summary: 'You automatically slam on the breaks, and your father yells, "Just keep going. Damn it, Quinn!" The hollow thump-thump is still jarring your heart. You've just received your State of Ohio learner's permit at age fifteen and a half.' Quinn and driving, six times. Fabrastings at the end.
an (1): because fabrastings and why haven't i written this before?
an (2): title and epigraph from purity rings' 'lofticries.' there are a lot of invisible monsters quotes as well. you all know how i feel about that. :)
...
lead our woes asunder beneath the proud, proud veins
.
let it seep through your sockets and earholes into your precious, fractured skull. let it keep you from us, patiently heal you
...
The first time you ever drive a car, you run over a pigeon. It scares the shit out of you. You automatically slam on the breaks, and your father yells, "Just keep going. Damn it, Quinn!" The hollow thump-thump is still jarring your heart. You've just received your State of Ohio learner's permit at age fifteen and a half.
"I'm sorry," you say. Tears sting at your eyes. You're just in your neighborhood, driving exactly fifteen miles per hour around the wide, tree-lined labyrinth, so it really isn't a big deal that you've stopped the car. You clutch at the steering wheel, the leather squeaking against your palms. You take deep breaths.
Your father pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "It's just a bird."
"I didn't even see it."
"Just drive home. It doesn't matter," he says.
"I didn't mean to."
"Quinn," he says, "sometimes swerving causes more damage. Sometimes you have to run over whatever's in the way."
Your driving instructor had told you the same thing, just after you watched Red Asphalt III.
"I understand," you say, because you do. You take your right foot off the break and push gently on the gas, and your father's Land Rover moves slowly forward.
"I'm sorry," you say again, to God or your own father, you aren't sure.
You check your rearview mirror, just in case, and you see the pigeon, squished in the road, its hollow bones broken everywhere, its blood scattered with feathers that float off the ground in the slight breeze.
...
For your sixteenth birthday, your parents give you a red VW Beetle, priced at around $21,995. The first place you ever drive it to is your church, for a youth group pot luck. It's small and you suppose it fits you perfectly, the same way the heirloom gold cross and the dresses from Anthropologie and blazers from J. Crew do, in the sense that you do like these things; you don't resent them, and you don't hate them.
Your bible—the same one you've had since third grade, with your name, Lucy Quinn Fabray inscribed in gold in the bottom right-hand corner of the red leather cover—sits on the front seat. It's currently situated beneath a copy of Invisible Monsters, a book Frannie had sent you as your birthday present. You're almost finished, and you're not that familiar with postmodernism, but you have seen Bladerunner and you enjoyed Fight Club, and it is the literary movement you find yourself gravitating most heavily towards outside of assigned reading.
The two texts probably contradict for the most part, you know, because you don't think God forgets you if you're boring—but then again, maybe sin is the most boring thing God can think of.
Your blinker thump-thumps.
In the end you think they're sort of beautiful, with their clean page breaks and their torment and their idea of saviours, their spines stitched together with the frantic threads of an ugly, human need to belong.
Someone honks at you.
You turn on the radio. You like to sing along.
Your church is an old building, historic and impressive and pretty, just like your own house, and your car, and your dresses and blazers and nose and hair and heirloom cross. The lights are on in the parish hall.
After you park, you pull the keys out of the ignition. You heft the salad in a large tupperware and the store-bought brownies your mother had given you to bring tonight.
You slip Invisible Monsters into your purse, tucked away under your bible. You won't read it, you know, and no one will even know it's there. But later that night, you pray, Oh love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be anybody you want me to be, silently, fervently, with reverence.
...
One night you get so drunk you don't have the dexterity to insert the keys in your ignition.
"Don't kill yourself yet," Sheila says, and she snatches the keys from your hand.
You don't fight her, and you stand unsteadily and steady yourself against your car. Your pink hair clashes horribly with the shiny red paint, and you love it.
You love it the same way that you love wearing a tank-top from Urban Outfitters that says Hell is so hot right now, because you are not who you appear to be, only people expect that this is a mask. It's a relief for people to notice how hard you're pretending, for you to expose yourself without really exposing yourself at all.
You drum your fingers against the top of the car, thump-thump.
"You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth," you slur.
Sheila rolls her eyes and loops an arm around your thin, enviable shoulders. "Come on, Plato."
You walk to her house and catch your reflection in a mirror. Urban Outfitters is the same company of Anthropologie. You enjoy demise only when others acknowledge your destruction.
"I hate how I don't feel real unless other people are watching," you say to nobody in particular. There are glow in the dark stars on the ceiling of Sheila's bedroom.
They spin. You do a few lines before you pass out.
...
There is fog around your wrists. Your veins are cloudy, evaporating.
Someone tells you to breathe.
You imagine the rain, so cleanly, flooding your chest. Your arteries are gutters.
Someone asks you what your name is. You tell them. They congratulate you. You're doing great, they say. Just stay awake, they say. Keep talking. Don't go to sleep.
Your vision swims. Your blood stings your eyes differently than tears, and then you are afraid.
Something very loud is close to you, and then hands are on you, around you, lapping in your flesh and stroking through blood.
It's going to hurt, they say. I'm sorry, they tell you. We're going to get you out of here, they promise. They curse.
Your bones grind against each other, waves on the shore. There is a storm in your body. It curls up and tendrils claw everywhere. There are riptides down your spine and your brain expands within your crumbling skull like a hurricane, and you no longer exist as anything you were before.
It is cold outside your car. It's February, and they leave your peacoat. You start shivering. They cut open your dress. They take it off. They should say, The most boring thing in the world is nudity, but they don't. They should say, The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open, but they don't.
They leave your shoes on.
They stick a needle into your spine. They wrap your puzzled head in tight gauze. They put a tube between your broken ribs.
You don't scream because you can't.
You look at your palm and there are shards of glass in it from your phone. They are ships.
Stay with us, Quinn, they tell you. Keep talking, keep blinking. Don't stop. I know this hurts, I'm sorry. Stay with us a little longer. You're going to be okay. Keep fighting. Don't stop. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
There are no clouds in the sky. Someone squeezes your wrist for a sublimating thump-thump of a pulse. It is a very bright day for winter.
...
"Lord Tubbington prefers car service as well," Brittany says. Santana is jittery and extremely focused on driving, but you laugh. You're in the passenger seat, and you're working on not shaking violently, even though it's been months and your legs are gradually regaining feeling. Your chest aches less. Your skull has fissured back together. You're using a walker now.
Santana is hardly breathing.
"Just look at it this way," you say. "I've pretty much taken care of shitty karma for all of us, so now we should safe."
"You're a bitch," Santana says.
Brittany leans forward and pats your shoulder.
"Plus, we do get awesome parking," you say.
Brittany says, "Yeah!" and squeezes between the two of you to turn on the radio. Thump-thump.
Santana cracks a smile and glances at the bright blue handicapped sign hanging from her rearview mirror.
...
You're in J-Brand skinny jeans, a stripped sweater from Madewell, a scarf from a little vintage place by Frannie's Mission apartment, and Tory Birch riding boots. You picked them all. You love them all. None of them really mean anything.
Spencer holds your hand across the center console of her Range Rover. Normally this terrifies you, because everyone should drive with their hands at ten and two, and everyone should watch the road at all times, and everyone should never text and drive, or sneeze and drive, or sing and drive, or do anything but just drive and drive.
But Spencer glances over at you, just for a second. She squeezes your hand gently. The scars along your other palm tingle.
"Do you think you'll ever want to drive again?" she asks. She's wearing a blazer from J. Crew.
"No," you say. It's too quick, panicked. "No," you try again, calmer this time.
She shrugs. "We're going to live in a big city anyway. There's really no need."
You smile. "And you're a safe driver."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I trust you."
"Thank you," she says. She is very serious.
"I fractured my skull," you say. She's seen your other scars, the ones along your ribs and back, but that one is covered by your hair. "Did I tell you that?"
"No. You didn't."
"It's better now," you say. "Our bones aren't hollow, you know? My brain tried to destroy itself."
She's quiet for a while, biting her bottom lip and carefully turning down streets. Philadelphia fades into tree-lined labyrinths; her neighborhood looks like yours. Gold leaves are falling along the damp, shiny asphalt.
Then Spencer asks, "Could you hold the chainsaw a bit closer to your mouth?"
Your eyebrows knit together and you can tell she's trying not to smile.
Then it clicks. You say, "Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism."
She laughs. You do too. "I had no choice but to fall in love with you, you know."
"Someone who can readily quote Invisible Monsters is indispensable," you agree.
She turns down a street and pulls up to a big, beautiful, cold house. She smiles. "We're home," she says. You kiss her on the lips, then once on the pulse point just below her jaw, if only to be sure of the thump-thump there.
There are a few pigeons sitting on the power lines across the street. Their feathers float around them in the cold, insulation. You step out of the car and hear the wires in the distance, tracked through your veins, transcribing conversations, copying, buzzing, humming endlessly.