Only one more weekend until Homecoming and the suburb of Rutherford was like a nightmare of insults. An idiotic school tradition dictated that dates got each other these stupid pennants to hang on their backpacks during homecoming week, and they were everywhere: A huge display at the grocery store, for sale in little roadside stands, flyers accosting you from the bathroom door ruining moment of solitude provided by normal bodily functions to hide from the incessant chatter of dresses, dinners, bouttonierres, and after-parties. The lemon juice to these myriad homecoming splinters was last period Algebra. Chris actually had the audacity to bemoan that Victoria already had a date before he could ask, and that Laura had rejected him. He had even reused the Moses invite, as lame as it was. Kate had the choice of protecting her precarious self conception by becoming a hermit of the cult of youtube cat videos, bicycle riding robots, and interviews with Josh Groban...or she could to drive to Frankleton to see her brother Jackson play in the losers bracket of the Charlotte Area Junior Soccer League.
Loser's Bracket..... what an interesting concept? I think that's me. I think I am the Rutherford High choral equivalent of the best of the worst. Kate couldn't decide if that thought made her ashamed because of the self-deprecation or the arrogance expressed in that sentiment. Then she was preoccupied by how strange that the two options, while diametrically opposed, could so frequently described her mental schema. No they're not quite opposites. I'm quite good at beating myself up--I'm especially good at thinking I'm no good at all. I mean really--I'm the back-up date for Chris Hemming...I wonder if I could count it as service hours for NHS. Kate had a twinge of guilt for being so thoroughly unchristian to someone she talked nearly everyday of the school week. She thought an apology to the ether for that train of thought, but that hardly improved her mood. Freaking Homecoming. Just an excuse to get dressed up and prove that you're desireable...except for when you're not.
During this mental malaise she was unknowingly leading on a poor 13-year old goalie who hadn't yet learned the pertinent difference between spaced-out staring and checking someone out. Kate then proceeded to spill the pseudo-cheese of her nachos all over her shirt, which in itself wasn't too much of a deterent to an early pubescent boy. However, she then used another chip to squeegee off the artificial cheddar and when that only resulted in smearing it further, she used first her pinky then index finger then middle finger to corral the volcanic "cheese product." After watching Kate lick all of these fingers, the short one-sided love affair was thoroughly over.
Kate looked around the stands further cementing how out of place she felt--not just at the CAJSL loser's tournament, but on this whizzing globe 93 million miles from the sun. Figuratively she was the only person there between the age of 14 and 26. Literally, there were twenty-seven. Granted, three of them were mothers of participants (former teenage moms) and eight more paid referees. But, Kate indulged too deeply in her self-loathing to pay too much attention to detail. She kept ruminating on the trajectory of her life, and being extremely imaginative 'cat lady' wasn't the worst scenario she could scare herself with.
I'm going to be that girl who shows up to her college graduation all dolled up in new clothes, but when her parents ask her to corral some of her friends to take photos the facade of functional social creature will fall away to reveal the embodiment of loneliness. I'm just awkward enough to scare normal people off, but not awkward enough to herd with the Magic The Gathering crowd. ...and by the way that degree they hand me won't be a BA in Music. Aside from saying "your real diploma will be sent to your designated address in 10-14 business days" the actual degree will read something along the lines of BS in Statistics so I can be an insurance actuary or other loathsome career path.
When I come home from deciding whether little Martha's bone marrow transplant is covered, I'll be greeted by a dead bromeliad and a fake ficus because I'm too depressed to feed myself not to mention act as guardian anything with a spinal cord--having cats would be an improvement. The only other living thing in my whole gigantic apartment (because at least the insurance business pays well) is a colony of Rhizopus nigricans growing on the heel of my Wonderbread.
Jackson scored twice in the first match, where his team won 10-9 (neither team excelled much in the area of defense). The Rutherford Atomics still had a shot at being cut-rate champions. In the three hour break before the next match Kate's mother wanted to shop around "these cute, quaint little shops."
"Oh, Kate look!" Kate's mother said excitedly. "Look! A dress shop, let's get you something for next weekend!"
Kate walked into the store and was immediately impressed that so much taffeta could be produced in such unattractive shades. She managed to at least muster the pretense of cheerfulness, and dutifully selected a few dresses to try on for her mother's sake. The first was so far from zipping up, Kate hurriedly tossed it in the corner before she had to wrestle with an internal harangue about weight loss in addition to her state of utter singledom. The second was pretty enough, but had a distracting amount of extraneous flouncy things. The third and final dress was beautiful on the hanger, like something Artemis would wear if she attended high school black-tie functions. On Kate, it still was a gorgeous color but seemed to suggest that the the Great Huntress had developed a taste for cheeze-its and adopted a sedentary lifestyle.
However, Kate knew better than make a comment about the dress being unflattering, "Mom, I um...I'm just not in love with it--I'd rather spend the money on something else." Miraculously, Kate's mom assented that they could leave.
After looking at over-priced boutique bags, and a weird year-round Christmas shop, Jackson had had enough and really wanted something to eat. But, on their way to Frankleton Pizzeria Kate saw the most lovely and anachronistic of institutions, a hat shop. In the window display there it was, The Hat, like it had descended straight from the angel head of Grace Kelley. A small black pill-box thing with a mesh veil and tasteful rosette of bird feathers in beetle green and black. Kate pointed and looked back at her mom. In one of those rare mother-daughter telepathic moments, her mother said, "That would be awesome Katie! You could wear it with that black sheath dress you wore to Aunt Dana's funeral."
Julian was subsisting solely on social energy. Now Sunday nights not only marked the beginning of the work week, but the last time Julian would get more than 6 hours of sleep for another 6 days. Julian also essentially skipped all meals but lunch. Julian's rehearsal bag included sweat pants, extra socks, a jar of peanut butter, sleeves of saltines, and a box of nilla wafers. Basically FDA Title 21 Section 137.167 Subpart B "Requirements for Enriched Flours" was exclusively responsible for any nutrients entering Julian's body.
However, Julian was a social creature and while extremely tired (and perhaps on the verge of developing both rickets and scurvy), she was thoroughly enjoying her life. This was the last weekend until opening night and Mr. Todd had reserved almost every hour between the end of school Friday and whenever they finished late into Saturday night. It was a weird mixture of sleepover, fire drill, and deadline chasing. Since Fantine only makes one appearance in the second half of the play, she spent most of her time painting sets and creating props, because the tech crew legitimately need all the help they could get, but it had the added bonus of allowing her to talk with Walt when he wasn't working with the lighting crew (which was most of the time). Many times he would walk into the backstage workshop to ask Ms. Frend, the assitant theater teacher about bulbs for scoop lights or the status of a prop needed for the next scene, and he would wave to Julian painting barricades onto plywood. One time Julian winked because she was holding a cross piece for Renee to bolt onto a set piece, and from then on Walt added an exaggerated wink to his greetings as he rushed back and forth.
By 45 minutes til midnight, they still had 7 scenes to rehearse, including the large cast number at the end. Julian sent her mom a text, "Don't stay up-- I'll get a ride home. Looks like we're going to be here until 1. I'll turn the hall light off on my way to bed. Love you!" and then curled up onto a Victorian style couch in the theater locker that had been used in last year's production of Mousetrap. The unheated room was a little spooky with the ghosts of past set pieces looming around her, but she was too tired to care. She woke up to the relayed yells of people calling for Fantine and Eponine so they could start the last scene. She bolted off the couch to realize that her feet and calves were numb with cold, but her arms had been protected by a black and grey striped hoodie she had last seen thrown on top of Walt's backpack.
As she wondered if it was creepy or not to do so, she put the cloth up to her nose as she ran to the stage wings. It smelled like sawdust like the rest of the tech shop, but also, subtly, like juniper and rosemary. It was a warm scent that begged to be smelled again but she didn't have time to do so without being seen.
After they rehearsed Valjean's entrance into heaven three or four million times, Mr. Todd finally told them to head home and get some sleep. The impetuousness of fatigue was acting on Julian, and although Terri lived six blocks away, Julian tugged on Walt's sleeve. "Hey...thanks for saving me from the arctic tundra of the locker."
"Not a problem--it's too late to find a replacement for one of our leads, I figured it fell under my responsibility as stage manager," Walt said with a sheepish grin.
"And uh...could I have a ride? I live in Riverside at the back of town.
"Yeah, that wouldn't be a problem at all. I live around there too."
The clock in the dash of Walt's 1993 Corolla read 1:44. "Good heavens...it's so late," Julian said with surprise.
"Yeah, it's like a casino. There's no windows or clocks. The theater is like it's own little planet with its own time zone. Kinda like when you fly somewhere really early and crave pizza during a layover even though it's only 7:30 in the morning."
There was a lull as Julian's tired brain fought for some kind of reply. She settled for a complete change of topic: "So if you play any character in any play ever what would it be?"
"Mmmm, that's a tough one....maybe Henry Fonda's character from 12 Angry Men."
"Why?"
"Uh...I dunno. He's just really cool. Convincing but not a jerk...and...you know..." Julian was glad to see that she wasn't the only one with three neurons functioning after such a long day. Walt circled his hand in the air trying to prompt himself for the right word. "He's just cool. The guy tiene cojones...oh, a wait, I mean....sorry."
They both laughed too hard for what the situation merited due to being hyper from exhaustion and mutually embarrassed. Walt redirected attention away from himself, "And yourself?"
"Well...if I really could be anyone and it not be completely weird. I'd love to play Bert from Mary Poppins. One, because he's awesome. Two, because in the musical he walks on the friggin' ceiling. It's really, really cool."
When Julian finally got home she collapsed into bed utterly ready to sleep. But right before she rolled onto her side to instantly fall asleep a thought instantly filled her with insatiable curiosity.
Two minutes later, on Google Maps for the only Carrick's listed in her town, Julian discovered that Walt lived about as far from her house as you could get and still attend FHS. To the late night/ early morning quiet of her house Julian smiled. "Walter Carrick, I'm glad you like me too."
During this mental malaise she was unknowingly leading on a poor 13-year old goalie who hadn't yet learned the pertinent difference between spaced-out staring and checking someone out. Kate then proceeded to spill the pseudo-cheese of her nachos all over her shirt, which in itself wasn't too much of a deterent to an early pubescent boy. However, she then used another chip to squeegee off the artificial cheddar and when that only resulted in smearing it further, she used first her pinky then index finger then middle finger to corral the volcanic "cheese product." After watching Kate lick all of these fingers, the short one-sided love affair was thoroughly over.
Kate looked around the stands further cementing how out of place she felt--not just at the CAJSL loser's tournament, but on this whizzing globe 93 million miles from the sun. Figuratively she was the only person there between the age of 14 and 26. Literally, there were twenty-seven. Granted, three of them were mothers of participants (former teenage moms) and eight more paid referees. But, Kate indulged too deeply in her self-loathing to pay too much attention to detail. She kept ruminating on the trajectory of her life, and being extremely imaginative 'cat lady' wasn't the worst scenario she could scare herself with.
I'm going to be that girl who shows up to her college graduation all dolled up in new clothes, but when her parents ask her to corral some of her friends to take photos the facade of functional social creature will fall away to reveal the embodiment of loneliness. I'm just awkward enough to scare normal people off, but not awkward enough to herd with the Magic The Gathering crowd. ...and by the way that degree they hand me won't be a BA in Music. Aside from saying "your real diploma will be sent to your designated address in 10-14 business days" the actual degree will read something along the lines of BS in Statistics so I can be an insurance actuary or other loathsome career path.
When I come home from deciding whether little Martha's bone marrow transplant is covered, I'll be greeted by a dead bromeliad and a fake ficus because I'm too depressed to feed myself not to mention act as guardian anything with a spinal cord--having cats would be an improvement. The only other living thing in my whole gigantic apartment (because at least the insurance business pays well) is a colony of Rhizopus nigricans growing on the heel of my Wonderbread.
Jackson scored twice in the first match, where his team won 10-9 (neither team excelled much in the area of defense). The Rutherford Atomics still had a shot at being cut-rate champions. In the three hour break before the next match Kate's mother wanted to shop around "these cute, quaint little shops."
"Oh, Kate look!" Kate's mother said excitedly. "Look! A dress shop, let's get you something for next weekend!"
Kate walked into the store and was immediately impressed that so much taffeta could be produced in such unattractive shades. She managed to at least muster the pretense of cheerfulness, and dutifully selected a few dresses to try on for her mother's sake. The first was so far from zipping up, Kate hurriedly tossed it in the corner before she had to wrestle with an internal harangue about weight loss in addition to her state of utter singledom. The second was pretty enough, but had a distracting amount of extraneous flouncy things. The third and final dress was beautiful on the hanger, like something Artemis would wear if she attended high school black-tie functions. On Kate, it still was a gorgeous color but seemed to suggest that the the Great Huntress had developed a taste for cheeze-its and adopted a sedentary lifestyle.
However, Kate knew better than make a comment about the dress being unflattering, "Mom, I um...I'm just not in love with it--I'd rather spend the money on something else." Miraculously, Kate's mom assented that they could leave.
After looking at over-priced boutique bags, and a weird year-round Christmas shop, Jackson had had enough and really wanted something to eat. But, on their way to Frankleton Pizzeria Kate saw the most lovely and anachronistic of institutions, a hat shop. In the window display there it was, The Hat, like it had descended straight from the angel head of Grace Kelley. A small black pill-box thing with a mesh veil and tasteful rosette of bird feathers in beetle green and black. Kate pointed and looked back at her mom. In one of those rare mother-daughter telepathic moments, her mother said, "That would be awesome Katie! You could wear it with that black sheath dress you wore to Aunt Dana's funeral."
------------------------------------------
Julian was subsisting solely on social energy. Now Sunday nights not only marked the beginning of the work week, but the last time Julian would get more than 6 hours of sleep for another 6 days. Julian also essentially skipped all meals but lunch. Julian's rehearsal bag included sweat pants, extra socks, a jar of peanut butter, sleeves of saltines, and a box of nilla wafers. Basically FDA Title 21 Section 137.167 Subpart B "Requirements for Enriched Flours" was exclusively responsible for any nutrients entering Julian's body.
However, Julian was a social creature and while extremely tired (and perhaps on the verge of developing both rickets and scurvy), she was thoroughly enjoying her life. This was the last weekend until opening night and Mr. Todd had reserved almost every hour between the end of school Friday and whenever they finished late into Saturday night. It was a weird mixture of sleepover, fire drill, and deadline chasing. Since Fantine only makes one appearance in the second half of the play, she spent most of her time painting sets and creating props, because the tech crew legitimately need all the help they could get, but it had the added bonus of allowing her to talk with Walt when he wasn't working with the lighting crew (which was most of the time). Many times he would walk into the backstage workshop to ask Ms. Frend, the assitant theater teacher about bulbs for scoop lights or the status of a prop needed for the next scene, and he would wave to Julian painting barricades onto plywood. One time Julian winked because she was holding a cross piece for Renee to bolt onto a set piece, and from then on Walt added an exaggerated wink to his greetings as he rushed back and forth.
By 45 minutes til midnight, they still had 7 scenes to rehearse, including the large cast number at the end. Julian sent her mom a text, "Don't stay up-- I'll get a ride home. Looks like we're going to be here until 1. I'll turn the hall light off on my way to bed. Love you!" and then curled up onto a Victorian style couch in the theater locker that had been used in last year's production of Mousetrap. The unheated room was a little spooky with the ghosts of past set pieces looming around her, but she was too tired to care. She woke up to the relayed yells of people calling for Fantine and Eponine so they could start the last scene. She bolted off the couch to realize that her feet and calves were numb with cold, but her arms had been protected by a black and grey striped hoodie she had last seen thrown on top of Walt's backpack.
As she wondered if it was creepy or not to do so, she put the cloth up to her nose as she ran to the stage wings. It smelled like sawdust like the rest of the tech shop, but also, subtly, like juniper and rosemary. It was a warm scent that begged to be smelled again but she didn't have time to do so without being seen.
After they rehearsed Valjean's entrance into heaven three or four million times, Mr. Todd finally told them to head home and get some sleep. The impetuousness of fatigue was acting on Julian, and although Terri lived six blocks away, Julian tugged on Walt's sleeve. "Hey...thanks for saving me from the arctic tundra of the locker."
"Not a problem--it's too late to find a replacement for one of our leads, I figured it fell under my responsibility as stage manager," Walt said with a sheepish grin.
"And uh...could I have a ride? I live in Riverside at the back of town.
"Yeah, that wouldn't be a problem at all. I live around there too."
The clock in the dash of Walt's 1993 Corolla read 1:44. "Good heavens...it's so late," Julian said with surprise.
"Yeah, it's like a casino. There's no windows or clocks. The theater is like it's own little planet with its own time zone. Kinda like when you fly somewhere really early and crave pizza during a layover even though it's only 7:30 in the morning."
There was a lull as Julian's tired brain fought for some kind of reply. She settled for a complete change of topic: "So if you play any character in any play ever what would it be?"
"Mmmm, that's a tough one....maybe Henry Fonda's character from 12 Angry Men."
"Why?"
"Uh...I dunno. He's just really cool. Convincing but not a jerk...and...you know..." Julian was glad to see that she wasn't the only one with three neurons functioning after such a long day. Walt circled his hand in the air trying to prompt himself for the right word. "He's just cool. The guy tiene cojones...oh, a wait, I mean....sorry."
They both laughed too hard for what the situation merited due to being hyper from exhaustion and mutually embarrassed. Walt redirected attention away from himself, "And yourself?"
"Well...if I really could be anyone and it not be completely weird. I'd love to play Bert from Mary Poppins. One, because he's awesome. Two, because in the musical he walks on the friggin' ceiling. It's really, really cool."
When Julian finally got home she collapsed into bed utterly ready to sleep. But right before she rolled onto her side to instantly fall asleep a thought instantly filled her with insatiable curiosity.
Two minutes later, on Google Maps for the only Carrick's listed in her town, Julian discovered that Walt lived about as far from her house as you could get and still attend FHS. To the late night/ early morning quiet of her house Julian smiled. "Walter Carrick, I'm glad you like me too."
New to JA? Welcome! If your feeling a bit lost, you should start from the beginning. Or if you want more general information, read What the heck is this?
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