#careful harvard is pretty brutal

[acsisz]

Real DecaP DARK Fanfic.

Warning: contains quite a bit of violence, blood, some swearing.

This isn't DecaP fluff fanfic (there's a bit at the end tho), I wrote this while imagining a DARK DecaP game. Harvard is an actual merciless bastard, and his teammates don't have a good time.

Writing this caused me some emotional pain, so be prepared.

(Also I'm so tired, this is like 5,500 words long... I didn't beta read it, no energy left 😅 I'm sorry if there're any wording mistakes)

Plot: The team experiences Harvard's darkness firsthand.

*Huff puff*

Carl was running alone in an abandoned building.

'Where is everyone?' Carl thought as he went around a corner.

*BANG*

'What was that?!' Carl heard a loud sound coming not far from where he is.

'Are the others in trouble?!' He tried to once again contact his teammates through his special police assigned phone, but it still didn't work.

'Damn it... I guess there's no other choice...' Carl began to turn the other way and started running to the source of the loud sound he had heard.

'Everyone... please be okay...!'

*bang*

"Hm? That was..." Zhang muttered to himself as he checked his laptop for any contacts from his teammates.

"It was quite loud, but still far off from where we are," said his partner, Manimani.

Her tone of voice signaled worry, yet still radiates a strong calmness.

"Any news from the others?" Manimani asked her partner.

"No, not yet..." Zhang shaked his head and began typing on his laptop.

"We've been separated from them for quite some time now... Did Mikey contact you?" asked Manimani again.

"Nope... This is just speculation on my part, but I think this old building is jamming our signals," Zhang begins to explain.

"Mikey just went in to search for Carl and Harvard, so maybe he hasn't had any new info to tell us," he continued.

"...but it's weird that Carl or Harvard hasn't contacted us at all, is what you're saying right?" Manimani said.

"Exactly," said Zhang as he finally tears his sight away from his laptop screen to face Manimani.

"Especially Carl," Manimani emphasized.

"Especially Carl... he's the biggest worrywart of this team," Zhang agreed.

"So, what should we do know? Me going in after them won't solve any problem," Manimani puts her hands on her hips, slightly annoyed.

"Right..." Zhang begins to think.

"Honestly we were so lucky to be regrouped with Mikey, only for him to immediately went off in search of those two," Manimani briefly remembers when they managed to accidentally find Mikey in this labyrinth of a building.

"Mikey!" Manimani shouted a bit to get her teammate's attention.

Mikey was running, about to turn around a corner when he heard Manimani's voice calling him.

"Goodness! What a coincidence! Good to see you two!" Mikey, noticing Manimani and Zhang, began to ran over to them whilst shouting a bit.

"A coincidence of great effort, this place is like a maze!" Zhang said, "Why didn't you contact us?"

"Oh! Yes, contact! Sorry, I forgot!" Mikey admitted, an embarrassed smile began to form on his face.

Zhang and Manimani sighed at the revelation, 'Knew it,' they both thought at the same time.

"Putting that aside for a moment, did you find anything? Where are our leader and his partner?" Manimani asked.

"Very weird. I found nothing, not a single person. And no Harvard or Carl either," Mikey said, perplexed.

"Wait, not a single person? But you came from the other way. We also didn't find anyone, so thinking logically, you should've had more chance in encountering those members!" the news shook Manimani.

"Yes, very weird. This is hideout of a big crime organization, correct?"

"Right, but we also didn't find a single person..." Manimani looked to Zhang for correction, and he only nods.

"Could it be that they already fleed?" Zhang raised a possibility.

"No way, Harvard clearly told us they'd be here. He was sure of it," And Harvard was rarely wrong when he's that sure, Manimani added in her mind.

"Damn it, this is turning into a mess. I thought we'd be able to instantly raise our achievements if we're able to caught a big crime organization by ourselves," Zhang sighed.

"I told you so," Manimani said perturbed.

'What a mess... This is what happens when you don't listen to Carl and me, we're like the only functioning brains with common sense in this team...!' Manimani swallowed her words, making the situation worse is the last thing she wants to do right now. Scolding Zhang can come after they're all together and safe.

"How about we search for leader and Carl together?" Mikey asked, sensing the disturbance in the air.

"Can't do, I wanna try contacting headquarters," Zhang said, rejecting Mikey's offer.

"I see, what about you Manimani?" Mikey turns his focus to Manimani.

"I want to, but Zhang's horrible at fights. Can't risk him getting jumped by the enemies while he's working on contacting headquarters," Manimani shook her head, a bit disappointed she couldn't go searching for her teammates.

"That's okay I understand, Zhang's the worse at fights in our team. I would also be worried if I were to left him alone in the middle of enemy territory," Mikey agrees.

Zhang didn't mind being spoken off like a deadweight at fights, he's good at other things after all. And he's about to demonstrate that other things right now as he opens his laptop and begins working.

"Alright, then see you guys later!" Mikey said as he began to run off to find Harvard and Carl.

"Ah, don't forget to contact us with updates!" Manimani shouted at Mikey's running figure that's getting farther and father away from them in just a few seconds.

She could see him making an 'OK' sign with his hand, and lets him leave, hoping he wouldn't forget again.

"Maybe we shouldn't have let him leave after all..." Manimani said a bit dejected.

"Don't say stupid things like that, if that happens then we three'll be sitting ducks here when there might be something happening to our two missing teammates," Zhang debated, he's already working on his laptop again.

"Right, Mikey's strong anyway, he'd be able to handle himself just fine. You say some pretty good stuff sometimes too, huh?"

"Yep, glad you understand," Zhang answer as he types on his laptop.

"How's the progress with contacting the headquarters?" asked Manimani.

"No luck, we're sitting ducks," Zhang answered, his typing stopped.

"Figures," Manimani sighed, "Still, what was that noise anyway?" she asked.

"Don't know, but it seems to be coming from the way Mikey ran off to, so he may be close to it. We're definitely far off though," Zhang said.

"Should we go there?" suggested Manimani.

Zhang closed his laptop with a clicked, "Sure, it's not like we're making progress here," and stood up.

*Huff puff*

Carl could hear himself breathing.

The building he's in is old and so very quiet.

He could only hear his footsteps and rapid breathing.

'That source of that noise should be close... Damn it!'

Carl thought about how it all came to this, and almost swore to himself to give Harvard a good beating when he sees him next.

'Harvard, you stupid...!'

He remembers when Harvard came to them with surefire proofs on a crime organization and a plan to catch them all by themselves.

He and Manimani tried to convince him otherwise and to at least tell their higher-ups, but Harvard wouldn't listen.

Not only that, he managed to gain Zhang's support by luring him in with talks of achievements and promotions or whatnot.

With Mikey not really supporting one or the other, they were at a tie.

But Harvard was reckless enough to tell them that he would even go by himself, so there's no use stopping him.

Carl has been friends with Harvard for at least 3 years and he had an ability to understand other people's hearts and, through them, their thoughts and personalities.

He understands his friend and partner's personality very well.

So he knew he couldn't stop him, but, "Okay, we'll come with," Manimani gasped, shocked at his decision.

"But, let me contact our instructors first. At the very least, they should know if we're about to attempt this. Things may go south after all, we may need their help," Manimani's relieved sigh reached his ears.

Harvard gave him a look, indicating 'not bad', then smirked and shook his head, "If they know, they would first stop us from going, then issue a formal request to their higher-ups to be allowed to catch them. It could take DAYS. There could be an information leak, and the entire organization could be gone from that building by the time that venerable permission comes out."

Carl couldn't say anything, especially when he thought about what's going on inside the force currently.

There were talks about traitors inside Broadstone Police Force.

"We're going, NOW," was what Harvard said last before he left the room.

Carl wasn't about to let that kill them all though, so he whipped up his phone and was about to call one of their instructors, Misae or Granger.

But just then, a message came in. From Harvard. Carl pales and closed his phone, he then followed the others and left the room, chasing after Harvard.

*BANG*

'It's that noise again, I'm getting close!' Carl thought as he fasten his pace.

*BANG BANG BANG*

'It's increasing?! What are they from? Gunshots? It's so loud, like metal...'

*SCREAM*

'What in the-?! I need to hurry up, someone's life could be in danger!'

Carl slowed his pace as he gets closer to the source of the loud metal noises and screams.

He very carefully peeked inside the room where the noises originated from.

'What is... ugh-!' Carl held his breath.

*BANG BANG BANG*

"Agh! Spare me!" pleaded a bloody man covered his head with his hands.

"Sure, once you tell me what I want to know!" a voice resembling his partner's, Harvard's, told him.

"I already told you, I don't know anything- UGH!" the man's words were cut short by a metal pipe hitting his side.

*BANG*

"Harvard...?" Carl stood shocked, unable to let a single word out.

"I'll give you another chance!"

"I don't know, please-"

*BANG*

Carl reflexively turned his face away and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he took a glance at the room they were in.

There was a lot of red splattered on the floor and the wall, and...people. Unmoving people. Dead people.

Carl felt nauseous.

"C'mon, spill it!" Harvard demanded.

No, if this goes on...!

"Harvard stop...!" Carl heard himself scream.

Harvard seemed to hear him, his hand holding the steel pipe froze and he turned around to face him.

"...Carl," was all that Harvard said in this situation. Carl could hear the annoyance in his tone of voice.

"What were you doing?!" Carl asked, terrified.

"I was just beating information out of our suspect here," answered Harvard, his hand still holding the steel pipe.

"Oh goodness..." Carl could feel himself dizzier by the second, his partner was showing absolutely no signs of guilt.

"Look at all these people Harvard! Y-you... What did you do to them?! They couldn't be...dead?" Carl asked in disbelief.

"Don't worry, I made sure they're still alive," Harvard said, his patience getting thinner.

"That's not the problem you-"

"It was self-defense. They attacked me first with steel pipes, I just returned the favor," his voice exasperated.

Carl felt that Harvard is saying, 'Are you done yet?' with his body language.

"Harvard, j-just put down that steel pipe first," Carl begged.

Harvard sneered, "Or what? You'll beat me up?"

There was no way Carl could win against Harvard, his fighting prowess is second only to Mikey in their team, while Carl is only as strong as Manimani.

Beating Harvard in a hand-to-hand combat is like asking for broken bones and pain.

Yet, he can't use any of his official police assigned weapons, like his gun, he needs permission from their higher-ups.

And he for sure didn't even tell their direct higher-ups, their instructors, that they would even be here, in this mess.

'Harvard's mess...' thought Carl.

Carl stayed quiet, unable to answer Harvard's provocation.

"Just like I thought," sighed Harvard as he went back to terrorize the bloody man that couldn't even stand up anymore.

"Now, tell me what you know, or I'll bust your head open."

"I-I don't know, I don't know...-"

*BANG*

"UGH!!" the man let out a muffled scream and coughed out some blood.

"HARVARD STOP!!" before Carl realized, he was running to stop his partner.

Carl tackled him from behind.

Harvard's footing wobbled, but he easily pushed Carl away.

Carl landed on his back, "Guh...!"

"Carl, I'm warning you, don't get in my way," Harvard's voice was serious and laced with anger.

"You can't do this! This isn't right!" said Carl as he attemped to get up.

"And who decides on that?" Harvard sneered.

"The law does!" Carl yelled.

"Well, the law is wrong."

Harvard's eyes looked down on him, and Carl trembled from the fear and pressure.

Harvard's eyes were merciless, his eyes now were like the eyes of criminals they've caught together before.

Dark, cold, merciless, cruel...

Carl couldn't bear to look at them.

Harvard turned away from Carl and looked back at the man lying down in his own blood.

"Tell me, what do you know about the Clown case from 10 years ago?"

The man didn't answer and only laid still while covering his head with his hand pitifully.

"Answer me!!" Harvard screamed as he swung the metal pipe once more.

"HARVARD NO!!"

Carl ran over and gripped his partner's hand that's holding the steel pipe tightly, trying to get him to let it go.

"Harvard, please don't do this!" Carl cried.

"Carl, LET. ME. GO!" Harvard's strength outpowered Carl and he swung down the pipe to hit Carl's upper arm.

"Aagh!!" Carl wailed as he fell down.

Harvard sighed annoyingly as he steadied himself, he lifted his hand again to hit the man.

"Harvard no...!" Carl clenched Harvard's leg, pleading for him to stop this madness.

Harvard kicked him back and swung down his metal pipe on the man again.

*BANG*

"Harvard no! This is wrong! Please stop it already!!" Carl could feel tears streaming down his face.

"Is this your justice?! Harvard!!" Carl cried at the top of his lungs.

"That's right, this IS my justice," Harvard coldly answered.

Carl's heart fell.

Why am I so weak? Carl hated himself at this moment.

If only the others were here, any one of them could do a much better job at stopping Harvard than he could...

"Harvard STOP!!!" Carl forced himself to get up, the pain in his upper arm tearing through him mercilessly, but he hold it back.

Carl tackled Harvard from behind again, and he felt a sharp pain stabbing his stomach.

Harvard had elbowed his stomach.

Carl could taste blood in his mouth, but he held his ground.

"Har..vard!!" Carl swung his fist to Harvard's face, but Harvard caught it.

"Stand. Back. Carl."

Harvard kicked his stomach and threw him back.

The impact from hitting the ground made Carl gagged on his blood.

Carl felt pitiful.

If only anyone from his team were here, they could surely stop Harvard.

Carl couldn't, Carl never could. He was too weak, too fragile, too much of a pampered crybaby to do anything.

He was scared, terrified. He couldn't even properly look at his friend without trembling so much.

He wants to go home to his family. He wants to sleep in his soft and large bed, and have his parents and elder siblings tell him that everything will be okay.

He hated this. Why did he even go to Police College for? He should've stayed and continued his family's business. What dreams? Being a hero? Laughable.

"Uhh...uwaaaa..." Carl cried.

He couldn't even lift his arms anymore, one of them hurt too badly and he just has no more energy left to lift the other anymore.

'It hurts...' Carl's whole body was screaming in pain, he was coughing up blood, but most of all, his heart hurt.

His friend and partner is doing something so horrible, yet he couldn't even stop him.

Since he's 2 years older, he always feels like should show Harvard the way, that he should guide him on the right path.

But he failed, miserably.

He is a failure.

*Sniff sniff*

Unbeknownst to Carl, Harvard was silently watching him, his expression contorting slightly.

Harvard suppressed the feelings in his heart, and began to interrogate the man again.

"I'll ask again, what do you know about the Clown case from 10 years ago?"

The man curled up and stayed silent.

"I know you know something. I've obtained information that before you founded this criminal organization 8 years ago, you were in contact with Clown. My source even told me that you were sending hit list to them."

The man kept silent.

"Tell me, 10 years ago, were you the one that gave the instruction to kill a woman surnamed Marks?" his voice intensified.

"..." silence.

"Hahaha... is that how you wanna play? Fine."

*BANG BANG BANG*

"You know, maybe you'd be interested to know who's the source of all my information on you," Harvard gave a forced smile.

"Do you have any idea of an old woman and her daughter who's surnamed 'Hart'?"

"...!" the man responded slightly.

Harvard smirked, "The old lady has trouble with her left leg and walks with a cane, while the daughter has burn marks on her right hand. Do you suppose know who they are?"

'...You-" the man's teeth clenched.

"Willing to talk now?"

"What did you do to them?" the man face Harvard with a new fiery determination.

Harvard let out a geniune laugh, "Ahaha, nothing. Yet."

The man lunged at Harvard as if his wounds aren't bothering him.

"Heh!" Harvard easily evaded him, "If you tell me everything you know and did with Clown, nothing would happen to them."

"You...monster!" the man screamed as he lunged forward to attack Harvard.

Harvard just clicked his tongue and kicked him back, "Monster? If I'm a monster, then what the fuck are you huh?"

"You killed people, you terrorized them, you were so evil that you wife and kid left you AND told all of your wrongdoings to the police to get you in jail. You're a fucking PIG in a human society."

"SHUT UP!!" the man yelled and got up again.

"You're the shit of society, the least you could do is own up for being a shit and tell me everything I want to know from you."

The man attempted to tackle Harvard, but Harvard dodged and hit him hard with his metal pipe.

*BANG*

"Feel like talking now?"

*Cough cough* the man coughs up a lot of blood.

"Harvard...stop...he's gonna die...sniff," Carl tried to force himself to stand up again.

He's a failure, sure, but if he and the man were gonna die in his partner's hands, the least he could do is to reduce that kill count from 2 to 1.

He's used to cleaning up after Harvard anyway, one more time wouldn't hurt.

"Stand down Carl. What am I gonna tell your prestigious family if you get hurt any more than this?" Harvard sighed.

Carl clenched his teeth and forced himself to get up again, and, oddly enough, he couldn't quite feel the pain anymore. Is that good or bad? He was supposed to be knowledgeable about this, but he couldn't quite remember. He feels dizzy.

"ZHANG, MANIMANI, MIKEY, HELP!!!" Carl screamed loudly.

Carl couldn't do it alone, so he called for help. After all, that's what teammates are for.

*Huff puff*

"This place is a labyrinth!" Manimani said between breaths.

"Tell me about it," Zhang unenthusiastically replied.

"At least we are together!" Mikey added.

"I'm glad we found you! But why were you still so close to our location?" Manimani asked.

"I got lost! This place is a labyrinth!" Mikey said a bit too enthusiastically.

"Wow," Zhang replied.

*BANG BANG BANG*

"We're already so much closer to the source of those loud noises, just a bit more!" Manimani said.

"I hope Harvard and Carl are already there, I don't think I could manage to run around again to search for them," Zhang said, out of breath.

"Don't worry, I could still go for another run!" Mikey said with a reassuring smile.

"Gee, good for you," said Zhang.

*BANG*

"Another loud noise! It's so close now!" said Manimani.

"C-Can we take a short break?" Zhang pleaded.

"Not now! We're so close..." rejected Manimani.

"B-But I'm so tired...can't go on running...!"

"That's why we always told you to train with us! But you always refused!"

Manimani and Zhang were about to start a scuffle.

"ZHANG, MANIMANI, MIKEY, HELP!!!"

"Huh, that was...!" Manimani was suprised for a second, but immediately began to search for the source of the voice.

"Carl...?" Zhang added, surprised and out of breath.

"Here! Let's go!" Mikey acted first, the two then followed behind him.

"Carl!!" Mikey called back.

Carl could feel his heart literally jumped with joy and relieve hearing that voice.

Mikey was the strongest in their team, if anyone could stop Harvard, it's him!

Carl sniffled for one last time before steadying himself, 'That's right, this isn't time for crying. We need to stop Harvard. We need to help him!'

"Mikey! We're here!" Carl called out to Mikey again.

Harvard's expression showed his displease, 'More annoyances...'

"CARL!" Mikey's loud voice was even louder as he got closer.

And he finally managed to find them.

Carl almost cried again out of joy when he saw that Zhang and Manimani were also with him.

"Carl- What in the?!" Manimani spoke first, she scanned the room and immediately formed a hypothesis.

"What the..." Zhang was second, he turned paler as his gaze traced the people lying on the ground in blood.

"Oh goodness..." Mikey was the last as he looked between Harvard and Carl in confusion and horror.

"Carl, what is happening?!" Manimani asked agitated.

"Speak later! Mikey, you need to restrain Harvard!" Carl's orders were straight and sure without a hint of doubt.

That, coupled with Harvard's annoyed expression and his steel pipe, were enough to mobilize the three people who just arrived.

"I don't really get what's happening, but I need you to drop that steel pipe leader!" Manimani demanded.

Harvard sighed, and finally dropped the steel pipe.

"Mikey, go get that man lying beside Harvard!" Carl instructed.

Mikey carefully went over to Harvard's side.

As he bended over to grab the man, Harvard's kick swerved upward aiming right on Mikey's stomach.

Fortunately, Mikey managed to dodge at the last second due to his natural fast reaction and body control.

"Harvard...?" Mikey got into his fighting pose as Harvard picks his steel pipe up again.

"Manimani, Zhang! Help Mikey restrain Harvard. Subdue him if necessary," Carl quietly said.

Manimani and Zhang gave a short nod as they ran over to Harvard.

Harvard was now surrounded by his 3 teammates.

"I don't know what's going on, but I don't want any trouble," Zhang said to Harvard.

"Harvard, drop that steel pipe. I'm warning you," said Manimani.

"..." Mikey stayed quiet, his fighting pose maintained.

...

...

...

After some very long seconds, Harvard finally spoke up, "Try me."

Mikey went first, his fist aiming at Harvard's stomach.

Harvard dodged him as his steel pipe swerved to hit Zhang who's coming from behind him.

"Uugh!" Zhang grunted in pain as the steel pipe hit his side.

"Harvard!" Manimani yelled as she tried to kick Harvard.

Harvard dodged again and was about to hit Manimani's side with his steel pipe as Mikey suddenly came from behind Harvard and restrained him.

With his arms locking Harvard's torso, Mikey pulled him back.

Due to Mikey's height, Harvard was currently lifted a few centimeters off the ground.

Manimani rushed over and quickly tore the steel pipe from Harvard's hand.

She also put handcuffs on him to make sure he can't attack anymore.

"It's over, mister!" she said to Harvard as she turned back to check on Zhang just as quick as she came.

Mikey, relieved, let his guard down for a second.

Just then, Harvard tried to kick Mikey back.

"Mikey focus!" Carl yelled.

Mikey immediately let go of Harvard, swiftly pulled up behind him and, with one fell swoop, knocked him out.

The unconscious Harvard immediately fell, but is caught by Mikey.

Relieve washed over Carl as his legs buckled and he fell down himself.

Looks like his body finally gave up.

The last thing he could hear was Manimani screaming his name.

...

...

...

Carl woke up in a hospital room.

"You're awake?" a familiar voice called out from beside him, it was his eldest brother, Alfred.

"Elder brother...?" Carl called out sluggishly.

Alfred gave a nod, "Do you know why you're here?"

Carl tried to think back and remembered Harvard's madness.

"H-Harvard, what happened to him?" Carl asked, worried.

"Don't worry, he was just knocked out by your other teammate. No other external injuries were found, it's almost a miracle," his brother answered.

"How is he now? Will he be punished...?"

"Hm, it seems like his higher-ups will give him some sentences for going off alone and badly injuring a key person in the case," his brother calmly told him, "but, all of the other people he injured confessed that they attacked first, all of them just lost."

"So, it's really self-defense?" Carl asked.

"Yes, it seems so. The only injuries he caused because of his own agenda, were to the man who was the key suspect and leader of the crime organization that used the building as their base of operation and to his teammates, including you," explained his brother.

"But," Alfred continued, "none of the injuries he caused were life-threatening, case in point, the worst injury you got is a cracked left upper arm, and to the man, quite a bit of cracked and broken bones."

"He also caused injuries on your, the man's, and one of your teammate's stomachs, but none of it was life-threatening," Alfred concluded his explanation.

"I see..." Carl said as he quietly digest all of the information.

"Keeping a lion and disguising it as a cat is quite dangerous, sometimes it causes this sort of unexpected trouble, but the benefits it gives to the Police organization are also immense. It could even be said that this sort of trouble is just a small price to pay for all of its given benefits," Alfred continued, "The city has never been this peaceful in years."

Carl listened quietly.

"He didn't want to hurt you nor your other teammate, Carl. Trust me, I already had the chance to spoke to him for a lengthy while," Alfred puts a hand on Carl's shoulder.

"As for the man though, he was quite fortunate that your partner still wants to be on the side of the law, not against it."

"He still has use for it, you mean?" Carl asked with a painful smile.

"I don't have an answer to that, maybe you should ask your partner about it. Although, I doubt that, at this point in time, he knows the answer himself," Alfred pats Carl's head and gives him a soft smile, "Be there for him, why don't you? I know you could never leave him alone."

Carl clenched the blanket tightly.

"Harvard Marks could be the one to greatly alter Broadstone. As Oxfords, we will continue to be watching over him," Alfred said as he began to get up.

"...for the Oxford's sake?" Carl asked, almost bitterly.

His brother gave a smile and said, "A lion who obediently follows his owner, is nothing more than a cat. Harm his owner though..."

Somehow, in Carl's eyes, his brother's smile seemed terrifying.

The day is turning dark as Carl said farewell to his 3 teammates, Manimani, Zhang, and Mikey who came to visit him in his hospital room.

Zhang's injury was pretty light and had already healed fully, maybe Harvard really held back against them after all.

Carl too, aside from his cracked upper arm bones, all of his other injuries were healing rapidly.

"What did the doctor say?" Manimani asked.

"He said that I'm actually able to be discharged already, but my family wanted me to at least stay for another 3 days, jut to be on the safe side," Carl explained.

"Gee, your people sound great!" Manimani said with a smile.

"Yeah, we're a tight-knit family," Carl gave a wry laugh.

They had a pretty nice converstation.

The 3 were visiting after all of the 'Harvard caused' paperworks were done, and stayed for about an hour.

It seemed like Harvard just acted like his usual self back in their office, much to their chagrin.

Harvard didn't tell them anything, or even if he was sorry.

He did, however, bought Zhang lunch today, which was a very rare occurence.

Maybe that's his way of apologizing, Mikey suggested.

Zhang, reluctant at first, soon maximized Harvard's offer and bought lunch enough for the other 2 as well, much to Harvard's chagrin.

Carl laughed at their story, and briefly wondered when he'll be able to talk to Harvard again, and how'll their conversation flow after this incident.

After the 3 left, Harvard immediately visited him.

"I thought they'd never left," Harvard said.

"You were waiting for them to leave? Why?" Carl asked.

Harvard awkwardly scratched his hair and said, "Explanation, I thought I owe YOU at least that much."

Harvard seated himself on the chair beside Carl's bed.

"So yeah, about your injuries..." Harvard started.

"My bad."

Carl waited to hear Harvard's continuation, but it seemed that there was no continuaton.

"Wait, that's it?" Carl asked baffled, "Where's the explanation?"

"Yeah, maybe I changed my mind," Harvard gave a joking smile.

"Don't joke around!" admonished Carl, still he's kind of happy to see Harvard back to his usual self.

"...10 years ago, my mom was killed by Clown," Harvard began.

Yes, Carl knew about that.

"The man I was trying to get info out of? 10 years ago, he was the one giving out hit lists to Clown."

"Huh? But, Clown was a serial murderer, not a hitman," Carl said confused.

"On the cover that is, I have information that suggested Clown actually took requests from big corporations," Harvard said serious.

"W-wait, are we alright with talking about this stuff here?" Carl looked to the surveillance camera on the corner of the room.

"Don't worry, I talked with your brother. This hospital belongs to the Oxford right? He'll be able to do something about it, besides, it's not really super-secret anymore. I heard the higher-ups plan to release this info to the masses soon, since Clown's long dead," Harvard calmly explained.

"A-alright, then please, continue."

"During the course of my investigation into Clown, I met the 'Hart' mother and daughter. The mother told me about her divorced husband being a possible carrier linking Clown to the bigshots."

"Though she said 'possible', her demeanor showed that she was sure of it," Harvard said while thinking back on the mother-daughter duo.

"Next, I researched into her husband's past and current whereabouts, and, lo and behold, turns out now he's the leader of a crime organization right here in Broadstone," Harvard eyed Carl meaningfully.

Carl doesn't need further explanation, he know that the divorced husband was the man from the building.

"So, it was all connected to your mother?" Carl asked after some time thinking.

"Everything, is connected to my mom. Everything I do is for her," Harvard answered, his eyes directly locking into Carl's.

"I admit, I lost control," Harvard remembered the state Carl was in, coughing up blood and crying on the ground. Something inside him hurted, "So, my bad."

Carl's right hand slowly reached up to the top of Harvard's hair, and he gently pat him.

"Next time, Harvard, we'll handle it together," Carl spoke gently.

Harvard made an expression like a sad and guilty kitty, making Carl smile a bit, "There, there."

As the youngest of the Oxford siblings, Carl only had older siblings, so he had always wanted to have a younger sibling.

When he met Harvard and, subsequently, as they got closer, Harvard's existence felt like the younger brother he had never had but always wanted to have.

Sometimes Harvard made him angry, other times he made him happy.

Sometimes Carl couldn't take his eyes from Harvard lest he'll make trouble, and sometimes Carl couldn't help but to depend on Harvard.

Being with Harvard was as frustrating as it was fun.

Carl both adore and admire Harvard, but deep in his heart, there was a sense of uncertainty and fear as well.

Carl knew Harvard so well, he fears himself getting too close to the darkness inside Harvard.

A deep, black, unending darkness.

It could consume Carl whole if it so wishes to.

He briefly wondered, what he means to Harvard.

And, if the time comes when the darkness inside Harvard is unleashed, would their bond endure?

------

Author's note: if you read this far, thank you!!

Also, before you ask, "Clown's dead?"

Yes, I headcanon (for this fic) that they're already dead, since at the end of the 'Concept Image Trailer', Harvard said that he wants to meet Clown in DecaSim.

That raises the question: "Why not just meet him in real life?" Unless he CAN'T.

[ajsbookreviews]

Angels and Demons Book Review

Angels & Demons

Author: Dan Brown

Description: When a world renowned scientist is found brutally murdered in a Swiss research facility, a Harvard professor, Robert Langdon, is summoned to identify the mysterious symbol seared onto the dead man's chest. His baffling conclusion: it is the work of the Illuminati, a secret brotherhood presumed extinct for nearly four hundred years - reborn to continue their bitter vendetta against their sworn enemy, the Catholic church. 

Rating: ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

WARNING! Medium spoilers ahead. It’s difficult not to broach things that occurred without spoiling, but the context is relevant for my points to get across. 

Review: It’s been a long time since I last read a Dan Brown book, but I remember vividly being completely in awe of how amazing it was. However, Angels & Demons was… a different experience. 

The Robert Langdon movie adaptations have always fascinated me. To say that I’ve watched Angels & Demons at least 20 times is an understatement, being as it is my favourite out of the three releases. Maybe that was my misstake. Maybe Dan Brown books are just meant to be read without any previous knowledge, the surprise factor being key to the whole experience. Maybe my subconscious expectations were too high. 

The storyline of Angels & Demons is incredible, mixing the intricacies and mysteries of Christianity with calculated, dangerous science. The thing about new science and technology however, is that it gets outdated fast. Many of the things mentioned that are ”impossible” are practically child’s play nowadays. Maybe not everybody knows about antimatter, but if you study science in High School you’ve got to at least have heard of it. Additionally, it’s ridiculous that computers can’t make ambigrams! Or, from a writer’s perspective, that there will never be a time in the future where ambigrams will be very easy to procure. I’m sure Dan Brown meant this book to be based in the year 2000, but, personally, it threw me completely off the loop that it was so profoundly based on ”new impossible technology” that didn’t hold up in the real world. 

Another thing I found quite annoying, even more so than the previous point, was the constant media presence and its main characters. I did not like the story’s angle from their perspective. It was quite boring and, of course after seeing how they did it in the movie, pretty unnecessary the quantity of pages it got. The journalist was a horrid character, not likeable in the least, and the camerawoman, who seemed to be the only one who caught my interest, fell flat halfway through. 

Remaining characters were quite bland as well. Langdon lacked charisma, Olivetti was dislikable but then grew on me and Richter seemed for far too long like a side-side-side character that didn’t really culminate in something truly relevant. Yet Vittoria and Chartrand were great. 

Although, nothing beats the awfully written Hassasin. Why was it necessary to make him a sexual predator? Was it truly relevant for the plot? It certainly doesn’t further it, rather it drives from it and loses it’s focus. Also – and maybe it’s just me – but him being Muslim was a weird trait. There was not any true significance to it other than make him brown-skinned and giving him an accent. Why would a Muslim man work for the Illuminati? Wasn’t he religious himself? If not, then why make a big deal of him being Muslim? And if he was, why would he help a satanic group that actively denounces God himself? I’d understand if he was just ”doing a job”, not really caring for who contracted him, but it’s written like he almost worships the brotherhood. It just… did not sit right with me. 

Which leads me to the Camarlengo’s speech when he broke conclave… I have never read such religious propaganda in a literature novel before and my eyes rolled so far back it hurt my skull. Yes, it’s the year 2000, but please make it at least seem believable. There’s absolutely no way that the other Cardinal’s would just go along with a Camarlengo breaking conclave, having a 10 minute speech and on top of that bring media presence, who were reporting everything LIVE, into conclave! The previously reserved, mature Camarlengo completely blew his cover for the reader. It became much too obvious that he was involved, thus the later plot twist had no impact. It felt so forced, with Dan Brown writing over and over again how amazing, brilliant, smart and valiant the Camarlengo was for standing up, all from different perspectives to ensure unanimity. 

What had been a solid 6 in my mind plummeted to a generous 3 out of 10. 

Nevertheless, one of the few things that holds this book up is Dan Brown’s writing style. I understand it’s not for everybody, but it is for me. The quick pace, the change of perspective… I like it. However, the action scenes were not well planned nor well written. They were messy, hard to follow and sometimes made absolutely no sense. For example, the fact that Vittoria didn’t go with Langdon to help Cardinal Guidera when he was branded but instead chose to wander around the church. Yes, she saw a man literally being burned to death and instead took a stroll around to see what else was going on. Langdon immediately ran to help, yet she didn’t. Besides being lazy writing, it felt completely out of character for her. 

Lastly, the ending. I… What a way to really nail this book in its grave. It was bad. Too convoluted and took away too much of the significance of the plot throughout. There was no gratification, no satisfaction to it. After everything that happened, it all boiled down to… a miscommunication? Are you for real? 

There’s not much left to say. I can’t with good conscience recommend this book, for its adaptation is far superior. All of the incredible aspects are well reflected in the movie and the insufferable ones thankfully omitted. Maybe I shouldn’t have read the book after watching the movie. Nonetheless, I’m sure I still would’ve found the movie much more enjoyable either way. 

[aulel-process]

My Week of Radical Transparency at a Chinese Business Seminar

“In transgressing the normal rules of social decorum, the teaching assistant set the tone for the rest of the class: This was a place where we were not only allowed but expected to be fully transparent...

Ray Dalio, Bridgewater's founder, had built his company around the idea of “radical transparency” and frequently evangelized for its adoption in other companies. Yet the notion of constantly giving your coworkers no-holds-barred feedback was considered so outlandish that Bridgewater was sometimes called a cult. For all our pretensions of being straight shooters, Americans don't really have the stomach for it. At least at the office...

Yet Chen's so-called improvement in the class left me unsettled. I couldn't help but think that, had those criticisms been leveled in the US, they would have felt tinged with sexism, and would have been received that way. Why shouldn't she command a room? Why shouldn't she wear the earrings she wanted to wear? We were forcing her to get a likability makeover of the sort that stifles women everywhere...

For all our obsession with self-help books and motivational videos, Americans often emphasize “feeling good” about ourselves; we pull off this delicate act by redefining our flaws as something to be embraced. Self-help exists to uplift. It traffics in empowering messages. It tells us that our only flaw is negativity. We must put positive energy out in the world, or celebrate our inner goddess.In China, the message is bleaker, but also more bracing: Of course you are flawed, and of course you want to fix those flaws. Suggestions to lose weight, comments on physical appearance, gender stereotypes, discussions of net worth, are not only commonplace, they're considered motivating exhortations. There's no expectation that society will change, so the responsibility is on you to get with the program.

Think your husband is having an affair with a younger woman? Hire a mistress dispeller to gain the woman's confidence or bribe her to break up the relationship. Aren't pretty enough? Get plastic surgery. Your parents are poor migrant workers without a hukou, a residency permit that allows you to access public benefits like school or health care in Beijing or Shanghai? Tough luck. Go out and make some money to buy your way in. There is no reinterpreting these facts. Competition is brutal, and the market is cruel...

Of course, viewing life as a series of market interactions—the labor market, the education market, the marriage market—and seeking to maximize your value within these markets exacts an emotional toll. I know because, to a certain extent, that was how I was raised. My parents put pressure on me to win music competitions, get into a top-ranked university, get a prestigious job. If I failed to do so, they seemed to believe, the world would look down on me. Early on in the course, one of the teaching assistants pointed out that in an exercise about our identities, I had listed things that I do or had done—gone to Harvard, worked as a Google engineer—and not things that I am. I brushed her off at the time, but she had touched a nerve. I was both a child of America and my parents' daughter. The American side of me said that my identity is intrinsic, independent of others. The Chinese side of me said that my identity exists as the sum total of others' perception...

She was arguing that the choice was neither to blindly follow my dreams nor to blindly chase financial security. Rather, there was a third path, one that would require creativity but might ultimately reconcile all my contradictory desires.”

____________________

A brilliant article that resonates so hard with me. I was considering the messaging behind the BakuDeku ship as one that is reflective of Chinese upbringing - Deku starts out as a worthless piece of shit who deserves to get his ass handed to him and Bakugo is going to tough love beat him until he stops being a worthless piece of shit. When Deku becomes the hero he dreams of being, all of Bakugo’s “tough love” (*cough* abuse) is justified. (Chinese cultures use shame as a method of social control: ”If you don’t get into Harvard, you will disgrace our family, we won’t be able to show our faces in public, and you should just die from shame. You’re either the best or you’re worthless.”)

( doujin )

When I first created this alter-ego, online moniker AULEL, the intention was to hide it from anyone I knew in real life, because it was to allow me to be the person I felt I couldn’t be due to various pressures and expectations. It was so I could liberate myself to make *anything*. Show what I’m making now to my MoMa PS1, award winning hoity toity architecture professors and they would laugh in my face. And that’s exactly what I wanted. Because I feel if I can do that, if I can embrace and outright celebrate what I feel ashamed about, then I’ll be ok with myself. I may not understand the stigma of embracing gayness in a straight world, but I understand how hard it is to not bow down to the one hierarchy I care most about, the one that defines my worth as an artist, the hierarchy that says I am legitimate if I aspire to stand next to Picasso in the canon, but I’m worthless if all I want to do is make anime porn for anime porn’s sake. 

The American in me says my value is intrinsic - hence where I forward the personal definition of value in art: “if it’s interesting to you, it’s good.” It isn’t the art gallery, critic, curator, dealer, buyer, audience, price tag, history that determines the value of the work of art. It is you, the artist. Don’t disempower yourself by willingly handing over what you deem valuable. Don’t let someone else decide that for you. You are not flawed, if is not you who needs to bend to the world, it is the world that needs to bend to you.

But my Chinese upbringing identity tells me I should spin my anime porn art as “pop surrealism” because that is my ticket to acceptance in the canon - that is the route to MoMa, Christie’s, Centre Pompidou, to fucking making art history. And if I have that, then I am valid. 

Mark Manson has a brilliant article on the ethical dilemma this poses:

“Or worse, we feel entitled to be extraordinary. When in reality, it’s just not viable or likely. For every Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, there are 10 million scrubs stumbling around parks playing pickup games… and losing. For every Picasso or DaVinci there have been about a billion drooling idiots eating Play-Doh and slapping around fingerpaints. And for every Leo Motherfucking Tolstoy, there’s a lot of, well, me, scribbling and playing at writer.

The Tyranny of a Culture of Exceptionalism:

So here’s the problem. I would argue that we have this expectation (or this entitlement) more today than any other time in history. And the reason is because of the nature of our technology and economic privilege.

Having the internet, Google, Facebook, YouTube and access to 500+ channels of television is amazing. We have access to more information than any other time in history.But our attention is limited. There’s no way we can process the tidal waves of information flowing through the internet at any given time. 

Therefore the only ones that break through and catch our attention are the truly exceptional pieces of information. The 99.999th percentile.

All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The scariest threats. Non-stop.Our lives today are filled with information coming from the extremes of the bell curve, because in the media that’s what gets eyeballs and the eyeballs bring dollars. That’s it. Yet the vast majority of life continues to reside in the middle.

It’s my belief that this flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that “exceptional” is the new normal. And since all of us are rarely exceptional, we all feel pretty damn insecure and desperate to feel “exceptional” all the time. So we must compensate. Some of us do this by cooking up get-rich-quick schemes. Others do it by taking off across the world to save starving babies in Africa. Others do it by excelling in school and winning every award. Others do it by shooting up a school. Others do it by trying to have sex with anything that talks and breathes.

There’s this kind of psychological tyranny in our culture today, a sense that we must always be proving that we’re special, unique, exceptional all the time, no matter what, only to have that moment of exceptionalism swept away in the current of all the other human greatness that’s constantly happening.

Yet we are not exposed to those years of practice. Or those hours of drab and failed footage. We’re merely exposed to each person’s absolute finest moment — possibly in their entire lives.

And then we watch this and forget about it within minutes. Because we’re onto the next thing. And then the next.

It’s an accepted part of our culture today to believe that we are all destined to do something truly extraordinary. Celebrities say it. Business tycoons say it. Politicians say it. Even Oprah says it. Each and every one of us can be extraordinary. We all deserve greatness.

The fact that this statement is inherently contradictory — after all, if everyone was extraordinary, then by definition, no one would be extraordinary — is missed by most people, and instead we eat the message up and ask for more. (More tacos, that is.)

Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve.

I find this sort of thinking to be dangerous. Once you accept the premise that a life is only worthwhile if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population sucks and is worthless. And ethically speaking, that is a really dark place to put yourself.”

I admire the true avant-garde because the true avant-garde is not posturing egalitarianism or forwarding social good as a means to “jerk off one’s ego” to be immortalized in art history. The true avant-garde has the courage to give the middle finger to the numerous value/status hierarchies and truly fucking believe it. I’m not there yet, maybe I’ll never be. But I take consolation in thinking that whatever this inner struggle is... it allows me to truly know what facing down stigma/shame feels like. And that maybe brings me intrinsically, truly closer to being the avant-garde that I admire.

( also why I admire Bakugo - for his “unhinged zero fucks given attitude”. punk rocker!!! )

( epic doujin )

[badartfriend]

There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”

On June 24, 2015, a year after completing her M.F.A. in creative writing, Dorland did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys, and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular but instead was part of a donation chain, coordinated by surgeons to provide a kidney to a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. There was some risk with the procedure, of course, and a recovery to think about, and a one-kidney life to lead from that point forward. But in truth, Dorland, in her 30s at the time, had been wanting to do it for years. “As soon as I learned I could,” she told me recently, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she and her husband were caring for their toddler son and elderly pit bull (and, in their spare time, volunteering at dog shelters and searching for adoptive families for feral cat litters). “It’s kind of like not overthinking love, you know?”

Several weeks before the surgery, Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where Dorland had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be.

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real. … Throughout my preparation for becoming a donor … I focused a majority of my mental energy on imagining and celebrating you.

The procedure went well. By a stroke of luck, Dorland would even get to meet the recipient, an Orthodox Jewish man, and take photos with him and his family. In time, Dorland would start posting outside the private group to all of Facebook, celebrating her one-year “kidneyversary” and appearing as a UCLA Health Laker for a Day at the Staples Center to support live-organ donation. But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

Larson and Dorland had met eight years earlier in Boston. They were just a few years apart in age, and for several years they ran in the same circles, hitting the same events, readings and workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. But in the years since Dorland left town, Larson had leveled up. Her short fiction was published, in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere; she took charge of GrubStreet’s annual Muse and the Marketplace literary conference, and as a mixed-race Asian American, she marshaled the group’s diversity efforts. She also joined a group of published writers that calls itself the Chunky Monkeys (a whimsical name, referring to breaking off little chunks of big projects to share with the other members). One of those writing-group members, Celeste Ng, who wrote “Little Fires Everywhere,” told me that she admires Larson’s ability to create “characters who have these big blind spots.” While they think they’re presenting themselves one way, they actually come across as something else entirely.

When it comes to literary success, the stakes can be pretty low — a fellowship or residency here, a short story published there. But it seemed as if Larson was having the sort of writing life that Dorland once dreamed of having. After many years, Dorland, still teaching, had yet to be published. But to an extent that she once had a writing community, GrubStreet was it. And Larson was, she believed, a close friend.

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

Afterward, Dorland would wonder: If she really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?

They wouldn’t cross paths again until the following spring — a brief hello at A.W.P., the annual writing conference, where the subject of Dorland’s kidney went unmentioned. A month later, at the GrubStreet Muse conference in Boston, Dorland sensed something had shifted — not just with Larson but with various GrubStreet eminences, old friends and mentors of hers who also happened to be members of Larson’s writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. Barely anyone brought up what she’d done, even though everyone must have known she’d done it. “It was a little bit like, if you’ve been at a funeral and nobody wanted to talk about it — it just was strange to me,” she said. “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. On June 24, 2016, a Facebook friend of Dorland’s named Tom Meek commented on one of Dorland’s posts.

Sonya read a cool story about giving out a kidney. You came to my mind and I wondered if you were the source of inspiration?

Still impressed you did this.

Dorland was confused. A year earlier, Larson could hardly be bothered to talk about it. Now, at Trident bookstore in Boston, she’d apparently read from a new short story about that very subject. Meek had tagged Larson in his comment, so Dorland thought that Larson must have seen it. She waited for Larson to chime in — to say, “Oh, yes, I’d meant to tell you, Dawn!” or something like that — but there was nothing. Why would Sonya write about it, she wondered, and not tell her?

Six days later, she decided to ask her. Much as she had a year earlier, she sent Larson a friendly email, including one pointed request: “Hey, I heard you wrote a kidney-donation story. Cool! Can I read it?”

‘I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art.’

Ten days later, Larson wrote back saying that yes, she was working on a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation.” In her writing, she spun out a scenario based not on Dorland, she said, but on something else — themes that have always fascinated her. “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art,” Larson wrote.

Dorland wrote back within hours. She admitted to being “a little surprised,” especially “since we’re friends and you hadn’t mentioned it.” The next day, Larson replied, her tone a bit removed, stressing that her story was “not about you or your particular gift, but about narrative possibilities I began thinking about.”

But Dorland pressed on. “It’s the interpersonal layer that feels off to me, Sonya. … You seemed not to be aware of my donation until I pointed it out. But if you had already kicked off your fictional project at this time, well, I think your behavior is a little deceptive. At least, weird.”

Larson’s answer this time was even cooler. “Before this email exchange,” she wrote, “I hadn’t considered that my individual vocal support (or absence of it) was of much significance.”

Which, though it was shrouded in politesse, was a different point altogether. Who, Larson seemed to be saying, said we were such good friends?

For many years now, Dorland has been working on a sprawling novel, “Econoline,” which interweaves a knowing, present-day perspective with vivid, sometimes brutal but often romantic remembrances of an itinerant rural childhood. The van in the title is, she writes in a recent draft, “blue as a Ty-D-Bowl tablet. Bumbling on the highway, bulky and off-kilter, a junebug in the wind.” The family in the narrative survives on “government flour, canned juice and beans” and “ruler-long bricks of lard” that the father calls “commodities.”

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma. One small consolation was the way her mother modeled a certain perverse self-reliance, rejecting the judgments of others. Another is how her turbulent youth has served as a wellspring for much of her writing. She made her way out of Iowa with a scholarship to Scripps College in California, followed by divinity school at Harvard. Unsure of what to do next, she worked day jobs in advertising in Boston while dabbling in workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. When she noticed classmates cooing over Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping,” she picked up a copy. After inhaling its story of an eccentric small-town upbringing told with sensitive, all-seeing narration, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

At GrubStreet, Dorland eventually became one of several “teaching scholars” at the Muse conference, leading workshops on such topics as “Truth and Taboo: Writing Past Shame.” Dorland credits two members of the Chunky Monkeys group, Adam Stumacher and Chris Castellani, with advising her. But in hindsight, much of her GrubStreet experience is tied up with her memories of Sonya Larson. She thinks they first met at a one-off writing workshop Larson taught, though Larson, for her part, says she doesn’t remember this. Everybody at GrubStreet knew Larson — she was one of the popular, ever-present people who worked there. On nights out with other Grubbies, Dorland remembers Larson getting personal, confiding about an engagement, the death of someone she knew and plans to apply to M.F.A. programs — though Larson now says she shared such things widely. When a job at GrubStreet opened up, Larson encouraged her to apply. Even when she didn’t get it, everyone was so gracious about it, including Larson, that she felt included all the same.

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Now, as she read these strained emails from Larson — about this story of a kidney donation; her kidney donation? — Dorland wondered if everyone at GrubStreet had been playing a different game, with rules she’d failed to grasp. On July 15, 2016, Dorland’s tone turned brittle, even wounded: “Here was a friend entrusting something to you, making herself vulnerable to you. At least, the conclusion I can draw from your responses is that I was mistaken to consider us the friends that I did.”

Larson didn’t answer right away. Three days later, Dorland took her frustrations to Facebook, in a blind item: “I discovered that a writer friend has based a short story on something momentous I did in my own life, without telling me or ever intending to tell me (another writer tipped me off).” Still nothing from Larson.

Dorland waited another day and then sent her another message both in a text and in an email: “I am still surprised that you didn’t care about my personal feelings. … I wish you’d given me the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t interfere.” Yet again, no response.

The next day, on July 20, she wrote again: “Am I correct that you do not want to make peace? Not hearing from you sends that message.”

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”

Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”



Image



Sonya Larson in Massachussetts.Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Like Dawn Dorland, Sonya Larson understands life as an outsider. The daughter of a Chinese American mother and white father, she was brought up in a predominantly white, middle-class enclave in Minnesota, where being mixed-race sometimes confused her. “It took me a while to realize the things I was teased about were intertwined with my race,” she told me over the phone from Somerville, where she lived with her husband and baby daughter. Her dark hair, her slight build: In a short story called “Gabe Dove,” which was picked for the 2017 edition of Best American Short Stories, Larson’s protagonist is a second-generation Asian American woman named Chuntao, who is used to men putting their fingers around her wrist and remarking on how narrow it is, almost as if she were a toy, a doll, a plaything.

Larson’s path toward writing was more conventional than Dorland’s. She started earlier, after her first creative-writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When she graduated, in 2005, she moved to Boston and walked into GrubStreet to volunteer the next day. Right away, she became one of a handful of people who kept the place running. In her fiction, Larson began exploring the sensitive subject matter that had always fascinated her: racial dynamics, and people caught between cultures. In time, she moved beyond mere political commentary to revel in her characters’ flaws — like a more socially responsible Philip Roth, though every bit as happy to be profane and fun and provocative. Even as she allows readers to be one step ahead of her characters, to see how they’re going astray, her writing luxuriates in the seductive power that comes from living an unmoored life. “He described thick winding streams and lush mountain gorges,” the rudderless Chuntao narrates in “Gabe Dove,” “obviously thinking I’d enjoy this window into my ancestral country, but in truth, I wanted to slap him.”

Chuntao, or a character with that name, turns up in many of Larson’s stories, as a sort of a motif — a little different each time Larson deploys her. She appears again in “The Kindest,” the story that Larson had been reading from at the Trident bookstore in 2016. Here, Chuntao is married, with an alcohol problem. A car crash precipitates the need for a new organ, and her whole family is hoping the donation will serve as a wake-up call, a chance for Chuntao to redeem herself. That’s when the donor materializes. White, wealthy and entitled, the woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism.

In early drafts of the story, the donor character’s name was Dawn. In later drafts, Larson ended up changing the name to Rose. While Dorland no doubt was an inspiration, Larson argues that in its finished form, her story moved far beyond anything Dorland herself had ever said or done. But in every iteration of “The Kindest,” the donor says she wants to meet Chuntao to celebrate, to commune — only she really wants something more, something ineffable, like acknowledgment, or gratitude, or recognition, or love.

Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”

They aren’t entirely equal, however. While Chuntao is the story’s flawed hero, Rose is more a subject of scrutiny — a specimen to be analyzed. The study of the hidden motives of privileged white people comes naturally to Larson. “When you’re mixed-race, as I am, people have a way of ‘confiding’ in you,” she once told an interviewer. What they say, often about race, can be at odds with how they really feel. In “The Kindest,” Chuntao sees through Rose from the start. She knows what Rose wants — to be a white savior — and she won’t give it to her. (“So she’s the kindest bitch on the planet?” she says to her husband.) By the end, we may no longer feel a need to change Chuntao. As one critic in the literary journal Ploughshares wrote when the story was published in 2017: “Something has got to be admired about someone who returns from the brink of death unchanged, steadfast in their imperfections.”

For some readers, “The Kindest” is a rope-a-dope. If you thought this story was about Chuntao’s redemption, you’re as complicit as Rose. This, of course, was entirely intentional. Just before she wrote “The Kindest,” Larson helped run a session on race in her graduate program that became strangely contentious. “Many of the writers who identified as white were quite literally seeing the racial dynamics of what we were discussing very differently from the people of color in the room,” she said. “It was as if we were just simply talking past one another, and it was scary.” At the time, she’d been fascinated by “the dress” — that internet meme with a photo some see as black and blue and others as white and gold. Nothing interests Larson more than a thing that can be seen differently by two people, and she saw now how no subject demonstrates that better than race. She wanted to write a story that was like a Rorschach test, one that might betray the reader’s own hidden biases.

When reflecting on Chuntao, Larson often comes back to the character’s autonomy, her nerve. “She resisted,” she told me. Chuntao refused to become subsumed by Rose’s narrative. “And I admire that. And I think that small acts of refusal like that are things that people of color — and writers of color — in this country have to bravely do all the time.”

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The writing world seemed more suspicious to her now. At around the time of her kidney donation, there was another writer, a published novelist, who announced a new book with a protagonist who, in its description, sounded to her an awful lot like the one in “Econoline” — not long after she shared sections of her work in progress with him. That author’s book hasn’t been published, and so Dorland has no way of knowing if she’d really been wronged, but this only added to her sense that the guard rails had fallen off the profession. Beyond unhindered free expression, Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

‘I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma.’

By summer’s end, she and Sonya had forged a fragile truce. “I value our relationship and I regret my part in these miscommunications and misunderstandings,” Larson wrote on Aug. 16, 2016. Not long after, Dorland Googled “kidney” and “Sonya Larson” and a link turned up.

The story was available on Audible — an audio version, put out by a small company called Plympton. Dorland’s dread returned. In July, Larson told her, “I’m still working on the story.” Now here it was, ready for purchase.

She went back and forth about it, but finally decided not to listen to “The Kindest.” When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

So she didn’t click. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.”

Dorland could keep ‘‘The Kindest” out of her life for only so long. In August 2017, the print magazine American Short Fiction published the short story. She didn’t buy a copy. Then in June 2018, she saw that the magazine dropped its paywall for the story. The promo and opening essay on American Short Fiction’s home page had startled her: a photograph of Larson, side-by-side with a shot of the short-fiction titan Raymond Carver. The comparison does make a certain sense: In Carver’s story “Cathedral,” a blind man proves to have better powers of perception than a sighted one; in “The Kindest,” the white-savior kidney donor turns out to need as much salvation as the Asian American woman she helped. Still, seeing Larson anointed this way was, to say the least, destabilizing.

Then she started to read the story. She didn’t get far before stopping short. Early on, Rose, the donor, writes a letter to Chuntao, asking to meet her.

I myself know something of suffering, but from those experiences I’ve acquired both courage and perseverance. I’ve also learned to appreciate the hardship that others are going through, no matter how foreign. Whatever you’ve endured, remember that you are never alone. … As I prepared to make this donation, I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life. I withstood the pain by imagining and rejoicing in YOU.

Here, to Dorland’s eye, was an echo of the letter she’d written to her own recipient — and posted on her private Facebook group — rejiggered and reworded, yet still, she believed, intrinsically hers. Dorland was amazed. It had been three years since she donated her kidney. Larson had all that time to launder the letter — to rewrite it drastically or remove it — and she hadn’t bothered.

She showed the story’s letter to her husband, Chris, who had until that point given Larson the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh,” he said.

Everything that happened two years earlier, during their email melée, now seemed like gaslighting. Larson had been so insistent that Dorland was being out of line — breaking the rules, playing the game wrong, needing something she shouldn’t even want. “Basically, she’d said, ‘I think you’re being a bad art friend,’” Dorland told me. That argument suddenly seemed flimsy. Sure, Larson had a right to self-expression — but with someone else’s words? Who was the bad art friend now?

Before she could decide what to do, there came another shock. A few days after reading “The Kindest,” Dorland learned that the story was the 2018 selection for One City One Story, a common-reads program sponsored by the Boston Book Festival. That summer, some 30,000 copies of “The Kindest” would be distributed free all around town. An entire major U.S. city would be reading about a kidney donation — with Sonya Larson as the author.

This was when Dawn Dorland decided to push back — first a little, and then a lot. This wasn’t about art anymore; not Larson’s anyway. It was about her art, her letter, her words, her life. She shopped for a legal opinion: Did Larson’s use of that letter violate copyright law? Even getting a lawyer to look into that one little question seemed too expensive. But that didn’t stop her from contacting American Short Fiction and the Boston Book Festival herself with a few choice questions: What was their policy on plagiarism? Did they know they were publishing something that used someone else’s words? She received vague assurances they’d get back to her.

While waiting, she also contacted GrubStreet’s leadership: What did this supposedly supportive, equitable community have to say about plagiarism? She emailed the Bread Loaf writing conference in Vermont, where Larson once had a scholarship: What would they do if one of their scholars was discovered to have plagiarized? On privacy grounds, Bread Loaf refused to say if “The Kindest” was part of Larson’s 2017 application. But Dorland found more groups with a connection to Larson to notify, including the Vermont Studio Center and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.

When the Boston Book Festival told her they would not share the final text of the story, Dorland went a step further. She emailed two editors at The Boston Globe — wouldn’t they like to know if the author of this summer’s citywide common-reads short story was a plagiarist? And she went ahead and hired a lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, who agreed she had a claim — her words, her letter, someone else’s story. On July 3, 2018, Cohen sent the book festival a cease-and-desist letter, demanding they hold off on distributing “The Kindest” for the One City One Story program, or risk incurring damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act.

From Larson’s point of view, this wasn’t just ludicrous, it was a stickup. Larson had found her own lawyer, James Gregorio, who on July 17 replied that Dorland’s actions constitute “harassment, defamation per se and tortious interference with business and contractual relations.” Despite whatever similarities exist between the letters, Larson’s lawyer believed there could be no claim against her because, among other reasons, these letters that donors write are basically a genre; they follow particular conventions that are impossible to claim as proprietary. In July, Dorland’s lawyer suggested settling with the book festival for $5,000 (plus an attribution at the bottom of the story, or perhaps a referral link to a kidney-donor site). Larson’s camp resisted talks when they learned that Dorland had contacted The Globe.

‘This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story.'

In reality, Larson was pretty vulnerable: an indemnification letter in her contract with the festival meant that if Dorland did sue, she would incur the costs. What no one had counted on was that Dorland, in late July, would stumble upon a striking new piece of evidence. Searching online for more mentions of “The Kindest,” she saw something available for purchase. At first this seemed to be a snippet of the Audible version of the story, created a year before the American Short Fiction version. But in fact, this was something far weirder: a recording of an even earlier iteration of the story. When Dorland listened to this version, she heard something very different — particularly the letter from the donor.

Dorland’s letter:

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real.

Larson’s audio version of the story:

My own childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I wasn’t given an opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. But in adulthood that experience provided a strong sense of empathy. While others might desire to give to a family member or friend, to me the suffering of strangers is just as real.

“I almost fell off my chair,” Dorland said. “I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma. To me it was just bizarre.” It confirmed, in her eyes, that Larson had known she had a problem: She had altered the letter after Dorland came to her with her objections in 2016.

Dorland’s lawyer increased her demand to $10,000 — an amount Dorland now says was to cover her legal bills, but that the other side clearly perceived as another provocation. She also contacted her old GrubStreet friends — members of the Chunky Monkeys whom she now suspected had known all about what Larson was doing. “Why didn’t either of you check in with me when you knew that Sonya’s kidney story was related to my life?” she emailed the group’s founders, Adam Stumacher and Jennifer De Leon. Stumacher responded, “I have understood from the start this is a work of fiction.” Larson’s friends were lining up behind her.

In mid-August, Dorland learned that Larson had made changes to “The Kindest” for the common-reads program. In this new version, every similar phrase in the donor’s letter was reworded. But there was something new: At the end of the letter, instead of closing with “Warmly,” Larson had switched it to “Kindly.”

With that one word — the signoff she uses in her emails — Dorland felt trolled. “She thought that it would go to press and be read by the city of Boston before I realized that she had jabbed me in the eye,” Dorland said. (Larson, for her part, told me that the change was meant as “a direct reference to the title; it’s really as simple as that.”) Dorland’s lawyer let the festival know she wasn’t satisfied — that she still considered the letter in the story to be a derivative work of her original. If the festival ran the story, she’d sue.

This had become Sonya Larson’s summer of hell. What had started with her reaching heights she’d never dreamed of — an entire major American city as her audience, reading a story she wrote, one with an important message about racial dynamics — was ending with her under siege, her entire career in jeopardy, and all for what she considered no reason at all: turning life into art, the way she thought that any writer does.

Larson had tried working the problem. When, in June, an executive from the book festival first came to her about Dorland, Larson offered to “happily” make changes to “The Kindest.” “I remember that letter, and jotted down phrases that I thought were compelling, though in the end I constructed the fictional letter to suit the character of Rose,” she wrote to the festival. “I admit, however, that I’m not sure what they are — I don’t have a copy of that letter.” There was a moment, toward the end of July, when it felt as if she would weather the storm. The festival seemed fine with the changes she made to the story. The Globe did publish something, but with little impact.

Then Dorland found that old audio version of the story online, and the weather changed completely. Larson tried to argue that this wasn’t evidence of plagiarism, but proof that she’d been trying to avoid plagiarism. Her lawyer told The Globe that Larson had asked the audio publisher to make changes to her story on July 15, 2016 — in the middle of her first tense back-and-forth with Dorland — because the text “includes a couple sentences that I’d excerpted from a real-life letter.” In truth, Larson had been frustrated by the situation. “She seemed to think that she had ownership over the topic of kidney donation,” Larson recalled in an email to the audio publisher in 2018. “It made me realize that she is very obsessive.”

It was then, in August 2018, facing this new onslaught of plagiarism claims, that Larson stopped playing defense. She wrote a statement to The Globe declaring that anyone who sympathized with Dorland’s claims afforded Dorland a certain privilege. “My piece is fiction,” she wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.”

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson was accusing Dorland of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for Sonya,” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”

‘I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities.’

But Ng also says this wasn’t just about race; it was about art and friendship. Ng told me that Larson’s entire community believed Dorland needed to be stopped in her tracks — to keep an unreasonable writer from co-opting another writer’s work on account of just a few stray sentences, and destroying that writer’s reputation in the process. “This is not someone that I am particularly fond of,” Ng told me, “because she had been harassing my friend and a fellow writer. So we were quite exercised, I will say.”

Not that it mattered. Dorland would not stand down. And so, on Aug. 13, Deborah Porter, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, told Larson that One City One Story was canceled for the year. “There is seemingly no end to this,” she wrote, “and we cannot afford to spend any more time or resources.” When the Chunky Monkeys’ co-founder, Jennifer De Leon, made a personal appeal, invoking the white-savior argument, the response from Porter was like the slamming of a door. “That story should never have been submitted to us in the first place,” Porter wrote. “This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story. You owe us an apology.”

Porter then emailed Larson, too. “It seems to me that we have grounds to sue you,” she wrote to Larson. “Kindly ask your friends not to write to us.”

Here, it would seem, is where the conflict ought to end — Larson in retreat, “The Kindest” canceled. But neither side was satisfied. Larson, her reputation hanging by a thread, needed assurances that Dorland would stop making her accusations. Dorland still wanted Larson to explicitly, publicly admit that her words were in Larson’s story. She couldn’t stop wondering — what if Larson published a short-story collection? Or even a novel that spun out of “The Kindest?” She’d be right back here again.

On Sept. 6, 2018, Dorland’s lawyer raised her demand to $15,000, and added a new demand that Larson promise to pay Dorland $180,000 should she ever violate the settlement terms (which included never publishing “The Kindest” again). Larson saw this as an even greater provocation; her lawyer replied three weeks later with a lengthy litany of allegedly defamatory claims that Dorland had made about Larson. Who, he was asking, was the real aggressor here? How could anyone believe that Dorland was the injured party? “It is a mystery exactly how Dorland was damaged,” Larson’s new lawyer, Andrew Epstein, wrote. “My client’s gross receipts from ‘The Kindest’ amounted to $425.”

To Dorland, all this felt intensely personal. Someone snatches her words, and then accuses her of defamation too? Standing down seemed impossible now: How could she admit to defaming someone, she thought, when she was telling the truth? She’d come too far, spent too much on legal fees to quit. “I was desperate to recoup that money,” Dorland told me. She reached out to an arbitration-and-mediation service in California. When Andrew Epstein didn’t respond to the mediator, she considered suing Larson in small-claims court.

On Dec. 26, Dorland emailed Epstein, asking if he was the right person to accept the papers when she filed a lawsuit. As it happened, Larson beat her to the courthouse. On Jan. 30, 2019, Dorland and her lawyer, Cohen, were both sued in federal court, accused of defamation and tortious interference — that is, spreading lies about Larson and trying to tank her career.

There’s a moment in Larson’s short story “Gabe Dove” — also pulled from real life — where Chuntao notices a white family picnicking on a lawn in a park and is awed to see that they’ve all peacefully fallen asleep. “I remember going to college and seeing people just dead asleep on the lawn or in the library,” Larson told me. “No fear that harm will come to you or that people will be suspicious of you. That’s a real privilege right there.”

Larson’s biggest frustration with Dorland’s accusations was that they stole attention away from everything she’d been trying to accomplish with this story. “You haven’t asked me one question about the source of inspiration in my story that has to do with alcoholism, that has to do with the Chinese American experience. It’s extremely selective and untrue to pin a source of a story on just one thing. And this is what fiction writers know.” To ask if her story is about Dorland is, Larson argues, not only completely beside the point, but ridiculous. “I have no idea what Dawn is thinking. I don’t, and that’s not my job to know. All I can tell you about is how it prompted my imagination.” That also, she said, is what artists do. “We get inspired by language, and we play with that language, and we add to it and we change it and we recontextualize it. And we transform it.”

When Larson discusses “The Kindest” now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. “It’s like saying that ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about whales,” she said. As for owing Dorland a heads-up about the use of that donation, Larson becomes more indignant, stating that no artist has any such responsibility. “If I walk past my neighbor and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden, do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbor, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story? I just couldn’t disagree more.”

But this wasn’t a neighbor. This was, ostensibly, a friend.

“There are married writer couples who don’t let each other read each other’s work,” Larson said. “I have no obligation to tell anyone what I’m working on.”

By arguing what she did is standard practice, Larson is asking a more provocative question: If you find her guilty of infringement, who’s next? Is any writer safe? “I read Dawn’s letter and I found it interesting,” she told me. “I never copied the letter. I was interested in these words and phrases because they reminded me of the language used by white-savior figures. And I played with this language in early drafts of my story. Fiction writers do this constantly.”

This is the same point her friends argue when defending her to me. “You take a seed, right?” Adam Stumacher said. “And then that’s the starting point for a story. That’s not what the story is about.” This is where “The Kindest” shares something with “Cat Person,” the celebrated 2017 short story in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian that, in a recent essay in Slate, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claimed used elements of her life story. That piece prompted a round of outrage from Writer Twitter (“I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles,” the author Lauren Groff vented, “and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets”).

“The Kindest,” however, contains something that “Cat Person” does not: an actual piece of text that even Larson says was inspired by Dorland’s original letter. At some point, Larson must have realized that was the story’s great legal vulnerability. Did she ever consider just pulling it out entirely?

“Yeah, that absolutely was an option,” Larson said. “We could have easily treated the same moment in that story using a phone call, or some other literary device.” But once she made those changes for One City One Story, she said, the festival had told her the story was fine as is. (That version of “The Kindest” ended up in print elsewhere, as part of an anthology published in 2019 by Ohio University’s Swallow Press.) All that was left, she believes, was a smear campaign. “It’s hard for me to see what the common denominator of all of her demands has been, aside from wanting to punish me in some way.”

Dorland filed a counterclaim against Larson on April 24, 2020, accusing Larson of violating the copyright of her letter and intentional infliction of emotional distress — sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, weight loss “and several incidents of self-harm.” Dorland says she’d had some bouts of slapping herself, which dissipated after therapy. (This wasn’t her first lawsuit claiming emotional distress. A few years earlier, Dorland filed papers in small-claims court against a Los Angeles writing workshop where she’d taught, accusing the workshop of mishandling a sexual-harassment report she had made against a student. After requesting several postponements, she withdrew the complaint.) As for her new complaint against Larson, the judge knocked out the emotional-distress claim this past February, but the question of whether “The Kindest” violates Dorland’s copyrighted letter remains in play.

The litigation crept along quietly until earlier this year, when the discovery phase uncorked something unexpected — a trove of documents that seemed to recast the conflict in an entirely new way. There, in black and white, were pages and pages of printed texts and emails between Larson and her writer friends, gossiping about Dorland and deriding everything about her — not just her claim of being appropriated but the way she talked publicly about her kidney donation.

“I’m now following Dawn Dorland’s kidney posts with creepy fascination,” Whitney Scharer, a GrubStreet co-worker and fellow Chunky Monkey, texted to Larson in October 2015 — the day after Larson sent her first draft of “The Kindest” to the group. Dorland had announced she’d be walking in the Rose Bowl parade, as an ambassador for nondirected organ donations. “I’m thrilled to be part of their public face,” Dorland wrote, throwing in a few hashtags: #domoreforeachother and #livingkidneydonation.

Larson replied: “Oh, my god. Right? The whole thing — though I try to ignore it — persists in making me uncomfortable. … I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing. … Of course, I feel evil saying this and can’t really talk with anyone about it.”

“I don’t know,” Scharer wrote. “A hashtag seems to me like a cry for attention.”

“Right??” Larson wrote. “#domoreforeachother. Like, what am I supposed to do? DONATE MY ORGANS?”

Among her friends, Larson clearly explained the influence of Dorland’s letter. In January 2016, she texted two friends: “I think I’m DONE with the kidney story but I feel nervous about sending it out b/c it literally has sentences that I verbatim grabbed from Dawn’s letter on FB. I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to — that letter was just too damn good. I’m not sure what to do … feeling morally compromised/like a good artist but a shitty person.”

That summer, when Dorland emailed Larson with her complaints, Larson was updating the Chunky Monkeys regularly, and they were encouraging her to stand her ground. “This is all very excruciating,” Larson wrote on July 18, 2016. “I feel like I am becoming the protagonist in my own story: She wants something from me, something that she can show to lots of people, and I’m not giving it.”

“Maybe she was too busy waving from her floating thing at a Macy’s Day parade,” wrote Jennifer De Leon, “instead of, you know, writing and stuff.”

Others were more nuanced. “It’s totally OK for Dawn to be upset,” Celeste Ng wrote, “but it doesn’t mean that Sonya did anything wrong, or that she is responsible for fixing Dawn’s hurt feelings.”

“I can understand the anxiety,” Larson replied. “I just think she’s trying to control something that she doesn’t have the ability or right to control.”

“The first draft of the story really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn’t it?” Calvin Hennick wrote. “But Sonya didn’t publish that draft. … She created a new, better story that used Dawn’s Facebook messages as initial inspiration, but that was about a lot of big things, instead of being about the small thing of taking down Dawn Dorland.”

On Aug. 15, 2016 — a day before telling Dorland, “I value our relationship” — Larson wrote in a chat with Alison Murphy: “Dude, I could write pages and pages more about Dawn. Or at least about this particular narcissistic dynamic, especially as it relates to race. The woman is a gold mine!”

Later on, Larson was even more emboldened. “If she tries to come after me, I will FIGHT BACK!” she wrote Murphy in 2017. Murphy suggested renaming the story “Kindly, Dawn,” prompting Larson to reply, “HA HA HA.”

Dorland learned about the emails — a few hundred pages of them — from her new lawyer, Suzanne Elovecky, who read them first and warned her that they might be triggering. When she finally went through them, she saw what she meant. The Chunky Monkeys knew the donor in “The Kindest” was Dorland, and they were laughing at her. Everything she’d dreaded and feared about raising her voice — that so many writers she revered secretly dismissed and ostracized her; that absolutely no one except her own lawyers seemed to care that her words were sitting there, trapped inside someone else’s work of art; that a slew of people, supposedly her friends, might actually believe she’d donated an organ just for the likes — now seemed completely confirmed, with no way to sugarcoat it. “It’s like I became some sort of dark-matter mascot to all of them somehow,” she said.

But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that “The Kindest” was personal. “I think she wanted me to read her story,” Dorland said, “and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.”

Larson, naturally, finds this outrageous. “Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?” she said. “Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don’t care about Dawn.” All the gossiping about Dorland, now made public, would seem to put Larson into a corner. But many of the writer friends quoted in those texts and emails (those who responded to requests for comment) say they still stand behind her; if they were ridiculing Dorland, it was all in the service of protecting their friend. “I’m very fortunate to have friends in my life who I’ve known for 10, 20, over 30 years,” Larson told me. “I do not, and have never, considered Dawn one of them.”

What about the texts where she says that Dorland is behaving just like her character? Here, Larson chose her words carefully. “Dawn might behave like the character in my story,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that the character in my story is behaving like Dawn. I know she’s trying to work through every angle she can to say that I’ve done something wrong. I have not done anything wrong.”

In writing, plagiarism is a straight-up cardinal sin: If you copy, you’re wrong. But in the courts, copyright infringement is an evolving legal concept. The courts are continuously working out the moment when someone’s words cross over into property that can be protected; as with any intellectual property, the courts have to balance the protections of creators with a desire not to stifle innovation. One major help to Dorland, however, is the rights that the courts have given writers over their own unpublished letters, even after they’re sent to someone else. J.D. Salinger famously prevented personal letters from being quoted by a would-be biographer. They were his property, the courts said, not anyone else’s. Similarly, Dorland could argue that this letter, despite having made its way onto Facebook, qualifies.

Let’s say the courts agree that Dorland’s letter is protected. What then? Larson’s main defense may be that the most recent version of the letter in “The Kindest” — the one significantly reworded for the book festival — simply doesn’t include enough material from Dorland’s original to rise to the level of infringement. This argument is, curiously, helped by how Larson has always, when it has come down to it, acknowledged Dorland’s letter as an influence. The courts like it when you don’t hide what you’ve done, according to Daniel Novack, chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s committee on media law. “You don’t want her to be punished for being clear about where she got it from,” he said. “If anything, that helps people find the original work.”

Larson’s other strategy is to argue that by repurposing snippets of the letter in this story, it qualifies as “transformative use,” and could never be mistaken for the original. Arguing transformative use might require arguing that a phrase of Larson’s like “imagining and rejoicing in YOU” has a different inherent meaning from the phrase in Dorland’s letter “imagining and celebrating you.” While they are similar, Larson’s lawyer, Andrew Epstein, argues that the story overall is different, and makes the letter different. “It didn’t steal from the letter,” he told me, “but it added something new and it was a totally different narrative.”

Larson put it more bluntly to me: “Her letter, it wasn’t art! It was informational. It doesn’t have market value. It’s like language that we glean from menus, from tombstones, from tweets. And Dorland ought to know this. She’s taken writing workshops.”

Transformative use most often turns up in cases of commentary or satire, or with appropriation artists like Andy Warhol. The idea is not to have such strong copyright protections that people can’t innovate. While Larson may have a case, one potential wrinkle is a recent federal ruling, just earlier this year, against the Andy Warhol Foundation. An appeals court determined that Warhol’s use of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith as the basis for his own work of art was not a distinctive enough transformation. Whether Larson’s letter is derivative, in the end, may be up to a jury to decide. Dorland’s lawyer, meanwhile, can point to that 2016 text message of Larson’s, when she says she tried to reword the letter but just couldn’t. (“That letter was just too damn good.”)

“The whole reason they want it in the first place is because it’s special,” Dorland told me. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother.”

If anything, the letter, for Dorland, has only grown more important over time. While Larson openly wonders why Dorland doesn’t just write about her donation her own way — “I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities,” Larson told me — Dorland sometimes muses, however improbably, that because vestiges of her letter remain in Larson’s story, Larson might actually take her to court and sue her for copyright infringement if she published any parts of the letter. It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her.

Last year, as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group. “I know virtually all of them,” Dorland said. “It was just like seeing friends.”

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland’s name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat. Larson’s life had moved on in so many ways. She’d published another story. She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the importance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who’d branded her a plagiarist, watching her. “It really just freaks me out,” Larson said. “At times I’ve felt kind of stalked.”

Dorland remembers that moment, too, seeing Larson’s face fall, convinced she was the reason. There was, for lack of a better word, a connection. When I asked how she felt in that moment, Dorland was slow to answer. It’s not as if she meant for it to happen, she said. Still, it struck her as telling.

“To me? It seemed like she had dropped the facade for a minute. I’m not saying that — I don’t want her to feel scared, because I’m not threatening. To me, it seemed like she knew she was full of shit, to put it bluntly — like, in terms of our dispute, that she was going to be found out.”

Then Dorland quickly circled back and rejected the premise of the question. There was nothing strange at all, Dorland said, about her watching three different events featuring Larson. She was watching, she said, to conduct due diligence for her ongoing case. And, she added, seeing Larson there seemed to be working for her as a sort of exposure therapy — to defuse the hurt she still feels, by making Larson something more real and less imagined, to diminish the space that she takes up in her mind, in her life.

“I think it saves me from villainizing Sonya,” she wrote me later, after our call. “I proceed in this experience as an artist and not an adversary, learning and absorbing everything, making use of it eventually.”

Robert Kolker is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 2020, his book “Hidden Valley Road” became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club and a New York Times best seller. His last article for the magazine was about the legacy of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian World War II hero.

Correction: Oct. 6, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated the GrubStreet writing center's action after Dorland's initial questions about potential plagiarism. It did reply; it's not the case that she received no response. The article also misstated Dorland’s thoughts on what could happen if she loses the court case. Dorland said she fears that Larson would be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she publish her letter to the end recipient of the kidney donation chain. It is not the case that she said she fears that Larson might be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she write anything about organ donation.

[cherryusa]

welcome to town, TAG BOURBON!

JOB: DEPUTY AT THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT TRAITS: +DEPENDABLE, -IMPATIENT SECRET: Tag went into law enforcement because he wants to get his hands on the person who killed his high school sweetheart. They'd had the picture perfect romance and he'd been about one paycheck away from a ring when she'd been brutally murdered in a hit and run. Tag became self taught in a lot of skills because when he swore he was gonna find a way to track kill the person responsible. He even got so close as to track them to their apartment but was interrupted by the Police Department that not only brought him no justice, but let them get away on what they deemed to be a lack of evidence.

“Do you really think Lux was murdered?“

Tag had to admit that it came with a bit of relief that he wasn't the only one to instantly assume something more sinister was afoot when he heard that Lux Lewis was dead. While it certainly wasn't totally unheard of for young adults her age to go and take their own lives, there were too many things about this case that didn't add up. Not that he could share that in the case of this interview, but he considered himself well versed in seeing things the Cherry Police Department didn't. The lazy bastards. "I don't really know how many times they've gotta rule it out, but all the evidence is not pointing towards a murder. This was a pretty cut and dry suicide and I think the sooner the kids in this town accept that, the easier it's going to be for this family to move on."

“How do you feel about Harvard Hargrove’s expansion of the Boardwalk? Do you really think it’s going to help the town grow, or is he gutting everything you love about Cherry?“

If it wasn't for the little reminders, Tag set for himself every day that Harvard Hargrove had this town under his thumb, he swore he'd have burst into his home without any sort of probable cause just for giving him the creeps. Harvard was the kind of person that made you want to cross the street if he was coming towards you and everything he did screamed suspect in Tag's eyes. "I guess from where I'm standing there's nothing wrong with growth. But I don't know that I believe the kind of growth Hargrove wants for this town, and the kind of growth I'm talking about are the same thing. If your only motivation for growing a town is to put more money in your pocket you're not exactly doing it for the right reasons. But what the fuck do I care right? I'm just here to help protect a place that's got very little left for me."

"Did you vote for Sheriff Teller in the last election? Or do you think he should be replaced next year?"

"I'm surprised a column like this would bother getting political..." Tag started for only a moment before remembering just who this girls father was. Of course if things were going to get political it'd be about this. Luckily for Tag, he didn't have a bad thing to say about Teller for the most part. "I did actually. I appreciate what he stands for. Namely that he doesn't put up with the bullshit from the Cherry Police Department. I think he was a great choice for the Sheriff and I'm pretty honored to get to be working with him. I feel like there's a lot I can learn from him." Which wasn't a total lie. Tag may have learned what he needed to from not so creditable sources, but as far as doing things by the book? He had some room to grow and was fairly certain Tom Teller was going to be his best bet. "If they replace that man with just about anyone else, that's not the only Deputy they're going to lose. Respect is earned in that position. I don't see anyone from the Police Department cutting it in that department."

[until-we-fall-in-love]

la volpe

Pairing: Ransom Drysdale x Reader, slight Marta Cabrera x Reader

Summary: You and Ransom have a complicated relationship.

Warnings: Smut, slightly dub-con because Ransom is an asshole, slightly unhealthy relationship, mild bdsm, rough sex.

If you are under 18, you should not be reading this!

A/N: hello everyone!! no one asked for this and yet here it is!! i hate ransom!! but alas, now i have this smutty fic of him so lmao enjoy?? also i’m physically incapable of writing ana de armas and not making it somehow romantic im so sorry i just have too big of a crush on her and marta

let me know what you thought of this!!!

***

The musical clinking of glasses and cutlery is soft against the piano twinkling in the background. The lights are low and glowing, candles and sparkling, dim-lit chandeliers overhead. The restaurant is dark and lavish, velvet and smelling rich and spiced and enticing. Wine is placed before you, plum and bitter berry tasting. It’s fine and expensive and you swirl it delicately in your sparkling glass. 

Your eyes flicker up to the man across from you, seated casually, leaning back in his chair with broad shoulders covered in a black, finely knit sweater. It’s expensive, you can tell simply by looking at it. Designer, you’re sure. You know his shoes have blood red bottoms. He drips wealth still, smug as ever, handsome as ever. 

“You look good.” He says with a smile curling at his lips. 

You take a sip of wine. Your back is straight, the black, cashmere turtle-neck clinging to your figure. The delicate, ruby earrings glint under the low light, your hair pulled back elegantly. 

Of course you look good.

“What do you want, Ransom?” You ask, setting the glass down carefully. You study him with cutting eyes, skeptical, but composed. 

“Can’t I take my girl out to a nice dinner?” He asks, his eyes glimmering. 

“Haven’t been your girl in months.” You counter, drum your crimson colored nails against your glass. You grow impatient, sigh lightly and glance away from him.  

“C’mon, don’t be like that, princess.” He croons all low and soft, leaning forward onto the table. You like when his eyes flash like that, sincere for you. Just on the right side of desperate. He deserves it, since it’s been months since you’d last heard from him. 

You’re actually certain he has a new girl on his arm now. 

And you want to make him squirm a little. 

You roll your eyes at him, at the way he tries to butter up to you with the nice dinner and a few compliments. You know he wants something. He always wants something and the gleam in his eyes is too sharp and pretty. Greedy, greedy man that would gorge himself on you, on this life, if you’d let him. 

You bite your lip, watch as his eyes track the movement like a predator. 

He at least needs to work for it.

“I could be doing a thousand other things right now, Ransom. Why am I out to dinner with you?” You ask instead, your lashes fluttering prettily as your eyes land on him once more. Your features are aloof and cold and haughty. It makes his blood boil, you can see it in the curl of his lips. 

He huffs lightly, “Oh, yeah, busy Harvard graduate student, isn’t that right?” His voice is just shy of a sneer when he asks, “How’s the dissertation going, kitten?” 

“Well, thank you.” 

You look down your nose at him as his own eyes settle into a glare. The blue of his eyes burns and smolders, bright and sparking on you. Your gazes are as sharp as knives, gleaming and ready to gut each other. 

You wait until he relents, takes this loss to hopefully get a win. He lowers his eyes with another breath, concedes. 

He’ll give you another compliment, maybe reach across the table to touch you. Then he’ll ask you for what he needs. 

“I am glad to hear that.” He says smoothly, “I know how much it means to you. I’m sure it’s incredible.” And he offers you an earnest look, the one you’re sure he’s used to get into plenty of girl’s panties. 

And like clockwork, he reaches over to brush his fingers against yours, which are gently resting on the stem of your wine glass. 

He gives you a smile like that’s supposed to work.

You roll your eyes, pull your hand from his.

You watch the heat and anger rush over his features and wonder if he’s going to make a scene. Now that would be fun. You wonder if you’ll get to toss your wine all over that expensive sweater, storm out only for him to follow hot on your trails. And he’ll drag you to the car and you’ll scream at each other until you’re kissing and your nails are biting into his skin and he’s trying to teach you a lesson in manners—

If your cheeks flush, he doesn’t notice, because he snaps, “Are you always such a brat?” 

You smile for the first time that evening. 

“No, you just bring out the worst in me.” You quip back before taking another slow, savored sip of wine.

He scoffs, “I could say the same of you.” 

“Then why am I here?” 

Now he does soften a little, “I want you to come home with me for my grandfather’s birthday party.” 

Your brows furrow and you settle back into your chair, skeptical. “Don’t you have a girlfriend right now? Why not just bring her?” You ask, even though you already know the answer to your own question.

“You know you’re the only one I bring home to my psychotic family.” He says and now he captures your hand with his, brushes his thumb over your knuckles, leans close and in your space. His cologne is familiar and washes over you, spiced and warm and musky. Expensive.

“You’re psychotic, too.” You respond, but allow your fingers to slip into his. His hand is warm against yours and it slides against your palm, open and large. His fingers brush over the pulse in your wrist, move along the sensitive skin there. 

“That’s why you fit in there, princess.” He says and gives you a shark’s smile, so hooked and gutting. He lowers his voice for you, “And,” His eyes roll up to catch yours, “I’ve missed you.” 

The hint of vulnerability in his face makes you hum lightly, amused or pleased or warmed by it. You’ve missed him, too, in truth. Nobody is like Ransom.

There’s something about him and you that always keeps you two returning to one another. He’s inevitable, you think. You’ve never known anyone to get under your skin in such a way, to burrow their way into you and refuse to leave. 

He’s a disease. 

One you can’t cure yourself from. He’s ruined you for anyone else. 

But you think you’ve ruined him, too. 

It’s been months since your last fling with him. Years since you officially dated but you’re both always circling back to one another. He doesn’t bring any other girls home besides you. He was only ever serious about you. You’re both fated in some way, your stars entwined, looped and crashing into one another again and again. A dance that never ends, that you never want to end.

“Yeah?” You ask, soft and breathy, leaning towards him now, too. “Whad’ya miss about me, Ransom?” 

His eyes flicker lower, over your form and they roam slow and savoring. He licks his lips fleetingly. “Well,” He begins, “I miss fucking you.” 

The vulgarity shouldn’t shock you, it shouldn’t make you flush, but it does. You blame the little wine you’ve had. You pull from his touch once more, continue your game of cat and mouse and try to keep your thoughts from sliding into memories of him on top of you. At your neck with teeth. Parting your legs.

“Pig.” You scoff, shaking your head and pulling your hand from his. “You have a girlfriend.” 

“Yeah, but she’s not you.” He muses, “No one’s you.” He adds, tilting his head slightly. “So c’mon. Come home with me, baby.” He then almost purrs and smiles again, slow and charming this time. He means it now and it’s the kind of smile that gets him out of trouble if he ever tried to wear it. It could be boyish, if it wasn’t so hungry. 

You pick up your wine glass once more, glare over the rim before taking another sip. A bigger one this time, let it burn down your throat and warm your chest. You think your heart is beating faster than it should as he looks at you as if he wants to lay you out on this very table. 

“Get me a diamond bracelet and I will.” You tell him, your bottom lip sticking out a little as you gaze back at him. 

His eyes spark, dance with the flame of the candle. He looks a little crazed now, like he’s lost a few screws and hasn’t bothered to find them again. He looks a little wild-eyed and it’s enticing, the uncertainty in him. The promise of pain and pleasure and the fast pace life of the wealthy. All beautiful and dirty and filthy fucking rich.

He takes your hand and kisses it, slides his lips to your palm. To your wrist where your pulse flutters underneath his mouth, beneath the touch of his tongue. The threat of teeth. He murmurs then, his voice smooth and low and so lovely it makes you shiver;

“Anything for you, princess.” 

***

The Cartier white-gold, diamond bracelet catches in the sun proudly and flashes brilliant light as your hand slides into Ransom’s while he helps you out of his car. You step out onto the gravel driveway and smooth out the tight, leather black skirt hugging your hips and thighs. You inch it down as you ready to see the Thrombey’s once more after nearly a year. You adjust your cream, turtleneck sweater, too. The knitting chunky and loose, oversized on you but chic and soft to the touch.

You have to be sure the wine dark bruise on your neck is covered, the red marked rings around your wrist are drowned in the sleeves of your sweater. Can’t have his family realizing his tastes in bondage, not that you think he would care, but you certainly do. 

In fact, the mere memory of it makes you flush with heat in the crisp autumn air. 

You’d barely gotten into Ransom’s apartment in the city before he’d shoved you hard against the door. A picture rattles, swings precariously. He kisses you with a brutalness you haven’t felt in months, the quick cut of his teeth at your bottom lip. His hands on your body, hungry, greedy hands that want to take and take and take. 

You’d shoved him back, tried to get him off you as you glared up at him with fever dark eyes. Your chest was already heaving, rising and falling in quick bursts, your face flushed with color. 

You’d already look frazzled, hair slipping from the updo it’d been in. His little hell cat, little brat that’s gotta try and fight him on everything. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” You’d gasped, your lips already raw and spit-slick and he’d wanted to absolutely fucking ruin you--

He had smirked lazily, as if the whole world was his to take. But there was a restless bite to him, a deep seated and painful desire. A desperate hunger that was raw and open on his face as he looked at you like you were his for the taking.  

 “C’mon, baby,” He purrs, nearing you again, despite your palm going to his chest. As if that’d keep him back for long. You could tell by the look in his eyes, the dark, sharp gleam that he was going to get what he wanted. “I just wanna show you how bad I missed you.” 

And you could feel how bad he’d missed you, the hard line of him now pressing back into your hip as he crowds you again. Your back hits the wall again, his hands already dragging under your clothes to find sensitive, bare skin.

He groans slightly, maybe at how soft you are, maybe because he does just fucking miss you. 

But you’re not done protesting, even if your stomach is twisting in excitement. Even if there’s heat building on the inside of you, making you grip at his broad shoulders slightly. 

“Get off me, Ransom.” You try to snap, but your voice is getting all high and breathy like he loves. You squirm, try to push him off once more. 

He laughs slightly as you manage to wriggle out from beneath him. You dart for the bedroom and if you’d truly not wanted him, you would’ve slammed the door in his face. But you leave it, let him follow after you. 

He shuts the door behind him, then. Strolls in leisurely. 

“You think after months of not speaking, you just get to take what you want?” You ask in the haughty little way that makes his blood sing. It’s more to taunt him, more to test is control. 

You could tell he didn’t have much left. 

“Yes,” He drawls, arrogant, pushing up the sleeves of his sweater. “Now, why don’t you be a good girl and get on the bed for me?” 

You inhale sharp and quietly, your wide eyes staring at him as he wanders closer. The bedroom, though large and luxurious, now feels too small. Like there’s no more oxygen and a single spark would send it up in flames. 

“Make me.” You say, just to watch it all burn.

Within seconds, he’s on you, pushing you back onto the bed where the air leaves your lungs in a taken, guttering breath. His knee comes right up between your legs, his hands back on you and roughing you up. 

You wrestle with him and he laughs again, excited, dark and knowing. “Oh, you wanna fight, huh?” He rumbles, grappling with your wrists. His strength shouldn’t make you all hot-blooded for him, shouldn’t make you want to sink into the silk sheets and let him do whatever he pleases but it does. 

You ache already, in the core of your body. 

He gets your hands down on the bed, pins you with his weight and his strength and his large hands. You arch your back, pull at your wrists to try and free yourself. Cry out when he squeezes harder. 

“Am I gonna have to tie you up?” He says through his teeth, manhandling you, keeping you down with his weight. He releases your hands, but he’s on you, and it’s only so he can loosen his belt and slip it off. 

You’re like a little doll, so easily possessed by him. So easily detained. You squirm and kick uselessly beneath him. The belt is slipped around your wrists, the cool leather tightening as he loops it in such a way that binds your hands together and above your head. 

You’re about to snipe something about how the hell he’s supposed to get your clothes off now, but suddenly he grips the front of your t-shirt and just rips. 

You gasp, mouth popping open in surprise for a moment. 

“Fuck you,” You curse then as he starts pushing the shirt to the side, baring your chest to him, which is clad in a lacy, creme bra. His hands immediately glide over the skin exposed, the soft skin of your chest. 

“Yeah, that’s what I want you to do.” Ransom snarks, fingers sliding over the soft fabric of your bra, digging in like he might—

“Don’t you dare!” You hiss, “This was expensive!” 

“I’ll buy you a new one.” He tries to wager, pulling at the fabric a little, forcing you to arch up for him. And what a pretty picture you make for him, already all disheveled and roughed up, eyes shining, hands bound on his bed.

“No!” You try not to whine too much but your voice pitches upward as he palms a breast roughly through your bra, watches you with dark, hooded eyes. And thankfully, for whatever reason, he takes mercy on you and only pulls it downward, so your breasts spill from the top.

His fingers are gentler than you thought they’d be as he rolls your nipple slowly. He leans down to consume you in another bruising kiss, mouth hot and demanding, a little slick and open-mouthed. Messy in its roughness. 

His fingers turn into a sudden, stinging pinch and you mewl lightly into his mouth. He swallows it down hungrily. 

And then his lips drag to your neck, leaving you gasping and squirming, his teeth setting to fragile skin, mouth against your pulse. He sucks hard, until it turns into a blooming bruise of pain and heat. 

“Ransom!” You yelp when it becomes too much, but the damage is done and you know there will be dark marks where he wants. You know there will be evidence of him all over your body by the end of this. 

The rest of your clothes are removed in a hurry, tossed aside, thankfully intact. 

He always gets what he wants, it seems. 

It’d make you livid if it also didn’t make you so--

“Oh, princess, you’re so fucking wet.” He nearly purrs, fingers sliding through where you’re silken and petal-soft, velvety and flooded with heat. 

He gets over excited, too desperate for you, only loosens his trousers, pulls himself out. You feel overexposed with his clothes still on, your bare skin littered with evidence of him, open and vulnerable to him. 

He strokes himself, slow, with your slick before positioning himself. You can tell he’s painfully aroused, too impatient, because the smooth head of him glides along where you’re weeping and sensitive. You mewl, try to twist away from him but he grabs your waist with one, strong hand and holds you still for him.

“Do you have a condom?” You ask, breathless, watching as he makes another slow pass through your folds. 

He snorts slightly, too fascinated with the feel of you, the way you glisten on him to even look up at your face. “No,” And then, “Aren’t you still on the pill?” 

“Well, yes, but--” 

He presses in a little too easily, just the head, and you gasp sharply at the stretch of him already. But! Your mind frets, but you should still be cautious! But it hasn’t been a full week of your new pack! But, but, but!

“Ransom,” You warn, wishing you could push at his thighs, straining slightly with the belt still holding you together. “Don’t-- unless you have a condom.” You get out. 

“I’ll be careful,” He says flippantly, sliding out slowly and back through your aching folds.

He teases you more, makes you ache something awful. Makes your hips buck up and a whine be pulled from your chest. Gets you all desperate until he glides all the way in, bare, and fitting far too snug inside of you. 

“Ransom!” 

He groans, which falls off into a dark, rumbling laugh at the way you keen and squeeze achingly tight around him despite all your protests. A little velvet vice, and he’s delirious and heady with you, struck breathless at the sensation. 

“But you just feel so fucking good like this,” He gets out, drops his head onto your chest, wraps his arms around you tight. You shouldn’t, but you give in to him, let your head drop back and moan, broken and soft, as he fills you.

He likes to fuck close and intimate like this, deep and dirty and with this violent sort of tenderness for you. He likes to make you lose yourself in the slow, rough push and pull of him, so you can’t do anything but take him and cry doing so. 

Your memory is abruptly cut off when Ransom’s hand comes down on the back of your neck, the heated flashes of images you’d been thinking about burning through you. As if he can sense where your mind has gone, (and maybe he can, maybe he can see it in the way your eyes glow and get all wide-- the same way they do when he says something dirty that you shouldn’t like, but do, the slight soft desperation in them), because he smirks slightly. Hooked and curved and too sharp.   

He quirks a brow, “Let’s make this quick.” He says, “So we can leave and I can push that skirt of yours up and--”

“Behave,” You hush, even if your cheeks are still burning, and you pinch his side for good measure anyways. 

He hisses and swats your hand away before you tip your chin up and stride forward, only for the dogs to come rushing out towards the pair of you. Ransom grows upset, jolting back at their jumping and barking. He hates these dogs, whereas you’re able to press onward, allow Ransom to wallow for a moment. 

He shouts at them, before hurrying after you and into the safety of the arching, dark doorway. 

The party is already in full swing; you’re both late, of course. Ransom wanted to spend as little time as possible here tonight. But upon entering, you’re quickly and eagerly greeted by his mother, who has a drink in hand. 

“Oh! Well, isn’t this a pleasant surprise!” She says, perhaps too loudly, but rushes forward to wrap you in a hug. You’re well-liked by most of his family surprisingly, who usually let loose scathing remarks about Ransom not deserving you. 

And you put on a good face for them, try to put on the air of the Harvard princess; you know wealthy people well, even if you haven’t always been the richest. Mundanely middle class for most of your life, but you worked hard to go to Harvard, to play in the big leagues. You know what they like to hear from you and see from you; so you play rich. 

“It’s been far too long!” She continues, pulling away to look at you, and then, “Didn’t think you would’ve stayed with him!” She snarks then, squeezing your arm and you force out a laugh.

You know not to mention you haven’t been with her son. 

“Well, you know Ransom,” You shrug lightly, a dainty, graceful lift of your shoulders,  “He doesn’t like to come around much.” 

“No, the little shit.” She shakes her head, but her smile reappears after a moment, “C’mon, let me get you a drink!” 

And you are led deeper into the house, deeper into the Thrombey’s absurdity and vanity and spiraling greed. 

~ 

 Playing rich is fun for awhile; your diamond bracelet sparkles in the low light and the clothes are expensive and flattering but there’s only so much you can take. You grow tired of putting on your best fake, glittering smile and parading around the big house. 

A moment of reprieve when you speak with Ransom’s grandfather, the man of the hour, Harlan. 

He’s always liked you dearly. Not because you have expensive boots on or because you’re poised and can put on a mask of wealth for an evening, but because you study literature. As an author, he thinks it’s one of the most noble pursuits, one of knowledge found in digging through books, getting lost in the stories only to emerge with concrete ideas and arguments. Larger concepts and critiques of society, a bigger picture that so few seem to grasp and pay attention to. 

So Harlan asks, as he does when he sees you, “What are you reading right now, my dear?” 

And he doesn’t mean what you’re studying, but what you’re enjoying. 

“The Beautiful and Damned.” You tell him and a sudden laugh rumbles from him. 

“A good one to revisit while you’re with my family, surely.” He says, all good natured and warm. 

But the moment is fleeting with everyone vying for his attention, and the evening slinks onward. Petty squabbles are had, more drinks are poured, food taken and eaten and taken. 

While Ransom talks privately with his grandfather, you rest on the couch beside Marta, tucked away in an alcove, reclining leisurely beside the girl you’ve met the past few times at the Thrombey gatherings. She’s lovely and doe-eyed and she smiles very sweetly at you. It’s a little timid and soft and you wonder how her dark lashes might feel against your cheek. 

You offer her wine from your glass, which she declines with a shake of her head. Her smile is earnest and you manage to make her laugh somehow, soft and quiet sighs and giggles that fall from both of your lips. She is slow to open up but now she unfurls before you, petal soft and wonderful and glittering eyed in the softly lit room. 

“You’re my favorite part of the Thrombey’s,” You tell her with a slip of a smile, take another sip of your wine and you think her eyes are following your lips. You feel a flush crawl along your face. 

“Not Ransom?” She asks, because you think she’s wondering. Everyone wonders about you two, about him. No one knows your relationship, no one understands it. They don’t have to, but while you can hear Ransom faintly from the other room begin to raise his voice, you let out a huff of air. Almost a scoff at her question.

“Please,” You say, eyes flickering over to the closed door, where Ransom and Harlan hide behind. “I haven’t been Ransom’s girlfriend in years.” You admit and maybe it’s the wine that makes the words slip from you, drop like precious diamonds from the cave of your mouth. Maybe it’s the honesty of her face, the twinkling empathy in her eyes. She’d be soft, so soft and gentle and--

“I hadn’t even seen him in months until a few days ago, when he asked me to come.” You add, take the last sip of your wine bitterly; it’s turned sour and puckered and dry in your mouth. You set the glass down.

“That’s awful.” Marta says quietly and you don’t realize how close she’s gotten, your thighs touching, almost hip to hip. Your arm is leisurely thrown over the back of the sofa, behind her. 

“Yeah, well,” You say and it comes out breathier than you intend, “That’s Ransom.” 

“Why did you come?” She asks then, not rudely, but genuine. 

You hold up your wrist and your diamond bracelet sparkles in front of her eyes, catches in the darkness there to look like a star. “I got a diamond bracelet if I came.” You say and it’s meaner than you intend it to be, but maybe you’re a little more upset than you thought. Maybe you wanna throw a fit. Maybe you want Marta to comfort you with lips and soothing words. 

Maybe it’s just the wine. 

“That’s not the only reason you came, though.” Marta probes gently, “Is it?” 

Your jaw ticks and your lashes flutter as you turn to face her. “Why else would I?” 

“Because you love him.” She whispers. 

“Love’s a big word, Marta.” You respond, hushed and secretive, and your fingers slip into the hair at the back of her neck. A strand of it slides over your knuckles as you twirl the chocolate lock slowly, silky soft against your skin, “It’s so heavy.” 

She blinks slightly, a rush of pink spreading over her cheeks. “Sometimes.” She whispers, leaning into your touch. 

You wonder if she’d whimper if you pulled her hair, how she’d feel against your throat with teeth and tongue. If she’d cry out all pretty and soft, if she’d give what she gets. 

“It is with Ransom.” You say, but you don’t think it would be with her. It’d be as light as the sigh that escapes her, the little breath that comes from her chest. As light as feathers and silk, snowflakes that swirl in the night sky, petals on the wind. 

A door explodes open, rattles on the hinges, through the whole house. It makes you both jolt away from each other. 

Ransom barrels out. You huff, spring up quickly as you watch him grab his coat and wrench the front door open. 

“I’m sorry,” You tell Marta, “It was nice seeing you.” You say earnestly and then move to follow, to find your coat, and hurry out the door and into the chill of the night. 

“What the fuck?” You shout to Ransom as you slam the front door shut behind you. 

His eyes flash dangerously in the darkness, “Get in the fucking car.” He says, “We’re leaving.” And he slides into the front seat and slams the car door just as hard. 

He’s in a mood, then. 

You hustle over, slip into the passenger side and he peels out of the driveway and down the dirt path.

He’s eerily quiet. Uncharacteristically so. The growl of the car fills the silence with rumbling, with an unsettled sound that rattles through you.

You don’t dare break the quiet first. 

And the quiet stretches and stretches, stretches thin until it breaks--

“I forgot something.” He says suddenly, jerking the car to the right, pulling off the road. 

“What’d you forget?” You ask, browns furrowing. He doesn’t answer you, though, only stops the car, kills the engine. He stares in silence for a moment, as if he’s making a decision. You can feel your heart in your chest, the steady thrumming that skips when he raises his eyes in the darkness. The red light of his dash casts him in crimson, in unnatural white light. 

The whole world feels at a stand-still, on a teetering precipice.  

“I’ll be back.” He says and he leaves you, slides out of the car and into the night. Your stomach sinks for some reason, the plummet catching you off guard. 

So you wait for him, alone, as a decision that changes everything is made.

***

Ransom is quiet still, pensive, when you both return to his apartment. After all that anger, you thought maybe he’d take it out on you. You’d both yell and scream and then end up making up on the kitchen countertops, furiously trying to rip away clothes and egos and pain.

But he’s uncharacteristically gentle with you as he lays you out on his sheets. Silver light from the moon, the faint stars, cut across the bed like a knife. Slices over his face in a diagonal, one half eclipsed, and the other luminous and sterling silver. 

He gets rid of your clothes with reverence, looks over you with hunger and thinly veiled tenderness. A violent sort of need that makes him seem wolfish, even in his gentleness. He covers you, enfolds you in shadow and the curling strength of his arms. 

He slides down your body, parts your legs and rolls the warmth of his tongue against where you’re most vulnerable and soft. He flutters his eyes up to you, threads his fingers through yours so you have something to hold onto.

He doesn’t stop until you’re crying, arching off his sheets, twisting and turning and tormented. Until tears slide from the corners of your eyes and you’re aching and open and then he gathers you in his arms, nudges his waist into the crook of your own and fits himself in the depth of you.

You gasp, open mouthed, as he finds home. His own groan blooming from the pit of his chest and out against the hollow of your throat. His hands are bruising, gripped too tight, but you don’t even care, not as you toss your head back, let it fall against his pillow. 

The way he looks at you is somewhere between desperation and viciousness. He wants to possess you, he wants to make you delirious with him. Maybe because you’ve made him as mad with you. He wants to infect you the way you’ve infected him.

He wants to belong, he wants to keep you forever. He wants to give you everything, and you think maybe he says so. Maybe he gets it out into the crook of your neck, maybe he presses it into your skin besides all the marks he gave you. His, his, his. 

He curls around you afterward, slides his hands over your vulnerable belly, the skin soft beneath his broad palms. 

“Let’s leave and never return.” Ransom says and you blink, bleary and sleepy, glance at him with a flutter of your lashes. 

“Where would we go?” You murmur, carding your hands through his hair. 

“Paris, maybe.” He rumbles into your skin, fingers creating a strange, swirling pattern on your stomach. 

“You can read and study and write.” He says and for some reason, your heart squeezes painfully. For some reason, you’re still foolish to imagine it. Sitting pretty in a cafe, a worn book in your hands, glasses of wine between the two of you. He’d look stylish and handsome against a violet rose sunset. 

“And what would you do?” You ask softly, a whisper.  

“Anything I wanted.” 

Quietness falls upon you both again, slow and heavy. He fingers the skin of your stomach, slides over it in strange rhythms only he knows. You’re nearly on the brink of sleep when he turns his face up to you, totally shadowed now, and says;

“I have to tell you something, baby.” 

And you can tell by the look in his eyes that this is the beginning of the end.    

***

He’d said it was his hour of need and you’re smart so you listen and you absorb. You’re appalled and you’re a little shocked but you-- 

You keep your head on straight. Ransom starts to unravel. 

The moment it’s discovered that his grandfather apparently comitted suicide, he starts to slip into a dangerous edge. He starts ranting and raving and then he’ll go deadly silent and then he’ll become prickly and hot. You are cool and collected. 

You are waiting for your time to strike. 

A detective is hired by Ransom in an attempt to win it all; and you are careful, walk the tightrope slow and steady. You keep him sane and dull the sharp part of him. 

And then, the way a ribbon is pulled apart, Marta slips right into Ransom’s jaws. His plan didn’t work; Marta didn’t kill his grandfather. Ransom technically didn’t, either. 

You think, maybe, it could’ve been put to rest here. You think maybe he could've walked away. But Ransom never half does anything, doesn’t ever not finish the job. He spirals. 

You wait for a time to strike.    

***

Your time is quick and fleeting and you remember piece of a conversation, a snippet of information that could change everything. 

You speak with Fran on the outskirts of the family as they discuss heavier matters. She chatters a lot, on and on about just about anything. And you carefully weave the conversation, guide it slowly but surely towards this one factor;

“You have a friend that does toxicology, don’t you?” 

She nods enthusiastically, tells you about what he does, how interesting it is. How long she’s known him. You gaze at the family, at the way they try to be hush and talk and end up bickering. Fran’s voice comes in and out, the world turning slow. 

Another argument breaks out. Voices raising, cutting over each other. Ruthless. And poor Marta who has to deal with them all, whose only in this position because--

You glance at Ransom, watch his handsome face screw up into a mocking smile as he speaks with his relatives. Smug, greedy, too arrogant. You think about what he said; running away to Paris. To Rome or anywhere in the world. You wonder if you could’ve been happy with him-- dream about a life never lived. A path never taken. 

Because later, when Ransom tells you to keep watch so he can slip the antidote back in Marta’s bag, you step away. You hide in the bathroom, peak through the crack in the door, breathe slow and quiet as you watch Fran catch Ransom in the act.

Watch as it all comes crashing down; a domino effect that will slide into place now. You watch as you tip the first scale, as you set the life you could’ve had with Ransom up in flames. Fran disappears, obviously upset and reeling with what she’s discovered. 

You emerge once more, greet Ransom with a kiss on the cheek. 

A Judas kiss, betrayal placed softly upon his skin. 

You force yourself to look into his eyes, so he doesn’t suspect a thing. You smile at him, the kind of smile that makes him kiss you. Hard and quick and furious. He calls you his Bonnie, says so against your lips. 

You laugh and hope it doesn’t come out as tumbling and mad as it sounds to your ears. 

 ***

When all is said and done, Ransom ends up behind bars, just as you knew he would. Just as he should be. He thinks you had nothing to do with it, he thinks you’re gonna help him out of this one, too, somehow. 

So you visit him in prison, dressed in Chanel and fur and the Cartier white-gold bracelet that flashes so prettily. Your heels click against the cold, tile ground as your approach the stall to speak with him. He sits behind the glass in an orange jumpsuit, garring and horrible. It’s unzipped slightly, showing his broad, muscled chest, rolled up at the elbows. A far cry from his lavish coats and scarves and sweaters. 

His eyes glint when they see you, a tilting of his head that is arrogant and predatory. His smile is hooked when he sees you. 

With all of your grace, you glide to him, take a seat in front of him. In front of the glass. You both stare at each other a moment, his eyes always so hungry and wolfish. Heat flares slowly inside of you, an inkling of torment from hell, from the devil before you. 

Slowly, with measured ease, he picks up the phone to speak with you. 

You reach for it, too, your eyes still on him. 

“Hello, princess.” He rumbles into the phone. 

“Hello, Ransom.” You say almost hushed. 

“I miss you,” He says with his curling smile, a flash of sharp teeth. You think of them at your neck, on your pulse that beats rapidly. 

“When I get out of here, let’s leave.” He then says, soft and murmured, “Let’s leave and never look back. I’ll take you wherever you want.” 

You hum on that, look over him slowly, and you think that seeing him here, in the jumpsuit, behind the glaring glass, leaves your dreams of Paris dashed and destroyed. The idea of loving him, sitting on that balcony with a book in your hands and his hand on your thigh as you watch the city fall into dusk shatters right in front of you. You can put it to rest once and for all, dig a grave inside the pit of your chest and bury it. 

“I don’t think you’ll get out for a long time, I’m afraid.” You tell him finally. 

His eyes darken, brows furrowing, “What are you talking about? I’ll get the best lawyers, you’ll help me--”

“I won’t.” You say, finding his eyes, shaking your head the slightest amount. 

His eyebrows shoot up, his face becoming cold and hard and outraged, “You won’t?” He asks, and then, “Thought you were my Bonnie?” His jaw ticks in anger, in pain that bubbles up inside of him, “You know I could get you here on assisted murder. I protected you. You knew everything--” 

“Oh, Ransom,” You say, a slight sigh, pitying and soft. And now it’s your turn to be sharp-smiled, a slip of fox’s wit, “Who do you think led Fran to look into the toxicology reports?” You ask lightly. 

He blinks, his mouth suddenly falling open. 

“How do you think she caught you replacing the antidote to Marta’s bag?” You ask him, tilting your head, the look in your eyes cunning and quick and burning. 

He stares in disbelief. 

“I know I’m psycho,” You sigh, lift your finger to the glass, draw a swirling pattern as if you’re stroking his face. All that you feel is the cold, clear glass. “But you didn’t think I’d let you get away with this, did you?”

He sits back in shock, staring at you. And then a laugh bursts from him, rough and hard and he looks at you with awe, with a wild sort of amazement. 

“Backstabbing, rotten bitch.” He says, but it’s with fondness. Like he can’t believe someone bested him, like he can’t believe you could be so cutthroat or ruthless, “You really were made for me, weren’t you?” 

He looks at you like he wants to take you up against the glass in front of everyone, like he wants to punish you and praise you and love you so violently that you can’t see or feel anything but him. 

But there is no rough love making, there is nothing but the glass between you and the triumph and the ache inside your ribs. 

“It seems so.” You say and you let your hand fall away from the glass, your diamond bracelet clinking lightly. You take a last look at him, sear him into your memory like this, looking at you like you’re both the best and worst thing the world could ever give him.

“Goodbye, darling.” You purr, even if your heart is burning, even if your breath is tight. And then you hang up the phone and rise, graceful and elegant as ever. 

You can hear his laughter, feel the way his eyes try to keep you here, brand you and scorch you. 

You walk out with your head high, a too-clever grin touching the corner of your lips and a weight off of your shoulders, but a sinking feeling in your stomach.

You’ll miss him, you think, even if all the world knows you shouldn’t. 

[thekillerssluts]

Arcade Fire’s Will Butler on How White Privilege, Race Reporting Informed New Solo LP

The fall after Will Butler’s debut album, Policy, was released in 2015, he went to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to study…policy. After working with Partners in Health, a non-profit focused on providing global medical health care, by donating proceeds from Arcade Fire’s single “Haiti” off Funeral and licensing proceeds from NFL ads that used the band’s “Wake Up,” Butler wanted to help the organization more. It would also be a great opportunity to be exposed to people he wouldn’t have necessarily met otherwise.

Studying at Harvard coincided with Donald Trump winning the presidency, intensifying Butler’s desire to investigate how the United States got to the point where this could happen and how to move forward from there. Butler studied under Leah Wright Rigueur, the historian who wrote The Loneliness of the Black Republican. In her course, Butler read the Chicago commission report on the Chicago riots of 1919, which left a substantial impact on him.

“[The report was] like ‘We noticed in our 1920 media that when we talk about criminals and they are Black, we say that they’re Black, and when they’re white, we don’t talk about their race! It really feels as though we are racializing media reporting around race in America and perhaps we should address that!’ That was very impactful,” Butler tells SPIN over Zoom. “The moment in time that the Charleston shooting happened was the same moment that Donald Trump declared his candidacy, came down the golden [Trump Tower] elevator, and talked about how Mexicans were rapists. That horrifying stretch of history that we were reporting on for class really has informed my worldview of America since then.”

Butler analyzed how America’s past and present tied into his own identity, questioning how it fit into his family history and position of privilege as a white, wealthy man. It ended up being the impetus for his new solo album, Generations, out Sept. 25 on Merge Records.

“My parents live in the house that my dad grew up in on the island that my dad’s family has lived for 200 years in Maine, so it’s always been quite present in my life,” he says. “We drive past land that people in my dad’s family have been like, squabbling over for hundreds of years. The explicit family legacy has always been quite present, but I never analytically thought about it, and I never situated it within American history in any rigorous sense. So I started to put those pieces together.”

One of the first songs Butler wrote for the record was “Fine,” a satirical look at his family history, where he acknowledges his lineage of privilege. It also references the 1963 murder of Black barmaid Hattie Carroll at the hands of William Zantzinger. (The story was brought to public attention with Bob Dylan’s song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”)

“There’s a line in the song where I say ‘I’m more Zantzinger than Carol,’ which isn’t necessarily meant as kicking on this burden of guilt that I’m a white man, but literally if I killed someone, I would have a lesser prison sentence,” Butler says. “Zantzinger got six months and was suspended for killing someone, and that’s the position that I am in structurally in this world. If I killed someone, I would have a light sentence.”

While writing “Fine,” Butler also thought about his grandfather, famed jazz musician Alvino Rey, and how Charles Mingus was in his band as a bass player. But as a Black man, Mingus wasn’t allowed to travel or eat with the group in public, so they had him pretend to be Hawaiian. “They had him wear a Hawaiian shirt and say he was Hawaiian because it would fry people’s racist brains,” he says. “There’s a dark comedy to it, but it’s so fucking brutal that he’s a genius that they had to give a Hawaiian shirt for him to live his life and do the thing that he was a genius at. It’s horrifying and so fucking thorny.”

Much of the album revolves around Butler’s relation to his white privilege. The album’s release comes at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement and a vital conversation about race are at the forefront. But Butler hasn’t spoken much about the subject on social media.

“I’ve thought about it, and I’ve felt like, ‘Should I be talking about this more?’ It’s just not my skill set,” he says. “I’m dying to play shows and put together town halls and have weirdo activists open for me at shows, but that’s all stuff that happens in person. I have a skill set that’s pretty good at putting that stuff together. I learn a lot from other people talking online, but I don’t have the toolkit for being online. Maybe I’ll develop it if we stay in a pandemic for years and years. I don’t have a perfect knowledge of the role I can play, but I have a sense of the role I can play in the world, and I try to focus on that.”

Although the album was written between 2015 and 2019, Butler says many of the topics feel pertinent to the state of the world now, including the apocalyptic feeling brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. “‘Hard Times’ came on, and [my eight-year-old son] was like, ‘This song is called “Hard Times,” is that about now?’ And I was like ‘You know, these are hard times! It wasn’t literally about right now, but yes, these are hard times; this sucks,'” he says.

The pandemic also halted Arcade Fire’s plans of working on the next record. This year, the band was supposed to gather their new songs and see which ones would fit for the follow-up to 2017’s Everything Now — a fact his brother Win confirmed on social media in April. Butler says the band still isn’t quite sure what direction it will take.

“We always have a giant pile, and we’re still in the giant pile phase, and then we narrow it down to 15-20 songs, and then it starts to take shape,” he explains. “Always in the giant pile, like, it could be a punk record; it could be this kind of record. It just depends on once we get back together — god willing we’ll be able to get back together at some point — it’ll be pretty clear what we’re good at playing and what direction it is, but there’s kind of not a direction yet.”

Generations is the closest in Butler’s solo music to his work in Arcade Fire, recalling the band’s early records like Funeral and Neon Bible, yet it’s inherently Will Butler. And it couldn’t have come at a more fitting time.

https://www.spin.com/2020/09/arcade-fires-will-butler-on-how-white-privilege-race-reporting-informed-new-solo-lp/

[lararutherford]

                                 RELATIONSHIPS: PAST & PRESENT.

Prince Mahmoud bin Faisal al Ghazi. (ex-boyfriend, 33) Lawyer. Businessman. Saudi Royal Family.           “Actually, can I have five more of these little Saudi bitches?” Mahmoud was her first serious relationship, and the two met whilst attending Harvard Law together. Lara can say, with her hand on her heart, that he’s one of the best people she’s ever met in her life. Intelligent, kind, compassionate, attentive; all the traits that should’ve made for a sustainable relationship. Instead, the two years she spent with him were muddled with the beginning stages of her relationship with Amir. Lara frequently saw the two of them at the same time, and reached a point where she was technically in a relationship with them simultaneously (albeit not to their knowledge.) In the end, Amir won out, and she broke Mahmoud’s heart. For all Lara’s past flings, she has never revisited any of them later in life, but he is an exception, because apart from Amir, he’s the only man she ever really loved. They’ve never completely lost contact, and if ever he’s on business in London, they make the effort to see each other again. Lara is too ashamed of how she treated him to consider the idea of reconciling, though.

Amir Dawar. (ex-fiancé, 39) Businessman.           “Sad face.” Irrevocably the love of her life. They met at Harvard, and it was love at first sight--for him, at least. In the beginning, Lara had really only pursued him because of his family’s wealth and connections with oil, but nearing the end of her relationship with Mahmoud (who introduced the two) she began to realise a business arrangement had turned into something more. Lara treated him awfully, despite knowing he deserved better. She cheated on him often whilst they were together--shout out to people like Silas, Gaius, and Eitan--because her fear of commitment was real. They split up and got back together often. It wasn’t until Amir followed her to Porto Velho that she really started to realise that he did care about her, was in it for the long haul, and deserved better than what she was giving him. Lara cleaned up her act, and things got better quickly. Until Revati. Seeing how close she and Amir became in the years that followed pushed her back into questioning everything. Even when Amir proposed, the thought loomed over her head: what if he woke up one morning and decided he wanted Revati more than her? It was a terrifying prospect. One that lead to her cheating on him right before the wedding in a brutal act of self-sabotage she regrets to this day. Amir had forgiven a lot, but he couldn’t look past that. She doesn’t blame him. Lara still loves him, and even though she is finally learning how to move on, she doubts that will ever change.

Anand Chowdhury. (ex-boyfriend, 34) Lawyer. Junior Partner at Bennett & Gallagher, London.           "Prettier than Lara, and that’s too pretty...” When she first got to London, faced with the fact Amir had moved on and started a whole new life with another woman, Lara jumped at the first person she thought might have the potential to make him jealous. Diana had set the two up, as Anand was a mutual friend, and had she not been in such a bad position mentally, Lara could’ve easily seen herself pursuing him genuinely. In hindsight, it was a miserable idea. It also didn’t work in the slightest. Lara dated him for a few months, and whilst he was wonderful, he also understood that she had no interest in him beyond helping her to get over someone else. Lara doesn’t know why he played along for so long, but eventually, she ended things before she could feel like any more of a shit person than she already did.  

Jasper Menzies. (ex-boyfriend, 38) British army. Captain in the SAS.          "Guess he didn’t like the family.” Lara had known Jasper through Gideon (and by association, Harrison) since she was much younger. Years later, though, upon her return to London, when the two crossed paths once more, sparks flew. Despite being determined to take a break from relationships until she was sure her head was in the right place (and her heart was no longer with a man she couldn’t have) for the first time since Amir, she found herself unable to help it. Sure she would regret it if she waited, the two made things official after a few months of casual sex and the occasional date. It took them both by surprise how well it worked; neither of them had anticipated actually wanting a relationship, let alone one that made the both of them genuinely happy. Lara adored him. Just before things ended, he had even given her keys to his Hereford home. There’s no doubt in her mind that things would’ve continued down the path they were had Cassandra not intervened and told him everything about the Rutherford family, and their alleged connections to the Russians. Lara understood that after what happened to his brother, he would have a problem with it. Even though she wanted to tell him that she hated the fact her family was involved with the Russians, too, she couldn’t bring herself to fight. Even though they’re technically ‘broken up’ they’re still talking, and she wonders if things are fixable. It seems unlikely. Lara also isn’t sure she has the heart to try. 

[jalebi-weds-bluetooth]

There’s More To Her #8

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A Touch of Fantasy

AR boasted one of the largest and most prestigious photo studios in India. From supermodels to millionaires - they had all been dressed and photographed here. The likes of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar often graced their covers on shoots held in this space. So nothing should have fazed Arnav Singh Raizada about the beauty and potential of the studio he owned.

Except this was the second time his heart skipped a beat. The first time, it had nothing to do with the studio - it was all about a woman dressed in a gossamer, scarlet red saree.

The lights were dimmed to mimic moonlight. Tall trees, with fairy lights for leaves, twinkled in the darkness. Translucent, stone studded drapes hung, filtering and reflecting the lights on their crystals. At the center was a white table, with matching chairs. There was a small candle, silver cutlery on the table and a few white roses scattered around the studio.

An artificial pond was constructed on both sides of the seating, with hundred floating candles, bathing the entire room in a soft, warm glow. Akash didn’t realise when Payal held his hand. They walked into the studio, in a trance, half in love with the beauty of everything and with each other.

The blue light, golden candles, transparent crystal studded drapes, Payal’s purple salwar and Akash’s white suit was aesthetically… perfect.

Khushi thought of all of this? Arnav turned to her, but was rendered speechless by her soft smile.

“Thank you Arnav ji, Aman ji had told me that you strictly instructed money not to be taken into account for Jiji’s first date-” Khushi’s breath hitched and smile fell at the intensity of his dark gaze. Many nights ago, he had looked at her in the exact manner. No, he couldn’t look at her like this. Not now, not when it was impossible.

“Khushi!” Arnav and Khushi snapped out of their eyelock as Payal ran and grabbed Khushi in her arms, swinging her in excitement.

“Why… you didn’t have to work so hard? When did you find the time? Khushi you shouldn’t have!” Payal fretted but couldn’t stop smiling. Khushi laughed and jumped in equal fervor.

“Offo Jiji, first tell me whether you like it or not.” Khushi asked.

“Like it? Khushi ji this is beyond what either of us expected!” Akash, finally finding words and Payal’s hand, told Khushi.

“Exactly, it’s as if we have-” Payal began, “-entered a fantasy.” Akash completed. Payal and Akash looked at each other, and immediately looked away, blush creeping up their cheeks.

“Alright, it’s our time to go.” Arnav said. No matter how enchanted he was by the setup, another minute of Akash and Payal’s romance would send him to the hospital for blood sugar - even if he wasn’t diagnosed with diabetes.

Khushi, on the other hand, scowled at the interruption. She wanted to sit and watch the entire exchange. Nothing interested her more than romance. In reality. Or on television. Or both - Kamlesh Tha Khabri Ab Pandit Ji, a show where her favorite news anchor married brides and grooms across the country was her current obsession.

“No really Khushi ji, this is very… very…” Akash cracked a wide toothed smile, the fashion analyst and romantic in him too satisfied by what he saw.

“Beautiful,” Arnav murmured. Khushi stiffened, noticing that Arnav wasn’t looking at the setup at all. In bringing out the best for Payal, Khushi had bared her heart and fantasies in front of the one man who quashed it all down. This was a mistake.

“You’ve nearly done better than Bhansali.” Akash brought Khushi out of her thoughts. And just like that, Khushi’s worries disappeared.

“Hey Devi Maiya! Really?” Khushi shrieked.

“Bhansali? Is he a photographer or-” Arnav frowned, the name seeming familiar.

“-arrey Sanjay Leela Bhansali! Hindi film director.”

“Of course,” Arnav muttered.

“He’s known for his grand designs. Also, he has worked with everyone - Amitabh Bachchan ji, Aishwarya ji, Shah Rukh ji, Salman ji-” Khushi gushed, “-but Akash ji, you’re quick to catch my reference. And you’re being too kind!” Akash scoffed at her humility.

“No way! It’s one thing to see a song and another to bring it to life. This is a replica of Chand Chupa-”

“Baadal Main!” Khushi shrieked, yanking a bemused Payal’s hand. If anything, Akash and Khushi’s budding friendship only made her fall faster and harder Akash.

“No, the moon does not hide. Scientifically it’s a matter of perception-” Khushi and Akash simultaneously rolled their eyes.

“They’re talking about a song in a film.” Payal clarified. Arnav had the grace not to turn red out of embarrassment.

“Yes, I was only speaking about the futility of this metaphor. Thank goodness I’ve never seen such films-” Payal signaled Arnav to stop talking. He did, after noticing Khushi gawking at him.

“You… you’ve NEVER SEEN Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam?!”

“No-” Arnav, belatedly caught Payal miming a movement of a belt buckle. What the hell? Payal wears belts? What shitty move is this? Oh shit… is this a Salman Khan film?

“And you’ve NEVER seen Chand Chupa Badal Main?” Khushi emphasized, forgetting the man in front of her refrained from almost any and every Salman Khan film.

“Chand Chupa Badal Main!” She stressed, wildly gesticulating to the entire studio. Arnav nodded negatively. Payal’s plan to rescue Arnav from Khushi’s hysteria was interrupted with Akash handing her a white rose. It was a nice interruption.

Khushi unpinned her dupatta and lifted the white translucent fabric high in the air. The faint glow of the candles and moonlight danced across her face.

“Chand Chupa-” Khushi’s smile halted at his haunted eyes. Arnav’s hand itched to pull the fabric away. Against every will, his hand rose.

“Khushi ji,” Akash said. Arnav froze and violently tucked his hand back into his pocket. Khushi dropped her dupatta like a hot coal. “Bhai has not even seen the film, so the song’s a long shot! But I have-”

It’s the precise moment Akash realized his brother was staring at him.

“I have… heard, heard about my film. During my tenth board exams, when I left for tuition classes - my friends told me about the film. I did not watch it. I did not skip classes - Bhai you know me.” Payal gripped Akash’s arm to stop his verbal diarrhea.

“Your tenth grade results suddenly make a lot of sense.” Arnav folded his arms, staring at a pale Akash.

“What are you saying Bhai?! I got ninety four percent, despite watching-” Payal pinched his arm. Khushi, if not worried about her to-be-brother-in-law’s future at the hands of his brother, would have cooed at Payal’s concern.

“-birds.” Akash croaked, “and Bhai, you were anyways miles away at Harvard. It’s not that you would’ve known-”

“Known how wonderfully talented Khushi is!” Payal interjected. Akash nodded, so quickly that Khushi was afraid his head might fall off. Seriously, what’s the big deal? It’s not that Arnav ji would kill Akash ji for watching a Salman Khan film!

Khushi opened her mouth to pacify the Laad Governor, and with one look she chose to her right to remain silent. Arnav positively glowered, and because of the dim light one wouldn’t see the smoke fuming out of his nose and ears.

“I love how pretty this is!” Payal continued, “The fairy lights, roses, moonlight, pond, table, chair, candles” Payal pointed at each element.

“Candles… Khushi, you told Aman to switch off the fire sprinklers for the studio, right?” Arnav turned to a very still Khushi.

“Khushi ji must have done that, she’s worked here before.” Akash supported her.

“Exactly,” Arnav glared at her.

“A few-” Arnav raised an eyebrow, “-hundred candles won’t cause any trouble-” Khushi whispered and at that precise moment, the fire sprinklers activated with an alarm.

The candles, studio’s decorations, Akash’s dreams, Payal’s expectations and Khushi’s plans were sufficiently doused.

---

With Payal in the washroom and Akash in the AR wardrobe, post his wise decision of bringing spare clothes for the rest, Khushi murmured a prayer as Arnav dragged her to Akash’s office.

He pushed back his wet hair and thumped an empty vase in the center of Akash’s table.

“Ar-”

“Shut up!” He stormed to his cabin and returned, a bunch of white roses in his hand. With brutal force he pushed the stems into the vase. Khushi stood in the corner, her hands folded ahead of her like a naughty child punished by a school teacher.

Arnav grumbled, the fairy light trees were- thankfully - waterproof. As Arnav bent to pick one heavy tree up, Khushi edged forward to help.

“Don’t!” He barked. She quickly resumed to her position, fidgeting with the edge of her wet dupatta.

“Fuck!” He exclaimed as none of the lights switched on. Khushi tiptoed by him and put the plug into the socket. Arnav glared at her as the lights came to life. He removed his wet coat, vest and tie and handed it to her.

“Ar-”

“Just stand here.” He ordered and rolled back his sleeves. With a swift squat he picked up two heavy trees and deposited them on the corners of Akash’s office.

“Unbelievable! You are unbelievable Khushi Kumari Gupta! THIS was your plan? Tell me, does any stupid song of yours have a rain sequence?” Arnav huffed.

“Tip tip barsa pani-” Khushi squeaked as Arnav shot her a glare, “No I mean you asked about a rain song… no of course that’s not going to come into real life! You don’t have to be upset - it’s not a Salman Khan song!” She stepped back as Arnav marched towards her, his anger rising at every statement.

“It’s Akshay ji and Raveena ji’s song. He wears a brown suit while she wears a yellow saree an-and I’m sorry!” Khushi clutched her eyes shut.

“I don’t care who’s song it is! I don’t care what they’re wearing. This is Akash’s first date with a woman he wants to marry and that’s all I care about!” Arnav growled and slapped his palm against the wall.

“I didn’t do this purposely! And it’s not just your brother’s first date - it’s also my sister’s!” Khushi jutted her chin, matching his temperament. How dare he accuse her! It was just an accident! But his eyes bored into hers, as if he believed she was intentionally capable of ruining things.

“Why is it so easy for you to believe the worst of me?” Khushi choked up. Arnav lost his grip, his palms slid off the wall, his anger replaced by confusion.

“I don’t-”

“Bhai, Payal and I got some clothes for you and Khushi ji,” Arnav and Khushi sprang away from each other.

“You’re wearing-”

“A brown suit. And I took the liberty of getting a charcoal grey one for-” Akash stopped, realising Arnav and Khushi were gawking at him.

“What happened?”

Payal had appeared, draped in a canary yellow saree.

Khushi, warily, turned to a shocked Arnav.

“You’re fucking kidding me!”

---

Glossary:

Dupatta = stole, Chaand Chupa Baadal Main = the moon hides in the clouds (a song in the film, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam), Offo = a common expression in Hindi-Urdu speaking regions, used for expressing the feeling for something that is just too much, something like Oh My God, Oh Man!, etc., Kamlesh Tha Khabri Ab Pandit Ji = Kamlesh was a new journalist, now he’s a priest, Tip Tip Barsa Pani = water fell, drop by drop (a song in the film, Mohra). 

A/N: I hope you all liked this update. But what's important is the #BlackLivesMatter protests happening in America across the world. Let's support in any and every way we can.

Study. Support. Speak.

Love,

S

Also read it on: Wattpad

[hyucksong]

impulse.| lee jeno

summary: Jeno doesn’t understand what makes a human happy, or what makes them impulsive or unsatisfied -- he doesn’t understand why there’s a ‘certain’ way to be happy. Because there’s not. And you (and his friends) prove that. 

warnings: weed and dreamies, jeno has a pretty close-minded view at the beginning and it made me mad to even write it lol, 

word count: 2.0 k

   Jeno doesn’t understand why he’s impulsive.

   He wonders sometimes if it’s because when he was in high school, he never let himself breathe. He stuck to the rules like gum to long hair, you’d never catch him dog-earing book pages or with a button undone on his sweater. His shoes were always polished and his hair always combed, his smile always polite and his posture stick-straight. Being untidy was a sign of unorganized, and unorganized was a sign of bad grades -- and bad grades were a sign of a bad future. At least, to Jeno it meant that.

   His thoughts were always racing, whether it be about the Calculus test the next day or how what you wore defined you -- he thought himself to be open-minded, but the second he’d see a girl in a miniskirt or a guy with loose pants, he’d judge them. To him though, that didn’t matter -- everyone judged everyone! I’m no different.

   But his way of thinking was exactly what drove him into a corner. It drove him into burnout, into depression. Because he could never be as perfect as he idealized. He could never be his older brother with a 5.0 GPA and a full scholarship to Harvard, and he couldn’t be his younger brother with musical genius and social skills. His charisma was lacking, he couldn’t help but let negative and rude insults slip from his mouth whenever someone made a mistake, which unsurprisingly pushed people away from his personality, even if he was mildly good-looking. 

   So maybe he’s impulsive because one day he snapped -- maybe it happened when he didn’t get a full ride to the college of his dreams, or when his little brother got a girlfriend before him, or maybe it was when he was walking on his way to his first college class and a rude upperclassman bumped into him, spilling his drink all over his sweater vest and polo shirt, without apologizing. 

   Regardless, by the time he had made it through the first month of college, he was different. He no longer cared about his grades, about the rules, or about his brother’s success. He let himself be free, he let himself go. 

   He dropped out of college and let his appearance become untidy, his hair was always combed by his calloused fingers and his buttons were always mismatched. He decided to pursue music, it was something he had heard about, and was mildly interested in during high school, but pursuing music meant being a starving artist. And that was unacceptable to Jeno.

   Or, it was to the old Jeno. 

    The new Jeno just wanted to be happy. So the new Jeno spent a good three months working odd jobs and learning about music in his free time, and while the odd jobs sometimes required him to get up at the ass-crack of dawn and clean questionable places, he had never been happier. Especially when during the graveyard shift at the convenience store down his complex brought him the opportunity of meeting his now close friends.

   Jaemin had came in reeking of weed, his friends trailing behind him with the same half-lidded red-lined eyes he had. Jeno had initially rolled his eyes, not really wanting to deal with seven annoying and high teenagers. That was until Whitney Houston’s ‘ I Will Always Love You ‘ came on and the teens joined all together in a raspy and off-key high rendition of the classic.

   He supposed they were alright then. 

   “Can I also have a cup of coffee?” The blonde in front of Jeno asked. Jeno tried to ignore the distracting blue streaks on the boy’s bangs, instead opting to shake his head and point towards the front of the store. “You get it when you come in. It’s literally by the door.” A fluttery giggle left the blonde-and-blue boy’s lips before he apologized and trailed over to get his coffee. At...three in the morning. Jeno didn’t ask.

   “Sorry about him, he’s, uh --” A shorter boy with a mullet started, and hesitated his words. He looked over to the rest of the group, watching as they slowly-blinked right in front of him, still processing the words. “High. He’s high.” Another voice added, a hint of annoyance hidden in their tone. 

   Jeno’s eyes darted over to your figure. Your hands were in the pockets of your distressed black jean jacket, and your legs were tittering back and forth in tight black leggings. Your eyes weren’t red like the rest, but your eyes were still tired-looking nonetheless, and your brows were tilted downwards in perpetual irritation. Jeno noticed that your hair was extremely messy, and then saw your shirt that was covered in an abundance of stains. He realized that you must’ve been pulled out of bed in your pajamas. 

   You looked down to see what he was looking at and laughed, “They dragged me out of bed to be their designated driver.” 

   “Ah.” Jeno understood your aggravated expression. 

   “Yes we did! Thank you so much Angel, we appreciate you so much!” The coffee boy exclaimed, wrapping his arms around your waist, but fell back with a groan as you elbowed him in the stomach. “Don’t touch me, you smell like cannabis.” You grumbled. 

   “You’re driving them around even though you don’t like weed?” Jeno smirked, amused at your contradicting actions. You rose your brow and scoffed, shifting your weight onto another one of your legs. “I don’t want a phone call telling me six boys died in a car crash because they wanted to smoke weed late at night. I’m being generous.”

   “Not that it’s any of your buisness.” You quickly pushed out, before suddenly springing into action and shoving your card into Jeno’s hands and muttering that you would pay for everything, making the boys cheer from behind you. This time, when a separate boy with bright orange traffic cone hair hugged you,  you didn’t shrug him off, instead letting out a heavy sigh.

   You mumbled a quick ‘thank you’, before grabbing the bag and handing the coffee to the blonde-and-blue boy and walking out of the door, waiting for all the boys to go out in front of you as you did a head count. 

   When you finally stepped out of the store, Jeno couldn’t help but feel a magnetic compulsion to go after you, so he gave in. He grabbed his coat and keys before closing the store way too early -- considering the store is open 24/7 -- and ran after your slouching figure. The second his hand caught your wrist, he felt he really made the right move. Like the best decision of his life was being made right that second.

   “Hey,” He panted, his eyes searching your wide ones, “Can I get your number?” His heart was beating in his ears and his mind raced with thought of what could happen between you two if you said yes --

   “What? No.” You sneered, and with that, you got in the car and turned the key towards you, speeding off. (well, drove off, you don’t like speeding, especially not with six other high boys in the car.) 

   Oh.

   Jeno sighed and walked back in the store, turning back on the lights and going to his place behind the counter. ‘So much for impulse.’ Jeno bitterly thought.

   He sure was surprised when he saw you come in the next night with the same boys with double the darkness under your eyes, except their eyes were clear and held a teasing nature. Your cheeks were dusted in  hesitant a beautiful red as you held out your phone. Maybe, just maybe, he’d get his chance again.

   Now here you were, dressed in his shirt with nothing else on but socks and your underwear, choking Jisung for eating all your snacks. Jeno felt himself smile as you pulled the youngest member of your friend group into a choke hold, the younger begging for mercy. Jeno’s eyes looked over your apartment, where his boxes were sitting in the corner, not yet unpacked. He watched as Jaemin attempted to cuddle his boyfriend and was brutally rejected by a blushing and stuttering Renjun, he watched as Mark and Haechan napped on the large sofa, embraced in each other’s arms, where Chenle sat at the end of the sofa, scrolling through his phone.

   This was true happiness. Not getting perfect grades, not being judgmental, not thinking you’re better than everyone else; maybe that was happiness for someone else, but not for Jeno. Jeno found his happiness in the moment, the moment where he and his friends were laughing and annoying the old neighbors. 

   After a few seconds, Jeno realized that the screaming stopped, and Jisung walked out the kitchen rubbing his throat, complaining as Chenle squawked and made fun of him. But either way, the boy still sat next to Chenle and buried his head in the older’s shoulder, whining about the ‘trauma’ that Y/n gave him. 

   Jeno got up from his spot in the reclining chair and walked towards the kitchen, where he found you. You were bent over looking in the bottom of your pantry, grumbling about how kids were gremlins, or something like that. Your pale blue underwear with the word ‘badass’ printed in bold golden letters stuck out, making Jeno’s shoulders shake with amusement. 

   “What’re you doing there?” He chimed, walking up behind you and using his fingers to trace the grooves of your spine. 

   “I’m currently looking to see if there’s anything Jisung didn’t eat.” Your hand still moved around the storage, not paying much mind to Jeno, even though his hands did make the corners of your lips tug up. “Mmm, really?” He bent down with you, matching the contours of your back as he practically laid down on you. You laughed and stood up, with a slight struggle because he weighed so much, and turned to face him.

   “Yes,” You sang, crossing your arms as his wrapped around your waist and pulled you closer. Jeno didn’t say anything, instead opting to let his lips wander to yours. He could feel you smile into the impulsive kiss, the mold of his lips against yours a familiar feeling that caused butterflies to fly in both of your stomachs. 

   He pulled away, and let his forehead rest on yours. Your eyes smiled in a rare show of happiness. You were never one to show your affection constantly, nor were you someone people should be friends with if they wanted a normal friendship. So the grin on your face caused Jeno’s cheeks to bloom in love.

   “You can see your underwear...” He whispered, his glasses making the close proximity of your face give him a slight headache. You quirked your brow up, and smirked. “And? So what?”

   Jeno took off his glasses, placing them on the counter before caging you in the corner where the two counters met. 

   “So? We’ll have to do something about that.” His whisper in the crook of your neck caused pleasant shivers to travel up your spine, much like his fingers did, into your heart strings. It probably wasn’t the best idea to do anything with the boys in the next room, but you just wanted to feel him against you, in the most intimate way possible.

   You could face the consequences later. 

///

   Lee Jeno understands why he's impulsive.

   It’s because the thrill of the unplanned moment makes Jeno’s heart race the way 100′s on his tests never did -- it’s because he’s finally happy to not have to adhere to the rules and follow in his brother’s footsteps with no choices or happiness of his own.

   And maybe it’s because his impulse gave him the gift of your love. 

   (and the gift of his good friends, but that’s way too cheesy for him to ever say.)

[tu-mint]

‼️⚠️NEW OC⚠️‼️Introducing...Jade Lofota/Dome‼️🥳

‼️‼️Hey guys! Hope all has been well with you since quarantine! Speaking of which, Tiktok has officially dragged me back into “bingewatch anime and mess up your sleep schedule” mode and ofc I listened. So I just recently got back into My Hero Academia specifically (I started it when it first came out then lost track 😅) bc I’ve been seeing this trend with MHA based OCs and it’s so cool! My personal favorite is Artiste aka Hina Tsukuru which y’all can check out on Tiktok @/mailleur_maker btw! Anywho, I figured why not go on and make one too?? These are pretty much the basic layouts to my character (I used a website to create my character’s look bc I can’t draw for 💩 so I apologize if they aren’t the best quality!) Let me know what you think!‼️‼️

Name: Jade Lofota (Hero Name: Dome)

Age: 18 (DOB: 02/20)

Height: 5’8” 1/2

Species: Human

Ethnicity: Samoan

Hair Color/Type: Brown w/ Natural Highlights; 2C-Type

Eye Color: Indigo, Mint Green (when using quirk)

Physical Description:

Jade has a muscular physique with noticeable curves around her mid section. Her skin is a caramel tone with a diamond shape face. She has thick curved eyebrows that arch slightly upward giving her a natural weighty expression. Her lips are turned downwards and two toned, her upper lip a slightly darker shade. Her nose and ears are wide set, but her ears are slightly pushed back. Jade's hair is a 2C curl texture, but she keeps it in a braid that reaches right above her hips with shorter locks slipping out on the side.

During school hours, Jade wears the UALA version of the UA uniform, which is initially the same without the stripes on the collar or cuffs. Jade also wears black leggings and gloves, along with a pair of boots that stop above the knee. With the hero attire, Jade wears a long mustard top that reaches the top of her thighs with loose sleeves that end at her elbows, along with a hood. Attached to the tip of her hood is an inverted triangle shaped device. The top is slightly opened down to the navel, and the hem has high slits on either side. Under the top, she wears high waisted shorts that are the same color of the hood and the sleeve outlines. At her waistline is a utility belt full of medical supplies held up by a strap that goes across her body. Jade wears tech infused gloves and boots that are a metallic grey color and reach below the knee. On her left thigh is a blunt held up by a black strap with yellow buckles; the blunt can stretch to full length when used.

Family:

Manu Lofota [father; retired pro hero]

Lina Lofota [mother]

Manu Jr. Lofota [oldest brother; deceased]

Tony Lofota [younger brother]

Joseph Lofota [younger brother]

Matthew Lofota [younger brother]

Mikey Lofota [youngest brother]

Carolei Lofota [sister]

Backstory:

Jade is a second-year student in class 2-A at UALA apart of the special program they'd developed. (⚠️In this AU, due to its rising global popularity, UA High has now evolved into an international school program to assist upcoming heroes around the world, so there are other UA institutions in select locations (but the original UA in Japan is pretty much the Harvard to all Ivy Leagues). Every year, one student per location is handpicked to spend 3-5 months at the original UA and understand the history behind heroes while getting to personally train and meet with pro-heroes. A special structure created for this purpose is directly across the UA building.⚠️) She comes from a middle class family and was able to get into UALA (UA Los Angeles) school after being scouted by a staff member who she saved from danger. When she was younger, Jade had witnessed her oldest brother, Manu, get shot and killed by gang members he was associated with, thus making the ultimate decision to become a hero. The memory constantly torments her as she believes it to be her fault for not acting quickly enough to defend him, though her parents often try to assure her that it isn't. Being where she’s from, Jade takes a crucial amount of time learning to master her quirk and combat skills as a means of survival. She dedicates her life to protecting her family at all costs, even if it means sometimes committing wrongdoings.

Persona:

Jade is a cordial person and enjoys any opportunity to meet new people; many often take a quick liking to her because of the comfortable aura she gives. Along with meeting new faces, Jade is observant of those she interacts with and can remember distinct aspects very well, such as body language, habits, facial expressions, and speech patterns. While her observance is meant as a defense mechanism, she sometimes uses it to her advantage. Persuasion is one of Jade's strong suits and often she will use it to get herself or others out of trouble. On the field, Jade is a formidable and aggressive combatant, but impulsiveness is often a struggle she deals with. Sudden flashbacks of her brother's death trigger Jade to act without thinking which in turn ends up hurting herself or others. The passing of her brother also overcame Jade with guilt and made her develop a pessimistic view on life and society. These cynical beliefs drove her to swear complete protection over her family from the world's evil, especially her siblings.

Abilities:

- Quirk: Animal Control: Similar to Shinso, Jade has a quirk allows her to use mind manipulation over any animal classified organism, but the only way it can be activated is if she makes physical contact using the head, legs, hands or feet. She can manage multiple minds at once but must be careful to the extent at which she does because she can put herself into sensory overload. The quirk can be deactivated two ways: Jade verbally declares the opponent free of her command, or sensory overload will forcibly shut down her control (if multiple minds are being controlled, she can pick and choose who is released; if there's no specification, the quirk will deactivate control over all minds). Jade can command her opponent telepathically or verbally, but the deactivation can only be done verbally. Her quirk can involuntarily be triggered by the smallest touch, so Jade must be cautious with her interactions as to not set it off (ex: giving hugs).

- Telepathy: When in close range, Jade has the ability to temporarily share her telepathic powers with someone in order to communicate with them. Using telepathy for too long can leave her lightheaded and susceptible to fainting as it requires a lot of mental strength. This also applies to when her quirk is in use with the exception of range. Since most are unaware of this ability, Jade will use it to temporarily distract an opponent when in combat.

- Enhanced Strength: Jade is physically robust and can endure high levels of pain while fighting. Jade can also handle severe injuries while engaging in combat or using her quirk, which easily makes her an intimidating opponent. At the same time, she has the ability to deliver lethal punches and kicks that are deadly to an opponent if powerful enough and has proved this her first year of the final exams in UALA.

- Enhanced Agility: Given that her quirk requires physical contact, Jade can move at an impressively quick rate despite her stature. She is able to maintain incredible balance between her speed and strength at close and mid range and will occasionally use gymnastic maneuvers to take down her opponent or latch herself onto them. Jade's rapid observations on her opponent also help her in using their physicality against themselves.

Uncanny Balance: One of Jade’s most notable skills during combat is the constant switching of her body position. Whether in direct combat or moving away from it, Jade can quickly shift whatever stance she’s in and hold it for long periods at a time despite its complexity, showing her flexibility, durability and balance. An example of this would be fighting in a hand stand depending solely on the legs and feet for combat. (This is connected to Enhanced Agility.)

- Special Moves:

Footlose: Jade back flips into a hand stand position before the opponent and swings a brutal kick between their legs or to the groin then delivers another blow to the side of the face with her other foot, activating her quirk. She brings both her legs to her chest to deliver one final kick to the opponent's face.

Tama’s Blow: At long distance, Jade sprints to her opponent then leaps and spirals while coming down, allowing momentum to build into her left arm. Her fist connects with the opponent’s jaw before her feet reach the ground, twisting the neck far back and killing or severely injuring the opponent. When this move is performed, parts of Jade’s tattoo will glow.

Quote(s):

"Look kid, I’m not here to be the world’s hero—this is for my family."

Trivia:

- Played softball for 3 years but quit before high school

- Jade owns two electric guitars -- one in her dorm and one at her house -- and plays them to relieve stress, worry, anxiety or sadness

- Tama’s Blow was named in honor of Jade’s father as it was one of his finishing moves as a Pro Hero

PLEASE DON’T STEAL OR POST MY WORKS WITHOUT ASKING

[thvodora]

hello !! i’m luna, from the est, and i use she/her pronouns !! this is my baby theodora (aka dory but can also be called theo/thea/teddi/etc. skjdfjks) !! below i have a whole summary of her bio and personality, and also some ideas for connections if you’re into that !! if you’d like to plot, please message me on discord @luna#6219 or like this and i will come to you (most likely on discord, but tumblr im also works) !! if you have time to read things that are way too long, feel free to peek at her biography, statistics, personality traits, headcanons, pinterest, and playlist !! okay let’s dive in !

( lee ji-eun, cisfemale ) hey ! have you seen THEODORA KWON around ? SHE works as a ICE SKATING INSTRUCTOR at big bear resort, but they must be off their shift by now. well, if you do see them can you let me know ? they’re 20 years old & they’ve been working here for FOUR MONTHS. they tend to be +AMBITIOUS & +FASTIDIOUS, but can also be -DOGMATIC & -PREDICTABLE. the other employees have labeled them THE POLYMATH. thanks a lot ! ( delicate fingernails painted red grazing over a piano, wilted flowers resting in the sunlight, elaborate sand sculptures washed away by the tides, ripples in otherwise perfectly still water, & tea-stained book pages )

biography (tw: car accident)

theodora basically grows up w/ two controlling parents who are doctors, but she has a relatively ok childhood where she spends most of her time with her brother. she reads a lot, does well in school, takes some piano lessons, all that jazz

then her mother has an affair and so her parents divorce when dory’s 10 y/o and she’s pretty distraught, split between households. she’s especially spiteful of her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.

her brother leaves for harvard, which sets high expectations for her to excel similarly. but this absence + anger from the divorce + pressure to do well culminates into her accidentally falling into the Mean Girl™ clique at her high school. they basically rebel, party hard, and are super condescending to/basically bully others but all this peer pressure and social conformity is enough for her to ignore her Bad Behavior

she crushes on and later dates the whole ringleader of the clique’s/her bff’s crush. she’s so in love but then at a party she finds her bf + her bff kissing and its just rly bad. her bff has pretty much spread rumors about her, her boyfriend ridicules her, and dory’s effectively thrown out of the social circle.

now with an outsider’s perspective she realizes how terrible she’s been and succumbs to her guilt. she becomes super introverted and only sticks to studying hard and reading books and playing the piano. she tries to apologize to the ppl that she used to bully and tries to insert herself back into high school society but it doesn’t rly work 

so she carries on like this, fighting with her parents yet adhering to their expectations + virtually outcasted but sticking to her studies. then her brother comes home over break and gets into a really bad car accident. he ends up being hospitalized and paralyzed waist down. 

dory’s pretty angry so she ends up tracking the case and watches it happen in court, but the judge/jury/lawyers suck and nothing really happens to the drunk driver who caused the accident

this spurs her into an epiphany that she can right her wrongs and right these wrongs by becoming a lawyer herself, taking justice into her own hands. her parents hate the idea because they don’t think that dory has what it takes + try to persuade her not to, telling her it’s dangerous, unstable, time-consuming, etc. she doesn’t care anymore, though, and seeing how her brother has decided to take a gap year and travel, she frees herself from her parents and goes off to yale for pre-law.

then her dad is diagnosed with early on-set dementia and she decides to move closer to his home to take care of him. she transfers to a uni in colorado, and then gets a job at the resort to a) get that $$$ to help support her dad + her education and b) she’s gone to the resort b4 as like an annual family vacay and is a lil sentimental ! 

she visits her dad a bunch but it’s a lowkey secret, she feels slightly embarrassed and also is just generally quite private

so that’s it! she’s basically just a hell of a mess who still hasn’t forgiven herself for all her mistakes in high school and still feels like she needs to conform + control everything as much as possible + be “perfect” .... but more on that in the next part

personality

my gal dory is the . most . uptight perfectionist ever . she’s super detail oriented and will undoubtedly nit pick at everything she can, both about others + herself. she’s the type to always take control in a group project because a) it has to be done in a specific way for her and b) she doesn’t really trust other people with her grades.

she’s super pragmatic and is super frugal. she hates people who talk their way around things and would rather just have direct communication and be to the point. she’s so honest and brutally critical that it gets her into a bunch of confrontations but.. she doesn’t really mind it. she lowkey loves arguing and asserting her opinion (cause she thinks it’s correct), hence the whole lawyer thing

curious about everything and if you know her well she can ramble on about an insane amount of topics if you give her the time. but like if you know her well... don’t give her that time sdkjfnsk

stubborn and holds grudges, doesn’t forgive easily aka if you lose her trust it’s pretty hard to get it back. super hard to sway her in your favor/opinion. like try to get her to spontaneously go to a party night of? sorry she hasn’t factored it into her planner two weeks in advance and also she hates parties ksdnfgks

loves playing the piano!!! is currently trying to figure out how to dj!!! but she keeps it lowkey

learned to skate when she was pretty young!! by no means an olympic skater but she does like skating bc its v graceful and she loves 2 be on the ice

basically. self-critical, hates Fun, perfectionist who is the embodiment of an istj, enneagram type 1, slytherin, & capricorn sun so....... enjoy

this is a terrible summary please go read her headcanons + personality traits page its so much more well written skfnksndfvbs

wanted connections !!

here’s a link to a tag i have for some ideas and also here’s my connections page w/ some wanted connections but i’m down for anything we brainstorm!!

[jennacolemans]

The Man in the High Castle - Character Bios from Amazon’s X-ray feature - requested by anonymous

John Smith 

John Smith was born in Manhattan in 1917, the second son of a prosperous Wall Street Banker.  In many ways, John's early life looked picture perfect.  Any hint of superiority, however, was tempered by his father, who instilled a deep sense of civic duty and propriety in his sons.  The boys were four years apart in age.  John looked up to older brother Chris, a star athlete and an A-student, following in suit.  In 1927, when John was 11, Chris collapsed and was soon wheelchair bound.  In March, 1929, The Wall Street Crash struck, and overnight American banking institutions folded.  John's father was financially ruined and promptly took his own life.  And so, at 13 years old, John Smith swore to himself that he would never allow himself to break.  Even when his beloved brother passed away, two years later, John Smith pressed on.  Despite witnessing a New York City that had become decrepit and corrupt, and a failing America that had been gutted once more by the 1933 assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, John was still determined and still a patriot.  He earned a degree at Princeton, he joined the New York Mayor's office, implementing programs to get America back to work, and, when war loomed, he signed up for officer training at West Point. where he proved a natural solder and tactician.  Graduating to a post within the US Signal Corps.  By 1942. John Smith was a 1st Lieutenant.  In 1943, he was promoted to Captain and re-deployed to the Pentagon to advise all branches of the military on intelligence gathering.  During this time, he met and married Helen McCrae, the beautiful, accomplished daughter of two Harvard academics.  Helen became pregnant with their first child in July, 1945.  Just a few months later, the American government fell to the New Reich.  Smith saw surrender as the right thing to do.  America had lost.  Nothing in the US arsenal could compete with Nazi nuclear power.  So, John Smith assimilated into the interim government, in sincere hope he could lessen the brutality of Nazi retaliation against rebel uprisings.  He could save American lives.  He could keep those he loved safe.  Nazism is survival.

Wyatt Price

Wyatt Price is the alias of an Irishman who fled Nazi Europe in 1944 to seek refuge in unconquered North America.  Though Ireland had remained neutral at the outset of The War, large numbers of Irishmen had been called to fight and more took to the front after nearly 400000 British soldiers were killed or otherwise defeated at the beachhead in Dunkirk, France in 1940.  In September of that year, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was killed in a German air raid, and the war raged on.  Young Liam had been away from home for a year, fighting for the British Army.  In January, 1942, the British Government fell to the Reich.  England was occupied, but fierce resistance continued in Wales and Scotland for two more years.  In 1944, the remnants of the British Isles were finally conquered.  When Ireland capitulated to German rule, Irish men and women left the mainland In droves, pushing off the coasts by night, bound for the Americas.  Young Liam was among those who fled.  In America, Liam became Wyatt Price.  He had seen his fair share of horrors back in Europe. He had lost almost his entire family, and wanted to start anew.  But war was encroaching on North America as well, and in 1945 Germany took the continent, dropping the A-Bomb on the capital.  For two years, Wyatt fought in the Rebel American War.  By 1947, badly beaten, and starved of resources, the resistance was forced underground.  Wyatt's surviving network spread out.  Some military comrades stayed on the East Coast in the Greater Nazi Reich, while others dispersed to the Neutral Zone in the former American heartland, where 'freedom' became simply another word for ‘lawlessness’.  It was in this wild, neutral territory that Wyatt established himself.  He became known as a shrewd, resourceful fixer.  He was depended on by many, but trusted no one.  He never spoke of the past, he never told anyone his real name.  He shrouded himself in secrecy and misinformation.  He could smuggle anything, obtain official-looking documents; it was impossible to know whose side he was on.  And Wyatt liked it that way.  It was the best way to stay alive while doing so-called dirty work.  He had long abandoned the fight for liberty and justice in this world.  He resigned himself to mating for justice in the next one.

Juliana Crain

Juliana has a tendency for deep introspection and even depression - a result of her father's death, which cast a shadow over her life.  She was 10 and her sister Trudy nearly 3 when the A bomb fell on Washington, D.C.  Within days, the American government had surrendered.  Intense resistance followed and life became hard for white Californians.  The Japanese occupation was brutally enforced.  White people were denied ownership of major businesses.  Anyone not bowing to a Japanese citizen in the street was shot dead.  By the time Juliana completed high school, the San Francisco where she was born was unrecognizable.  But, despite the horrors, many things about Japanese culture fascinated Juliana - its orderliness, beauty, food, and subtle philosophy.  She persuaded a Japanese Dojo to take her on as an Aikido student and found she had a talent for the martial art and its focus on energy, poise, and balance.  Nevertheless, the atmosphere of oppression and obedience in the JPS was draining.  Over the years Juliana's depressions deepened until, one day, she stepped in front of a bus, determined to set herself free.  Death, however, was not In store for Juliana Crain.  Instead, she found herself injured and in the arms of a young passerby, Frank Fink.  Over the course of her recovery, the two established a strong bond that became a deep love.  But as she began to settle into a life with Frank, a restless searching began to rise once more within her.  On the night she witnessed her sister Trudy's execution at the hands of the Kempeitai, Juliana Crain stepped once more into the unknown, this time to answer the call of a transcendent force, somewhat akin to destiny. 

Takeshi Kido

Takeshi Kido was born in 1917 in the town of Koriyama, Japan.  The son of a tenant farmer, Kido was the fourth of eight children.  Theirs was a hard life with no prospects for improvement, of backbreaking work, and unpredictable, often swift, death.  In 1930, a 13-year-old Kido took the intelligence test given to 15-year-old prospective students for the Japanese Intelligence Service and scored off the charts.  In 1932, he ran away from home to join the Army and was recruited into the Kempeitai — the highly respected Japanese military police and intelligence force.  Kido excelled not just because of intellect but because of his strength of will and unyielding sense of patriotic duty.  His drive to succeed was unmatched.  Orders that might give others pause had no effect on the young officer.  Kid0 was serving in Manchuria when the Japanese army invades deeper into China in 1937.  The infamous Rape of Nanking occurred during this campaign, and Kido was confronted with a level of brutality he had never before imagined.  Such horrors left an indelible mark on him.  In the intervening years, Kido became a seasoned officer, serving honorably across many bloody campaigns.  He witnessed many horrors including the Rape of Nanking and, later, the carnage of the Solomon Islands offensives, which claimed the lives of many American and Japanese troops.  Having risen In the Japanese societal hierarchy, Kido took a wife in 1950.  He would father two children with his bride, but the family was divided by Kido's duty to the Empire.  Kido took up a post in the Japanese Pacific States of America in 1952.  In 1957, he was promoted to Chief Inspector of the Kempeitai, one of the most senior positions in the JPS, and by 1962, the year he shot and killed a young rebel by the name of Trudy Walker, Kido had spent five years crushing American resistance firmly under his boot and almost seventeen years away from mainland Japan, a place he would never again call home. 

Joe Blake

Joe believed he was born in Brooklyn in 1938, the single child of a single, German mother who claimed Joe's German father abandoned them before he was born.  When the A-bomb dropped on Washington. D.C. the Nazis assumed power, and, by 1950, the American Reich was firmly established.  But young Joe Blake was never totally certain who he was or what he wanted to be.  He still wanted to hide his mother's German-ness.  Most of all, he never felt worthy of an absent father's love.  This confusion and shame came out in a rebellious streak.  Joe stole a car at age 15 and, at the police station, he heard his mother tell a desk sergeant about what an important man his father was, back in Berlin.  Later that day, he received a visitor - a GNR colonel named John Smith, who offered him a ride home.  Joe's run In with Smith helped him turn a corner.  He got an apprenticeship in construction, did a year of mandatory military service and signed up to the Corps of Engineers.  He was a charming young than who kept intimacies at a distance.  He did honest work for an honest Mark.  His mother died of Septicemia when he was 21 years old, and Joe buried his grief along with her.  That muted sadness turned into a silent rage at their poverty, at their abandonment by his father, a man he longed to have known.  Two years later, John Smith - now Obergruppenführer - re-appeared In Joe's life.  Smith had a Job for him if he was willing to commit.  Joe didn't care about the Reich or duty to his country but Smith fascinated Joe and so did the prospect of finding out more about his elusive father.  Joe agreed to Smith's terms for he had nothing to lose.

Nicole Dörmer

Nicole was born to a pretty, young ward of the Lebensborn nursery where every aspect of her upbringing was designed to indoctrinate her and her Lebensborn fellows.  One of Nicole’s earliest memories was a visit by Himmler to the orphanage.  Nicole was only four and already a starling beauty.  She as chosen to hand Himmler a bouquet and sing a patriotic song.  Himmler raised her in his arms and kissed her cheeks, telling Nicole that he was her father.  Then, in the spring of 1944, Otto Dörmer, Nicole’s real, biological father arrived.  Young Nicole was taken to Dörmer’s grand family home in Potsdam, where she had the run of the mansion.  By 1944, the Lebensborn program was being phased out by the Reich; thusly, its products were becoming more and more valuable.  Private schools vied for the privilege of taking Nicole and her comrades.  With their privileged status, the Lebensborn children often found they could get away with behaviors or attitudes that would have placed other citizens in danger.  They illicitly collected Jazz, read banned books, and made mildly critical observations of about the state.  But despite this rebelliousness, they were proud believers in the clear superiority of the Nazi regime.  Nicole traveled the world before college.  She dined at all the fashionable restaurants and attended all the best parties, plays and film galas.  Fascinated by the media as an instrument of State Control, she enrolled at the Brandenburg Studios Propaganda Arts course and dropped out after four semesters, bored by the conventionalism.  She experimented with LSD and had liaisons with both men and women in an attempt to free herself from conventional norms.  In 1960, at age 21, Nicole was expected to find a husband, but she wanted a career, she wanted to be noticed, and she wanted to make a difference.  Later that year, she was arrested under suspicion of publishing a seditious pamphlet.  Upon release, she was cowed but far from broken.  It was a wake-up call that she was not immune from harm and that she shouldn't be foolishly outspoken.  But in other ways, it made her even more determined to challenge the received wisdom of the "fossils" in power.

Robert Childan

Robert Childan was born in San Francisco in 1919.  He was an only child and the apple of his mother's eye.  Robert's father was a stern and emotionally closed man who ran a kitchen and housewares business.  Robert was 10 when the Great Depression hit and his father's enterprise went bust.  The family moved into a small downtown San Francisco apartment and lived in the midst of Mrs. Childan's sprawling book collection.  After college, Robert got a junior curator position at the San Francisco Museum of Art and managed to avoid going to war after a mild cardiac arrhythmia was detected during his medical examination.  In 1942, Robert's father died, and, in 1945, his mother passed away too, just before the Germans dropped the A-bomb.  As Japan began its occupation of San Francisco, Robert realized he'd need to adapt quickly or he'd likely wind up dead or arrested.  His resourcefulness ultimately led him to the idea of starting a bookstore using his mother's collection as initial inventory.  The white-collar jobs Robert was suited for were not open to him in the San Francisco of the JPS, but Japanese hunger for Americana and curiosity about American literature was taking hold all over the city.  He knew he could exploit this.  Robert began to buy up old heirlooms and American antiques.  Very soon sales of American object's d'art outstripped book sales.  His livelihood depended upon a growing Japanese client base.  Over the years, he grew to admire the distinctive and aloof cultural superiority of his patrons and envied their grace and beauty.  He was becoming part of a new class of 'Nippophile' aesthetes, an inevitable side effect of Japan's cultural imperialism in California.  But, deep down, Robert resented those he seemed to adore.

Edward McCarthy

Edward was born in Oakland in 1934 to proud second-generation Irish Americans.  His father had grown up in the Bay area, inheriting a small metalworking factory from Ed's grandfather.  After his family moved into a modest townhouse near the factory, Ed met and quickly befriended his neighbor, Frank Frink.  The war with Japan began in April 1941 and many factory workers signed up, leaving wives and daughters to keep factory production lines moving.  Ed spent a lot of time there; he loved the smell, sound and vitality.  In July 1944, when Ed and Frank were 10 years old, the war with Japan arrived on America's doorstep.  Planes swooped down on San Francisco to unleash their bombs.  The family survived the raid, but later that year, the Japanese dropped Chlorine explosives on the city, leaving Ed poisoned and on the edge of dying.  Ed's mother perished in the attack.  At the hospital, Ed spent many hours alone, in pain and in fear.  With this isolation and suffering came an extraordinary strength of resilience to endure.  And though he did not recognize it as a boy, he felt a deep love towards Frank who came to visit him every day for months.  It was a bond of affection that would be a guiding light for the rest of his life.  By 1946, Ed would need this kinship for survival.  The Bomb had been dropped on Washington, the factory had been taken over by the Japanese, and Ed's father had been dragged into the factory courtyard, forced to his knees and shot in front of all the workers; Ed went to live with his grandparents.  Churches closed, St. Patrick's Day was banned, and San Francisco filled with waifs and strays fleeing the Nazis in the East and migrant workers from the Japanese Empire in Asia.  But Ed never hated the Japanese; he hated war and violence and brutality.  Ed's deepest reaction to loss was always to love.  This was his gift.

Frank Frink

Frank was born in 1934, his older sister had been born two years earlier.  After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in April, 1941, Frank and his sister went to live with their grandmother.  They worked jobs after school, cooked, cleaned and helped to pay the bills with what meager funds they could scrape together.  Their father died on the front lines in 1943, fighting the Japanese, and five years later, their mother passed away too.  It was around this time that Frank's best friend's father was shot dead in the courtyard of his metalworking factory by Japanese occupiers who had come to take over.  Frank and his friend, Ed, were bonded in unspoken shared pain.  At age 16, Frank got a job at the factory where he helped craft handguns for the Japanese market.  Frank's first passion had always been art; drawing and painting had been a way for his mind to escape.  Unfortunately, there was little appreciation or legitimate outlet for Frank's gifts.  One morning, on the way to the factory, Frank was shocked to see a beautiful young woman purposely step into the street in front of an oncoming bus.  It was Juliana Crain.  The two moved in together shortly after Juliana got out of hospital and began a life together.  They were happy, for a time.  But, as much as Frank and Juliana loved each other, a series of tragedies and shocking experiences would set them on very different paths.  Frank supported Juliana as she committed herself to a purpose he couldn't fully understand, making the best of a bad situation, until finally, they parted.  The young artist also fell victim to the encroachment of racial purity laws on the JPS and Frank Frink, once passive and resigned, found himself consumed by hatred for the leader of the Kempeitai who cruelly and capriciously enforced the laws of the Reich.

Helen Smith

Helen was born in Boston in January 1922 to parents who were academics.  Helen was being raised to think for herself and challenge conventional wisdom.  After the Great Depression hit in 1929, she witnessed deep poverty and hunger in addition to the birth of a fierce political environment, which helped incite the assassination of President Roosevelt in 1933.  With Stalin's rise in the Soviet Union and Hitler's imposition of Fascism in Germany, it seemed to young Helen that America was itself on the brink of totalitarian take over.  And why not?  If it got America working again.  In 1940, Helen went to study at the prestigious NYU School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance and, in 1941, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she dropped out to volunteer as a secretary in the New York War Office.  Then, in June, 1943, Helen's life changed again.  A young Captain, named John Smith, came to City Hall to set up an intelligence bureau.  He and Helen became friends, then lovers.  A year later, they were married in a modest ceremony, just before John left to fight in the war raging in the Pacific.  Every day, Helen dreaded bad news from the front.  But in 1945, Helen discovered she was pregnant; this good news was accompanied by word that her husband was to take up a permanent post at the Pentagon.  The couple shipped their belongings to Washington, D.C. and drove down from New York together, stopping for the night, just outside of the city.  That night, the Nazis dropped the Heisenberg device on Washington; overnight, the world changed.  John Smith was a profoundly moral man who shared Helen's belief in a benevolent and supportive community.  It seemed the only way towards that future would be to fully capitulate to Reich, avoiding potential nuclear annihilation.  And so began Helen's embrace of the Nazi way of life.  She wanted a safe world in which to raise her son, and eventually her daughters.  Despite her parents' executions in 1949 at the hands of the GNR, she had made peace with the realities of Fascist America, the means and methods by which it was achieved, and was grateful for the benefits it brought her - if only for a time.

Nobusuke Tagomi

Tagomi was born in Tokyo in 1887, in the Meiji era - when Japan restored the Emperor and rapidly began to militarize and modernize.  Tagomi's family was Samurai caste from the ruling elite, with close ties to the royal family.  He and his younger brothers were raised from the cradle to understand that their life would be in service to the Japanese State.  At age 11, Tagomi was sent away to Navy Cadet School.  There he was schooled in English, French and German, served in the Japanese fleet for several years, and became a junior Naval Attaché.  He soon realized his aptitude for diplomacy and negotiation was better suited to work in the Trade department and in 1916, he left the Navy for a position at the Japanese Trade Mission.  Years later, in 1933, Tagomi met and wed the daughter of another elite Samurai family from Yokohama.  He was 38 years old at the time.  Their son, Yoshi, was born the following year, and, in many ways, this era was the happiest of Tagomi's life.  Professionally, he continued to rise in stature, but clouds were gathering.  Fascism in Germany, coupled with the emerging political influence of Major General Hideki Tojo, was an increasing threat.  In 1939, the war in Europe began, and in 1940, Japan allied with Hitler.  Tagomi became crucial to the war effort as Japan was challenged by lack of oil in its territories.  He went on a series of trade missions to California to negotiate oil imports and was successful in his negotiations.  The irony: US oil would fuel the conflicts that eventually defeated her.  Despite much success, death was slowly closing in on Tagomi's loved ones.  His brothers perished in the Pacific at the start of the war.  After the family moved to San Francisco in 1947, so Tagomi could help set up a colonial administration, Yoshi joined the Japanese Imperial Army and died serving in Manchuria in 1952.  Tagomi's wife returned to Tokyo, heartbroken, and succumbed to Pneumonia in 1953.  Tagomi went into himself, seeking solace in meditation.  There must be some purpose to this life.  Some reason to the world.  Could he find it, alone in San Francisco?

[walkerismychoice]

For Law and Love Chapter 4

Book: Desire and Decorum - Modern day AU

Paring: Ernest Sinclaire X MC

Raiting: PG

Summary: Another week of class begins. Will Anna ever be able to look Sinclaire in the eyes again?

Count: ~2000

Law and Love Master List  - Catch up here

Anna met up with Annabelle to walk to class Monday morning. She hadn't talked to her, or anyone really, since the party Friday night. She spent a good part of Saturday sleeping off her hangover and then studied all evening. Sunday she went home to do laundry and have dinner with her dad. She told him about Luke being her TA and that she went to a gathering at his place, but omitted any and all details about Ernest Sinclaire. After her performance Friday night, she was certain he'd want nothing to do with her outside anything pertaining to Business Law.

"Hey, what happened to Friday night?" Annabelle asked with brows furrowed. "You just disappeared."

"I disappeared? I was told you had already left."

"I was still there. I was just, uh, busy with Eva." Annabelle averted her eyes shyly. "Sorry about that."

Anna smirked. "No, I get it. I'm glad one of us had a good time."

"You didn't walk home alone did you?" Anabelle inquired, concern evident in her voice.

"No, but I wish I had. I made a complete fool of myself." Anna buried her head in her hands.

"I'm sure whatever it is couldn't be that bad." Annabelle patted her on the back and Anna proceeded to tell her everything. Annabelle cringed. "Okay, yeah, that's pretty bad."

"Ugh, what's wrong with me? I'm so not looking forward to seeing him today." Anna had noted the TAs were taking turns attending class after the first day. It was just her luck that Hamid was Wednesday and Luke was Friday, so it had to be Ernest today. Why was life so cruel?

They arrived in class and took their usual seats in the middle of the room. Anna spotted Sinclaire at the front and kept her head down to avoid any chance at eye contact.

Annabelle leaned in. "He's totally looking at you."

Anna scoffed. "Is he giving me the death stare?"

"Is that any different than his normal stare?" Annabelle chuckled.

“You have a point. He’s got the RBF down.” They both giggled and were hushed by a guy in the row behind them. “Oops, we should keep it down before they have to split us up.”

Class went along as usual with Professor Richard’s self-important prattle sandwiched between short bits of important information. Anna alternated between taking notes and staring at the back of Ernest’s head thinking of all the ways she messed things up. Was there really anything to mess up anyway? He had shown zero outward interest in her. But there were those little things, like the way his eyes always seemed to be on her, or the spark she felt from the brief touch of hands at the party. It gave her hope the attraction was not one sided. At least it had until she made a literal mess of things.

Time was almost up and Anna was ready to bolt out the door immediately, when Professor Richards announced Ernest would be handing back the papers they turned in on Friday. There would be no avoiding him completely. They gathered near the front of the room and he listed off their names one by one.

"Edgewater," he called out. and she quickly shuffled over, trying not to look him in the eyes. She grabbed the a paper from his hand and turned towards the door, not even waiting for Annabelle who later caught up with her outside.

“Wait up Anna!” Annabelle was short of breath by the time she caught her. “You know you can’t avoid him all semester. That was....awkward back there.”

“I just grabbed the paper and left. I don’t see anything weird about that.”

“I don’t know, he just stood there kind of stunned for a few seconds too long and fumbled to get the next persons name out.”

Anna rolled her eyes. “Whatever, I’m sure only you noticed it because you were looking for it. She flipped through her paper which was thoroughly marked in red with comments and corrections and the intials ‘E.S.’ Of course he would be a super critical grader. “I got a B? Look at all these marks. This is brutal...Ernest is brutal."

“If it makes you feel any better, I got a C.” Annabelle held out her paper which was not nearly as marked up but still showed the lower grade.

“But I don’t get Bs.” Anna shook her head in disbelief. “I always get As.”

Annabelle laughed dryly. “Welcome to Harvard. You’ll get used to it.”

“Ugh. I don’t want to get used to it.” Anna flipped to the last page to see the final comments signed by Sinclaire. “What the- How is yours signed?” Annabelle held out the page to her which said ‘Ernest Sinclaire’. “Oh my god.” Anna buried her head in her hand.

“What’s wrong?” Annabelle questioned

“He signed mine ‘Ernie’, in quotes. The embarrassment is unending.”

“Am I missing something?”

“I actually almost forgot about it until now, but I might have drunkenly called him Ernie at the party.”

“You did not!” Annabelle exclaimed before doubling over with laughter. "It seems like he thought it was kind of funny though if he wrote it on your paper."

"I don't know. There are a million comments marked on mine," Anna huffed. "He hardly made any comments on yours."

"But you still got a better grade." Annabelle snatched the paper from her hand and pointed to the B on the front. "Maybe he just cares more about you."

"Or..." Anna swiped it back. "He's trying to get back at me for acting like a fool and ruining his shoes."

"Whatever you say, Anna. I've go to get to class. Text me later?" Anna nodded and Annabelle took off in the opposite direction.

~~~~~

Anna stewed over her grade from Sinclaire and was still thinking about it the next day. It wasn't just that she wasn't used to getting anything less than an A, but she was confused by the comments as well. They were actually positive for the most part with only a few minor corrections. She couldn't understand where she went wrong enough to drop an entire letter grade. It was ridiculous to obsess so much, and the only way to stop was to talk to him about it during his office hours. Of course this meant facing him and owning up to her embarrassment, but she’d have to do it sooner or later.

As Anna approached the office she could see he was with another student. He nodded his head to acknowledge her presence and she took a seat in the chairs outside to wait. No sooner had she sat down when Professor Richards peeked his head out the door.

“Can I help you with something?” His eyes ran over her body as if he was trying to survey what was underneath her clothing, causing an uneasy shiver to run down her spine. Maybe there was some truth to the rumors.

“Oh no. I’m just waiting for Ernest.” Anna looked towards Ernest’s office as she spoke and saw him look up at the mention of his name and narrow his eyes at the professor.

“I’m sure I can help you out with whatever you need Miss-”

“Edgewater. But no, that’s quite alright. I can just wait.”

“Edgewater! I can see the resemblance to Harry now. He wasn’t as pretty as you though.” Professor Richards winked at Anna, making her skin crawl.

At that moment, Ernest stood up and hurriedly rushed the student out of his office, telling him he could email any further questions. “Anna, please come in.”

Professor Richards smile turned to a scowl but he didn’t protest. Ernest ushered Anna inside and shut the door. He didn’t explain nor did she comment on why he closed the door for her and not the other student. He was shielding her from the creep next door.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting.” Ernest said softly before his features hardened. “He shouldn’t have said that to you.”

“It’s fine, It wasn’t a big deal.” Anna lied. Professor Richards hadn’t said all that much but he didn’t have to. His tone and mannerisms were enough to make her uncomfortable.

“No Anna, its not. He crossed a line. I’ve heard rumors before, and some were pretty terrible, but I had never seen anything in person. If you want me to help you file a report-”

“Ernest, it’s okay...really.” Anna’s pleading eyes begged him to drop it. “It was gross, and yes he crossed a line, but he didn’t really do anything. I hardly think him calling me pretty is going to get him into any actual trouble.” 

Ernest finally relaxed his tightly clenched fists. “Just be careful around him.”

“Luckily he’s too busy to care about us measly undergrads, and we’re stuck with you.” Anna grinned and Ernest smiled back, a genuine, honest smile she hadn’t seen before.

“What brings you in today? Here to apologize for ruining my shoes?” He still had a hint of a smile on his face.

With the unwanted attention from Professor Richards, Anna had finally forgotten, if only for a few minutes, how mortified she was. But was Ernest actually teasing her? He seemed to find it much more amusing than anything. “I’m so sorry. That was so embarrassing, and so not like me.”

“You mean to say vomiting all over someone is not a typical sign of affection from you?”

“Were you hoping for some affection from me?” She knew she shouldn’t flirt with him but she couldn’t help herself.

Ernest cleared his throat and sat up straight but his cheeks were flushing red. “I assume the actual reason you're here has something to do with the class.” Ernest speculated, trying to get back on track. 

Anna sighed. He was so hot and cold. One second he was starting to let down his walls and them next he was more difficult to infiltrate than Fort Knox. “Yes, that. I wanted to talk to you about my paper. I have questions about the grading."

"You got a B. You did well." He stated matter of factly.

"But I looked at your comments and the criteria, and I don't see what I'm missing." Anna turned to the rubric on the last page.

Ernest looked over it thoughtfully and pointed to the issue. "The specifications were for 12 point font. Yours was 11."

"Seriously?" Anna questioned with an edge of irritation. "One little detail, and I drop a whole grade?"

Ernest shrugged and threw his hands up. "I don't make the rules. Besides, missing one small detail could cost you a case in court. I'm doing you a favor to be strict with you now. I expect you will now read all instructions thoroughly."

"Fine," Anna muttered. "Lesson learned. I guess I'll see you in class.

Anna stood to leave when Ernest grabbed her hand. "Wait!" He exclaimed before looking down at his hand on hers and suddenly pulling away. "I should give you my number in case you need to text me...for class related purposes."

"I do already have your email...like all the other students." Anna suppressed another smirk.

"Right..." Ernest ran a hand through his hair. "Texts are a much better way to get ahold of me if you have any urgent questions." Ernest scrawled his number on a post-it and handed it to her.

"Sure...if i have any burning questions about business law I'll make sure to text you." Anna saved the number in her phone and texted him. Ernest's phone lit up on the desk and he checked the text. "You know, in case you have any questions about my assignments that must be answered immediately." This time she failed to hold back her sly smile as she stood to leave. "See you in class Mr. Sinclaire."

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[leftistpracticalpolitics]

what do you say to people who argue against leftist politics with kind of juvenile (if u ask me) cookie cutter arguments like “it discourages innovation” and “if i become a doctor i want to get paid more than a fry cook” etc

There’s at least two different ways to try to convince people. The first is to “own” them which makes for a flashy post on the internet but is unlikely to convince them. That isn’t to say the snarky “owning” approach is bad, because it might go towards convincing the general audience that reads the post. So it’s not always the wrong response and I don’t want to condemn it. Some people are really good at doing that. I’m not one of them but I can still appreciate it as a skill.

To seriously convince someone, you have to go deeper though, and that takes time and energy and emotional labor. So you have to decide if it’s worth it. But if you do decide it’s worth it, then find some common ground with the person and then go from there.

For example, “it discourages innovation.” What field is this person in? Is it a field you’re familiar with? Pretty much any field has easily Googleable examples of how capitalism can stifle innovation. Find one, verify the source, expand on it and give it as an example. One of the most terrifying examples that everyone  (at least everyone who doesn’t want to die of super-Ebola) should be worried about is how vaccine development has stalled over the last few decades because there’s no money in it. If you give a link from Tumblr or HuffPo they’re probably going to discount it as not serious, so give them links from places like Harvard or The Economist. 

There’s also more personal common ground. The doctor fry cook thing for example. Is this about societal good? In that case, point out how our current system encourages doctors to go into specialist fields where they’re pushed to do more unnecessary procedures on rich boutique patients in order to pay off their ridiculous medical school bills. A lot of doctors are leftists too! On the other hand, if the person doesn’t give a shit about societal good and really means, “I love brutal economic hierarchies as long as I’m on top of the hierarchy” then we’re back to the old paradox I DON’T KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE. In that case the only thing you can do is appeal to their self interest. Hardly anyone can afford medical school without going into massive debt, so as long as your right-wing or apolitical person isn’t part of the 1%, you still have a route to change their mind solely through self-interest. If you want to go even deeper, you can question why they dislike fry cooks so much. Where did they learn that message? How likely is it some of their friends or family have been are or will be fry cooks? Why the negative association? Fried food feeds people and makes them happy and is delicious. I don’t want to live in a world without fry cooks.

Whatever you do, don’t get discouraged if the person just pushes back and refuses to engage even though they claim they are. Just cut your losses and move on, and remember it might not even be a loss! Maybe they weren’t convinced but the person standing next to them or reading over their shoulder was convinced, and you might never know.

Speaking of Harvard I’m going to put in a Harvard link about the science of political persuasion, and you might also find something useful there. The idea of cognitive dissonance reduction is really crucial. Your task is to carefully leverage that cognitive dissonance but they have to notice that it exists in the first place.

[sinrau]

“We’re just rife with cash and it has led to a decent amount of guilt.”

Joe Pinsker 7:00 AM ET

Shutterstock / The Atlantic

One paradox of the pandemic economy is that even as businesses have shut down and jobs have disappeared, American households have on average been saving more money than they usually do. The country’s “personal saving rate”—the share of people’s disposable income that gets saved or invested—has rarely exceeded 10 percent in the past 20 years, but it shot up to more than three times that in April. In the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic, the checking-account balances of Americans up and down the income scale rose, thanks to government aid.

Now that that aid has been discontinued, many people’s balances are likely falling, making daily life even more precarious. But one segment of the country will keep on saving, seemingly living in an economy all their own. Their incomes have remained steady, while their spending has decreased dramatically.

In March, when lockdowns began, spending declined steeply for low earners and high earners alike. But while low earners’ spending returned nearly to normal levels in May, higher earners’ spending has remained much lower. “The people who had the least job loss are precisely the people who have the biggest cut in spending,” Peter Ganong, an economist at the University of Chicago who co-authored a paper analyzing household finances in March, April, and May, told me.

In the course of reporting this article, I spoke with people whose monthly expenses have fallen by hundreds, in some cases thousands, of dollars during the pandemic. They’re spending less on daily comforts that are now dangerous, or merely unnecessary, including eating out, entertainment, new clothes, and extracurriculars for their kids.

Travel cutbacks in particular are keeping large amounts of cash in people’s accounts. Lyn Alden, a 33-year-old investment researcher in New Jersey, told me that by skipping one short trip to New York City and two longer ones to visit relatives in Florida and Egypt, her family reduced their travel spending by about $15,000 this year.

Other spending cuts are more minor, but still add up. “One of the largest costs prior to the pandemic was my ‘bad’ habit of eating out nearly every day at work,” Jeremiah Stanley, a 40-year-old engineer at a tech company in North Carolina, wrote to me in an email. “The office culture is to have [lunch] meetings off-campus and this [costs] about $23 a day.” Lately, he’s been working from home and making ham sandwiches instead, leaving him an extra $400 a month to spend or save. Overall, he estimates that he and his girlfriend have together been spending about $750 less on food each month.

Another remote worker I heard from, Taryn, who is in her late 20s and works at an accounting firm in the Chicago area, estimated that she’s spending $400 less per month during the pandemic. She and her husband qualified for $2,400 in stimulus payments earlier this year, even though “we didn’t need the money,” she said—she currently makes $87,000 a year.

“It honestly feels pretty good, but it also feels kind of strange,” Taryn said. “It’s a weird feeling of Oh yeah, I’ve got extra money! but also I want to buy things, but there’s no reason to buy things.” (She requested that I publish only her first name, because of the sensitive nature of her job.)

Instead of buying things, Taryn and her husband have put that extra money toward a down payment for a house. They previously thought about buying one next spring, but since mortgage rates have fallen to historic lows, they’re buying one now—so in that sense, the pandemic has brought them closer to their financial goals.

To others higher up the income scale, the additional cash is much less consequential. “We’re really privileged … Honestly, our life doesn’t change a ton” with extra money, says Byron Hing, a 39-year-old lawyer at a tech company in San Francisco, whose family of five has been spending about $3,000 less a month during the pandemic. Another interviewee, a 60-something in Southern California working in finance, told me, “I hate to be the bourgeoisie, but there’s a point where you have enough money and it doesn’t make any difference.”

That 60-something, who expects to earn at least $750,000 this year, has been saving enormous amounts of money during the pandemic. Recently, he realized just how much more slowly cash has been flowing out of his checking account this year: His balance was about $70,000 higher than it would have been in normal times. (He requested anonymity in order to protect his privacy.)

There’s “just nothing to spend money on,” he told me. He said he used to spend $300 twice a week on restaurant meals, and $3,000 roughly once a month on short family getaways. He estimated that his spending is down by at least $10,000 a month since the pandemic started, and that doesn’t factor in the $25,000 he got back after canceling a two-week vacation in Europe. “We’re [also skipping] one this Christmas,” he said, “so I’ll save another 25 grand.”

A lot of the money that well-off people aren’t spending right now is money that lower-paid people would normally receive as income. Many industries that employ lots of lower-wage workers, such as restaurants, hotels, and child care, are ones that make life more comfortable or fun for higher-income people. So when those people’s spending on in-person services dries up, those lower-wage workers’ pay dries up too.

In mid-August, reduced spending among the top 25 percent of earners accounted for 57 percent of the estimated drop-off in spending overall, according to Opportunity Insights, a team of economic researchers based at Harvard. The damage done by that lost spending “reflects what happens in a pandemic when high-income people can work at home … but it also reflects the huge growth of inequality of recent decades,” Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard, told me. “Such a large part of our economy, and of employment, has been embedded in servicing high-income people, as opposed to making things and manufacturing.”

The savers I spoke with were aware of, and felt conflicted about, the fact that they were prospering in a brutally stratified system. “We’re just rife with cash and it has led to a decent amount of guilt when we hear about friends that are struggling with their jobs that can’t go remote,” said Stanley, the North Carolinian saving money on lunches. “We don’t take this lightly and wish there was some way that we could make sure that society was a bit more just.” (He told me that he’s doubtful about the efficacy of charitable giving and believes it’s the government’s job to step in when people need financial support.)

“We’re doing a really bad job as a society,” the 60-something working in finance said. “I would gladly give a big chunk of my savings to make sure that [others are] okay … I’m fine with [the government raising] my taxes.”

The starkest example of someone thriving during the pandemic came up in a conversation I had with Dan Ho, who is in his late 40s and lives in Brighton, Michigan. Ho has been playing the stock market since the beginning of the year, when he came to suspect that traders were underestimating the threat of the pandemic. He correctly bet that certain stocks were going to lose value, and has profited from the market’s unusually jagged ups and downs. Overall, he’s turned an initial investment of $100,000 into about $500,000 this year.

Ho told me that he doesn’t feel bad about these gains, because, due to the nature of day-trading, he could just as easily have lost his money. “I can see how [the pandemic] has really hurt a lot of people,” he said. “Do I feel guilty? No, because it’s not anything that I personally did. I’m just a little more financially savvy or literate than a lot of people.”

Some of those I interviewed felt compelled to give away some of their money. One, a 40-year-old software engineer in Boston named Mike who asked to have his last name withheld for his privacy, said his family has kept paying the man who cleans their house, even though they’ve asked him to stop coming during the pandemic. Taryn said she sent some money to the hairstylist she used to see, to compensate for the money she normally would have given as a tip. And several have donated to charitable causes.

These are humane responses, and they certainly don’t hurt. But they are no substitute for government policy. For much of the pandemic, many people out of work were able to, if not keep pace with these super-savers, at least stay afloat because of federal aid. Now, in the absence of comprehensive support, the gainfully employed will keep piling up money, while millions of other people strain to make ends meet.

The Pandemic Has Created a Class of Super-Savers