Hey guys! How's everyone doing? Well, I hope. Anyway, this story doesn't take place during any particular part in the series. It's just a study of Odd's character, a new way to see him through Ulrich's eyes.
Dedication: This is to every girl who has ever felt like she's not pretty enough. (Which is every girl ever.) If you have ever had a moment when you thought that you lacked something special, you were wrong. This is also to every guy who has noticed something special about a girl. Props to you, there should be more guys like you in the world.
Pretty Girls
"That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are." - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 10
Ulrich slumps onto his bed, ignoring Kiwi's indignant barks. He groans and shoves the previously-napping dog off his pillow so that he can cover his face with it.
"Be nice to Kiwi!"
Pushing the pillow tighter to his face, Ulrich debates whether a quick, suffocating suicide might be the best option he has at this point. It's not until he accidentally breathes in dog hair that he removes the pillow. So much for a cottony death.
Spitting out dog hair, Ulrich looks up to see Odd still standing between the two beds. In his open arms, Odd holds two different shirts, each a different shade of purple.
"Odd," Ulrich starts, trying to keep his temper in check. "As I have told you about fifty times now, both of the shirts are purple. Just pick one and put it on!"
Ignoring Ulrich's growing anger and surely twitching eye, Odd frowns and places the shirts carefully on his bed before petting the once-again-napping Kiwi on his own pillow.
"I know they're both purple, but they're different shades of purple!" Clad only in blue jeans and untied sneakers, Odd turns around to stare pleadingly at Ulrich once more. "The dark purple makes me leaner, older. More suave, you know? But the lighter one makes me look sweeter, softer. Julie's a real perceptive girl. I wanna make a good impression."
Sighing, Ulrich realizes that Odd won't leave him alone until he finally makes a decision. Half-heartedly, he points a lazy finger at the darker purple shirt. Girls are supposed to like lean bodies, right? Older guys?
Honestly, at this point, Ulrich will do anything to make him put on a shirt. A bare-chested Odd is not his favorite Odd. Regardless, Odd seems satisfied with the choice and puts the shirt on. He starts rambling on about how Ulrich always makes the best choices, and Ulrich can't help but roll his eyes.
Seriously, when did he become a fashion consultant?
Idly, he watches as Odd fumbles with the buttons. It's not until Odd puts the buttons in the wrong holes for the third time that Ulrich finally opens his mouth.
"What does it matter what you wear? You don't really care about that girl anyway."
"Her name is Julie, not just 'that girl,'" Odd responds, briefly looking up from his misaligned buttons. "Besides, it's just a nice thing to do. Girls dress up for guys."
"Not always." An image of black and combat boots swims into Ulrich's mind.
"Well, if you really care about a girl, she can wear ordinary clothes and not look ordinary in them," Odd retorts in a highly annoying know-it-all manner.
"Yeah, alright, Casanova," Ulrich rebuffs, irritated that someone who can barely button a shirt is trying to tell him how to think. "Sometimes clothes are just clothes. And sometimes even the best clothes can't help a girl out."
"All girls are pretty."
Ulrich snorts. He's not Prince Charming, he isn't obligated to agree. He's seen some girls around campus with less than fortunate faces.
"You don't agree, buddy?" Odd asks, staring at Ulrich with wide eyes. His eyebrows are drawn together in a confused wrinkle.
Feeling cornered, Ulrich doesn't know quite how to respond. Those stupid blue eyes of Odd's are burning into him. So he pulls out the Yumi card, his own personal Get Out of Jail Free card.
"I'm in love with Yumi, remember?" It's the first time he's ever admitted it aloud and it's to get himself out of trouble with his friend. Not exactly the scenario he had always pictured in his mind. "I don't look at other girls."
"Yeah, okay," Odd says in his trademark sarcastic way. He finally buttoned his shirt correctly and begins the apparently difficult task of tying his shoes.
No wonder he usually wears slip-ons, Ulrich realizes.
"So you think all girls are pretty? All girls in the entire world are magazine-worthy?" Ulrich asks as Odd's in the process of making two bunny ears cross each other to enter the bunny hole on his left shoe.
"I never said that," Odd responds, tightening his laces. "I just said that girls are pretty. Every girl has something pretty, something special about them."
"Just one thing?" Ulrich asks.
"No," Odd shakes his head, "some extremely special girls have two." He pauses from his right shoe to look at Ulrich with a serious expression. "I think a goddess would have three."
He returns to carefully double-knotting his shoe as Ulrich vaguely worries about what idea Odd has concocted in that crazy mind of his.
"Is that why you date so many different girls? So that you can find one with four special things?" Ulrich jokes. Leave it to Odd to try to outdo every other guy.
"No, one is plenty. Girls with more than one seem to think themselves too important."
Ulrich takes a second to savor the irony of the moment: Odd just commented on the vanity of some girls while waggling his eyebrows and blowing kisses at himself in the mirror over his dresser.
Believing that their conversation is finished, Ulrich fishes under his bed for a comic book or Gameboy to occupy his time with. It's not until a few seconds later when Odd starts talking again that Ulrich realizes he's opened the gate to a long and probably strange conversation.
"All girls have something pretty about them. Even if they aren't the best to look at or even if they aren't that graceful or that smart. Every single girl in the world, at least, all the ones I've ever seen, has something pretty."
There was something about Odd's tone of voice that was unnerving. His inflection, his word choice, his pauses between sentences, they all sounded sincere. Honest. It was as though each sentence, each thought was carefully crafted in his mind to best describe his thoughts. Odd never, in the entire time that Ulrich knew him, put that much effort into his words. Odd had always been a "talk first, think never" kind of person. Ulrich looked on in slight wonder as to what caused this change in his friend.
Odd, not sensing Ulrich's undivided attention, begins sifted through a disorganized drawer. He continues talking, gathering momentum with each word.
"Sometimes it's a particular shade of green in her eyes, the way her irises curl into their pupils like a lily pad. Or her hair, no matter how sick she is, or how frazzled she is, it always shines, even in a dark room."
Odd frowns to himself as he examines a barely tarnished watch he discovered in the depths of his drawer. He looks it all over and sniffs it twice before fastening it around his wrist and continuing his monologue.
"I once dated a girl who talked constantly, but I didn't mind listening to her because on the rare occasion that she stopped to take a breath, her lips would pucker the tiniest bit." He finally looks at Ulrich just in time to wink. "It was adorable."
Ulrich looks on in disbelief, half-assuming that this "theory" was just something Odd randomly made up. Quite frankly, it's stupid and illogical. Girls as a whole are nice, but individually? They're not all as special as Odd makes them out to be. His idiotic compliments probably flatter girls, make them feel special and unique even if it's not sincere. That's entirely something Odd would do, Ulrich decides in an irrational train of thought.
In an effort to call him out on his spontaneous lies, Ulrich decides to ask Odd for a specific prettiness about a specific girl. Unsure of who to ask about, he watches Odd add extra gel to his already carefully styled hair. He weighs his options, tries to pick which girl he should ask about.
The first option that pops into his head is Yumi. But truth be told, Ulrich is too jealous to know what any other guy thinks about Yumi, regardless of whether or not that guy is his best friend.
The second option is Aelita, but she's already spoken for by Jeremie. Odd knows well enough to stay away from Aelita. And if Odd hasn't figured out that Aelita is entirely hands-off, well, then Ulrich doesn't want to know anything about that love triangle. He refuses to let the conversation go down that tumultuous path.
Suddenly, the perfect option springs to his mind.
"Sam," Ulrich declares haughtily. He crosses his arms and raises a jaunty eyebrow as Odd looks at him curiously. "Tell me what was so special about Sam."
"Sam," Odd repeats, his eyes glazing over somewhat. He wipes the excess gel off his hands on a tissue, absentmindedly throwing it away. Leaning against his bed, his brow furrows as though he is trying to remember something.
"What was special about her?" Ulrich asks, confident that Odd will fail to answer the question. Sam had been alright looking, sure, but pretty? With her red streaks and her skateboard? Pretty girls, in his opinion, didn't steal laptops and make sneaky glances around the room with narrowed eyes.
"She had a peculiar way of looking at something through her eyelashes," Odd finally decides. His brow has relaxed itself as he thinks back on his girlfriend from nearly two years ago.
Ulrich blinks his own eyes a few times before finally opening his mouth to speak. He's desperate for a chance to bring this conversation back to a level that he is comfortable with.
"So was Sam the only girl for you?"
Ulrich feels a need to tease Odd. After all, Odd's teased him countless times about Yumi. It's how they communicate. They tease, they joke, they mean nothing seriously. Ulrich finds himself hoping against hope that Odd will say yes, just so he can tease him and life can go back to normal.
Hope must have left Ulrich for Odd shakes his head abruptly.
"Sam was great, but she was too much like me, I think, for it to work," Odd answers, his voice matter of fact. "No, Sam could never compare."
There is a softer way that he holds his expression that Ulrich has never seen before.
"Her hair doesn't curl at the base of her neck."
Oh, so there is a girl. The quiet way that Odd speaks as though Ulrich isn't even in the room, the faraway look in his eyes as he stares at the carpet. This clues Ulrich into the fact that this isn't a teasing matter no matter how much he wishes it was.
Ulrich's a bad friend for not realizing that there is one girl in a million that Odd genuinely cares about. He's a terrible friend for not even realizing who this girl is.
He has the distinct feeling that he'll be searching for a girl with curly hair at the nape of her neck for the rest of his life. He'll be sixty years old and still looking for curly, wispy, gray hairs.
Scared to enter a conversation about particular girls or feelings towards them, Ulrich tries to revert the conversation back to the original topic.
"So all girls are pretty?"
It's such a lame statement. If he had been listening at all for the past ten minutes, he would know the answer.
Odd looks at him, the softness gone. There's no irritation in his eyes, just a sort of pleased expression that Ulrich understands something for once.
"Yeah. Pale girls wearing pale pinks. The way they look so delicate and much softer than they do in blues or reds. Dark eyed girls who look out of the corner of their eyes. Short girls who stand on their tiptoes. Tall girls who always seem to have strong spirits. Girls who sit in the back of the classroom, too nervous to be looked at, but the sunlight coming in through the window falls on their faces anyway. It almost makes them glow."
Odd is talking, talking, talking. All these things that Ulrich never noticed about girls, but always appreciated anyway. Odd mentions them all.
Suddenly the room is quiet, and Odd looks vaguely surprised to see Ulrich slack jawed and looking at him. He springs to his feet, his skinny hands sloppily smoothing down the front of his shirt.
He's scared, Ulrich realizes, that someone might finally see that he isn't just a goofball. He is considerate, he is observant. He isn't just there for the comic relief.
Still staring as though he has no purpose, Ulrich watches Odd place his hand on the door, ready to leave for his date.
"Odd, wait," Ulrich asks before he can stop himself. Odd turns around expectantly. His expression is banal, clearly indicating that the striking conversation they just had was to be forgotten. Ulrich ignores his friend and presses on with his question.
"This girl, Julie, does she have curls at the base of her neck?"
Odd is already exiting the room as he shakes his head no.
Yes, Odd's quote from the story/summary is highly inspired by The Catcher in the Rye quote. lol That quote was my inspiration.
I wrote this in the hopes that girls will have at least a little more confidence in themselves. Just the other day in my yoga class, the instructor told us that we are special, unique, and beautiful. That there has never been anyone else in the world like us before and there will never be anyone in the world like us after. I literally teared up in class. It was just something that I apparently needed to hear.
So, I hope that this reaches someone that might need to hear this message. Keep Odd's/my theory in mind the next time you think you aren't special, unique, and beautiful. Take care.