I'm not making any promises about updating because it's pretty clear that I suck at it but I am tired of this being in my folder so here it is I do not have the next chapter written I don't know if I ever will I am sorry.
When I started college, I did not expect to have friends. I opted for a small local college. I'd gotten scholarships to some pretty prestigious names but I wasn't quite ready to abandon my home completely, and judging by the half crazy look in my mother's eyes as she helped me pack and told me about how to live on my own and how she'd visit every weekend if she could manage, I thought I'd made the right decision. The campus was small, but accessible, out in the middle of nowhere and then some, but it had wifi and decent arts and tech programs so who was I to complain.
The first month passed in a haze of getting situated and rushing to and from classes and looking for a job, which I found at a bookstore in the one-bar town that was the only thing for miles around the campus. I was on a first name basis with a couple guys from a few classes and had spent a few afternoons chatting up the other college student employed at the bookstore, who was a cordial fellow named Jim who always seemed melancholy about something or another. But there was nothing substantial in the way of friendship, except...
There was this girl. I swear to god every time I looked up it was like she had just looked away from me. I mean there were only like eleven people in the lecture hall in the one class we shared, but at the time all I could think about was that I wished she would stop staring. One day, in the last ten minutes of a class, Prof. Steiner invited us down to sit in a circle in front of him and this girl gave me this quizzical look and then slowly sat down next to me. He told us to introduce ourselves, something we had never done despite the class's size.
This girl, wiry, all elbows, a puff of ginger hair sticking out of this giant striped hat she had on and so many freckles that she looked like someone just squirted her with a bottle full of mud, introduced herself as Cerulean Alexandria Myer. Everyone looked at her, part "is she for real?" part "oh man, that's one crazy hippie chick right there." and then the Prof had to go get something he wanted to set up, and we were just stuck there sitting on the platform waiting and this girl, Cerulean, would not stop looking at me, leaning slightly away from me like she was afraid I would get something on her.
"It's not contagious, you know." I finally muttered to her. She looked up at me, bemused. "Huh?" "It's not contagious. The nerd or the paraplegia or whatever else you think is gonna rub off on you. You don't have to do that." She looked down at her position, than back up at me, and cracked a shy, buck-toothed smile. "Oh. Sorry." She corrected herself, sitting with her arms around her knees in front of me. "No offense meant. Quite the opposite in fact, I didn't want to infringe on your..." she stopped, trying to reign in her train of thought. "Sorry. I... um... Hi." she laughed quietly. "Hi."
I looked her over. She was one of those naturally awkward people, every angle at odds with another. Her wrists were laden with bracelets, cloth, hemp, brightly colored woven strings intertwined and pulled down by heavy glass beads. She was barefoot, something I had neglected to notice until now, her sun browned toes covered in the highlighter orange of faded henna tattoos. "Um. Sorry. Again." she said, interrupting my thoughts. "I just..." she looked down, at her wriggling toes. Around us the other students, all nine of them, were huddled in groups of two or three, chatting lightly, while we sat in awkward silence.
"Why are you still sitting here?" I couldn't help the question. She looked surprised. "Where else would I be?" I looked up, in the general area of the others. From the group, it was pretty easy to tell who's who. On the edge of the platform, elbows propped up, smiling lazily, were the ones who took this class for the easy A they were sure it would be. There at the back were the serious students who took this class because they needed the credits to fill out their extensive curriculum. Those two were here because the guest lecturers were 'sort of famous', and they wanted to rub elbows with people who have succeeded where they were probably doomed to fail. And then there was us, bright, jangly, alive Cerulean, and me. "I guess." I shrugged. "But still. Why me?" She shrugged too, biting her lip and looking down before answering me.
"Because. I'm weird. I doodle on my feet and try to get away with knitting hats in class and I really like creative psychology and I wear too many belts at once and I was homeschooled until the tenth grade and then a bit after that, and this is my third year of college but I don't want to tell anyone that. I listen to weird music and hate shoes. They're all 'Future corporate execs who can smell freak from a mile away'." She laughed and looked tentatively up at me, almost like she was making sure I was still there, and kept going. "But you're weird too. You wear grandpa sweaters and yellow gloves that clash with everything except bees and you read and bookmarked all the material already and you doodle the ocean in the margins of your notebook and I thought that maybe if your weird and my weird were compatible... we could. You know. Be friends."
She was studying her toenails, the edges showing signs of some long lost coat of fluorescent purple paint, and the last few words were haltingly stuttered out at them. And maybe it was something in that shy smile she gave me that reminded me of a girl I'd once loved, or something in her word spewing tendencies that reminded me of myself, but even though I was pretty sure she'd just insulted my style and the fact that she knew what I had been doodling even though we were several rows away from each other might have been cause for concern, I found myself saying, "Okay. Sure."
She looked up, her eyes hopeful and that shy smile back on her face. "Cool. Then you can call me Xan." she looked around, like she was afraid someone else might get wind of this new development. "But only you. That's a friends only privilege." I had to laugh. "So you knit?" "Yeah. But don't expect me to be making you any fancy shit, k? I am strictly a scarf and hat type of girl. Maybe I'll make you a bee scarf to go with your gloves though. Maybe." She leaned against the side of my chair, her head brushing the armrest and her legs against mine. "I've never had anything that matched these gloves before. I got yellow gloves the first time because the yellow one was my favorite power ranger, and then it just became a thing."
"Impressive, Abrams. It takes a real man to admit that he liked the girl power rangers. But they totally kicked ass, so. Good choice. With the yellow and black, I would have guessed you were trying to emulate Bumblebee."
"Bumblebee was awesome. But Optimus Prime was better."
"Blatant lies."
After that, everything was about Xan. I don't know if it was just me, that I have some complex that requires me to revolve my life around another person, any other person, or if it was her, her bright flame and passionate insanity that drew me to her like a moth to a vibrant flame, or a planet orbiting a sun. But that was how it was. I had Xan, and I didn't need anyone else.
Xan was always in motion. There was never a time that I would look over at her and her body would be completely still. When she came calling she'd stand outside my dorm building with a hula hoop going around her waist, tossing pebbles at my window until one day she threw one too hard and left a spiderweb fracture on the glass (which never got fixed, even though I asked repeatedly) and she promised to knock like a normal person.
I was used to having only one friend, and Xan was used to having none, or at least, none that stayed for long, and together we made a pretty good friendship team. It was almost like Tina, but not quite. Xan made me laugh in the comfortable easy way that two people who have all the inside jokes together can laugh, not the gut wrenching side splitting laughter of two people who can read each other's minds, but still surprise each other with the most outrageous things. She was not as cuddly as Tina, and the questions she asked, and she asked questions everywhere, were different from Tina's, although they reminded me so strongly of her sometime I couldn't answer them. And when we curled up with bad old movies to watch again and again, it felt right. Like I'd gotten a piece of my life, that, if it was not the same puzzle piece as before, at least fit reasonably well and comfortably and made the puzzle more interesting to look at. So when she pulled herself closer and put her her face next to mine, I kissed her. And when she asked why, I said "Because you're my best friend." And when she asked if I was in the habit of kissing my best friends, I kissed her again and replied, "Actually, yes."
Xan and I didn't last very long. Part of it was timing. She was leaving college, she said, for the wild yonder and what was ahead of her. She said this, and also that she was never very good at being tied down by the system and people and she needed some space and she wasn't sure if this was what was best for us. She hugged me goodbye one unexpected morning and as I watched her go I felt the past year slide off of us like an old tarp, the lightness of barely making an impact in someone's life. And had she really made an impact in mine, I wondered. She was just a placeholder, after all.
Without Xan, it was different, in college. The first few weeks were empty, hollow without the constant of the girl I'd shared the last year and a half of my life with. I scrabbled to regain the rest of life, bits and pieces of it that had fallen out of my mind and been forgotten coming back into place. As it turned out, the rest of my life had not forgotten about me. Jim, who I'd continued to work alongside, welcomed me back to the world by inviting me to come to his "Coffee circle", and intriguing concept which boiled down to a ragtag group of people who met for overpriced coffee once a week and talked, loudly and possibly rather obnoxiously in the small campus coffee shop, about life, and everything. I became a regular, and from it branched more friends.
Caramel skinned, mocha haired Brandy, who had a deep sultry voice in the jazz club and a talent for perfectly mimicking singers when we got together with "Tough guy Sid" (who's folk guitar skills were second to none and had a voice like an ill frog) to jam and laugh and kill time when we should have been studying. Kyle, who had a funny blond beard and built machines and had lots of philosophy that was good to listen to and even better when one or both of you was drunk, and who drove a tractor because cars were all part of the system and "Hell, you can't mow a fuckin' lawn or till wheat with a car, can ya?", Jesse and Milo and Rae-Anne, who introduced me to seductive concepts like strip beer pong and parties in the cornfields that lasted until dawn, and were singlehandedly (Tripe handedly?) responsible for me almost failing one of my most important classes senior year.
When I went back to my computer (Xan had sworn against them and had been trying to wean me off of using mine) I found emails from almost all of my friends from back home, worriedly wondering why my correspondence has stopped. One name was noticeably missing, but I tried not to dwell on that, and after that there were late night skype calls from Sam and Puck sending me texts whenever he knew I'd be in class, which inevitably lead to texting battles afterwards until it was too much for my poor phone bill and we had to resort to Facebook to continue our insanity.
I can barely remember my classes, even the ones I hated, but for the most part college was good, and I'm sure in the end it was worthwhile. After all, it set in action the motions that would bring about the rest of my life, and that's something I'll always be thankful for.
In my last months of college, it had, of course, crossed my mind that when it was over, I'd need to go somewhere, and I spent long nights, online, making phone calls, until I thought I'd set up something in Cincinnati that seemed reasonably likely to work out. My friends and I talked at length about life after college, plans for the future, promising to keep in touch after we would no longer be forced together by circumstance. We had our last parties, out last coffee circles and jam sessions and philosophy under the stars, and prepared for the life that was ahead of us. Just as it seemed I was finally, completely putting Xan out of my head, she called me again a week before my graduation and told me to meet her in New York City.
Fact. I hated New York City. It's crowded and large and full of strange smells and terrifying noises. When I met her, fresh off the train, Xan blended in with the populace, her copper colored hair streaked with aquamarine, her usually bare feet stuffed into a pair of black loafers that just looked wrong on her somehow, and her bracelets still clacking and jangling as she reached around to hug me. As we left the station together, en route to her so called apartment, she told me about the band she had started, about how it'd gained some minor notoriety in the underground scene, but it could really use some male lead vocals and none of the other guys were really up to scratch.
She took me to meet them, all lounging about the overcrowded loft, Caden and Dominic, a pair of twins who look like a photograph and its negative, Caden's long blond hair pulled up in a ponytail exposing his tan neck while his brother's dark waves fell freely around his pale face. They played guitar and bass, respectively, and Xan told me in confidence she mostly took them on because they make such a lovely contrast on the stage. Bailey, the other girl, had a shaved head and studs in her cheeks and on her collarbone and a floral dress and said she didn't like using gender specific pronouns but Xan told me that that was more about her being an insufferable prick and wanting to be edgy than anything to do with gender preference. She said she would get rid of her but no one could drum like Bailey.
I joined the band even though my parents were clamoring with me to get a real job and not waste my life but I figured I'm twenty three and only live once and I'll have plenty of time to waste my time not wasting my life when I'm thirty. We played at bars and clubs and people cheered us on and there was a heady sense of excitement that I couldn't get rid of and it plus the drinking and the fans that sometimes came up to tell me how good I was made me do more than a few stupid things.
Six months later Xan had slammed all the doors in the apartment on her way out, after an altercation that had left the window panes rattling and with Bailey in tow, flipping the bird and still screaming about equality and misogynist pigs as she hit the street, and the girl who'd come home with me after the set standing bewildered in nothing but my bedsheet and probably wondering how she'd managed to get herself confused into this insane family.
I dated her for almost a month afterwards, the longest I'd managed to keep a girlfriend since Xan herself, and once Xan and Bailey were gone, we all breathed an unspoken sigh of relief and Caden and Dom (Who Xan really never gave enough credit to, they were amazing at what they did) and I scouted for new members. As luck would have it, we found Casey, who was an even better drummer than Bailey and had no piercings, in her collarbone or anywhere else, relatively easily, and she readily agreed, head of dreadlocks bobbing as she signed the sheet, because as she put it she was "Mildly homeless" and "Rent four ways seems pretty sweet" and "Drama is what keeps life together, and besides you guys let me drink out of the milk carton and everything!"
Our next bit of luck came with an email announcing that Brandy was in New York and looking for work. It took her about two seconds of convincing to join in with us and before we knew it our little group was being hailed as a hit in three different underground rags and in two months we'd lined up at least one or two shows per week, the next of which was the opening of a new up and coming club that would earn us a pretty penny. And that's when she showed up. But I'll leave that part of the story to her. She tells it better than I do.