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 Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2010 7:51 pm
There was a bathroom a little way away from the auditorium building, the bathroom anyone working in the drama suite used. It was a bathroom rich with history that Jenny Prideux did not know about. In fact, it was a bathroom rich with history that Charys Murphy didn't know about; she'd used that bathroom for two things -- puking in when she was thirteen and had, like, mumps and norovirus, and shutting herself in and calling the bomb squad on the fateful day that Mrs. Finklestein had been attacked.
Mrs. Finklestein had long since retired and left for Delaware, citing exhaustion. That had been the day Sidra Winters stood with her eyes squinted into betrayed, antagonised slits and snapped that Charys Murphy was a total loser.
We're both Super Senshi! We're only supposed to get that sort of power upgrade if we prove we deserved it and frankly I'm unsure how you did!
'Frankly'. Sid had spit that in the prissiest little tones you could imagine, tones that had been starched and bleached, hands on her hips like an anime character. Those had been old, ancient, worn-out days, and they'd only happened last August. Last August? Since then Sidra had died and Charlie had become T-Bird and she'd tried gay and tried a lot of things and Ray Gordon beat her in minigolf and a multitude of planets were spinning, some imperceptibly and some macroscopically wheeling out of control. She wasted days like they were toilet paper.
Her modus operandi was brutally outdated.
There was once a boy named Pierre
Who only would say, I don't care!
In fact she cared about a lot of s**t, put most of her effort in every day to make sure people cared a hell of a lot about what she was doing no matter how she had to make them care. Caring was her medium, incoherent pop refs the megaphone she held to communicate it. It was not a language for other people. Now when she woke up in the morning with her head on fire and her eyes too bloody to see, she could go and cry in her caramel macchiato but not come bitching to Charlie Boyle.
Charys held the grille that was set against the bathroom window and howled like a wounded animal. Her cellphone had one new message. Beep, boop. Back to square one. The world moved again. Didnt want u to c it on the news. im alive & ok & at home. idk when ill be @ school. sid What the hell did that even mean, what the hell. The grille cut a griddle pattern into her fingers.
Her crying was incoherent now. She wasn't even sure for who: intense self-pity, Charlie, Sid, Raymond Gordon. It was a terrible time for Jenny Prideux to walk in the door.
I didn't get to be a Super Senshi by acting like some Clark Kent dicklick. You don't have to be a hero -- I'm not gonna be.
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Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 3:36 pm
I'll show you what your worth
If you let me inside your world
There's gonna be one less lonely girl
These were the words that blasted through the pink earbuds attached to Jenny's surprisingly not-pink iPod (now in a delightful Spring Green) as she made her way off of the unused stage. There were no plays coming up, nor any musicals. This was fortunate for Jenny, because she had a habit of putting Ray Gordon in the uncomfortable position of having to find a place for her on stage during Sweeney Todd without letting her actually sing. Anyone who had every heard Jenny Prideux sing would tell you that it sounded a lot like Justin Bieber. A lot like Justin Bieber once he hits puberty and his voice cracks and screeches every few notes.
Even if given the world's most secure bucket made of sturdy Ent wood and sealed with the finest sealant made of unicorn horns and toe shavings from hobbit feet, Jenny Prideux could not carry a tune. It was for this reason that she was pulling fake sideburns from her cheeks, having spent an unauthorized hour on stage beneath a spotlight that the principal would balk over the cost of running. She was practicing for the role of bystander in a play which she anticipated Mr. Gordon might pick for the fall show.
She had a tophat and a fake prison tattoo on standby just in case he went with another piece. Oh yes, Jenny was also ready to audition for silent man in crowd and cellmate number three.
She especially had her fingers crossed for cellmate number three, but had yet to convince Mr. Gordon that the Dark Mark was an acceptable prison tat. She had spent two hours explaining how wearing it in class would give her 'street cred', but Ray had gently guided her away from the notion by calling her precious and reminding her that school ended an hour ago.
Jenny shouldered open the bathroom door just as her playlist ended, the second sideburn half-peeled off with a trail of glue running the length of her jaw. It hung there, flapping in the breeze of the exhaust fans that had carried out years worth of pot smoke and stink bombs and in years worth of stale air from the auditorium. Jenny pulled the earbud out with a soft pop and let it dangle beside the strip of hair, staring at Charys with those perpetually wide blue eyes.
Jenny said nothing, but frowned for a moment. She bit the inside of her cheek, as though indecisive, before nodding once. The door closed behind her with a rattle of the broken lock, and not five seconds later she was wrapping her arms around Charys' shoulders and pulling her into a hug.
She hadn't yet removed the fake moustache.
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Posted: Sat May 08, 2010 2:45 am
Charys hadn't noticed the fake mustache. It was at that point Jenny Prideux knew that something was very wrong. Actually, the tears had given her a pretty good tipoff that something was wrong but the lack of mustache-noticing shifted the weights into Very Wrong, and the final straw on the wrong camel's back was Charys letting her hug her. She did not struggle. She sat there in the steady embrace of the other girl's arms and cried like a baby.
The last time she had cried so hard, she'd been fourteen -- it was for pride's sake too that she cried now, one hand clutching the front of Jenny's nasty Meadowview school shirt in what had been the closest anyone had ever managed to her bra. If Charys was in her right mind she would have been horrified at her inadvertant sexual harrassment of Genevieve Prideux. She wasn't in her right mind.
When she had cried herself out, hot-cheeked and tearless, she lay limply against the wall. Her only offering to normalcy was to take Jenny's iPod with nervous fingers and look through her playlist. When the song blasted through the abandoned earbuds, it was Clay Aiken singing soulfully about all the things he would do were he, in fact, invisible.
"I am an epic ********," said Charys.
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