I have fallen shamefully behind on my thank yous, so to Anasatsia98, MegLPie, AshleyKless, TD, IndigoBoat, Ola L, Sophietschiii, Cyanide Laced, Giulia1410, heidi0620, Jj, Yaboi, 2001, Dusktreader, akina speranza, anonymfan, and anyone further back who has left a review on ffnet, thank you so much for taking the time to comment. To the readers on Ao3, I always reply to your comments each time I update the story, but thank you again. You are the people that ensure I return with lengthy chapters.
On less lighthearted note, I use fiction to escape and I'm sure many of you do as well. I won't speak about the state of the world beyond sincerely wishing safety, happiness, and health to you all.
'O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my
children...'
~ One Hour to Madness and Joy, by Walt Whitman (1860)*
Chapter Forty-Eight - O' Savage and tender achings
Damp, December air misted the windows of the common room, the condensation broken by lashes of rain dripping down the glass.
Kathleen uncurled her legs, stretching her limbs across the tarnished floorboards. The movement disturbed the labyrinth of papers arranged around her in an endless spiral of algebra. Her eyes traced the numbers - her gaze clouding on the blotted, scribbled out mistakes which littered the pages. Her days always seemed to circle back to some sort of numerical torture. Which ring of hell mathematics belonged to was for Dante to decide, but without Cameron's guidance, Kat was ready to hurl herself headfirst into the lake outside.
Her tutor had been absent ever since the events of yesterday; choosing to sit at the edge of the group in resentful silence. Neil's tentative glances failed to soften Cameron's resolve, and even Knox's attempts at quiet companionship had been rebuffed. The truth remained unspoken, but undeniable. They missed him.
A sigh escaped her lips, incongruent with banal simplicity of the day. No tempers had flared, no wit had been tested, and most unsettling of all, no wry smiles with razor words had put an end to any - admittedly - unruly antics. Meeks' head may heal from chess roulette, but Kat feared their wavering friendship with Charlie's roommate may not. Her thoughts trailed off into the maelstrom of numbers once more, all focus swept up in its turbulent tide until heavy footsteps dropped like rocks, breaking through the surface of her daze. The sound reverberated through the floorboards, each thunderous step slowing until the noise halted inches from her ear. Kat pushed herself up onto her elbows, chin resting on her knuckles as she looked up to see Cameron staring intently down at her.
"Um, hello?"
The surprising visitor nodded curtly, "give me your paper to correct as soon as it's finished and remember to estimate when you're uncertain. You keep leaving answers blank." His glare intensified for a moment, his voice growing loud against the abrupt silence descending upon the common room. Kat nodded; her jaw numb. Shock, it seemed, was universal. Her cheeks reddened at the attention of her classmates, their eyebrows arched as whispers surged into the void in conversation.
"Thank you." He turned on his heel without a reply, leaving her words lost to the gossipmongers' din. The creases marring her forehead deepened as she caught Neil's hopeful eyes. As predictable as Cameron appeared against the fervour of the Carpe Diem club, Kathleen was beginning to suspect him to be the true wildcard. Beyond his temper, nothing about his behaviour had seemed certain in recent days. She shook herself from her wandering thoughts, her focus sharpening at her name in Fraser's mouth.
"Who cares about a one-man mission to kill your friends when Kathleen's grades are on the line," Fraser surveyed the room, slumping further into his armchair with affected laziness. "I never could have guessed the key to Cameron's forgiveness is homework." His sarcasm elicited snickers from the boys gathered around him like fawning subjects at the foot of cheap throne. Kat rolled her eyes and scribbled out yet another wrong answer.
Her pencil scratched a soothing rhythm of answering and erasing as the drama disintegrated into low murmurs once more. In her distraction, she almost missed the pen thrown in her direction until it landed with a thump, rolling across the floor until it tapped her foot. She blinked. Like déjà vu, a pair of brown shoes took five long strides towards her. A hand descended to grasp the pen, leaning over to scrawl answers in the gaps on her page before it pressed a finger to its owners' lips. With a wink, Fraser was gone.
Kat looked between the newly completed equations - working out included- and the whirlwind helper absconding like a criminal from the scene of a crime. She watched as the charming boy melted into the defensive bully she had first met. Every step towards Hopkins hardened the set of his shoulders, each glance toward his seat solidified the steel in his eyes, and soon his smirk twisted into a copy of theirs. Kat watched his transformation, thinking back to the fleeting moments of his kindness. It would be a blessing, she realised, if their fragile friendship rooted in shadows could survive. She turned, expecting to meet Knox's disapproving gaze. Despite his self-proclaimed tolerance of her choices since their argument, Knox's opinion was always written all over his face. Instead, the eyes were darker, becoming molten like sunset in the late-afternoon light.
Numbers imprinted on her corneas as she read keenly over the work. Warmth bloomed across her cheeks from the burn of Nuwanda's stare. As instructed, she rose and left her paper on Cameron's desk. She had barely circled half-way back around the desk when Charlie swapped his stare for speech at last.
"I have a surprise for you" he said, grabbing the tin of biscuits the group had received in the mail from Nancy and Chris. "If you're done, we could head to the lake?"
She threw a glance over her shoulder at the mess of study materials littering the floor. "Sure," she shrugged. With a few strategic steps she managed to grab her satchel and hop back over the chaos.
Charlie's claim of maintaining an air of mystery held against her interrogation of 'why' and 'where' until they reached the cloakroom. The rain had stopped but the ground remained visibly damp through the clouded windows. Kat donned her coat and scarf, startled to see Charlie swipe two drying coats from hooks that clearly were not his own.
"Do I want to know?"
He smiled wickedly. "People who laughed at Cameron are kindly donating their coats as reparations." She looked at him reproachfully for a moment, making a poor attempt at hiding a smile of her own. She signalled for him to continue, and he led her outside, cutting across the lawn to the spot by the lake she had occupied yesterday. They avoided the more treacherous patches of mud with laughter at the last time they had encountered the more unsavoury side of the elements and earned a detention from Hager's ire. As Charlie spread the stolen coats on the ground like blankets, Kat inquired about the surprise again. In answer, a copy of their English anthology was deposited in front of her.
"Pick a poem."
"You brought me out here to pick a poem?"
He simply popped a biscuit into his mouth, stretching out on the improvised picnic blanket to watch the clouds.
"Pick a bloody poem" she muttered, opening the book at random to Lady Mary Wroth, "how could I have expected anything else."
She chewed thoughtfully on a biscuit as she examined the selection of sonnets. Perhaps it was the ginger exploding over her tastebuds, or the sugar coursing through her veins, but the moment she spied Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,* the lines of Sonnet One leapt from her lips like the flame from a match. Soon, her companion had commandeered the book with his own war cry of verse; never one to be outdone in the sphere of the dramatics. Pages turned faster, voices rang louder with each line, and more expressive as a battle of Sonnets broke out. He countered her heights of Shakespeare's romance with the melancholic depths of Charlotte Smith.* Their voices melded into a chorus of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella,* their harmony splintering into laughter at the theatrics.
"God, Astrophil's pathetic" he whined, waving his biscuit as he gestured. "All he wants is pity."
Kat laughed. "But if the biographical theory is true, Sidney is so dedicated to pettiness that I can forgive it."
"One hundred and eight sonnets is obsessively petty" he conceded. "For such a plot his imagination must have been torture."
"A tortured genius. It's terrible to joke about," Kat reached for another biscuit, "but Knox should stress Chris out more if it results in excessive baking."
"Not excessive, excellent."
She hummed in agreement, dusting the crumbs off the pages of his textbook.
"Did you finish Frankenstein* in the end?"
"No," her lip protruded sulkily. "I haven't had a minutes' peace."
"From math or Cameron?" He questioned, opening his mouth and closing it as if he had been about to speak again. To speak, Kathleen guessed, of Fraser.
She slid the novel from her satchel and pointed at the bookmark poking out near the end. "From all of the above."
"Great!" He plucked it from her hands and opened it. He began reading aloud before she could reply. With a sigh of concession, Kat reclined under the sky. She let her eyelids fall, her senses engulfed by the deep, soothing cadence of his voice.
"The stars shone at intervals, as the clouds passed from over them; the dark pines rose before me, and every here and there a broken tree lay on the ground: it was a scene of wonderful solemnity, and stirred strange thoughts within me. I wept bitterly; and, clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, "Oh! stars, and clouds, and winds, ye are all about to mock me: if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart and leave me in darkness."
Charlie's voice tailed off as he glimpsed her still, peaceful face framed by locks of hair arranged in a dark halo around her head. He chuckled fondly, stopping abruptly as her eyes opened like brunnera flowers in the greenery beneath the clear sky.
"I brought you here for this," he pulled a sketch from between the leaves of the anthology, "not to bore you to sleep."
"I wasn't sleeping!" A sheepish expression crept across her face as she yawned. "I was resting." She took the paper, ignoring his smirk. Her youngest brother's name covered one side. Curiosity charged her form as she flipped it over, her breath hitching as a perfect sketch of the lake trout was revealed.
It had been months since she had left home, but she saw every detail of Neville's joy playing on loop like a cinema reel in her mind. Every freckle over the bridge of his nose would crinkle with his luminous smile. Two crooked teeth would sink into his lower lip as he jumped up and down, ignoring their Mother's teasing that one day he would break the kitchen tiles. Her Father would ruffle his youngest's hair fondly, and William would forget his grown-up age of fourteen and wrestle beneath their Father's arm to see the source of the excitement. If she were home, she would be peering over William's shoulder while his height still allowed it. But she wasn't home, and she knew her Mother would dial the telephone number she hated knowing by heart, smiling when her retelling of the morning inevitably got interrupted by Neville. He would be impatient to tell his sister about the trout all over again. The visual snowballed into an unintelligible lump in her throat.
"Is it really so unusual for me to be nice that you're speechless?"
His words pulled her attention to the dizzying present. The fluttering of his hands betrayed the uncertainty beneath his self-assured persona. Acting on impulse, she cut off his deflective comments by throwing herself at him. Her palms hit the dirt on either side of his neck as they fell off-centre from the fabric spread across the ground. She half-lay over his torso for a moment, her cheeks aflame as she comprehended the impromptu embrace.
"Sorry," she pulled away, wiping the mud from her hands. "I probably didn't need to imitate the trout." Her laugh sounded embarrassingly brittle to her own ears. "Neville will love it."
Charlie pushed himself up. "It's fine" he said, hardly caring about the wet mud clinging to his shoulders and the nape of his neck. Despite the foreign edge to her demeanour, he saw her delight in quirk of her mouth as she spoke. Her breathless voice would prompt him to draw thousands of mundane fish if the warmth of that tone would just once be directed at him.
XXXX
Raindrops clung to blades of grass, soft, and interspersed with rugs of moss along the woodland floor. Strong trees extended their branches, knitting together a shelter from the light rain. The leaves whispered as the amateur poets passed through the realm of Pan's creation.
Neil fell into step beside Kat. "So, what's the deal with you and Fraser. Not," he added hastily, "that I am judging. This is no judgement space. We swore to put to rout all that is not life on the word Thoreau, remember?"
She shrugged. "Fighting off his Father and my Grandfather on a united front made us allies. We're sort of friends."
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" recited Meeks. "There is some evidence suggesting adrenaline inducing activities can strengthen friendships."
"Anyone up for stealing Hager's car for street racing?" Charlie made eye contact with Neil. "Come on, Cameron. We're always being told we should bond."
Kat watched him stomp ahead into the shadows, still surprised that he had joined them tonight. "I wouldn't call it a strong friendship, Meeks. I trust him enough to keep a secret for me, but not for the rest of you." She gestured at the surrounding patchwork of bark and shadows, "I won't be inviting him out here."
"Fraser only looks out for himself" Knox pointed his torch at her, his eyes narrowed. "What secret are you keeping in exchange?"
She pushed his torch down, aiming the pale beam at the ground. "Things were said at the dinner, and its clear he doesn't believe half of the things he says, so as long as he cuts it out, I don't see why we can't get along. It's a shame he didn't pick better friends," she looked pointedly at the group, "perhaps then he'd behave more transparently."
"That's his fault" mumbled Pitts. "He doesn't have to be such a jerk."
"You can like the guy, Kat-" Neil held up a hand at Pitts' protest, "-but I doubt we'll ever be best friends with him."
"I won't deny that, Pitts." She moved toward the last silken strand of moonlight guiding them to the mouth of their beloved cave. "But best friends" she added, ducking beneath the rough entrance, "would be pushing it."
Todd slipped through the hollow space next, joining her on the log next to Cameron in silence. They watched the others settle in, striking up the usual ritual of sharing refreshments as Meeks took charge of the fire. Soon, warmth seeped into their bones as Neil invoked the meeting, quickly passing on the book to grab a few biscuits while Knox read.
Silhouettes slipped across the stone walls enclosing the fire, operating like a sundial each time a new poet rose to read. Kathleen listened; her spirit spellbound by every heat-wrenching intonation of the aged verse. Todd's quiet determination captured her attention as a short, Ezra Pound poem dripped like nectar from his tongue. The textured, cloth-bound book was situated in her hands before she could blink. Tracing the index with one hand, she used the other to separate the spotted pages with care until she found the composition she had locked in her heart long ago.
"I dedicate this" she began, "to the society."
'One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)'
Her words rained with an ardour more comforting than the patter of rain upon the stone above. A melody of desire, solicitude, and hope rang clear into the night like the song of a nightingale,
'To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.
O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.'*
Applause thundered in time with the rumbling heavens. Kat sunk into a playful bow; its effect made comical by her brightly patterned nightwear. Neil sheltered the book into the folds of his winter coat, careful to keep his arm tucking it into place.
"That performance has my approval, and I would say Apollo's as the God of poetry, but a thunderstorm is traditionally the acknowledgement of Zeus." Neil's grin glowed golden in the dying firelight. "I wish we could stay but the storm is worsening, everyone ready?"
Heads bobbed around the cavern as the society grappled for their belongings. In a familiar dwam the group progressed with sprightly steps, bathed in the atmosphere of quiet revolution, all unaware of the kindling within them begging for the spark that would soon set them alight. The next generation to set the world ablaze.
* Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Lady Mary Wroth (1621)
* Elegiac Sonnets, Charlotte Turner Smith (1784)
* Astrophil and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney (1591)
* Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1818)