Daria Gender Flip From Not So Different JTL Version
58. 'Takes A Licking …'
'Okay … the movie just started and you're in the comfort of your own home. So', Jane's voice continued over the phone line, 'I'd say you're not going to make it. What would you say?'
Sonny looked at his watch. What would he say?
'Crap.'
He didn't want to explain to Jane what he was doing, so he promised to be with her as soon as possible.
On the way down the stairs he passed his father going up.
'Uh … Sonny … uh … your mother said …'
'Dad, I'm sorry, can this wait, I have to meet Jane.'
'Oh! … so … uh, Stacy …'
'No Stacy tonight, I'm meeting Jane and I'm already late. I'll see you later', he said, and then, as he opened the door to leave, 'have a good evening.'
It was only being flustered and embarrassed about having forgotten to meet Jane that got that last remark out of him. And he felt even guiltier afterwards about the way his lateness had forced Jane to go with him to the movie she referred to as 'It Came From Planet Stupid' instead of the latest Croatian comedy—guilty enough to give in to Jane's demands for a confession about the mysterious unexplained cause of said lateness. He'd been writing a short story which he was thinking of submitting for publication.
Jane was excited and enthusiastic. He hated that. But he was already in the wrong and couldn't complain. He made a token effort to discourage her from taking an interest.
'You're willing to have it published and read by strangers', Jane said, 'but you don't want your best friend to see it?'
'Thank you for understanding.'
In the end, an uneasy conscience about his forgetfulness undermined Sonny's resistance and he let Jane read the story. But after she'd read it, Sonny had difficulty undermining her resistance to telling him what she thought about it, as she too adopted the avoidant tactics that stem from an uneasy conscience. Eventually he dragged a few vague but obviously negative comments out of her. He told her that her reaction didn't matter. By now he hated the story himself.
'Look', said Jane, 'why don't you show it to somebody else? Somebody who might appreciate it more.' She crossed her arms. 'Somebody named Stacy.'
Sonny didn't buy this. If Jane could discuss the cinema of Croatia intelligently, then she could discuss literature. Ha! Who was he kidding? 'Literature', indeed. A story about a flesh-eating virus! He told Jane that he couldn't show it to Stacy because it was too intimate.
'Sonny, it's about a flesh-eating virus. How's that intimate?'
'You'd think it was pretty intimate if it was eating your flesh.'
The trouble was that although Sonny wasn't talking about the story to Jane or to Stacy, he couldn't stick to a resolution never to refer to it again. He found himself raising the subject of his writing ability with his father. Luckily it only set the man off on a rant about the lack of qualification of teachers for judging such things, the specific he had in mind emerging as a teacher at his military school who hadn't liked a song Cadet Morgendorffer had written for a school musical. Sonny abandoned his father mid-rant. He would be better off letting Stacy read the story.
Stacy... liked the story. Once she got over the ick factor.
Sonny had to solicit confirmation.
Stacy liked the story. Seriously.
Sonny was so distracted that he was taken by surprise when his bedroom door swung wide and his father came in. 'Oh, uh, hey, Stacy! Good to see you! Um …'
'Hi, Mr Morgendorffer.'
'Not that it's not always great to see you, Dad, but did you come in here with any particular purpose in mind?' Insincerely, Sonny continued, 'If it was important I wouldn't want you to forget about it.'
'That's right! Thanks, Sonny. Your mother asked me … your mother asked me to find out whether you want any snacks. She said she could get you some … uh … some …'
'That's okay, Dad, we don't want anything.'
Jake looked to Stacy.
She smiled brightly. 'I'm good, thanks, Mr Morgendorffer.'
As his father turned to leave, Sonny said, 'You can remind Mom that nobody's getting pregnant in here. Also, you can give her my guarantee that no infections are being transmitted. But of course I can't ever vouch for what might go on in Quinn's room.'
'What? Quinn? My little girl!'
Over the noise of the ensuing ruckus vibrating down the hallway, Stacy asked Sonny whether there was even anybody else in Quinn's room.
'I can't ever vouch for what might go on in Quinn's room. Besides, whatever I just did to my parents was only what they deserved and, as for Quinn, I don't see why she shouldn't share the pain. That is, if she's even in her room. She might be out at a Fashion Club meeting."
"There isn't one right now."
Sonny continues. "Now that I think of it, that noise might be just Mom and Dad having a full and frank exchange of views about parenting strategies.'
Stacy shrugged and looked back at the computer screen. 'You could submit this to, uh, what magazine did you say?"
"Musings Magazine. It's much better than the story O'Neil sent to Val.'
"Really? I heard it was really good."
Sonny thought of O'Neill and Taylor. 'I know faint praise when I hear it. You're not exactly convincing me that this thing's good enough to be published.'
'That's why you submit it. To find out.' She plays with her hair. "Right?"
He recognized when she was nervous. She wanted to say the right thing but wasn't sure what the right thing was. 'I did think about submitting it somewhere. But what about the rejection, indignation, and lasting humiliation?'
'How about the success, stardom, and other stuff? Like, um,' Her face screwed up in concentration. "Poe, died young, uh, other famous guy I read was an alcoholic. Um, not like them but other famous writers?"
Sonny frowned at Stacy. 'Are you trying to motivate me to make an effort?'
'If it works, I'll never tell.' Stacy stood up. 'Come on, nobody has to know.' She stops playing with her hair. "Besides, like, if some one wants to write stuff, shouldn't others see it?"
Sonny isn't sure what Stacy was getting at. "As long as it is good." He looks at his story and wonders if it was good enough just because he didn't think it was.
'Morgendorffer.' Mr Taylor lingered over the word with the disquieting affection of a stalker, or a supervillain of the more insidious variety. 'Musings Magazine?' he read from the mailing address on the envelope Sonny was holding, before Sonny managed to drop it into the slot. 'Are you submitting a story for publication, Morgendorffer? A story that, perhaps, you wrote in time misappropriated from your school obligations? Don't think just because you get … grades of a suitable standard … that even some pathetic magazine editor will attribute literary merit to your subversive outpourings.'
'Thank you, Mr Taylor.' Sonny posted the envelope. 'You've really helped me get this in perspective', he said, with an odd feeling about being so honest.
'High-school children. Delusions of grandeur. I've seen it all, Morgendorffer, and before you were born.'
'And you keep coming back for more. That makes a strong statement about your … character.'
'Cocky', Taylor said. 'I've seen cocky teenagers before.' He moved his face a fraction closer to Sonny's. 'One day you're going to find out where cockiness gets you.' He turned and walked away.
So long as it doesn't get me a job as a schoolteacher I'm ahead of the game, Sonny thought.
For no good reason, Quinn and the rest of the Fashion Club had inadvertently chosen the same time as Sonny to try to break into the world of publication, or at any rate vanity self-publication. They were selling copies of their own 'Fashion Club Forecast' at school. Sonny and Jane were standing in the hallway when Joey, Jeffy, and Jamie came past with the copies they had just bought because Quinn was selling them (both a sufficient and a necessary condition for their action). The actual content was another matter: they were reading out the article titles in puzzlement.
'An Ode To Aubergine?'
'A Good Pluck?'
'Please Remember To Blush?'
Jane said, 'Are there things going on in the boys' room that I don't know about?'
'Do you really want to know everything that goes on in the boys' room?' was Sonny's reply.
Jane changed the subject with a crack about how Stacy could publish Sonny's story. Sonny cracked back that his story would be unsuitable because it was full of sentences that didn't begin with 'I'—and then confessed that he had already submitted it to the magazine. After Stacy had supported the idea.
'Stacy liked your story? That's great.' Jane spread her hands. 'See, what do I know about literature?'
'What does she?'
Jane's hands went back down. 'Was I being enthusiastic again? I'm sorry.'
'You didn't mean anything by it.'
Stacy answered a knock at the door to find Sonny standing there. He kept standing there when Stacy invited him inside. Careful scrutiny of his face and posture disclosed (to Stacy, anyway) the signs that something was wrong. When Stacy asked, Sonny said (still without coming in) that his story had been rejected.
Stacy was surprised. It was a good story, surely better than a lot of the stuff that got published in Musings Magazine. Though she never actually read it. Still, she had some idea of the unpredictability of the publishing business, and some of the reasons why rejections were something that authors had to get used to, why one rejection didn't prove anything, why the professional thing to do was to keep submitting.
She tried to explain some of this to Sonny, but Sonny was doing one of those things he did, the one where he treated people talking to him like a book that he was only skim-reading. He seemed to want to accept the rejection as a definitive affirmation of his negative view of the world. Of course his story wasn't good enough to be published, why dream of behaving as if there were any other possibilities? Stacy persevered as best she could in face of this perversity, but Sonny (still not moving from the doorstep) interpreted everything Stacy said as an attempt to protract his suffering by getting him to repeat the cycle of submission and rejection indefinitely. He told her she was being insensitive.
Stacy shook her head. 'No, I'm supportive. But you're too thick-headed to notice. I liked that story, I thought it was smart, funny, even if it was a little icky. None of which I could say about you right now.'
'Well, thanks. See ya.' Finally, Sonny moved. In the direction of away.
'Why don't you try again?' Stacy said to Sonny's departing back. She couldn't tell whether Sonny had heard. 'Or not', she added as she started playing with her hair. Debating if she should go after him or not.
Quinn and the Fashion Club had been completely humiliated when the latest issue of their favorite fashion magazine had appeared and contradicted everything they'd 'forecast' in their 'newsletter'. Sonny wasn't comfortable with the suspicion that he wasn't being any more adult in his coping than Quinn.
He became even less comfortable when he passed by his parents' room and his father insisted on performing for Sonny the song he'd written for his military school musical. Sonny moved mental baffles into place between his auditory system and his higher brain functions, but too much leaked through and his opinion was written on his face so that even his father could read it. Sonny couldn't honestly reassure him about the quality of the song. His father threw his electronic keyboard to the floor, growling, and then said, 'I'm a failure.'
'Dad, you made up one song when you were a teenager and it's not the best thing ever written. Does that make you a failure?'
'Well, that's one of the things.'
This burst of insight from his father surprised Sonny enough to jolt him into an unaccustomed effort to reciprocate with some of the wisdom of maturity. He pointed out that at least Jake hadn't mistaken crap for something great. He'd done better than that by recognizing that he'd fallen short of the high aims he'd set himself. His father was encouraged by this to think of himself positively as having been gutsy enough to take a chance, and set up the keyboard again to have a try at a new song. Sonny reverted to shutting down the input channel, but when his father's composition stalled, he realized that he'd absorbed enough of the meter and the rhyme ('Lexus') to provide a closing line for the lyric: 'Who cares what jerk rejects us?'
'Who cares what jerk rejects us!' Jake echoed. 'Yeah!'
Sonny almost smiled. Well, at least on one side of his face.
Before he could change his mind, he went to the phone to ring Stacy and invite her to come over for the delicious meal of crow Sonny was planning for that evening.
'Oh, I'm not hungry', was Stacy's reply, 'but I'll watch you eat.'
Sonny figured he deserved that response. Actually he thought he was getting a better reaction from Stacy than he deserved. And was surprised she got the crow reference. Yes he had tutored her and they had read several books together. It still stunned him some times when Stacy showed intelligence. Some thing he didn't expect from any of the Fashion Fiends. Even if they were... hanging out. He still felt that way when Stacy arrived and made a crack about the smell of the crow cooking, and when Stacy came up to his room and then pretended not to know why Sonny had invited her. Sonny admitted he deserved the reaction, and then apologized. 'You were being supportive', he continued. 'I was the one acting like …', he said, and then, his nerve failing him, '… you know.'
'I know. But you are sorry and stuff.' Her smile let some light in to his normally dark and dim room.
Sonny wants to do some thing. Some thing he'd never done before. 'Wait a minute', Sonny said. He moved to the door and threw it open, revealing his mother behind it.
'Did you want something, Mom? Because I was just about to give Stacy a kiss, and we'd like a little privacy. You don't mind if I kiss my girlfriend in private, do you?'
'Of course not, Sonny! I was just wondering whether you and Stacy would like a snack.'
'Not right now, obviously. But thank you for thinking of it. We really appreciate it', Sonny said, and then, turning his head, 'don't we, Stacy?'
'Yes, thank you, Mrs Morgendorffer, it's very considerate of you.'
'So we'll let you know later if we want anything', Sonny said, and started to close the door.
'Okay, I'll be right here!'
Sonny paused with the door half-closed and raised his eyebrows. 'Right here?'
'Well, not right here outside your door, of course!' Helen gave a tinkle of laughter, half-turned, and took one step away. 'I mean, I'll just be … right …'
'Of course', said Sonny. 'Thanks, Mom.' He shut the door, walked back to Stacy, put his hands on Tom's shoulders, and said, 'So, forgiveness and whatnot?'
'Um, yes.', Stacy said. 'About what you said, about, um, kissing...'
Sonny gave her a lingering kiss. And another. Then he said, 'I'd like to imagine that tasted better than crow.'
'Hmm', said Stacy. 'Let me check.' They kissed again. 'Yes', said Stacy, 'even better than your mother's doubtless delicious snacks.'
'The truth is that she does mind her teenage children kissing in private', Sonny said. 'But she tries her best to be grown-up about it.'
Stacy laughed nervously. "I, um, don't mind kissing in private. I'm uh, I wasn't,"
"Expecting it?" Sonny hated how he became when it came to the subject of... closeness. "Neither was I. But you supported me even when I was being a jerk." He couldn't stop thinking about how it felt to actually kiss on the lips. Sure she had kissed him on the cheek a few times but this was a first.
Helen called out to them. 'Sonny, I just thought you should know that we're out of cheese! but there are pretzels if Stacy likes them, or pineapple chunks!'
'Thanks for letting us know, Mom!' Sonny called back.
Stacy took the conversation back to the original subject, saying that she was glad to see that Sonny was over getting a rejection letter.
'What letter?' Sonny said. 'Oh, wait.' He recited the whole text tonelessly from memory. 'Dear Mr Morgendorffer, Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work. It's not right for us at this time, but please keep us in mind for future submissions.'
'But Sonny, that's great!' Stacy gave him a hug. 'If they said they want you to submit again, they really meant it. Didn't you know that?'
'I thought it was just a form thing.'
'No! The editor must have thought you really had something. They don't often give people that kind of encouragement.'
'Encouragement', said Sonny, not welcoming the word. 'Right. They want me to send them more stories they won't like so that they can reject me again. And this is a good thing.' He raises an eyebrow. "How did you know what it meant?"
"Um," Her hands start touching her hair. "I like, wrote stuff, to magazines before. Ok, not like yours but you know, fashion stuff."
Sonny scratched behind his ear. 'Well, in that case—and much as I enjoy the strain you're putting on my mother by being here—I guess I should get back to my writing.'
"Ok! Good luck Sonny!" She leans in and gives him a quick kiss on the lips. "See you at school!"
"Yeah, school." Sonny was still thinking, as that was what he did best, about Stacy after she left and what kissing her meant.
Some dialogue from 'The Story Of D' by Jacquelyn Reingold
