Carry on, my wayward son
I officially, actually, amazingly, have an idea of where this plot is going. Aren't you proud of me?
Granted, it's not a very well-fleshed-out plot, but it's coming together in my mind.
And... I'm a day behind. Due to not writing at all on Saturday. Oops.
10075 / 50000
(20.15%)
Chapter Two: In Which Things Begin to Happen and a Plot Begins to Spring Forth
The glass windows on the side of the room opened, up and out, about the same time that the sun went down. It was cold, and interrupted the flow of conversation where Trent and Tahlia were still debating whether colored blocks on canvas counted as art, or degenerate art, or which of them was more of a bigger fathead. The cold air sweeping in and around the room effectively halted discussion, as everyone in the room looked over at the view of the night sky. Or something that looked like the night sky.
There were too many lights. But no one was really paying attention to the outside as a woman dressed in high heels and an evening gown swept through the entrance made by the windows - that were evidently also doors.
Trent looked miffed. “I tried for like twenty minutes to get through that side. If it opens, why didn’t it when I tried to get through?”
The girls ignored him, impressed by the woman’s spectacular outfit. Somehow it did not seem insanely out of place in the room - and all of a sudden, they all felt far too dressed down to be in the establishment.
“Wonder why she’s here?”
Meg checked the poster above her head, but no - the dance wasn’t for another couple of days. “Think we have to dress up that nicely for her dance?”
“I hope not”
“Trent, you’re such a boy.”
“I don’t mind whipping out a suit and tie, but I don’t think I can pull of that sort of a dress. Or those heels.”
The three girls, in quick succession, smacked him over the head. “Really Trent? Though it would be hilarious to see you in a dress, I’m pretty sure that you couldn’t pull it off.”
Becky chimed in, so quietly that Trent missed it “or if you did, it would be absolutely hysterical”
Trent whipped his head around when he heard Meg giggle at Becky’s comment. “What?”
“Oh, nothing!”
“Seriously, what?”
“Seriously, you’ll be happier not knowing.”
“And telling me that is just going to make me want to know even more.”
“Yeah, yeah. Poor you.”
Trent unsprawled, dislodging Tahlia from using him as a pillow (which she had done for a good half of their argument) and glared at Meg. “You, miss, should not keep secrets from me.”
“Or what? You’ll art at me? I’ll art right back!”
“Could you stop abusing the English language, Megs? It hurts my brain.”
“Sure, Tahlia. Because you take everyone else’s feelings into consideration all the time.”
Tahlia sat back, rather affronted. Meg’s grin and teasing tone seemed to imply that she was teasing, but it still rankled. She had stopped abusing English, though, so that was a plus at least.
Becky hadn’t gotten involved in the squabble, but had been watching her friends with an air of acknowledgement of how utterly ridiculous they were. She glanced up at the room, which had begun to buzz with chatter yet again. “Wait, where did she go?”
“Who?”
“The fancy dress lady. With the shoes that Trent couldn’t manage.”
“I don’t know. Think she got a table?”
“Maybe. But it was weird. I just have this distinct impression that she’s not here anymore. Windows are closed, too.”
Meg nodded “I agree, actually. She seems to be gone. I don’t feel like such a slob anymore. Wonder who she was?” As the words slipped out, she knew she was going to regret them.
Tahlia’s eyes flashed. “Let’s figure it out. Megs, gimme your phone.”
Meg handed it over, but warned Tahlia that it didn’t seem to be working. Tahlia disregarded her with an airy wave of her hand, until she couldn’t actually get the internet to work either, and tossed it back.
“Anyone else have internet at the moment?”
Trent grabbed his netbook out of his bag and flipped it open. “I don’t expect this to work, sadly. The internet connection is almost always better on Meg’s phone.” He booted up the computer, which turned on and made the happy little start-up noises that everyone had come to associate with Trent’s computer (the Pachabel’s Canon in D seemed to be one of those songs that even computers knew, strangely).
He tried to grab the internet, but his computer whirred, and thought, and cranked the fan as it tried its best to do as he asked it to, but no luck. He patted it, and tried to convince it to calm down, because he knew how easy it was to break these things. Granted, they weren’t hugely expensive to replace, but this model seemed to always boot up to Pachelbel, and he had already run through netbooks named after the composer’s first two wives. This one’s name was Vienna, as the site of most of Pachelbel’s major work. But if he had to get another one, he wasn’t sure what he would go for, as far as names go. Maybe one of the songs that stole the same chord progression.
“No luck, Tahlia, sorry. Vienna’s not happy with me, though she should be able to access the school’s internet from here.”
“Not a huge deal. Now. Details.” Tahlia rooted through her messenger bag and grabbed her sketchbook, ripping out a sheet for each of her friends who were there. “You’ve got pencils, right? See if you can sketch out who you saw. I’m going to compile them later, and then see if I can track down our mystery lady on the internet.”
“You’re such a stalker, Tahlia. Alright, though.” They bent over their sketchbooks, scribbling, passing around a single good eraser and making do without when they needed to. Tahlia glanced up to make sure that everyone was on topic every so often. She was done first - not so much a sketch of what the woman had looked like, but what she had been wearing. Tahlia knew that she hadn’t been paying attention to the face, so she just wasn’t going to try. She gave the woman nondescript shadowed features and waited for the others to come up with their sketches.
Becky was next to finish, trading pictures with Tahlia to check and see how they matched up. The dress and shoes definitely did. The face, though, and any identifying characteristics, were pretty sparse in Becky’s sketch as well.
Trent pushed his drawing across the low table towards Tahlia and Becky. His drawings, as always, looked a bit like video camera footage blown up past its highest resolution. So not a whole lot of detail there, but a fantastic drawing nonetheless.
Meg slid hers across the table, biting her lip. “I’m not sure if it’s right, but I tried to get the expression on her face when she walked in.” The woman on Meg’s paper had a half-smile on her face, just daring them to comment on her outlandish attire. She was classically beautiful, and her eyes just bore into the viewer.
“Meg, this is really good. How come you don’t do more drawing?”
“Because if I’m trying too hard, bad things happen and I get flustered. Drawing’s not really my thing.”
Tahlia squinted at the unobtrusive Meg, pretty sure that she should say something that would properly explain the fact that Meg had gotten what they all had missed, and that it was super important that someone did, if she was going to manage to track down who this woman was. But she saw that Meg didn’t want to be pushed, so raised her eyebrows and threw a noncommittal “ahuh” in her direction.
Meg was happy that Tahlia dropped it; Tahlia was happy that Meg let her keep the sketch, and the group of art students walked back to campus, Trent and Tahlia bickering about something completely unimportant and Meg and Becky hanging in the background, occasionally making commentary on the more ridiculous of Trent or Tahlia’s arguments.
Kerry got out of swim practice feeling a bit like a potato that had recently been mashed. Sure, it had been a good practice. She had tapped into that beautiful place where everything hurt, but it didn’t really matter anymore, and the times were good, and she only got lapped by each of the boys a couple of times every time they went through the set. It was a bit frustrating to have the guys lap her every single practice. Yeah, there was the idea that guys, for some reason, just had a better chance of being crazy-fast even without working all that hard. Somehow that seemed unfair to Kerry - but unless she felt like whining to God, that was the way that it seemed to be. There were a couple of girls on the team who could keep up with the boys, and occasionally kick their butts, but Kerry had never really been one of that group.
Frankly, Kerry wondered about her place on the team. Yeah, she was useful. She was the third-fastest girl distance swimmer on the team, and it was a good position to have - not too much pressure to win, but still someone from the other team that she could try to take out in her race. It wasn’t her favorite position in practice, though. Being the person to actually lead the lane would be so nice for once - not the person seventh or eighth in a lane, so by the time she pushed off the wall, the leader of the lane would have already come back around, and she’d be lapped before she even started. It was slightly better when they were doing distance things - the coaches made sure that there weren’t more than six distance swimmers in a lane, and while she did end up getting lapped a crazy amount of times, it was at least by fewer people.
Kerry was pretty sure that this was a good thing. Most of the time, it was fine. But there were certain days where she wanted, so desperately, to be one of those people who had it all together and won meets for the team by their sheer awesomeness. She was a secondary member of the team - when Manticore had won the state championship two years ago, she was one of the people who was not put on the banner, because she hadn’t been on the state team. That rankled, a bit. And the whole idea of certain swimmers getting certain priveledges when the whole team was supposed to function as a unit - it was insanely frustrating.
There was Sarah, for instance. A super-senior this year, she still swam (even though she wasn’t really supposed to be, she had argued that her first year had been spent out of state, so she deserved another year on the team). Sarah was one of the team’s fastest breaststrokers, but she swam just for herself - not really for anyone else. So when she swam with the team, she was always more focused on her individual accomplishments than anything that the team did as a group. This made her kind of stuck up, and just a pain to be around. But Kerry found herself as one of the people that Sarah counted as a firm friend, and found herself at the receiving end of many of Sarah’s rants about all the other people on the team, the crazy coaches, boy troubles, and homework. It could get pretty sad, sometimes, because Sarah only came to chat with Kerry when she wanted someone to rant at. Kerry had no idea what Sarah would do with her spare time if she ever had any, what she did when she was in a good mood rather than a terrible one. There were rumors that Sarah had gone through the entire boy’s team looking for someone who could keep up with her, ah, exploits, but had decided that none of them were good enough for a long-term thing.
And it wasn’t as if Sarah had is all together, as her rants showed. But the fact that she could somehow tap into that competitive edge and really lay it all on the line and win things… Kerry wouldn’t mind having some of that. Maybe this year would work out better than the past 3. The coaching staff was still awesome; whatever Sarah said, Kerry believed that they were really good people and trying to help the swimmers out in both life and in the pool.
Kerry trudged to the shower with the rest of the girls on the team and rinsed out her hair. She had forgotten to buy shampoo and conditioner again. Luckily, everyone else seemed willing to share. She grabbed shampoo from Kim, exchanging tired grins as they stood under the scalding water, letting it relax super sore muscles.
Sarah had bought a boom box into the locker room a few weeks ago, and plugged it in and started blasting her music. It was popular, sure, and pretty bouncy. Not really Kerry’s style, but she had to smile as she saw Sarah bouncing around the locker room singing along and trying to get people to dance with her.
Rinsing out her hair and adding some conditioner (probably more than she should have borrowed from someone else, but if she didn’t throw a pretty big glob into her hair, there was absolutely no way that she was going to get a brush through it) and watched as three or four of the freshman stared at Sarah with googly-eyes. Thinking back to her freshman year, Kerry wondered if there was always someone crazy in the locker room. She kind of wanted to go over and tell the freshies that if they stared anymore, their eyes would fall out and then Sarah would dance on their eyeballs - but Kerry quicky decided that that was probably a poor idea.
She changed quickly, planning to meet up with Meg for dinner. The swimmers ate together after morning practices, but ridiculous hours of the morning were more conducive to shoveling food in your mouth before class than to any in depth discussion. So while some of the team - especially the freshmen and the captains - ate dinner together, she felt more comfortable eating with friends that she could let her crazyness out with.
“Oy, Kerry.” That was Missy, the senior captain. “Before you go - we’ve got a prospie coming in this weekend. Your turn to host. You ok with that?”
“I was under the impression that none of the seniors had to host?”
“We restructured a little bit. You don’t mind, do you?” And before Kerry could make up her mind whether or not it was worth shouting down her captain to protest the fact that seniors never had to host, because they were expected to be working on college essays and stressing out about their hardest classes, and, oh yeah, picking up a few extra extracurriculars to make their resumes gleam, Missy was off to the next thing. “Everybody, give me just a second?”
Sarah continued to dance, actually cranking up the boom box. Kerry sighed, and walked over to the boom box, and pulled the plug out of the wall. Sarah stopped dead, and the gleam in her eyes said she was going to freak, but even she knew better than to throw a hissy fit in the locker room right in front of the captain. It wasn’t that Missy had the authority to kick people off the team, but she did have a pretty good relationship with their head coach, and he was pretty patient, but would sit them both Sarah and Missy down and have a Talk. Kerry had never been on the receiving end of a Talk, but had heard the rantings and ravings of Sarah after several of hers.
Missy thanked Kerry, and continued “I’m going to email out the schedule for meets later today. Read it, follow it, dress up for it, all that good stuff. I’ll put what we’re wearing for each meet on there. First meet coming up in a week. We’re going down to Halcyon, so maybe some warmer weather. We’ll see. Up til then, try to get enough sleep, try not to get sick at the parties this weekend, try not to get sick in general, and get ready to swim fast!”
As she watched the girls swarm around Missy, Kerry made her escape. The pool, and the other athletic buildings, were at the bottom of campus, and the dining hall was close to the top. Kery pulled her hood upand tried to keep her hair from freezing, and started walking up trhough the woods. The sun was well and truly down, now. She hoped that the sun would stick around for a longer time this year, but it seemed to be vanishing fefore she got out of practice right on schedule. Made the walk up that much colder. Not too bad a breeze tonight, though. The sweatshirt and long-sleeve t-shirt combo was actually warm enough. Strange, that.
The dining hall was a welcome place of light and warmth. She stood in the entranceway and waited for Meg to show up. Pulled out her cell phone to check - it was 6:30, their usual dinner time. No Meg, though.
Kerry shrugged, and texted her. Dinner?
She sat in one of the comfy chairs in the foyer and tucked her feet up under her. Sure that Meg would come, she probably just got hung up on something. She closed her eyes, waiting for the buzz of her phone that would imply that Meg was on her way. The chair was really comfortable, and Kerry could feel the warmth of the building soaking into her shoulders, her legs, and relaxing muscles that seemed to be continuously tense throughout the swim season.
Meg got Kerry’s message and headed over to the dining hall. She didn’t text back, as she wasn’t sure if her phone was going to continue to be finicky or not, but was really excited that she ahd been able to turn it back on. Plugging it in in her room, and waiting for it to get a little more charge seemed to do the trick, though it really took about 20 seconds before it said it was fully charged, which was just odd.
It was a cheap phone, sure, but it was a little worrisome that it had a blip in its functioning already. It was only a year or so old - it should last longer than that, right? Meg had only had one phone before this - and that one had lasted for a good 5 years.
She tried texting Kerry back, but the phone got stuck on the ‘sending’ phase, and she shoved it in her pocket. Walking from her dorm to the dining hall, she noticed how cold it had gotten outside. Somehow, the walk back from the Esmerelda’s, even in the dark, had been warmer. Clouds covered the sky, and the streetlights dotting campus stood out from the surrounding area as pinpricks of light - the stars that couldn’t actually be seen through the clouds had floated down to earth for the students to still have some consolation from the dark.
Meg got to the entrance of the dining hall and saw Kerry asleep in the foyer. She sat down in a nearby chair and checked the time of Kerry’s last text. A good 15 minutes before: so if she gave Kerry another 10 minutes to nap, she would probably wake up refreshed and happy. Meg thought it was a pity that she didn’t know the exact time when Kerry had fallen asleep; there was some special benefit in 20-min increment naps. (The psych textbook that she had been reading before she got Kerry’s text had told her so.)
Meg turned her chair around, glad of the carpeting underneath this little section of the foyer, so she didn’t make a huge amount of noise and wake up her friend, earning herself a glare from the lady at the desk where you swiped your card, but giving her a view of the dining hall. She looked over the railings toward the food service area, seeing that whatever was coming out of there appeared to be pasta-based. Again. It was one of the deficits of the dining hall that every different kind of pasta sauce made a different meal, and one that was pretty easy for the kitchen people to concoct. Some people did all sorts of crazy things using the microwave and the toasters and made the kind of blah ingredients into really good food - but Meg had never really been so inclined. She tended to prefer more time hanging out with people at the dining hall rather than spending it cooking. Because really? The point of having a dining hall was that you came in and dined. Sure, Manticore didn’t use the more normal term of cafeteria, but that is what it was.
Meg liked to look down at the people. In some ways, they seemed to be the little cell parts that she and Kerry had been playing with the ideas with earlier. You could see them by the tops of their heads, buzzing here or there, stopping for no discernable reason from above, bumping into people and manuvering around them, and then, eventually, moving back to the back of the cafeteria to drop off their trays. All the people were a bit like vesicles: they transported, stored, and digested food products (as well as waste products, she supposed, but really, that might be taking the metaphor too far). They could get into and be expelled from the cell (the building, maybe?) because they could merge with the cell membrane (well, not so much. But they could walk in the doors and through the card-swipe-point because the lady at the desk recognized their card as belonging to the school). They all had the same sort of tray - phospholipids bilayers, anyone? - and used it to transport food. So maybe the trays were the vesicles? Eh, well. Meg checked her watch and woke Kerry up.
“Hey honey, time for dinner?”
“Mumphrgurgle?”
“Yes. Agreed. Time to wake up, ok?”
“Mumphrgurgle.”
“A huh. Open your eyes, dear. I know that you’re hungry from practice. Time to go get some yummy dining hall food.”
“Mumphrgurgle?”
“Ok, ok, not necessarily yummy dining hall food. But sustenance is good. Your brain stops working if you don’t feed it.”
“Mumph”
“Sorry? Didn’t quite get that one.”
Kerry picked up her head from where it had effectively been imprinted by her courderoy pants, and blinked at her friend. “Really?”
“Sorry. Once it moves beyond just the tonality I have trouble translating it.”
“That was, very clearly, a ‘my brain works fine when I don’t feed it, it’s just the rest of me that gets angry and rebels.”
“Oh, how silly f me. Clearly, I should work harder on figuring out your sleepy-code.”
“you said something about dinner?”
“We are at the top of the dining hall. Dinner seems to be a good idea, no?”
“Fine, fine.”
They wandered down to grab dinner. One of the nice little date tables by the windows was open, and they grabbed it before some gushy high school couple could do so. (They existed, even here. Tended to be all over each other in public, and rather discomfiting to everyone not in a steady relationship.)
“So Kerry.”
“Eh?”
“Tell me about practice”
“Urgk.”
“That good, eh?”
“Food, then the drill of trying to figure out why I do what I do when I don’t really like it before, during or after?”
“Sounds like a good idea to me.” They got up to go through the server’s line, but as the line seemed to be long no matter which option they wanted to go with, Meg pounced again. “Seriously, Ker. What is keeping you on that team? Half the time you tell me about it, it’s a ‘Meggy I don’t want to go to practice’ and the other half is pretty evenly split between you grumping about your times not coming down, and your frustration with the coaching staff. What is actually good about this sport?”
Kerry looked at Meg, square in the face. “It’s the once in a while time when I can feel the water slip past my face, my arms, my legs, and know that I’m doing what I need to do to help the team. It’s knowing that despite this hurting, every moment, it’s making me a stronger person. It’s about the little girl I once was, who loved the sport and couldn’t for the life of her understand why everyone else in the whole wide world didn’t love the sport as much as she did. It’s insanity incarnate, it’s masochistic, and I did love it, sometimes still do, and am hopeful that sometime in the future I will love it again. It’s not something that I understand, and I want to. It’s a science, but one that I don’t know all the variables to, and all the variables are tied up in my own body. So if I can’t find the variables, it’s my fault, and I need to experiment more. It’s a lifestyle, of reeking of chlorine, of having long leg hair, of getting crazy excited and running up and down the pool when the person who usually beats you every moment of every day is swimming and you’re not. Of signs on lockers and corny cheers, of honor and integrity and knowing that you have to complete everything that you were assigned because otherwise you’re letting down not only yourself but also the team. It’s a push to do things quickly, but well, it’s a drive to turn off your mind even as you’re analyzing everything and just sing a happy song to yourself. It’s - yes, pasta please, and the red sauce, and two pieces of garlic bread, if that’s all right? - hope, and fear, and the one place where I actually tap those primal emotions. I love it, I hate it, I fear it, I respect it, I don’t want to fail and do, I want to succeed, and do - for a given definition of success. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, and no. I hear that you’re addicted to this sport of yours, I still am not hearing that it makes you happy.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time it doesn’t. But when it does…” Kerry stared out the window as if there was some beautiful thing hiding right behind the dark. “When it’s right, it’s really right. Does that make sense?” Her voice had quieted, grown more intense, and her brow scrunched up as she tried to find the right words to really explain this.
“I guess so. You know that I definitely respect the time that you put into it, and the ability you have. But you have so much talent in other things, as well, I don’t know how it makes sense to want to devote so much time to that one thing.”
“You devote plenty of time to your art.”
“Yeah, but I like art - not just some of the time, either.”
“Eh. I dunno.”
“Sorry to pry.”
“No, it’s not that you were prying, it’s just that… I need to not doubt this right now.”
“Well, if you want my support, you know where I am. And I may poke you to explain yourself, but I promise that I won’t ask the why questions if you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Thanks.”
“So what are the crazy swimmers now? Any new gossip for me?”
“You know that you have an unhealthy love of gossip of members of the team for someone who’s not even a part of it.”
“Well, you think I come to your meets strictly for you?”
“No. You come to sketch the half-naked boys. I know your tricks. Question is, which one is going to fill up your sketchbook this year?”
Meg shook her head. “I refuse to get another random unrequited crush on another one of your silly swimmer boys.”
“A huh. Gimme your sketchbook.”
Meg wanted to say that she didn’t have her sketchbook on her, but Kerry knew her too well. As always, it was tucked in her bag - and Kerry flipped through it with rather vindictive glee, identifying each of the swimmers by their back muscles and occasional faces.
“See - John, John, John, Frank, John - you really like how he looks? - Frank, Peter, John - you do, don’t you - Peter, John, John, and… I have no idea who this is.” Kerry held up a sketch, quickly (but quite capably) executed depicting a swimmer’s butt. “Though if I had to take a guess, I would say probably John?”
Meg, a blush spreading across her face and ears, said with as much dignity as she could muster, “I plead the fifth.”
“Which means I’m right. Huh. I didn’t realize he had such a nice butt.”
Meg looked, if possible, even more embarrassed. Her ears were well and truly red now. “Kerry!” She shot a glance around the cafeteria - the school wasn’t that big a place, and it would be mortifying if this boy had been right around.
“What, Meggy? You drew his butt, you must know how nice it is.”
“Give me that.” Meg regained her sketchbook and slipped it back into her bag, and her blush gradually faded. She knew that Kerry wasn’t attempting to be mean, but there was one of those taboos against swim team boys dating non swim team girls. Or at least there was in her mind. So despite the fact that Meg shared gossip about this or that swimmer boy hooking up with this or that nonswimmer girl, it was pretty firmly embedded in her mind that she had no chance with this boy.
It was safer that way.
Granted, it's not a very well-fleshed-out plot, but it's coming together in my mind.
And... I'm a day behind. Due to not writing at all on Saturday. Oops.
10075 / 50000
(20.15%)
Chapter Two: In Which Things Begin to Happen and a Plot Begins to Spring Forth
The glass windows on the side of the room opened, up and out, about the same time that the sun went down. It was cold, and interrupted the flow of conversation where Trent and Tahlia were still debating whether colored blocks on canvas counted as art, or degenerate art, or which of them was more of a bigger fathead. The cold air sweeping in and around the room effectively halted discussion, as everyone in the room looked over at the view of the night sky. Or something that looked like the night sky.
There were too many lights. But no one was really paying attention to the outside as a woman dressed in high heels and an evening gown swept through the entrance made by the windows - that were evidently also doors.
Trent looked miffed. “I tried for like twenty minutes to get through that side. If it opens, why didn’t it when I tried to get through?”
The girls ignored him, impressed by the woman’s spectacular outfit. Somehow it did not seem insanely out of place in the room - and all of a sudden, they all felt far too dressed down to be in the establishment.
“Wonder why she’s here?”
Meg checked the poster above her head, but no - the dance wasn’t for another couple of days. “Think we have to dress up that nicely for her dance?”
“I hope not”
“Trent, you’re such a boy.”
“I don’t mind whipping out a suit and tie, but I don’t think I can pull of that sort of a dress. Or those heels.”
The three girls, in quick succession, smacked him over the head. “Really Trent? Though it would be hilarious to see you in a dress, I’m pretty sure that you couldn’t pull it off.”
Becky chimed in, so quietly that Trent missed it “or if you did, it would be absolutely hysterical”
Trent whipped his head around when he heard Meg giggle at Becky’s comment. “What?”
“Oh, nothing!”
“Seriously, what?”
“Seriously, you’ll be happier not knowing.”
“And telling me that is just going to make me want to know even more.”
“Yeah, yeah. Poor you.”
Trent unsprawled, dislodging Tahlia from using him as a pillow (which she had done for a good half of their argument) and glared at Meg. “You, miss, should not keep secrets from me.”
“Or what? You’ll art at me? I’ll art right back!”
“Could you stop abusing the English language, Megs? It hurts my brain.”
“Sure, Tahlia. Because you take everyone else’s feelings into consideration all the time.”
Tahlia sat back, rather affronted. Meg’s grin and teasing tone seemed to imply that she was teasing, but it still rankled. She had stopped abusing English, though, so that was a plus at least.
Becky hadn’t gotten involved in the squabble, but had been watching her friends with an air of acknowledgement of how utterly ridiculous they were. She glanced up at the room, which had begun to buzz with chatter yet again. “Wait, where did she go?”
“Who?”
“The fancy dress lady. With the shoes that Trent couldn’t manage.”
“I don’t know. Think she got a table?”
“Maybe. But it was weird. I just have this distinct impression that she’s not here anymore. Windows are closed, too.”
Meg nodded “I agree, actually. She seems to be gone. I don’t feel like such a slob anymore. Wonder who she was?” As the words slipped out, she knew she was going to regret them.
Tahlia’s eyes flashed. “Let’s figure it out. Megs, gimme your phone.”
Meg handed it over, but warned Tahlia that it didn’t seem to be working. Tahlia disregarded her with an airy wave of her hand, until she couldn’t actually get the internet to work either, and tossed it back.
“Anyone else have internet at the moment?”
Trent grabbed his netbook out of his bag and flipped it open. “I don’t expect this to work, sadly. The internet connection is almost always better on Meg’s phone.” He booted up the computer, which turned on and made the happy little start-up noises that everyone had come to associate with Trent’s computer (the Pachabel’s Canon in D seemed to be one of those songs that even computers knew, strangely).
He tried to grab the internet, but his computer whirred, and thought, and cranked the fan as it tried its best to do as he asked it to, but no luck. He patted it, and tried to convince it to calm down, because he knew how easy it was to break these things. Granted, they weren’t hugely expensive to replace, but this model seemed to always boot up to Pachelbel, and he had already run through netbooks named after the composer’s first two wives. This one’s name was Vienna, as the site of most of Pachelbel’s major work. But if he had to get another one, he wasn’t sure what he would go for, as far as names go. Maybe one of the songs that stole the same chord progression.
“No luck, Tahlia, sorry. Vienna’s not happy with me, though she should be able to access the school’s internet from here.”
“Not a huge deal. Now. Details.” Tahlia rooted through her messenger bag and grabbed her sketchbook, ripping out a sheet for each of her friends who were there. “You’ve got pencils, right? See if you can sketch out who you saw. I’m going to compile them later, and then see if I can track down our mystery lady on the internet.”
“You’re such a stalker, Tahlia. Alright, though.” They bent over their sketchbooks, scribbling, passing around a single good eraser and making do without when they needed to. Tahlia glanced up to make sure that everyone was on topic every so often. She was done first - not so much a sketch of what the woman had looked like, but what she had been wearing. Tahlia knew that she hadn’t been paying attention to the face, so she just wasn’t going to try. She gave the woman nondescript shadowed features and waited for the others to come up with their sketches.
Becky was next to finish, trading pictures with Tahlia to check and see how they matched up. The dress and shoes definitely did. The face, though, and any identifying characteristics, were pretty sparse in Becky’s sketch as well.
Trent pushed his drawing across the low table towards Tahlia and Becky. His drawings, as always, looked a bit like video camera footage blown up past its highest resolution. So not a whole lot of detail there, but a fantastic drawing nonetheless.
Meg slid hers across the table, biting her lip. “I’m not sure if it’s right, but I tried to get the expression on her face when she walked in.” The woman on Meg’s paper had a half-smile on her face, just daring them to comment on her outlandish attire. She was classically beautiful, and her eyes just bore into the viewer.
“Meg, this is really good. How come you don’t do more drawing?”
“Because if I’m trying too hard, bad things happen and I get flustered. Drawing’s not really my thing.”
Tahlia squinted at the unobtrusive Meg, pretty sure that she should say something that would properly explain the fact that Meg had gotten what they all had missed, and that it was super important that someone did, if she was going to manage to track down who this woman was. But she saw that Meg didn’t want to be pushed, so raised her eyebrows and threw a noncommittal “ahuh” in her direction.
Meg was happy that Tahlia dropped it; Tahlia was happy that Meg let her keep the sketch, and the group of art students walked back to campus, Trent and Tahlia bickering about something completely unimportant and Meg and Becky hanging in the background, occasionally making commentary on the more ridiculous of Trent or Tahlia’s arguments.
Kerry got out of swim practice feeling a bit like a potato that had recently been mashed. Sure, it had been a good practice. She had tapped into that beautiful place where everything hurt, but it didn’t really matter anymore, and the times were good, and she only got lapped by each of the boys a couple of times every time they went through the set. It was a bit frustrating to have the guys lap her every single practice. Yeah, there was the idea that guys, for some reason, just had a better chance of being crazy-fast even without working all that hard. Somehow that seemed unfair to Kerry - but unless she felt like whining to God, that was the way that it seemed to be. There were a couple of girls on the team who could keep up with the boys, and occasionally kick their butts, but Kerry had never really been one of that group.
Frankly, Kerry wondered about her place on the team. Yeah, she was useful. She was the third-fastest girl distance swimmer on the team, and it was a good position to have - not too much pressure to win, but still someone from the other team that she could try to take out in her race. It wasn’t her favorite position in practice, though. Being the person to actually lead the lane would be so nice for once - not the person seventh or eighth in a lane, so by the time she pushed off the wall, the leader of the lane would have already come back around, and she’d be lapped before she even started. It was slightly better when they were doing distance things - the coaches made sure that there weren’t more than six distance swimmers in a lane, and while she did end up getting lapped a crazy amount of times, it was at least by fewer people.
Kerry was pretty sure that this was a good thing. Most of the time, it was fine. But there were certain days where she wanted, so desperately, to be one of those people who had it all together and won meets for the team by their sheer awesomeness. She was a secondary member of the team - when Manticore had won the state championship two years ago, she was one of the people who was not put on the banner, because she hadn’t been on the state team. That rankled, a bit. And the whole idea of certain swimmers getting certain priveledges when the whole team was supposed to function as a unit - it was insanely frustrating.
There was Sarah, for instance. A super-senior this year, she still swam (even though she wasn’t really supposed to be, she had argued that her first year had been spent out of state, so she deserved another year on the team). Sarah was one of the team’s fastest breaststrokers, but she swam just for herself - not really for anyone else. So when she swam with the team, she was always more focused on her individual accomplishments than anything that the team did as a group. This made her kind of stuck up, and just a pain to be around. But Kerry found herself as one of the people that Sarah counted as a firm friend, and found herself at the receiving end of many of Sarah’s rants about all the other people on the team, the crazy coaches, boy troubles, and homework. It could get pretty sad, sometimes, because Sarah only came to chat with Kerry when she wanted someone to rant at. Kerry had no idea what Sarah would do with her spare time if she ever had any, what she did when she was in a good mood rather than a terrible one. There were rumors that Sarah had gone through the entire boy’s team looking for someone who could keep up with her, ah, exploits, but had decided that none of them were good enough for a long-term thing.
And it wasn’t as if Sarah had is all together, as her rants showed. But the fact that she could somehow tap into that competitive edge and really lay it all on the line and win things… Kerry wouldn’t mind having some of that. Maybe this year would work out better than the past 3. The coaching staff was still awesome; whatever Sarah said, Kerry believed that they were really good people and trying to help the swimmers out in both life and in the pool.
Kerry trudged to the shower with the rest of the girls on the team and rinsed out her hair. She had forgotten to buy shampoo and conditioner again. Luckily, everyone else seemed willing to share. She grabbed shampoo from Kim, exchanging tired grins as they stood under the scalding water, letting it relax super sore muscles.
Sarah had bought a boom box into the locker room a few weeks ago, and plugged it in and started blasting her music. It was popular, sure, and pretty bouncy. Not really Kerry’s style, but she had to smile as she saw Sarah bouncing around the locker room singing along and trying to get people to dance with her.
Rinsing out her hair and adding some conditioner (probably more than she should have borrowed from someone else, but if she didn’t throw a pretty big glob into her hair, there was absolutely no way that she was going to get a brush through it) and watched as three or four of the freshman stared at Sarah with googly-eyes. Thinking back to her freshman year, Kerry wondered if there was always someone crazy in the locker room. She kind of wanted to go over and tell the freshies that if they stared anymore, their eyes would fall out and then Sarah would dance on their eyeballs - but Kerry quicky decided that that was probably a poor idea.
She changed quickly, planning to meet up with Meg for dinner. The swimmers ate together after morning practices, but ridiculous hours of the morning were more conducive to shoveling food in your mouth before class than to any in depth discussion. So while some of the team - especially the freshmen and the captains - ate dinner together, she felt more comfortable eating with friends that she could let her crazyness out with.
“Oy, Kerry.” That was Missy, the senior captain. “Before you go - we’ve got a prospie coming in this weekend. Your turn to host. You ok with that?”
“I was under the impression that none of the seniors had to host?”
“We restructured a little bit. You don’t mind, do you?” And before Kerry could make up her mind whether or not it was worth shouting down her captain to protest the fact that seniors never had to host, because they were expected to be working on college essays and stressing out about their hardest classes, and, oh yeah, picking up a few extra extracurriculars to make their resumes gleam, Missy was off to the next thing. “Everybody, give me just a second?”
Sarah continued to dance, actually cranking up the boom box. Kerry sighed, and walked over to the boom box, and pulled the plug out of the wall. Sarah stopped dead, and the gleam in her eyes said she was going to freak, but even she knew better than to throw a hissy fit in the locker room right in front of the captain. It wasn’t that Missy had the authority to kick people off the team, but she did have a pretty good relationship with their head coach, and he was pretty patient, but would sit them both Sarah and Missy down and have a Talk. Kerry had never been on the receiving end of a Talk, but had heard the rantings and ravings of Sarah after several of hers.
Missy thanked Kerry, and continued “I’m going to email out the schedule for meets later today. Read it, follow it, dress up for it, all that good stuff. I’ll put what we’re wearing for each meet on there. First meet coming up in a week. We’re going down to Halcyon, so maybe some warmer weather. We’ll see. Up til then, try to get enough sleep, try not to get sick at the parties this weekend, try not to get sick in general, and get ready to swim fast!”
As she watched the girls swarm around Missy, Kerry made her escape. The pool, and the other athletic buildings, were at the bottom of campus, and the dining hall was close to the top. Kery pulled her hood upand tried to keep her hair from freezing, and started walking up trhough the woods. The sun was well and truly down, now. She hoped that the sun would stick around for a longer time this year, but it seemed to be vanishing fefore she got out of practice right on schedule. Made the walk up that much colder. Not too bad a breeze tonight, though. The sweatshirt and long-sleeve t-shirt combo was actually warm enough. Strange, that.
The dining hall was a welcome place of light and warmth. She stood in the entranceway and waited for Meg to show up. Pulled out her cell phone to check - it was 6:30, their usual dinner time. No Meg, though.
Kerry shrugged, and texted her. Dinner?
She sat in one of the comfy chairs in the foyer and tucked her feet up under her. Sure that Meg would come, she probably just got hung up on something. She closed her eyes, waiting for the buzz of her phone that would imply that Meg was on her way. The chair was really comfortable, and Kerry could feel the warmth of the building soaking into her shoulders, her legs, and relaxing muscles that seemed to be continuously tense throughout the swim season.
Meg got Kerry’s message and headed over to the dining hall. She didn’t text back, as she wasn’t sure if her phone was going to continue to be finicky or not, but was really excited that she ahd been able to turn it back on. Plugging it in in her room, and waiting for it to get a little more charge seemed to do the trick, though it really took about 20 seconds before it said it was fully charged, which was just odd.
It was a cheap phone, sure, but it was a little worrisome that it had a blip in its functioning already. It was only a year or so old - it should last longer than that, right? Meg had only had one phone before this - and that one had lasted for a good 5 years.
She tried texting Kerry back, but the phone got stuck on the ‘sending’ phase, and she shoved it in her pocket. Walking from her dorm to the dining hall, she noticed how cold it had gotten outside. Somehow, the walk back from the Esmerelda’s, even in the dark, had been warmer. Clouds covered the sky, and the streetlights dotting campus stood out from the surrounding area as pinpricks of light - the stars that couldn’t actually be seen through the clouds had floated down to earth for the students to still have some consolation from the dark.
Meg got to the entrance of the dining hall and saw Kerry asleep in the foyer. She sat down in a nearby chair and checked the time of Kerry’s last text. A good 15 minutes before: so if she gave Kerry another 10 minutes to nap, she would probably wake up refreshed and happy. Meg thought it was a pity that she didn’t know the exact time when Kerry had fallen asleep; there was some special benefit in 20-min increment naps. (The psych textbook that she had been reading before she got Kerry’s text had told her so.)
Meg turned her chair around, glad of the carpeting underneath this little section of the foyer, so she didn’t make a huge amount of noise and wake up her friend, earning herself a glare from the lady at the desk where you swiped your card, but giving her a view of the dining hall. She looked over the railings toward the food service area, seeing that whatever was coming out of there appeared to be pasta-based. Again. It was one of the deficits of the dining hall that every different kind of pasta sauce made a different meal, and one that was pretty easy for the kitchen people to concoct. Some people did all sorts of crazy things using the microwave and the toasters and made the kind of blah ingredients into really good food - but Meg had never really been so inclined. She tended to prefer more time hanging out with people at the dining hall rather than spending it cooking. Because really? The point of having a dining hall was that you came in and dined. Sure, Manticore didn’t use the more normal term of cafeteria, but that is what it was.
Meg liked to look down at the people. In some ways, they seemed to be the little cell parts that she and Kerry had been playing with the ideas with earlier. You could see them by the tops of their heads, buzzing here or there, stopping for no discernable reason from above, bumping into people and manuvering around them, and then, eventually, moving back to the back of the cafeteria to drop off their trays. All the people were a bit like vesicles: they transported, stored, and digested food products (as well as waste products, she supposed, but really, that might be taking the metaphor too far). They could get into and be expelled from the cell (the building, maybe?) because they could merge with the cell membrane (well, not so much. But they could walk in the doors and through the card-swipe-point because the lady at the desk recognized their card as belonging to the school). They all had the same sort of tray - phospholipids bilayers, anyone? - and used it to transport food. So maybe the trays were the vesicles? Eh, well. Meg checked her watch and woke Kerry up.
“Hey honey, time for dinner?”
“Mumphrgurgle?”
“Yes. Agreed. Time to wake up, ok?”
“Mumphrgurgle.”
“A huh. Open your eyes, dear. I know that you’re hungry from practice. Time to go get some yummy dining hall food.”
“Mumphrgurgle?”
“Ok, ok, not necessarily yummy dining hall food. But sustenance is good. Your brain stops working if you don’t feed it.”
“Mumph”
“Sorry? Didn’t quite get that one.”
Kerry picked up her head from where it had effectively been imprinted by her courderoy pants, and blinked at her friend. “Really?”
“Sorry. Once it moves beyond just the tonality I have trouble translating it.”
“That was, very clearly, a ‘my brain works fine when I don’t feed it, it’s just the rest of me that gets angry and rebels.”
“Oh, how silly f me. Clearly, I should work harder on figuring out your sleepy-code.”
“you said something about dinner?”
“We are at the top of the dining hall. Dinner seems to be a good idea, no?”
“Fine, fine.”
They wandered down to grab dinner. One of the nice little date tables by the windows was open, and they grabbed it before some gushy high school couple could do so. (They existed, even here. Tended to be all over each other in public, and rather discomfiting to everyone not in a steady relationship.)
“So Kerry.”
“Eh?”
“Tell me about practice”
“Urgk.”
“That good, eh?”
“Food, then the drill of trying to figure out why I do what I do when I don’t really like it before, during or after?”
“Sounds like a good idea to me.” They got up to go through the server’s line, but as the line seemed to be long no matter which option they wanted to go with, Meg pounced again. “Seriously, Ker. What is keeping you on that team? Half the time you tell me about it, it’s a ‘Meggy I don’t want to go to practice’ and the other half is pretty evenly split between you grumping about your times not coming down, and your frustration with the coaching staff. What is actually good about this sport?”
Kerry looked at Meg, square in the face. “It’s the once in a while time when I can feel the water slip past my face, my arms, my legs, and know that I’m doing what I need to do to help the team. It’s knowing that despite this hurting, every moment, it’s making me a stronger person. It’s about the little girl I once was, who loved the sport and couldn’t for the life of her understand why everyone else in the whole wide world didn’t love the sport as much as she did. It’s insanity incarnate, it’s masochistic, and I did love it, sometimes still do, and am hopeful that sometime in the future I will love it again. It’s not something that I understand, and I want to. It’s a science, but one that I don’t know all the variables to, and all the variables are tied up in my own body. So if I can’t find the variables, it’s my fault, and I need to experiment more. It’s a lifestyle, of reeking of chlorine, of having long leg hair, of getting crazy excited and running up and down the pool when the person who usually beats you every moment of every day is swimming and you’re not. Of signs on lockers and corny cheers, of honor and integrity and knowing that you have to complete everything that you were assigned because otherwise you’re letting down not only yourself but also the team. It’s a push to do things quickly, but well, it’s a drive to turn off your mind even as you’re analyzing everything and just sing a happy song to yourself. It’s - yes, pasta please, and the red sauce, and two pieces of garlic bread, if that’s all right? - hope, and fear, and the one place where I actually tap those primal emotions. I love it, I hate it, I fear it, I respect it, I don’t want to fail and do, I want to succeed, and do - for a given definition of success. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, and no. I hear that you’re addicted to this sport of yours, I still am not hearing that it makes you happy.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time it doesn’t. But when it does…” Kerry stared out the window as if there was some beautiful thing hiding right behind the dark. “When it’s right, it’s really right. Does that make sense?” Her voice had quieted, grown more intense, and her brow scrunched up as she tried to find the right words to really explain this.
“I guess so. You know that I definitely respect the time that you put into it, and the ability you have. But you have so much talent in other things, as well, I don’t know how it makes sense to want to devote so much time to that one thing.”
“You devote plenty of time to your art.”
“Yeah, but I like art - not just some of the time, either.”
“Eh. I dunno.”
“Sorry to pry.”
“No, it’s not that you were prying, it’s just that… I need to not doubt this right now.”
“Well, if you want my support, you know where I am. And I may poke you to explain yourself, but I promise that I won’t ask the why questions if you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Thanks.”
“So what are the crazy swimmers now? Any new gossip for me?”
“You know that you have an unhealthy love of gossip of members of the team for someone who’s not even a part of it.”
“Well, you think I come to your meets strictly for you?”
“No. You come to sketch the half-naked boys. I know your tricks. Question is, which one is going to fill up your sketchbook this year?”
Meg shook her head. “I refuse to get another random unrequited crush on another one of your silly swimmer boys.”
“A huh. Gimme your sketchbook.”
Meg wanted to say that she didn’t have her sketchbook on her, but Kerry knew her too well. As always, it was tucked in her bag - and Kerry flipped through it with rather vindictive glee, identifying each of the swimmers by their back muscles and occasional faces.
“See - John, John, John, Frank, John - you really like how he looks? - Frank, Peter, John - you do, don’t you - Peter, John, John, and… I have no idea who this is.” Kerry held up a sketch, quickly (but quite capably) executed depicting a swimmer’s butt. “Though if I had to take a guess, I would say probably John?”
Meg, a blush spreading across her face and ears, said with as much dignity as she could muster, “I plead the fifth.”
“Which means I’m right. Huh. I didn’t realize he had such a nice butt.”
Meg looked, if possible, even more embarrassed. Her ears were well and truly red now. “Kerry!” She shot a glance around the cafeteria - the school wasn’t that big a place, and it would be mortifying if this boy had been right around.
“What, Meggy? You drew his butt, you must know how nice it is.”
“Give me that.” Meg regained her sketchbook and slipped it back into her bag, and her blush gradually faded. She knew that Kerry wasn’t attempting to be mean, but there was one of those taboos against swim team boys dating non swim team girls. Or at least there was in her mind. So despite the fact that Meg shared gossip about this or that swimmer boy hooking up with this or that nonswimmer girl, it was pretty firmly embedded in her mind that she had no chance with this boy.
It was safer that way.