00:00
"Seriously, shut that thing up now."
Steve hears nothing, and then there's the gentle click of Andrew's fingers on buttons. You saved my life! his own voices says, recorded, marbled and weirdly alive through the crackling white-noise of the wind. And Andrew's fingers click the button again and then he shouts you saved my life!
"Andrew, I'm tryin' to sleep here," he interjects. He sits up and stares at him. Andrew is smiling and his skin glides up and down over his collarbone with each breath. For a moment the dark light in here makes it look like it's shimmering dryly wet like snake flesh. And Andrew is picking at a rough black-healing scab on his elbow, and suddenly Steve knows that nowadays all of the shit and pain people lather the guy up with is just sliding right off his skin, and if it sinks in he'll just shed it. It's a good thought.
"One more time," Andrew tells him. Rewind, play. You saved my life! And Steve rolls his fucking eyes.
"O.K., now shut up."
"O.K."
Andrew is lying with his pillow perpendicular to his, and when he sighs it feels like the cold breath of the sea against Steve's forehead. It's quite clear he's not going to shut up when he reaches out into his open rucksack and pulls out the green apple he had forgotten to eat earlier. The memory of today is just as sweet and crisp as that apple skin, and he knows Andrew is thinking it. It's funny how you know. Sometimes the thoughts get muddled. Sometimes it's like a VCR pause and things that were not moving move, dance, heart attack, and the laws of physics are suspended, and what goes up does not come down, and you just don't know, and the world is frozen and so for a few moments it seems it jitters under external influence. And sometimes Steve thinks that it is how Jesus felt, and he worries he's over thinking it. And sometimes he worries its Andrew thinking it. Sometimes the thoughts get muddled.
Andrew bites the apple skin and it's clear, sour, bubbling blood goes dribbling down his chin.
"Andrew, shut the fuck up eating, man!" Steve huffs. Andrew chuckles.
"I'm sorry, I'm so hungry."
"You should've eaten when everybody else did."
"I was too excited to eat," Andrew says, quietly, mousily happy like always, scrubbing his chin with the back of his hand. "I was like Superman. I just kept thinking about, like, when I was a kid, and my Mom bought me Superman pyjamas and I'd jump off the sofa, flying for a few seconds – and there I was, catching someone falling through the sky –"
"I am not your Lois Lane," Steve shook his head, grinning. "Quit it now, c'mon, we gotta sleep."
"I can't. I seriously can't."
Steve shrugs, "Me neither, but at least try."
"If we just talk, that'll help. That'll tire us out, I guess."
Steve's reluctant but he agrees, because gotta please the crowd. After all, he does need Andrew's vote for class president. He had got kind of overly pissy about discovering he was planning to vote for Taylor McMurphy, which had probably only swung him the other way. Please the crowd.
"Alright, alright."
"Let's talk about flying," Andrew says immediately. He lies his head down on the pink floral pillow that he guesses belongs in Matt's Mother's bedroom, which is kind of creepy, especially when it smells like her chalky perfume.
"Oh, yeah. I meant to ask you about that, did you get to record the falling?"
Andrew laughs in that hushed, charming way of his. Steve knows girls would like it, demure, sweet – if only he laughed a little nicer and not like a whale. That was a winning laugh. "It's just a recording of my jeans and some clouds after we got scattered apart, but all of the flight recordings are fine."
"When we're old, and we've got like, kids and grandkids, we could sell it, the footage. Think of the money," Steve whispers, a little choked. "We'd pay for like, the four generations' college education. And we could buy houses, mansions, big houses with pools and miles of grass and basketball courts. And houses in Barbados. Hell, our own beach in Barbados!"
"Why would we sell out on each other?"
"It's not selling out, it's basically funeral investment. Family investment."
"But wouldn't they lock us up if they knew?"
Steve pauses. In the night light Andrew's face is contorted by a singular curve of shadow below his eyes. His eyes are quick and bright black as a beetle's, so dark they're reflective, so dark there's no inside, and he swears for a moment they make a scuttling sound as they move across his face.
"What could they jail us for?"
"Not jail, experiment," Andrew explains. "They'd want to test us to see what's wrong."
"It'd be for the good of everybody else though, Andrew," Steve reasons. "And there's nothing wrong about this. Maybe if we're just a crazy combination of chemicals or toxins they could recreate this power. Or kill off the chance of it getting to the wrong hands. I dunno, man, I don't think they'd kill us though."
"But they'd probably separate us?"
"I dunno. It's for science, and progress, and the future and the people."
"I don't really care too much about that."
"About what?"
"The people."
There is a stretch of silence in which Steve remembers the gluey sponge of wet mud beneath his feet, and rainwater, and the oily swirls of red red red blood on the surface of a lake, like the syrup in a can of cherry preserves.
"Andrew?"
Andrew doesn't reply.
00:22
"Monica, Monica, oh Monica, yeah baby, uh – oh God – uh yeah, fuck me!"
Andrew hears Steve yowling by the stairwell, and the gullish babble of laughter rises up again. Monica's hand, in his, feels like a slab of meat cold from a fridge. It's slightly damp and writhing a little. She's tugging and tugging him up the stairs. Steve is thwacking his pelvis against the lens of his camera and screaming, "Fuck yeah baby, pop that cherry like a bitch!"
He looks at Monica. She has strange, pale blue eyes, glassy like those in a rocking horse. But he likes them. He smiles and swallows down the taste of a burnt fuse in his mouth. There's a churning in his stomach. Monica. "Monica," he whispers, and her name just flows, rolls, spills off his tongue like liquid. His groin gets hot. Her mouth was so warm and so wet, pink, bright, full.
"Hey, c'mon, ignore that asshole," she grins. Her hair looks like raspberry ice cream or something. Andrew nods and they walk along the cream carpet to a room that's empty. Monica isn't the way he'd imagined, because they shut the door and she pushes him down onto the bed, and then just takes her panties off. It's not even sexily, like. Just yanks them down her legs. There's a glossy looking print in her gusset. The clothes are crumpled at her ankles.
"I gotta teach you, right? You're a virgin?"
Her oval of pubic hair is the colour of Coors beer. He glances at it and nods. "Yeah, I – I am." He sounds like a little girl in a dentist's chair. Monica smiles.
"Come here, then."
He goes to her, shivering, the muscles contracting in the small of his back, and relaxing and contracting. It moves to his stomach. His fingers feel like shuddering slugs. She starts pushing down on his shoulders, and so he yields to the pressure and then she's got him on his knees.
No, he thinks. She's cradling the back of his skull and pushing his face into the junction between her legs. He doesn't want this. He's sick of fucking kneeling all the time, of cowering. Why, he thinks, can she not be completely naked and lay out like a picnic or horizontal crucifixion? That's what he wants.
"What –" he begins, but his words are slurred into the soft, soft damp flesh of her sex. She's smells like musk and kind of vinegary. He doesn't want to kneel and service. He won't – he won't do –
The movement in his stomach rises and he bolts back to a standing position, wiping her slickness off his lips. And then he pukes, and her hair is just like raspberry ripple ice cream, and it's funny because in a way, he'd much prefer that to the taste of her pussy; he'd prefer the taste of his own vomit, and the taste of some sort of reprisal or command. She runs away then, when he stares.
00:33
A/N: First Chronicle fic!
I saw this film for Valentine's Day and it's caused much hilarity between me and my boyfriend. I can't believe I've only just got around to writing a fic (I think we've just been too busy pretending I'm telekinetic when seeing trees move in the wind and cars moving around car parks, among other things).
This has been super interesting to write. Yes, my friends, it's kind of pointless unless you read between the lines and then it's just foreshadowing, but I had to write about Andrew's missing bits. And about his decline to misanthropy. I hope everyone enjoyed this, please let me know what you think!