Breakfast at Baratie's
by Memphis Lupine
(memphis_lupine@hotmail.com)
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Story One: Concrete Angel
I
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The first period bell rang with a resigned note of shrill air, and she grinned to herself, already tucked neatly away in her desk. Attending an actual school had been a rarity in the past year and, in contrast with the eleven other teenagers present in the Creative Writing class, she loved the excited feeling that bubbled in her abdomen. We're going to do it, she cheered, toying with her fingers over the crisp edge of her new notebook. The bold androgynous handwriting she used decorated her notebook with her name and the class' heading, telling her every time she glanced at it that she was free.
"Good morning, you miscreants and future hoodlums," a raspy female voice executed her thoughts and she looked up, the image of featureless attention. The elderly woman standing in the fore of the room, a Missus Edith Walston with all the strict sharpness her name brought to mind, glowered with the kind of disappointed glare that must be accumulated over time. She felt an immediate kinship with the woman, knowing she would most likely not have much in common with the bored students sharing the room with her, and inwardly smiled. "We'll be working on our historical stories today," Mrs. Walston continued in a dry voice, walking steadily to her short desk and flipping open the text laying plainly on its surface, "and I would like for someone other than Mister Ulan to actually finish before the end of the week, if it doesn't kill you."
She looked up, beady eyes peeking over the half-moon glimmer of her glasses, and she pointed briefly at her with a disparaging quickness. "Speaking of which, Mister Ulan, would you please help Miss," she hesitated to glance at the updated, handwritten roster, "Miss Natalie Tartan." She crooked the same finger at a boy who was scribbling what appeared to be shorthand notes over an already wrinkled and crammed paper, smiling with a creaking fondness. "Miss Natalie," she began to explain, turning to the flame-haired girl, "I'm going to send the one student in here who actually gives a damn over to explain what we're doing and what I don't want to see handed in. Mister Ulan, if you will." She gestured and turned stiffly on her heel, retiring herself to an existence behind the worn desk.
Natalie waited patiently, watching him from the corner of her eye as he gathered together what seemed like an impossible amount of paper, sketchpads, and pencils into his arms. He kicked the faded brown backpack near his chair to the one parallel to it, one exactly next to hers, and promptly dumped the contents of his arms in the seat. "Be there in a second," he said cheerfully, and he swung over the adjoined desk on the chair, landing and sliding momentarily over the slick tiling. "Wha!"
When he regained his balance and somehow arranged the stack of clumsy paper onto his new desk, plopping into it, he turned to face her. "Nice tattoos," was the first thing he said with an impressed tone in his voice, referring to the black spirals and webbing decorating her arms from an inch or so above her elbow to just below her shoulder. The aesthetic was meant to imitate lace or delicate spiderwebs, and she thumbed the tight black cloth of her turtleneck sleeveless with a surprised feeling of warmth. Judging her expression correctly, he grinned. "I'm not exactly normal, myself," he said as if in answer to an unspoken question, pointing with a resigned look to his long nose and large mouth.
"I'm Natalie," she said after a moment, rolling her eyes as she spoke, knowing it had already been shared. He grabbed her pale hand with his dark one and shook firmly, his grin turning only slightly mocking.
"I'm Ulan Harris," he informed by way of introduction, and he picked open his ragged binder, exposing to the light a ring of silver spirals nearly broken by the weight of countless sheets of paper stuffed into it. "And I," he furthered, "am a writer. And an artist." He smiled sheepishly, adjusting the line of his checkered bandana where it kept the front of his immensely curly black hair from spilling into his eyes.
With a bluntness that caught him off guard, she questioned, "Are you black?"
"Partly," he answered, picking up a pencil and scribbling something indefinable at the bottom of one of the nearly filled pages. "Why? Are you deep south or something?" He said it teasingly, good-naturedly, and she felt no insult in his words.
It surprised her, did not fit into her sense of normality, for there to be no insults in speech, and she hated that it surprised her.
We're going to do it, her older sister's voice echoed loudly in her head, and she found a small smile creep its way onto her face. "Deep south?" she repeated, injecting a disbelieving tone into her words. "The hell are you talking about? If I was deep south, do you honestly think I'd only have two eyes? Seriously." She rolled her brown eyes for emphasis, and he grinned a wide gash of teeth at her, something innately friendly.
"Point taken," he replied breezily, tearing the scrap of paper at the bottom out of his binder and folding it into perfect fourths, then eighths. "My mom and I went down to Alabama one time," and he flicked the folded paper at her, "and there was this construction everywhere. Alabama's about two thousand years behind everyone else, I swear, because we're driving along and suddenly, there's these roads that aren't even dirt, they're like this kind of Paleolithic rubble the state legislature's decided is worth digging up. Honest to God," he crossed his heart empathetically, glancing at the ceiling for support as she watched, fascinated, "there were dinosaur bones sticking up everywhere. They have them strung up for telephone wires and stuff. Brontosaurus neck is a Cellular South connection tower. We figured they were going to replace the roads with that mortar stuff the Egyptians used, and maybe in a hundred years, they'll put cement down or something.
"Anyway," he interrupted himself, and she started laughing. "What's so funny?" he asked innocently.
"You're an idiot," she chuckled.
"Aw," he faked a Southern belle voice, fluttering his eyelashes at her, "ya'll jus' sayin' that."
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"Spaghetti," Ulan stated over the din of the high school's collective lunch, scooting his tray along and helping himself to a reasonable amount of the otherwise indefinable mess. She looked at it dubiously, then, with an extreme look of apprehension crossing her features, ladled some onto her own neon yellow tray. "At least," he continued in a doubtful voice, "I think it's spaghetti. It hasn't killed anyone yet, so it isn't the chicken alfredo."
"You want spaghetti in your hair?" she asked pleasantly, lifting her tray over her head with one hand, the other holding her creative writing notebook to her hip. She trailed after him as he bulldozed his way through a group of the beautiful people, keeping her tray carefully out of knocking distance.
"Don't even joke about my hair," he retorted, taking a place at an empty circular table near the back, between a locked door leading into the woods and the wall lined with smudged windows. "It's the only thing about my appearance I'm really proud of," and he lifted his fork, spearing a tiny fraction of meat, or what might be meat. "If I die, tell my mother never to wear the red dress again," he mouthed around the food and she gave him a dirty look.
"Talking with food in mouth," pointed Natalie, taking a testing bite and chewing once before swallowing. "Mmm: bland, and yet unsatisfying." Shrugging, she took a few more small bites and scraped her teeth over her tongue, keeping her lips firmly placed together, dark maroon lipstick smearing just the faintest in the corner. "This is daily fare?"
"Alas, if only it weren't so," he muttered, twisting a clump of slightly cold noodles around his fork and shoveling it into his mouth. Swallowing, he continued, "I still insist I found a gym sock in my burrito one day." At her are you insane or just stupid? look, he hastened to clarify. "We're not talking Taco Bell burrito, which, by the way, is still nasty, but school burrito, where they recycle items from the lost and found for construction purposes. Cardboard makes a cheap substitute for dry tortillas, anyway. I bite into this burrito, and suddenly I'm pulling threads out of my braces, thank God for miracles and orthodontists deciding I didn't need them anymore. I pull out a particularly gruesome victim of Joel Underwood's feet from my mouth, and I haven't eaten Mexican since." He bit into the lump of spaghetti and made a face.
"That's disgusting," she made sure to inform him just as he said in an odd voice, "And speaking of Joel Underwood…"
She blinked, following his gaze and spying a senior of average height and not-exactly-average musculature, and instantly recognized the genre. "Jock from Hell," she stated wryly, twirling her fork in the rounded lump on her tray and finding it alarmingly difficult. "The kind of guy who stifles the creative individuality of the singular human."
Ulan looked at her as if she was an angel descended from heaven to speak the word of the Lord. "The new girl speaks truth," he agreed, himself dressed in a clashing adornment of yellow jeans and a long, shining black shirt with one long sleeve and the other torn into a lack of sleeve. "But that's not the only reason I loathe Joel Underwood and wish for him to explode in a horrible manner during every pep rally ever held under the roof of this high school," he added without batting an eye.
"Oo," she said with an arched eyebrow and sly grin, "do tell."
He merely lifted one elongated brown finger and stabbed it decisively in an area near the aforementioned Jock from Hell, his face morphing into a mask of wistfulness. She turned obligingly, slurping at a meaty strand of flavorless spaghetti, and questioned absently, "The brunette?" He shook his head no. "The girl with obvious stuffage of bra?" He gave her an exasperated look. "The guy in the muscle shirt?" she asked innocently, and he rolled his eyes, stabbing once more. She squinted and followed the line directly, straight to a fairy-blonde girl who appeared as if she had been cut straight from the pages of a fairy tale. "My, my," she grinned.
"That," he said in a dreamy tone of voice, "is Chamomile Eastwind, the most popular girl at school. She has amethyst eyes and, to quote a certain popular teenflick, 'I burn, I pine, I perish.'"
"Damn," she found fit to comment. "Couldn't choose an easier girl, could you?"
He smirked at her.
"Nope, not happening, I don't want to deal with guys right now," she forced out in a light voice, hearing the hated voice in her head as it taunted her to say why.
We're going to do it.
"Anyway," he was saying, "she's always been weaker than everybody else, and no one knows why. I've gone to the same drama camp as her for the past three summers, and I manage to spend time with her there, and we act like friends, but as soon as the summer internment is over and school starts again," he shrugged helplessly, then made a repelled face at his lunch. "Maybe the spaghetti is lethal."
"She sounds like a bitch," Natalie said with a mirroring shrug, tossing her fork to the tray and lifting a napkin to rub at her tongue. "This food is horrendous."
"Eat at Baratie's," he responded automatically, as if rehearsing an old line or advertisement, the glorious beauty of amethyst-eyed Chamomile Eastwind seemingly forgotten. "Try to get there when Sef or The Sandman is on duty, because they really are the best cooks. They only work at night, though, so it might be kinda hard if your older sister's a stickler for curfews."
"The Sandman," she repeated in a tone that meant something or other along the lines of are you messing around again? She walked behind him once more, dumping the chunky remnants of her school lunch into the one trashcan with a sadistic relish. "Like, puts you to sleep Sandman? Or Neil Gaiman spooky Sandman?"
"Neither," Ulan answered, sliding his tray and fork into the slot that led to the washing room. "He's his very own personal kind of Sandman. He smokes, he chases girls, and he swears a blue streak."
"Wow," Natalie commented as they left the cafeteria for pursuit of the library and a planned search for David Eddings books, "he sounds like a dream."
"You burn, you pine, you perish?" suggested her newfound friend and social salvation.
"I'll leave that brand of idiocy to you," she retorted airily.
"Ouch," and he held the library door open for her.
I'm going to make it, she thought to herself, and it didn't seem so bad anymore.
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Notes: Ah. I haven't written friendship stuff in so long, I'd forgotten how much fun it can be. (I really hope it was as much fun to read as it was to write. And, yes, I know it wasn't very long, and I apologize.) I do sort of know where I'm going with Story One, and it's mostly going to serve as an introduction of everyone (more or less). Ulan is Usopp, Natalie is Nami, Chamomile is Kaya, and that's it for new names and whatnot. I did my best to stay close (or somewhat close) to the original name (and I have no idea if Ulan is an actual name, but I liked writing it). I mean no insult to Alabama at all, but they do have crappy road systems. And the 'more than two eyes' thing is a reference to the old joke of incest in the deep south. Which might be true for all I know, but I haven't been living in Mississippi long enough to know. *winks*
Pop Culture Reference: Neil Gaiman again, as well as the old Sandman stories and all. A line shamelessly filched from '10 Things I Hate About You,' Cameron talking about Bianca, and a reference to David Eddings – he's one of my favorite fantasy writers, he and his wife Leigh.
Disclaimer: Don't break my heart. You know I don't own them.
Feedback: Still highly encouraged. :'] I would really like to know if I'm writing okay.
Written: April 1, 2003.
Revised: ----