#just enough space for a bumper sticker between those ears.

[pfaugh]

sort of the "Men are worried women will laugh at them. Women are worried men will kill them" quote

[very-grownup]

It’s me, committing word crimes once more (why would you click this link, be kinder to yourself)

Trucy Wright sat on the back of one of the hard, plastic airport chairs, rocking slightly with her legs extended. She was looking in the direction of the arrival gate for international flights, but most of her attention was focused on maintaining her balance. The periods of waiting were prime opportunities to hone skills and were not to be wasted. Besides, there was no way she would miss someone arriving, even if a flood of people emerged from the doors.

The heavy security doors opened and closed several times, Trucy's legs remaining steady throughout, inching slowly higher and higher, before they were abruptly no longer in the air and she was no longer on the moulded plastic back of the chair, but across the distance between the chairs and the doors to the international arrival gate. "Polly!" she shouted and Apollo Justice's tired face blossomed into a sudden smile, eyes and teeth shining. She flung her arms around him, pressing her face into the fabric of his t-shirt. It felt thin, but not worryingly so, and he smelled mostly like she remembered: the deodorant was different but similar enough as was the cooled sweat smell of a man prone to perspiring with anxiety, excitement, exertion, anger, fear, and probably other emotions that Trucy had never seen him express (although if she hadn't seen them she wasn't sure who had). The sweat wasn't exactly as she remembered, either, but she had it on good authority from Aunt Maya, corroborating her own observations, that Khura'in was a country deficient in important elements of the American diet, like noodles and burgers, and if you were what you ate, then likely your sweat was, too, and so if you were eating different things, you and your sweat would probably smell different, too. In her mind, it all seemed soundly scientific.

Apollo returned Trucy's hug with enough strength that, if he had been a bigger man, Trucy might have been lifted off her feet. But, unlike Trucy's small gains, Apollo's height had remained the same since they had last seen each other, and after a moment, Apollo ended the hug, holding Trucy at arm's length.

"I've missed you, Polly," Trucy said, because she had. Ever since her daddy had started the process to re-enter the legal community, Trucy had looked upon each of the various assistants and summer students working at the Wright Anything Agency with a frank possessiveness, seeing each as a mixture of younger sibling and cherished toy. Apollo had been the first, though, and when the young man, barely more than a stranger, had hugged her, crying with relief in a court room lobby because he'd thought she'd been kidnapped, she'd felt a weird but pleasant spontaneous warmth that hadn't just been because his reaction indicated just how good her large-scale sleight of hand and ventriloquism were. Others had left since Apollo, but Apollo had been the only one whose absence she had felt, who she'd stubbornly continued texting and sending letters to, even through the periods of prolonged silence.

"I missed you, too," Apollo said after a moment, his voice a bit rough, quieter than Trucy remembered. He was telling the truth, though. He always told the truth, even if saying it made a lump as large and hard as a rock take form in his throat. She'd always liked that blind commitment to honesty about him, even if she pitied him at the same time, kind of like how she felt about dogs when she first found out they couldn't eat chocolate. Although Apollo wouldn't die if he told a lie, probably; he might throw up, though.

There was a greenish cast to Apollo's skin, under the warmth of his tan (maybe he sometimes saw the outside world and sunlight instead of his office and the inside of the courtroom; maybe he got really adventurous and sometimes did paperwork outside!), but Trucy guessed that had more to do with Apollo's fear of heights and complicated relationship with air travel and less to do with a deathly allergy to telling lies which was something she had only just thought of and hadn't had an opportunity to run past her number one source on science (Ema Skye) or a panel of experts (everyone who had ever worked with Apollo Justice). She grabbed one of his hands with both of hers and squeezed, smiling at him with her most disarming stage smile. "Of course you did! And the shine of the spotlight and the thrill of the stage, I bet! Once you've gotten a taste of the limelight with Trucy Wright it's probably hard to go back to the stage of the courtroom! No thrills, no flash, no fire --"

"Usually," Apollo said, wrinkling his nose at the world through Trucy's optimized vocal illusion projection. Trust her best assistant and number one stagehand to also be her harshest critic, the toughest of nuts to crack. Although in Trucy's experience, there were no uncrackable nuts, just ones that required a bit more spit and elbow grease, and maybe literal grease for the metal ones.

"Do you think your luggage is here yet? Do you want to watch me do a disappearing act on the luggage carousel? Do you want to ride the luggage carousel with me? You know the inventor was practically beginning for people to ride it when he called it a carousel. One of those grumpy safety people who always try to stop me should have warned him!"

Apollo laughed, rubbing his face with his free hand. "Not applicable," he said, shrugging a shoulder over which hung one strap of his familiar brown does-it-even-qualify-as-a-backpack-no-it-doesn't-actually-Polly, "no, no, and do you swear you got your confirmation for graduation without any funny business?"

Trucy stuck her tongue out and quickly dropped Apollo's hand to walk with him to the parking lot, looping one arm through his elbow. "That's nothing even for carry-on Polly! I could fit more in my magic --"

"You could fit my entire office in those," Apollo said quickly, raising his voice to more familiar Chords of Justice levels to drown Trucy out. She pouted. "I'm good at travelling light, especially when I chucked the pretense of bringing my suit jacket with me; frees up a lot of space for socks and toothpaste." The grip on Apollo's arm tightened and he said, quietly, "I'm not here to stay, Trucy. You know that."

Chin up; Trucy put her smile back in place. Not even the corners wobbled in the face of Apollo's unappreciated perceptiveness. Why was it never about important things? "The car's parked this way, Polly!"

"When did you get a car? How did you get a car?"

Trucy rolled her eyes and patted Apollo's arm. "You don't need to own a car to drive it, Apollo." For a moment, Apollo's eyes widened in horror, red agitation rising in his face and pushing away the sallow green tint, making him look more like the Apollo she remembered. Then his eyes narrowed, metaphorically shaking himself free of the bait. Trucy laughed. "It's Athena's! I'm just borrowing it! I do have my driver's license, Polly." With a flourish, she flipped open her purse, pulled her wallet out and flipped it open to the glossy rectangle officially obtained with hardly any deceit from the State of California, waving it close enough to Apollo's suspicious face that she bumped his nose. It was back in her purse before Apollo could try and take it from her for closer examination -- not that closer examination would reveal anything but the most flattering driver's license picture that had ever been taken and the rest of the contents of her wallet, but it was the principle of the thing!

When the car was in their field of view, Trucy didn't even have to tell Apollo, which was one of the advantages of the car, but she still felt the need to add a flourish to the occasion, spinning Apollo with her (was it really that different from doing some fancy misdirection while wearing a particularly heavy cape on stage?) and coming to a halt just to the side of the headlights. "Ta-da!"

The car was tiny -- her dad hated going anywhere in it, knees cramped up near his ears in the passenger seat, but she and Athena were firm on the subject of passengers not having a vote in the independent nation of Athena's Car -- a cute little glowing yellow sun bubble of a vehicle that Trucy had taken it upon herself to customize with little painted blue birds (which were, as far as she was concerned, much more tasteful than bumper stickers and when she put it that way, Athena had readily come to agree). Spinning the keys around her finger, Trucy released Apollo's arm and unlocked the car simultaneously, a little bit of nicely timed theatrics that was just for her private, personal enjoyment.

"Cute," Apollo said, touching a bird on the passenger door before getting in, swinging his bag to sit in his lap.

Trucy beamed at this effusive praise and plopped herself in the driver's seat. "So," she asked, looking in the rear-view mirror as she backed the car out of the tiny niche of a parking spot, "do you have a driver's license in Khura'in?" Apollo groaned, the sound echoing in the little car as he pressed his forehead to the top of his bag, and it was -- almost -- like he had never been gone.

-

To say it was weird being back in LA would have been a misuse of the word. Weird was sitting in the passenger seat of Athena Cykes' little yellow car, his feet bumping empty (mostly, hopefully) reusable water bottles and setting off a symphony in crinkling energy bar wrappers. Weird was being next to Trucy again, close enough to reach over and squeeze her hand in his if both hands hadn't been clasped firmly on the wheel. Weird was her hands being on the wheel of an actual car that was actually being driven, legally, on an actual road and not feeling like any of his internal organs were going to jump out of his throat with nervous terror.

Much.

LA after five years in Khura'in was, much as it had been as a child after a decade of Khura'in, like being dropped onto the surface of another -- like finding himself in a different dimension, even if this time it was a dimension he recognized. The low, smoggy haze always visible to his eyes, even in in the sunshiniest, beach surfingest, high noon, middle of summerest California day. The endless low-level sprawl of buildings in every direction, punctuated by stabs of sleekly modern skyscrapers that were nothing but gleam and windows and edges. Snow-capped mountains on the horizon looking like little more than pale bumps after being reminded of the stomach churning overwhelming height of the Khura'inese mountains. Palm trees and seagulls. The smell of too many people, too close together, the salt of the sea, the garbage slowly baking in overfull dumpsters. The cars and their exhaust and the cars and the noise and the cars.

Nahyuta travelled constantly. So did Ema. He wanted to ask if travelling, especially between countries, ever got so commonplace that you couldn't even remember the disconcerting feeling of having the dry and ragged roots of your soul ripped out of parched and crumbling soil that you were trying to call home. But it seemed like a weird conversation to start when things were finally more normal than weird between him and Nahyuta; he didn't want to tip the scale back to the weird end of things.

Abruptly, the little stuffed samurai dangling from the rearview mirror snapped back into focus. Fuck he was tired.

"I'll take your dozing off as a compliment to my amazing driving rather than an insult to my equally amazing conversational skills," Trucy said brightly. "Daddy never even shuts his eyes when I'm driving him somewhere."

"I was --" Apollo began as Trucy parked Athena's car and fixed him with that still-familiar, unblinking blue gaze that made his tongue go numb at the merest thought of telling the suggestion of a lie (even though there were certain individuals in her life that Apollo definitely thought she should be using that look on instead of him). They were outside the Wright Anything Agency, so unchanged Athena's car could have been a time machine. "I was asleep."

"You were," Trucy chirped, in agreement or confirmation. "I appreciated all the agreements and promises you made, though! It more than made up for the snoring. I should have been recording you; some of those noises would make for great scare effects at a show!"

Apollo got out of the car, refusing to rise to Trucy's familiar, cheerful teasing, but: "You need a meeting of the minds for a legally enforceable contract and that isn't present if one of the parties is asleep, Trucy. Even if said party spoke in their sleep. Which, for the record, I don't."

Trucy didn't step out of the car so much as leap from it with a flourish, landing at Apollo's side in a blink and whisper of cloth. "For the record, I think you need to present a witness or some form of evidence to substantiate your claim. You yourself just established the lack of proper mens rea of an unconscious person." The way the words tumbled as easily from Trucy's lips as any of her magician's patter was like a punch to Apollo's gut, an uncomfortable reminder that it had been five years since he'd seen Trucy. She'd grown up in that time, an always too-mature girl suddenly an adult woman, demonstrating the legal knowledge she'd accumulated by shrewd, easily-overlooked observation over the years as easily as she might pull a string of colourful scarves from the pocket of Apollo's jeans where he knew there was only crumpled kleenex, receipts, and a mint wrapper. Then: "Unless you have a surprise witness to your sleep habits you're going to divulge?" She captured Apollo's hand, peering critically at his ring finger, her smile widening to wicked lengths as Apollo felt his face warm with embarrassment. He reclaimed his hand.

"Only if you've learned to speak cat," Apollo grumbled, even though he shouldn't have let Trucy's teasing rankle him. Reworking an entire country's judicial system and laws, not to mention additional reading on constitutions and assorted human rights legislation so he could try to give a very hot-headed young queen lessons on the subject of constitutional monarchies (and how had that ended up being part of the job of the kingdom's only defense attorney?) wouldn't have left even the most social of butterflies time to develop a social life. The work was important, his work was important, and that took precedence over little things like "making friends" and it wasn't sad if he could go for an entire week without seeing anyone who didn't possess a dragon tattoo.

Trucy sighed. "No, Ivy didn't offer it as a foreign language option for some reason." The hand she lay on Apollo's shoulder was far too consoling, too full of the sympathy and understanding of a peer for comfort. He tried to shake it off, subtly, but doing so left him with no alternative but to proceed through the familiar doors of the Wright Anything Agency. Trucy, undaunted, followed at his heels.

The first thing Apollo noticed threw all the familiar feelings into disarray, out the window, and threw a firecracker after for good measure.

Phoenix Wright, Apollo's adolescent idol, first client (technically), first client to need their account written off, questionable mentor, one-time boss, and all-time instigator of complicated, frustrated feelings Apollo didn't have time to examine and even if he did, didn't need to examine (and even if he did, he couldn't have afforded to see a psychologist when he lived in LA; the prospect of asking Nahyuta for help in Khura'in was terrifying and would surely only lead to offers of spiritual counselling). It wasn't that Mr. Wright had significantly aged in five years, although Apollo could spot a few grey hairs that hadn't been there before, a few small lines at the corners of those deceitfully innocent blue eyes.

However.

Phoenix Wright was sitting behind the desk, frowning at the computer screen with a pen between his teeth, an open file to one side, and he appeared to be working.

Apollo took a step back, double-checking the lettering on the door, but Trucy grabbed his wrist in a surprisingly tight grip. A piece of her private sadness showed in her eyes; did Trucy think he was going to bolt back to Khura'in just like that? He didn't even have a return ticket. "Just making sure we're in the right place." The smile he mustered for her was more awkward than reassuring, he was certain.

Mr. Wright looked up from the computer, removing the abused pen from his mouth and twirling it between his fingers. "The right place - or the Wright place?"

Trucy groaned good-naturedly, shutting the door behind them with a firmness Apollo obediently noted. "Mr. Wright, the homophone dad jokes really need to stay on social media."

"Maybe I wouldn't be driven to these depths if more people I knew were on SmileSpot, stranger." Mr. Wright pushed away from his desk and stood, stretching his arms over his head as he did so, something in his back cracking and making Apollo wince in sympathy before he quickly hid his reaction. It wasn't safe to give Mr. Wright even a fraction of an inch. If Mr. Wright had seen anything in Apollo's face, though, he didn't show it. He flipped the file on his desk closed before reaching to grasp Apollo's hand warmly. "It's good to see you, Apollo. It looks like Khura'in agrees with you."

Whatever that meant; Apollo made a noise that belonged in a sound library under 'neutral' and looked away to scan the rest of the office, casually. There was still the spirit of something very antithetical to a law practise inhabiting the place, even if Trucy had gotten much better at tidying her magic props away in an unobtrusive manner. There was even a second desk with what appeared to be an actual, functional computer on it.

Trucy announced, "I'm going to get takeout from Mr. Eldoon! Don't let Polly leave, Daddy!" disappearing out the door before anyone could react.

"Should I see if I can find Trucy's handcuffs?" Mr. Wright asked after a moment of strained silence.

Apollo pointedly set his bag on the familiar couch, raising his hands in surrender. "I'm not going anywhere," he said, exasperated, before moving to inspect the new desk more closely. It wasn't shiny new; clearly, it had been used, but there was a sparseness and lack of personality to it that suggested it was currently unoccupied. He knew Athena was no longer with the Wright Anything Agency (but her new enterprise must be somewhere within walking distance if Trucy had casual access to her car) and it obviously didn't belong to Trucy. Apollo brushed his thumb along the edge and it came back barely dusty.

"My last articling student passed the bar and decided to take a vacation before finalizing any of her career decisions," Mr. Wright said, his voice breaking through Apollo's thought process before it could drift further into investigative patterns. It didn't look like the former articling student planned to hang her shingle at the Wright Anything Agency when she came back from her vacation, though. There wasn't even a stray sticky note left to remember her by.

Mr. Wright cleared his throat. "How about some coffee while we wait for Trucy to get back?"

"Coffee would be fine," Apollo said, looking at Charley (someone had, thankfully, been remembering to water him regularly).

The relief coming off Mr. Wright was palpable. Apollo had never thought of the older man as having a problem making conversation. When he wasn't being difficult or lost in his own darker thoughts, Mr. Wright was easily more charming and personable than Apollo, someone who nervous clients often found relief in speaking to, but he could also be reluctant to take action or initiate things that would be uncomfortable, especially more personal conversations.

Neither of them wanted to jump into discussing Kristoph Gavin's appeal.

[artemisrae]

Stranger Things - The Last Picture Show

Title: The Last Picture Show

Rating: T (for language)

Fandom: Stranger Things

Characters: Mike/Eleven, Jim Hopper, and the full party all make an appearance.

Word Count: 4,981

Summary:

One thing I know for sure - a person can't sneeze in this town without somebody offerin' him a handkerchief...it's an awful small town for any kinda carryin' on... - The Last Picture Show

Hopper catches Mike and El at the local drive in after being led to think that they were at the Hawk with their friends.

Note: Shenanigans. Way less making out than the premise would suggest. Mostly about Hopper’s priorities as a dad.

Dedicated to @juxtaposie, who loves Hellraiser so much she felt it worth cashing in 11 years of BFF good will to make me watch it.

AO3 Mirror

Hopper tapped his pen impatiently on the desk. He had deliberately picked up the Friday evening shift, knowing that El would be out and not at home, waiting for him, and had planned on using it as an opportunity to catch up on paperwork that he’d admittedly been slacking on. It was sorted into neat stacks based upon how passive aggressive Flo’s Post-It read: “take your time”, “need these yesterday”, “not that important”.

He was working on the “I will forge your signature” stack when Callahan came in.

“You up for a 10-10?” he asked, and Hopper, eager for any excuse to ignore paperwork, immediately pushed back from his desk and picked up his hat.

“Who’s fighting?” he asked, holding his hand out for the keys.

“Archie Foreman’s Mustang was spotted going up the exit ramp to the Sterling Drive-In,” Callahan said.

“And let me guess.” They banged out into the parking lot. It was the end of September, and unseasonably warm. He hadn’t even bothered with a jacket or wool socks. “Jack Sanders’ Camaro is there too?”

“Right in front of the snack bar,” Callahan confirmed, and in synchronized motions they opened their car doors and stepped inside. He didn’t bother with the light - if they were just going to break up a fist fight, they probably didn’t even need two of them, but all the cops in town knew Archie Foreman, and if Archie had been drinking before heading out to the Sterling after Jack then they would need someone to sit on him just to get the cuffs on. He got wild when he drank.

Archie’d had his eye on Jack for a while - some beef over a woman, although it was hard to imagine the quality of woman who would find both Archie Foreman and Jack Sanders attractive.

It normally took about a half-hour to reach the Sterling Drive-In - twenty minutes if one could skirt traffic rules the way Hopper and Callahan could. Like Archie, they too went up the exit ramp, gravel crunching under the wheels of the cruiser.

What they found was a scene of chaos - what had probably started as a regular old Friday night fist fight had devolved into a full out brawl. Archie had brought back up, and Sander’s brothers were with him.

Despite the group of men, the sloppy fight, and their drunken shouts and curses, the movie was still playing on the big screen. There were still some cars in the lot too, but not many - it was the second feature, and some kind of gross out horror movie too, so all the families would have left. Hopper could hear the sounds of the speakers getting louder and fading as they drove past the rows towards the back, where he could see the Mustang had blocked the Camaro into its spot.

Foreman was arrested at least once a month. As soon as the high beams of the police cruisers hit them the brawl broke up - the Mustang was now blocked into the lane on either side by Hopper and Callahan, and so Archie’s friends scattered into the woods. Sanders’ brothers, with no one left to fight, fell back against the Camaro. One of them leaned into the backseat and opened a can of Budweiser. Archie and Jack were still struggling against each other.

“Seriously?” Hopper asked, gesturing to the beer, as they strode past the cars to the men still fighting.

He nodded and toasted Hopper, who merely rolled his eyes. In unison, he and Callahan both waded into the scrum. Hopper got a hand on the back of Archie’s jacket, while Callahan was picking up Sanders by his elbow.

Dimly, he heard Callahan reading Sanders his rights, and mechanically he started to do the same, pushing Archie onto the hood of the cruiser. Archie, having been read his rights innumerable times already, was still yelling threats at Jack as Hopper lifted him off the hood and started to push him towards the backseat of the car.

Then, he looked up, and saw the blue station wagon with the wood panelling. It was dumb luck that he saw it; it was parked two rows up and three over. There was nothing special about it, no vanity plates or bumper stickers, just a plain Ford taking in the double feature, but the second he saw that car he knew, he knew -

“Son of a bitch!” he growled, and dropped Archie belly first onto the ground. “Ugh, sorry -”

Hopper dragged him up and threw him into the backseat, slamming the door with a stern, “Stay there.”

“Chief? What are you -” he heard Callahan call after him and then, “Damn, I have to start over. You have the right…”

Hopper pulled out his flashlight and clicked it on. He heard someone heckle him, but he ignored them, having eyes only for the car ahead of him.

He approached from the front. The driver and passenger windows were rolled down, the speakers hanging inside, the movie blaring within the confined space of the car.

There was no one sitting in the front seats.

He found the car’s occupants stretched out in the back. They were… quite busy. The only light was from the movie, flashing over them, but there was no mistaking who it was even if he couldn’t make out their faces, and he also knew that they weren’t supposed to be in the Sterling Drive-In.

He tapped on the window with the end of his flashlight. It took a minute to get their attention - they really were very busy. He tried again, a little harder this time, enough to resonate within the car without risking breaking the window.

His patience was rewarded, however, as he finally got their attention and got to watch as Michael Wheeler’s face morphed from irritation to confusion to full blown panic.

***

His knee was digging into the door handle.

Mike Wheeler sat in the front seat of the police cruiser and mentally made a list of all the times his life had done such a 180 before - like Will going missing, finding El in the woods, her dramatic return at the Byers’, even their kiss at the Snow Ball - but this was somehow… scarier.

He thought it was because during all of those events there had been an action he could take, something he could do - he could look for Will, he could help El get settled, he could fight demodogs, they could dance. Right now there was nothing he could do but sit, crammed into a bench seat with his girlfriend and her father, and listen as they yelled over one another.

“You lied! You fucking lied to me!” Hopper was yelling.

“You snuck up on us! How could you -”

“You are not listening! You told me you would be at the Hawk with your whole little fucking party and I find you at the Sterling with him -”

“I said we were going to the movies and we were at the movies -”

“You are sixteen! Fucking sixteen!”

“Why were you spying? Only assholes spy!”

“That is not the point, that is not the goddamn point, you lied -”

“That is what you said when -”

“And don’t ever call me an asshole again kid!”

“You used that word -”

Between the yelling and the pounding of his heart, his ears were ringing. He had no idea someone else was in the car with them until he heard a quiet mutter from the backseat.

“You really dating Chief Hopper’s kid?” the man in the backseat asked.

“Yeah,” Mike answered distractedly. Under other circumstances he would have ignored him, but Hopper’s face was an alarming shade of red, and the lights on the dashboard were starting the flicker - no doubt the influence of El.

“You poor bastard.” Mike glared at him. He chuckled. “Can’t believe you got caught by the Chief going at it in the back of a station wagon. That’s a shit Friday.”

“You got arrested,” Mike pointed out.

“Yeah but he’s not mad at me,” he pointed out reasonably. “Chief isn’t someone you want mad at you.”

“I’m not taking advice from a criminal,” Mike said, insulted. He didn’t think El and Hopper were hearing them at all. On top of their shouting, the radio was making an alarming squealing noise as El got more and more worked up.

“That wasn’t advice. Advice is, don’t get caught fucking the chief’s daughter in the backseat of your car.”

“We weren’t fucking!” Mike yelped, alarmed. Christ, he hoped Hopper didn’t think they were having sex.

“Goddamn kid, it was the second feature! What were you waiting for?”

He was saved from having to come up with a reply when Hopper abruptly wheeled around and positively roared, “AND SHUT UP ARCHIE.”

He turned to Mike, and shoved a finger in his face. Mike stared at it. It was shaking slightly. “You are driving her home. Right now. It takes exactly 27 minutes to reach my house from here. You have 32 minutes. El, if you’re not on that radio telling me you’re home in exactly 32 minutes, so help me -”

“What?” El asked, irritated and challenging. “You’ll do what?”

Mike didn’t want him to finish the threat. He grabbed El by the wrist and all but dragged her from the car. “Right yes, we’re leaving now. Right now.”

***

Hopper stewed the entire ride back to the station.

She had lied to him. Little Miss Friends Don’t Lie had lied, and by extension, her entire little party had too. And she’d had the nerve to act like he’d done something wrong.

He was so angry that when he parked the cruiser, he didn’t go back into the station - instead he pulled out the truck keys and went to his Blazer.

“Uh, Chief?” He heard Callahan call cautiously. “What do you want me to do with them?”

“Throw Archie in the tank. No charges, he’ll be arrested again within the month.” There was so much wrong with what he was doing, starting with leaving Callahan alone with two perps, and yet.

They had lied to him.

Hopper wasn’t an unreasonable man. He understood teenagers pushed their boundaries. He, as a teenager, had done a lot more than push. Driven through them with a bulldozer, more like.

He thought he was a fairly permissive parent - half the stuff he’d gotten into at sixteen hadn’t even occurred to El, who, despite being a living breathing medical experiment, still thought glitter nail polish was the height of technology. And if there was anyone he was going to trust with her, it was the Wheeler kid, who thought rose petals fell out of her ears when she walked.

Wheeler had been doing right by El since he’d found her in the rain that night in November. There was no point in trying to protect her from him and his teenage hormones - hell, half the time Hopper thought that Mike more likely needed protection from El, who had brain powers and no sense of shame.

She needed to live as normal a life as possible. For him, that meant meeting all her friends but letting her go out anyway. Going to the high school open house, but sending her anyway. Wanting to punch every snot nosed piece of shit that called her weird, but letting Wheeler get detentions for doing it instead.

Healthy boundaries.

It looked like there were some boundaries he needed to reenforce.

He pulled up at The Hawk. The lights were still on, so it looked like the late feature was still rolling - Hellraiser, the same gross out horror movie that had been playing at the drive-in. Sinclair’s Cavalier was parked under a street lamp, and so Hopper strode over, leaned against the trunk, lit a cigarette, and waited.

He was distracted from his vigil exactly once, when El radioed the code for H-O-M-E with exactly one minute to spare. Considering his response, he finally went with G-O-O-D, but was unsure whether or not she’d left the radio on while she was pouting.

Three cigarettes later the movie let out, and Hopper watched as the small crowd of people - mostly teenagers, the only people who bothered to go to the late weekend features at The Hawk - trickled out of the theater.

El’s party was near the back of the group, talking animatedly. He sized them up.

Will as always, was near the front of the pack, but off to the side. Hopper wondered if the kids even realized that they tended to walk behind him, as if they were always keeping an eye on him.

Immediately he ruled out Will. Will would be frank, and honest, and no fun at all. Plus, he’d literally breathed life into the kid.

Lucas, swinging his car keys around his index finger, was the only one in the pack to have been gifted his own car, giving him a significant edge in the social hierarchy. He was holding Max’s hand, swinging slightly with their gait. He was a straight talker, the best liar of the bunch, but he also knew when to cut and run.

No good for Hopper’s purpose.

Max, her stringy hair blocking her face from view. She and Dustin were exclaiming over the special effects of the movie - sounded like a bloody one. Also ruled out. She’d tell Hopper right to his face to go to hell.

Hopper thought she was a good influence on El.

He focused on the last one - Dustin, who, in the middle of shouting his point and making sweeping arm gestures, was the only one who hadn’t yet noticed Hopper was waiting. In fact, he didn’t notice Hopper even after everyone else stopped short. He bumped into Lucas from behind, declaring in an annoyed tone, “What the hell guys?”

Dustin. Dustin was his mark.

“Hey Chief,” Will greeted him easily, and Hopper felt a surge of affection through his annoyance. Will knew they were caught, and didn’t look half as nervous as the others did.

“Hey kids.” He took a drag of his cigarette, flicked ashes into the night. “It's a late one, isn't it?”

No one really had a response to that. Hopper waited expectantly for one of them to break the silence. Finally - he counted to five - just as he expected, it was Dustin who took the lead.

“So Chief we, uh, weren’t expecting you to swing by. Did you… want to watch Hellraiser? Because it wasn’t that good.”

Max snorted, and then immediately ducked her face behind Lucas’s shoulder, not wanting to draw Hopper’s attention. He stayed focused on Dustin.

“I thought I’d do you a favor and pick up El from the movie. You don’t all really fit in the Cavalier, and my house is way further out than anyone else’s.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” Lucas said, talking a smidge too quickly to pass for playing it cool. “I don’t mind dropping her off -”

“I don’t see her though,” Hopper said, brows creasing in confusion. He tilted his head, the motion a little exaggerated, judging by the smirk on Will’s face. He pretended to search over their heads. “Or Mike. Where are they?”

“They’re still in the theater!” Dustin blurted out, and Hopper did not miss the dirty look that Lucas shot him. “They’re just… taking a moment. To themselves. They’ll be out in a minute, and we can drop El off, we don’t mind.”

As soon as he said these words, the marquee to the Hawk winked off, leaving them with only the street lamp and Hopper’s cigarette for light.

He straightened up. “Looks like they’re locked in for the night. Come on, I guess we’re going to have to go knock on the door and get the owner to let them out.”

“Wait!” Dustin shouted, scrambling. Will was shaking his head at this point, and Max had stepped all the way behind Lucas, as if Hopper wasn’t going to see her. “I mean, they’re not in there anymore.”

Hopper looked at him. He kept his tone serious and concerned. “But they were in the movie, right?”

“Yes! I mean!” He hugged his bag of popcorn, glanced around him as if looking for help, and then picked up, “Sometimes they sit somewhere else. Like we’ll sit up front and they’ll sit in the back.”

“Why would they do that?” Hopper asked, feigning confusion. Like he didn’t already know that the back row was goddamn makeout city.

The look on Dustin’s face indicated that he knew the answer to that question - and more than that, he knew that Hopper knew the answer to that question. He tried to bail, looking around uncertainly for help. “Guys?”

“Look, if they weren’t with you guys, I have to phone it in,” Hopper interrupted, and if he didn’t know better he would have felt bad at the look of panic that crossed all their faces. They weren’t panicking about their missing friends, they were panicking because their little lie was falling apart. “We’ll have to get a search party going, the first 24 hours are crucial in something like this.”

He strode towards the truck, opening the door and reaching against the bench seat, looking for all the world a concerned father about to radio the station and then -

“Wait, wait!” It was Max, having finally gained the courage to step in front of Lucas and elbow Dustin out of the way. “Chief, we know where they are. They went to a different movie.”

Hopper wheeled around, leaned against the truck, and took in each one of their faces. Will, too quiet, but obviously amused at the situation. Lucas, who was still holding the hand with his car keys up, as though if he just held still enough, Hopper wouldn’t throttle him. Dustin, cheeks bright red, holding his bag of popcorn from the movie so tightly there would be nothing but crumbs left. Finally, Max, eyebrows low and annoyed, clearly ready for this farce to be over.

“I know,” he said, aggravated and patronizing. “I know exactly where they went. I almost impounded Wheeler’s car about an hour ago.”

He was met with four slack jawed stares, and Will, who still looked like he knew too much for his own good. Hopper climbed up into the truck, took a final drag of his cigarette, and flicked it off into the darkness. “And if I ever catch you lying for them again, I'll make sure you all have parking tickets until you’re ninety.” Nodding at Max, he added, “That includes your skateboard too, missy.”

The driver’s side window was open as he pulled away. Distantly, under the rumble of the truck’s engine, he heard Dustin, asking the real question:

“Is Mike alive?”

It was enough to make Hopper smile and congratulate himself on a job well done.

Now to deal with El.

***

The door was unlocked when Hopper got home, which was the first thing to set his teeth grinding. The house was dark, and the door to her bedroom was shut, which was an indication that she didn’t want to talk and probably had every intention of ignoring him for daring to interrupt her date.

He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and moved into the kitchen. She was sixteen, and had been interrupted with her boyfriend by her father. She was naturally frustrated with him, and while he had learned that it was best to let El stew, and not push her when she was emotional, the fact was they needed to have a serious conversation and he didn’t feel like it could wait.

The only sign that she wasn’t asleep was the squeal of the walkie-talkie from her bedroom - probably talking to Wheeler, moaning about their failed date. If Sinclair had gotten the rest of their little party back to their respective houses maybe they were having a party line, talking in hushed whispers about Hopper cornering them at the Hawk.

Giving her space for the time being, he heated up a pan full of milk, stirring in the chocolate and getting the mugs ready before adding his secret weapon: a load of marshmallows, packing the mug so full that the hot chocolate would have to seep in around them. As he was holding the pan over the mugs, he finally called out:

“El! Come out here.”

There was a long moment of silence - Hopper’s heart skipped a beat, he really didn’t want to force this - and then he heard the hissing clunk that could only be El retracting the antenna on her walkie-talkie. The door creaked as it opened and she came to stand in the entrance to the kitchen, looking solemn.

She was still wearing the dress she’d left the house in, but she’d put on a pair of pajama pants underneath. The electric yellow print clashed with the grass green dress, and if he weren’t so goddamned irritated with her he would have thought she looked adorable with her mussed hair and little kid pout.

He held up the mug of hot chocolate. “Do you want to tell me why you lied tonight?”

The pout deepened. Accusing El of lying was an affront to her personal moral code. “We did not lie. I said we were going to the movies, and we went to the movies.”

Right. This was the crux of the issue. “El, go to the bookshelf and get your dictionary.”

For a moment she set her jaw, looked at him mutinously, but then conceded, turning tail and grabbing the book. He gestured for her to sit, pushing one of the mugs of hot chocolate across the table.

“Look up the word omission and read it out to me.”

She was going to high school like a normal teenager, but there were still these little things, these gaps in her knowledge. Lying was something she generally didn’t do (and frankly wasn’t good at) but telling half truths, and letting him fill in the rest - did she really not understand why that was a problem?

“Omission,” El read out to him mechanically. “Noun. Someone or something that has been left out or excluded. Example: "there are glaring omissions in the report".”

“A lie of omission,” Hopper explained, “is you telling me that you’re going to a movie with your friends, knowing that I’m going to believe you’re at the Hawk with your entire party. You didn’t tell a lie, but you deliberately left out information. I need to know where you’re at when you go out, do you understand that?”

She gave a half shrug, one shoulder rising and falling, and Hopper exhaled roughly, tamping down the urge to snap at her.

“I’m not trying to spy on you,” he told her, an edge to his voice. “But if there had been an emergency, or if you got in trouble or I needed to find you, I wouldn’t have known where to start looking.”

Healthy boundaries, his brain reminded him.

Normal teenager, his heart reminded him.

How could he explain to her that it wasn’t just a courtesy to him, as her father? That he still had nightmares about meeting rooms in Washington D.C. where men in suits were shouting “What do you mean the Hawkins Initiative is shut down? Three years?! Where is the subject? ”

He’d been in the Army. He knew how bureaucracy worked. It wasn’t just that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing - it was that the right hand was pushing half-finished paperwork towards the left hand and not reading anything the left hand gave back, just trusting the left hand to be doing what it was told.

It was his darkest nightmare that the closing of Hawkins Lab wasn’t really the end of the story, that at some point someone with some actual sway in the government was going to realize that they’d lost track of valuable assets - and do everything they could to track them (her) down.

A normal teenager was not a paranoid teenager, but all the same -

“Now, you realize that’s only part of the problem,” Hopper said to her, and judging by her downcast eyes he thought he was reaching her. “Because what worries me is that I not only didn’t know where you were, you didn’t really seem to know where you were?”

She tentatively met his eyes then, her face a question mark. It had been a lot of work, encouraging her to use words, be a participant in conversations, and he knew when she was scared or stressed all that work meant nothing and she just withdrew into herself. It had been just as much of a learning curve for him to learn what all of her facial expressions meant, what she was asking for without saying it out loud.

“You said I was spying on you,” Hopper said, tone still stern. “But I wasn’t. If you had been paying attention to your surroundings you would have seen the police lights when me and Callahan got to the Sterling.”

Now a blush colored her cheeks. Hopper reminded himself again that he wanted her to be smart, not paranoid.

“Look.” His fingers thrummed against the table as he looked for the right words. “You’re a smart kid. God knows I got into shit when I was your age.”

El’s eyes lit up. “What kind of shit?”

Shit that had involved girls, and cars, and cigarettes, and alcohol. My mom thought I was on the debate team. Once he’d had to give a cop his entire case of beer in exchange for not giving him a ride of shame back to his house, and his poor naive mother. A different cop had once given chase after (an underage) Hopper had threatened a bartender with a wrench, vaulting over fences and under laundry lines for what felt like a mile before he was able to get away. Another time he’d learned a very hard lesson on what not to say to a girl when you found your condom had broken. The flip side of that lesson had been the one on not believing women who say it's okay, I’m on the pill.

He had so many pearls of fatherly wisdom to pass on to El, but don’t stick your dick in crazy wasn’t one of them.

Be aware of your surroundings was, however.

When the cops show up, the date is over was too.

“That’s not fair,” Hopper finally said, raising his mug to his lips. “I had to figure it out on my own. You do too. We can compare notes when you’re older.”

El considered this. “Am I grounded?”

“I think that’s appropriate,” Hopper considered, then added, “If you can tell me why you lied I might be talked into cutting it short.”

“I didn’t think you’d let me go if I asked,” she said frankly. Hopper slapped a hand to his forehead. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting.

He sighed. “That doesn’t mean you manipulate me to get what you want, kid. You’re grounded for a week, for not being aware of your surroundings. That means no after school homework tutoring with Mike, no dates or campaigns next weekend, and I’m riding you to school this week, not him.”

She bit his lip but appeared to accept his terms. “So you’re not mad about the kissing?”

“Right.” He tried not to think of her and Wheeler grappling in the back of that station wagon. What he did think about was a jet black 1950 Impala, and Jeannie Rogers - although she was Matthews now, wasn’t she?

“That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.” Hopper gestured vaguely towards her neck, where a dark mark was visible under her ear. “You are the worst at covering hickies. You really need to talk to someone who knows about makeup. Try Nancy.”

That should be awkward enough punishment for both her and Mike. Too bad Nancy had to get caught up in it, though El might actually learn something useful.

To her credit, El didn’t look ashamed or embarrassed. “Okay,” she agreed easily.

“Good. Now go to bed.” He needed a drink, and didn’t like to open the bottle in front of the kid. “And no more walkie talkie tonight, got it?”

***

It was a month before Mike and El got to go on another date. Hopper was home that Friday evening when Mike came to pick her up, and the atmosphere was deliciously awkward. Hopper sent El back to her room to search for a jacket, as the weather had turned, and he was alone with Mike on the front porch.

“Tell me again,” he ordered Mike, who apparently thought staring at the wall over his shoulder would pass for eye contact.

“We’re going to the Harvest Festival,” Mike recited mechanically.

“Right” Hopper confirmed.

“There’s a corn maze there.”

“There is.”

“And a hay ride.”

Hopper nodded.

“Then we’re going to the diner with the entire party.”

“The entire party?”

“Lucas, Max, Dustin, and Will.”

“Callahan patrols tonight and usually takes a coffee break there around 10,” Hopper observed.

“He will see us there?” Mike asked meekly.

“I bet he will.” Hopper lit a cigarette. “And Wheeler?”

“Yes?”

“If you ever lie to me again, I will tell you, in absolute, excruciating detail, what I did to your English teacher when I was sixteen.” He exhaled a plume of smoke, watching as it caught the icy breeze.

“Mrs. Matthews?!” Mike asked, and El came out then and took his arm, and completely missed the mortified look on his face.

“Goodnight!” El called over her shoulder, like Hopper wasn’t going to wait up for them. Mike was still looking back at him, and Hopper found something deeply satisfying in the awed, intimidated look on his face.

He smirked, waved cheerfully, and shut the door.

Healthy boundaries.

[scaryastheyseem]

Animorphs October day 15-16: AU + Confessions

Tw for canon-typical body horror + canon-typical discussion of child death and endangerment

It’s weird, the things we don’t know about our parents. My parents have known me since the day I was born. They could tell you the name of every friend I’ve ever had, every food I don’t like, every teacher I’ve had since kindergarten. They know every time I had been sick. They remember every birthday party and every broken bone, every Halloween costume and bad dream.

 On the other hand, I didn’t that my parents had names until I was six years old. They were just ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’, until the day that my aunt called the house and asked for someone named Loren, and I learned that Loren was my mom, and Alan was my dad, and that they’d had entire lives as Loren and Alan, almost thirty years apiece before I came along.

 I still couldn’t tell you what they were like as kids. Or what their hobbies are now, or the names of any of their friends. That’s not because I don’t know. It’s because any information I give you about my parents could be used to find out who they really are.

 I won’t even promise you that my parents’ real names are Loren and Alan. Or tell your our last name. Even that could be enough for the Yeerks to track us down. And I can’t let that happen.

 Usually, it’s parents who have to worry about keeping their kids safe. They make sure they’re eating enough vegetables and aren’t staying out too late or going to parties where there might be drinking. If they’re like my dad, they keep us from watching violent movies and lecture us on the dangers of teen alcoholism like once a week, because my dad takes the very special episodes of Boy Meets World way too seriously.

 My mom says it’s because he worries about us, and that I shouldn’t let it bother me. I act like it does anyway, because that’s what a normal kid would do, and I like to think that I’m still pretty good at pretending to be a normal kid.

 The truth is that it doesn’t bother me. I know that my dad’s right to be afraid. Even if it’s not for the reasons that he thinks.

 See, my parents don’t know everything about me, either.

--

I coast back in through my bedroom window, so tired that it’s a physical ache, like someone’s reached into my body and wrung out my bones. Two years ago, I didn’t know that you could be tired enough that your vision blurred. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to find my open window on instinct, or glide through it on the silent wings of an owl and land on my headboard with no more sound than any other owl would make catching a mouse. Which is to say, no sound. Most people don’t think of owls as scary, because even the biggest ones only weight about three pounds. But they’re some of nature’s most silent and deadly predators. Silent flight. Talons that could crush a human’s hand. Better vision than humans at any time of day, and better hearing, too. Most of their prey die without knowing what hit them.

I hopped down onto my pillow and started the slow shift back into human. Morphing takes a long time, and demorphing takes me longer than it takes the other Animorphs. I’m not bad at it, exactly. It’s just that sometimes, when I’ve been in morph for long enough, I forget what it feels like to have arms instead of wings. Or teeth instead of fangs, or wavy blond hair instead of the curled horns of a bison, my battle morph. None of the others have this problem. I don’t know why I do.

 My toes split and shriveled. Marrow pooled in my bones. The other thing about morphing is that not only does it take a few minutes to go from human to animal and back, but the in-between phase is completely disgusting. I caught sight of myself in the mirror on my closet door. I was back to my full human height, but my face was still mostly screech owl, with huge yellow eyes and a thin beak where my mouth and nose should have been. Tufts of feathers stuck out of body at weird angles, and my fingers were still fused into long, chunky wings. I looked like a rejected design for the baby alien in Alien, or like somebody had skinned Big Bird. In short, totally gross.

 Which of course, was when my dad walked in.

 My already-human ears didn’t hear him coming until he was already opening the door. “Tobias,” he started to say, and then stops, eyes going wide. I froze. There was nowhere to hide, and no way to convince him that he was dreaming, or that this was all a trick of the light. It was a full moon, which had been convenient for our mission, but was now just letting me dad see that I was only maybe three-quarters human. My owl eyes saw every detail of his face as it sagged in shock, the color draining from his skin. I heard his T-shirt wrinkle as he sagged against the doorframe, the wood creaking as he gripped it for support.

 Jake’s going to kill me, was the first thing I thought. Or he’s going to kill my dad. Or Dad’s going to call the cops, and one of the cops will be a Controller, and then we’ll all be dead. I have to stop him before he calls the police.

 “Dad,” I tried to say, but it came out as a squawk. My vocal cords were still mostly bird, my lips hard and grey like a beak. I needed to get human, and say something, anything, that would stop him from screaming long enough for me to—what? Explain that I’d been given the power to turn into any animal I touched by a dying blue alien named Arbron, and that the reason I’d been making so many new friends lately was because we were fighting a guerilla war against mind-controlling alien slugs bent on enslaving humanity by masquerading as a coed youth charity organization? He’d think I was on drugs, or insane. Or worse, he’d tell me that I’d had a bad dream, that the stress of work was getting to him and making him see things. I’d go back to bed, and the next thing I’d wake up to would be Controllers swarming our house and dragging me and my mom and my sister down to the Yeerk Pool to be infested, while the thing in my father’s body looked on in approval.

 See, we’re pretty sure that Jake’s the only one of us with a Controller in his house. Ax keeps watch on our families while we’re at school, and the only one of them who goes to Sharing events—or inexplicably vanishes for hours on end, locked in a cage by the Yeerk pool while the slug controlling them soaks up Kandrona rays—is Tom. But we never really know.

 If my dad’s a Controller, I thought, I might have to kill him myself.

 “Tobias,” my dad said, “Are—are you morphing?”

 --

 We sat on the bed together, my dad in his sweats and old MIT T-shirt, me in the worn-out leotard that was the only clothing I could morph. My scalp itched where my dad was staring at me. I kept lifting my hand to scratch it, thinking that maybe there were still some feathers left in my hair. But it was just my dad staring at me like he always had when he thought I wasn’t looking. Like he thought that Abby or I would vanish into thin air if he took his eyes off of us for a second.

 “Does Mom know?” I asked.

 My dad nodded jerkily. “Loren knew me before I was human.”

 “But—how?”

 “She was abducted, abducted by a Skrit Na ship, along with another human. My fellow aristh and I were tasked with rescuing them and returning to earth.” His lips thin. “The mission became—became complicated.”

 My head spun. My mom had been in space. My mom had been abducted by Skrit Na, the dumpster divers of the galaxy. She’d been brought into space, and then met my dad, because my dad was an alien. An Andalite. An Andalite aristh, which meant he’d been a warrior at some point, or at least a warrior in training. Which was insane in its own way. I love my dad, but I was never one of those kids who walked around on the playground boasting that he could beat up everyone else’s dad. My dad was a California pacifist hippy, the kind of guy who goes to environmental rallies and puts bumper stickers on his Prius that say Give peace a chance, and meant it, and only owned a Prius because he was too uncoordinated to ride a bike. He had a stutter and shook hands like he was participating in an exotic foreign ritual. He cried during E.T. I mean, he didn’t even eat meat. It was impossible to picture him in battle. Impossible to picture him killing anybody, the way that my friends and I had.

 I love my dad. I love my entire family, so much that it scares me, sometimes. It’s why I’ve never been able to get mad at him for being so overprotective, even when it makes sneaking out to do Animorphs things way more complicated than it is for someone like Rachel or Marco, whose parents have probably never seen a very special episode in their lives. I thought I understood what he felt when he looked at us. The deep and terrifying love that comes from knowing just how easily the people you care about could be gone forever. We both felt it, even if it was for different reasons.

 Of course, it turned out that I didn’t understand at all. My dad’s fears came from a place that was a lot closer to mine than I’d thought. I suddenly got the insane urge to laugh, and had to bite down on my tongue to stop myself. All this time, we’ve been wondering when the Andalites will arrive to save us, and there’s been one in my house this whole time, warning me about the dangers of online chatrooms and making sure that I wear a jacket.

 When I was sure that I wouldn’t break into a hysterical giggling fit, or possibly start screaming and never stop, I said, “Does Abby?”

 “No.” He didn’t have to tell me not to tell her. Abby’s ten. She likes Archie comics and science books and learning baseball statistics. There are plenty of things a ten-year-old doesn’t need to know.

 “Are you going to tell Mom that I know?”

 “I already have.” He inclines his head towards the door, and I realize, thoughtspeech. This whole time, Abby and I thought that our parents always won at Catchphrase because they’d been married for so long. Weird that I’m thinking about Catchphrase. My dad is an Andalite. Was an Andalite.

 When I’d brought up my demorphing problem to Marco, thinking that maybe he’d felt the same thing, he’d looked at me like—well, I’d seen how Marco looked at me when I grew a third eye. This was weirder. “It’s two hours, dude”, he’d said. “I think it’d take me a lot longer than two hours to forget what it was like to be human. I mean, setting aside the issue of anyone ever forgetting this handsome face, have you forgotten about opposable thumbs? Buffalo can’t play Nintendo.”

 Of course, at that point Cassie’d had to chime in and tell him that my battle morph was an American bison, and then tell me that there wasn’t anything wrong with me. “Maybe your sense of self isn’t rooted in how you look,” she’d said, which would have been nice if it was true, like most of the things Cassie said. “I mean, you might not be the fastest morpher—“ She refrained mentioning that she was the fastest morpher, which was also very nice “—but you’ve always been the best at controlling new morphs, even ones with really strong instincts. You were the first one to fight off the ant morph, remember? You have an innate sense of Tobias that has nothing to do with the body you inhabit.”

I didn’t tell her that I thought the truth was something different. I thought it was just easier for me to come unmoored from my body. I wondered how long it had taken my dad to forget what it felt like to be an Andalite. I wondered if he was like me, and had forgotten quickly. I wondered if he still remembered.

 Sometimes when he was in human morph, Ax would shift his head like he was trying to use his stalk eyes to look around. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen my dad do that, but there was no way of knowing.

 “She’s making us tea,” my dad said, and it took me a moment to remember who he was talking about. My mom. Who’d known all along that her husband was an alien, and knew that I knew, which meant that were were probably going to have to have a whole other conversation about this.

 My dad reached out, slowly, so that I was prepared when he wrapped his hand around mine. I clutched his bony fingers in my fat ones and held on tight. Maybe some guys would’ve thought it was dorky for their dad to hold their hand, but I figured that I’d been fighting aliens an hour ago, and I could hold my dad’s hand if I wanted to.

 “I’m sorry,” he said.

 “What?”

 “I thought I was saving you,” he said. His voice sounded strained, like he was talking through a chokehold, and I knew that if I looked up at him, there’d be tears running down his face. He sounded exactly like Jake when he was trying not to lose it on a mission. I kept staring at our hands. My dad’s wedding ring, the hot-glue gun scar on his thumb, my total lack of callouses or scars or any sign that anything bad had ever happened to me at all.  Our bodies regenerate from our base DNA after we morph, and your DNA doesn’t store injuries. Even my chewed-up fingernails would come back whole. For all that my dad was a hippy, I’d never heard him cry before, and I knew that I didn’t want to see it. Just hearing it felt like my stomach was hollowing out. It was worse than Jake crying, because for all that Jake’s our general, he’s still technically another kid. My dad’s an adult, and he’s my dad. He might have been a pacifist hippy, but I guess part of me still thought of him as totally unflappable and capable of fixing all my problems, no matter how much I knew that it wasn’t true.

 “You and Abby. War is—war is a terrible thing, a terrible thing.” He was stuttering bad, the way he did when he got cut off in traffic or misplaced a semi-colon in his code. “I thought Earth was safe—safe and peaceful. They had just had a war. Loren said it was terrible, terrible, there wouldn’t be—another. Not this time. So—you would be safe. But instead you’re fighting your own war, you and these other children. Children.” He shook his head. A tear dripped down onto the back of his hand.

 Part of me wanted to scream at him for ever trusting that humanity could change for the better. For thinking that a species that invented the atomic bomb and then kept having wars would suddenly decide to lay down their arms and plant flowers. I suddenly thought of the psalm framed above his dresser. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn war any more. I always thought it was weird that it was on my dad’s side of the bedroom and not my mom’s. She’s the religious one. Ax told me that Andalite culture was mostly based around the military, but that before their long war with the Yeerks, they’d been nomadic grazers who wrote poetry about the beauty of how trees framed rivers.

 Rachel had snorted, and said that she couldn’t imagine any of the Andalites we met writing poetry, which had been my first thought too. But my second thought had been: Oh, that sounds nice. Like after the war was over, I’d like to wander and write poetry too. Maybe my dad had thought the same thing. I could be mad at him for taking that chance. Nothing I could say would unravel time until he took my mom—Loren, the girl he’d met in space—back to his homeworld and let Abby and I be born under a red sky. Or not be born at all. I don’t want that, and I need him to know that I don’t. That my life is violent and painful and worth living; that he gave me a life worth living.

 “It’s not all bad,” I say. “I mean, I get to fly. I’ve been a bird. I’ve seen the whole Santa Ynez mountains from above.” I tighten my grip on his hand. “That’s—that’s worth a lot terrible things.” I don’t’ have the words to tell him about the feeling that flying gives me. Feeling the wind rising under my wings and knowing exactly where I’m going, and how to get there, and that when I do, it’ll be under my own power. It’s like freedom, bottled and purified. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

 I can’t tell my dad that, but when I look up at his face, it’s lifted towards the window, where a few stars peek through the orange smear of the street lights. I can see tear tracks drying on his face, but he’s not crying anymore. “Yes,” he says. “I had forgotten. There is a certain joy to flying.”

 --

 My parents read a lot of books about how to be better parents. There’s a shelf of them in the basement. The Aware Baby. The New Baby. Siblings Without Rivalry. Raising Boys. Raising Girls. Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. Raising Positive Kids in a Negative World.

 I don’t know what any of those books said about what to do after your husband tells your kid that you’re an alien, and your kid tells you and your husband that he turns into animals and fights aliens after school. My mom had made tea, which as a response to family strife seemed like it would cover a lot of bases.

 We sat around the table in the kitchen, which felt overlit and yellow and slightly fuzzy around the edges, the way that kitchens are in the middle of the night. I drank my tea. My mom brought out a bowl of edamame, which no one ate.

 “You have to stop fighting,” she said.

 “We can’t,” I said, dully. “We’re the only ones standing in the way of the Yeerks completely conquering humanity.”

 “You’re children,” my dad protested.

 We were fifteen—mostly, Cassie and Marco hadn’t had their birthdays yet—but I was pretty sure that bringing that up wouldn’t do us any favors. I think that as soon as you turn into an adult, anyone under the age of eighteen might as well be a kindergartener as far as you’re concerned. There was a big difference between somebody my age fighting a war and somebody Abby’s age doing it, but try explaining that to my parents. “The Yeerks don’t know that,” I said instead. “And we’ve been doing a pretty good job so far. We destroyed a Kandrona generator that was supposed to be installed in a homeless shelter tonight, to transform it into a Controller recruitment center. That’s a couple hundred people we saved from being enslaved, easily.”

 My parents both looked shocked. I didn’t know if it was because I was talking so casually about aliens, or because I’d all but admitted that I’d killed somebody two hours ago. A few somebodies. I was pretty sure none of them had been humans, but then, neither was my dad. I imagined that I could taste Hork-Bajir blood in my mouth. I took another drink of tea.

 “What about the Andalite fleet?” It was mom who said it, which surprised me. The world Andalite sounded even weirder coming out of her mouth. “Have you made contact with them? Surely they’ll want to oppose the Yeerks on every front possible.”

 “We’re not an urgent case,” I told her. I could hear how flat my voice was, but the energy it would've taken to make myself sound gentle was so far beyond me that it might as well have been on the other end of the galaxy. “They’ll be here in three years. Maybe two.”

 My dad’s lip curled in anger. “I’ll contact them myself. They’ll listen to me—“

 “Will they, Dad?” I cut him off. “Will they listen to an aristh who abandoned his post? A voluntary nothlit? I’ve met Andalites; they’re not exactly accepting of alternative lifestyle choices. What makes you think that you can say anything that Ax hasn’t already?”

 “Then give me the morphing power.”

 It’s not what I’d been expecting him to say. My mouth fell open in shock, and he steamrolled on, stuttering but staring me down. “If you have the, the morphing power, then you must have an Escafil device. I may be a nothlit, but even a nothlit, even a nothlit can regain their morphing power, and acquire morphs in their new body. I’m an adult, an Andalite. I know the Yeerks, their strategies, their ships.”

 “Me too,” my mom said. She reached out and touched my shoulder. “I might not be an Andalite, but I’m not about to let my son risk his life without at least trying to keep him safe.” She paused. “Also, we can both drive, which I imagine would be helpful.”

 Weirdly, it sounded nice for a moment. I wouldn’t have to lie to my parents anymore about where I was going or what I was doing or why I was staying out so late. And they were right. They were adults. At least theoretically, it was their job to take care of us. To make the hard calls that Jake makes now, when there aren’t any good options. The ugly calls when there are good options, but the bad ones will hurt the Yeerks a little bit more. Or keep us alive for one more day. Or eliminate a threat that needs to be eliminated, no matter what the cost.

 I thought about David.  A bat cracking across my beak. Jake choking on his own blood. The terrible thing that Rachel had to do. I closed my eyes. “I’ll have to talk to Jake,” I said.

 “What does that mean?” my dad said.

 At the same time, my mom said, “Jake?” She said his full name. “That Jake? The sleepy-looking one who roots for the Padres?” My mom’s a Dodgers fan.

 “He’s our leader. Our war-prince,” I added to my dad. Though maybe my mom knew what a war-prince is, too. “If anyone’s making new Animorphs, it’ll be him making the call.”

 “He’s fifteen,” my mom protested.

 “I trust him, Mom. With my life, like once a week.”

 Her face got red and blotchy, which meant that she was about to start crying. My dad made a choking sound. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry we let this happen to you.” I stared at the chip in my mug and thought that I should have feel more awful about making my parents cry, twice. Or at least that I should have feel more awful than I did tired.

 I thought about explaining to my parents that the last time we’d given somebody else the morphing power, he’d snapped and tried to sell us out to the Yeerks before almost murdering half of us and forcing us to trap him in the body of a rat. That just made me feel more tired.

Mostly, I thought, I could have told them, all this time. I’d been lying to my parents for a year and a half. About my slipping grades, about why I was so tired, about what I was doing with the new friends that they were so relieved to see me make. About why I kept waking up screaming in the middle of the night. And all this time, they would have understood. Maybe better than anyone.

 “Dad,” I said, “Dad, I—I killed someone.” I hold out a hand like maybe he can see it, even though I’d used my back to crush the Hork-Bajir’s ribcage with a single blow and send them stumbling into Marco’s outstretched arms. Even though it had been my horns that had ripped someone open, stomach to sternum. Even though I’d demorphed inside the swimming complex at the Y and washed my feet and head off in chlorinated water before remorphing and flying home again, just like I did after every battle.

 I didn’t know how the others washed the blood off. I’d never asked.

 “I killed someone tonight,” I repeat, and my dad closes his eyes but he doesn’t flinch away from me. He wraps his hands around mine, and I think, this is what he will look like when he’s old. Then I think, he’s already old.

 “I love you,” he says, and I think of all the things I could tell my father.

[adambstingus]

The 3 Biggest Lies Wives Believe

ShareTweet

While driving the other day I noticed a bumper sticker at a red light that said,

“Don’t believe everything you think.”

So true. I could save myself a lot of trouble by adhering to those five words. How often do we create reality out of our thoughts? If we behave as though these thoughts are actually true, we can make ourselves miserable.

We can scare ourselves silly.

When I was seven, I had a reoccurring dream that a lion sat on my couch each night. When I would go get a drink of water, it would stare at me as I walked down the hallway. It never pounced or attacked, but it was frightening to me. On nights when I was awake and thirsty, I would sit in my bed feeling terrified to get a drink of water. Sometimes I would refuse to go to the kitchen because I knew that [the] lion would be in my living room. There were nights when I gained enough courage to fly down the hallway and run to the faucet in a frantic hurry. I would fill my cup and then sprint back to my bed, spilling my water everywhere, and quickly jump onto the mattress in case the lion had decided to hide under my bed. I looked like a crazy girl. I wasn’t crazy, I just believed my own thoughts.

I still believe lies. I often freak out and waste time and energy running from imaginary lions. There are real things in life that are plenty scary, so why do I add pain by worrying about things that just aren’t true? When it comes to marriage, there are three big lies that come to mind. They stare us down and cause us to second guess things. I have whispered these lies to myself, and I have heard them from others. A lot.

1. If my spouse would just change, I would be happier.

We all think it. We look across the room at our spouse and wonder why he won’t shape up.

It’s easy to blame our sadness and broken expectations on our spouse. When our hopes are dashed against the rocks, we tend to get really bummed out. I doubt you had childhood dreams that included fighting, anger, and bitterness in your future marriage.

You were pretty certain Prince Charming rode a white horse, not a lawn mower while drinking a beer. Sleeping Beauty gets woken up by a kiss, not by snoring and gas being passed on her leg. And Mr. Darcy exists only between the pages of a book. If your husband is exactly like Mr. Darcy, then you are possibly delusional, in denial, or really blessed.

Reality is sort of surprising, isn’t it? Even at his finest moments, your husband is not able to make you happy in every area. But, there isn’t a human walking on this earth who can do that. The quicker we understand that our spouse isn’t our all in all, the better. Instead of expecting your guy to change, try to love the person he is becoming. (It’s called faith.) Jesus is better than the worst spouse and he’s better than the best spouse.

2. I am failing my family.

Yes, you are. You fail, I fail, we all fail — and that is why we so desperately need a Savior. Your husband, your children, your extended family need more than you can give.

In fact, you need more than you can offer to yourself. Peace is an outside job. You aren’t going to find it looking inward. If you search your heart, you will find lots of crazy things, like selfish motives, pride, lust, envy, and on and on. Look up! Jesus is called the Prince of Peace because He is the highest form of peace you can ever find or know. Women tend to see all of the things they are doing wrong, (compared to others) and begin to emotionally flog themselves.

Please put down the whip, because all wrath has been atoned for at the cross, so you don’t have to make amends for your failures. Don’t try to do really good things to make God happy, just repent and ask for strength. Trying to appease everyone, including God will burn you out fast. And then you will feel like a failure. And then you will have to try harder to feel acceptable. See? It’s kind of like “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” … it leaves you chasing rabbit trails instead of steadily walking in forward in the light of grace and forgiveness.

3. I married the wrong person.

If I had a dollar for every time I have heard this, I could buy my own island and spend my days splashing around in blue waters. I have thought this a time or two, and I am sure my husband has as well. The fact is, we are all the wrong person. Nobody has marriage figured out.

We have limited tools to work with, depending on our upbringings, experiences, and struggles. Life is hard, and nobody is left untouched by the damage that takes place when we are sinned against. Some people have fewer tools than others, but thankfully God is there to support us in our weakness. And loving your spouse is a decision to hang in there, despite the hurts and disappointments. Like Matt Chandler states,

Love says, I’ve seen the ugly parts of you, and I’m staying.

As a side note: I am not saying stay if you are being abused. Get help, get safe, and pray God intervenes. It’s okay to place boundaries in your marriage and stand by them. Leaving doesn’t mean divorcing, and leaving might be the most loving thing you can do of your spouse. I am no expert in this, but if you are in that situation, please protect yourself and your children. For encouragement in this area, June Hunt offers good insight.

For the marriage that struggles with everyday fighting and failures, hang in there and know that you are not alone, because God loves you and has good intentions towards you. He wants your marriage to stay whole and will see you through the dark times that inevitably come. Looking for a better-suited spouse might not work, because you are still bringing YOU with you, and that is half of the equation. The new person will be flawed, and will also let you down.

So forget about finding your soul-mate. That is all baloney. Why would you want to find someone that suits you perfectly, anyway? I believe God uses our differences to bring about growth and maturity in each other. I certainly don’t need a male version of myself. We would just sit around all day talking and daydreaming and cuddling, but the house would fall down around us, and nobody would get fed. My husband benefits from my emphasis on intimacy and family time, because without it he would end up an independent island unto himself, and get very lonely.

Lies will come at you.

Plug your ears. Saturate yourself with the truth of scripture. Ignore the lion. Your husband might change for the better or for the worse, but it still isn’t where your joy comes from. You are going to fail your family, so try not to beat yourself up so much.

Look at each other’s weaknesses as an opportunity to help each other become more like Christ.

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area { height: 130px; position: relative; } .IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active { border:0!important; } .IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after { content: “”; display: table; clear: both; } .IRPP_ruby { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #FFFFFF; box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -o-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); } .IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #eaeaea; } .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl { background-position: center; background-size: cover; float: left; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 31.59%; } .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area { float: right; width: 65.65%; padding:0; margin:0; } .IRPP_ruby .centered-text { display: table; height: 130px; left: 0; top: 0; padding:0; margin:0; } .IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0 74px 0 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .IRPP_ruby .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #3498DB; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: .125em; margin: 0; padding: 0; } .IRPP_ruby .postTitle { color: #000000; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; } .IRPP_ruby .ctaButton { background: url(https://faithit-eszuskq0bptlfh8awbb.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat; display: inline-block; height: 130px; width: 54px; } .IRPP_ruby .ctaButton { background-color: #3498DB; margin-left: 10px; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .IRPP_ruby:after { content: “”; display: block; clear: both; }

Read Next On FaithIt

Dear Dad: “You Need to Love Your Wife as You Want Your Daughter to Be Loved”

ShareTweet

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-3-biggest-lies-wives-believe/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/181919104122

[allofbeercom]

The 3 Biggest Lies Wives Believe

ShareTweet

While driving the other day I noticed a bumper sticker at a red light that said,

“Don’t believe everything you think.”

So true. I could save myself a lot of trouble by adhering to those five words. How often do we create reality out of our thoughts? If we behave as though these thoughts are actually true, we can make ourselves miserable.

We can scare ourselves silly.

When I was seven, I had a reoccurring dream that a lion sat on my couch each night. When I would go get a drink of water, it would stare at me as I walked down the hallway. It never pounced or attacked, but it was frightening to me. On nights when I was awake and thirsty, I would sit in my bed feeling terrified to get a drink of water. Sometimes I would refuse to go to the kitchen because I knew that [the] lion would be in my living room. There were nights when I gained enough courage to fly down the hallway and run to the faucet in a frantic hurry. I would fill my cup and then sprint back to my bed, spilling my water everywhere, and quickly jump onto the mattress in case the lion had decided to hide under my bed. I looked like a crazy girl. I wasn’t crazy, I just believed my own thoughts.

I still believe lies. I often freak out and waste time and energy running from imaginary lions. There are real things in life that are plenty scary, so why do I add pain by worrying about things that just aren’t true? When it comes to marriage, there are three big lies that come to mind. They stare us down and cause us to second guess things. I have whispered these lies to myself, and I have heard them from others. A lot.

1. If my spouse would just change, I would be happier.

We all think it. We look across the room at our spouse and wonder why he won’t shape up.

It’s easy to blame our sadness and broken expectations on our spouse. When our hopes are dashed against the rocks, we tend to get really bummed out. I doubt you had childhood dreams that included fighting, anger, and bitterness in your future marriage.

You were pretty certain Prince Charming rode a white horse, not a lawn mower while drinking a beer. Sleeping Beauty gets woken up by a kiss, not by snoring and gas being passed on her leg. And Mr. Darcy exists only between the pages of a book. If your husband is exactly like Mr. Darcy, then you are possibly delusional, in denial, or really blessed.

Reality is sort of surprising, isn’t it? Even at his finest moments, your husband is not able to make you happy in every area. But, there isn’t a human walking on this earth who can do that. The quicker we understand that our spouse isn’t our all in all, the better. Instead of expecting your guy to change, try to love the person he is becoming. (It’s called faith.) Jesus is better than the worst spouse and he’s better than the best spouse.

2. I am failing my family.

Yes, you are. You fail, I fail, we all fail — and that is why we so desperately need a Savior. Your husband, your children, your extended family need more than you can give.

In fact, you need more than you can offer to yourself. Peace is an outside job. You aren’t going to find it looking inward. If you search your heart, you will find lots of crazy things, like selfish motives, pride, lust, envy, and on and on. Look up! Jesus is called the Prince of Peace because He is the highest form of peace you can ever find or know. Women tend to see all of the things they are doing wrong, (compared to others) and begin to emotionally flog themselves.

Please put down the whip, because all wrath has been atoned for at the cross, so you don’t have to make amends for your failures. Don’t try to do really good things to make God happy, just repent and ask for strength. Trying to appease everyone, including God will burn you out fast. And then you will feel like a failure. And then you will have to try harder to feel acceptable. See? It’s kind of like “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” . . . it leaves you chasing rabbit trails instead of steadily walking in forward in the light of grace and forgiveness.

3. I married the wrong person.

If I had a dollar for every time I have heard this, I could buy my own island and spend my days splashing around in blue waters. I have thought this a time or two, and I am sure my husband has as well. The fact is, we are all the wrong person. Nobody has marriage figured out.

We have limited tools to work with, depending on our upbringings, experiences, and struggles. Life is hard, and nobody is left untouched by the damage that takes place when we are sinned against. Some people have fewer tools than others, but thankfully God is there to support us in our weakness. And loving your spouse is a decision to hang in there, despite the hurts and disappointments. Like Matt Chandler states,

Love says, I’ve seen the ugly parts of you, and I’m staying.

As a side note: I am not saying stay if you are being abused. Get help, get safe, and pray God intervenes. It’s okay to place boundaries in your marriage and stand by them. Leaving doesn’t mean divorcing, and leaving might be the most loving thing you can do of your spouse. I am no expert in this, but if you are in that situation, please protect yourself and your children. For encouragement in this area, June Hunt offers good insight.

For the marriage that struggles with everyday fighting and failures, hang in there and know that you are not alone, because God loves you and has good intentions towards you. He wants your marriage to stay whole and will see you through the dark times that inevitably come. Looking for a better-suited spouse might not work, because you are still bringing YOU with you, and that is half of the equation. The new person will be flawed, and will also let you down.

So forget about finding your soul-mate. That is all baloney. Why would you want to find someone that suits you perfectly, anyway? I believe God uses our differences to bring about growth and maturity in each other. I certainly don’t need a male version of myself. We would just sit around all day talking and daydreaming and cuddling, but the house would fall down around us, and nobody would get fed. My husband benefits from my emphasis on intimacy and family time, because without it he would end up an independent island unto himself, and get very lonely.

Lies will come at you.

Plug your ears. Saturate yourself with the truth of scripture. Ignore the lion. Your husband might change for the better or for the worse, but it still isn’t where your joy comes from. You are going to fail your family, so try not to beat yourself up so much.

Look at each other’s weaknesses as an opportunity to help each other become more like Christ.

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area { height: 130px; position: relative; } .IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active { border:0!important; } .IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after { content: “”; display: table; clear: both; } .IRPP_ruby { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #FFFFFF; box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -o-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); } .IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #eaeaea; } .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl { background-position: center; background-size: cover; float: left; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 31.59%; } .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area { float: right; width: 65.65%; padding:0; margin:0; } .IRPP_ruby .centered-text { display: table; height: 130px; left: 0; top: 0; padding:0; margin:0; } .IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0 74px 0 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .IRPP_ruby .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #3498DB; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: .125em; margin: 0; padding: 0; } .IRPP_ruby .postTitle { color: #000000; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; } .IRPP_ruby .ctaButton { background: url(https://faithit-eszuskq0bptlfh8awbb.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat; display: inline-block; height: 130px; width: 54px; } .IRPP_ruby .ctaButton { background-color: #3498DB; margin-left: 10px; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .IRPP_ruby:after { content: “”; display: block; clear: both; }

Read Next On FaithIt

Dear Dad: “You Need to Love Your Wife as You Want Your Daughter to Be Loved”

ShareTweet

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/the-3-biggest-lies-wives-believe/

[samanthasroberts]

The 3 Biggest Lies Wives Believe

ShareTweet

While driving the other day I noticed a bumper sticker at a red light that said,

“Don’t believe everything you think.”

So true. I could save myself a lot of trouble by adhering to those five words. How often do we create reality out of our thoughts? If we behave as though these thoughts are actually true, we can make ourselves miserable.

We can scare ourselves silly.

When I was seven, I had a reoccurring dream that a lion sat on my couch each night. When I would go get a drink of water, it would stare at me as I walked down the hallway. It never pounced or attacked, but it was frightening to me. On nights when I was awake and thirsty, I would sit in my bed feeling terrified to get a drink of water. Sometimes I would refuse to go to the kitchen because I knew that [the] lion would be in my living room. There were nights when I gained enough courage to fly down the hallway and run to the faucet in a frantic hurry. I would fill my cup and then sprint back to my bed, spilling my water everywhere, and quickly jump onto the mattress in case the lion had decided to hide under my bed. I looked like a crazy girl. I wasn’t crazy, I just believed my own thoughts.

I still believe lies. I often freak out and waste time and energy running from imaginary lions. There are real things in life that are plenty scary, so why do I add pain by worrying about things that just aren’t true? When it comes to marriage, there are three big lies that come to mind. They stare us down and cause us to second guess things. I have whispered these lies to myself, and I have heard them from others. A lot.

1. If my spouse would just change, I would be happier.

We all think it. We look across the room at our spouse and wonder why he won’t shape up.

It’s easy to blame our sadness and broken expectations on our spouse. When our hopes are dashed against the rocks, we tend to get really bummed out. I doubt you had childhood dreams that included fighting, anger, and bitterness in your future marriage.

You were pretty certain Prince Charming rode a white horse, not a lawn mower while drinking a beer. Sleeping Beauty gets woken up by a kiss, not by snoring and gas being passed on her leg. And Mr. Darcy exists only between the pages of a book. If your husband is exactly like Mr. Darcy, then you are possibly delusional, in denial, or really blessed.

Reality is sort of surprising, isn’t it? Even at his finest moments, your husband is not able to make you happy in every area. But, there isn’t a human walking on this earth who can do that. The quicker we understand that our spouse isn’t our all in all, the better. Instead of expecting your guy to change, try to love the person he is becoming. (It’s called faith.) Jesus is better than the worst spouse and he’s better than the best spouse.

2. I am failing my family.

Yes, you are. You fail, I fail, we all fail — and that is why we so desperately need a Savior. Your husband, your children, your extended family need more than you can give.

In fact, you need more than you can offer to yourself. Peace is an outside job. You aren’t going to find it looking inward. If you search your heart, you will find lots of crazy things, like selfish motives, pride, lust, envy, and on and on. Look up! Jesus is called the Prince of Peace because He is the highest form of peace you can ever find or know. Women tend to see all of the things they are doing wrong, (compared to others) and begin to emotionally flog themselves.

Please put down the whip, because all wrath has been atoned for at the cross, so you don’t have to make amends for your failures. Don’t try to do really good things to make God happy, just repent and ask for strength. Trying to appease everyone, including God will burn you out fast. And then you will feel like a failure. And then you will have to try harder to feel acceptable. See? It’s kind of like “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” . . . it leaves you chasing rabbit trails instead of steadily walking in forward in the light of grace and forgiveness.

3. I married the wrong person.

If I had a dollar for every time I have heard this, I could buy my own island and spend my days splashing around in blue waters. I have thought this a time or two, and I am sure my husband has as well. The fact is, we are all the wrong person. Nobody has marriage figured out.

We have limited tools to work with, depending on our upbringings, experiences, and struggles. Life is hard, and nobody is left untouched by the damage that takes place when we are sinned against. Some people have fewer tools than others, but thankfully God is there to support us in our weakness. And loving your spouse is a decision to hang in there, despite the hurts and disappointments. Like Matt Chandler states,

Love says, I’ve seen the ugly parts of you, and I’m staying.

As a side note: I am not saying stay if you are being abused. Get help, get safe, and pray God intervenes. It’s okay to place boundaries in your marriage and stand by them. Leaving doesn’t mean divorcing, and leaving might be the most loving thing you can do of your spouse. I am no expert in this, but if you are in that situation, please protect yourself and your children. For encouragement in this area, June Hunt offers good insight.

For the marriage that struggles with everyday fighting and failures, hang in there and know that you are not alone, because God loves you and has good intentions towards you. He wants your marriage to stay whole and will see you through the dark times that inevitably come. Looking for a better-suited spouse might not work, because you are still bringing YOU with you, and that is half of the equation. The new person will be flawed, and will also let you down.

So forget about finding your soul-mate. That is all baloney. Why would you want to find someone that suits you perfectly, anyway? I believe God uses our differences to bring about growth and maturity in each other. I certainly don’t need a male version of myself. We would just sit around all day talking and daydreaming and cuddling, but the house would fall down around us, and nobody would get fed. My husband benefits from my emphasis on intimacy and family time, because without it he would end up an independent island unto himself, and get very lonely.

Lies will come at you.

Plug your ears. Saturate yourself with the truth of scripture. Ignore the lion. Your husband might change for the better or for the worse, but it still isn’t where your joy comes from. You are going to fail your family, so try not to beat yourself up so much.

Look at each other’s weaknesses as an opportunity to help each other become more like Christ.

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area { height: 130px; position: relative; } .IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active { border:0!important; } .IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after { content: “”; display: table; clear: both; } .IRPP_ruby { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #FFFFFF; box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -o-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); -webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.17); } .IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #eaeaea; } .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl { background-position: center; background-size: cover; float: left; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 31.59%; } .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area { float: right; width: 65.65%; padding:0; margin:0; } .IRPP_ruby .centered-text { display: table; height: 130px; left: 0; top: 0; padding:0; margin:0; } .IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0 74px 0 0px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .IRPP_ruby .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #3498DB; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: .125em; margin: 0; padding: 0; } .IRPP_ruby .postTitle { color: #000000; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; } .IRPP_ruby .ctaButton { background: url(https://faithit-eszuskq0bptlfh8awbb.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat; display: inline-block; height: 130px; width: 54px; } .IRPP_ruby .ctaButton { background-color: #3498DB; margin-left: 10px; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .IRPP_ruby:after { content: “”; display: block; clear: both; }

Read Next On FaithIt

Dear Dad: “You Need to Love Your Wife as You Want Your Daughter to Be Loved”

ShareTweet

Source: http://allofbeer.com/the-3-biggest-lies-wives-believe/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/the-3-biggest-lies-wives-believe/

[how2to18]

This short story appears in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 16,  Art

To receive the LARB Quarterly Journal, become a member  or  donate here.

¤

Meredith Lovelace was hoping to resolve the Dan Graves situation before lunch. It was Monday, the day she liked to meet her wife Amy at the cart for soup and sourdough rolls.

The situation concerned two newly admitted graduate students to the Department — both sculptors, both Meredith’s advisees. Elena claimed Dan Graves had showed up on the steps of her apartment the night before — blotto, talking suicide, and toting a suitcase of letters from his dead dad.

“He told me he wanted to get in his car and crash it,” Elena had said earlier that morning while whipping tissues from the dispenser in Meredith’s office. “He told me he wanted to die.”

When the door closed behind Elena, the director clapped his hands together and puffed. “Those are the magic words,” he said. He handed Dan Graves’s file across the room to Meredith. “Just knock on his door and see if he’s alive,” he said. “That’s what we did with Ronda last year. Let’s hope this goes the other way.”

Dan Graves lived in an un-hip part of the college town, a residential neighborhood near the woods, in a small, stucco house painted mint green. The driveway was short, and in order to park out of the flow of traffic, it was necessary for Meredith to nudge her Volvo station wagon all the way up nose to ass against the bumper of Dan Graves’s white pickup. The pickup wore a single bumper sticker — Say Ya to the UP, eh? — and a Michigan license plate, which was clean and perfectly flat. Meredith inspected the truck carefully for signs of an accident, but it was showroom-shiny, possibly brand new, with a clean black bed-liner. The foot wells had been vacuumed so recently that Meredith could still see the overlapping lines of the nozzle. A CD in a clear plastic sleeve bearing the inscription To Dan, love Kelsey Sue in orange sharpie sat politely in the passenger seat, and a stadium cup holding a mountain of clean quarters was wedged in the middle console. A sensible, admirable thing, that cup. Standing in front of parking meters on campus, Meredith was always rummaging in her pockets, only to turn up dimes, nickels, pennies, and the occasional earring of Amy’s.

Meredith walked up the stone path and stepped onto Dan Graves’s porch. To the right of the front door, a faded American flag hung from two nails. Meredith pushed the button on the storm door with her thumb and pulled the plexiglass toward her. The button wobbled in its socket and clicked halfway but the door did not release. She tried again, pulling harder, and when it still didn’t open, knocked lightly on the storm door with her knuckles. The sound rattled the glass, but didn’t penetrate. She waited. Dan Graves did not come. How long was sufficient? A minute? Two? His car was here, after all.

Meredith had met Dan Graves only once before, at the director’s annual lawn party to welcome the new class. He had seemed plodding and straight-laced, not a guy given to dramatics. Meredith remembered him as tall and shy; he had eaten a lot of fried chicken, drank only root beer, and left early. She had made sure to meet him. He was her advisee after all, but also she liked the work, plain and simple. The images he submitted with his application the previous spring had stuck in Meredith’s brain: a deer antler that had grown swollen and infected (in bronze), a large-as-life elk that cowered on its back feet (in bronze) and, Meredith’s favorite, a walleye that lay split open and bleeding against a rock (in bronze). It seemed that at any moment the fish’s eye might blink, and the fish’s bronze blood, even in the half-lighting and bad quality of the pictures, seemed to ooze slow and thick.

“Yawn,” said one of Meredith’s colleagues, a water colorist. “Isn’t this the kind of macho-nostalgia that belongs in a place called the Soaring Eagle lodge?”

But Meredith had spoken up, praising the work’s energy and simplicity, and the director backed her up.

It was not exactly that Meredith thought Elena was lying about the Dan Graves situation. As assistant director of the Department’s graduate arts program, it was basically Meredith’s job to answer emails. But in the two months since the new class arrived, Elena had emailed more than her fair share — asking to take a Sociology course instead of the required graduate arts survey or urging Meredith to bring a female tileworker from Nepal as the semester’s visiting artist instead of the male welder that the director had already selected via costly search committee.

“When I asked him to leave, he called me a dyke,” Elena had added, near the end of their interview. Dyke, Meredith typed into the Incident Report Form. The cursor disappeared then reappeared.

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” Elena said. She had a chain that connected a stud in the top cartilage of her left ear to a regular stud in the lobe. It hung long and shimmering as a stalactite, and shook in the air against her shaved head when she spoke.

“We absolutely hear you,” the director said.

When Meredith and Elena passed each other in the cinderblock stairwells of the Department, Elena would smile warmly, then nudge the tip of her chin quickly upward in a kind of micro-nod. It was the kind of nod that lays a claim. Meredith did not nod back.

Meredith was halfway down the stone path when she heard the storm door open.

“It sticks sometimes.”

Dan Graves stood on the porch, his thin body holding the door open. He was even thinner than Meredith remembered, and stood with his bare feet close together. His eyes were small and set back deeply into his head, which was surprisingly bare for such a young man, the pale skin covered only by a fine translucent fuzz. He wore a red-and-white-checked dress shirt that bore the faint creases of being professionally pressed and folded, and expensive-looking black corduroy pants. He retreated into the foyer of the house as Meredith advanced, but kept his hand pushing against the storm door so it stayed open.

“I’m not properly dressed,” Dan Graves said, his feet pink and huge. “But will you come in?”

To cross the threshold, Meredith had to pass very close to Dan Graves. She was tall for a woman, 5’10 on a good day, but she came up only to the top button of Dan Graves’s shirt. He smelled of a sporty masculine deodorant, the one that Meredith also wore. He was an attractive man, Meredith observed. Most women would think so.

Dan Graves let the storm door slam. The entryway was carpeted in a thick white shag. Meredith checked her watch. She had 20 minutes if she wanted to catch Amy.

“Will you take your shoes off?” he said. “If you don’t mind. It’s hard work to keep a white carpet clean.”

Meredith bent down and unlaced the men’s blue suede Oxfords that Amy had bought her for their wedding anniversary. Meredith had ogled the shoes from outside the window of the downtown store for a month. On the night Amy gave them to her, Meredith got out of bed to turn on the closet light and hold the shoes in their white tissue paper. They were ridiculous shoes, Meredith saw now, looking at them on Dan Graves’s white carpet.

The white carpet continued in every direction. To the right, there was a narrow hallway which led presumably to his bedroom, but Dan Graves led Meredith in the other direction, left into the living room.

The living room was empty of furniture, just the white carpet and a raised platform of hardwood that supported a fireplace. In front of the fireplace, a ’50s-era green plaid suitcase with gold clasps lay on its side. On the far side of the room were sliding glass doors that opened out onto a small wooden deck, and beyond that, a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A small square of sun hovered on the near wall.

Dan Graves rubbed his hands together like he was cold, and looked over at the wooden platform, where there was a bottle of Old Crow and a squat, squarish glass. He strode to the platform, gently nudged the bottle and glass to the side, then sat down on the platform with his back to the fireplace.

“We can sit on this,” Dan Graves said. He looked like a grasshopper when he sat down; all knees.

Meredith sat too, but left enough space for two of herself to sit between them. “Dan, do you know why I’m here?”

“I think so,” he said. “I got drunk and scared Elena.”

“You did,” Meredith said. “And you said some things. Things the Department is required to take very seriously.”

“Damn it.” He said it with a pronounced Midwestern accent so that the words came out through his nose, dee-yam it.

“Elena said you indicated you might be a danger to yourself,” Meredith said. “She said you told her you wanted to die.”

Dan Graves looked down at his thighs. With his eyes looking down, everything about his face changed. The lids of his eyes looked pale and veined and there were deep purple shadows around his sockets. The skin of his face was red and raw.

“I don’t deny anything,” said Dan Graves. When he looked back up at Meredith, his face was neutral again.

“I’m sorry,” Meredith said. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

Dan Graves lifted his shoulders to his ears and dropped them. He jiggled his knee, then tapped his bare feet against the carpet. “I said what I said and I probably meant it at the time. But I’m okay now, Ms. Lovelace. You don’t have to worry about me. I’ve slept, I feel a world better.”

The wind blew around a few brown leaves that had landed on Dan Graves’s deck. The mountains were just starting to turn. It was October. She could go now, Meredith knew. But something in the room tugged at her. There was no art of any kind in this room, and no sign that art was being made in it. The walls were gray and bare. To Amy, filling a house with love was equivalent to filling a house with things. Walking around their house on Saturdays, Meredith would notice new things that had appeared during the week — a clock in the shape of a cat maybe, or a deep purple lampshade. Amy’s collection of ceramic fish, gifts from her parents and friends, took up every mantel and surface, and Alex’s closet was crammed with sneakers and skateboards.

“What was wrong with the old lampshade?” Meredith asked one night after they’d turned the lights out, her heart beat rising in her ears.

“It was faded,” replied Amy.

“What does one boy need with seven skateboards?”

“Go easy, honey,” Amy said. “Just because your family worshipped at the church of deny thyself everything you want, doesn’t mean we have to.”

  Dan Graves reached for the bottle of whiskey that still sat to the side, on the platform. It was a big bottle, glass, but it fit neatly in his hand, which was pale and clean without any dirt under the fingernails. Dan Graves unscrewed the cap, and poured two fingers of whiskey into the glass. He brought the glass to his lips, slurped a few sips, then drained the rest. The bottle was more than half empty. It occurred to Meredith that Dan Graves was very drunk — still, perhaps, or again.

The director had given the Department’s faculty a presentation about when and how to refer students to the University’s psychological services. He had used a metaphor drawn from his years as a river guide on the Colorado.

“You want to throw them a lifejacket,” the director said. “You don’t want to swim out to the drowning point after them.”

“How about you don’t drink any more while I’m here?” Meredith said.

“Alright,” Dan Graves said. “That’s fair.” He leaned down to the suitcase and touched it. “Would you like to hear a letter from my dad?” Dan Graves said. “My dad is dead now.” When he said dad and dead, they came out sounding the same; dead, dead.

She could not leave now, something again was required. But also: Meredith recognized what had been bothering her about this room. It was a feeling of anticipation, of story.

“I would,” Meredith said. “Please, go ahead.”

Dan Graves seemed pleased. He slid to the carpet and crossed his legs Indian style. With a snap of his big thumb and middle finger, he released the two gold-plated fasteners so that the two halves of the suitcase jumped away from each other. Inside were white envelopes, torn open. He plucked a letter from the suitcase, then held it up for Meredith like a game show host. His name and current address were swept across the front in old-timey script.

Dan Graves read the time stamp, August 17 of the present year. “Dear Pal,” he read. “That’s what he always called me.” Dan Graves looked up at Meredith to see if she was listening. When he saw she was, he reached for the bottle and refilled his glass. He nestled the bottle in the hole his legs made, then set the glass on the platform behind him.

“See?” Dan Graves said. “I didn’t drink it.”

Meredith smiled and said nothing. She was familiar with alcoholics — her father, who else — and wasn’t about to fight with this one.

“Dear Pal,” Dan Graves read. “I read that part already.”

“Remember Briery Knob? Remember when we camped there and we tried to push the tent poles into the ground and how they wouldn’t go in more than an inch? The wind farms there are getting bigger. Now when I go on my walks, there’s geese carcasses everywhere. I can’t camp without you. Camping is nothing alone.”

“You see?” Dan Graves said. “He loved me.”

“Of course,” Meredith said. “Of course he did.”

Dan Graves looked down at the letter in his hands. “If I could cry, I would cry and I would not stop crying.”

“Go ahead,” Meredith said. “Go right ahead and cry. It’s okay.”

“I want to.” Dan Graves made a sound in his mouth like a gun cocking. “Hmm,” he said. He lifted the glass and drank from it.

Dan Graves read letter after letter aloud to Meredith, pausing sometimes after each letter, sometimes in the middle of a long one, to drink from the glass or refill it. The square of light moved slowly across the wall.

Dear Pal — You caught the walleye with nothing but your hand and then bashed its head against a stone. What a bleeder!

Dear Pal — Pop quiz: How long does it take to bleed a deer and when should you do it?

Dear Pal — At your Aunt’s place you built sculptures out of the driftwood that came down the St. Mary and I sat on the porch and forgot you were there. How could I forget? I don’t know. I think it was because of the light, how it didn’t get dark until very late, 11 maybe, because then the news would come on.

Dear Pal — What are the grocery stores like there? Can you get a hunting license? How much does one cost? Tell me how much and I’ll send you the money.

Dan Graves set down the last letter. “He wrote to me every day I was away from home until last week when he died. That’s 57 letters.” He scrunched his eyes and made breath-sucking noises. He held the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb.

“It’s okay,” Meredith said again.

The square of light was weak now, had become distorted. Now that he was crying, Meredith wished he wouldn’t. She felt unfree, put upon. But also, she wanted to give Dan Graves something, something that would say, you still have people here. There were a thousand ways to fuck a kid up it seemed, and only time would tell your unique, trademark method. Dan Graves’s dad’s it seemed, was being good and then dying.

When Dan Graves was done, he put his open palm to his eyes, gathered the fingers into a duckbill and shook the tears onto the white carpet.

“Where were you 10 years ago?” Dan Graves said.

Meredith smiled. He was a good kid and she felt sorry for him.

“No,” Dan Graves said. “Where were you, actually, 10 years ago? I want to know.”

Meredith thought. Ten years ago, Meredith was 28, and in her last semester as a student in the Department. She was still making her art then — collages of human faces from pieces of chalkboard and scotch tape. She made the collages, nearly one a week, in a desperate, hungry fashion that made her forget to eat for hours and then, starving, eat with the fridge door open, sitting on a milk crate. She and Amy lived in a small cottage near the Appalachian trail, where they’d met, and far from campus. She wore brown Carhartt overalls almost every day. They carpooled to town and then she told Amy to take the car. Meredith walked everywhere, stopping at coffee shops and parking lots and bars around the town to watch people she might want to make into art. She had a walkman. In the walkman, she listened to the soundtrack of the movie that had not been made yet about the life she had not yet lived. It was a good soundtrack: expansive, unexpected, full of grace and rage and resistance and banjos.

These people, she had begun that year to think, looking around the seminar room at the faces of the other graduate students — all men — in her cohort in the Department. When her work was critiqued, the men said her collages were too faithful to life, too descriptive, too pastoral. Alan, as she had called him before he became the director, was the only one who spoke up for her work. After critique, Meredith often went to a dive bar with him to complain about their colleagues. So pretentious! So bourgeois! So disaffected! In her former life, Meredith had grown up in the city, and it comforted her to sit and drink and play pool among people who cursed and swore and did not wear the polo shirts or cotton jersey dresses that were the university people’s uniform.

Alan brought Meredith a book about anger by a Buddhist monk. Say your house is on fire, the book said. Would you run down the street after the arsonist demanding to know why he set the blaze? Meredith thought she might. No! the book said. If you did that, all your stuff would burn. Forget the arsonist, all arsonists have their reasons. Run toward the house to save what you value most. Care for your anger, the book suggested. Treat it like a child. Where does anger live in the body? The book wanted to know. Meredith was able to locate it somewhere in the region behind her sternum. These men, her chest moaned as they gestured with their hands, are killing me.

“I was a student too,” Meredith told to Dan Graves. “It was hard at times, but also good, and I lived with my wife, but we weren’t married yet.”

“The girl you loved then, 10 years ago. You’re married to her now?”

“I am,” Meredith said.

“That’s good. You really had it together.” One of Dan Graves’s eyelids drooped, then fluttered lightly. “Unless there’s something else.”

There was something else. Like her soundtrack that year, Meredith too had been full of rage. She had not broken dishes or yelled in critique, but she had taken to committing tiny acts of cruelty against people she could not see or would never see again, people who did not matter, and who she did not believe in — the telephone operator at her bank, the woman who worked the counter at the cupcake store, a stranger who came to buy an old desk she had in storage.

Also, that was the year Alex was born. She and Amy had reached the decision mutually that Amy would carry the baby, on a walk through a park near campus where the bodies of thousands of unknown black people — domestic workers for the university — would later be discovered.

I can’t be the one who changes, Meredith thought. But she said nothing.

Then Amy spoke. She said, “I can’t be the one who watches.”

Amy cleared out a drawer in their bureau for the new, strange items she brought home in plastic bags — bright indigo jeans with black stretchy waistbands that folded over, long yellow cotton tunics with slits up the sides. Amy would take out a pair of leggings and close the drawer quick before shaking them out, like a secret. Amy’s feet spread then swelled. Meredith tended to Amy’s cravings and hurts, attended the necessary doctor’s appointments, but she had done so out of a sense of obligation. She could not get over the feeling that she had been wronged in some way. Meredith often saw women — at the bar, on the bus, in the coffee shop — who she wanted to have sex with. They were all conventionally attractive; thin with big breasts and long hair. Amy was pretty, no doubt about it, but she did not look like these women. Meredith watched the women but did not approach them. Once, after church, Meredith had opened her father’s Bible and seen that in addition to annotating parts of Genesis, he had underlined a short passage: There is the thief. There is the liar. There is the man whose wife is not enough for him, who cannot be happy until he possesses every woman who walks the earth.

Then her best collage of all had been critiqued: a 6-inch-by-6-inch portrait of a woman she found sitting cross-legged in the periodicals room. The woman wore a floppy green hat like one might wear to the beach. But she had this face.

And still, the men had critiqued “Woman In Floppy Hat” with the same tone — good, but not excellent. Real, but not true. After that critique, Meredith and Alan stopped at a liquor store on their way to the dive bar. Alan went inside, while Meredith called Amy at her office.

“Don’t worry,” Amy said. “You’re so talented.”

But in the background, Meredith heard a male coworker of Amy’s walking by Amy’s desk.

“Hey there Amy,” Meredith heard the man say, and she could see Amy raise her right shoulder to take the phone so that she could wave hello to the man — Jacob or Andy or Chance — and smile her plump-cheeked smile. Even while Amy was on the phone with her, Amy was watching a man walk away.

Alan emerged with a blue bottle of gin, and they opened it on the street over a curbside drain. They were in a silly mood, amped up. It was spring and the girls looked rumpled and damp. They walked the rest of the way to the bar joking and shoving each other and putting their whole mouths on the bottle and spitting the gin onto the street.

They drank and played three games of pool in the bar and then they left and walked circles around the small downtown area. The night was cool and the streets just above and below the busy retail thoroughfare were dark and empty.

“You know,” Alan said, when they reached the parking lot of the town’s only all-night convenience store. “I don’t get it. You’re so pretty.”

Meredith laughed.

“What?” Alan said, turning toward her. “Don’t you believe me? You’re such a pretty girl.” He licked his lips, lightly, as if looking for crumbs. “You can’t be gay,” Alan said.

Meredith felt light, her mouth dry. “Why not?”

“Because I want you,” Alan said.

A car was idling, waiting to pull out of the parking lot onto the slick street and the wind was still, as if inhaling, and right then, something in Meredith sort of flowed toward Alan, and when he leaned his face into her neck, she didn’t push him away. She hesitated.

It is this hesitation which Meredith remembers now, with Dan Graves’s small expectant eyes on her. How willing she was to be undermined, to believe, to sell Amy and their not yet born son down the river on the word of a man.

Nothing happened — the wind picked up again, the car pulled out of the parking lot onto the street, and Alan only ran his lips along Meredith’s neck, then apologized for being “in his cups” the next day in an email. Amy had picked Meredith up from the convenience store and driven her home and held her and said nothing. Meredith had graduated from the Department and then six months later, their son had been born. Alex was nearly nine now. He liked soccer and drawing animals at the museum. He helped Amy set the table before dinner. His job was the napkins. The years had rolled by and Meredith had stopped being so angry.

“No,” Meredith said. “There’s nothing else.”

Dan Graves drank from his glass. The square of sun was gone.

“We could go outside,” Dan Graves said. “It’s a nice evening.” When he got up and opened the glass doors, and went out to stand on the deck, Meredith followed. The chill came through her cotton sweater. She had the strange feeling that comes when two people are in a room and something significant is happening, but only one mind is recording it.

“I’d like to go camping,” Meredith said.

“You camp?” Dan Graves said. He laughed. “You don’t, not really.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a city girl. I can tell. Pop quiz: What’s the best way to build a fire?”

Meredith turned to look at Dan Graves. He was triumphant, happy. This is what he did, this was his power. The woods, which belonged to Dan Graves and his dead dad, were dark beyond the deck.

“Elena said you called her a dyke. At her house, when she asked you to leave.”

Dan Graves blinked his blond eyelashes, which were long but perfectly straight like the bristles of a broom. “I don’t remember,” he said. “But if Elena says I did, then I did. Elena’s not a liar.”

Dan Graves hugged himself with his huge hands.

“I don’t know why I am the way I am,” he said. “I haven’t made anything since I’ve been here. I look at every person and I just think, you, and you, and you, none of you matter.”

Stop, Meredith could have said. Stop now. Stop today. Here’s the thing, she could have said. It really does get better.

But she said nothing. Dan Graves would not remember anything tomorrow. Even if he did, who would believe him now, discredited as he was — a drunk, a homophobe?

Dan Graves finished what was left in his glass. “Brrrrrr,” he said, leaning against the railing of the deck. “I’m so cold.”

Meredith felt younger, lighter. She remembered it all now — the heat rising to her ears, the urge to swallow and swallow, the tingly feeling somewhere around the knees, the way the breath refused to come, and the chest, the chest. She listened to it. It was moaning, again. These people, these people, these people.

Meredith turned and went inside the house. She gathered the letters and their empty envelopes back into the green suitcase, then lifted the suitcase up onto the wooden platform. She opened a letter so that it lay flat on the platform, then rolled it the long way into a thin tube. She stood, removed the fire screen, and balanced the rolled letter between the andirons.

Dan Graves filled the doorway, his body backlit by the sun. “Hey,” Dan Graves said. His eyes were on her, but he had the other look about him.

Letter by letter, layer by layer, the log cabin began to take shape.

“I’m so cold,” Dan Graves said again.

“I know it,” Meredith said. “Wait. Soon. I’m building you a fire.”

¤

Emma Copley Eisenberg is a writer of fiction and nonfiction based in West Philadelphia. She is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl, forthcoming from Hachette Books.

The post The Dan Graves Situation appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2ploRo1 via IFTTT

[very-grownup]

I finishing writing this scene and also answer the question ‘how long before I start slamming italics on everything?’

Trucy Wright sat on the back of one of the hard, plastic airport chairs, rocking slightly with her legs extended. She was looking in the direction of the arrival gate for international flights, but most of her attention was focused on maintaining her balance. The periods of waiting were prime opportunities to hone skills and were not to be wasted. Besides, there was no way she would miss someone arriving, even if a flood of people emerged from the doors.

The heavy security doors opened and closed several times, Trucy's legs remaining steady throughout, inching slowly higher and higher, before they were abruptly no longer in the air and she was no longer on the moulded plastic back of the chair, but across the distance between the chairs and the doors to the international arrival gate. "Polly!" she shouted and Apollo Justice's tired face blossomed into a sudden smile, eyes and teeth shining. She flung her arms around him, pressing her face into the fabric of his t-shirt. It felt thin, but not worryingly so, and he smelled mostly like she remembered: the deodorant was different but similar enough as was the cooled sweat smell of a man prone to perspiring with anxiety, excitement, exertion, anger, fear, and probably other emotions that Trucy had never seen him express (although if she hadn't seen them she wasn't sure who had). The sweat wasn't exactly as she remembered, either, but she had it on good authority from Aunt Maya, corroborating her own observations, that Khura'in was a country deficient in important elements of the American diet, like noodles and burgers, and if you were what you ate, then likely your sweat was, too, and so if you were eating different things, you and your sweat would probably smell different, too. In her mind, it all seemed soundly scientific.

Apollo returned Trucy's hug with enough strength that, if he had been a bigger man, Trucy might have been lifted off her feet. But, unlike Trucy's small gains, Apollo's height had remained the same since they had last seen each other, and after a moment, Apollo ended the hug, holding Trucy at arm's length.

"I've missed you, Polly," Trucy said, because she had. Ever since her daddy had started the process to re-enter the legal community, Trucy had looked upon each of the various assistants and summer students working at the Wright Anything Agency with a frank possessiveness, seeing each as a mixture of younger sibling and cherished toy. Apollo had been the first, though, and when the young man, barely more than a stranger, had hugged her, crying with relief in a court room lobby because he'd thought she'd been kidnapped, she'd felt a weird but pleasant spontaneous warmth that hadn't just been because his reaction indicated just how good her large-scale sleight of hand and ventriloquism were. Others had left since Apollo, but Apollo had been the only one whose absence she had felt, who she'd stubbornly continued texting and sending letters to, even through the periods of prolonged silence.

"I missed you, too," Apollo said after a moment, his voice a bit rough, quieter than Trucy remembered. He was telling the truth, though. He always told the truth, even if saying it made a lump as large and hard as a rock take form in his throat. She'd always liked that blind commitment to honesty about him, even if she pitied him at the same time, kind of like how she felt about dogs when she first found out they couldn't eat chocolate. Although Apollo wouldn't die if he told a lie, probably; he might throw up, though.

There was a greenish cast to Apollo's skin, under the warmth of his tan (maybe he sometimes saw the outside world and sunlight instead of his office and the inside of the courtroom; maybe he got really adventurous and sometimes did paperwork outside!), but Trucy guessed that had more to do with Apollo's fear of heights and complicated relationship with air travel and less to do with a deathly allergy to telling lies which was something she had only just thought of and hadn't had an opportunity to run past her number one source on science (Ema Skye) or a panel of experts (everyone who had ever worked with Apollo Justice). She grabbed one of his hands with both of hers and squeezed, smiling at him with her most disarming stage smile. "Of course you did! And the shine of the spotlight and the thrill of the stage, I bet! Once you've gotten a taste of the limelight with Trucy Wright it's probably hard to go back to the stage of the courtroom! No thrills, no flash, no fire --"

"Usually," Apollo said, wrinkling his nose at the world through Trucy's optimized vocal illusion projection. Trust her best assistant and number one stagehand to also be her harshest critic, the toughest of nuts to crack. Although in Trucy's experience, there were no uncrackable nuts, just ones that required a bit more spit and elbow grease, and maybe literal grease for the metal ones.

"Do you think your luggage is here yet? Do you want to watch me do a disappearing act on the luggage carousel? Do you want to ride the luggage carousel with me? You know the inventor was practically beginning for people to ride it when he called it a carousel. One of those grumpy safety people who always try to stop me should have warned him!"

Apollo laughed, rubbing his face with his free hand. "Not applicable," he said, shrugging a shoulder over which hung one strap of his familiar brown does-it-even-qualify-as-a-backpack-no-it-doesn't-actually-Polly, "no, no, and do you swear you got your confirmation for graduation without any funny business?"

Trucy stuck her tongue out and quickly dropped Apollo's hand to walk with him to the parking lot, looping one arm through his elbow. "That's nothing even for carry-on Polly! I could fit more in my magic --"

"You could fit my entire office in those," Apollo said quickly, raising his voice to more familiar Chords of Justice levels to drown Trucy out. She pouted. "I'm good at travelling light, especially when I chucked the pretense of bringing my suit jacket with me; frees up a lot of space for socks and toothpaste." The grip on Apollo's arm tightened and he said, quietly, "I'm not here to stay, Trucy. You know that."

Chin up; Trucy put her smile back in place. Not even the corners wobbled in the face of Apollo's unappreciated perceptiveness. Why was it never about important things? "The car's parked this way, Polly!"

"When did you get a car? How did you get a car?"

Trucy rolled her eyes and patted Apollo's arm. "You don't need to own a car to drive it, Apollo." For a moment, Apollo's eyes widened in horror, red agitation rising in his face and pushing away the sallow green tint, making him look more like the Apollo she remembered. Then his eyes narrowed, metaphorically shaking himself free of the bait. Trucy laughed. "It's Athena's! I'm just borrowing it! I do have my driver's license, Polly." With a flourish, she flipped open her purse, pulled her wallet out and flipped it open to the glossy rectangle officially obtained with hardly any deceit from the State of California, waving it close enough to Apollo's suspicious face that she bumped his nose. It was back in her purse before Apollo could try and take it from her for closer examination -- not that closer examination would reveal anything but the most flattering driver's license picture that had ever been taken and the rest of the contents of her wallet, but it was the principle of the thing!

When the car was in their field of view, Trucy didn't even have to tell Apollo, which was one of the advantages of the car, but she still felt the need to add a flourish to the occasion, spinning Apollo with her (was it really that different from doing some fancy misdirection while wearing a particularly heavy cape on stage?) and coming to a halt just to the side of the headlights. "Ta-da!"

The car was tiny -- her dad hated going anywhere in it, knees cramped up near his ears in the passenger seat, but she and Athena were firm on the subject of passengers not having a vote in the independent nation of Athena's Car -- a cute little glowing yellow sun bubble of a vehicle that Trucy had taken it upon herself to customize with little painted blue birds (which were, as far as she was concerned, much more tasteful than bumper stickers and when she put it that way, Athena had readily come to agree). Spinning the keys around her finger, Trucy released Apollo's arm and unlocked the car simultaneously, a little bit of nicely timed theatrics that was just for her private, personal enjoyment.

"Cute," Apollo said, touching a bird on the passenger door before getting in, swinging his bag to sit in his lap.

Trucy beamed at this effusive praise and plopped herself in the driver's seat. "So," she asked, looking in the rear-view mirror as she backed the car out of the tiny niche of a parking spot, "do you have a driver's license in Khura'in?" Apollo groaned, the sound echoing in the little car as he pressed his forehead to the top of his bag, and it was -- almost -- like he had never been gone.