Black Hole Sun
By Pouncer
The stars shine with a faint glow, dimmed by city lights, yet she still feels their pull. Standing at the end of the driveway waiting for Luke to collect her for another in an endless round of parties and revelry, Marissa looks up into the night sky. A year and a half ago her family had gone to a resort in the desert. Her mother had disappeared into the hushed recesses of the spa for renewal and pampering, her father had fled to the silent cathedral of the golf course, and she had been left to supervise Caitlin as she swam in the pool and took her first horseback riding lessons. She'd stolen away one night after Caitlin had fallen asleep in their shared room, wandering out onto the sandy paths of a walking trail. She was shocked to see the brilliance of the night sky spread out overhead, infinite suns rich and black and shimmering.
She'd found a flat stone ledge to perch on, craning her neck to see constellations that were smothered by grey fog in Newport. The cold radiance of stars in the crystalline air awoke her imagination, and she stayed out for hours staring at the night's endless depth. She'd fallen asleep on her rocky seat and been awakened at dawn by an ominous rattle. She'd started away from the snake, scrambling back to her room to find she hadn't been missed.
She wants the sharp edge of a billion stars tonight, but instead she meets a boy on the ground. Dirty blond hair, black leather jacket, solid body, smooth grace in his every move. He spins some crazy story of car theft and a rampaging mother that's too dramatic to be believed. He must be the loony cousin from Boston her dad's talked about.
His mouth closes with sensual abandon as he inhales a cigarette. Marissa longs for the intense bite of smoke. When she wants too much, nicotine dulls the ache. The boy lights her bummed cigarette with a practiced sharing of the red tip of his own. Mr. Cohen's appearance makes her flick her own barely smoked cigarette away, knowing her mother's words about future skin damage too well to want to hear them again.
Her mother's words slice her skin like flensing knives, a thousand cuts of prodding jealousy for her youth. Her mother wants to devour her, become her through some twisted alchemy and reclaim her lost youth. Surgery and laser resurfacing and the newest topical chemical cocktails can't erase the hard set of her features, the pursed calculation of her mouth, the shrewdness in her eyes. Yet still her mother will try to cling to a past she never had, that she had lived only in imagination and now through Marissa.
A litany of expectations for The Perfect Daughter load Marissa down. She heeds their call and reminds the Cohens about the fashion fundraiser the next night. Luke's kiss in the truck testifies to his possessiveness, open suspicion on his chiseled face as he looks at the new Cohen. He doesn't see her loyalty, only the threat of a new boy. He doesn't see her, doesn't know her inner self, just wants a golden girl hanging on his arm to complete the image of the water polo Team Captain.
The next day she lies to the suited menace at the door and listens to the deceit streaming from her father's lips. His affection is unconditional if absentminded. He is the only person she believes when he says he loves her. The fashion show benefit that night allows her mother to nod in sycophantic approval at Marissa's organizational efforts, proof of her maternal accomplishments. Marissa endures until the end, holding the knowledge of the reserve bottle of vodka in her tote bag close to calm her nerves.
Holly's beach house holds the usual mad crush of feral children pretending to be mature. Marissa fills her cup to the brim, glad that she'll be able to numb the emptiness now. The sharp bite of alcohol burns her throat and spreads blessed calm through her body. She finds the new Cohen and flirts with him, wanting more of his intense regard. His eyes have such depth. He makes her think he might see *her* and not just the façade she hides behind. As she plays cards, she tracks his every move. Seth's blurted accusation about car stealing and Chino shocks her. He'd told her the truth on the driveway. His bravery and her blindness shame her. She reaches for the vodka to find the dull, safe place again.
Panic and nausea race through her body the next morning when she wakes. This isn't her room! She doesn't remember the end of the party, doesn't remember anything after Cohen had outed his erstwhile cousin. Head pounding, she looks around to see Cohen and cohort sprawled across the room. How did she get here? There's no time to wonder; she creeps homeward by the faint light of the rising sun. No more drinking, she vows. Not like that. She'll have to find some other way to soothe the pain, calm the resentment, fill the emptiness inside her.
General Relativity: The geometric theory of gravitation developed by Albert Einstein, incorporating and extending the theory of special relativity to accelerated frames of reference and introducing the principle that gravitational and inertial forces are equivalent. The theory has consequences for the bending of light by massive objects, the nature of black holes, and the fabric of space and time.
Driving Ryan and Seth to some undisclosed location the next night like the bagman from one of Summer's car movies, she wonders how they broke her out of her Junior Newpsie role. And here she was going to stay on the O.C. definition of the straight and narrow. She only takes the risks accepted by her peers, not the risks of kindness or true adventure. When Cohen mocks her for liking punk, her reply claiming anger is not believed. They don't know the rage that bubbles under her skin, the bile that twists in her stomach day after day. It turns food to ashes, transforms friends into competitors, shifts day to night and back again. She has to fulfill crushing expectations, navigate treacherous social shoals, excel as a student, and bear a thousand other burdens. She does it alone, with no real support or comfort from her friends. Even Summer, oldest and closest, doesn't understand the pressure.
Charcoal blackness chokes the stars above the empty pool. She sits with Ryan on the edge, Cohen riding with metronomic rhythm on his skateboard behind them. She listens to Ryan's words, hearing a life worse than hers in so many ways. Yet he bears his burdens alone, just like her. She knows they're the same under their skin, except he has a courage she can't imagine ever possessing. She's been the moon orbiting Luke's steady planet for years and now Ryan's wandering comet has come to disturb the equation derived from gravity and physics. She witnesses it Monday night after he sends her away following her clumsy offer of intimacy at the model home. His sudden arrival in Luke's truck presages his acknowledgement of responsibility for the house fire. Some devil's bargain she can't comprehend was struck between her boyfriend and this new enigma. The memory of Ryan's anguished rejection, his forthright confession and set face while the police handcuffed his wrists bring scalding tears to her eyes when she goes back to bed.
She calls forth her favorite fantasy to try and get calm. She'd taken astronomy last year in school, enduring the mocking of her friends to learn about the music of the stars. She loved the myths behind the constellations, the rules of the cosmos. She'd been captured by the idea of black holes – a gravitational force so immense that it pulled all matter towards it in an ever-slowing spiral of time, crushing atoms to dust and beyond inside its event horizon. If you know the rules of astronomy, you can predict the outcome of any permutation of interaction. Mass causes gravity, which pulls on other celestial bodies causing orbit, spin, rotation. None of her friends react the same way twice, and she needs to know that the universe obeys the laws of its structure. So many strange and wonderful phenomena dot the night sky. Her teacher had told the class they were lucky to have the Hubble space telescope and the Chandra X-Ray observatory orbiting overhead. He'd told them how theories about the nature of the universe were being proved based on new knowledge gleaned from the skies. She holds the pattern of the solar system in her head, an orrery of twirling spheres.
Luke and his cronies, Summer and her friends – she doesn't cluster with them any more, but the tentative bonds with Ryan and Seth haven't coalesced into a steady constellation. Her mother's diatribe on juvenile delinquents from Chino makes her understand that the dream of belonging would have turned to a nightmare in days. She rejects Seth's plea to visit Ryan in juvie, imagining the silent punishment that would follow as her mother's displeasure flared.
Escape Velocity: how fast an object has to be moving away from a planetary object in order to escape its gravitational field.
Vegas Night returns her to Luke's orbit, even if the pattern isn't the same as before. Watching Ryan's mother tumble over furniture and rage at bystanders makes her renew the vow made when she woke up in the Cohen pool house the morning after the fashion show. Alcohol might dull the pain, but the consequences are too great except for times of direst need. Ryan said he was leaving with his mother. Some horrible collision will occur in Mrs. Atwood's wake instead, she knows.
The prospect of her debut fills her with apathy. Her duties as lead debutante chafe, but she tries her best to hide her discontent. Matching dateless girls with free boys and trying to get the unruly herd to dance the waltz makes her want to scream. The electric feel of Ryan's hand on her back tingles on her skin long after the end of her cursory positioning lesson. Luke's touch never excites her like that; usually she has to stop herself from shrinking away from his hard hands.
Her father's dilemma threatens to shatter her family into shards sharp enough to cut. Her parents arguments fill the house with discord. Pulled hither and yon between Ryan and Luke, she doesn't know what to do. Her heart yearns for the thrill of Ryan's newness and contradictorily longs for the routine and sameness of Luke's presence. At the end of the disastrous night, her father exposed as a thief, beaten into the ground, she can't endure the conflict in her heart any more and runs from them both. The course she takes is uncharted and she is blind to potential obstacles and hazards. A rogue body on no set path.
Event Horizon: the radius from a black hole inside of which it is impossible to escape (a "point of no return" called the Schwarzschild radius).
She lets Ryan's direct grin and confident air lure her into a rendezvous. He never shows up for their evening looking after Caitlin. Seth's intervention on behalf of his new best friend warms her into granting a second chance. Before leaving for the Cohen's house, she looks into the mirror, her mother's exhortations about looking her best ambushing her confidence. Appearance is all that matters to her mother, not character or depth or complexity. When Marissa flips through the latest issue of InStyle, she knows that the celebrities pictured in its pages are the pinnacle of her mother's values. All Marissa sees is plastic, manufactured surfaces devoid of reality. She doesn't want to listen to her mother, but she's too accustomed to preening and primping to forego the ritual. Her mother thinks she looks best with her hair down. Maybe Ryan will too.
The night by the pool is magic. So long since she could play and let herself outside the shell of proper bored behavior expected by Newport. She's frustrated and saddened when Seth's call cracks the fragile mood of romance. She'd longed to taste Ryan's lips. The news of Luke's shooting brings back their shared history, and she's ashamed of her earlier happiness without him. Ryan has once again done the right thing, while she betrayed the closeness she's had with Luke for years.
She's so confused, torn between the two of them. Her mother counsels Luke's cause and he asks her to Mr. Nichol's birthday party before she runs into Ryan at the burrito stand. The night of the party, she's smothered by Luke's hovering and glad-handing and recalls the reasons for her disaffection. She tries to seek out Ryan, to talk with him about his intentions and recapture their shivery magic. Instead she walks into the pool house to find him in a steamy clinch with Mr. Nichol's young and voluptuous girlfriend. Her mother had talked disparagingly about the "whore" Gabrielle, and Marissa had wondered if a wedding ring really made that much of a difference. Ryan's hands on Gabrielle's half-dressed back shake her with their carnality. She wants to experience that warmth for herself, but she's been wrong about him. She flees to Luke, offering the one thing she's always held back.
In his cold bed, lying on her back as he claims her, she feels tears gathering in her eyes. The blunt pressure of his latex-sheathed cock stabs at her, his heavy body crushing her into the mattress, his mouth biting at her neck like a vampire. He'll devour her, she knows he will. His cock will invade her womb and eat her up from the inside out, converting her into his dutiful concubine. She manages to endure his pounding, through thrust after thrust of pain. She curls up miserably on her side after he shudders and groans and nearly flattens her with his force. He rolls in behind her, suffocating her even more although he misses her silent tears by falling into a dazed sleep. She's given herself to him now and she can't go back. She'll always be recaptured by the force of his gravity.
Singularity: The center of a black hole, where the curvature of spacetime is maximal. At the singularity, the gravitational tides diverge; no solid object can even theoretically survive hitting the singularity.
The trip to Tijuana is supposed to be a diversion from her problems. Her parents aren't talking to each other any more. Her father makes it clear that he no longer has time to fulfill her hunger for affection, pushing her out of the house behind Summer. The bickering in the Range Rover and Ryan's heat emanating from his side of the back seat is almost more than she can bear. She welcomes the distraction of chicken trucks and auto repair to keep her from screaming. Summer's barbs about the motel make her want to strangle her best friend and she lets Ryan drag her to the vending machine to escape the rancor between Seth and Summer. Their talk resolves nothing, but she's still drawn in by his intensity. Then her cell phone rings.
Her father tells her about the divorce and her feet go numb. The only solid thing she had is imploding in a rush of his weakness and her mother's voraciousness. Even waking up surrounded by Ryan's warmth can't ease the pain totally. But maybe this weekend away will let her find some peace. Lose herself in music and dancing and the jagged bite of alcohol, just this once.
Walking on the catwalk to the suspended dance floor, the music pulses through her cells. She's almost happy, the tequila shot simmering through her bloodstream to calm her anguish. Bodies grind against one another in a rhythmic blur of flesh and then she distinguishes two of them. Holly and Luke, having what might as well be vertical sex in full sight of Tijuana and the world. She'd surrendered to him and now he's betrayed her. Her first thought is "maybe it was just this once," but Holly dispels that fantasy. The revelation of Luke's betrayals is like vipers striking her skin.
She flees the club, escaping back to the hotel to huddle over the misery of embedded snake fangs. If she tells her mother about Luke's faithlessness, she knows Mom will advise her to do whatever she must to get him back and keep him. Julie Cooper wants Marissa to be her bionic clone, better, stronger, faster. Marissa can anticipate Julie's words; a knife plunged into her chest to cut open her ribs. Acrylic-taloned nails will claw her heart out, filling the hole with petrochemical ooze to cover her skin and make her hard and brittle. She'll smother and die under the plastic shell. Only the asps will remain, two-headed, injecting their venom into her skin and pulling her towards a future she can't escape. Summer's arrival and suggestion of dinner roils her stomach with nausea. She'd puke if she had to eat anything now. Only alcohol can soothe the utter destruction of her life. She grabs the pills from Summer's purse with the vague thought that they'll make the pain of snake fangs go away.
She can feel the vipers embedded in her skin pulling her towards destruction as she tries to find a quiet bar. A black hole lies just out of sight and she's already caught in its immense gravity well. The mass of her future doom is concentrated so intensely that she can't escape, can only rush onwards. Time slows as she knocks back shot after shot of tequila. She feels like she's floating in space, weightless and untethered from her past. She motions for one more shot from the bartender and opens the bottle of painkillers. Maybe this way the agony will be over by the time she's pulled apart inside the event horizon, the inevitability of her supposedly perfect future.
Her body will lengthen, brittle shell stretching like taffy once she's inside the singularity, where time and location switch places. Everyone will still see her, think that she's just distant and cool, but she'll be racing towards her doom and nothing they can do will stop her. Her body and soul will tear apart from one another the closer she gets to that ideal. No escape velocity is fast enough to avoid the exploded remnants of her sunny Newport life. She can feel time slowing, location rushing by as she leaves the bar.
Stumbling through the crowds, she knows that nothing she can do will stop her destruction.
Notes: My deepest thanks go to SerialKarma and wwolfe for their beta efforts. You're the bestest. I consulted Ted Bunn () and Matt McIrvin () for information on black holes and the Zoom Astronomy Dictionary () and the Imagine the Universe Dictionary at NASA () for definitions .
Disclaimer: Marissa, Ryan, Seth and other characters and situations from The O.C. are not my property. I'm just borrowing them for a while.