heavy-metal-lover-girl - Tumblr blog

heavy-metal-lover-girl · 1 month ago

Text

ache

prologue (ao3 version)

summary: In the year 2000, opposites attract like polar ends of a magnet. Art and Patrick play their first of hundreds of matches together; a promising young Tashi spends hours Duncan-ating on the court, and Fox begins writing stories in the margins of books, in the corners of stray sheets of paper and on post-it notes she tucks into her socks.

word count: 9.1k

series warnings: depictions of abuse (familial and romantic), ableism, biphobia, internalized biphobia, descriptions of mental health decline, mentions of potentially triggering topics like fatphobia, sh, and si. please read at your own discretion.

rating: 18+

warnings: Patrick has an icky relationship with his dad, adult language and themes from time to time, ummmm internalized biphobia (both Art and Patrick), mildly sexual conversations, emetophobia (light gagging), light nonexplicit ableism, internalized ableism, in-universe writing of H*arry P*otter fanfiction (fuck J.K. R*owling and fuck terfs)

out of context spoilers

ache | three body problem |characters | ship masterlist | pinned

join my taglist!

tell me what you thought!

The first time Patrick saw Art, he was struck nearly dumb by how much Art looked like a mouse. He was a mouse with snowy pale skin and fluffy angel-blond curls and big ears flushed a tender pink at the tips, a mouse who made Patrick’s palms go sweaty immediately before they had even exchanged a word. Patrick’s mouth went dry and numb like when he would go to the dentist and he got cotton swabs shoved into his cheeks. His tongue felt far too heavy to speak, which was a foreign experience for him—silver-tongued charmer, lead-mouthed clumsy child. He could not recall a time that a person made him feel genuinely nervous in a way that made his intestines twist like snakes, but he knew that he needed to impress this boy.

It was foolish too; this boy was practically surgically attached to his grandmother as they inspected the hallways of Mark Rebellato’s tennis academy. If it were anyone else, Patrick would have sneered. They were far too old to cling to their mother’s skirts and to tear stitches away as they were forcibly yanked by the advancement of adulthood. But something about this boy screamed tentative, shy, cautious in a way that set Patrick’s blood hot like fire. Before he even knew his name, Patrick thoroughly documented the soft, downy fluff of Art’s blond eyelashes and his side profile, a broad nose that makes his silhouette entirely unique. Before he even knew his name, Patrick would recognize him anywhere. He would know him at the world’s end. He would know him even if he’d never met him.

They almost ran into each other outside of their shared dorm room. Patrick was busy looking around at the activity going on: older boys reuniting with their roommates all around him and families milling around the halls. He (and his roommate, DONALDSON, A., according to the pink housing slip the Resident Advisor table outside gave him) seem to be the only 7th graders on the entire floor. Patrick had never been easily intimidated; he had always been charming and funny, but he felt smaller than he ever had before, watching boys all around him, much older, saying words that stung his ears, even though he’d practiced them with the kids back home. There was something different about twelve and thirteen year old kids sneaking out back to smoke their mother’s Marlboro Golds and spit curses at one another and hearing seventeen year olds crassly shout back and forth.

Patrick was distracted and Art was staring at the toes of his shoes instead of looking up, so they very nearly collided head-on and instead, their shoulders crashed against each other.

When Patrick looked at the offender, he saw a mouse. He saw squinted soft blue eyes, furrowed blonde eyebrows, and soft pale eyelashes. Patrick wondered how they would feel against the back of his hand. Would they be soft? They looked soft.

“P. Zweig?” The stranger asked, in a soft, reedy voice that had not grown into a masculine depth yet.

“Zweig. It’s like a ‘v’ not a ‘w,’” Patrick corrected him automatically after a lifetime of mispronounced names. This boy mouthed it a few times. Zweig… Zweig… Zweig…

“It’s Patrick, though. You can call me Patrick,” he said quickly. The idea of this boy saying his name made his heart palpitate uncomfortably, but the spasms continued even after his voice stopped.

“I’m Art.”

Yes, you are, Patrick thought, but didn’t yet understand why.

Debbie came up behind him, startling him nearly out of his skin. He’d forgotten about her the moment he started mapping fluffy blonde curls and pale skin, especially since she was behind him, carrying in a bag from the car. Debbie was technically Patrick’s step mother, but she had been around since Patrick was five years old, way more than his so-called real mom who rarely answered the phone these days. Besides, she was here. Even his dad couldn’t be bothered.

Debbie glanced between Patrick and Art, calculating, before gently placing her hand on Patrick’s shoulder.

“Who’s your friend?” Art clammed up immediately. It’s not like he’d been particularly chatty, he’d said all of two words, but his eyes go wide at the sound of her voice like he’s a fawn caught on a highway, staring down the barrel of a set of headlights. Patrick noticed the pale blue of his iris as well as the patch of brown eclipsing the blue in his right eye. Art stared at Debbie, not blankly, but like he was terrified of her. Patrick rolled his eyes, partially because he was always good at playing cool and for some reason, he needed to show that off to Art, and partially because he was trying to avoid being drawn into the dark splotch, swirling in the clear blue, an optical illusion.

“Art,” Patrick said, gesturing at him. “And that’s Debbie.”

Debbie ruffled Patrick’s hair with a scoff before looking to her right and evaluating the door to their room before opening and poking her head in to investigate. Art looked horrified, but waited until Debbie had disappeared into their shared dorm room to speak.

“You call your mother by her first name?” he whispered, sounding agitated.

“No, she’s not my mom, she’s my stepmom,” Patrick explained, which doesn’t seem to help.

“Still,” he insisted.

“Patrick,” Debbie called.

Patrick toed his way to the doorway, observing the room. It was smaller than the one he has at home and much more utilitarian. Two slightly elevated twin sized beds occupied the room on opposite sides of the room and the walls were blank chalk-white concrete. He had never shared a bedroom before.

A duffle bag already sat on one of the beds—Art’s. A small window on the farside of the room overlooked the tennis courts outside, but it’s not quite enough to lighten the sudden dark, heavy clouds filling his chest. Debbie stopped fidgeting with the plain gray sheets on the unoccupied bed to look at him, her thin eyebrows knitting together at the expression on his face.

His belly turned uncomfortably and she crossed the room in two steps before wrapping her arms around him. She was still taller than him, but probably not for much longer, so he relished in the moment and savored the feeling of pressing his forehead into her shoulder.

“I know, Patrick,” she soothed. He took a deep inhale of Debbie’s coconut shampoo and vanilla lotion. When she let him go, he missed her already, but instead of asking for just a little longer, he sniffed a little, feeling the warmth of his nose starting to run. Just a little bit.

Debbie reached into her purse and pulled out a small packet of Kleenex. It was only when she reached over to wipe his cheeks that he realized that he was crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. Patrick understood. Neither of them said another word for several minutes.

It had been Debbie’s idea that he go to Mark Rebellato in the first place. Patrick had been angry that she’d been researching places to send him as a backup plan, but truly, nobody in the world knew Patrick’s father like Deborah Zweig. She had foreseen Patrick’s banishment coming from a mile away and prepared herself for impact.

Patrick’s father had actually pushed to send him off to a military academy, but Debbie had insisted. She had always been his ally, his only real ally, especially against his father’s expectations and his mother’s, well, everything. Debbie was far from a shrinking violet, more than willing to spit fire back at his father when he was being a dick.

Patrick recalled the final conversation for the millionth time since it happened, him shrinking in his father’s study as his parents shouted at each other about what they would do with him for the better part of two hours.

He had fucked up, he knew that, but no worse than usual.

That was the lie he told himself over and over and over again in his head, trying to force his seasick feeling to subside, trying to make the Earth stop tilting beneath his feet and giving him dizzying swells of vertigo.

“He’s your son,” Debbie had snarled, full upper lip curling in disdain for the man she’d married. “Not just something for you to pawn off-”

“He’s a stain on this family is what he is.”

“He’s a child, Robert. He’s no more of a stain than Abby or Riley.”

“Don’t bring up the girls, you know they would never do anything of the kind.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

Patrick shrunk even further at the mention of his sisters. Abby was his full sister, just as much an agent of chaos as Patrick, if not even more so, but the apple of their father’s eye, so no matter what she did, it was never nearly as bad as anything Patrick did. Riley was still just a kid—Debbie and his dad’s kid, so his half sister, a distinction he only remembered to make when he remembered that she was usually better behaved than he and Abby, even if only because she could hold still for longer than thirty seconds. Otherwise, she blended right in: freckles, lack of an ‘inside voice,’ and eyes that never could quite decide if they wanted to be blue or green.

“Deborah, stop. He’s got to go.”

“At least let him go to that Mark Rebellato place I found. For tennis. That way, he can focus his energy into something he’s really talented at.”

“Oh, talented-”

“Yes, Robert, talented.”

Afterwards, Debbie sat with him while he sobbed. His father couldn’t be bothered (“Be a man, Patrick.”), but Debbie sat and listened while he choked on his tears, unflinching as he swore at both her and his father (“Fuck both of you, you’ve always wanted to get rid of me ‘cos I’m not your real son…”). And now, she was the one here with him.

“I’m so sorry, Patrick. On the plus side, your roommate seems nice,” she said with a gentle smile. He nodded, wiping his face with the back of his hand, neglecting his crumpled tissue.

Patrick cried himself to sleep that first night, alone, wrapped in thin gray sheets, sweltering in the humid North Carolina August. His sweat stuck through his t-shirt and his boxers, plastering him to the mattress. It wasn’t like it was hotter than home; Fort Lauderdale felt about the same as Winston-Salem, and the Floridian beaches were much more humid. Still, he was sticky with discomfort in addition to the tears rubbing his cheeks raw as they dripped down from the corner of his eyes down to rest in the shell of his ears. He stared at the ceiling, missing his glow in the dark star stickers.

In the middle of his tears, maybe around midnight, he heard Art get up and pad over on sock feet across the floor. Patrick had thought he was being quiet enough that Art wouldn’t be able to hear him, and to Art’s credit, he had enough tact not to bring it up. Instead, he simply turned on his small desk lamp light and looked across the room at Patrick, his face illuminated on its broad planes, with his delicate features drowned in shadow, his golden hair backlit and shining white.

“D’you want a blue gatorade?”

Patrick wouldn’t find out until later that Art considered blue gatorade to be nectar of the gods and regarded it nearly as a holy relic and savored each bottle, but he appreciated the electrolytes anyhow. While he drank the offered beverage, Art hopped up on his bed next to him, and together, they played with Art’s tamagotchi well into the early morning hours before they both fell asleep in Patrick’s bed.

Art’s neck smelled cool and soft, like lavender and his skin felt like a soothing aloe salve on a blistering burn. Patrick woke up almost cold, his nose buried in Art’s blond curls.

It helped him forget to cry, and it also gave Patrick his first glimmer of hope since what he’d done in May. It really was worse than anything he’d ever done, but he tried to ignore the twists of guilt and to take deep breaths until his heartbeat settled back into the ordinary. Until it matched Art’s, still sleeping, his heart thrumming against Patrick’s belly.

Maybe Mark Rebellato wouldn’t be as bad as he’d thought.

Patrick had originally felt sour when he found out that at Mark Rebellato, they practiced both singles and doubles and that feeling only further embittered on the first day of New Student Orientation, when he woke up with his eyelashes sticky and his mouth dry, then proceeded to flail miserably with his first two doubles partners. Patrick liked playing by himself, all wild limbs and chaotic moves, and he was irritable about lacking the opportunity to be the star player. He was also irritable about working with people he didn’t connect with. Patrick had too much fire; he wasn’t always a good fit.

Cameron Pierce (Match One) was far too methodical. It was like playing with a robot. He was stiff and slow, like he was just barely calibrating, and he seemed to dislike Patrick’s mess all over the court, with flailing long limbs and erratic shots that seemed to only just land, scraping just inside the court. Cameron seemed nice enough, didn’t argue or sneer, but Patrick could tell his patience was wearing thin by the end of the final set. Patrick’s was too. It seemed like Cameron didn’t have an ounce of passion in his entire body.

Match 1

Pierce/Zweig 5 4

Walker/Zhao 7 6

As if noticing his need for chaos, Coach Jake, an equally chaotic seeming person, paired him with Jackson Moore (Match Two). This was even worse because of the complete imbalance of playing two wildcards at once. They ran into each other at full speed three different times, got into five screaming matches, and nearly got into one fistfight before an assistant coach broke them up. Fire does not play nicely with fire very often, and neither of them were willing to snuff theirs out to keep the peace.

Match 2

Moore/Zweig 4 4

Chen/Walker 6 6

A lot of students at Mark Rebellato played with their roommates. They already had a built-in practice companion, why wouldn’t they? Still, they tried multiple combinations first, just as a test. But the third time's the charm, and Art fit Patrick like a glove. Calmer and more level headed on the court, he walked on with an air of confidence he hadn’t had anywhere else in the day Patrick had known him: not in the corridor outside of their dorm, not in their bedroom, not at breakfast, not through the first half of New Student Orientation. Art took steps onto the court like he owned it.

And together, they absolutely did.

Match 3

Donaldson/Zweig 6 6

Garcia/Nguyen 1 2

The moment he stepped back off the court, Art turned right back into his mousy self, curling in on himself a bit more than he had before. But there was an undeniable smolder, one that stitched their fast forming bond even tighter.

Art’s grandmother stuck around for the first few days after she brought him to Mark Rebellato’s Tennis Academy. He appreciated it. Art’s anxiety was somewhat quelled by having a familiar, loving face around, even just to get him through New Student Orientation. Plus, he had always gotten along well with his grandmother. His parents had spent his twelve years of life being invested primarily in their jobs, with their only child as an afterthought. That was not to say that he wasn’t loved by them, just that he spent a lot of his time alone.

His grandmother took care of him when he was too small for school, then began to pick him up from school once he was old enough to go. He was always seen when he was with her. She heard him without being preoccupied by real estate or by whatever middle management was.

Art spent a lot of the first few days pondering his luck and his new roommate. He was surprised when Mrs. Zweig (w pronounced like a v!) had to leave early the next morning. She must have seen it on his face, his has always been an open book, because she stopped to assure him that Patrick would be okay and that she didn’t want to leave but her patients needed her back at home. Art supposed that he could let it slide, however, Patrick seemed to need her, even if he tried to pretend he didn’t really care so much.

“Bye, Deb,” Patrick had said as she left the first night. After she was well on her way, Art couldn’t help himself.

“I can’t believe you call your mom by her first name.”

“Dude, I told you, she’s not my mom. She’s my stepmom.”

“Aren’t they basically the same?”

Art understood a stepmother in a conceptual sense. Patrick’s parents weren’t together anymore and now his dad had a new wife. But he thought that she seemed like his mom anyway. She looked like she’d scrubbed Patrick behind his ears when he was little and cleaned up his scraped knees. As far as he was concerned, someone like that was as real a mom as any, even if you didn’t come out of her. Art tried to explain, but then Patrick started talking about babies and vaginas and Art didn’t want to hear anymore at that point.

“I didn’t come out of her vagina, so she’s not my real mom,” Patrick insisted. Art flinched at the word. He didn’t want to seem like a wuss, he just grew up around parents and other kids who never said dirty words like that.

“What’s the matter with your face,” Patrick said. It wasn’t a question.

Art explained politely. Perhaps Patrick didn’t know that vagina was a dirty word and that it wasn’t something that people were supposed to talk about. Patrick stared at him with incredulity through his entire explanation, like Art was suddenly speaking Greek.

“You shouldn’t use dirty words like that.”

“Vagina isn’t a dirty word, it’s a body part, dude. Like a foot. Deb says so. It would be dirty if I called it a ‘pussy.’”

Art could not believe his ears.

“Well, don’t call it that!” Art said, horrified yet again by his new roommate.

Much of the evening was spent in this way. Patrick spoke in unfamiliar ways, but something about it made Art’s stomach flip. It had flipped anxiously and irreverently when Patrick said the p-word, sort of like on a rollercoaster, and before going to sleep, as he laid on his bed in the dark, back turned toward Patrick, he tried mouthing it out a couple of times. Just to try it out. Maybe Patrick had been right when he said Art had been too sheltered—a brutal read for a first meeting.

Art had never been able to sleep away from home. He spent many nights having to have his parents called to come pick him up from failed sleepovers, and he’d skipped any boy scout camping trips because he couldn’t stand the idea of being away from home at night. This was for two reasons: he missed his parents and because he didn’t like the dark. He refused to use the word afraid, but he definitely needed some light in order to sleep.

In his bedroom back home, he had glow in the dark stars stuck to every perceivable surface in his room and multiple night lights in various shapes scattered around; at least one on each wall. Art didn’t bring them with him because he hadn’t wanted his randomly assigned roommate to think he was a baby, or scared of the dark. He wasn’t scared—he just didn’t like it and the lurking sense of dread it brought with it. He was regretting this choice now, curled in his bed, staring at the wall, feelings of anxiety creeping in, heavy and dark in his lungs, like a weight on his chest. Art had never been able to sleep away from home and that didn’t seem to be changing any time soon.

As he pondered the lack of light and why he’d insisted so fiercely on wearing a brave mask for someone he didn’t even know, Art’s ears perked up as he heard Patrick’s breathing become heavy across the room. It didn’t get heavy with sleep, but heavy, slow, and wet, with his breaths sharp and shaky. Patrick was crying.

It was for different reasons, Art thought, than his own homesickness. His stepmother was the only family who had been there, and Art’s grandma was the only one there with him too, but it seemed different. For one thing, he called her by her first name, which seemed like a strange distance to him. For another, he had seemed weirdly sad, even through his brash loudness and large white teeth he showed off with large smiles. It was like those big grins didn’t fully meet his eyes. They didn’t crinkle up around the edges until he’d laughed alone in the room with Art.

Art didn’t want to embarrass him, but he wanted to comfort him anyways, so he uncoiled his body and slipped from his bed, landing lightly on his tiptoes. He turned on a desk lamp as he passed it, just so he could see, not for any other reason, and began to rummage around for his holy grail, his favorite drink, his sealed new bottle of blue gatorade. He found it and for extra measure, grabbed his tamagotchi.

When he turned to see Patrick, his nose was slightly puffy and pink at the tip. His eyes were bloodshot and shone a nearly electric teal color and his cheeks were wet.

“D’you want a blue gatorade?”

Patrick took it like he didn’t know he was doing it, almost hollowly. Art climbed up onto the bed next to him and showed him his Tamagotchi, which he had lovingly named Gizmo 2 (Gizmo 1 had died and in his bereavement, he had raised a second, named in memoriam). He showed Patrick how to feed it and play with it as Patrick took little hits of vibrant blue electrolytes and readjusted back into the boy he had met that afternoon. Up close, Art could see the freckles all over Patrick’s face and the way some of them hid in the crinkles of his eyes and in his dimples when he laughed.

One moment, Art was watching Patrick and the next, he was waking up with his head laying heavily on Patrick’s belly at 6:30 a.m. Patrick was warm, like a sentient, breathing heating pad, relaxing and cozy for Art’s anxious sensibilities. Art allowed himself to move with the rhythm of Patrick’s breaths for a few beats before disentangling himself.

He celebrated internally at his victory—falling asleep—before realizing that the lamp light was still on, cruelly reminding him that he had still needed it after all.

Coach Jake Martinez led his orientation group in a way that felt too casual for Art’s taste, personally speaking. He wore flip-flops and gestured vaguely at confusing sets of buildings on a tour that was supposed to take thirty minutes but stretched into two long hours, with frequent side tangents and long stops, which left Art more disoriented than ever. Ancient-looking buildings, carefully tailored to appear worn, despite being no more than thirty years old, loomed all around him. They all looked the same, and Art felt smaller than ever; insignificant, like a dandelion fluff floating in the wind. Art’s panic rested on the back of his tongue as he desperately tried to distinguish between the Mark Rebellato buildings. He’d need to know the difference in only a few days when he was trying to go to his classes, but the dizzying, artificially weathered, gray stone walls all blended together.

The sight of a deep forest green court surrounded by chain link fence caught his attention and he immediately forgot his navigation-based woes. The white asphalt baseline marked the outline of his safest space, and he ached to get onto the court. When he wasn’t at his grandmother’s house, he was spending most afternoons, evenings, and weekends playing tennis at the local community center.

He’d picked up his first racket at age six at his grandmother’s home for the summer, and he��d never been able to remove it fully from his hand. He felt the weight of it heavy at all times like a phantom limb, his muscles never wanting to let go of the memory, even momentarily. He spent the next six years of his life practicing whenever he could. It almost felt like the court was what sparked him to life every time, reviving a body that otherwise felt useless.

Watching Patrick play was like watching a raging wildfire; beautiful but chaotic, elegant but overwhelming. His movements were fluid but unexpected, and they didn’t match well with his first two partners, the stiff android and the additional wildfire. But when the other coach, Coach Mark Collins, sent Art in to play with Patrick, their styles snapped into place, two halves of a whole, equal but opposite. Hot and cold, red and blue, wild and calm, chaotic and practiced all at once.

Coach Collins stood off to the side, watching them as they wiped their opponents all across the court, not turning his head when Coach Martinez came to stand by him.

“I think we may have something beautiful on our hands,” Coach Collins said, taking a sip of his now stale, cold coffee, unblinking. Despite barely having finished his bachelor’s degree in athletic training and a very quick teacher certification that had him now beginning his first year coaching professionally, at such a prestigious academy no less, slipping into an imposter-syndrome sinkhole, Coach Martinez felt inclined to agree.

That night, Art’s grandmother took him and Patrick to some little diner on the edge of town. Patrick didn’t act as lonely as he was. He was crass and loud, but he called Art’s grandmother ma’am and that was good enough for Art. Besides, the fact that Patrick was all alone made the cavity in between Art’s ribs ache with both sameness and sorriness at once. And Art and his grandmother had always been on the same wavelength, even since he was no bigger than her knee. She’d known to invite Patrick without Art even opening his mouth.

“Art and I are going to a little diner next to my hotel. Happy’s, I think it’s called. Why don’t you come with us, Patrick?”

It didn’t take much convincing, or any really. Patrick had brightened up immediately, so bright it was like the scarlet North Carolina sun was in their room with them, a brightness that radiated an overwhelming heat that left Art’s skin feeling pink and tender, like he had a sunburn from overexposure. Patrick had seemed a little gloomy when his grandmother had showed up at their dorm room, but it was gone so fast that Art was sure he’d imagined it and he didn’t see it resurface again for the entire night. Besides, it was eclipsed by the euphoric high of being around Patrick, who was already becoming an emotional support source of dopamine.

Sitting in the backseat with Patrick, Art’s chest constricted and his heart swirled in his chest. For one thing, he was with Patrick who was fun and made his heart beat so hard he felt like he’d been running uphill for a mile and a half. For another, his stomach sunk with sickening anxiety: his grandmother would be leaving early the next morning, and he already missed her. He was able to sleep somehow (fitfully), but that didn’t mean he wasn’t afraid of the chasm of loneliness destined to follow after her departure.

Patrick ripped open his straw wrapper, placed it at the end of his straw and shot it at Art as soon as he got it. After it hit his cheek, Art’s grandmother showed Patrick how to fold it into a worm.

“If you fold it like so… then drip just a little water on it…”

Art had watched the trick many times, and something about watching Patrick’s eyes go wide as she eased a drop of water out of the end of her straw, landing on the crumpled worm and it began convulsing immediately, hurt him. It felt like getting stabbed, not that he’d had any experience with such a thing. The diner lights hitting Patrick’s eyes made the gold in the center glow even sharper, which made Art’s stomach feel funny and his tongue feel heavy, and he placed his napkin on his plate, his appetite now gone.

“How does it… do that?” Patrick asked, sounding for the first time like a vulnerable young person, wishing for an adult to pay attention to him. He was a different person than the person who called his stepmother by her first name only the night before. Despite the present height difference—Patrick stood a few inches taller than him—he looked genuinely small. Art’s ears felt like they had been submerged in hot water. He could barely hear the two of them as they continued to speak.

At the end of night, Art’s grandmother dropped them off at their dorm building. Patrick began the walk back to the front entrance, but she stopped Art after he shut her car door.

“Hang on just one second, Artie,” she said kindly, getting out of the car. “I have a gift for you.”

She handed him a small, brown paper bag, gently pressing it into his palms, her long acrylic French tip nails sending soothing scratches over the backs of Art’s hands.

“Hopefully this will help you out while you still need it. Remember that you can call me anytime you need me,” she said, then pressing her lips to the top of his head and ruffling through his soft, fluffy curls. “I love you, Artie.”

“Love you too, grandma,” he says, taking a small inhale of the floral perfume against the crook of her neck.

Back in his dorm, Art sat down on his bed and opened her gift to him. Inside of the paper bag was a small night light, wrapped in pale blue tissue paper.

The wall was a reliable, dependable partner, even if not dynamic. The wall never moves. It would always return her serve, directly back into her racket, sending electric shock through her homemade absorber.

Playing the wall in her family’s rundown Queens backyard, Tashi found out that she was a good player. Playing with other girls on the tennis team she couldn’t afford to be on after school, Tashi found out that she was a great player. Playing against random adults at the local YMCA knock off, Tashi found out that she was a fucking star.

Tashi dragged the toes of her tattered, worn white Reeboks along the subway floor, watching the scuffed rubber gum of the shoes rub against worn sheet ground. Her backpack rests in the aisle seat next to her and she leans back in the window seat to look at various apartment buildings, bodegas, and cardboard signs as they pass by below. Her daily venture took her from school to the youth center, tennis racket and ball in her backpack until her mom could stop by on her way home from work and pick her up to take her home.

Tashi would stay at school each day until the adults told her to go home at 4:30 (sometimes 4:45, if she was lucky) because the tennis coaches couldn’t babysit her, not for free, she had to be on the team if she was going to stick around after school. The coaches put up with her for an extra hour each day, but only because she truly dominated the courts, which helped their actual students get better, but each day, like clockwork, they would tell her to leave, at which point, she would ride the subway to the youth center.

Sometimes at the center, she could find adults to play with. She had her favorite recurring characters. Joe was an older man who reminded her a bit of an uncle, too old to be like her dad, too young to be like her grandfather, who worked there and was there four days a week. Usually he could play with her for an hour at least, but on days when Joe was off or busy, she would have to find other partners or play with the center’s back wall. Rita was another good choice, but she wasn't very good at tennis. She was a bit too old to move very quickly and she couldn’t see fuck all without her giant horn-rimmed glasses, but she was a very nice woman, who Tashi really liked.

The subway came to a screeching halt at Tashi’s daily stop and she evacuated from the automatic sliding door, beginning her three block walk to the center. It was a Thursday, so Joe’s day off, so instead of even going inside and trying her luck, Tashi went around back and began throwing various serves to her best, most dependable partner, the brick back wall of the center. The crack of the tennis ball smacking against the wall was only interrupted by the sharp exhales and her occasional shouts as adrenaline began to snake through her veins, shining pale green under her glistening brown skin, sparkling with sweat. She bit the soft, tender flesh inside of her lips, drawing crimson, salty drops of blood against her tongue.

It was seven o’clock before her mother’s 1995 deep green Toyota Camry pulled up against the curb. Tashi was ready for her—seven o’clock was the typical time her mother would be by, with both Tashi’s brothers in the car already. She was the last stop on her mother’s way home, which Tashi appreciated. Playing tennis was essentially what kept Tashi alive, and with each day she got better, and that made her chances of becoming a professional and carrying her family to the place they deserved to be climbed higher and higher. At seven, she was sitting on the curb, her right knee throbbing, legs drawn up against her chest, flyaways frizzing at her hairline, the rest of her hair slicked back with equal parts gel and sweat.

Her mother’s eyes were heavy, like she was half asleep already, behind the wheel. Tashi’s brothers, 10 and 6, already waited in the backseat, also looking half asleep. Tashi’s energy overwhelmed the station wagon, so she nipped back the instinct to immediately start talking tennis. She would need to save that for her father, who despite having no energy for anything else, always wanted to talk sports. Josiah’s small hand reached out from the backseat to squeeze hers and she gave him the customary greeting, twining their fingers together. More than anything—more even than her exhausted mom with bruise colored bags under her eyes falling asleep in her work scrubs for three hours a night, more than her dad, focused on the athletic direction of one of the poorest high schools in the state with a win record of zero, and Malachi, aged ten and already half-grown, Tashi practiced tennis because she wanted a better home for Josiah. She wanted Josiah to have opportunities that she and Malachi would never get to have. She wanted Josiah to have his own bedroom and to eat home cooked meals that weren’t just Spaghetti-Os prepared via microwave. Tashi practiced so she could give that to him. If she was good enough, she could ease the burden of their family, and she could reinvent Josiah’s entire life. It was the reason she was able to power through the ache in her right knee, the reason she was able to power through the pain in her lungs and the blisters on her palms and the arthritic aches in her wrists.

“How was your day, baby?” Tashi’s dad asked her, placing a quick kiss to the top of her hair, damp from her post-dinner shower. She placed her 6th grade math homework pages back down onto her pale pink bedspread to look up at him.

“Same as usual,” she said. “Pretty good.”

An unspoken thread hung between them. Tashi desperately wanted to join the school tennis team and she understood that the reason she couldn’t was because of financial strain and a lack of time from her parents. She had stopped asking months ago, but she knew her father heard it every day when she looked at him. It broke his heart not to be able to give her the one thing she ached so painfully for, and it ached even more that he knew that she wanted it not for herself, but for her family. She wanted to be something, sure, but she also wanted her family to be something too. More than anything.

Her dad sat on her bed next to her, shifting her homework out of his way.

“I found something for you,” he said, handing her a small pamphlet.

It advertised a local tennis tournament, in Queens, about a month away. Most tournaments for girls her age didn’t boast cash prizes or anything like that, but the first thing she noticed was different age brackets from 11 to 17 and a cash prize of $250 for the winner in each bracket, plenty for her to be able to pay the fee for the school tennis team. Tashi’s stomach swelled upwards like she was on the ferris wheel at the local carnival; that place at the tippy top of the world where her stomach went to her throat and she felt almost like she could step out of the seat and walk into the stars. It felt like touching the sky, it felt like defying every single gravitational limit, it felt like soaring, being pushed up instead of pulled down, not weightless but her weight supported by the sparkling silver staircase of stars she could use to crawl up to heaven.

She stared at the pamphlet silently for a few moments before emitting a high-pitched squeal she’d never heard herself make before.

Tashi’s win was practically promised to her before she even stepped onto the court. She wasn’t just the best player in her neighborhood or in her city, but maybe in the entire state of New York. Plus, she’d been sleeping with the pamphlet under her pillow for three and a half weeks, thinking, dreaming, doing nothing but tennis. It wasn’t surprising to anyone who knew her that she won. Joe came to watch, screaming at each hit she made, at each feral growl that emanated from between her clenched teeth. When she hit the final winning point, Tashi screamed like a banshee, then couldn’t stop sobbing as she accepted the award check. They were her adrenaline tears, fatter and saltier than sadness tears, the kind that are impossible to really fight. They just run their course.

Rita from the youth center called her at home that night, congratulating her as she iced her right knee, which was throbbing like it had a headache. Still, Tashi couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear, looking at the prize check where she had it held carefully, uncreased, between her hands as her mother held a bag of frozen peas to her kneecap to soothe the internal irritation.

It was only just the beginning of Tashi’s life—and she could not wait to be something.

Step One: Wake up.

Fox slowly uncurled at the sound of her alarm clocks, two of them, chiming at the same time. Despite very rarely being late, she had developed a truism that she was entirely unable to wake up with just one alarm, so she had two, one across her room on the bookshelf that she would have to get up to shut off, something she always wanted to do immediately. The shrill screams of her alarm sent goosebumps up the back of her neck and she got up as soon as it began, hands clasped over her ears, jolting out of bed to get rid of the nails on a chalkboard to reinstate silent peace. She’d then check the times on each clock. 6:30 on the pink Hello Kitty bookshelf alarm clock. 6:30 on the faux brass twin bell bedside alarm clock. 6:31 on the Kit-Cat Klock on the wall, wagging its tail and dashing its eyes back and forth as the second hand ticked past.

Step Two: Get dressed.

Fox fumbled with the buttons on the top of her cotton pajama set, having to take a few extra seconds for direct focus on undoing the buttons. Nimble, quick movements with her hands had always been borderline impossible for her, so she ends up spending a frustrating amount of time on clothing buttons. Sometimes zippers, sometimes locks and door handles, but buttons were always the worst offenders because of the care it took to guide a button through a buttonhole. It was why the ladies at church had ultimately given up on her sewing lessons after nearly four years—she just wasn’t built for hand-eye coordination. She never had been. Fox’s mom told her not to mind the old ladies at church who said that her fumbling, uneven hand stitches made her poor wife material. The first time she’d heard them say it, she had been confused: she was nobody’s wife, she was only just now in the seventh grade. The second time she had heard it, she’d cried. Fox understood why they said it that time; she understood that they meant that she would ultimately grow up to be worthless, something soothed by spending time with her father afterward, where he reminded her that anyone of quality would know that she had inherent value as a human being. Every time they said it after that rolled off of her. She wasn’t anyone’s wife, and she wouldn’t really want to marry anyone who judged her quality off of her embroidery skills, or her lack thereof.

Fox’s school had a loose dress code. Acceptable clothing items included: dark wash jeans, knee length (or longer) skirts in denim, khaki, black or plaid, dark trousers (patterns were immaterial—that is to say, you could wear whatever pattern desired on your trousers), khakis (gross), polos, t-shirts, sweaters, sweatshirts in either white or blue. Fox didn’t like picking clothes out, so she stuck with the same pattern each day: white polo, knit blue sweater on top, and jeans. She pulled her socks up high so they wouldn’t leave uncomfortable creases in her ankles. Fox always double knotted her white Keds, perpetually smudged with dirt from walking home and pencil marks from doodling.

“You’re wearing that? The high today is 90.”

Step Three: Eat breakfast and talk to mom.

“I always wear a sweater. It’s cold in the school. Except when I have P.E., but I have to change for that anyways,” Fox informed her mother, as she did most days, who looked at her with furrowed brows.

“Well, alright, if you’re so sure.”

“I am.”

Fox poured exactly one spoonful of brown sugar into her plain oatmeal, stirring and mixing it into the damp oats. Oatmeal was never particularly appetizing. Fox used to pretend she was a horse just to get through it, though now she had been eating it each morning for years. But on this day, when she took a bite, it felt cold, slimy and heavy in her mouth, coating each centimeter of her tongue as it slid toward her throat. Her stomach immediately convulsed and she heaved, snatching up a napkin and spitting the mouthful into it.

“What’s wrong with it?”

Fox shook her head. It was the same as it always was, but the texture was just wrong today and even looking back at the beige slop had her stomach swirling and twisting with nausea.

“I don’t know. I can’t today.”

Her mom took a deep inhale through her nose, closing her eyes as she did so. Fox was aware that she could be exhausting, but it’s not like her mom ever said it out loud. She could just see it reflected in the same grayish-olive eyes that she had, a sense of exasperation that may as well have been its own new color. Speaking of-

“Five straight seconds of eye contact.”

Fox raised her eyes to meet her mother’s. It’s not like she couldn’t look at people’s eyes, she just didn’t tend to hold eye contact for very long (blinking, glancing away, looking at her hands), so she and her mother had a daily five second staring contest. One. Olive-gray. Just like her own. Two. Dark eye lashes. Just like her own. Three. One pupil is slightly larger than the other. Just like her own. Four. Yellow in the center. Just like her own. Blueish on the outside edge. Just like her own. Five. Blink. Finally.

“Okay?”

“Okay,” her mom replied.

Fox felt sorry for tiring her mother out, but to be fair, the staring contest wasn’t her idea, it was her mom’s. Everything else was probably Fox’s fault, though.

Step Four: Makeup.

Fox went back into her bedroom, pulling out her makeup tin. It was a little tin box that contained all of her little makeup things: powder foundation that was perhaps one shade too light, glitter lip gloss, and the piece de resistance, black liquid eyeliner. The lid had her mirror glued to it and onto that, she had taped a cutout photo of Veronica Bennett to look at each day for inspiration. Veronica sat in her box in picturesque gray and black ink, black cat eyes staring back and beehive hairdo sitting pretty on her head, bangs nearly falling into her eyes. When she’d found the picture of her in one of her mother’s discarded magazines, Fox had practically fallen in love, especially with the dark cat eyes.

Fox first wiped the powder foundation all across her face, over her nose, cheeks, eyelids and eyebrows. Her brows were thick and a tad unruly, so Fox had taken to putting makeup over them since her mother wouldn’t let her puck them yet. Next, the glitter on her lips—her favorite thing about it was that it tasted like pineapple coconut; flavored lipgloss was all the rage. And the eyeliner, which she did, sitting in a hunched position on her bed, her face as close to the mirror as she could get. If she was too far away, her face was blurry, which was no good at all.

She had just finished the first eye, inner corner extending toward her nose, wing out towards her eyebrow, when her mom came in.

“Absolutely not. Take it off.”

“But-”

“I said, take it off.”

With a sigh, Fox took her nearby makeup wipes to get rid of the evidence of her hard work. It was a daily occurrence. She and her mom never really argued about it, but she tried every day because maybe one day, her mom would let her finish. She’d see how pretty it was and she would let her go to school that way. Then people would pay attention to her, not as the weird girl to ask out as a joke or the smart girl to copy off of, but as something else entirely. The black smudged makeup wipe tumbled into the trashcan next to her bed, thumping softly on top of a pile of now dried makeup wipes, smeared with heavy black ink.

Step Five: Take the bus.

When walking past the mailbox on her way to the sidewalk, Fox stopped to pop open the lid, stooping to look inside. She found it entirely empty. She knew it would be, but she found it difficult not to check each time she passed by it. A month ago, Fox had mailed a set of three novellas to a publishing company for a writing contest. The winner would have their story published and sold in bookstores. Fox’s truest passion was writing stories, but she was also trying to build up funds for college. It seemed far away, but it really was only 6 years away.

She arrived at the bus stop two blocks away at exactly 7:13 am, the same time she did every school day. During the six minutes between her arrival at the bus stop and the bus pulling up, Fox pulled her tiny lined notepad and gel pen from her jean pocket, flipping it open to the nearest blank page.

Hermione Granger was an enigma to all who knew her. To none moreso than Ron Weasley and Harry Potter, her two closest friends in the world, who still knew so little about her. The things that they—and boys as a whole—noticed about her tended to be at the surface-level. Her buck teeth, her wild, frizzy curls, her baggy robes, the way she wore her wand tucked behind her ear. They also knew and understood that she was brilliant. But they didn’t know her. In fact, they knew so little that they didn’t even realize how much about her there was left to discover. She was not the kind of girl to set someone’s heart aflutter, at least not now. At least, she shouldn’t have been.

But lately, Ron had started to feel seasick around her, something he could not justify to himself. He convinced himself that it was some sort of weird illness that would go away sometime soon. Perhaps with exposure therapy. But exposure to the source of the virus proved to be an ineffective solution and the seasickness only became more prolonged as he tried to address-

When the bus arrived, it did so with a loud sigh, like a neglected shelter dog and Fox immediately flipped her notepad shut and boarded, taking her usual right side window seat three rows behind the bus driver, resting her cheek against the cold window, curling against the side of the bus, pulling her knees up onto the leather seat. The sounds of other students faded into a dull roar around her as the bus left the stop with a loud, high pitched squeal.

Step Six: Class.

Most of Fox’s classes were typically monotonous in a way that is comforting for her. All, in fact, with one exception: gym class. She had forgotten that the coach was beginning the tennis unit, something that she was beginning to regret almost as soon as the racket touched her palm. Had she remembered, she would have begged her dad to let her stay home—she was her dad’s favorite, and she might have been able to persuade him to take her with him to work. This would not have worked on her mother, so she would have had to try before her dad left for work anyway.

Fox swung desperately at each tennis ball, making contact with none of them. The two girls on the other side of the net shared a high five. The one on the left stuck her tongue out at Fox’s partner, who had buried her face in her hands. The other two girls were her partner’s best friends, who were clearly delighting in the assigned partnerships and in their friend’s misfortune. The one on the right had laughed out loud when Fox had been paired with the third in their triumvirate.

Cory (her partner) was not Fox’s friend, that had always been clear. She didn’t even like her. Cory was out of her friendship league. She was out of Fox’s every league. She glowed in the hallway, turning everyone’s head. Boys, girls, it didn’t matter. She wore shimmery blue eye shadow, low-rise jeans with her g-string floss visible, and had butterfly clips that matched her baby tees that she never got dress coded for somehow. She crimped sections of her hair. Once she came to school with the crimps bedazzled.

Fox could tell that Cory actually couldn’t stand her. And when Coach had been assigning partners, Cory pretended first not to have heard, then not to know who she was, then she tried begging to be assigned with anyone else, literally anyone but Fox.

“Felicity is your partner, Cory. You’re gonna just have to get over it,” he said, not even looking at her.

Cory and her friends were fairly competitive, Fox couldn’t fully fault her because she knew that whoever’s team she was on was going to be the losing team.

She hit one tennis ball for the entire 50 minute class period. She swung at every ball that came her way, but she was a terrible judge of distance and she never could get her hands to do what she wanted them to do. So she hit one and only one. One out of at least fifty. Probably even more than that. Fox would have counted, but she was distracted by the prickling hatred of her doubles partner.

When Coach allowed them to hit the locker rooms to change out of their gym clothes, Cory shoulder checked her, nearly sending Fox to the ground because of Cory’s major height advantage. Fox took her time walking back to the locker room, looking at her feet the whole way, blinking back hot tears.

Fox wished she had remembered the tennis unit. She wished it more than anything. She wished that Cory hadn’t been her partner. They both probably would have been much happier that way. She was a little grateful that she hadn’t worn the eyeliner to school that day. When she furiously rubbed her eyes to send the tears away, there was nothing there to smear.

“God, that was terrible to watch.”

“I know. I hope we change partners tomorrow,” Cory said.

Me too.

Step Seven: Check mailbox again.

Fox opened the mailbox door for a second time that day, this time rifling through letters left in the box before locating the one she had been waiting for so anxiously. Her stomach turned with anxiety but she tore it open anyway, carrying it and all of the other letters into the house. Her mom is the one who reads the letter for her as Fox chewed her nails down to the quick.

Dear Felicity Lovelace,

We are pleased to inform you that your novella collection has been selected as a finalist for official publication. We received hundreds of amazing submissions and yours stood out among the best of them. We believe that your writing abilities are beyond what your age would suggest and are excited to continue working with you.

We will be in touch with your parent/guardian to discuss necessary next steps to move forward in the publication process.

We look forward to bringing your novellas to life in a collaborative effort.

Sincerely,

Roselight Publishing.