A/N - I don't know why I started this. It started out as a Megan/Mindy drabble for nick_girlslash on LiveJournal (which you should all join if you love Nickelodeon femslash :D), but I hated that and started over. Then I started two more times before just going into stream-of-consciousness mode and getting the first thousand words of this. I'm almost expecting no one to read it because the pairing is so obscure, but hopefully it'll mark the end of my block at least.
Takes place right after the episode "Honor Council," and the Carly in this story is the one Drake dated in "Who's Got Game" and "The Storm." My first time writing in second person, and there's one more part to this. Eep.
Young Girl Sunday Blues
It's your parents' idea, curse them.
You aren't crazy, and your parents are firm in the conviction that they agree, but they still usher you into the Bentley without your cloned cockapoos, which you gave two identical pats goodbye and expect to never see again, even once you return. You clench your hands in your lap the entire drive and grind your teeth and recite atomic numbers all down the periodic table emblazed into your brain like it's a lullaby.
Turns out Evil Genius isn't what your parents deem a suitable career path, but a character flaw, and since nurture isn't in them, they explain that, "We think this is something better left to the professionals."
Their job is to cultivate genius, and so they leave the flaws in the human design to the trained facilitators to handle.
The Mental Rehabilitation Center—the actual name of the place and what everyone urges you to call it—is nothing like what you've come to expect from those movies that double as boastful character studies. It isn't endless egg-white hallways and glinting floors with a hysterical, clawing body being dragged across it by two men with crew cuts and white coats. There are violets, for Darwin's sake. Violets and pale rose carpets and chintz armchairs, and chintz lampshades, and even chintz table surfaces. (And you can't explain why, but something about how tacky it is makes you feel righteously grown up.)
After signing you over, mom shakes her head and sniffs a bit too loudly before she kisses you on the cheek, and two large arms come around you the next second so you can lay your head against daddy's protective chest for a moment before pulling away. You all hold back from any embarrassing human emotion as the nurses pretend not to gawk from behind the nurses station.
You're in a colorful room shimmying off your tennis skirt and toeing off your Sketchers once your parents have been dismissed, and the nurses weigh you twice and make you show them your clean arms all the way up to the shoulders before checking your vitals, which they say they'll be doing twice a day. A huge woman with sword-straight hair gives you a paisley hospital gown and takes your clothes and luggage into the adjacent room to sort and search for any prohibited paraphernalia, and you seethe at the injustice.
It fuels the proverbial fire tonguing up through the discs of your spin, and once you're left to your own devices—or made to suffer through some half-witted orientation—you'll be able to plan.
Comeuppance. Revenge. Ten puny eyes for one perfect, scientifically-minded one sentenced to a few months in the wacky shack. Once you're out of here, the Parker-Nichols clan is going to get their due.
You're slap-happily given a high dose antipsychotics within the first hour, and you obey because you want out of this cuckoo's nest, violets or no, and because you trust science and the holy practice of chemistry even if you don't trust people or these idiots who call themselves doctors. They're trained babysitters who've been instructed to provide false intimacy, that's all, nothing more.
The medicine makes you see afterimages and feel like you're balancing a purring truck on your shoulder while inhaling the gasoline fumes, and within six hours, you can't remember the simple things without a struggle: the golden ratio, the quadratic equation, or even the first thousand digits of pi, because even when your toes are curled into the carpet, you're somewhere pressed up against the ceiling, waiting for it to open up so you can drift away like a balloon in a fluffy pink bathrobe.
And you don't think like this. It's illogical; people aren't comparable to balloons. People meander or become chemically altered or have cerebral hemorrhages instead. You wait for one of those.
You wake up Friday feeling like two matches have been lit behind your eyes and your skeleton has been replaced with steel and part of your mind has been parred away like a soap carving, but you don't get a cerebral hemorrhage.
Instead you get her, and you figure she's enough like a cerebral hemorrhage for you to justifiably go on cursing your condition.
They bring her in on a stretcher, and when you peek up from a crisp copy of Quantum Mechanics For The Teenage Soul and over the back of the chintz couch in the common room, the first thing you see are two pointy, black boots peaking out from beneath the overlong hospital gown like two swords thrust through a storm cloud.
You expect to discover she has a name like Morticia or Raven to wear as a justification for her stringy, streaked-blue hair and pallid face, but you overhear the waddling nurse who obsesses over how much of their meals the patients are eating say that it's Carly.
She has the serene guise of the newly-baptized.
You've got a mean glare, a sharp tongue, and an IQ prerequisite so none of the other patients sentenced here will talk to you. You hope the new girl will take their plebeian-like example, only your dreams are crushed a few minutes later when you peevishly learn that Carly is claiming half of your heretofore-private room.
When she learns your name, her far-too-expressive green eyes light up, and she says, "Like from Mork & Mindy?"
She's pointing at you—palm up, her hand cocked like a shotgun—from beneath the gown that swallows her whole, and that's when you know that you hate her, and that she's probably the type of idiot who worships science fiction but can't tell a neutron from an electron.
The sun goes down in golds striped by white-metal bars, and a nurse punches out two little pink tablets from a rectangular sheet with her thumb. It makes a jeering sound like a baby's rattle, and the pills fall into your palm like the three glinting eyes of a mutated lab rat.
Carly is unconscious within fifteen minutes, but you force yourself awake against the medicine's chemical persuasion to work on preliminaries for operation 'Pulverize The Parker-Nichols Clan' but drift off to sleep less than a half an hour later as you think that science is pure and essential, an objective pair of eyes that feels nothing but supremacy and the knowledge it holds.
In the morning you throw the sheets over your head and bring out the textbook you woke early to smuggle from the storage area so you can melt into a cocoon of interwoven numbers, and you're only just getting down to the good stuff when someone tugs the blanket from over your head.
"Hah!" Carly crows triumphantly, and then her pink, freshly-showered face goes blank before shifting into a frown. "Science?" She plucks the textbook from your fingers, ignoring your indignation, and her stance shifts in confusion as she puts an assault on the only thing keeping you sane in this forsaken place. "I thought I'd catch you doing something way more interesting than reading."
You make a swipe for the book that doesn't even seem to register with her, and say, "Hey, take your puny-minded hands off of George!" before you can realize your slip and feel yourself go one of the primary colors. George Herald Justice is the prevailing author of the textbook, but you never let on that you sometimes refer to the best texts this way.
Carly--but at this moment, you're considering calling her Ameba--dodges easily. "I'm all down for happy time with George, but aren't you gonna interact with something that talks back? Another person maybe," she adds as an afterthought, an amused lilt in her voice.
"Why should I? It took way more time and effort for that information to be compiled than for you to even be conceived!" Her hair is drying in loose curls around her face, the cheap blue dye starting to leech out, and she pushes it back before pressing George to her chest. "You make me feel very peeved in my own room," you say, low and threatening, because if there's one thing you don't do, it's that you never hide emotions. They just appear later and turn you into a weakling.
"Half this luxury suite is mine, sweet pea." Carly plops smugly onto the comforter beside you, flipping through pages and pages of what she surely can't understand while popping her tongue in her cheek.
She stalls a moment and peers at you from over the rim, and you glare and thrust words through your incisors:
"Well this isn't a honeymoon. So leave." You tug at your comforter indignantly, but what's been described as your freakish strength does nothing to dislodge her. "And you're darn right about the sweet pea. Those little seeds, if ingested in large amounts, cause lathyrism, which has symptoms comparable to scurvy! So unless you want to start bleeding from the mucous membranes, I suggest you get!"
To your complete annoyance, Carly does nothing by grin, her stupid apple-round cheeks creasing her eyes as she pats you on the knee in some delusion of camaraderie, and you take that chance to rescue George from her clutches. "Oh, come on," she says and bounces on her bottom. "There's like, two 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles in the recreation room. Let's go mix them all up and make a mosaic in the hallway."
"What're you even doing here?" you snap, throwing your hands in the air and prodding her hip with your toe despite the no touching rule. "Did you miss the memo? Most people here are neurotic or depressed! Leave me to my misery, why don't you?"
Carly starts to look martyred and puffs herself out as if something about what you said hit a nerve, but you aren't scared, because you know your limits, and you'll bite if you have to. "Look, someone said I was gonna do something I wasn't gonna do." She says it as if she thinks you care, but hot off her tongue it doubles as a threat, and her face puckers as if out of all the memories rattling around in her skull, this reminiscence is the most sour. "Got it on a recording, and obviously I got screwed because of it."
That's when you realize that you've got her, and you say so.
"Tell me," you say challengingly, squinting hard and leaning forward. "How do you get recorded saying something you didn't say?"
For a second she looks like you've just slapped her, which you wish you did, but then she glares right back, leans in to meet your stare, and raises you a fist twisted into the comforter. "Fine, so I said something I wasn't gonna really do." At that she springs up and stomps to the door like the peeved eight-year-old you expected her to be from the beginning. "And so you know," she says when she reaches the door, her hair bouncing in her indignation, "You gotta get to the showers early rather than staying in bed all morning to beat off to the periodic table. The really bad cutters try to use all the hot water before nine for self harm!"
You gasp in horror, but not because of what goes on in the showers.
"Oh yeah?" you scream back. "Well, as a euphemism, 'beat off' is a transitive verb which is only used for male masturbation, and so if you're going to try and insult me, you can at least get your filthy terminology right!"
The nurses overhear your tiff because obviously privacy is a concept reserved for the understanding of higher life forms, and that's the morning they inform you that art is therapeutic and then hold a meeting regarding putting stricter limits on the showers. You beg to differ, but only on the statement about the art. Free expression is sloppy, and you'll only listen to music with the same mathematic constructs of nature, and when writing poetry with perfect iambic pentameter gets you nothing but a lousy B in seventh grade English, you know the world is a wasteland full of temperamental saps.
The brush clicks against the plastic cup as you swish away the excess gray paints you squeezed from a tube and watch it form murky clouds of discontent and think that if you wanted arts and crafts, you would have invented a time machine and retrogressed back to kindergarten.
You drag a straight line across a piece of paper.
You've no clue what to draw.
The medicine pumping through your veins is like a fleet of novocain injections, and so you wrap your fuzzy blanket tighter around your shoulders and yell to the nurse overseeing this amateur romp that you need to go get unconscious.
Sometimes you're a little unsure of yourself. You'll never let it be documented in your biography, but it's true.
You're slouched against a plastic chair in some infernal group therapy session and are supposed to wax poetic about your interpersonal relationships, because, "It's those who care for you who keep the mind sound and the heart bright," the nurse informs idiotically, but when it's your turn all you can say is that the Belleview science department, and sometimes the math, lets you help pick out the new textbooks.
From across the circle of current woebegone youths of San Diego, Carly is looking goggle-eyed at you, and you shift a little against the plastic.
You decide you're going to hire minions, and that this dumping ground full of mentally unstable teenagers is probably the best place to find them.
Your parents visit you in the afternoon. It's a Sunday, and with the air conditioning out there's nothing to cleanse away the piety in the air.
They sit across from you in the dining area and inform you, businesslike, that you don't appear to be making progress and that the doctor will be increasing the dose of your medication. Mom worries the pearl bracelet circling her left wrist, her eyes falling on your bare ones. You aren't permitted to wear jewelry inside the hospital, and she still looks at you like it's a shame your arms have to suffer their status-stripping nakedness.
Behind them Carly laughs loud and mixes dark cocktails in paper cups with different flavored juice boxes for several other patients until the containers hack out the last remains of liquid. Your stomach does something peculiar when she leans over a blond with shaggy hair and a black sweatshirt, and you inform your parents that you may be developing an ulcer.
They've been gone for an hour when you call your parents on the slick pay phone in the back of the dining area and ask how long.
The only person you can persuade to be your minion doesn't speak any English, and by the way he attempts to hold your hand, you suspect that he thinks you've asked him to be your boyfriend.
At dinner Carly sits beside you and begins to discuss the un-edibility of the rehabilitation center's food, and you calmly seethe:
"Again. You seem to be under the impression that I am willing to exchange words with you."
"I can speak nerd, too, brainiac," she says and turns to give you a sidelong look, an apple at her lips and a mischievousness about her eyes that hangs like green leaves. She recites the 6 noble gasses with a lilt like a full-fledged song and looks smug when she's through. You keep your lips pressed tight and your eyelids narrowed because it might not be cloning her own dog, but it's a lot more than you had expected. Your heart gives an awkward little palpitation, and you realize how overmedicated you actually are for you body weight, to which you decide inform the dismissive nurses of right away.
You realize uncharacteristically late the doctor can't be bought with promises of a lifetime supply of salmon and resignedly sit through a late showing of Tuck Everlasting, because that's when you also realize through your examination of those actually being discharged that participation in childlike activities here is analogous to joining clubs in high school. They both go on record and contribute to your getting the hell out and on to bigger and better things.
But the movie is mind-numbingly sentimental and disconcertingly implausible, enough to reach in and stimulate your gag reflex, and when Winnie finds the spring of eternal youth and hears Jesse's voice in her head--I'll come back for you--Carly lunges to shut off the television and insists that that's where it ends, and you get indignant because you want to see the cold, hard truth of Jesse showing up at Winne's grave a hundred years later.
Back in your room, Carly twists her hands in the loose material of the pajama pants hanging around your hips and says slyly, "Look at you. It looks like two of you fit in there," and when you glare at a spot which ends up being her lack of pajama pants under the hospital gown because no one has brought her personal things yet, she laughs and you think you might be blushing.
She has the round cheeks and tiny heart lips of a cherub, and for the first time you realize that she also has a smile that leaves her roaming eyes shadowed and distracted.
These new drugs give you lucid dreams, and that first night, you quickly conceive that you can now literally plan for revenge in your sleep.
So you do, and you decided that due to time constraints, brain operations are out of the question, and untested chemical injections are simply too risky. You believe you might opt for the undetectable brute force of a photon canon, but then a dog wearing a pearl necklace walks toward you on his hind legs and splits into an exact replica of itself while counting off square roots, and you force yourself awake.
Carly laughs in your face when you offhandedly divulge the story of how you got Mrs. Hayfer's car into the classroom despite you omitting the part about how Mrs. Hayfer gave you a B for your 'emotionally-stiff poetry' to preserve your genius girl image.
"So you're in here because of a boy?" Carly's licking the sugary froth off the plastic lid of one of the copiously-provided brand name 'health' drinks, and you decide darkly that the girl has sub-par English language comprehension skills.
"No, I'm here because of my parents," you say slowly, gesturing with the arm not wrapped around your midsection.
Carly grins wickedly and sets down the bottle, leaning over the table. "Right, but you also said that this guy—this Josh and his brother—what was the brother's name?"
"Oh, it doesn't matter what the underachiever's name was!" you say. His name can be Jane Austen or Speck for all you care, but you irrationally worry about Carly getting stuck on a conversation about that teenage womanizer. "The point is that the entire family crossed me, even their kid sister, and so I'm making sure that they will rue the day that—Pray. tell. Why are you smiling?"
"I'm not," Carly grins, cocking her head to the side, and you slap your hand to the table surface, urging her to continue. She does, but she doesn't look daunted, curse your puny form. "Just look at it this way. You think about this guy a lot, don't you?"
"Just that I want to pulverize him in everything he does."
"Right. So you go out of your way to impress him, too," she says smugly, and you glare, you glare like there is no tomorrow. "If you didn't have your IQ test results framed by your bedside, I'd have to ask if you were really a super genius."
You think of the pink-stuffed picture frame by your bedside, stripped of its glass, and feel mostly offended that she would dare doubt your perfect aptitude, but you think past it, because you think maybe you've known for a while that what she's saying makes sense in this harrowingly simplistic way. You poke around for the words and glance about the bright room for lurkers before leaning forward to test this new theory. You can't throw anything out untested, after all.
"So...you're saying that me imagining what his face would look like in abject misery as I stand over him with a medal for first place in the science fair means..."
She leans in to meet you. "You can say it."
"It means that I care about what he thinks about me?"
"Right on, overachiever," Carly says smugly, which apparently calls for her suggestively popping something into her mouth. It's a maraschino cherry, and you blush despite yourself. "Looks like I'm making a dent in that exterior yet."
You worry when she says it, because it's at least a tiny bit true.
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Your comments are much appreciated.