TITLE: Dry Kind of Love 2/?

AUTHOR: tanith

RATING: PG-13, just to be safe.

ARCHIVE: It's all yours, just let me know.

FEEDBACK: Bring it on. akirgo@yahoo.com

SPOILERS: Very minor for "Earshot."

DISCLAIMER: Same as before, but amended thusly: The town of Middlebury belongs to itself. The deep emotional scars it has left me with are mine. They're up for grabs, though, if you want em.

SUMMARY: You can run, but you can't hide. Future fic.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Patience, please! I'm still setting up our heroes' calm little world before shredding it to pieces. At least I've thrown in some (hopefully) recognizable characters by now, and some yummy foreshadowing, too...

*************

The dream is always the same.

She wakes on a bed of cold, hard stone. She looks down at herself; she is clothed in a long dark dress, pale wrists and hands and ankles and feet jutting out from beyond the rich fabric. She drops off the stone platform onto the ground, and pads silently across the room, the edges of which shimmer and mist and remain out of sight. Still, she walks forward with purpose, rounding a corner and finding herself in a sterile white bathroom. She places her hands on either side of the porcelain sink and looks up. The white tiled wall reflects back at her; the mirror is filled with empty white space, barren, with nothing in between the wall and the glass.

She has no reflection.

And with that realization, she wakes.

*************

By now, Zoe is so used to the dream that it no longer bothers her. Much. It still makes her nervous if she thinks about it too long, but she has grown accustomed to not thinking about it, and so she doesn't. There is far too much else to think about anyway. Like APs. And finals. And colleges. And Roger...

Zoe sighs and rolls over in bed, smushing her hair down with the back of her pillow. It's unusually warm for a Vermont May, and Zoe shifts uncomfortably under her sheets, her bare legs breaking free to caress the cool breeze drifting in the open window. Last year this time, there was still snow on the ground. Global warming, she thinks. A sign of the coming apocalypse.

She glances over at the clock on the bedside table. The glowing red numbers read 3:55. Through the walls, Zoe can faintly hear her father snoring. She sighs; she knows she will get no more sleep tonight. Resigned, she reaches over and flicks on the lamp. By her bed is a worn copy of "Neverwhere." She flips it open to her favorite part and begins to read.

*************

"You snore like a broken weed wacker," Zoe informs her father the next morning at breakfast.

William raises his eyes from the pages of The Burlington Free Press, and his glasses slip down the length of his nose. "Do I now?"

"I think it's more comparable to a rusty chainsaw, actually," Anne says. She leans against the island and spoons a cluster of Fruit Loops into her mouth. Sometimes she eats at the table with William and Zoe, but mostly she prefers to stand. The entire family is always alive with nervous energy; none of them can stay seated for long. Zoe has been teased more than once about how much her dad paces when he teaches.

The teasing is clearly the biggest disadvantage to having both of one's parents be teachers. And one at each school, too, Zoe has often thought ruefully, so there's no escaping. When she was in elementary school, Zoe was purposely not placed in her mom's kindergarten class, but once in high school, it was inevitable that she would have to take one of her dad's classes. There was only one 11th grade AP English class. Zoe wanted to take it. William taught it. End of story.

"I'll try not to embarrass you too much, luv," he had told her when the counselor had given her the news. "And likewise, you'll do the same for me."

He had smiled at her and she had smiled back. "Does put me at a disadvantage, though," she had told him. "Means I can't write any revealing stories about my family."

"I might specially request those."

Zoe smiles at the memory. "I think I feel my next reflective piece coming on," she says. "My Dad, The Human Outboard Motor.'"

"That's funny," William says, flipping the page of his newspaper casually. "I think I feel some creative grading coming on, too." He mimes drawing a big fat "F" on an imaginary paper in the air.

Anne laughs, and plops her bowl down in the sink. As she turns on the faucet, she checks her wrist watch. "Uh oh, folks, we're all going to be late again."

"You know what's not fair?" Zoe grumbles as she swings her backpack up onto her shoulder. "We might all be late, but I'm the only one who gets detention."

"Life's not fair, pet," William says, reaching over his daughter to snag a last sip of tea. "But at least you never have to worry about getting a ride to school."

That was true, Zoe decided as she headed out the door. So there was at least one advantage to having both her parents be teachers.

*************

Cafeterias tend to be loud and hot and soaked with the stench of burning grease, and Middlebury Union High School's cafeteria is no exception. The cafeteria is as old as the school, dating back to the early 1950s, and the only updates it has been given since then are a new layer of linoleum on the floor and four new drinking fountains. Zoe sits in the corner near the only one of the four that is still working, cutting her slice of pizza into pieces with a plastic knife and fork. It's too slimy to eat any other way.

"I think they're trying to kill us," Roger says, finishing the last bite of his plate-size chocolate chip cookie. He holds the plate itself up in front of his face; the grease from the cookie has turned the white paper murky grey and left it nearly transparent. "I mean, I can practically see through this thing."

Sarah makes her patented "eww" face at Roger. "And that is precisely why I bring my *own* lunch," she says, taking a large bite of her homemade sandwich and gloating at her companions.

Zoe takes a thoughtful sip of Country Time lemonade. "You know," she says, "once, when my uncle Alex was visiting, he started telling me this gonzo story about how his high school cafeteria lady tried to put rat poison in the Jell-O, but then my mom gave him The Look and he shut up."

"You don't mess with the lady when she's got The Look," Roger confirms.

"But you don't think it's really true, do you?" Sarah asks, scrunching up her nose. "About the cafeteria lady and the Jell-O?"

Zoe considers for a moment before answering. "No. Uncle Alex is full of it. He used to try to pull quarters out of my ear and all that crap." She pushes the plate of half-eaten pizza away. "I can't take any more of this. It tastes like burnt rubber." She stands and walks over to the garbage can and starts to scrape off her tray. "Can you believe my dad actually likes this stuff?" she asks over her shoulder.

"Maybe compared to the food in England it's really good," Roger suggests.

"Then I pity the British."

"I don't pity them a bit," Sarah says, as she rises to dispose of the remnants of her lunch. "Least not the women. They've got themselves a whole country full of men who talk like your dad." Her eyes grow misty.

"Sarah!" Zoe stares at her friend, aghast. "That's disgusting! Stop it!"

"I'm only kidding," Sarah says, recovering slightly. But her cheeks are still so red that she has to turn away.

Roger is watching them from the table, an expression of barely contained laughter smothering his face. Zoe sits back down across from him, her head in her hands.

"God. It's bad enough to have Kelly and Emily and their minions, all of whom otherwise hate me, trying to get placed in my group for projects just so that they can come over to my house and make up lame excuses to repeatedly go into his study. And then it's like," she pitches her voice higher to mimic the Kelly and Emily minions, "Oh, hi, Mr. Barnet! I think I left a book in here, let me bend over in my skanky top right in front of you and pretend to look for it!'" She fixes Sarah with a steely gaze. "I really don't need that from you, too."

Sarah sits down next to her friend but still doesn't look at her. "Jeeze, sorry."

"Oh, come on, Zoe!" Roger supresses his laughter long enough to say. "It's not as if your dad sees it as anything other than ridiculous. Besides, he's so into your mom it's scary." He leans in low over the table, grinning. "Remember that time on the camping trip when we caught them--"

Zoe slams her hands over her ears and starts humming, loudly. "I'm not listening to this!" she yells between bars of "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts." "Must we bring up everything that makes me want to hurl?"

"Well, we could talk about the food again..." Sarah says.

"Arrgh! That's it! I'm going to class!" Zoe says and storms away.

Roger and Sarah look at each other for a moment before going after her. Roger reaches her first and taps her on the shoulder.

"Er," he says. "We all have class together. Remember? It's called AP English, your dad teaches it, Kelly and Emily sit up front and bat their eyelashes at him...sound familiar?"

Zoe freezes in her tracks, her shoulders tense. Then she spins around and kisses Roger hard on the lips.

"I hate you," she says as the kiss breaks. She turns on here heel and walks the rest of the way to class, smiling in spite of herself.

Sarah approaches Roger who is standing completely still, grinning like an idiot.

"You're grinning like an idiot," she tells him.

Roger just watches Zoe's retreating form, still smiling. "We should really fight more often."

*************

TBC