#sccuevent; fallfest

[sccu-starling]

Adorable Renegade

Fall Fest: Petting Zoo.

I shouldn't have ever went over there. Lydia thought with dread as she lugged her unusually heavy backpack higher on her shoulders. She also shouldn't have decided to walk to the festival. Her back was aching, her hair was a fright, and she could feel sweat dripping down her back, her forehead and under her breasts. While she was bemoaning her life choices, she threw in deciding to move to California. She was a New Yorker born and bred- she wasn’t made for this tropical heat. 

Walking in the air conditioned Zeta Tau house was absolute heaven, but though Lydia wanted nothing more to collapse on the couch, flip her hair up, and wait until the artificial breeze returned some of her sapped strength, an urgent shift of her backpack's content put her on high alert. The house seemed empty- all of her sisters still either volunteering or enjoying the festival- but that didn't mean that someone wasn't in their room, ready to emerge and discover her secret. Lydia couldn't let that happen, simply because if she was discovered, it was the end of her days in the Zeta Tau house.

Not exactly sneaking, but not exacting walking as loudly as she normally would, Lydia hurried up the stairs, pausing at Elizabeth's door and pressing her ear to the door, listening intently. She couldn't hear anything except the rustling from her backpack, but she wasn't going to trust that her president wasn't napping or being particularly quiet.

Looking around the empty hall for another moment, Lydia made a dash for her room, checking to make sure her roommate wasn't around and closing the door swiftly behind her. The resulting slam made the contents of her backpack squeal in protest, and Lydia cringed, thinking of the laptop in her backpack as well, and how she really didn't want to have to replace it because her secret package leaked and got it wet. Or worse. Yuck.

Setting her backpack on her bed gently, Lydia hazarded one more look around before unzipping it, a smile crossing her face and a squeal welling in her throat as a tiny spotted piglet the size of her hand tumbled out of her bag and on to her patchwork bedspread, looking around and snuffling. Lydia found to her trepidation she was just in love with the little micro mini pig as she had been when she saw her at the petting zoo.

"Hello." Lydia cooed, offering her hand and making a high pitched, wordless noise of joy as the little pig pushed her snout into the palm of her hand. "Yes hello little lady. Aren't you precious? Aren't you just the sweetest little thing? What are we going to call you, huh?"

The little pig stumbled around the soft wrinkles of her bedspread, disgruntled. Lydia laughed under her breath, scooping up the little pig and putting her on the floor, stretching out across the middle of her room so that her new pet wouldn't decide to explore her roommate's side of the room. It wouldn't do for the little piggy to ruin something of hers and make her mad. Lydia was going to rely on her to keep her secret, until Lydia could find an apartment close to campus that allowed pets.

"Can you be good until then, princess?" She asked the pig in what would be a very annoying baby voice, should anyone be around to hear. Lydia’s new pet didn't acknowledge her one way or another, as she had found a bag of organic potato chips under her bed and was munching away. Lydia allowed herself a moment of imagining the consequences of her actions- including Elizabeth's furious (or worse, disappointed) face. She bit her lip. "Ooooh baby, mama is in suuuuch trouble."

Barbie Q. Bacon the spotted micro mini potbelly pig

[braxtonanthony]

Kissing Booth | Tony & Sam

Tony had wandered around the festival for two hours. The majority of his time had been dedicated to throwing rings onto bottles, absolutely determined to win the giant pink teddy bear. Eleven attempts and too much money later, the man working the booth gave in and handed over the stuffed animal, pitying the clearly insane college student who was willing to spend thirty minutes on a rigged game.

Since then, Tony had been waiting for the kissing booth, holding his newly acquired pink friend in one hand and a cup of eggnog cocoa in the other. The line was longer than anticipated, winding around the edge of the corn maze. It didn’t help that a few assholes kept holding everyone up by propositioning the sorority girls and refusing to walk away. Tony might have felt bad for the guys in question -- they were clearly desperate for some kind of attention -- if he hadn’t grown up under a roof with two moms and three sisters. If there was one thing he had learned from his childhood, it was that the worst kind of person was a guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Eventually, Tony made it to the front of the line and approached the booth. He hadn’t been able to see the girl who was working until now, and was thankful that she looked old enough that he didn’t feel like a creepy old man to kiss her. Setting his cocoa on the counter next to a few other abandoned drinks, he reached into his pocket and placed a twenty on the counter.

“I would give you a cheesy pick-up line, but I’m pretty sure you’ve heard plenty of those today. Can I interest you with some Shakespeare instead? To set the mood, I mean. I can also pull up some Al Green on spotify, if you’d prefer that. Or, y’know, we can just get right to it.”

[gabe-wallace]

Dust & Rattling Bones || Self Para

SCCU Fall Festival Task (Baking Contest & Cornhole Tournament) (if you squint... fuck u I’m counting it anyway) Words: 1,659 Summary: Gabe goes to visit his mother for the first time in awhile.

Gabe's careful steps were accompanied by the faintest crunching of brown grass as he picked his way carefully through headstones. He took large, hesitant steps over people's graves and looked around him warily as he made his way towards an unassuming, pinkish stone. He had never found cemeteries scary or creepy, but there were other ghosts that lingered here.

He'd already taken his accustomed pause in the car, where he closed his eyes and let a fantasy play behind his closed eyes. He might cross the graveyard gate, take the bend in the road and notice a young woman standing in front of his parent's stone. She would be facing away from him, but her hair would be just as brown and wild as his own, and the unguarded stoop of her shoulder would speak to the same ragged edge of sadness he felt here in this lonely place. His heart would begin to pound, and he would pause, find the courage to call "Bekah?" and when he did she would turn, see him. Maybe she'd call "Gabe?" back, maybe she'd just recognize him after all these years. Someone would scream with joy, Gabe would feel tears on his cheeks. They'd run towards each other, heedless of the stones and years between them, and he'd wrap his long lost finally found sister in his arms, and then, and then, and then...

It hadn't happened. It was heartbreaking in the way most of his past was, an aching, bleeding wound square in his chest. But he poked at this particular wound enough that small jabs at it didn't hurt anymore. If he ignored it (or convinced himself that he was able to ignore it) it wasn't too hard to keep going about his life.

He took his second accustomed pause. The stone was made for two people- couples or siblings or parents and their child. Gabe always made sure to approach it from the back, to give himself time to examine how he might feel if he came around the side of it and found not one but two set of dates staring at him. Let down. Disappointed. He decided after a moment. It would be discouraging to have never found his father alive, and to never be able to tell him that he was a giant asshole to his face. 

As they'd been every time he'd visited so far, he fears were completely unfounded. It was only the one date that he would never, could never, forget. January 7th, 2005. He settled into the grass straight in the middle of the double stone, bunching his backpack under his head as a makeshift pillow and shoving his knock off aviators higher up on his nose. He had lived in Southern California his entire life, but he still loathed the heat- he was sure he could live here his entire life and never grow used to it.

He laid his hands gently on his chest, staring up at the cloudless blue sky and letting the relentless sun beat down on him. He hadn't been out here since this summer, when most of his roommates had headed home for weeks if not months at a time, and there had been no one to question where he was going. He'd have a farmer's tan by the time all was said and done, and everyone would assume he'd been out at the Carnival, or doing yard work for people with more money than motivation, and that was how he wanted things. He didn't talk about his past for a reason, and he certainly didn't talk about this.

It felt a little bit like regressing, honestly. He wondered if it was healthy, to curl up on his mother's grave, to run his fingers over the date and name on her stone in lieu of a face to touch or hand to hold, or tell her about his life as if she could listen and understand. That was a question for some far off future where he had enough money for a therapist. And the therapist could wait until he hired a private investigator to find the missing members of his family, bought a more reliable car and a better computer to code on, and treated all of his friends and foster family who had helped him along the way to a big fancy party. Until then.

"Hey Mom." Gabe murmured to the sky, eyes closed and he pictured Gloria Wallace as he had last seen her- brown curls a messy halo around her head, smiling from the driver's seat of the family's Volkswagen, blowing a kiss at her children as Gabe walked Bekah up the stairs of their school. (Gabe didn’t count her funeral, of course.) It was easy to picture her now, or how she might have been. A tiny woman, smaller than him now, leaning over their worn kitchen counter with paint smeared on her cheek and clay under her nails, exhausted from dealing with teenagers all day, peering at Gabe over the rim of a tea mug filled with orange juice- How’s college baby? Still liking your roommates? And your classmates? Not partying too hard now that’s you’re twenty one and making your mother feel older by the minute? I don’t have to ask about your grades, you’ve always been so smart- don’t know where you got that from. 

Another prod to the gaping hole in his chest, this one a little harder than the last. He was fine, he was fine. Another two years, then maybe he’d have time to break down over all of these small hurts.

“Hi Mom.” He said again, his voice slightly rougher. "I miss you, same as usual, you’re probably getting tired of hearing it every time. Tough, because I still do. It's Fall Festival time again, and I thought I'd pay you a visit. I remember how much you used to love it. I remember every year you'd sign up to enter the baking contest, and every year you got to run and you lost you'd complain about the wasted money, and dad would say it wasn't wasted if you enjoyed yourself, and you would say you'd enjoy it more if you had won. I heavily identify because I too hate wasting money, no matter how much enjoyment I might get out of wasting it. That’s why I hate strip clubs... You know, I know you know I’m kidding and would have laughed if you were here, and that still felt way too awkward. Anyway."

Gabe shook his head as much as he could with the book bag shoved under his head, grinning. "Bekah and I liked it when you entered the baking contest. We got to eat all your practice batches and accidents. We were accidents too, so we identified. Ba dum tssk. (Jesus Mom, this hiding my trauma through humor thing gets exhausting.) But I still miss those maple-apple-pumpkin cupcakes with that cinnamon cream cheese frosting- the ones you made the Fall Festival before- all of that. Bekah and I tried to make them for dad after. We thought maybe they'd cheer dad up. Bekah had this idea in her head that if we could just make him laugh he'd suddenly get better, and I was just desperate for him to not drink so much that night that I was willing to try.

We made just the biggest mess of the kitchen, and we didn't make the right of course. The frosting was basically just pure cream cheese with powdered sugar and about half a jar of cinnamon added. The batter was running and wouldn't sit up, and I had dumped so much vanilla extract into it was was nigh on inedible, but we still got so excited when dad came home, we ran to show him... I think I had this naive idea that it would be like the movies, where the parent is still sad, but seeing the kids had tried to cheer them up made an impression on them, and they at least tried to fake it better for them... Of course that's not what happened, but you know." Matthew Wallace had barely blinked at the food, had instead sighed, told them to clean up the mess and clean the dishes, and stumbled to his recliner with a bottle of Jack Daniel's already in his fist. Bekah had thrown the cupcake pan on the floor sobbing and ran to her room, and Gabe had spent the next two hours quietly cleaning the kitchen and biting his lip so his own cries weren't audible.

Rubbing his eyes under his sunglasses, Gabe sighed, letting his arms flop back to the ground and shaking his head again. "Whatever Mom. I know you have some things to say him, when it comes time. Kick him in the balls once or twice for me if you see him before I do. I didn't mean to go on a tangent. I just wanted to say that I saw the ads for the baking contest and it made me think of you."

"Did I tell you that this year they're importing corn for a corn maze? It's wild Mom, and there's some game called 'Cornholes' or something that's a big Midwestern thing. It just sounds dirty to me, but while someday I'm sure the Fall Festival will be dying for Gabe Wallace to show up as some kind of celebrity judge or wealthy alumni, in the here and now they don't give a shiiii-uck. Shuck. They just don’t give a shuck. That sounds even worse. Sorry Mom. Anyway. I thought about signing up for the tournament, it's this big competitive thing and some of the people on my Quidditch team wanted to do it, but in the immortal words of an exploited person of color 'ain't nobody got time for that'. Oh- You know mom, I wish more than anything you were still around so I could show you memes, because I know for a fact you would find them hilarious."