Author's Note: Something I dashed off. I needed a procrastination outlet, and after rewatching Now Or Never this came to mind.
The pieces of the E.E. Cummings poem are not mine.
And on that note - I promise I don't hate English majors! I WAS one, after all =p
Twitter: AlbatrossTam14 (protected tweets)
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I don't own Degrassi.
I.
She decided pretty early on she wasn't meant for an English major. Mostly because she found a lot of them completely obnoxious – a bunch of preppy kids who loved coffeehouse Open Mic nights and fell hardcore in love with the sound of their own voices – but also because it seemed like a colossal waste of time. Like, who cared about the symbolism in Melville, the metaphors in Gatsby? She'd bet whatever little money she had in her savings (after shelling out all but her soul for the price of textbooks, what bullshit THAT was) that no one cared about the Marxist reading of Dickens, yet she'd just spent three nights in a row sitting her ass in that stranded corner of the library's all-but-deserted fourth floor, dutifully researching the topic with a frappuccino at her side and Frank Ocean playing through her earbuds.
Stories didn't matter much to her – nothing abstract really did, she preferred cold facts and always had – but she needed the marks, and when she scored a 98 on her paper and the TA scrawled "Fantastic work – keep up the solid research!" at the top, she figured she could put up with it, at least until she got enough credits under her belt to stop caring about the meaning behind a flashing green light, or a big white whale.
Her roommate, a redhead named Caroline who was sweet enough to live with but way too into "getting involved", offered her some of her boyfriend's ADD pills to help her get her work done. He sold them to friends at a discount, but Caroline thought she could get him to lower the price even more for Bianca, since they were roommates and all. Bianca declined; she'd seen that episode of Desperate Housewives where the mom trips balls on her kids' Ritalin, and besides that, her days dealing with drugs in one way or the other were long over.
It brought her back to the day before classes started, when they'd all moved into the dorms. Her RA, a girl named Kimberly who had more pep than a cocker spaniel, had made all the girls in Bianca's wing sit in a circle and play Three Truths and a Lie, which sounded like either a scene from the worst slumber party movie of all time or a mean-spirited form of that "Telephone" game.
One girl, Dani, whose jeans were artfully torn at the knees and had hair that was part-green, part-orange, part greasy, said "I got a perfect score on my SATs, I've lived in three foreign countries, I'm allergic to shellfish, and I'm a pathological liar."
A girl in a pink sundress raised her hand and hesitantly said, "Umm, the lie is that you're a liar?"
Dani had looked her square in the eye. "Maybe," she said calmly. "But you'll never know."
When it was Bianca's turn, she hesitated a moment, suddenly thankful she'd taken off her engagement ring and left it in her desk in her dorm room. She hadn't worn it since she moved in, and although Caroline knew she wasn't single, Bianca had deleted her Facerange at the end of junior year, so the news of her engagement was pretty limited to the people who knew her at Degrassi. Bianca was grateful for it; she didn't feel much like getting into the whole history of her and Drew, especially with people who had only known her for a day and a half.
"I'm Bianca," she'd said. "I've lived in Toronto my whole life, I used to be a dancer…" she'd picked at loose threads on the barf-colored carpet on the hall floors, "I once won backstage passes to a Dead Hand concert by keeping my hand on a truck for six hours, and…"
I've been arrested four times for underage drunkenness, I'm still serving probation for drug charges, I spent the past eight months trying to kick a smoking habit I've had since I was thirteen, I was forced to date a gang leader who threatened to kill me and my boyfriend if I didn't sell drugs for him, oh yeah, and I killed a guy who tried to rape me, and that same boyfriend took the fall for me and the whole world thinks he's a murderer. And he did it all for me, so I could out of jail and actually get the chance to even set foot in a university.
She'd cleared her throat. "And I was voted Homecoming Queen at my high school."
They figured out she wasn't Homecoming Queen fast enough; nobody who wears hoop earrings the size of dinner plates and has enough fishnet stockings to catch a humpback whale would ever be considered Homecoming Queen in the land of Kimberlys and Carolines and Hannahs and Emilys that seemed to populate her dorm floor.
Bianca wonders how she ended up in the Land of the Blondes. If this is some sort of punishment.
She remembers, later that night, as she lay in bed waiting for the seconds to tick by to her first day of class, she'd made sure Caroline was fast asleep before taking her ring out of the drawer and slipping it on her finger, twisting it around. The diamond glimmered in the pale lamp light, and she stared at the glowing stone, knowing and hating that it was just one more story people around here wouldn't be able to understand.
II.
The way she sees it, their story isn't about symbols or metaphors. There's no white whales or flashing green lights, that's for sure, and there isn't much room for ambiguity or deconstruction or zeitgeist or whatever other fancy textbook words her professors like to throw around (or the students, when they're feeling particularly douchey and want to sound smart).
Things are simple. Even though they've never been with them.
Like now. It's just them, and the bare shadows of the night skipping across the wall of the bedroom. It's the stroke of hands, the smooth warmth of bare skin. The moonlight spidering across their bodies, twisting and tangling and moving in tandem underneath the rumpled sheets. The way his mouth has memorized the crest of her neck in the dark, the valley of her hip bones; the way her hands know the jut of his shoulder blades, her fingers can map the broad expanse of his chest. These things, they never have to learn.
It's simple, their tale. As complicated and war-torn and spattered with blood and lies as it is, it's still simple.
Even though they've always been anything but. Even with the gunpowder promises, the drunken mistakes; the two AM nightmares and the Vegas lights, and snow-covered spring they spent broken.
Because, when you boil it down to the long and short of it –
It's just them. Paint still in his hair from the pep rally at school, and her pushing the speed limit down a rainy highway that smelled like steam. Her first weekend home. The shadows lining the walls and the tie of their tongues, match of their mouths, their moans, and the moon going down.
Nothing symbolic about it; everything she needs to know is right here.
III.
Her second semester, she ends up getting shut out of every class imaginable during the insanity that is registration, and gets stuck fulfilling her English credits with a class on epics.
At first it's torture – Paradise Lost is like being trapped on the middle seat during a ten-hour flight, the kind where that baby won't stop crying and the kid behind you won't stop kicking your seat – but then they get to The Iliad, and it's weird how much she likes it. It's kind of like Jerry Springer, except in Greece. And with gods.
(Mixing gods and men. Doesn't sound like the best idea, and from the way the story plays out, it looks like it didn't work out too well for Paris and Hector and Achilles, either.)
At times, though, it really pissed her off, because of the way it talked about war. The entire damn story was about war, and a war that dragged on for years. All about the glory of battle, the honorable death. At times, it sounded like it had been written by some hardcore gamer, or one of those freaky guys who worshipped the Unabomber and subscribed to weapons magazines.
And not to completely call Homer out on his bullshit, but he got it all wrong. War wasn't about glory, or honor, or anything. She would know, living in a war zone.
Unless you call being beaten and forced to push drugs on your classmates under the threat of watching the people you love murdered glory.
Yeah…no. She calls bullshit.
The gods and generals of ancient Greece got it wrong. The glory was in peace. That was the real victory, the real noble end. No gangs or guns; no corpses and Trojan horses and mixing men in the affairs of immortals. Whatever "glory" there was to be found came in having a future completely free of war.
She would know. It's hers. His.
Theirs.
She imagines the feeling is like whispering a prayer, if she knew what that felt like. How people who believe in those kinds of stories feel when they fold their hands and look to the sky. The peace that must wash over them, knowing they're being taken care of, that everything ultimately out of their hands will work out in its time, and that no matter how bad things seem to get, they always have someone looking out for them.
It's what she's reminded of every time he spoons up against her after they're done, holding her and pressing as closely into the curves of her body as he can, folding them together. When he puts their foreheads together and his hands trace the outline of her face in the dark, the pattern from her eyes to her lips already known. How it feels when he drifts off whispering her name into her neck, lips pressed to her ear, and she puts her head on his chest and feels him breathe her to sleep.
She'll take a prayer over an epic every day. Short as prayers may be, she'd rather have devotion than danger, reverence over battle cry.
Let them keep their wars. She'll take knowing the safety and surety of tomorrow.
IV.
Then there's the one semester she's forced to take a poetry class, and it makes her want to stab herself in the eye with a dull pencil. Every discussion they have seems to bring out everyone's innermost hipster, and some days she can barely refrain from rolling her eyes out of her skull.
Ego, a lot of poetry is. Not that some of it isn't good and whatever, but when she flips through the pages of the poetry anthology – a book that she swears cost more than the down payment on her car – all she sees is a lot of ego.
Though she has to admit, sometimes she sees something she doesn't completely hate. While the professor plays them a bunch of Youtube videos of people reading Whitman and Dickinson, Bianca flips through the anthology and finds this:
stand with your lover on the ending earth-
and she's in that alley, both times.
Both times there was red, and tears, and both times he fought for her, but in different ways.
She closes her eyes against it.
It makes her think, weirdly, of Vegas. The night before they came back home, after the aborted wedding and the gold suit and her own serenade. Drew sneaking into her hotel room late that night (even though he was supposed to be sharing with Adam – Audra had done some "creative" rebooking to keep them out of the honeymoon suite, as originally planned) and they made love on wrinkled sheets that smelled like too many people had stayed in this hotel. Outside, the cold desert wind blew against the window and it didn't matter that they had both planned yesterday to be married now.
suppose we could not love, dear; imagine
A year ago there was red and tears and he fought for her. That night the Nevada hotel room was as far away from that Toronto alley as possible. His hands molded her body underneath his, and she spread out to let herself to feel whole; it's nothing like the brutal rip and claw as her clothes were torn, Anson's fingers clamped on her mouth, pressing hers against a wall so he could break her apart. The dry desert air crackling with heat and lightning outside was nothing like the skid of old snow under her boots as she was dragged into that alley, the glassy streets still painted over with black ice. Their voices breaking on each other's names and the way he murmured into her neck, a tone with enough reverence for a sanctuary – it was far cry from the rush of their feet on the pavement as they fled, their breathing ragged and their hearts pounding, the sob that escaped her throat as she flung her arms around him and the screams from the alley that no one heard, no one but him.
-how fortunate are you and i, whose home
is timelessness: we who have wandered down
from fragrant mountains of eternal now
She didn't need words to know the meaning of Drew's sliding teeth and grappling tongue, the mess they could make of each other's mouths with bruised lips and aching jaws. Whatever words they chanted when her hands rake down his back so hard the skin breaks and his fingers mesh into the hollows between her bones don't need rhythm, meter. The comfort, the ease, the safety of a slow fuck under the curved blade shadows of a ceiling fan while the desert moon is hot and fat in a lightning sky –
Stripping away ego and the lack of poetry is what makes them what they are.
It was the alley and there was red and tears and he fought for her, and there's lightning and the night is torn in two and she's put back together in a Nevada hotel room under scratchy sheets while a fat desert moon hangs over their abandoned chapel.
to frolic in such mysteries as birth
and death a day(or maybe even less)
That's all she needs to know.