Short Stories: Music Prompts!
Feb. 23rd, 2012 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaI've been story-jumping rather badly lately, so I decided 'screw this, tonight I am abandoning all the usual characters and writing the first thing that comes into my head when I listen to music, and that is that.' Then I was in the mood for Death Cab For Cutie. Warning for varying degrees of wish-fulfillment and projecting my own experiences onto nameless characters.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I Will Follow You Into The Dark – Death Cab For Cutie
It’s not forever, because nothing is. I know that as well as the next person, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep trying to hold onto her. She pulls away and goes off into her own world, and when she comes back, she’s changed just a little bit.
‘Honey,’ she says, ‘If this is going to be a dealbreaker, I understand. I’m not going to guilt you into staying.’
‘But that’s in and of itself another way to guilt-trip me,’ I tell her. She gives me a sad smile, and that’s another thing that’s not meant to be calculating, but it is. It’s all an act, and I know it, but it’s not malicious.
‘I’m just – no, that’s not going to work. Listen. I’m fucked up.’ We’re sitting on the couch, drinking and painting each other’s nails. ‘I don’t mean in the head. I don’t mean that I was in a bad relationship with a man, and that’s why I’m with you now. I mean … things happened, and I’m not sure how to explain it without sounding like a martyr.’
‘Try. I’ll tell you if you’re veering into the melodramatic,’ I tell her.
She does. It takes a long time: it covers thousands of years. ‘I want to be human. Not always, because can you imagine, letting go of all of that?’ She laughs, and hiccups. I get up and get the big crocheted blanket that my mom made for me when I was a little girl, and I wrap it around our shoulders. ‘But most of the time, I just want to be human. I want to be flawed like you, not flawed like me.’
‘Yeah, well, you know. Biting your nails and not always being able to tell whether you’re manic or depressed or just plain irritated because you woke up wrong, that’s attractive,’ I joke.
‘More attractive than leaving you every night to spend another year or so in hell, and I come back and you’re still so young and I’m still so young,’ she says. ‘Listen, now, I sound like an old fart. And it’s never going to come naturally. I wish I could stop.’
I wrap my arms around her and rest my chin on top of her head. ‘Me too, querida, but you know, not many people can say they’re dating the Nightmare Queen.’
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Marching Bands of Manhattan – Death Cab For Cutie
Last night’s clothing lies strewn across the floor where you threw it in a fit of directionless rage at midnight, then went to sleep wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt that your ex-girlfriend gave you. Jeans and a grey shirt landed on top of notebooks half-open, their pages crunched, blue cursive filling the margins. The shades are down, but they aren’t heavy enough to shut out the sunlight completely; the room fills with a warm grey light, filtered through so that there doesn’t seem to be a single source, muting the colors in an already muted room. You curl up into a ball on your bed, and your fingers scrabble to pull sheets around you that are currently bunched at the bottom of the bed because the thermostat is broken and stuck at eighty degrees.
It is that heat, not the light, that wakes you in the end. You open your eyes, and then you shut them again, and groan. Dreams about a forest full of birds and women vanish, are replaced by the sound of traffic outside your window and the column that you never finished writing because your head was full of intrusive thoughts of the same ex-girlfriend whose t-shirt you put on last night, after you came back from doing laps around your block because you couldn’t shake those thoughts, and now you have to finish the essay before three this afternoon if you want to keep your job. You don’t even like your job, but it is what it is, and your parents were right, you should have gone into accounting, you’d still be miserable but at least the pay would be consistent. Then, they hint, she wouldn’t have left you for your friend with the Mercedes, which, as you point out, is impractically expensive to keep in the city. This all comes back to you as you open your eyes, all of it at once, crashing down without the benefit of your dreaming subconscious to sort it out for you and put it into some sort of sense. You remember this, and you remember that you threw your notebooks off of your bed and now the pages are bent and you hate bent pages; you remember that you forgot to brush your teeth last night and now your mouth tastes like cotton soaked in roadkill; and you remember the phone calls you made last night, and you fill with such shame that you cover your head with your hands and tuck your elbows in towards your face, eyes squeezed shut as though the physical barriers can prevent the thoughts from getting to you.
In the end, it is the sliver of sunlight that manages to slide into the room once the rotation of the earth has brought the light to the correct angle relative to your window to escape the safety net of the shades and land directly in front of you when you open your eyes at the right time to see it. See, it says, life goes on.
'Fuck you,' you tell the light. You'll apologize later.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Someday You Will Be Loved – Death Cab For Cutie
Sarah’s life is nothing like she expected at eight, at thirteen, or even eighteen.
When she was eight, she thought she was going to marry a firefighter. They’d meet when he rescued her from her burning apartment building, and he would win her heart when he ran back inside to rescue her notebooks and paintings. They would move into a house in the suburbs, and have two Golden Retrievers, and twin girls. She would be happy and loved, and things would be perfect.
When she was thirteen, she thought she would marry someone with a white collar job, and he would come home late from work, but she would have waited up for him with dinner. He’d do chores on the weekends to prove that they were equal partners in this relationship, and she would sit at home writing books about girl detectives who fell in love with the bank robber they were supposed to be apprehending, and in the end, the robber would confess to his crimes, earn redemption, and then they would get married. Her family had gotten a Golden Retriever when she was twelve, and so her revised plans for the future only made provisions for one dog, and because she was socially conscious, the Golden Retriever would be adopted from a pet shelter and it would be so grateful to be adopted that it would be sweet and kind to her and her husband and two children, but ferocious towards strangers, and she would be surrounded by love.
When Sarah was eighteen, she had realized that her dreams of marrying a white-collar worker would have to be nebulous, because she wasn’t so sure that she was going to end up marrying a man after all. Maybe, maybe not. She would have to make provisions. She had also realized, newly matriculated at an all-women’s college, that it was a man’s world out there, and she would have to want a job outside the house, too, in order to prove to her fellow students that she was throwing off the patriarchy along with the best of them. Something about this bothered her, because she didn’t see what was wrong about enjoying cooking and cleaning as long as she also had other interests, but still. She would marry someone, at any rate, and it would be a lovely small ceremony, and she would wear a white dress like a Disney Princess, and they would live in a tiny house they could barely afford until one of them got a raise, at which point the white-picket fence with the shelter dog and twin girls would come true. Even if they did have to adopt the twin girls from Russia or China, they would still grow up in a loving household.
When Sarah was twenty-two, she met Matt, who was an editor at a magazine devoted to short fantasy, and who was allergic to dogs. As such, she immediately discounted him as a potential life partner, until she discovered that he liked to cook, too, and that it was even more fun to cook together than it was to cook for someone else alone. Then she met Matt’s friend Gina, whose time was largely spent in the pursuit of a degree in law, and who couldn’t cook worth a damn. And she and Matt agreed that it was a shame that Gina had to live off of spaghetti and meatballs, and wouldn’t it be nice if they cooked together and had her over for dinner every few nights?
Seeing the way that her boyfriend cared about another woman should have set off alarm bells in her head, shouldn’t it – that was the plot of all the romance stories she had ever read – but he was still cooking with Sarah, and bickering with Sarah over who had let the leftover rice ferment in the back of the fridge, and still having long conversations about whether Gimli got short shrift in the movie adaptations of the Lord of the Rings with Sarah, so she couldn’t bring herself to mind. Especially not when Gina came around even when Matt was out, and then it turned out that Gina loved dogs too, and offered to bring her to the animal shelter to volunteer on weekends. They came home some days smelling like animal, and had to change their clothes and hide the evidence before Matt returned from work, and then one day they all sat down and talked about that last part, where most of Gina’s possessions had migrated to the home with Sarah and Matt’s names on the lease, and how it was really her home now, too. So that was a bit unexpected.
And then, and then! Sarah got a real job, and that was unexpected, too. She wound up as a TA while getting a master’s degree in rhetoric, and then realized that she really enjoyed teaching, and then she got an official position as an English teacher at the local community college. Which is important, yes, but not as important as the fact that one day, she met a fellow professor by the name of Russell for lunch, and he turned out to be a fantasy writer, too, and wouldn’t she just love to introduce him to Matt? So she did, and they hit it off; and then while she was at a concert with Gina, she met a lovely couple who did Renaissance reenactments in their free time and spent the rest of it doting on their twin girls with their boyfriend, and Sarah mentioned that she and Gina knew an Irish pub a few blocks away from the concert that served excellent chicken pot pie, would they like to come and talk after the concert?
So yes, Sarah’s life is nothing like she expected. At eight, she wanted to marry an accountant and have two dogs and two children. At twenty-five, she has a husband and a wife, and her husband has a boyfriend who spends his weekends at their small house that they can afford only with three incomes, and her wife has a boyfriend with a small daughter who spends weekday afternoons doing homework at the kitchen table while Sarah grades papers, and there are still no dogs in the house but there are plenty at the shelter, and she just met a woman at a science fiction convention that her husband dragged her to, and they’re going out for dinner this Saturday, and Sarah thinks that though it’s a very different manifestation than that which she had ever pictured, and it will never be perfect, she still ended up happy and loved after all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Everything Is Alright – Motion City Soundtrack
It’s difficult to get out of bed sometimes. Vance wishes he could make this go away; he hates how he feels like a girl, being controlled by his emotions and the stupidest things imaginable. It wasn’t always like this. He remembers not being terrified of shadows and of seeing unfamiliar people; he remembers a time when the thought of standing up and performing, acting in front of a crowd, didn’t make him so nervous that he threw up and locked himself in his room.
He wakes up and puts on his uniform: a black t-shirt for some heavy metal band or the other; it doesn’t matter which, and he doesn’t listen to them very much anyway, but it’s important because they all look pretty much the same to the untrained eye, so people tend to slide over them. When they see him, he can be nothing but ‘heavy metal kid’. Pair that with black jeans, and he becomes practically invisible by virtue of standing out; by only being a label, he can erase himself.
It’s one of those days, though, one of the days where he reaches for the one light blue shirt that his older brother gave him, that says ‘I’m not gay but my boyfriend is’ as a gag gift that he can wear as a nightshirt. He thought of it as armor that he could use, something to put on to say, I don’t care what you think, and I will not let you mock me for this even if it’s not true. And he must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, or the right side, because he lets the Flogging Molly shirt fall back into the drawer and takes out the still-folded blue t-shirt out instead.
He regrets it immediately after getting on the bus. His vision blurs, and he can’t move. He stands in the front of the bus, staring down the rows and rows (eighteen rows of two seats that each seat two people, three at a pinch) of kids on the bus, and his body will not obey him. He knows this as surely as he knows that his name is Vance; he can’t speak, can’t do anything but look around in mute, crashing horror. The fear presses down on him, and he does the only thing that his treacherous terrified body will let him do: he throws himself from side to side inside his brain, and the momentum causes him to topple sideways. By a miracle, his head hits the soft part of the first row of seats, and not the hard metal structures inside them.
Of course he can move once he is on the floor. He gets up, face flushed and shoulder stinging from impact, certain that every eye is on him. ‘Hey kid, you okay?’ asks the bus driver.
Vance can’t speak. He nods and shuffles down the aisle with his head down to the nearest empty seat. It ends up being one next to a girl wearing a tank top and shorts in eye-watering neon colors, and he doesn’t feel privileged enough to sit next to her, lest his presence bring down the summery cheer that sings out of her pores. See, it’s things like that that make people think he’s weird, he reminds himself. That, and he’s a weedy fourteen-year-old boy wearing a gay pride shirt to the war zone of high school.
‘Do you really have a boyfriend?’ asks the girl, reading his shirt.
He stares down at his knees. ‘No. It was a joke.’
‘That’s pretty cool. I don’t think I’d have the guts to do that,’ she confesses.
Vance looks at her, really looks at her. She’s peppy and pretty and wearing her hair up in a perky ponytail and her voice is chirpy and her skin is improbably flawless, but she’s looking at him like he’s an interesting human being, not a specimen underneath glass plating. He wants to run away from the attention; there is a comforting familiarity in knowing that he is going to be received with disgust or at the very least with indifference, and a heady fear associated with a potentially positive interaction with another person his own age.
‘Jeez, I’m being serious. Chill,’ she says. Something in her expression closes off.
Vance panics. Did he just blow a chance to be a human being? ‘Sorry … I didn’t expect it. Thanks.’ He tries on a smile.
Her expression opens up again. ‘You’re welcome.’
‘I’m Vance,’ he says.
‘I know. You eat near me and my friends in the cafeteria. I’m Electra. Like the princess,’ she says with a grin. He returns it, and it sits a little easier on his face this time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I Will Follow You Into The Dark – Death Cab For Cutie
It’s not forever, because nothing is. I know that as well as the next person, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to keep trying to hold onto her. She pulls away and goes off into her own world, and when she comes back, she’s changed just a little bit.
‘Honey,’ she says, ‘If this is going to be a dealbreaker, I understand. I’m not going to guilt you into staying.’
‘But that’s in and of itself another way to guilt-trip me,’ I tell her. She gives me a sad smile, and that’s another thing that’s not meant to be calculating, but it is. It’s all an act, and I know it, but it’s not malicious.
‘I’m just – no, that’s not going to work. Listen. I’m fucked up.’ We’re sitting on the couch, drinking and painting each other’s nails. ‘I don’t mean in the head. I don’t mean that I was in a bad relationship with a man, and that’s why I’m with you now. I mean … things happened, and I’m not sure how to explain it without sounding like a martyr.’
‘Try. I’ll tell you if you’re veering into the melodramatic,’ I tell her.
She does. It takes a long time: it covers thousands of years. ‘I want to be human. Not always, because can you imagine, letting go of all of that?’ She laughs, and hiccups. I get up and get the big crocheted blanket that my mom made for me when I was a little girl, and I wrap it around our shoulders. ‘But most of the time, I just want to be human. I want to be flawed like you, not flawed like me.’
‘Yeah, well, you know. Biting your nails and not always being able to tell whether you’re manic or depressed or just plain irritated because you woke up wrong, that’s attractive,’ I joke.
‘More attractive than leaving you every night to spend another year or so in hell, and I come back and you’re still so young and I’m still so young,’ she says. ‘Listen, now, I sound like an old fart. And it’s never going to come naturally. I wish I could stop.’
I wrap my arms around her and rest my chin on top of her head. ‘Me too, querida, but you know, not many people can say they’re dating the Nightmare Queen.’
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Marching Bands of Manhattan – Death Cab For Cutie
Last night’s clothing lies strewn across the floor where you threw it in a fit of directionless rage at midnight, then went to sleep wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt that your ex-girlfriend gave you. Jeans and a grey shirt landed on top of notebooks half-open, their pages crunched, blue cursive filling the margins. The shades are down, but they aren’t heavy enough to shut out the sunlight completely; the room fills with a warm grey light, filtered through so that there doesn’t seem to be a single source, muting the colors in an already muted room. You curl up into a ball on your bed, and your fingers scrabble to pull sheets around you that are currently bunched at the bottom of the bed because the thermostat is broken and stuck at eighty degrees.
It is that heat, not the light, that wakes you in the end. You open your eyes, and then you shut them again, and groan. Dreams about a forest full of birds and women vanish, are replaced by the sound of traffic outside your window and the column that you never finished writing because your head was full of intrusive thoughts of the same ex-girlfriend whose t-shirt you put on last night, after you came back from doing laps around your block because you couldn’t shake those thoughts, and now you have to finish the essay before three this afternoon if you want to keep your job. You don’t even like your job, but it is what it is, and your parents were right, you should have gone into accounting, you’d still be miserable but at least the pay would be consistent. Then, they hint, she wouldn’t have left you for your friend with the Mercedes, which, as you point out, is impractically expensive to keep in the city. This all comes back to you as you open your eyes, all of it at once, crashing down without the benefit of your dreaming subconscious to sort it out for you and put it into some sort of sense. You remember this, and you remember that you threw your notebooks off of your bed and now the pages are bent and you hate bent pages; you remember that you forgot to brush your teeth last night and now your mouth tastes like cotton soaked in roadkill; and you remember the phone calls you made last night, and you fill with such shame that you cover your head with your hands and tuck your elbows in towards your face, eyes squeezed shut as though the physical barriers can prevent the thoughts from getting to you.
In the end, it is the sliver of sunlight that manages to slide into the room once the rotation of the earth has brought the light to the correct angle relative to your window to escape the safety net of the shades and land directly in front of you when you open your eyes at the right time to see it. See, it says, life goes on.
'Fuck you,' you tell the light. You'll apologize later.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Someday You Will Be Loved – Death Cab For Cutie
Sarah’s life is nothing like she expected at eight, at thirteen, or even eighteen.
When she was eight, she thought she was going to marry a firefighter. They’d meet when he rescued her from her burning apartment building, and he would win her heart when he ran back inside to rescue her notebooks and paintings. They would move into a house in the suburbs, and have two Golden Retrievers, and twin girls. She would be happy and loved, and things would be perfect.
When she was thirteen, she thought she would marry someone with a white collar job, and he would come home late from work, but she would have waited up for him with dinner. He’d do chores on the weekends to prove that they were equal partners in this relationship, and she would sit at home writing books about girl detectives who fell in love with the bank robber they were supposed to be apprehending, and in the end, the robber would confess to his crimes, earn redemption, and then they would get married. Her family had gotten a Golden Retriever when she was twelve, and so her revised plans for the future only made provisions for one dog, and because she was socially conscious, the Golden Retriever would be adopted from a pet shelter and it would be so grateful to be adopted that it would be sweet and kind to her and her husband and two children, but ferocious towards strangers, and she would be surrounded by love.
When Sarah was eighteen, she had realized that her dreams of marrying a white-collar worker would have to be nebulous, because she wasn’t so sure that she was going to end up marrying a man after all. Maybe, maybe not. She would have to make provisions. She had also realized, newly matriculated at an all-women’s college, that it was a man’s world out there, and she would have to want a job outside the house, too, in order to prove to her fellow students that she was throwing off the patriarchy along with the best of them. Something about this bothered her, because she didn’t see what was wrong about enjoying cooking and cleaning as long as she also had other interests, but still. She would marry someone, at any rate, and it would be a lovely small ceremony, and she would wear a white dress like a Disney Princess, and they would live in a tiny house they could barely afford until one of them got a raise, at which point the white-picket fence with the shelter dog and twin girls would come true. Even if they did have to adopt the twin girls from Russia or China, they would still grow up in a loving household.
When Sarah was twenty-two, she met Matt, who was an editor at a magazine devoted to short fantasy, and who was allergic to dogs. As such, she immediately discounted him as a potential life partner, until she discovered that he liked to cook, too, and that it was even more fun to cook together than it was to cook for someone else alone. Then she met Matt’s friend Gina, whose time was largely spent in the pursuit of a degree in law, and who couldn’t cook worth a damn. And she and Matt agreed that it was a shame that Gina had to live off of spaghetti and meatballs, and wouldn’t it be nice if they cooked together and had her over for dinner every few nights?
Seeing the way that her boyfriend cared about another woman should have set off alarm bells in her head, shouldn’t it – that was the plot of all the romance stories she had ever read – but he was still cooking with Sarah, and bickering with Sarah over who had let the leftover rice ferment in the back of the fridge, and still having long conversations about whether Gimli got short shrift in the movie adaptations of the Lord of the Rings with Sarah, so she couldn’t bring herself to mind. Especially not when Gina came around even when Matt was out, and then it turned out that Gina loved dogs too, and offered to bring her to the animal shelter to volunteer on weekends. They came home some days smelling like animal, and had to change their clothes and hide the evidence before Matt returned from work, and then one day they all sat down and talked about that last part, where most of Gina’s possessions had migrated to the home with Sarah and Matt’s names on the lease, and how it was really her home now, too. So that was a bit unexpected.
And then, and then! Sarah got a real job, and that was unexpected, too. She wound up as a TA while getting a master’s degree in rhetoric, and then realized that she really enjoyed teaching, and then she got an official position as an English teacher at the local community college. Which is important, yes, but not as important as the fact that one day, she met a fellow professor by the name of Russell for lunch, and he turned out to be a fantasy writer, too, and wouldn’t she just love to introduce him to Matt? So she did, and they hit it off; and then while she was at a concert with Gina, she met a lovely couple who did Renaissance reenactments in their free time and spent the rest of it doting on their twin girls with their boyfriend, and Sarah mentioned that she and Gina knew an Irish pub a few blocks away from the concert that served excellent chicken pot pie, would they like to come and talk after the concert?
So yes, Sarah’s life is nothing like she expected. At eight, she wanted to marry an accountant and have two dogs and two children. At twenty-five, she has a husband and a wife, and her husband has a boyfriend who spends his weekends at their small house that they can afford only with three incomes, and her wife has a boyfriend with a small daughter who spends weekday afternoons doing homework at the kitchen table while Sarah grades papers, and there are still no dogs in the house but there are plenty at the shelter, and she just met a woman at a science fiction convention that her husband dragged her to, and they’re going out for dinner this Saturday, and Sarah thinks that though it’s a very different manifestation than that which she had ever pictured, and it will never be perfect, she still ended up happy and loved after all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Everything Is Alright – Motion City Soundtrack
It’s difficult to get out of bed sometimes. Vance wishes he could make this go away; he hates how he feels like a girl, being controlled by his emotions and the stupidest things imaginable. It wasn’t always like this. He remembers not being terrified of shadows and of seeing unfamiliar people; he remembers a time when the thought of standing up and performing, acting in front of a crowd, didn’t make him so nervous that he threw up and locked himself in his room.
He wakes up and puts on his uniform: a black t-shirt for some heavy metal band or the other; it doesn’t matter which, and he doesn’t listen to them very much anyway, but it’s important because they all look pretty much the same to the untrained eye, so people tend to slide over them. When they see him, he can be nothing but ‘heavy metal kid’. Pair that with black jeans, and he becomes practically invisible by virtue of standing out; by only being a label, he can erase himself.
It’s one of those days, though, one of the days where he reaches for the one light blue shirt that his older brother gave him, that says ‘I’m not gay but my boyfriend is’ as a gag gift that he can wear as a nightshirt. He thought of it as armor that he could use, something to put on to say, I don’t care what you think, and I will not let you mock me for this even if it’s not true. And he must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, or the right side, because he lets the Flogging Molly shirt fall back into the drawer and takes out the still-folded blue t-shirt out instead.
He regrets it immediately after getting on the bus. His vision blurs, and he can’t move. He stands in the front of the bus, staring down the rows and rows (eighteen rows of two seats that each seat two people, three at a pinch) of kids on the bus, and his body will not obey him. He knows this as surely as he knows that his name is Vance; he can’t speak, can’t do anything but look around in mute, crashing horror. The fear presses down on him, and he does the only thing that his treacherous terrified body will let him do: he throws himself from side to side inside his brain, and the momentum causes him to topple sideways. By a miracle, his head hits the soft part of the first row of seats, and not the hard metal structures inside them.
Of course he can move once he is on the floor. He gets up, face flushed and shoulder stinging from impact, certain that every eye is on him. ‘Hey kid, you okay?’ asks the bus driver.
Vance can’t speak. He nods and shuffles down the aisle with his head down to the nearest empty seat. It ends up being one next to a girl wearing a tank top and shorts in eye-watering neon colors, and he doesn’t feel privileged enough to sit next to her, lest his presence bring down the summery cheer that sings out of her pores. See, it’s things like that that make people think he’s weird, he reminds himself. That, and he’s a weedy fourteen-year-old boy wearing a gay pride shirt to the war zone of high school.
‘Do you really have a boyfriend?’ asks the girl, reading his shirt.
He stares down at his knees. ‘No. It was a joke.’
‘That’s pretty cool. I don’t think I’d have the guts to do that,’ she confesses.
Vance looks at her, really looks at her. She’s peppy and pretty and wearing her hair up in a perky ponytail and her voice is chirpy and her skin is improbably flawless, but she’s looking at him like he’s an interesting human being, not a specimen underneath glass plating. He wants to run away from the attention; there is a comforting familiarity in knowing that he is going to be received with disgust or at the very least with indifference, and a heady fear associated with a potentially positive interaction with another person his own age.
‘Jeez, I’m being serious. Chill,’ she says. Something in her expression closes off.
Vance panics. Did he just blow a chance to be a human being? ‘Sorry … I didn’t expect it. Thanks.’ He tries on a smile.
Her expression opens up again. ‘You’re welcome.’
‘I’m Vance,’ he says.
‘I know. You eat near me and my friends in the cafeteria. I’m Electra. Like the princess,’ she says with a grin. He returns it, and it sits a little easier on his face this time.
