Prompt: 001. Beginnings.
Author's Notes: If you think I own Rent, you need more help than I do. For the rent100 community on LJ. I claimed April, so ideally I will be writing 100 ficlets about everyone's favorite suicidal junkie. My mission? Reduce April hate in the fandom!
The minute April looked around her dorm room, she got this pleasant feeling in her chest that was like everything she'd ever seen in the old movie musicals. If she were the solo singer sort, and her life were a musical, she probably would have tried to find a song to sing, something about moving away from home to NYU and about finding her niche in society and getting uber famous. And then she laughed at herself for using the word 'uber' in a stream of conscious thought.
Five minutes after her parents left, she decided her roommate was one of her new favorite people.
"Listen to this bed," Marie said, wiping tri-colored curls out of her eyes. She kneeled on the mattress, the springs creaking under the weight, and she began to rock back and forth, back and forth, with increasing speed. "Hear that? That's the sound of the noisiest sex ever had."
April laughed, unsure of what to think of this girl who was unlike anyone she'd ever met in Hartford. "Even without screaming and shouting and who knows what else?"
"Oh yeah," she nodded, flopping over on her back. "This is a dorm, you'll hear it through the walls, the door, the ceiling, everything."
As far as April cared to think about, her parents had only had sex twice, once for her and then once for her brother. And hell, her brother could be immaculate conception. "Aren't you a freshman?"
"Yeah, but my mom and I've lived in places with walls a lot thinner than these," Marie answered, drumming on the wall with her heels as if to prove a point. After a quarter of a minute of persistent drumming, she apparently got the reaction she was looking for with an impassioned "HEY, KNOCK IT OFF!" and the sound of something heavy hitting the wall. She turned on April and gave an angelic grin that she couldn't help returning. Suddenly, Marie cocked her head, examining April closely. "You have very beautiful hair," she finally said. "Have you ever done anything with it?"
April eyed the pieces of her hair that she could see, reddish-brown and rather well-taken care of. "What do you mean done anything with it?"
"Cut, style, color, anything?" she asked, guiding April to a desk chair and immediately began playing with it like she did it with all people she'd known for an hour or less.
"… I had a shag haircut when I was in middle school," she said a bit dumbly, offering little resistance to the tugging and pulling her hair was currently undergoing.
"Nothing personal, since I probably don't know you well enough to make anything personal, but why? Goddamn, I'm nosy," she said, pulling open a drawer and taking out a comb.
"Well I used to have really long hair, it was down to my ass and all-"
"Yeah, it's a gorgeous color too, I don't think I've ever seen it when it didn't come out of a bottle."
"-oh, um, thanks then. But my brother and my friends thought it would be cool to stick as much gum as they could chew in my hair, and the only way to get it out was to cut it out. So my mom took me to the beauty parlor and the hair stylist thought it would be okay to just cut practically everything off. I cried the whole way home."
"Agh, little brothers," Marie said sympathetically, taking barrettes out of the drawer and fastening April's hair back.
"Do you have one?" she asked.
"No, but I have cousins, which is nearly as bad," she replied. "I should take you to see my mom's hair person, she's great, even though she just kind of does it as an on the side kind of thing, but she's great. She'll find something that'll suit you without taking practically any hair off at all, I promise…"
April grinned. Even if she wasn't the solo-singing type and her life was not a musical, she could tell this was the beginning of something great.