#me sweating: o-outlier... again?

[definitelynotshouting]

[ryukogo]

flame

Summary: Jenny remembers a different Lola. One that was a brat. This Lola, she recognizes, has grown into someone else.

Prompt: Growth - Growth can encompass a wide variety of new changes, both metaphorical and literal. On the literal end: there’s something special about the first tulips that pop out of the ground in the spring. Some of us care and are quick to point it out excitedly, and some of us really couldn’t care less. Which one is whom? Has your muse literally grown and can’t fit in last year’s warm weather clothing? On the metaphorical end: character development, character development, character development. Anything and everything, give me all you’ve got. Maybe your muse is getting past a bad breakup, or an addiction? Are they trying to better themselves, like an internal spring cleaning? How about learning a new skill?

Words: 1,389

Link is in the title if you wish to read it on AO3!

Their homework for the day in English class was to use something to describe their best friend and compare them to their own description of themselves – an example given in class being Pip’s generous usage of ‘angel’ to describe Damien, who had choked on his own saliva at his words because Pip had just used ‘angel’ to describe the ‘Antichrist’; a strangely ironic description, give or take, but he had seemed so adamant on using it, and when he was asked why, he had actually listed good reasons – good reasons that had sent Damien spiraling down his seat hoping to melt into a puddle.

The breeze picked up, and Jenny Simon took a moment, tucking her hair behind her ears as the wind whistled all around her. The grass ruffled almost noiselessly, the leaves in the trees all around ruffling and shifting against each other to make a sort of natural symphony along with the occasional birdsong – one that made Jenny want to sleep, but she didn’t dare sleep, no. It’s her only unfinished homework for the day, and more than anything she wanted it over with in order to continue reading her favorite book before bed.

At the top of the paper, there were only a few sentences.

My best friend is Lola Branwen. We’ve been best friends since first grade, so, if I were to describe Lola using objects or concepts, I’d use

It stopped after ‘use’.

Jenny frowned, and inhaled deeply again. She didn’t know how to describe Lola anymore, because Lola’s… Lola’s different now, she realized then and there, and for a moment, she closes her eyes, and remembers.

She remembers Lola, in the fourth grade.

Fourth grade Lola was a brat, that much was certain, but then again, nearly all of them were brats in fourth grade – Eric Cartman notwithstanding. Fourth grade Lola used to be in love with the emotional, angst-ridden writers and singers, drowning in songs of heart-wrenching pain and grief, in novels of emotional turmoil.

Jenny remembers sitting on Lola’s bed, listening to her ramble about the latest young adult writer, and while she had wanted dearly with all her heart for Lola to stop talking about them, she couldn’t find it in her to tell her to stop. Lola’s eyes had been alight with a passion, a strange, flickering flame in her that had made Jenny stop and stare, transfixed by the light in her brown eyes.

It had left a strange feeling in her insides, back then.

“Go, go, South Park Cows! South Park Cows, South Park Cows!”

Jenny opened her eyes again.

In her cheerleading uniform, Lola practiced her routines with Annie, her partner, a little far away from where Jenny was sitting, but not far enough that she couldn’t see them clearly, and together the two performed the partner routines in sync, since the rest of the team weren’t around for them to perform the group routines. Jenny noted the way Lola’s movements seemed to be the opposite of her usual, being quick and sprightly now compared to her usually sluggish movements when not practicing cheerleading, and with a frown, she observed.

“And a lift-!” Annie stretched out her pompoms and one of her legs as Lola lifted her nearly effortlessly, and Jenny fought back the urge to cheer for her best friend as Annie did a front flip off of Lola’s hands to perform a cartwheel and then a split. With the routine over, Annie cheered, and threw her arms around Lola, saying, “That was great, Lola! We should totally show the others!”

Lola smiled softly, and Jenny’s stomach wrenched, strangely enough. “Maybe next practice, Annie. I’m feeling pretty tired, and Jenny’s still waiting for me, you know?”

“Oh?” Annie looked up and around until her eyes fell on Jenny, leaning against a tree, and Jenny suddenly felt like she was being scrutinized on the spot, sweating a little, until Annie grinned and winked at Jenny. “Oh, okay, okay, gotcha! I’ll just head on home then, okay? See you tomorrow Lola, see you tomorrow, Jenny!” The last part had been screamed over a distance of a thirty meters, and with a wave, Annie darted off in the direction of her house, leaving Lola to slug her way over to where Jenny had been waiting.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Jenny answered. Lola’s demeanor had immediately reverted back into her usual – morose and sleepy, judging from the way she stretched.

Eleventh grade Lola was very much unlike fourth grade Lola, finding solace in the quiet, nature themed poetry she found in the darker and dustier libraries of the neighboring towns rather than the emotional anguish of the likes of young adult writers like she had, years ago. This Jenny knew very well, having grown up with her and everyone else in the town – save for the likes of Estella and Charlotte, and Gary and Damien, maybe. They were outliers.

Lola flashed her sleepy smile at Jenny, one that sent Jenny’s stomach on vacation to Orlando for a few weeks. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting long.”

“You were doing backflips with Annie, of course I was waiting long!” Jenny harrumphed in an attempt to hide the fact that her best friend’s smile made her want to fly upwards and never return. “And to top it all off, I still haven’t finished my homework!”

Lola took a glance at Jenny’s homework, still mostly empty, and with a laugh and a twinkle in her eye, she replied, “That’s okay. You can finish it tonight, right?”

“Yeah, but…” Jenny pouted. “I still have a book to read.”

Lola considered this for a few minutes, but soon she just smiled, holding out a hand to Jenny to help her up. “You could stay up late to read.”

“Scandalous; I’d be losing beauty sleep,” Jenny teased as she stood up, gathering her things. “Oh, the things you imply, Lo.”

It was then that Lola’s eyes suddenly blazed brightly – something that startled Jenny into remembering fourth grade Lola, with her passionate eyes and burning fire. “You don’t need it.”

“Wh-wha-“

“You don’t need any more beauty sleep,” Lola told her in a determined tone, her sleepy demeanor falling away for that moment to make way for her fiery gaze as she gripped Jenny’s shoulders. “You look beautiful already, okay? You don’t need any more beauty sleep.”

Jenny stammered wordlessly before turning bright red, a flame burning at the pit of her stomach. “I-I- um- that is- o-okay?”

“Good,” The fire died away, and soon Lola was back to her sleepy self, yawning as she stretched. “Geez, I’m tired. Let’s go home now, ‘kay?”

“’K-kay,” Jenny stuttered, and with a sleepy smile, Lola took her hand in hers, and together they walked down the street, hand in hand.

Mental note: fire. Fire best describes Lola.

-=-=-=-

My best friend is Lola Branwen. We’ve been best friends since first grade, so, if I were to describe Lola using objects or concepts, I’d use fire.

She’s like all sorts of fire. Sometimes she’s a candle’s flame, soft and small, but sometimes, when she really likes something, she gets this look in her eye. It’s like someone set a bonfire in her eyes because when she gets that look in her eye, she’s unstoppable, like wildfire. She surprises everyone when she blazes through, which doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, she’s bright and fiery and beautiful.

My best friend is sleepy nearly all the time, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t a fire. Dying embers don’t die out immediately – if you fan the flames, you can get another fire going. That’s my best friend Lola. She used to be a bright fire all the time, and she still is, but now she knows better – she knows to keep it low until needed. She knows that a fiery passion is important, but only in the right places.

I wish I could say I was a fire, but I’m more of a rock. Stubborn and unyielding. I guess you could say sometimes I refuse to change. But Lola? She changed. She grew up into this fire that even I can’t control myself, but she can control herself, and that’s what makes us so different. In a way, she grew up, and I didn’t.

Maybe I should grow up, too.

[sending-the-message]

Scarecrow by famousleonard

One day when I was very, very young, a cockroach the size of a cat skittered around the corner from the hallway into the living room where I was playing, sending me running, shrieking in horror. I cowered in my room, sweating and weeping in fright as I heard the thing bound up the steps and push its way through my door, which in my haste I had neglected to shut properly. The rest is a nightmarish fever dream of strange colors and looming shapes, clawing and crushing. Through it all I was dimly aware of my parents’ voices, raised in concern and mounting alarm until darkness came and I knew no more.

It had been the cat, my mother had told me, red-eyed and weeping, when I finally regained my senses, sweating and bleary-eyed in bed twenty hours later. Trips to the hospital and various tests and gentle questions followed. “Hyperphantasia,” they called it. Spontaneous hallucinations. I quickly discovered that I could induce them at will. People would look up at the clouds and imagine they saw dragons, or faces. I could actually see them, could actually conjure the image up in front of my eyes as real and as vivid as my hands in front of my face. I can look at a hanging light and cause it to appear as a flying saucer, can see a refrigerator morph into an upright coffin. The effect lasts as long as I will it to. I’ve sat for hours watching naked statues in a museum writhe and beckon to me. That first incident with the cat was an outlier, but occasionally -- very, very occasionally -- an image has come upon me unbidden.

This strange gift gave rise to my greatest talent. I could draw, paint, or sculpt the most fantastical images with ease because I could literally see them before me, however bizarre or whimsical or frightening. By the age of eight my work had been featured in national art journals and my proud parents rested easy in the knowledge that this talent would see me through my life. They even ended up getting another cat.

And it was indeed my art that took me through grade school, high school and on into college. It was just as well -- I had little interest in, and in any case no real talent for, anything else. I was well aware of how good I was, and looked upon my peers in my art classes with a combination of pity and disdain as I effortlessly outshone them. I graduated with high honors and full-ride scholarship offers from all of the country’s top art schools.

On a cool September day my parents drove me up to the school and helped me unpack and set up my dorm room. They lingered. My mom fought back tears, my dad told me to call if I needed anything and finally they were gone. I exhaled and sat on the narrow bed I had claimed by the window, looking up and behind me at the paintings and drawings I had hung on the wall above it. The bed against the opposite wall stood bare.

My roommate arrived later that afternoon and introduced himself as Mark. We discussed schedules and it seemed we would have a class together, starting later in the week. He busied himself as we talked, unpacking his single suitcase and setting up his side of the room sparsely, fastidiously. I was vaguely irritated he made no comment on my artwork.

He showed me his later that week. After the painting class we had together, Mark pulled me aside and told me he wanted to show me something he had been working on. I smiled obligingly and pretended to be interested. People often wanted my approval after seeing my work, even though (or perhaps because) I so rarely gave it. We walked a short way down the hall and he unlocked the door of a small, shared studio, really just a large closet. In one corner stood an easel covered with a heavy canvas tarp, stained with oil paints. Mark crossed the room in one stride to stand beside the easel and lifted the tarp off.

My breath caught in my throat and my blood froze. The painting depicted the depths of a nighttime forest, the moon-dappled trees and grass rendered in deep greens and blues. A shadowy figure stood in a shallow pool of water amidst the trees in a strange, vaguely hunched pose, and an odd shadow nearby indicated the presence of another unseen person or thing, completely obscured by the massive trunk of a tree. My mouth gaped and my eyes wandered in disbelief and horror over the canvas. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. In comparison, all my drawings and paintings were an obscene joke, a mockery. A burning hatred filled my chest and I turned slowly towards Mark, watching his face crumble and melt, his eyes burst from their sockets. The bones of his hands crunched and snapped back in on themselves as an anguished, despairing howl ripped apart the universe.

“It’s very nice,” I said, smiling. Mark exhaled and a broad smile spread across his face as he relaxed. “Thanks so much, that really means a lot,” he said. “I just picked up painting this past summer and discovered that I really liked it. Before that I had actually been planning on majoring in music but have been thinking about pursuing this instead.” I assured him he had nothing to worry about and complimented him again on his work, after which we left the building. He was on his way back to our dorm but I muttered some excuse and headed off in a different direction.

The next day I destroyed all of the paintings and drawings I had brought with me, and threw out my pencils, paints and brushes, which I watched burst into a ghostly blue flame as I hurled trash bag after trash bag of the remains into a dumpster behind our dorm. I dropped all of my drawing and painting classes and decided to throw myself completely into sculpture. Over the following weeks I worked at a frenzied pace, churning out decadent and macabre forms in clay, in stone, in found materials cobbled together into bizarre diseased-looking figures with flailing appendages and odd face-like protrusions. Broken steel rods exploded out of pristinely polished porcelain forms like cancerous parasites. I was breathless, delirious, and surrounded by the visions I conjured in a dark and ever-changing world.

I descended from my ecstasy around the second week in November, having left behind painting for good and having produced a prodigious quantity of work. Mark had grace enough to refrain from asking about or mentioning the paintings missing from my wall. My professors had weeks ago conceded I had already more than fulfilled the requirements of their classes and were content to let me work on what I pleased. Having emerged from the passion of the past weeks, I found myself in a calmer, more level-headed frame of mind, and thought about trying a more lighthearted endeavor.

With the leaves turning and Thanksgiving approaching, I thought it might be fun to create a scarecrow to display in the center of campus. I proposed the idea to the necessary parties and after the inevitable buck-passing I was given an enthusiastic endorsement to go ahead with the project. They even had a maintenance man set up a wooden platform with a metal frame and hooks for me to mount the thing on.

Most of the materials I would be able to find around campus or salvage from vintage stores in the town nearby but the one thing I couldn’t readily get was straw, so I rush ordered a large quantity of it from a store online. It was scheduled to arrive a few days before Thanksgiving, which was later than I would have liked, as many of the students on campus would have already left for the holiday, but it couldn’t be helped. In the meantime I set about gathering the rest of the items I’d need.

On the Monday of Thanksgiving week, I ran into Mark as I was heading off campus into town to pick up a pair of gloves for the scarecrow’s hands. He greeted me warmly and said he was heading back to the dorm to take a nap and was then going home for the holiday. He’d probably be gone by the time I got back so if I didn’t see him, have a good holiday and say hi to my family for him, et cetera. I nodded and smiled and told him I would.

I got back to the dorm later than I expected. In a stroke of bad luck, most of the stores in town were either sold out of gloves or closed early and I had to try several places before I found a suitable pair and now it was getting dark. Mark would surely be gone by now, and I’d have the room blissfully to myself, which would give me plenty of space to work on my project, a welcome change from the cramped, closet-like shared studios I normally had to tolerate. The hallways of the building were deserted - almost all the students who remained on campus were out at a Thanksgiving dinner and dance in the student center, which was apparently one of the social highlights of the year here.

I opened the door to the room and stopped short in surprise and a bit of disappointment. In the evening gloom, I saw Mark lying on his side on the bed, apparently having overslept. But there was something strange about the shape of the figure on the bed, and a chill went up my spine as I realized it didn’t look like Mark at all. I flicked on the light and sucked in a breath. On the bed, lying on its side, was a figure made of straw, wearing old, baggy jeans, a plaid woolen shirt, hiking boots, and a wide-brimmed hat atop a pumpkin head. A scarecrow.

I closed the door behind me slowly and walked over to the bed, bemused, absent-mindedly dropping the gloves to the floor. From this angle, I couldn’t see the scarecrow’s face, so I reached down and gently turned it onto its back. I inhaled sharply. Its head was a jack-o-lantern, with a carved mouth, twisted into a sneer of cruel malevolence. But the most unsettling part was the eyes. A pair of shriveled, rotten apples had been shoved into jagged eye sockets, giving the thing a monstrous, bug-eyed, haunted appearance. I shuddered. But after a couple seconds my disquiet began to give way to rage as I realized what Mark had done. He had made a scarecrow just to show that he could do this better than me as well. And it was better than mine would have been. The thing on the bed was truly, sublimely terrifying. My fists clenched. All of Mark’s modesty and ignorance of his own genius had been an act. All of his seemingly ingenuous goodwill towards me and obliviousness toward the resentment and jealousy I had felt had been feigned. He must have been laughing to himself inwardly when we had spoken earlier, when, smiling, he had told me to give his regards to my family. He had gone home and left me to wander into the town, none the wiser, knowing what I would find when I got back to my room.

Of course he had noticed when I had taken my work down off the wall. And he had been secretly reveling in the torment he had caused me. And this thing on the bed was his masterstroke, a silent, haughty assertion that there was no refuge for me, that there was nothing I could do better than him. And he had waited all these weeks to let me know. He had let me throw myself heart and soul into a new passion so that when he revealed himself to me, I would have that much further to fall.

Hot tears of rage and despair clouded by vision and I shook with fury. I staggered over to my desk and opened a drawer of tools. I wiped the tears from my eyes and pulled out a hammer. Whirling on my heel, I strode back over to the bed and with a brutal swing brought down the hammer on the scarecrow’s pumpkin head, directly above the grotesque, shriveled eyes. The blow produced a satisfying thunk, oddly coinciding with a low, brief howl of wind from outside. I shivered. There was a large, cracked dent in the pumpkin where I had hit it. I took several deep breaths and started to calm down and think. Looking over the scarecrow, I began to wonder if I actually could improve upon Mark’s work. The awful thing was already monstrous, to be sure, but all the horror of the thing really came from the expression on its face. The rest of it was fairly normal, if that’s a word that can even be applied to a scarecrow.

I reached down and lifted one of the scarecrow’s gloved hands (Mark had even gotten gloves already, as he let me wander off to town like a fool on my quest to find a pair). It was oddly heavy, the straw packed into it tightly. I pulled at it but it seemed firmly attached to the arm. I tried holding the flannel-sleeved arm in one hand and pulling at the glove with all my might but still the thing wouldn’t budge. Standing, I walked back over to my closet and pulled out a lever-style paper cutter that I had sometimes used to cut up paper or cloth for my work. I lifted the blade and lay the scarecrow’s arm across the base, lining up the wrist. I grasped the blade’s handle, took a breath, and pushed down with all my might, putting my whole weight behind it, and somehow ended up on the floor with the scarecrow on top of me. I must have come down on the thing at an odd angle because the paper cutter was on the floor next to us and I was confused and disoriented, trying to extricate myself from the tangled limbs of the scarecrow on top of me as the wind shrieked piercingly outside. I offhandedly mused at how quickly this windstorm had risen; it had been mildly breezy out when I had come back to the campus.

The scarecrow was very heavy. I found myself struggling to get out from under it and finally got it back into the bed somehow. I was panting, and my face and hands were sticky with sweat. My left forearm and eye were sore, and rolling up my sleeve, I saw a quickly darkening bruise forming. Looking back at the scarecrow, I saw that there was now another dent in its head next to the first one, and the hammer was in my right hand, though I had no recollection of having picked it up again. The paper cutter lay on the floor against the bed, and the scarecrow’s hand lay next to it. Straw protruded limply from the wrist and bits of broken straw littered the floor nearby. I set down the hammer and adjusted the scarecrow slightly on the bed, and even more bits of loose straw poured out from the wrist. It was making a mess and would already be a hassle to clean up so I pulled the shirt sleeve over the wrist and tied it tightly. That seemed to do the trick, and I stepped back to survey my work so far and consider my next step as the keening wind blew outside.

In a flash of inspiration, I grabbed the severed hand and attempted to stuff it, wrist-first, into the twisted mouth of the pumpkin. The narrow sneer formed an awkward shape, but the mouth and carved teeth cracked and yielded to my shoving eventually, and the hand held firm in the crumbled, ruined hole.

The irritating shrieking of the wind seemed to have died down to a continuous, low muffled moan by this point which left me free to concentrate. Inspiration now came quickly and I set about my work almost automatically, losing myself in that delirium I knew and loved so well.

First, I took the other arm and bent it into an agonized spiral around the scarecrow’s neck, so that it stuck out at a tortured angle from the opposite site of the pumpkin head, fingers splayed out. This took a fair amount of time and brute force -- so tightly packed was the straw that it resisted all but the most determined efforts at reshaping. At one point during this endeavor I slipped and fell on the straw covering the floor, which stuck to my sweat-covered skin. Cursing, I vowed to be more careful and threw down my blanket on the floor to cover up the treacherous bits.

I now set to work on the still-attached hand which I had twisted up to the side of the scarecrow’s head. I pulled a razor-sharp paring knife out of my drawer of tools and began slicing down the fingers of the gloved hand, fanning the right and left sides of each finger off into thin strips which I left attached. The wind was starting to rise in pitch again and, in frustration, I grabbed the hammer again and whacked the pumpkin in the head a third time, after which the wind again decreased in pitch and volume. Setting back to work, I took up the paper cutter once more and carefully sliced off the tip of each finger on the hand, revealing the straw inside. From the tip of each finger I then began to carefully pull individual strands of straw so that they stuck out through the tip and hung limply to one side or another. A couple of these I extracted completely, and used them to bind the others together loosely. Stepping back to regard what I had accomplished, I was pleased with my work. The hand was now a strange, grisly, fan-like appendage formed of the pared fingers of the glove and copious strands of straw. The effect was macabrely humorous -- the scarecrow appeared to be fanning itself awkwardly with its own hand, as its other hand protruded from its mouth like time-frozen vomit.

I was immensely pleased, and completely exhausted, but something was still missing. Then my eyes met the eyes of the scarecrow and I knew what I had to do. I reached out to pluck the rotten apples from the eye sockets but, as I was coming to expect from this strangely robust construct, they were firmly entrenched. Not wanting to destroy them completely, I retrieved a chisel from my drawer and carefully worked them free. I tossed the shriveled things in my hands absent-mindedly as I considered where to put them. Finally it hit me. At the tip of each of the remnants of the stubby fingers of the fan hand, right in the center, was a jagged protrusion of exceptionally densely packed straw. With some effort, I managed to skewer each apple to the end of one of these protrusions, and then sat back down in satisfaction. It was done. I looked at the clock on my desk, breathing heavily with fatigue, and saw that it was almost time for the event in the student center to be let out. There would be no better opportunity to showcase my work before a large number of people until after Thanksgiving break, as everyone would be passing through the center of campus, where the platform and frame for the scarecrow had been prepared.

Gathering my strength, I lifted the heavy figure -- God, was it heavy! -- onto my shoulders and made my way out the door, edging my way past one of Mark’s suitcases. As I made my way down the hallway, one of the elevators dinged and a girl who lived on the floor got out. Her eyes instantly widened in horror and she screamed before darting into the adjacent stairwell. I smiled as her footsteps echoed down the stairs. What a triumph! The scarecrow was surely my finest work, and the fact that I had turned my seeming defeat into victory made it all the sweeter.

I shuffled into the elevator, hitting the buttons with my elbow, and waited as it descended to the ground floor. I smirked with pride as the security guard saw me and stifled a scream before lunging for his phone.

I proceeded outside, shuffling under my burden towards the platform in the center of campus. As I went, I noticed students beginning to emerge from the student center. I would be just in time. As I drew closer to the platform and the students approaching from the opposite side, people started to stop and stare, squinting and leaning forward to make out what I was carrying through the shadows of the nighttime gloom. As I passed through a patch of bright light formed by one of the few lamps on campus, I heard screams, shouts, shrieks of outrage, and the light of raised cellphones blinked across the gathering crowd like fireflies.

Finally I reached the platform and staggered up the steps onto it. With my foot, I pressed the switch for the lamps that had been set up to illuminate the installation. The sudden light coincided with a surge of screams and cries of horror and revulsion from the gathered crowd, and with a mighty heave I thrust the scarecrow onto the sharp hooks of the frame, crucifying the thing in place. The force my my effort caused the severed hand to dislodge from the mouth and fall to the ground. The howling wind of before exploded into existence again, and a cry high and long and inhuman joined that of the crowd, an anguished, despairing wail.

I sat down at last, utterly depleted. The sweat matted my hair and stung my eyes and I wiped it away with my sleeve as I looked in tired glory at the effect of my masterwork upon the crowd. Smiling serenely, I turned and looked back again at my handiwork, at the magnificent travesty hanging taut upon the metal frame. In the flashing red and blue lights, it looked almost alive.