Nanowrimo 2010 (no actual title yet)
In which many characters are added, and I cameo several people because I don't have a plot. (Yet? Hopefully.)
Also, the writing is crap. Apologies. I haven't done this for a while.
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“And then I threw a few pots and worked on - made - some squid.”
Kerry looked over at her friend and raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I know that I’m tired and zoned out a bit there, but how did we get from the dining hall to smashing things against walls and seafood? I gotta say, I’m confused.”
“Ceramics, Kerry. The wheel? The verb of making pots: to throw? And the midterm crit that I had last week told me that I should work on repeating forms. So I made 18 squid.”
“Right. Right. Sorry. But… that actually still doesn’t explain the squid.”
“They’re adorable. Duh.”
“Sure. If you say so. Are all squiggly things adorable, now, or just 10-legged Cephalopods?”
“Um… Cephalopods, gastropods, and myxomycetes. I think that’s it at the moment.”
“Meg, really? I can see the snails, they’ve got the searching antennae thing going on, but slime molds? Sure, the colors are nice, but really? They’re gross and squishy.”
“No more so than you are!” Meg poked Kerry in the side and sprinted up the hill. Kerry followed, at a slightly slower pace. Her backpack was full, and dragged at her sore shoulders.
Meg waited at the top of the hill, juggling books and a smart phone. She held the latter up triumphantly as Kerry made it up next to her. “See!”
Kerry grabbed Meg’s phone and examined the yellow splotch of slime mold, scientific name Fuligo septica, that Meg had googled. “Meg, dear?” Her friend nodded, waiting for Kerry to acknowledge how utterly lovely the slime mold was. “You do realize that the common name - right after the fancy sounding one that you found - for this particular slime mold is ‘dog vomit’? Somehow I’m not being convinced that this is a good thing. I had a dog. His vomit tends to be less than cute.”
Meg pouted, attempting to come up with a logical explanation for dog vomit looking - even if not being - adorable, and failed. Of course, she attempted anyway. “But since it’s a slime mold and not dog vomit, doesn’t that redeem it in some way? Because it probably wouldn’t show up anywhere where your dog might make a mess, and -“
Kerry tensed, just for a moment. “Conversation off of dog vomit and slime molds, now. Please? Fill me in on your social life. Your math homework. Whatever.”
Meg checked the surrounding area, looking for cute boys, professors, or other members of the seemingly ever expanding group who transformed Kerry into Attempting to Become Less Nerdy Than She Actually Is. No luck. There weren’t even other people out in the yard at this time, for goodness sake! They had dawdled over lunch, and their afternoon classes had been cancelled for some random National holiday. “How about plans for the afternoon? Anything in particular you want to do?”
Kerry shrugged. Meg kept her tone light - one of these days she would try to figure out what made that girl tick - and chattered on about the new bakery that some of the girls in her art class said was really good, and they could even get a ride into town if they didn’t want to walk the fifteen or twenty minutes to get there. Kerry agreed to go, so long as she’d be back for practice.
They decided to walk to the bakery. A brisk fall day, the leaves had just started to change color and the sky was a brilliant blue. Meg had her camera out, knowing that she should save the batteries for a little later, when the light slipped behind the hills and spilled out in unexpected ways, but couldn’t help taking multiple pictures of one or two orange trees, a couple of dogs that were being walked, and Kerry.
Kerry finally confiscated the camera, as “You’re dangerous with this thing!” and stuck it in her pocket. As Meg continued to lead the way along the shaded, uneven sidewalk, Kerry occasionally saw the light spill through the branches and light on Meg’s head, she could see the sun light the golden-brown curls and turn them to gold. Kerry -knew her own mousey-brown hair stayed that way. In good light, in bad light, she imagined even in the dark, her hair was and always would be mouse-brown. Still, Kerry appreciated the dappled lighting.
Whoever had decided that the sidewalk should go around the monster trees instead of chopping them down had left them a beautiful walk, if a trifle uneven one. The roots of the trees had reached down under the sidewalk, and pushed up as they grew. The sidewalk was unsure of how to react - but since the trees tended to be friendly the rest of the time, the sidewalk was not one to hold a grudge. It merely split along its seams, and let the roots push it into a little mountain wherever it felt necessary.
Kerry saw the caterpillar after Meg had passed. Grabbing a stick and picking it up, she bugged Meg to turn around and check it out. “I think it’s a Papilio polyxenes.”
“Otherwise known as? You know I didn’t jump in the Memorize All the Butterflies and their Life Cycles game.”
“Come on now, it was clearly a butterflies and moths game. And yeah, I know. Though you did pretty good with the slime molds and snails. Take a guess?”
“I frankly have no idea. Black and white and yellow, stripes. All that seems to say to me is ‘I’m poisonous, don’t eat me, please?’ and that doesn’t tell me a lot. Because no one really wants to be eaten.”
“Hrm. Well, I’ll give you 20 questions. And if we get to your little bakery first, I’ll tell you. Sound ok?”
“You realize that my butterfly knowledge is no better than a typical six-year-old girl’s, and that my moth knowledge is even worse?”
“Probably because moths come out after the 6 year old you were had to go to bed.”
“Lovely.” Meg grimaced. “Butterfly or moth?”
“Butterfly.”
“So I may have seen it. Awesome. Just because I have to ask: Monarch?”
“No. But that one also has the black and white and yellow stripes.”
“Huh. Ok. How about… color. Is it black?”
“Mostly.”
“Going to go with my only other butterfly, then. Tiger swallowtail?”
“Nope. Close, though. It is a swallowtail.”
“Awesome. But as awesome as that is, I give up. Don’t give me that look. This is where my butterfly knowledge ends.”
“You want me to tell you? Because you ask a few more questions, and I bet you’ll get it.”
“I don’t know any more butterflies. I seriously doubt it.”
“You’re going to kick yourself if you don’t at least try.”
“I may already be kicking myself for joining in a game where I don’t have any idea of what the answers even could be.”
“Seriously, though. What do you know?”
“It’s a swallowtail, and it’s black, and it’s not a tiger, and it’s not a monarch. And I’m kind of assuming that the other colors on it aren’t orange, because then it would seem to be tigerish.”
“Good. So what could it possibly be called?”
“A nontiger swallowtail? A jaguar swallowtail? A panther swallowtail - that one’s got the black, at least!”
“Meg, seriously, you’re making this harder than you need to. What color is it?”
“Black.”
“And what kind of butterfly is it?”
“Swallow - oh. Really? Figures. It’s a black swallowtail, yes?”
“Technically a Desert Black Swallowtail. But yeah.”
“Cool.” The girls walked in silence for a bit, soaking in the weak traces of the sun as it started to head down towards the horizon. The path changed to a more civilized one: the trees were little children compared to the ones who had the power to bend the sidewalk, front yards were tidily mowed, and the houses snuck closer together. They both saw it at the same time and rolled their eyes at each other.
Welcome to suburbia! The sign intoned. New houses for sale! Open house! Giving the name and number of a an architecture firm and a broker, they tried to entice potential buyers into the neighborhood with red and purple exclamation points. Both girls had commuted their first two years of school, and the utterly hideous signs that peppered the neighborhood had been one of their first talking points.
The atrocious signs also meant that they were almost to their destination. Meg pulled out the directions the girls had given her, and was displeased to discover that they had smeared. Asking artsy students to write directions was occasionally problematic, but generally they didn’t use vine charcoal. It smeared like no other. She sighed, and shoved the completely unhelpful directions back in her pocket.
“Well, we may get there, and we may not. Sorry - directions are pretty much impossible to read.”
“I mean, it’s part of the Magical Land of Suburbia. How hard can it be to find?”
“You’re probably right. We can just wander for a while, if you’re okay with that.”
“Sure. But if we’re wandering, fill me in on what you’ve been up to?”
“Other than the squid and the bowls?”
“Yeah. Like, in real life.”
“Watch it, girl! Clay is real life.”
“Yeah, yeah. If you say so.”
“So. Let’s see. Real life. I dunno. Little brother is squabbling with anyone and everyone; older brother is moody and won’t talk to me, so calling home is kind of a pain.”
“George isn’t doing well? What’s up with him now?”
“No idea. Pretty sure it isn’t anything super bad, but it’s just frustrating, you know? I want him to be able to talk to me about it, both because, yeah, I’ll admit it, I’m curious, but also because if there’s anything that I can do I want to be able to help him out. And I know that I’m the kid sister and not necessarily the person that a 22-year-old wants to talk to about life, but I’d love it if rather than never, he could talk to me some of the time at least. Mom’s kind of freaked out about it, which I don’t think helps with Tim at all, either. So our Skype chats just get more and more silent, or full of me randomly chatting about absolutely nothing. And it’s just frustrating.”
“Any chance that they’re going to be able to come visit this year?”
“Eh, I might get to go home for Christmas, depending on the scholarship fund. They’ll probably only make it down for graduation. You know that it’s a long way, and it’s just one of those things that they’re not sure they can pull Tim out of school, and convince George to leave his social life for a bit, more than the once at the end of the year. What about your family? Coming down soon?”
“You know that my Mom will stop by every single weekend until I beg her not to. But she’ll bring baked goods, which I know the team will appreciate, and she’ll take us out to dinner if you want?”
“Only if you really want me to come. I wouldn’t want to impose.” Kerry gave Meg a shocked look - faked, of course - and gestured towards herself and then her friend, before swatting her friend over the head.
“You silly. Of course I want you to come.”
“I don’t know. I just can’t see wanting to spend all your time with your mother with other people.”
“This might be, Meggy, because you’ve never met my mother.”
“Ker, I just don’t want to impose. I know that your family’s had some tough times in the past couple of months and I didn’t know if you maybe wanted to spend more time with your mom whenever you could?”
Kerry laughed. “Hence me not wanting to spend time with her, actually. It’s Mom’s fault that most of the drama went down, and it’s not one of those things that I really want to have time to chat with her about it.”
“If you want the moral support, than I’d love to come, you know that. And look - I think we’ve found it!” Meg rushed down a mildly sketchy alley, which opened into an adorable courtyard. Somehow the courtyard managed to keep more of the sunlight than the last three little streets combined had held. A sign hung over the door, but Kerry saw that it didn’t actually have a name on it.
“Any idea what’s up with the sign?”
“Oh - that it’s blank? Evidently Esmerelda - she’s the owner here - has a competition going to see who can make her a sign who really sparkles. She’s providing materials and a basic outline of what she wants, and anyone who wants to can make one. And then she’s planning to hang the ones that she doesn’t use out front as markers to get to this place and decorations for the inside. You interested?”
Kerry hesistated. It had been a long time since she had done any sort of artwork. “Maybe? Can we check it out first? I’m not sure how well my artsy skills are going to measure up.”
“Of course! And I’m freezing. Let’s go in, ok?”
The interior of the little bakery was warm and bright, plate glass windows in the back facing another street, and somehow perfectly channeling the autumn light so that it actually looked brighter, closer to summer, and warm. The space itself was divvied up into little nooks and crannies, tables tucked into more little tiny spaces than seemed to fit within the confines of the little building. Kerry looked around in astonishment - the weird squished oval-shape of the room, grouped with its high ceiling and walls that seemed to melt and form so that they carefully cradled the tables in little private worlds.
“Meg? Look at this place. What do you see?”
“Some place really cozy. Grab a seat and let’s see if their little tiramisu thingys are as good as the girls said they were.”
“No, look at it. And tell me what we were studying in bio first semester last year.”
Occasionally Meg got irritated at Kerry for her near-photographic memory, complete with when she learned the information and what the exact test questions had been. She was a shoo-in as a scholarship student, while Meg had to seriously work at it. But first semester last year had been the first when they had been expected to tell the deans what they expected to be studying for the rest of their time at school there, and provide an actual legitimate explanation as to what they wanted to do and why. It had been insanely stressful, but also the first time that Kerry had started helping Meg out in her studying - since Ker tended to memorize everything as soon as it was out of the teacher’s mouth or written on the chalkboard, she was the perfect person to have drill you on random facts as you walked through campus or sat over lunch. And she didn’t mind passing on the knowledge, either. She was one of those people who was a genuine nerd about information - she went through life with a generic attitude of “isn’t this fascinating!” and the world seemed to conform to the view she wanted to hold of it.
First semester bio had been cells - animal cells, plant cells, and all their little organelles. It wasn’t the cells themselves that Kerry was seeing - any building, any room, could be taken as a cell. It held stuff in, had a purpose for existing, and had entrances and exits that you could use to get in or out, provided you had the right key, or key code, etc.
So then she had probably found some sort of organelle that the room looked like. She looked around, really looked at the furniture, the placement of the walls, even the colors. “Wait, really? This completely matches the ER in our textbook. What’s up with that?”
“Does it matter? Isn’t it awesome? We’re going to have pastries - or maybe tea - in an Endoplasmic Reticulum. I’m excited.”
Meg shook her head. “I love the idea of somebody doing this, but the way that it’s done, so sneakily. It seems like if I had a place like this, I would want to try to really explain it to people. Show them how things work, why this part exists, what they’ve made analogies with…”
“Meggy. Really. Drop the teacher vibe for a minute and just sit here and experience how incredibly awesome this place is. Close your eyes for a sec.”
Meg closed her eyes but lifted an eyebrow.
“Yeah, yeah. You’re too cool for this. I know. Okay. Now when you open them, use that artsy background that makes you spend so much time in the ceramics studio.”
Meg kept her eyes emphatically closed. “You know that I have serious issues critiquing things. I don’t have any architecture background, and I don’t have any way of guessing whether or now I can even remotely crit something in the proper light.”
“Yeah, but. You’re not in bio-geek-mode anymore. You’re not trying to match it up with your perspective of what an ER is. And that’s one of those things that really matters to completely experience a building like this.”
Meg glued her eyes shut and rolled them emphatically.
“Seriously. Yes, I’m parroting the art criticism class that I’m taking that I don’t like very much, but occasionally they say something worthwhile. Try it.”
Meg opened her eyes, looking at the space again. “Would you like a formalist reading as well, Miss I don’t ever want to go to art class so I took a class where I could critique it instead?”
“No. Just look at it.” And they both did, for a few minutes. There seemed to be more room than space for the room, so that little tables could be crammed in all over the place. Each little detail fit into the space as if it had been specifically made to live there, and the architecture was amazing, in a quiet way. The ceiling was far overhead, the walls curved in and out, and even the plate glass windows were set at strange angles that seemed to amplify the idea of movement and life.
A short little lady interrupted their reverie. She was dressed in a rich eggplant purple with an inoffensive mint green apron that seemed to perfectly match the tones in the walls and the furnishings. “Hello girls. Welcome to Esmerelda’s. Would you care to take a seat?” At their nods, she led them to a table tucked into a corner that gave another, different, spectacular view of the establishment. The waitress put menus down on the table, and called over her shoulder that she’d be back in just a sec.
“Meg, hon, I thought you said this was a bakery?”
“It is a bakery. Evidently it’s also a coffeeshop and a hangout for everyone who feels like making the trek.”
Kerry looked around and realized that there were members of pretty much all of her classes - as well as her swim team - tucked into the various nooks and crannies around the restaurant. The place felt empty, welcoming, warm, as if they were the only people there. Somehow it made the other people in the room less threatening than usual, and slightly more comfortable. The restaurant - coffeeshop - bakery - thing was quite full, in actuality. And yet, as they sat and tried to take in the amount of people in the space, four or five more little groups of people came in, and the same girl found each of them a seat without any problem.
Ordering drinks (coffee for Kerry, tea for Meg) and pastries, the girls quizzed the waitress on how long the place had been open, who designed it, and what the hours were. The waitress filled them in on all the facts, and disappeared to go wait on someone else. When she came back to their table carrying steaming drinks in hand-thrown mugs, Kerry actually got up the nerve to ask for a job application. The waitress looked her up and down and told her that she’d bring over a couple with their pastries.
Meg picked up the mugs and turned them around and around in her hands. They were really well thrown - thick enough that you wouldn’t burn your fingers on them if you didn’t use the handle, but thin enough that they felt light and comfortable in your hand. And the heat could move through the clay in that way that your hands would stay warm, but you wouldn’t burn yourself.
“Oy. Earth to Meg, paging Meg. Can I have my coffee back?” Meg handed the mug back regretfully and played around with her own. Different shape, but somehow complimentary. She snuck glances at the tables around them, and didn’t see many cups out of people’s hands - but by those she did see, there seemed to be a correlation between coffee-drinkers and the taller mugs and the tea-drinkers and the curved, shorter, wider mug that she had gotten. But she was pretty sure that she was just making things up - some people got one type and others got another. It wasn’t as though she actually knew the entire school’s drinking habits. And in the terminology where “drinking habits” was usually used, she knew even less.
Meg and Kerry settled down to a simple back-and-forth of bio facts. They had a test coming up on Friday, and Kerry had been reading background stuff on DNA because the unit hadn’t been up to her standards. So along with the facts that they both knew they needed to memorize, they had plenty to discuss.
The waitress dropped off their pastries, which were just as good as advertised, and the applications, which they ignored until they had gotten through trading abbreviations and formal names and the ideas that they had learned about them in class. The waitress was really good about not interrupting conversation, but seamlessly inserted and then took herself away from their table.
Soon enough, Kerry had to go to practice. Meg saw a few of the girls in her art class on the way out, so they parted ways, each hanging onto an application that they vowed to fill out that evening when both of them had a little spare time.
Kerry headed to the pool. Swimming had become an added stress lately. It wasn’t really fun anymore, but it wasn’t terrible, either. Occasionally she got little glimpses of the good old days when swimming had been fantastic, though more often getting to practice was a drag and getting a suit on and jumping in even more so. It wasn’t as if she disliked swimming - it was one of those things that she had done for a long time, was relatively good at, and the people she swam with were pretty cool. It was just the day in, day out repetition of knowing that there could be other things that she would enjoy doing, but for this steady time commitment. She was sick of saying “I can’t, I have practice.”
And it being senior year? She was more and more tempted to just blow off practice and go do her own thing. Some people did, she knew. Some of the guys came to practice once a week, and even then, late, and no one really blinked an eye. But she wasn’t sure that she could do that. Kerry knew that if she quit the team, she would be fine, the team would be fine, and she would actually have the ability to do things that she wanted to do on a day to day basis. But quitting the team seemed like such a bad idea. Partially for college applications, partially for just, well, life. Swimming was the one place where Kerry got up off her butt and did things. Sure, she was also involved in all sorts of other activities. But college admissions looked for dedication, and quitting now would just be a bad idea.
Kerry threw her headphones in and bopped the rest of the world with a happy song in her head at least. Even with everything else she wanted to do, she needed to do - that bio lab would be due on Monday, and there was a quiz or two coming up that she wanted to review notes for. Still, practice might help to clear her head, and if not, maybe Build me up Buttercup would stay stuck in her head until practice was over.
Meg spotted some art students sprawled in front of a little table set on the ground in the corner across from where she and Kerry had been sitting. She went over and chatted with the art students, still in Esmerelda’s. They were discussing the contest for creating the logo for the sign. The discussion was rather typical of the students of Manticore; they were looking at the ideas that Esmerelda had given both from a strictly fomalist perspective, and one which would make them look more appealing to college admissions people.
Tahlia, a girl with a big of a fro and large dangly earrings, shook her head at someone at the table. “No, the flyer says that she wants something that’s just a preliminary sketch. That seems to imply that we can give her more than one, which would be great, because then we could each submit a few and everyone would have a bunch of ideas.”
“Is that really productive, though? The idea of a contest is that you submit your best work and hope that people judge you accordingly. Does handing in quick sketches really show that?” This was Becky, an Asian student who spoke just a little hesitantly.
Meg joined in the discussion, “I agree with Becky. Passing off shoddy work because you’ve done a lot of it doesn’t actually make it any less shoddy. We need to take that into effect.”
“Ok, Meg” Tahlia shot back “so if you look at Esmerelda’s flyer, do you have any idea of what she’s looking for?” Tahlia handed Meg the flyer, which said, simply,
Help Esmerelda come up with a logo for her place!
Cash prize and my eternal gratitude.
Please see me with ideas.
“I thought that you guys had heard something about signs, and giving us pieces of wood and seeing what we would do with them?”
“That was me” Trent, a boy with glasses, looked up from the pictures he was flipping through in his phone. “I had a chat with the proprietress the first day this place opened - I had been grocery shopping and stopped by. Tried to find a way to get through the glass-window side, but it seems sealed up tight.”
“And what did she say again?”
“That people who’s ideas showed promise would get to design signs to be put up in various places, incorporated into the design of the place, as it were. She said that she had a certain aesthetic that she was looking for, but only people who saw the place as it really was would be able to figure out what it was that she wanted. Not sure what she meant by that. I mean, formally, this place is crazy abstract and she’s done something spectacular with the space, and the walls, and I can’t even wait to see what she does to it for that” he nodded at a poster at about eye level to a person standing in their nook “because I’m curious how she could make this place any more spectacular, but I feel that this might be it, but I’m no sure what she meant by “seeing as it really is”. I mean, is it the same kind of thing where Teacher Jacob tells us to look at the colors, and when we have them right, to look at them again, and again, and again, until we end up with some modern-looking crap where before we had a completely representative picture? I dunno”
“Modern isn’t crap, Trent.”
“Some of it is. You’ve been in to the Art Museum, right? You saw the exhibit that was giant gessoed canvases with a child’s scrawl of the names of the cast of the Iliad on one side, and then random black and red scribbled brush strokes, and then a final canvas of the names of everyone who died? Call that art?”
Meg knew that the conversation was effectively derailed. Trent and Tahlia would argue about the definition of modern art, and what it meant in today’s society, and then call each other names and grumble at each other for a while before coming back to allowing Becky or Meg to have a say in the conversation. Knowing this, the two girls rolled their eyes at each other. Meg propped herself up on one arm to check out the flyer that Trent had alluded to. Evidently Esmerelda was holding a dance around Halloween. It was to be costumed, but evidently not scandalous. Costumes that fit with the theme of the party would be rewarded, those that weren’t would feel silly. (Who put that on a flyer?)
And there was to be a Jack and Jill. Which Meg knew in the context of “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water / Jack fell down and broke his crown / and Jill came tumbling after” but had no idea what it was going to be.
Meg turned to Becky, asking in a voice that was easily ignored by Trent and Tahlia but could still be heard, “any idea what a Jack and Jill is?” she pointed to the poster as a reminder.
Becky shook her head no, “But I bet the internet does!”
Meg grabbed her phone. Right. She actually had internet everywhere, since she upgraded her calling plan! Expensive, but so worth it.
She told her phone to jump to Google, so she could look up the term. She hoped that it was something good - a certain kind of theme clue, or something. Weirdly, her phone couldn’t connect. She tried again, and the little piece of technology made an unhappy noise and shut itself down.
Also, the writing is crap. Apologies. I haven't done this for a while.
5068 / 50000
(10.14%)
Word count meter from http://svenja.atspace.com/wordmeter.html
“And then I threw a few pots and worked on - made - some squid.”
Kerry looked over at her friend and raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I know that I’m tired and zoned out a bit there, but how did we get from the dining hall to smashing things against walls and seafood? I gotta say, I’m confused.”
“Ceramics, Kerry. The wheel? The verb of making pots: to throw? And the midterm crit that I had last week told me that I should work on repeating forms. So I made 18 squid.”
“Right. Right. Sorry. But… that actually still doesn’t explain the squid.”
“They’re adorable. Duh.”
“Sure. If you say so. Are all squiggly things adorable, now, or just 10-legged Cephalopods?”
“Um… Cephalopods, gastropods, and myxomycetes. I think that’s it at the moment.”
“Meg, really? I can see the snails, they’ve got the searching antennae thing going on, but slime molds? Sure, the colors are nice, but really? They’re gross and squishy.”
“No more so than you are!” Meg poked Kerry in the side and sprinted up the hill. Kerry followed, at a slightly slower pace. Her backpack was full, and dragged at her sore shoulders.
Meg waited at the top of the hill, juggling books and a smart phone. She held the latter up triumphantly as Kerry made it up next to her. “See!”
Kerry grabbed Meg’s phone and examined the yellow splotch of slime mold, scientific name Fuligo septica, that Meg had googled. “Meg, dear?” Her friend nodded, waiting for Kerry to acknowledge how utterly lovely the slime mold was. “You do realize that the common name - right after the fancy sounding one that you found - for this particular slime mold is ‘dog vomit’? Somehow I’m not being convinced that this is a good thing. I had a dog. His vomit tends to be less than cute.”
Meg pouted, attempting to come up with a logical explanation for dog vomit looking - even if not being - adorable, and failed. Of course, she attempted anyway. “But since it’s a slime mold and not dog vomit, doesn’t that redeem it in some way? Because it probably wouldn’t show up anywhere where your dog might make a mess, and -“
Kerry tensed, just for a moment. “Conversation off of dog vomit and slime molds, now. Please? Fill me in on your social life. Your math homework. Whatever.”
Meg checked the surrounding area, looking for cute boys, professors, or other members of the seemingly ever expanding group who transformed Kerry into Attempting to Become Less Nerdy Than She Actually Is. No luck. There weren’t even other people out in the yard at this time, for goodness sake! They had dawdled over lunch, and their afternoon classes had been cancelled for some random National holiday. “How about plans for the afternoon? Anything in particular you want to do?”
Kerry shrugged. Meg kept her tone light - one of these days she would try to figure out what made that girl tick - and chattered on about the new bakery that some of the girls in her art class said was really good, and they could even get a ride into town if they didn’t want to walk the fifteen or twenty minutes to get there. Kerry agreed to go, so long as she’d be back for practice.
They decided to walk to the bakery. A brisk fall day, the leaves had just started to change color and the sky was a brilliant blue. Meg had her camera out, knowing that she should save the batteries for a little later, when the light slipped behind the hills and spilled out in unexpected ways, but couldn’t help taking multiple pictures of one or two orange trees, a couple of dogs that were being walked, and Kerry.
Kerry finally confiscated the camera, as “You’re dangerous with this thing!” and stuck it in her pocket. As Meg continued to lead the way along the shaded, uneven sidewalk, Kerry occasionally saw the light spill through the branches and light on Meg’s head, she could see the sun light the golden-brown curls and turn them to gold. Kerry -knew her own mousey-brown hair stayed that way. In good light, in bad light, she imagined even in the dark, her hair was and always would be mouse-brown. Still, Kerry appreciated the dappled lighting.
Whoever had decided that the sidewalk should go around the monster trees instead of chopping them down had left them a beautiful walk, if a trifle uneven one. The roots of the trees had reached down under the sidewalk, and pushed up as they grew. The sidewalk was unsure of how to react - but since the trees tended to be friendly the rest of the time, the sidewalk was not one to hold a grudge. It merely split along its seams, and let the roots push it into a little mountain wherever it felt necessary.
Kerry saw the caterpillar after Meg had passed. Grabbing a stick and picking it up, she bugged Meg to turn around and check it out. “I think it’s a Papilio polyxenes.”
“Otherwise known as? You know I didn’t jump in the Memorize All the Butterflies and their Life Cycles game.”
“Come on now, it was clearly a butterflies and moths game. And yeah, I know. Though you did pretty good with the slime molds and snails. Take a guess?”
“I frankly have no idea. Black and white and yellow, stripes. All that seems to say to me is ‘I’m poisonous, don’t eat me, please?’ and that doesn’t tell me a lot. Because no one really wants to be eaten.”
“Hrm. Well, I’ll give you 20 questions. And if we get to your little bakery first, I’ll tell you. Sound ok?”
“You realize that my butterfly knowledge is no better than a typical six-year-old girl’s, and that my moth knowledge is even worse?”
“Probably because moths come out after the 6 year old you were had to go to bed.”
“Lovely.” Meg grimaced. “Butterfly or moth?”
“Butterfly.”
“So I may have seen it. Awesome. Just because I have to ask: Monarch?”
“No. But that one also has the black and white and yellow stripes.”
“Huh. Ok. How about… color. Is it black?”
“Mostly.”
“Going to go with my only other butterfly, then. Tiger swallowtail?”
“Nope. Close, though. It is a swallowtail.”
“Awesome. But as awesome as that is, I give up. Don’t give me that look. This is where my butterfly knowledge ends.”
“You want me to tell you? Because you ask a few more questions, and I bet you’ll get it.”
“I don’t know any more butterflies. I seriously doubt it.”
“You’re going to kick yourself if you don’t at least try.”
“I may already be kicking myself for joining in a game where I don’t have any idea of what the answers even could be.”
“Seriously, though. What do you know?”
“It’s a swallowtail, and it’s black, and it’s not a tiger, and it’s not a monarch. And I’m kind of assuming that the other colors on it aren’t orange, because then it would seem to be tigerish.”
“Good. So what could it possibly be called?”
“A nontiger swallowtail? A jaguar swallowtail? A panther swallowtail - that one’s got the black, at least!”
“Meg, seriously, you’re making this harder than you need to. What color is it?”
“Black.”
“And what kind of butterfly is it?”
“Swallow - oh. Really? Figures. It’s a black swallowtail, yes?”
“Technically a Desert Black Swallowtail. But yeah.”
“Cool.” The girls walked in silence for a bit, soaking in the weak traces of the sun as it started to head down towards the horizon. The path changed to a more civilized one: the trees were little children compared to the ones who had the power to bend the sidewalk, front yards were tidily mowed, and the houses snuck closer together. They both saw it at the same time and rolled their eyes at each other.
Welcome to suburbia! The sign intoned. New houses for sale! Open house! Giving the name and number of a an architecture firm and a broker, they tried to entice potential buyers into the neighborhood with red and purple exclamation points. Both girls had commuted their first two years of school, and the utterly hideous signs that peppered the neighborhood had been one of their first talking points.
The atrocious signs also meant that they were almost to their destination. Meg pulled out the directions the girls had given her, and was displeased to discover that they had smeared. Asking artsy students to write directions was occasionally problematic, but generally they didn’t use vine charcoal. It smeared like no other. She sighed, and shoved the completely unhelpful directions back in her pocket.
“Well, we may get there, and we may not. Sorry - directions are pretty much impossible to read.”
“I mean, it’s part of the Magical Land of Suburbia. How hard can it be to find?”
“You’re probably right. We can just wander for a while, if you’re okay with that.”
“Sure. But if we’re wandering, fill me in on what you’ve been up to?”
“Other than the squid and the bowls?”
“Yeah. Like, in real life.”
“Watch it, girl! Clay is real life.”
“Yeah, yeah. If you say so.”
“So. Let’s see. Real life. I dunno. Little brother is squabbling with anyone and everyone; older brother is moody and won’t talk to me, so calling home is kind of a pain.”
“George isn’t doing well? What’s up with him now?”
“No idea. Pretty sure it isn’t anything super bad, but it’s just frustrating, you know? I want him to be able to talk to me about it, both because, yeah, I’ll admit it, I’m curious, but also because if there’s anything that I can do I want to be able to help him out. And I know that I’m the kid sister and not necessarily the person that a 22-year-old wants to talk to about life, but I’d love it if rather than never, he could talk to me some of the time at least. Mom’s kind of freaked out about it, which I don’t think helps with Tim at all, either. So our Skype chats just get more and more silent, or full of me randomly chatting about absolutely nothing. And it’s just frustrating.”
“Any chance that they’re going to be able to come visit this year?”
“Eh, I might get to go home for Christmas, depending on the scholarship fund. They’ll probably only make it down for graduation. You know that it’s a long way, and it’s just one of those things that they’re not sure they can pull Tim out of school, and convince George to leave his social life for a bit, more than the once at the end of the year. What about your family? Coming down soon?”
“You know that my Mom will stop by every single weekend until I beg her not to. But she’ll bring baked goods, which I know the team will appreciate, and she’ll take us out to dinner if you want?”
“Only if you really want me to come. I wouldn’t want to impose.” Kerry gave Meg a shocked look - faked, of course - and gestured towards herself and then her friend, before swatting her friend over the head.
“You silly. Of course I want you to come.”
“I don’t know. I just can’t see wanting to spend all your time with your mother with other people.”
“This might be, Meggy, because you’ve never met my mother.”
“Ker, I just don’t want to impose. I know that your family’s had some tough times in the past couple of months and I didn’t know if you maybe wanted to spend more time with your mom whenever you could?”
Kerry laughed. “Hence me not wanting to spend time with her, actually. It’s Mom’s fault that most of the drama went down, and it’s not one of those things that I really want to have time to chat with her about it.”
“If you want the moral support, than I’d love to come, you know that. And look - I think we’ve found it!” Meg rushed down a mildly sketchy alley, which opened into an adorable courtyard. Somehow the courtyard managed to keep more of the sunlight than the last three little streets combined had held. A sign hung over the door, but Kerry saw that it didn’t actually have a name on it.
“Any idea what’s up with the sign?”
“Oh - that it’s blank? Evidently Esmerelda - she’s the owner here - has a competition going to see who can make her a sign who really sparkles. She’s providing materials and a basic outline of what she wants, and anyone who wants to can make one. And then she’s planning to hang the ones that she doesn’t use out front as markers to get to this place and decorations for the inside. You interested?”
Kerry hesistated. It had been a long time since she had done any sort of artwork. “Maybe? Can we check it out first? I’m not sure how well my artsy skills are going to measure up.”
“Of course! And I’m freezing. Let’s go in, ok?”
The interior of the little bakery was warm and bright, plate glass windows in the back facing another street, and somehow perfectly channeling the autumn light so that it actually looked brighter, closer to summer, and warm. The space itself was divvied up into little nooks and crannies, tables tucked into more little tiny spaces than seemed to fit within the confines of the little building. Kerry looked around in astonishment - the weird squished oval-shape of the room, grouped with its high ceiling and walls that seemed to melt and form so that they carefully cradled the tables in little private worlds.
“Meg? Look at this place. What do you see?”
“Some place really cozy. Grab a seat and let’s see if their little tiramisu thingys are as good as the girls said they were.”
“No, look at it. And tell me what we were studying in bio first semester last year.”
Occasionally Meg got irritated at Kerry for her near-photographic memory, complete with when she learned the information and what the exact test questions had been. She was a shoo-in as a scholarship student, while Meg had to seriously work at it. But first semester last year had been the first when they had been expected to tell the deans what they expected to be studying for the rest of their time at school there, and provide an actual legitimate explanation as to what they wanted to do and why. It had been insanely stressful, but also the first time that Kerry had started helping Meg out in her studying - since Ker tended to memorize everything as soon as it was out of the teacher’s mouth or written on the chalkboard, she was the perfect person to have drill you on random facts as you walked through campus or sat over lunch. And she didn’t mind passing on the knowledge, either. She was one of those people who was a genuine nerd about information - she went through life with a generic attitude of “isn’t this fascinating!” and the world seemed to conform to the view she wanted to hold of it.
First semester bio had been cells - animal cells, plant cells, and all their little organelles. It wasn’t the cells themselves that Kerry was seeing - any building, any room, could be taken as a cell. It held stuff in, had a purpose for existing, and had entrances and exits that you could use to get in or out, provided you had the right key, or key code, etc.
So then she had probably found some sort of organelle that the room looked like. She looked around, really looked at the furniture, the placement of the walls, even the colors. “Wait, really? This completely matches the ER in our textbook. What’s up with that?”
“Does it matter? Isn’t it awesome? We’re going to have pastries - or maybe tea - in an Endoplasmic Reticulum. I’m excited.”
Meg shook her head. “I love the idea of somebody doing this, but the way that it’s done, so sneakily. It seems like if I had a place like this, I would want to try to really explain it to people. Show them how things work, why this part exists, what they’ve made analogies with…”
“Meggy. Really. Drop the teacher vibe for a minute and just sit here and experience how incredibly awesome this place is. Close your eyes for a sec.”
Meg closed her eyes but lifted an eyebrow.
“Yeah, yeah. You’re too cool for this. I know. Okay. Now when you open them, use that artsy background that makes you spend so much time in the ceramics studio.”
Meg kept her eyes emphatically closed. “You know that I have serious issues critiquing things. I don’t have any architecture background, and I don’t have any way of guessing whether or now I can even remotely crit something in the proper light.”
“Yeah, but. You’re not in bio-geek-mode anymore. You’re not trying to match it up with your perspective of what an ER is. And that’s one of those things that really matters to completely experience a building like this.”
Meg glued her eyes shut and rolled them emphatically.
“Seriously. Yes, I’m parroting the art criticism class that I’m taking that I don’t like very much, but occasionally they say something worthwhile. Try it.”
Meg opened her eyes, looking at the space again. “Would you like a formalist reading as well, Miss I don’t ever want to go to art class so I took a class where I could critique it instead?”
“No. Just look at it.” And they both did, for a few minutes. There seemed to be more room than space for the room, so that little tables could be crammed in all over the place. Each little detail fit into the space as if it had been specifically made to live there, and the architecture was amazing, in a quiet way. The ceiling was far overhead, the walls curved in and out, and even the plate glass windows were set at strange angles that seemed to amplify the idea of movement and life.
A short little lady interrupted their reverie. She was dressed in a rich eggplant purple with an inoffensive mint green apron that seemed to perfectly match the tones in the walls and the furnishings. “Hello girls. Welcome to Esmerelda’s. Would you care to take a seat?” At their nods, she led them to a table tucked into a corner that gave another, different, spectacular view of the establishment. The waitress put menus down on the table, and called over her shoulder that she’d be back in just a sec.
“Meg, hon, I thought you said this was a bakery?”
“It is a bakery. Evidently it’s also a coffeeshop and a hangout for everyone who feels like making the trek.”
Kerry looked around and realized that there were members of pretty much all of her classes - as well as her swim team - tucked into the various nooks and crannies around the restaurant. The place felt empty, welcoming, warm, as if they were the only people there. Somehow it made the other people in the room less threatening than usual, and slightly more comfortable. The restaurant - coffeeshop - bakery - thing was quite full, in actuality. And yet, as they sat and tried to take in the amount of people in the space, four or five more little groups of people came in, and the same girl found each of them a seat without any problem.
Ordering drinks (coffee for Kerry, tea for Meg) and pastries, the girls quizzed the waitress on how long the place had been open, who designed it, and what the hours were. The waitress filled them in on all the facts, and disappeared to go wait on someone else. When she came back to their table carrying steaming drinks in hand-thrown mugs, Kerry actually got up the nerve to ask for a job application. The waitress looked her up and down and told her that she’d bring over a couple with their pastries.
Meg picked up the mugs and turned them around and around in her hands. They were really well thrown - thick enough that you wouldn’t burn your fingers on them if you didn’t use the handle, but thin enough that they felt light and comfortable in your hand. And the heat could move through the clay in that way that your hands would stay warm, but you wouldn’t burn yourself.
“Oy. Earth to Meg, paging Meg. Can I have my coffee back?” Meg handed the mug back regretfully and played around with her own. Different shape, but somehow complimentary. She snuck glances at the tables around them, and didn’t see many cups out of people’s hands - but by those she did see, there seemed to be a correlation between coffee-drinkers and the taller mugs and the tea-drinkers and the curved, shorter, wider mug that she had gotten. But she was pretty sure that she was just making things up - some people got one type and others got another. It wasn’t as though she actually knew the entire school’s drinking habits. And in the terminology where “drinking habits” was usually used, she knew even less.
Meg and Kerry settled down to a simple back-and-forth of bio facts. They had a test coming up on Friday, and Kerry had been reading background stuff on DNA because the unit hadn’t been up to her standards. So along with the facts that they both knew they needed to memorize, they had plenty to discuss.
The waitress dropped off their pastries, which were just as good as advertised, and the applications, which they ignored until they had gotten through trading abbreviations and formal names and the ideas that they had learned about them in class. The waitress was really good about not interrupting conversation, but seamlessly inserted and then took herself away from their table.
Soon enough, Kerry had to go to practice. Meg saw a few of the girls in her art class on the way out, so they parted ways, each hanging onto an application that they vowed to fill out that evening when both of them had a little spare time.
Kerry headed to the pool. Swimming had become an added stress lately. It wasn’t really fun anymore, but it wasn’t terrible, either. Occasionally she got little glimpses of the good old days when swimming had been fantastic, though more often getting to practice was a drag and getting a suit on and jumping in even more so. It wasn’t as if she disliked swimming - it was one of those things that she had done for a long time, was relatively good at, and the people she swam with were pretty cool. It was just the day in, day out repetition of knowing that there could be other things that she would enjoy doing, but for this steady time commitment. She was sick of saying “I can’t, I have practice.”
And it being senior year? She was more and more tempted to just blow off practice and go do her own thing. Some people did, she knew. Some of the guys came to practice once a week, and even then, late, and no one really blinked an eye. But she wasn’t sure that she could do that. Kerry knew that if she quit the team, she would be fine, the team would be fine, and she would actually have the ability to do things that she wanted to do on a day to day basis. But quitting the team seemed like such a bad idea. Partially for college applications, partially for just, well, life. Swimming was the one place where Kerry got up off her butt and did things. Sure, she was also involved in all sorts of other activities. But college admissions looked for dedication, and quitting now would just be a bad idea.
Kerry threw her headphones in and bopped the rest of the world with a happy song in her head at least. Even with everything else she wanted to do, she needed to do - that bio lab would be due on Monday, and there was a quiz or two coming up that she wanted to review notes for. Still, practice might help to clear her head, and if not, maybe Build me up Buttercup would stay stuck in her head until practice was over.
Meg spotted some art students sprawled in front of a little table set on the ground in the corner across from where she and Kerry had been sitting. She went over and chatted with the art students, still in Esmerelda’s. They were discussing the contest for creating the logo for the sign. The discussion was rather typical of the students of Manticore; they were looking at the ideas that Esmerelda had given both from a strictly fomalist perspective, and one which would make them look more appealing to college admissions people.
Tahlia, a girl with a big of a fro and large dangly earrings, shook her head at someone at the table. “No, the flyer says that she wants something that’s just a preliminary sketch. That seems to imply that we can give her more than one, which would be great, because then we could each submit a few and everyone would have a bunch of ideas.”
“Is that really productive, though? The idea of a contest is that you submit your best work and hope that people judge you accordingly. Does handing in quick sketches really show that?” This was Becky, an Asian student who spoke just a little hesitantly.
Meg joined in the discussion, “I agree with Becky. Passing off shoddy work because you’ve done a lot of it doesn’t actually make it any less shoddy. We need to take that into effect.”
“Ok, Meg” Tahlia shot back “so if you look at Esmerelda’s flyer, do you have any idea of what she’s looking for?” Tahlia handed Meg the flyer, which said, simply,
Help Esmerelda come up with a logo for her place!
Cash prize and my eternal gratitude.
Please see me with ideas.
“I thought that you guys had heard something about signs, and giving us pieces of wood and seeing what we would do with them?”
“That was me” Trent, a boy with glasses, looked up from the pictures he was flipping through in his phone. “I had a chat with the proprietress the first day this place opened - I had been grocery shopping and stopped by. Tried to find a way to get through the glass-window side, but it seems sealed up tight.”
“And what did she say again?”
“That people who’s ideas showed promise would get to design signs to be put up in various places, incorporated into the design of the place, as it were. She said that she had a certain aesthetic that she was looking for, but only people who saw the place as it really was would be able to figure out what it was that she wanted. Not sure what she meant by that. I mean, formally, this place is crazy abstract and she’s done something spectacular with the space, and the walls, and I can’t even wait to see what she does to it for that” he nodded at a poster at about eye level to a person standing in their nook “because I’m curious how she could make this place any more spectacular, but I feel that this might be it, but I’m no sure what she meant by “seeing as it really is”. I mean, is it the same kind of thing where Teacher Jacob tells us to look at the colors, and when we have them right, to look at them again, and again, and again, until we end up with some modern-looking crap where before we had a completely representative picture? I dunno”
“Modern isn’t crap, Trent.”
“Some of it is. You’ve been in to the Art Museum, right? You saw the exhibit that was giant gessoed canvases with a child’s scrawl of the names of the cast of the Iliad on one side, and then random black and red scribbled brush strokes, and then a final canvas of the names of everyone who died? Call that art?”
Meg knew that the conversation was effectively derailed. Trent and Tahlia would argue about the definition of modern art, and what it meant in today’s society, and then call each other names and grumble at each other for a while before coming back to allowing Becky or Meg to have a say in the conversation. Knowing this, the two girls rolled their eyes at each other. Meg propped herself up on one arm to check out the flyer that Trent had alluded to. Evidently Esmerelda was holding a dance around Halloween. It was to be costumed, but evidently not scandalous. Costumes that fit with the theme of the party would be rewarded, those that weren’t would feel silly. (Who put that on a flyer?)
And there was to be a Jack and Jill. Which Meg knew in the context of “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water / Jack fell down and broke his crown / and Jill came tumbling after” but had no idea what it was going to be.
Meg turned to Becky, asking in a voice that was easily ignored by Trent and Tahlia but could still be heard, “any idea what a Jack and Jill is?” she pointed to the poster as a reminder.
Becky shook her head no, “But I bet the internet does!”
Meg grabbed her phone. Right. She actually had internet everywhere, since she upgraded her calling plan! Expensive, but so worth it.
She told her phone to jump to Google, so she could look up the term. She hoped that it was something good - a certain kind of theme clue, or something. Weirdly, her phone couldn’t connect. She tried again, and the little piece of technology made an unhappy noise and shut itself down.