved forward a coupld of steps, and Jerry thought that he might have one try. He threw himself and his basil into the door, and to his complete astonishment, the door opened with only a minor squeak. He stumbled over the threshold, setting off a little bell chime as the door swung calmly closed behind him, and he managed to put the basil down on the counter in front of him, but wasn’t able to keep himself from falling off of the sill of the door and onto the floor.
Jerry completely expected the muggers to come bursting in after him. He had no idea why they would choose not to follow him, as he didn’t think that muggers had a very large view of trespassing and the consequences thereof.
He stared at the door, confused as to how it was still closed. There was no lock, but it very firmly was not moving. There was no knock, no booming irritation at a door that refused to move. Could it be possible that he was safe here? Where was here, anyway?
There were countertops, a fridge, what amounted to a sandwich making counter and what appeared to be an oven, and a full set of barista’s equipment.
Jerry picked up his pot of basil and went to explore what was past the door, hoping that what he found when he moved past the swinging door would provide some extra space between him and the thugs on the other side of the door, and that it might give him an idea of where he was.
The lights in the building he found himself in were low. It wasn’t as if they were turned off and it was dark, but they were quite dimmed. He looked around in the dim light, looking for clues as to where he was. He saw that the opposite wall glistened, as if it were made of glass, and that the walls of the room seemed wavy and curved back in and out around themselves.
He saw a likely looking corner and made a beeline for it, hoping that if the people following him were able to make it inside, they wouldn’t search every single one of the little nooks and crannies.
Jerry found himself in a little space with a low table, couches lining both walls, and throw pillows lying around the floor.
And a person he knew quite well, who lay still as death on one of the couches.
Meg nearly ran from German to the ceramics studio. There was something so spectacular about getting to go and play with clay after a day in school that was minorly insane. Or perhaps majorly insane, but it was the end of the week and she got to play with clay, and could probably grab a pass to go eat if she wanted to, but she really just wanted to check up on what she had been working on, and see how they were going.
She had made little squid as a random filler project while other things were drying, but they were kind of adorable and she found herself wanting to play with them, so she determined that making more squid and deciding what to do with them was a good idea.
It wasn’t as if they were difficult to make - the people at her table certainly weren’t impressed by the caliber of the work or anything - but they were pretty adorable and just a lot of fun to hold. Each one was a separate chunk of clay, rolled into an oblong shape and then hollowed out, given legs by pulling the clay on the outside down towards the base and then stenciling in the legs however the clay seemed to be turning. They usually got the suggestion of eyes and more well defined tentacles on a second pass, and she was working on seeing how many she could make before someone yelled at her for taking up too much space on the cart.
She started with little ones, about an inch and a half, and then made both bigger and smaller ones. The little ones looked positively alien, while the bigger ones got to have bigger tentacles and stretch out all over the table. The big ones would be a pain to keep an eye on as they dried, as they plotted to leap off the table to their deaths - or at least their brokenness - on the floor, while the little ones would behave and stay where they were put. It was just something Meg had noticed - the more time you spent on something, the greater the possibility that it would break into a million pieces. And that was, in general, really frustrating.
Still, she was running at twenty-six squid at the moment, and hoped that she could get to 30 by the end of the class period. She could come in after school, after she stopped by Esmerelda’s, maybe?, and work on throwing some more bowls. She wanted to have enough for Christmas presents this year, but she wasn’t sure that she would get there. Too many of the ones that she had spent hours inscribing and patterning had cracked when she put them through the bisque, and she was starting to get a little annoyed at the people watching the kilns. If it wasn’t dry, they shouldn’t grab it and put it in, and it if it was dry, there wasn’t really a good reason for it to crack, much less crack badly.
It was probably her fault, but it was easier to get irked at everyone else. And it wasn’t as though everyone who worked the kiln knew what they were doing, which was also irritating. Course, that meant that Meg wanted to be the one on kiln duty every single time it was fired, and though her teacher appreciated that, it wasn’t what she wanted - she wanted every person in the class to get a chance, even if they were rather incompetent.
But. Squid. Meg was a little amused at how jumpy her mind was at the moment. She patted the biggest squid’s legs down in place, making sure that it had the right number (her classmates giggled at her a little bit, but they were squid! That meant that they had to have 10 legs.) and smoothing down the bumps in the clay so that it evened out just enough to look like a real creature.
Meg was experimenting with a dark-chocolate colored slip. She knew that there were a bunch of things that she could do, but drawing with it seemed to be the best idea. So she grabbed a teeny tiny paintbrush and started to sketch out designs on the squid. She knew by the time she finished the first one (a good half hour after school had let out, but hey, who was counting?) that she was going to spend a good portion of the next week obsessing over these, and would still be interested in making more. The slip was a beautiful consistency so that it would draw across a clay surface like oil paint if she asked it to, but also would stay put and not roll over the smooth slanted surface.
She finally got up, as she had a crick in her neck from sitting still so long, and was a little irked to realize that, while the slip had not gotten all over the pieces, she had managed to drip it all over her pants. Lovely. Little brown drippy spots.
Luckily slip, like clay, would come off without too much of a hassle if she just let it dry. But she wanted to go visit Em before Kerry got out of practice, just to see if she needed any help in the early afternoon like she clearly had that morning.
Meg’s stomach growled at her, and she realized that not only was it late, she hadn’t had lunch yet. Yet another good reason to go down to Esmerelda’s, because if Kerry wanted to eat with her later, she would still be able to swipe into the dining hall.
So Meg cleaned up her area, wrapping the squid up in plastic and placing them on the cart, and then grabbing a sponge and wiping down her area and the floor underneath it. She left some brown smudges from the slip, but she knew that her teacher appreciated it when you at least tried to clean up after yourself. Her teacher was long gone - she had given Meg the code to the door back in junior year, and trusted her to make sure that everything got put away, and clean, whenever she left the room.
Meg took a glance around the room, realized that someone had left the wedging boards encrusted with clay, so went over to wipe those off, brought some more recycling up from the trash can and placed it on the plaster table that would bring the recycled clay back to a useful consistency, and checked that all the wheels were off. She killed the lights and headed down to Esmerelda’s.
Kerry let Sarah pass her and threw her kickboard up on the wall. She switched over to kicking without a board, on her back. After a 25 of that, though, she was back on her stomach, just popping up whenever she needed air. Getting enough air, being able to breathe whenever she wanted to with swimming, made her stomach turn flip-flops. Kicking on her stomach was preferable, though Coach Mac frowned on it - she wasn’t keeping a streamline and she was okay with looking like superman for part of the set if it made her stomach settle down.
Finally, the kick set was over. One more set before he would let them go. Kerry hoped that it would be something easy - or if not easy, something that she could do, at least. This constant state of not quite being able to do anything that he asked them to do sucked.
He wrote the next set up on the board, and she pulled herself out of the water to see what it was. 10 x 50s. okay. Short, at least. They were all supposed to be fast, and the interval would go down as they kept going. Alright. Not fun, but at least they weren’t 300s?
Kerry pushed off at the end of her lane, but happy, as 50s were these wonderful things where it was impossible to get lapped. Sure, someone could finish before you began, but they wouldn’t be able to actually pass you and squish you against the side of the lane to get there. It was super helpful. For the first time all day, Kerry felt motivated to really try to get the pace times that she should be aiming for: the 500 was, in effect, 10 50s. Kerry wanted to break 5:20, had wanted to break 5:20 for 4 years, and to do that, needed each 50 to be about 32 seconds. So she aimed for 32s, or below, for each 50.
One and two were no problem, and then they started to hurt. Or at least, the motivation and adrenaline rush backed off a bit, and she was left scrambling to try to get something under 35 seconds.
Coach Mac had a lot of people to keep his eyes on. But when she ran to the bathroom after the ninth 50, he stopped her on the way back and asked if she would stop by his office after practice.
Kerry’s first idea was to refuse. She didn’t really want to talk to him - he was a wonderful person, but she was pretty much miserable and had to force herself to come to practice every single time. Chatting with the person who instigated that pain didn’t seem like a good idea to her to try to ameliorate it.
But she agreed, as she knew she would, and jumped back in for warm down, hoping that she could actually relax for once. Not sure if it would happen.
Warm down helped a bit, though getting out of the pool was still exhausting and she really just wanted to climb into the super hot shower and cry for a bit. But Coach Mac was waiting, so she grabbed her towel and came back out on deck. His office was tucked into the corner of the pool, and completely plastered with pictures and newspaper articles of his successful swimmers. (Kerry was not on his walls, which she was a little disappointed about.)
Coach Mac wasted no time. “Kerry. I’ve seen you hop out of the pool twice now today. How many times in the past week have you hopped out of the main set?”
“I… probably six or seven times.” Kerry could feel her eyes start leaking. She hated hated hated it when she knew that she was disappointing people. Not staying through the main set was one of those things that was expected, that you did, that if you didn’t do, there was something seriously wrong or you were being a lazy bum.
“Can you tell me why?”
Kerry shrugged, trying to put on a good front, and knowing that she was not doing so. “I figure it’s better to hurl in the bathroom than on the pool deck.”
There was a flicker of distaste, of worry, of fear, that ran across Coach Mac’s face in quick succession. He ended on concern, though, his brow furrowing and his eyes locking onto her face. “Kerry, that’s not good.”
Kerry bit her tongue. No, really? I would never have guessed. Was NOT an appropriate reaction to this situation. “I know.”
“How long has this been going on?”
Kerry dug her fingernails into the palm of the opposite hand. Scrapping the what, have you really not noticed that this has been happening all season? Bitter response, she went with “Pretty much all year”, instead.
“Have you talked to your doctor about this? Why haven’t you told me? I can work with you to try to make it happen less, if you like?”
Kerry knew that he was just concerned, but she felt like he was talking down to her. She was in charge of what she did, even if her digestive system seemed to have a mind of its own, and not one that she liked, and she had a pretty strict mental image of what she wanted to be. “I don’t want special treatment.”
“And I don’t want to be responsible for you having something serious going on and not getting it checked out. I’m sorry to be annoying about this, Kerry, but you need to talk to someone about it. I don’t mind - much - if you don’t want to talk to me, but I need a doctor’s signature telling me that you’re okay to swim before I’m going to let you back in the pool.”
Kerry felt herself stand up, thank Coach Mac, and walk out before she completely lost it. There were still a couple of the freshman boys on deck, pulling in the lane lines and chatting about everything. One of them called over, asking if she were ok, but she waved him off and dove into the locker room, where there was at least hot water to soothe sore muscles, if not anything to soothe Coach Mac’s ultimatum.
It just wasn’t fair that she had to follow this - there were girls on the team who had eating disorders, who just didn’t eat, who ate too much and then barfed it up on purpose - and Coach Mac was, in general, pretty clueless. So just because he noticed - and didn’t really even notice, but wanted to talk to her about getting out of the pool early, he thought that he could dictate her life! And it wasn’t that she didn’t want to have someone tell her how to make it better, how to make the nausea stop, but she really didn’t want to have to explain swimming until she was sick to a complete stranger - especially one who didn’t understand swimming.
The school nurse might sign off on it, but Coach Mac knew that she would sign off on almost anything, so it had to be a real doctor. Kerry could call her Mom, but then Mom would completely freak out, and she would prefer not to see that. Again.
Best way to go about it would be to go figure out where people went to the doctor’s around here… and she had no idea who she would ask about that. The locker room was empty by the time that she got out of the shower, and she dressed slowly and knocked out the lights before she trudged up the hill to her dorm room. She would maybe check in on Meg, and maybe just go to sleep for a million years.
Jerry saw Em shift, just a little bit, so that she was curled up sideways rather than lying on her back. Two points in favor of the shift: she no longer looked dead, and he didn’t have to freak out about her being dead. And a few more points in favor, actually. This must be her place. It was completely deserted and the lights were down; he wondered if she closed normally during this time, or she had just gotten fed up waiting for him and decided to take a nap. He guessed that it was probably the latter.
She needed the sleep, so he decided to wait until she woke up on her own. He settled on the couch across from her and pulled out the work he had brought with him. If he let his eyes adjust, he might be able to read by the dim light. Or he could grab his computer and work on the paper that he was supposed to be writing.
Jerry pulled out his laptop, shifted the pillows on the couch so that he could put his feet up and still have his back supported, and went to work on his paper. He was writing about the psychological impact of scotophobia in Asimov’s Nightfall… or in layman’s terms, writing about the fear of the dark. It seemed appropriate, somehow, surrounded by this strange ambiguous space, across from a comfortable, sleeping woman, to work on a paper about the dark.
It was also nice to know that when she did wake up, he would look slightly less like a creeper while working on a paper rather than just staring at her creepily. There may have been a bit of the creepy staring, but he tried to limit himself. Something about her, though, that made him want to watch. She looked so calm, so comfortable, so radiant. Long, dark hair spilling out of whatever she had tied it back with, dark clothes, tucked into the pillows, only one hand visible. Still, no ring.
Em opened her eyes and took a couple of moments to start moving again. The caffeine either hadn’t kicked in, or she had slept through the buzz. She needed coffee, and got up to find some. Finding a person sitting across from her gave her a little jolt. “Wha--?”
She had never been particularly articulate when she woke up.
Jerry was silhouetted by his computer screen, his face taking on the eerie glow of the screen as he registered that she had woken up. His glasses glinted in the computer glare. He sat the computer to the side as he saw her try to recognize him, and said hi.
Em recognized him about the same time he started to talk, and felt a bit like a fool for the momentary panic. “Jerry, I’m super glad to see you, but give me like two minutes? I need to put on some coffee and get ready for people to start coming in again.”
“Sure, no problem. I put your basil on the kitchen counter.” Em staggered towards the kitchen, trying to convince her legs that they wanted to start walking again, and Jerry remembered the craziness of coming in. “Wait a sec. Let me go in first, okay?”
Em looked bemused. “Sure, but why?”
“I was almost mugged outside of your place, and somehow got in the kitchen door. I couldn’t be sure if it locked behind me somehow or not - there’s no reason that it would, but I didn’t see anyone follow me in.”
“That’s really strange. You all right?”
“Yup. Shaken a bit, but the basil and I made it in alright.”
“Good. Feel free to scout it out if you want, but that door should have been locked. If it closed behind you, it probably locked as well.”
Jerry was a little confused as to why Em didn’t see the possibility of one - or more - muggers in her kitchen to be a big deal, but figured that he would adopt her calm attitude. It wasn’t as if he could have held his own agains the muggers anyway, but he would have liked to get to play the knight in shining armor to Em’s fair maiden in distress. Granted, that probably wasn’t going to happen.
And it didn’t. The kitchen was clean of any undesirables.
Em twiddled a couple of dials on an imposing-looking machine that Jerry assumed made coffee and then paused a moment. “Would you like something? We’ve got a couple kinds of coffee, lots of tea - you were a tea person, yes?”
At Jerry’s nod, she opened one of the cabinet doors. It was chock-full of more types of tea than Jerry had ever seen lined up in one place, including supermarket shelves.
“Ooops, give me a sec.” Em flicked the lightswitch, and the building woke up, lights flickering on throughout the ceiling and walls, and, Jerry was surprised to find, from the back of the tea cabinet. It made the bounty much easier to identify, and he pulled out a tea bag that smelled good to try.
Em grabbed a mug and filled it with hot water from the mysterious coffee machine, handing it to Jerry as the machine squirted out her coffee into a handy mug.
“So how much coffee are you drinking these days?”
“Do you really want the answer to that question?”
Jerry paused. “Maybe?”
“I think I’m on about an 8-cup a day schedule. More when things are crazy, less when things are normal.”
“Yikes. And I thought that I was succumbing to grad school with four cups of tea a night.”
“Yeah… no. Sorry buddy, you don’t fit into the overly-caffeinated no matter how much tea you’re drinking.”
Em moved back to the corner where she had been sleeping, fluffing up the pillows and making it look perfect again. She sat down on the throw pillows, setting her mug on the low table.
“So what have you been up to? How’s life been treating you? What are you working on?”
“So much curiousity from someone who disappeared from the face of the earth for a million years!”
“It wasn’t a million. It was six. There is a substantial difference - though a million does have six zeroes!”
“Really, Em? It’s a long time to disappear, even so.”
Privately, Em agreed with him, but it had been necessary. But she hedged, and flirted a bit, and Jerry eventually moved from showing what he had been working on with his laptop on the couch, to sitting next to her on the floor, comfortably slouching against the same wall, side by side.
She left him there, when the first customers of the evening rush trickled in, and tried to stop by as often as she could without ignoring her customers. On about her third trip back to see if he’d like anything, if he was okay in his corner, he stood up and walked with her to the kitchen.
“Em, I’m going to head out. I’ll try to stop by sometime tomorrow, if you like?”
“Do, please! Oh, and if you’re planning on hanging out in the area for a while, feel free to come down for the dance I’m holding this weekend? Just whoever happens to be in the area, dress up if you like, there are fliers out front.”
“Sounds lovely. Are we talking more folk or ballroom?”
“Well, if I told you it would spoil all the fun! Grab a flier and I bet you can figure it out.”
Jerry turned to leave, but remembered that he didn’t have any idea where the front door actually was. “Em, how do I get out of here? I came in by the kitchen, and I don’t know where the front door is.”
Em laughed at him, showed him where the front door was, and shoved him out the door back onto his city street.