Author's Note: iTunes drabble, because I'm trying to make myself write again. It's a wee bit harder than I expected.
Sleeping Sickness—City and Colour
Maybe I'll sleep when I am dead/but now it's like the night is taking sides/with all the worries that occupy the back of my mind
The first month after Beth is born, she doesn't sleep.
Logically, she knows that she must have slept, because people can't actually function without sleep. But she also knows that she hadn't slept through the night in months, that she tosses and turns and paces and watches trash television in a desperate attempt to avoid sleeping.
When she does sleep, she dreams. She dreams that she is still pregnant, that the child she is carrying is one she can keep and nurture and parent and love properly; she dreams that she is a year younger and hasn't slept with her boyfriend's best friend and everything feels right about the world; she dreams that the home she put her daughter in, with a mother who wanted another child instead of her own, is all wrong for a tiny blond infant with her eyes and Puck's smile. She dreams that Beth grows up hating her, that her daughter will think she is a terrible person. She dreams that even the one time she tried to do the right thing—for someone else, for her daughter, for the only person in the world she loved above everything else—she did it wrong and it's going to ruin her daughter's life.
She tried to talk about it. She calls Puck in the middle of the night, frantic and wondering if they should try to legally reverse the adoption. She tries to talk to her mother, but the older blond is too ecstatic at regaining some semblance of her old life back to want to rupture the precarious balance they're restored. She looks up Shelby Corcoran and dials the number so many times she has it memorized, the digits emblazoned across the backs of her eyelids.
But every time she opens her mouth, no sound comes out. No words come to mind, her voice remaining dead in her throat as she struggles futilely to find the words to explain her fear, her self-hatred, the absolutely shattering worry that's taken up residence in her chest.
So she tosses and turns and paces, trash television playing in the background, and hopes that she can wait it out. She avoids sleep as much as possible and focuses her attention on exercise, determined to earn her spot back atop the cheerleading pyramid in the fall. The obsessive dieting and exercise regime she subjects herself is painful and distracting enough to offer a reprieve as she waits for it all to leave her alone.
She stubbornly ignores the part of her that considers that it may never go away, that she'll carry a baby-shaped hole with her for the rest of her life.
Walking On A Wire—Lowen and Navarro
You deal in black and white/and everything in between/you were blessed with such finesse/I almost know what you mean
She lies. She lies because she can, because she's good at it, because no one has ever made her stop, because it's difficult and exhilarating and entertaining, a challenge that can't be mastered like school or cheerleading or the social hierarchy of high school.
Every word she says is calculated, premeditated, set out for the world to see in a carefully-constructed balance. She glides through life like a tightrope walker, her words and deeds metered out specifically like weights on a balancing pole that keep her from teetering too far to one side. She cradles every truth that only she knows in her hands delicately, determinedly protecting it from the world like a fragile piece of crystal.
She lies about things that matter, about things that don't, about anything she can. She takes the only marketable skill inherited from her parents—demoralizing and segregating people she's never met like her father has no place in a world struggling for equality, and she has no desire to become a drowning housewife like her mother, floating along in a sea of gin and pinot grigio to pass the time—and practices it, masters it, garners a small measure of control from a world that tosses teenagers around like ragdoll playthings. She manipulates her way into the envy of every one of her peers, to a cheerleading captaincy meant for a senior instead of a sophomore, to a glee club she doesn't care for. Whatever control is taken away from her by reality, she snatches back with a perfectly-placed lie, a well-laid piece of fiction woven together like the most intricate of poetry. Her control never slips, her skill never waivers, and she keeps it tucked away as a comforting thrum deep in her chest, hidden beneath the protection of a uniform and a cross.
It takes three wine coolers on an empty stomach and a boy as persuasive as she is deceptive for her control to come crashing down, shattering into pieces on her bedroom floor. Days and weeks pass and she desperately tries to put back together the delicate pieces of her control, her guile, her perfect ability to master a situation through a well-placed piece of deception, but the comforting hum that had once resonated inside her, pressing against the cool golden weight of the cross around her neck, is gone.
When the pieces she had so frantically tried to gather and mend are scattered irreparably across a choir room floor as one boy punches another, she feels sick and hollow. Her control is gone, shattered, and she knows she can't ever get it all back.
Inexplicably, as the baby in her belly feels unbearably heavy, weighing her down like a cinderblock, her shoulders feel lighter than she ever remembered, as the weight of every tiny, insignificant lie she'd woven together and memorized and balanced seemed to vanish. She had just lost a second home and a boyfriend and whatever respect she may have pretended to still have from her peers, but for a brief, solitary moment, it felt extraordinary.
The First Of Me—Hoobastank
It's harder than it seems/When you're told that all your hopes and dreams/Are yours to hold if/You just give them what's expected
They promised her the world. Since before she can actively remember it, there was family and God and church, and they showed her the path and promised her the world for following it.
She has no questions. She acts as she is told, dresses as they expect, smiles when it's called of her and laughs only at their behest. She is only fourteen, after all, and painfully aware from the lectures and reassurances and sparing admonitions of parents and pastor that she is young and naïve and they are there to guide her, that they know better. The motions are comfortable and easy to glide through, perfection far more achievable than she expected, and she finds happiness in their pride, their smiles, their assurances that she is wonderful.
Her first day of high school is nothing of the terror she'd heard other students mumbling about. With the warmth of a cross at her throat and the stoic protection of a cheerleading uniform, she floats through the hallways with her chin held high and ponytail swishing in time with her steps. There are no challenges and no one dares speak against her. She is only fourteen, but the steel in her spine and chill in her eyes commands respect and distance and deference from every other student in the building. She has the weight of her family, her church, her God behind her, and she pities those who scurry out of her way, clearly too unfortunate or undeserving to not have the support and love afforded to them that she did—then again, she is a Fabray, and it is not in their way to pity those who don't follow the correct steps.
Her confidence never wavers until the ninth day of classes. A tiny brunette is walking down the hallway in front of her alone, and suddenly a hockey player has hurled a slushy in her face. As laughter rings and the hallway and the brunette breaks from her shock and runs to a bathroom, she stands and stares, mouth agape. Everyone around her laughs—even some of the teachers in the hallway are hiding giggles behind their hands—and the weight of family and church and God and the stare of the cheerleading coach she knows is watching from around the corner is suddenly oppressive.
The words she has read—blessed is he who has regard for the weak—are warring against the words she was told about strength and propriety and expectation, and she takes three steps towards the bathroom door before halting. Everyone is still laughing and the hockey player is accepting high fives from everyone around him, and she swallows the knot of apprehension in her throat and slips through the crowd and into the bathroom.
She is greeted with a glare that burns brightly through ice and corn syrup, and snarled "Get away from me!" that is barely pushed out through tears, and once again stops in her tracks. She stares, books clutched to her chest, and weighs her options. Less than five seconds pass before she straightens up, pulls her chin back up, and spins on one heel to march out of the bathroom.
In the hallway, she joins in the laughter and the conversation, parting crowds once more with her glare, and thinks that helping people who don't want to be helped is a waste of time, just like her father always said. And the next day, when she is gliding through the hallways and sees the same girl receive a slushy to the face from another student, she laughs coolly and continues on, as if the other girl is nothing more than a piece of litter on the side of the highway.
Wine Line—Do It To Julia
She's messed up again/drank too much of his wine
It was a cop out, she knew, to blame the wine. It was only a few wine coolers , after all; even if she's only sixteen and thin as a rail and hasn't eaten in twelve hours because she had a terrible weigh-in the day before, she knows that blaming the wine is just an excuse.
But she's curled up in the shower, hot water beating down against her back as she stares numbly at her toes, and she hurts in ways she didn't know she could. Her body aches and she dreads her early-morning practice she'll have to face the next day, sitting at the dinner table with her parents where she can't shift her weight without arousing suspicion; her throat feels tight and a childish sob is fighting to make it to the surface, battling valiantly against her impressively obstinate willpower as she desperately tries to hold herself together. Fingernails dig into her own sides as she uselessly wraps her arms around herself in an attempt to prevent the inevitable falling apart she feels approaching.
Lost in her own breakdown, she forgets the unexpected self-loathing on his face when she'd kicked him out, the shadows in his eyes as he tied his shoes and shuffled out of the room. Brief touches of memory brush against her wild distress, and she finally gives in, crying out the hour of wine and failure.
MFEO Part Two—You Can Breathe—Jack's Mannequin
You waited for me in the rain in the parking lot/cold hands, lips blue, clothes stuck to you/you could've phoned me for a ride
She gets into the car silently, not meeting your eyes. She's shaking and drenched, the steady rain outside having soaked through the jeans and t-shirt she's wearing. You can smell the familiar scent of sweat and sex and a cheap motel room—you're intimately familiar with the scent, having scrubbed it off yourself too many times to count—that even the rain couldn't wash away.
You stare at her, sarcasm and a sneer pushing at your lips as you struggle to find something—anything—to say that will get her to explain why you've been out looking for her for two hours in the middle of the night in winter. California is warmer than Ohio and neither of you are high school cheerleaders anymore, but age and distance seem to vanish and all you want to do is call her Tubbers and kick her out of the car and tell her to call Puck for a ride.
She sits quietly, shivering, squinting against the hot air blasting out of the dashboard, and you watch. You're both finishing up your penultimate semesters in college and she's grown far beyond the girl who was kicked out by her father for being pregnant at sixteen, but every year on the anniversary of the day her parents kicked her out, she calls her father and asks for his forgiveness. You weren't there the first two times, high school and Brittany and sheer disappointment at how far she'd let herself fall keeping you from letting her back into the role as her best friend. You weren't there the third time, even if you were both in college in San Francisco and met sometimes for coffee. You witnessed it first when you were nineteen and fed her shots of vodka until she stopped pacing furiously, and walked aimlessly around the hills of San Francisco with her the last two years ,and this year she hadn't answered your calls and you'd wound up driving around all night looking for her.
"You should've called," you finally say. The glare that used to send people twice your age running for cover has no impact on her, and you sigh, putting the gar into gear and rolling out of the parking lot.
"I needed air," she mumbles.
"Right," you say sarcastically. "Because going out for a stroll when it's 45 degrees and raining is a great idea. Especially after picking up some random prick to fuck your problems away. Way to go, Fabray."
She shrugs, still shivering. You come to a stop at a stoplight and look over at her trembling form; with a sigh, you tug off your sweatshirt and toss it at her.
"Don't die of hypothermia," you mumble. "And I hope you used a fucking condom." She is still silent, but strips off her wet shirt automatically and slides into the sweatshirt, sleeves tugged down over her hands as she curls in on herself.
The ride to her apartment is silent. You tug her not-too-gently out of the car and up to her door, digging the keys out of her pocket and leading her inside. Clinically, you strip off her wet jeans and get her into a pair of sweatpants and into bed, adding an extra blanket on top of her before you go and put on a pot of coffee. It's going to be a long night.
She wakes from a nightmare on the edges of a panic attack, mumbling about family and her daughter and her father and sin, and you make your way to her side from where you'd been sitting on the floor with a textbook in her lap.
"Breathe," you say softly, pushing her hair out of her face and stilling the frantic and aimless movements of her hands. "Breathe. You're okay."
She grips tightly to your shirt, burrowing into your shoulder as she cries, and you struggle to remember if she cried any of the other times you'd seen her break down. As her tears soak into the cotton of your t-shirt, you think that it feels a little bit like a breakdown; you tighten your arms around her waist and press an uncharacteristic kiss to her hair, and you wait.