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[amarantine-amirite]

Title: Choking On Dirt And Sand

Fandom: Seven Little Monsters

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Chose Not To Use/No Warnings Apply

Characters: One, Emily Woods, Integra Dandleton, Leona Mobo, Evelyn Duplessis

Summary: Six will not be joining her dance class for their showcase, but her replacement doesn't exactly have things under control

[amarantine-amirite]

Houseguest

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Descent

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[amarantine-amirite]

Be Careful What You Say

The universal college experience, no matter your major, is learning how remarkably fucked everything is. The sole exception is business majors, who never learn this because they don't have exams.

I used to think that the thing about business majors was true. Something happened that made me realize that it wasn't: what happened with my course in Operating Systems. 

We arrived in class on the first day. Our instructor, a skinny blonde woman, came in with a stack of syllabi. “Good morning everybody,” she introduced herself as she passed out the syllabi, “my name is Dr. Palmer, and welcome to Operating Systems.” 

Kids looked at the printouts. “Now, if you look at the syllabus, you will notice that there is no final exam despite being a sophomore-level course,” she said with a chuckle. “We actually can’t assign finals for this class anymore because of a problem we had last semester.” 

She then proceeded to tell us about all of the glitches that made the previous semester's final impossible to complete. The exam had 20 questions, but no Question 13. Some of the kids took it just assumed they skipped it on purpose due to superstition, like some buildings do with the 13th floor on the elevator. A Spanish question preceded a calculus question, neither of which had any relevance to the course. Some questions inquired about your sex life. To nobody's surprise, loads of people decided to duck away from that one, and when they did, they discovered the "pass" button, meant to skip questions and come back to them later, wasn’t working. One of the questions was written in Wingdings font, and nobody could make heads or tails of it. 

Kids complained. Nobody finished the test and their grades reflected it. The complaints made their way to the board of directors and the dean’s office. 

To everybody's shock, the dean's office forbade anyone teaching second-year OS design to create a final, and to assign a term paper instead. The argument was that if you can't complete your test due to one or more problems with the test itself, that’s on The course staff, and that penalizing students because of it was tantamount to fraud. 

The term paper was always on an extremely niche area of the subject. Dr. Palmer assigned topics randomly. The topic I got was so niche that I could find only one text on it. It was a good source with a three-page-long mathematical proof. I cited this proof as the fulcrum for my paper.

About 4 weeks before the deadline, Dr. Palmer left, and Dr. Mendez took over the class. The night before his first class back, he sent out an email instructing us to turn in my rough draft. It caught me by surprise, but I managed to put together a bibliography, get it legible, and hand it in.

Roughly a week after I handed in my draft, I got an email that said this: you have been founded gilty of ploariozaiton on yr term paper. 

I couldn’t help but laugh that an email from the university had that many spelling mistakes. I was positive it was a joke. 

The following day, Dr. Mendez pulled me aside at the end of class. I discovered that the email wasn’t a joke. “You wanted to speak to me, sir?” I asked timorously. 

“Ah, yes, Sophie,” Dr. Mendez said

I pulled up the email on my phone. “would it be related to this email that I really hope I read wrong?” 

Dr. Mendez dug my draft out of the pile on the podium of the lecture theater. “Look at this bibliography, tell me what you see.”

I looked at my bibliography. It only had one text cited. “the book with the proof?” I asked as I pointed to the lone item in the bibliography.

Dr. Mendez slammed the paper down on the podium. “You plagiarized this paper,” he barked. 

“Plagiarized?” I asked in horror. I clearly cited the book, I couldn’t have possibly plagiarized anything. 

“You used the wrong style of citation,” Dr. Mendez scolded, “That constitutes plagiarism.”

“The instruction sheet for the assignment said to use APA format”

Dr. Mendez shook his head. “It's supposed to be Chicago format,” he said. He had his mind made up and didn't want to be confused with the facts. 

“Even still, it was what I was instructed to use at the time,” I shrugged, “It's only a rough draft, I can fix it later”

I hoped he’d listen to reason. He didn’t. “Doesn’t matter,” Dr. Mendez blurted, “the citation style is still wrong.”

“But, this isn’t plagiarism,” I said, gesturing to the paper hard enough my fingers hit the page. 

Dr. Mendez got his bag and left. “Well, that’s for the council to decide,” he said as he exited

My hearing took place the following week. I showed up on time, and Dr. Mendez showed up half an hour later. Someone from the Academic Accountability Office arrived to take notes. 

The people at the student union told me that they let the student speak first. Before I could say anything, the notetaker passed me some printouts. “Sophie, do you recognize these?” he asked

I did. The printouts were hard copies of my long-since deleted LinkedIn profile from high school.

Yes, I had LinkedIn in high school. I had to take a careers class that required us to make a LinkedIn profile for ourselves. I only used it for that class.

About a month after the class ended, I got up in the middle of the night and saw a guy on LinkedIn named Jose was flexing his salary and boat. I very stupidly made a comment involving the words "No way Jose."

It swiftly devolved into madness. People made racist death threats, 25 people got their accounts suspended, and Jose ended up committing suicide. 

Dr. Mendez glared at me. “Sophie, do you remember what happened next?” he hoped to hear me say my account got suspended.

“Well,” I began, “after the Jose incident, I threw out the old LinkedIn account. I didn't get back to LinkedIn until after I graduated high school.” 

Dr. Mendez fixed his gaze on me like a laser drilling out a part. “Your stupid joke killed my son,” he growled. 

My jaw dropped. “Jose was your son?” I asked.

Dr. Mendez sighed. “Yes, and you need to learn your lesson,” he stood up and slowly lurched in my direction. “I gave you that topic because our library only had that one book on the subject. Honestly, I just thought you’d simply photocopy the proof and hand that in.”

The meeting ended like that. Not only did they find me guilty of plagiarism, but they found grounds to immediately remove me from campus. They usually only reserve that for kids to get kicked out due to violent behavior, not cheating.

The next day, they told me I had 6 hours to pack my things and leave or they would call the police and I would be found guilty of trespassing. I cried as I had to quickly pack my things and move back in with my parents who would be beside themselves once they found out.

I couldn't get everything packed in 6 hours. I had to leave about a quarter of my stuff behind. I’m not even allowed to go back there, so I can’t even pick it up.

It doesn’t matter whether you have an exam. College teaches you everything is fucked. 

@write-it-motherfuckers

[amarantine-amirite]

[amarantine-amirite]

My new single “Syzygy” is out now!

Track Listing:

Just Run

Syzygy

The Ugly Truth

[amarantine-amirite]

Movie Quotes

During an event at Fallingwater, I got overly tired and stimmed like crazy. I dropped random lines from the last movie I watched. 

To my surprise, Valerie Passafiume stormed out of the living room. She booked it past the stone fireplace like a centipede missing 98 of its legs. Everyone stared at me. Clearly, something I said royally pissed her off, but I had no idea what it could have possibly been.

Tethys Johnson shot me a judgemental glare. “Now, I know you like to think that you're the good guy in your movie, but we can’t all be heroes. Some of us have to be the villains.”

"Are you saying that I'm the bad guy in Valerie’s movie?" I asked. Of course, it's more likely that I'm the weird side character in Tethys’s movie.

Tethys shook her head. “Oh, she made it very clear that you are the bad guy in her movie!” she pointed at me.

The room fell silent. Everybody's still glared at me, even though I had no idea what I did wrong. After a few minutes, it occurred to me that it was probably nothing and Tethys only said what she said for the sake of some sort of appearance.

Valerie had cooled off enough to come in from outside, but I still doubt she was ready to talk. “Euphemia, what you said hurt,” she said, glaring at me. 

“I'm so sorry about that,” I said, “I hope you saw Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” 

Valerie disgustedly furrowed her brow. “What is that?” she snipped. 

“It’s a movie about these two guys who are scam artists, and…”

Valerie waved her hands at me and shushed aggressively. I don't think she cooled off enough to talk just yet. I still don't understand how she’d take that line I quoted so personally. 

The whole thing brought back memories of frequently getting in trouble at school for quoting movies.

I don't quote movies the way a “normal” person does. I script. Scripting is a stim where people recite quotes from TV, movies, etc. The person might recite the scripts solely to, and for, themselves. Some autistics can even act out entire scenes on their own. 

Scripting can occur simultaneously alongside a conversation, but we don’t intend for the scripts to be part of the conversation itself. The problems happen when people outside the autistic person’s household typically don’t understand what they're doing. Especially when they repeat something inappropriate. And because of this, we have to be careful about what media comes into the house.  

I was extremely lucky that many of my teachers understood the words carried no meaning, but sometimes it didn’t matter. I’d still get in trouble for it from time to time.

After getting told off, they’d tell me the consequences and make me promise not to do it again. Then, the next situation arises and I’d say something else. Because they didn’t understand it was a stim, they’d assume whatever consequence wasn’t enough, so they’d turn up the heat. It wouldn’t work, and after a time of bigger and bigger consequences, they’d accuse me of wanting to be a bad person. They would ascribe character flaws such as stubbornness and meanness. It doesn’t end well for anyone, especially me.

Once, it got bad enough that I came within a hair’s breadth of getting restrained. To this day, I am still not sure how I talked my way out of that, but I did. It’s even more impressive when you consider I was 12 at the time.  

These days, I am thankfully aware enough to avoid this. I keep a mental inventory of what’s safe to incorporate versus what isn't. Today was the first time scripting something “safe” caused a problem.

Realistically, I shouldn't worry about upsetting Valerie because it probably wasn’t my fault. People can be weird. 

I had to get away from everybody else. I exited the living room and went to one of the balconies overlooking the waterfall. Tethys caught up to me. “Hey Euphemia,” she said, “I just want to say you aren’t in trouble.”

I tipped my head to one side. “I’m not?” I asked. That would explain why I had so much trouble figuring out what I said that was wrong.

“No,” Tethys replied, “I went through the same find-fault-with-everything phase Valerie’s going through, right down to the thing that triggered it”

Her comment piqued my interest. “OK, then,” I asked as I leaned attentively, “What triggered it?” 

Tethys told me everything. On her eleventh birthday, her dad went to pay for parking at the Lego store in Harrisburg, and he discovered his card was declined the hard way. A trip to the bank "reassured" him that the card was fine and the problem lay with the machine. 

The next day, he discovered that things were not fine with the card and he needed to call the bank. He waited on hold for 4 hours before the bank closed with him waiting to speak with a representative. As it happened on a Friday, he had to call them back on Monday. 

Come Monday, her father called the bank again. They told him that there was nothing they could do because he didn’t notify them right away, which he did. After an expletive-laden tirade about how they told him everything was fine and how they ignored him waiting, they asked him to see a psychiatrist and come back after being screened for mental illness. 

Twelve days later, her dad got an appointment with the psychiatrist, who wrote him a prescription for Cyanex. “Are those cyanide pills?” I asked.

Tethys nodded. “He took the pills that evening and died in his sleep,” she said, sighing heavily. I could tell she still missed her father. “I don't think he knew what they were.” 

“He should have recognized something was up when the prescription was for something that sounded vaguely like cyanide,” I responded. I hope what I said didn’t rub her the wrong way.

“Now, here’s where it gets interesting,” Tethys said. She put aside missing her father to explain what happened right before he died, “The night Dad got his pills, I did something that made Dad mad. He said he’d discuss my actions with me the following morning. I never found out what I did wrong because he died overnight.”

“So, your dad died and didn't tell you what you did wrong?” 

“Exactly,” she said, “and it's the same thing with Valerie. She did something she wasn’t supposed to and one of her parents died without telling her what she did. all she can do is take offense to literally everything because she’s still guessing what she did wrong.”

I laughed. “I never would have guessed that you went through an offended-by-everything phase.”

“That’s because I grew out of it,” she chuckled. She nervously look back towards the house. “Valerie hasn’t, and I don't think she will.” 

@creativepromptfills

[amarantine-amirite]

It’s your move

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Guards at Every Door

[amarantine-amirite]

TV Time

The afternoon sun slanted through the living room window, casting long shadows across the worn oriental rug. I sat in silence, perched on the edge of the sofa.

“Why are you so quiet, Marguerite?” Angela said as she placed a charcuterie board with some grapes and cheese on the table.

“You want to know?” I responded. 

Angela nodded. I took a deep breath and said, “I’m quiet because when I talk, I get interrupted every time I try to say something. I have an infinite memory bank of the awful things you said as a kid. I was written up countless times in elementary school for being obnoxious and disruptive. I had almost no friends as a child because of how annoying you were”

Angela shook her head. “I don’t believe that” she responded, “not for a moment”

“Believe it,” I said, “because I’m worried that I’ll say the wrong thing and…”

Angela didn’t let me finish.“You’re wasting your time,” she blurted, “you should be more worried about losing track of time”

That’s a lie. I don’t really lose track of time. The problem is a bit more complicated than that: One day out of each year that gets deleted from my memory at random. I don't know what gets deleted until I discover I can't remember something. It bothers me because there’s a risk it will cause me to do something like lose track of finals at school and I can't help it.

The distant tick of a grandfather clock broke the heavy silence in the living room. Angela and I sprawled on the couch and put the TV on. Angela put the channel to a new show, much to my chagrin. The image on the screen froze with the presenter mid-sentence.

I stared at the TV.  Angela looked at the TV and shrugged. “Must be a technical difficulty,” she remarked

“Can we put something else on?” I pestered

Angela passed me a glass with some fizzy water in it. She then grabbed the remote and pressed some buttons. The screen flickered but remained frozen.

“This doesn’t seem to be working.” She huffed 

“Can't you just check the news online?” I asked. Frankly, I don't get why news shows exist in an online world.

Angela got up and walked towards the TV. She unplugged it from the wall, waited a few seconds, and plugged it back in. “There we go,” she said, “Should be good now.”

She turned the TV back on. The news report continued, but it's a different story. “Wait,” I asked, “what's going on?”

Angela looked at me with a confused look on her face, looking Confused. “I don't know,” she said, “is it back on the wrong channel?”

Angela looked at the TV, then back at me, completely bewildered. I grabbed her phone and checked the time.

My eyes widened. “Angela, it's 5:30!” I shouted, “We were watching the news at 3:30.”

Angela Looks at her watch. “No way,” she mumbled. 

I stood up. “We lost two hours!” I shouted, “Where did the time go?” 

The time to get made no sense. Either we both slept without realizing it or something weird happened.

Maxime, my stepmother, strolled into the living room, “Hey there!” she said.

Angela waved. “I have no idea what happened,” I butted in, “It’s like we lost two hours of the day”

Maxime nodded “I know.”

“Wait,” I hesitated as my eyebrows did their best impression of Volkswagens parking, “you know about this?”

“Sure,” she said, “I drugged your drink so we wouldn't have to listen to you yammer through what’s on TV.”

My mouth opened in disbelief. “What?!” I blurted. I struggled to comprehend what Maxime just told me. 

“Don’t take it personally. It’s a very sensible way of dealing with an annoying person.”

It soon occurred to me that perhaps my time management problems might not be my fault. 

@sleepyowlwrites

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The Caterpillar Express

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Greetings_From_The_Future.txt

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Name in Lights

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Everything is Crap

Here’s how sneaking out of the house usually ends for me. It starts when I'm not allowed to do something I need, and the reason I'm not allowed is usually really stupid. Nice, then something catches me off guard. I lose my cool and haul off at someone, usually because they try to gaslight me. After the dust settles, my parents find out and I get in double trouble: once for sneaking around, and again for yelling at someone. Sneaking out never seems to work for me.

That is, of course, until now.

I got canned from the soccer team for having short hair. I have no idea why that’s an issue, but it shouldn’t be. Back when I had long hair, I had such a hard time keeping it under control. I have a much easier time caring for short hair. Also, nobody can pull you over by your ponytail if you have short hair. 

The good news is that nobody knows I got kicked off. All of us have a microchip embedded in our bodies that monitor heart rate, respiration, and other stuff like that. The school only monitors our physical location during instructional time, but they look at the biometrics 24/7. To see if we’ve attended sports practice, they see if the time at which our heart rates go up corresponds with practice time. 

It's easy to bluff technology, especially if the technology in question feeds into a system built on a logical fallacy. All you have to do is take a digital metric and reverse engineer it to meet your needs. I could fool people into thinking I was still on the team by going to the gym at the time soccer practice took place. An increase in heart rate is an increase in heart rate, it doesn't matter what causes it.

I am not supposed to be here. The gym has a big sign that says NO PEOPLE UNDER THE AGE OF 19 BEYOND THIS POINT at the entrance. So far, nobody has cornered me. But I have a weird feeling that my luck will run out today. 

I accidentally knocked the weights off a barbell at the gym. They shattered when they hit the ground.

It’s not like accidentally breaking a plate at a restaurant. Nobody claps. Instead, the glare at you. One person even took a step further and asked, "Can you go for longer than ten minutes without breaking something?"

“No,” I said, “but not for the reason you think.” I remained unusually calm. 

“and why is that?” the person replied. I don't think it occurred to them that a person could constantly break things without being a total klutz. 

I shrugged my shoulders. “Nothing these days is built to last.”

An attendant looked at me and nodded. “Yeah, ain’t that the truth”, she mumbled. I get the sense that this is not the first time she’s had to replace a free weight because it shattered upon impact with a rubber floor.

I can’t think of a better example than what I’m talking about other than the zipper on a $5000 pair of pants that abruptly came apart. My mom was angry that she spent $5,000 on a pair of pants that fell apart within a week, and it came out as scolding me for being clumsy. And it’s because of that zipper that whenever anyone tells me I break things or I'm clumsy, I tune them out. It's not my fault everything these days is very expensive junk. 

It goes beyond goods. Services are going downhill, too. Nobody teaches people not to blow through a job without confirming what needs to be done. Of course, if you say anything, expect the political correctness crowd to rain blows on you.

After I finished at the gym, I went to the Starbucks down the street and ordered pumpkin tea. It took 22 minutes for someone to fill the order. The idiot barista gave me regular tea with chai syrup.

Now, there were two possibilities. Either she didn't understand the order and didn't double check or they ran out of pumpkin tea and she couldn't be bothered telling us.

I looked at the cup, waved down the barista, and said, “excuse, me, but this isn’t what I asked for”

The barista leaned over and yelled, “Hey, I have to juggle so much crap that I can't remember anything. You’re just too demanding!”

“what?” I said. I shook my head, “No, I'm not.”

The person behind me put my hand on my shoulder. I flinched. She nodded as she explained to me, “Instead of saying fast food employees are lazy, say fast food employees are overworked and underpaid and should be patient with them.”

My jaw dropped. “I never said that!” I barked, “I didn’t even imply it!”

The woman shrugged her shoulders. “Any time you complain about subpar service, you’re implying that providers of that service are lazy when in reality that is not true, they are overworked and underpaid.”

I ignored her. It sounded like she was trying to get me to say something that made me sound like a bad person. “Can you fix this please?” I asked the barista.

The barista walked over to me. Instead of offering to fix the drink, she said, “no, it’s cold tea season, not hot tea season” 

I knew what she said was ridiculous. I gestured to the guy who just got a hot cup of coffee and said, “But the guy over there got a hot drink!”

“We have any of the following available during cold tea season,” the barista replied. She gestured to the Iced Drinks section of the menu.

I looked up the menu and my eyes widened. “all that stuff has a ludicrous amount of sugar!”

The barista shrugged. “May I please talk to the manager?” I asked.

The barista left. The manager arrived a few minutes later. "Hey, how can I help you?" she inquired.

"I ordered a pumpkin spice tea," I began, my voice tight with frustration, "but I got this instead." I gestured to the offending beverage.

"And the barista wouldn't fix it?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. I shook my head in response.

The manager seemed to understand. With a curt nod, she disappeared behind the counter. A short while later, she reappeared with a steaming cup of pumpkin spice tea in her hand.

"Here you go," she said, placing it on the table. "That should be what you ordered."

“Thank you so much,” I said. I reached for the cup, ready to finally enjoy my drink.

"That'll be $100," the manager added, her smile now completely vanished.

I shook my head. “To hell with that,” I grumbled. 

I left. I didn't have it in me to complain. I can have tea at home.

My luck did run out today, but not because of a shattered barbell or everyone defending a barista who blows through things without checking what has to be done. The weather in Dallas screwed me over.

I saw a news story on TV. My school’s soccer team had a game down there. Every single on team got wiped out in a lightning strike due to the metal studs in their cleats. The other team was OK because they had plastic studs in their cleats. 

My phone rang. I snatched it out, muttering a quick "hello?"

"Paula, are you okay?!" My grandma's voice, usually warm and soothing, was laced with panic. "I saw something on the news..."

"Yeah, I'm fine, just leaving Starbucks," I replied reassuringly. 

Right after saying that, my heart hammered against my ribs. They’re going to find out that I got kicked off the soccer team. 

@promptlyprompting

[amarantine-amirite]

Warmer than winds of June

[amarantine-amirite]

L’Inconnu