I manage to avoid italics
I posted the single sentence of this a little while back and my friend and enabler pronounced it perfect and self-contained.
So of course I went and added to it after buying groceries this afternoon.
Mae culpa.
When it was over, Sam D. Kane decided she didn't want to be Hunter S. Thompson after all.
Sam had only been decided on her new identity for the past two weeks. Before that she had been Sammy to anyone who would consider her opinion on the subject, Samantha to all those who didn't (primarily her mother and her teachers, beings who existed in a sphere of greater contempt than mothers), and, worst of all, Samantha Delilah to Gran (grandmothers somehow being worse than teachers and mothers combined). She had been Sammy since the age of four and thought, in the way of youth, that she would be eternally comfortable to remain Sammy, but then she had gone to the library, looking for something that would light her imagination and provide her with distraction during the interminable and dull Christmas vacation.
The town library was a small, dusty place, sandwiched inelegantly between a baptist church -- just as small as the library but with the faded stained glass windows lovingly polished to catch the infrequent winter light -- and a Starbucks. She went to the Starbucks first, buying a bagel, which she wolfed down on the sidewalk, and a coffee, liberally cut with milk and sugar. She was working her way through adult vices and indulgences and had been making, to her mind, excellent progress in the past year, sampling beer, wine, scotch, rum (which she had thrown up), cigars, a wedge of her grandfather's chewing tobacco she had found forgotten in the back of a desk drawer, cigarettes, pot, and porn. Coffee was a learning curve she was taking slow, because she was determined to have the taste thoroughly acquired before he next birthday and because she liked the buzzed feeling it sent through her veins and to her head.
Entering the library, Sammy, as she had been at the time, had hidden the white and green paper cup under the cover of her jacket and the fall of her scarf until she had made it past the librarian. The younger one, mercifully, who would ignore her crimes once she'd gotten them past his little fort and to the small collection of donated and clunky computers where it was safe to drop her jacket, mitts, and scarf, and sip at steaming coffee while browsing the internet, looking for inspiration, jumping through links and stream of conscious searches from website to website, blog to blog, until it hit.
Harrison F. Said. Edgar P. Strong. Ben Y. Stone. Anna M. Witchell. Hannah W. Scripps. Andrew L. Reston. Hunter S. Thompson.
Journalism.
Sammy knew, in the dim, disinterested way of adolescence, that newspapers existed. The town had one, little more than a leaflet detailing deaths, births, and other trivialities of the community she had the misfortune to be born into. Only once had anything in that crumpled black and white dinosaur of print caught her attention. It was also the only time she had thought her father might be someone worth admiring, that glimpse into his secret adult life, one full of potential adventure and escaped convicts and assisting the FBI tantalizing on the front page of the newspaper, before her mother had snatched the paper, and any information about Sheriff Scott Kane that might have kindled his daughter's devotion, from Sammy's hands, the incident never to be discussed within Sammy's hearing.
The random trails of the internet, however, brought Sammy's attention to another world, as anachronistic in its way as her small, chilly island community. Journalism, actual journalism in places where things happened, where people were wild and impulsive, flawed and corrupt, terrible and awe-inspiring. Journalism that could change, influence, entertain the world. Journalism, with journalists getting entangled, thrillingly, in their own stories, like something out of flashy, sardonic, fast-paced films.
That was when Sammy Kane knew what she wanted and became Sam D. Kane, a name with punch and potential to suit her new goals in life. Before that, Sam had only known what she didn't want to be: her mother, a cop like her father or older obnoxious brother, a pilot like her even older and more obnoxious brother. The new-found knowledge of what she would be, her certainty rock solid and unshakeable to the very core of her being, and lit up her mind like fireworks in the midnight sky in the dead of winter.
And there was no time, in the flaming, wild beacon of Sam's mind and soul, like the present to start probing for truths and secrets to disclose to the world.
---
The problem, Sam decided, in the wake of her epiphany, was that she needed a sidekick, an accomplice, an assistant, a distraction, an idiot to distract the authorities while she pursued truth and wild, intoxicating adventure.
Sam was not a popular kid at school. She wasn't unpopular, either. She was, in the words of her grandfather, when an irate neighbour towed a bloody, bruised, and grinning Sammy to the summer cabin in the woods, 'infamous'. She was the tallest kid in her class, except for Idiot Isaac, who had been held back twice and had a scratchy blue shadow on his chin and jaw if he forgot to shave before classes. Her parents warned her, and had been warning her for three years now, that her superior height wasn't going to last, but Sam kept growing, a creature of impossibly long legs and coltish grace. She had established, from kindergarten onward, a willingness to fight, with fists and feet, teeth and knees, anyone and everyone who didn't give her respect and space. She fought bullying boys who thought they were tough, driving the sharpness of her knee into the soft vulnerability of their groins. She fought girls who thought they were tough until an impasse of exhaustion and bloody noses was reached. She even fought girls who made no pretences of toughness, but tried to sting and destroy with words and gossip, and who thought they were safe until six-year-old Sammy tackled one perfect China doll girl to the ground and knocked out her two front teeth.
At thirteen, her classmates had learned not to trifle with her, but it wasn't the sort of thing to build friendships, even the petty, quickly changed friendships and alliances of childhood.
But in a small town, isolated from the rest of civilization by rocks and water on all sides, it was impossible not to have people who weren't friends, but who you inevitably ended up associating with, due to proximity or family ties. Sam knew of one such person, who might not be a decent accomplice or assistant, but definitely fulfilled the criteria of idiot distraction.
So on the first day of Christmas vacation, Sam stomped into the kitchen and took her boots from the rack her mother always put them on, no matter where Sam kicked them off. They were good boots, for all they had belonged to two brothers before coming down to her. Indestructible black leather with thick soles, lined with soft flannel and lacing up above her ankles. The leather had long since faded to a dull grey-black instead of the shining black of perfect polish Sam assumed they must have been when a young Sloane Kane had first slipped them on. In Sam's care, they had grown scruffy and battered, with crusted white salt stains further blemishing the leather. They were warm, though, with good grips, and hard as rock in the toes.
Sam's mother was at the counter, rolling out dough for Christmas cookies that would taste bland and look blander, insipid candy-eyed reindeer, santa clauses, and snowmen, surreal and impossibly green Christmas trees, and tasteless candy canes and stars.
"Where are you going, Samantha?" her mother asked, the battle over 'Sam' having already been fought and lost ten times over in the past weeks.
"Out," said Sam, resolutely tightening the laces of her boots, head bent down.
"I'm making cookies."
Sam attended to the laces on the other boot. "I noticed, Mom."
"Don't you want to help?" Mrs. Kane asked, her voice syrupy and hopeful.
Sam looked up from her boots to stare at her mother. She might never have expressed to her mother the heartfelt opinion that her sugar cookies tasted like shit, tasteless emptiness on the tongue, but she'd also never established a precedent for things her mother saw as crucial mother-daughter bonding moments, like making cookies. "No," Sam said with certainty. "I'm going out."
A final attempt at an exertion of parental will: "At least put on a proper coat, sweetie."
Standing up, stamping her booted feet to ensure they were comfortable and the laces wouldn't fall undone at an inopportune moment, Sam examined the coat she was wearing and always wore. It hung unevenly, weighed down by the pistol her mother didn't know about tucked into the left inside pocket. Battered brown leather, worn and almost white at the elbows, lined in faded red flannel, two sizes too big still despite Sam's tallness, colourful patches sewn or stuck on haphazardly to cover tears and holes and age.
Her grandfather's coat.
"I have a sweater on," Sam said, and she tugged at the hem of the sweater, like the coat too big, but valueless, unlike the precious coat. "See?" she held a fistful of wool out in her mother's direction, and then stomped out before her mother could slow her down again with more insipid advice, platitudes, requests.
Sam's destination was a short walk down the snowy road, her boots leaving a trail of clear prints in the fresh layer of fluffy whiteness. After much deliberation, Sam knew there was only one person she could get to assist her on her first attempt at journalism, searching for the dark underbelly of the town: Trish.
Trish was not Sam's friend, but the daughter of Mrs. Kane's best friend and the mayor. Since their mothers were friends and had been since some long forgotten girlhood, it was assumed Sam and Trish would be friends.
They were not friends and the tone of their relationship had been set from the day a three-year-old Samantha had hit Trish in the side of the head with a toy car.
Their mothers' friendship made their acquaintance inescapable and Trish's family, like Sam's, rarely left the island for the holidays.
Trish thought Sam violent, reckless, and stupid, a juvenile delinquent in training.
Sam thought Trish worse than an idiot: gutless. She had perfect, shiny black hair in a trendy bob, and wore bright pinks and yellows, skinny jeans and cute skirts. She wore nail polish and sparkly lip gloss and got straight As in everything at school. She wanted to be a model, a chemist, or president. She was the daughter Mrs. Kane wished she had and Sam held her in scathing contempt.
When Sam rang the door bell, Trish's mother answered, a roundly pretty woman with perfect black hair like her daughter and floury hands. Like Sam's mother, she was baking. Christmas cookies. Of course. She smiled at Sam like she was happy to see the girl, which she wasn't. "Hello, Samantha, how lovely to see you, dear."
"It's Sam, actually," Sam said, but her words fell on deaf ears. She could see in the woman's bright black eyes that she was translating Sam's words to some more appropriate, reciprocal greeting. "Is Trish home?"
"I think so, dear. Just a minute." She walked back into the house, wiping her floury hands on her apron and leaving the door open. When she went into the hallway and called up the stairs: "Trisha! Samantha's here to see you!" Sam entered the kitchen just enough to steal a gob of unrolled sugar cookie dough and pop it in her mouth, back outside with the dough swallowed by the time Trish's mother came back in and returned to work on the cookies. She, unlike Sam's mother, could bake.
Sam waited on the doorstep, bored, until an eternity passed and Trish came downstairs, black hair bobbing and shiny, held away from her face with sparkling green clips shaped like holly leaves, her lips bright and moist with the sparkle of red glitter lip gloss. She was six inches shorter than Sam, but while Sam's body had been dedicating all its energy to long legs and height, Trish's had been focused on swelling breasts and curving hips. Trish had, embarrassed and pleased at the same time, been wearing a bra since fifth grade, and had made ample use of changing before and after gym class to make sure the other girls noticed.
Now, Trish wore a tight green sweater with white stripes encircling her breasts, the hem of the sweater curving around and below her hips and ending mid-thigh. She had on white jeans that clung to her legs and Sam thought anyone who wore white pants was asking for trouble. Her tiny feet, poking out from under the perfect end of her snow white jeans, were encased in red socks spangled with tiny gold stars and white snowflakes.
She looked at Sam with the stiff politeness that masked her share of their mutual loathing. "Hey, Sammy. What's up?"
"Sam now," Sam said, slouching against the doorway. "Wanna hang out?"
Trish looked over her shoulder at her mother, diligently absorbed in her baking and ignoring, inadvertently or wilfully, her daughter's clear desire to stay home and watch TV. But all Trish's mother said was, "Don't stay out past dark," and Trish said, "Fine," with the enthusiasm of a prisoner sentenced to death row.
So of course I went and added to it after buying groceries this afternoon.
Mae culpa.
When it was over, Sam D. Kane decided she didn't want to be Hunter S. Thompson after all.
Sam had only been decided on her new identity for the past two weeks. Before that she had been Sammy to anyone who would consider her opinion on the subject, Samantha to all those who didn't (primarily her mother and her teachers, beings who existed in a sphere of greater contempt than mothers), and, worst of all, Samantha Delilah to Gran (grandmothers somehow being worse than teachers and mothers combined). She had been Sammy since the age of four and thought, in the way of youth, that she would be eternally comfortable to remain Sammy, but then she had gone to the library, looking for something that would light her imagination and provide her with distraction during the interminable and dull Christmas vacation.
The town library was a small, dusty place, sandwiched inelegantly between a baptist church -- just as small as the library but with the faded stained glass windows lovingly polished to catch the infrequent winter light -- and a Starbucks. She went to the Starbucks first, buying a bagel, which she wolfed down on the sidewalk, and a coffee, liberally cut with milk and sugar. She was working her way through adult vices and indulgences and had been making, to her mind, excellent progress in the past year, sampling beer, wine, scotch, rum (which she had thrown up), cigars, a wedge of her grandfather's chewing tobacco she had found forgotten in the back of a desk drawer, cigarettes, pot, and porn. Coffee was a learning curve she was taking slow, because she was determined to have the taste thoroughly acquired before he next birthday and because she liked the buzzed feeling it sent through her veins and to her head.
Entering the library, Sammy, as she had been at the time, had hidden the white and green paper cup under the cover of her jacket and the fall of her scarf until she had made it past the librarian. The younger one, mercifully, who would ignore her crimes once she'd gotten them past his little fort and to the small collection of donated and clunky computers where it was safe to drop her jacket, mitts, and scarf, and sip at steaming coffee while browsing the internet, looking for inspiration, jumping through links and stream of conscious searches from website to website, blog to blog, until it hit.
Harrison F. Said. Edgar P. Strong. Ben Y. Stone. Anna M. Witchell. Hannah W. Scripps. Andrew L. Reston. Hunter S. Thompson.
Journalism.
Sammy knew, in the dim, disinterested way of adolescence, that newspapers existed. The town had one, little more than a leaflet detailing deaths, births, and other trivialities of the community she had the misfortune to be born into. Only once had anything in that crumpled black and white dinosaur of print caught her attention. It was also the only time she had thought her father might be someone worth admiring, that glimpse into his secret adult life, one full of potential adventure and escaped convicts and assisting the FBI tantalizing on the front page of the newspaper, before her mother had snatched the paper, and any information about Sheriff Scott Kane that might have kindled his daughter's devotion, from Sammy's hands, the incident never to be discussed within Sammy's hearing.
The random trails of the internet, however, brought Sammy's attention to another world, as anachronistic in its way as her small, chilly island community. Journalism, actual journalism in places where things happened, where people were wild and impulsive, flawed and corrupt, terrible and awe-inspiring. Journalism that could change, influence, entertain the world. Journalism, with journalists getting entangled, thrillingly, in their own stories, like something out of flashy, sardonic, fast-paced films.
That was when Sammy Kane knew what she wanted and became Sam D. Kane, a name with punch and potential to suit her new goals in life. Before that, Sam had only known what she didn't want to be: her mother, a cop like her father or older obnoxious brother, a pilot like her even older and more obnoxious brother. The new-found knowledge of what she would be, her certainty rock solid and unshakeable to the very core of her being, and lit up her mind like fireworks in the midnight sky in the dead of winter.
And there was no time, in the flaming, wild beacon of Sam's mind and soul, like the present to start probing for truths and secrets to disclose to the world.
---
The problem, Sam decided, in the wake of her epiphany, was that she needed a sidekick, an accomplice, an assistant, a distraction, an idiot to distract the authorities while she pursued truth and wild, intoxicating adventure.
Sam was not a popular kid at school. She wasn't unpopular, either. She was, in the words of her grandfather, when an irate neighbour towed a bloody, bruised, and grinning Sammy to the summer cabin in the woods, 'infamous'. She was the tallest kid in her class, except for Idiot Isaac, who had been held back twice and had a scratchy blue shadow on his chin and jaw if he forgot to shave before classes. Her parents warned her, and had been warning her for three years now, that her superior height wasn't going to last, but Sam kept growing, a creature of impossibly long legs and coltish grace. She had established, from kindergarten onward, a willingness to fight, with fists and feet, teeth and knees, anyone and everyone who didn't give her respect and space. She fought bullying boys who thought they were tough, driving the sharpness of her knee into the soft vulnerability of their groins. She fought girls who thought they were tough until an impasse of exhaustion and bloody noses was reached. She even fought girls who made no pretences of toughness, but tried to sting and destroy with words and gossip, and who thought they were safe until six-year-old Sammy tackled one perfect China doll girl to the ground and knocked out her two front teeth.
At thirteen, her classmates had learned not to trifle with her, but it wasn't the sort of thing to build friendships, even the petty, quickly changed friendships and alliances of childhood.
But in a small town, isolated from the rest of civilization by rocks and water on all sides, it was impossible not to have people who weren't friends, but who you inevitably ended up associating with, due to proximity or family ties. Sam knew of one such person, who might not be a decent accomplice or assistant, but definitely fulfilled the criteria of idiot distraction.
So on the first day of Christmas vacation, Sam stomped into the kitchen and took her boots from the rack her mother always put them on, no matter where Sam kicked them off. They were good boots, for all they had belonged to two brothers before coming down to her. Indestructible black leather with thick soles, lined with soft flannel and lacing up above her ankles. The leather had long since faded to a dull grey-black instead of the shining black of perfect polish Sam assumed they must have been when a young Sloane Kane had first slipped them on. In Sam's care, they had grown scruffy and battered, with crusted white salt stains further blemishing the leather. They were warm, though, with good grips, and hard as rock in the toes.
Sam's mother was at the counter, rolling out dough for Christmas cookies that would taste bland and look blander, insipid candy-eyed reindeer, santa clauses, and snowmen, surreal and impossibly green Christmas trees, and tasteless candy canes and stars.
"Where are you going, Samantha?" her mother asked, the battle over 'Sam' having already been fought and lost ten times over in the past weeks.
"Out," said Sam, resolutely tightening the laces of her boots, head bent down.
"I'm making cookies."
Sam attended to the laces on the other boot. "I noticed, Mom."
"Don't you want to help?" Mrs. Kane asked, her voice syrupy and hopeful.
Sam looked up from her boots to stare at her mother. She might never have expressed to her mother the heartfelt opinion that her sugar cookies tasted like shit, tasteless emptiness on the tongue, but she'd also never established a precedent for things her mother saw as crucial mother-daughter bonding moments, like making cookies. "No," Sam said with certainty. "I'm going out."
A final attempt at an exertion of parental will: "At least put on a proper coat, sweetie."
Standing up, stamping her booted feet to ensure they were comfortable and the laces wouldn't fall undone at an inopportune moment, Sam examined the coat she was wearing and always wore. It hung unevenly, weighed down by the pistol her mother didn't know about tucked into the left inside pocket. Battered brown leather, worn and almost white at the elbows, lined in faded red flannel, two sizes too big still despite Sam's tallness, colourful patches sewn or stuck on haphazardly to cover tears and holes and age.
Her grandfather's coat.
"I have a sweater on," Sam said, and she tugged at the hem of the sweater, like the coat too big, but valueless, unlike the precious coat. "See?" she held a fistful of wool out in her mother's direction, and then stomped out before her mother could slow her down again with more insipid advice, platitudes, requests.
Sam's destination was a short walk down the snowy road, her boots leaving a trail of clear prints in the fresh layer of fluffy whiteness. After much deliberation, Sam knew there was only one person she could get to assist her on her first attempt at journalism, searching for the dark underbelly of the town: Trish.
Trish was not Sam's friend, but the daughter of Mrs. Kane's best friend and the mayor. Since their mothers were friends and had been since some long forgotten girlhood, it was assumed Sam and Trish would be friends.
They were not friends and the tone of their relationship had been set from the day a three-year-old Samantha had hit Trish in the side of the head with a toy car.
Their mothers' friendship made their acquaintance inescapable and Trish's family, like Sam's, rarely left the island for the holidays.
Trish thought Sam violent, reckless, and stupid, a juvenile delinquent in training.
Sam thought Trish worse than an idiot: gutless. She had perfect, shiny black hair in a trendy bob, and wore bright pinks and yellows, skinny jeans and cute skirts. She wore nail polish and sparkly lip gloss and got straight As in everything at school. She wanted to be a model, a chemist, or president. She was the daughter Mrs. Kane wished she had and Sam held her in scathing contempt.
When Sam rang the door bell, Trish's mother answered, a roundly pretty woman with perfect black hair like her daughter and floury hands. Like Sam's mother, she was baking. Christmas cookies. Of course. She smiled at Sam like she was happy to see the girl, which she wasn't. "Hello, Samantha, how lovely to see you, dear."
"It's Sam, actually," Sam said, but her words fell on deaf ears. She could see in the woman's bright black eyes that she was translating Sam's words to some more appropriate, reciprocal greeting. "Is Trish home?"
"I think so, dear. Just a minute." She walked back into the house, wiping her floury hands on her apron and leaving the door open. When she went into the hallway and called up the stairs: "Trisha! Samantha's here to see you!" Sam entered the kitchen just enough to steal a gob of unrolled sugar cookie dough and pop it in her mouth, back outside with the dough swallowed by the time Trish's mother came back in and returned to work on the cookies. She, unlike Sam's mother, could bake.
Sam waited on the doorstep, bored, until an eternity passed and Trish came downstairs, black hair bobbing and shiny, held away from her face with sparkling green clips shaped like holly leaves, her lips bright and moist with the sparkle of red glitter lip gloss. She was six inches shorter than Sam, but while Sam's body had been dedicating all its energy to long legs and height, Trish's had been focused on swelling breasts and curving hips. Trish had, embarrassed and pleased at the same time, been wearing a bra since fifth grade, and had made ample use of changing before and after gym class to make sure the other girls noticed.
Now, Trish wore a tight green sweater with white stripes encircling her breasts, the hem of the sweater curving around and below her hips and ending mid-thigh. She had on white jeans that clung to her legs and Sam thought anyone who wore white pants was asking for trouble. Her tiny feet, poking out from under the perfect end of her snow white jeans, were encased in red socks spangled with tiny gold stars and white snowflakes.
She looked at Sam with the stiff politeness that masked her share of their mutual loathing. "Hey, Sammy. What's up?"
"Sam now," Sam said, slouching against the doorway. "Wanna hang out?"
Trish looked over her shoulder at her mother, diligently absorbed in her baking and ignoring, inadvertently or wilfully, her daughter's clear desire to stay home and watch TV. But all Trish's mother said was, "Don't stay out past dark," and Trish said, "Fine," with the enthusiasm of a prisoner sentenced to death row.