irishhills

[irishhills]

finally changed the appearance for this blog, too. thanks for sticking with me while i spent all of april preoccupied. in case you don't follow my other fiction blog, i got my phd on friday! that's been the main thing lately.

[irishhills]

glam

Jane buys a little bit of blue eyeshadow from the drugstore with her allowance.

It’s such a silly thing to buy. Her parents could afford to buy her much fancier makeup, something much more expensive, and not even for a special occasion. They like to do stuff like that – show off their wealth, even to their kids, who understand it better than anyone. At least, that’s what Jane tells herself. She’s seventeen now, almost a senior in high school, and she’s well read enough to know that being rich is embarrassing.

The blue eyeshadow isn’t an attempt to look less posh, or whatever you might want to call it. She’s not trying punk on like it’s a costume. She just really wants to do something that will piss off her dad.

It’s the oldest story in the world.

She’s not even sure when Ted stopped paying attention to her. Maybe it was right around the time he found out Amy hadn’t been a virgin for years. Maybe he thought Jane was a lost cause. That nothing he could say would keep his daughters from venturing outside of marriage, or whatever hopelessly Catholic value he feels like clinging to this week. Ted is one of those people who’s only Catholic when it suits him. As she’s gotten older, Jane’s found it’s been pretty obvious. She can’t wait to tell him she likes girls, too.

The blue eyeshadow won’t make him pay attention. Jane knows that. She’s not above living inside a cliché, but she is above believing in redemption. She’s above believing she can make anybody do anything, even if she thinks that’s what it should be.

The blue eyeshadow is there so she can say, Dad, do you like that I’m glam?

And he can look at her and say nothing. Just contemptuously snort and pretend like she’s not there, not eating breakfast in front of him, not the last Egan kid left at home. That means something to Mom, after all.

But it’s what she wants. To confirm to herself that he doesn’t care.

It will make it that much easier to move out of that place.

That too cavernous, impersonal, terrible space.

She puts the blue eyeshadow on the counter and thinks about how much better it was when her siblings still lived there.

How once upon a time, it didn’t echo.

(part of @nosebleedclub poetry month challenge -- day 13!)

[irishhills]

adult revenge

As a child, getting revenge was one of the easiest things Amy could do.

If Chris pissed her off, she’d just hide his shoes, put pepper in his water glass at dinner, or embarrass him in front of the whole student body, like she did during homecoming season in the tenth grade. That was easy. He’d get her back, and the cycle would start all over again. That was easy. They never hated each other – just couldn’t understand each other, refused to understand each other, makeshift twins who never asked to be born, trying to figure out how to share a living space when they never shared a gestation. That was easy. That was childhood. That was foolish.

Adult revenge is much harder.

Amy knows who Poppy’s father is. Very few people outside her family know the truth, and sometimes, when they ask, she lies and says she doesn’t remember. But she does. How could she forget where Poppy got those beautiful freckles – the ones you could forgive, no matter how searing the fight had been, until you were just burning up too much to cool down? Amy knows who Poppy’s father is. She also knows he’s a piece of shit.

Sometimes she looks him up online to see if anything has changed. Not that she’s wishing for him to get better. Sometimes, she’s even wishing for him to get worse. But it’s usually the same. He lives somewhat nearby. He’s married to a woman he met … somewhere. He has a boring office job, and he doesn’t have children. Thank goodness. Amy couldn’t even begin to explain that to Poppy, especially now that she’s old enough to understand.

He probably doesn’t look her up online. He never cared enough to really look her in the eye, so why would he bother typing her whole name into a search bar? But in case he does, Amy is sure to post lots of pictures of the food she cooks, the clothes she makes, the parties she and Poppy throw for special and ordinary occasions. If he ever types Amy Meadow Egan into his computer, he’ll see that she never needed him. He’ll doubt that she ever wanted him. She’ll dunk a bag of chocolate peppermint tea into an “I LOVE YOU MOM” mug, and she’ll enjoy her night with her daughter.

And that’s adult revenge.

(part of @nosebleedclub poetry month challenge -- day 10!)

[irishhills]

house with a name

Luke always felt like his family home should be a house with a name. He’s seen plenty of old movies; read plenty of old books. Houses as big as the Egans’ home always have a name. Elizabeth Bennet moves into Pemberley. Jane Eyre works at Thornfield Hall. Why don’t the Egans have something like that?

It seems like a nice tradition. That’s what he tries to get his siblings to understand. But Amy isn’t interested, Jane keeps trying to come up with silly names, like Pop Tart Place or The Other Disneyland, and Chris kind of laughs at him for citing Victorian women’s novels as his inspirations. It’s ironic, Luke thinks. The only reason he read those books was to relate to Chris, who not-so-secretly loves them. Otherwise, he would have stuck with horse books and detective novels, like every other teenager who’s young and old before his time.

But so what if his siblings aren’t interested? Luke is the oldest, and he doesn’t need them. He’s responsible for forging his own path, anyway. Unlike the rest of them, he has no example to follow. No, he hasn’t forgotten his father. Luke doesn’t need any of them. All he needs is time, space, and an idea. Then, for sure, he’ll come up with something perfect.

He brainstorms all the fanciest sounding names. Gladhill. Signet Manor, after his favorite spelling word from the third grade. Cheshire Shire, which is admittedly just as silly as some of Jane’s suggestions. But then, he finds the perfect name. And he knows exactly who to bring it to.

“We’ll call it Theodome,” he says over Saturday breakfast, right across the table from his father.

“What?”

“Theodome. Our house with a name. That’s what it should be. Theodome. After you. Theodore Egan.”

His father sighs.

“I don’t know, Luke,” he says. “Sounds a little religious to me.”

“What’s wrong with being religious, Daddy?” Amy asks from another end of the table. “You send us all to Catholic school, don’t you?”

Ted launches into some hypocritical explanation that Luke doesn’t have time for. That’s only right, after all. His father doesn’t have time for him, so he doesn’t have time for his father.

Except Luke knows that’s a lie.

On both counts.

(part of @nosebleedclub poetry month challenge -- day 5!)

[irishhills]

nun

Blair is beginning to think she should just cut her losses and become a nun.

Maybe they wouldn’t take her. She’s not great at going to church, even though she’s pretty sure she believes in God. Just not like the way a typical priest does.

But maybe they wouldn’t take her because they’d find out she’s succumbed to the temptation of earthly flesh one too many times. Ironically, the reason she thinks about joining the convent is that it hasn’t been enough times, that she hasn’t gone far enough. Maybe they should measure potential sisters on what base they’ve made it to, plus how old they are. For example, if Blair was only eighteen, never getting past third base with the same guy who won’t ever own up to loving her would absolutely disqualify her. But now that she’s just a month away from her twenty-first birthday, maybe the convent would have to consider her. Twenty-one is so old.

It feels old, anyway. Blair hears stories all the time about first hookups in high school, at college orientation, in the very first week of freshman classes. Not her. She and Chris messed around a little bit in her room the night before their first-ever classes, but he left her broken hearted that night. It was awful then.

Of course, it’s worse now. She and Chris are in their junior year of college, turning twenty-one, and they live together. When living at home became too much, they decided to strike out on their own in Ann Arbor … but together, so it would be less expensive. They wake up at the same time, eat most of the same meals, watch all the same movies, listen to all the same music, attend all the same departmental get-togethers and family parties … but they’re not a couple. Never a couple. Never past third base and never in love. It doesn’t matter how many times Blair tells Chris that he’s kidding himself, that they’ve been in love for longer than they knew what love was, he won’t have it. He’s terrified himself into stasis. Blair’s just going to have to live with that. Even if it means becoming a nun.

She’s home alone this evening. Chris’s Wednesday night class is a Writing Young Adult Fiction workshop, and he usually stays on campus until ten or eleven, talking about characters and plots and ideas with the other creative writing majors. The cool kids. At least, that’s how Blair sees them whenever they get more of Chris’s attention than she does. She wishes she didn’t feel that way, and she knows she’s her own person, knows who she is when the man she loves isn’t at home. It’s just better when he is. It’s better when they’re a team.

She picks up a blanket from the La-Z-Boy that no one ever uses anymore. Chris brought it from his parents’ house when they moved into this apartment a couple of months ago, but they only ever need it when they have visitors. Most nights, they sit together on the couch. It’s not a very big couch, either. More like a loveseat. Also Chris’s contribution.

Blair looks at the blanket with an idea. She begins to wrap it around her head like she’s the Virgin Mary … but then, the door swings open. Wide open.

It’s Chris.

He’s not in class.

And he has something on his mind. Blair can tell. She knows what happens to those brown eyes when they decide to be serious. Her breath disappears, and she lets the blanket fall to the floor.

This is going to be good.

(part of @nosebleedclub march challenge -- day 28!)

[irishhills]

blog appearance changed here, too ... i'll try to update more often for anyone who cares, lol

[irishhills]

parasitic plant

There’s mistletoe in the doorway of his parents’ kitchen, and Chris is acting like a real jerk about it. As he and Blair hang out in the kitchen, eating all the butter cookies so that Luke can’t bogart them again this year, he can’t seem to shut up about the mistletoe.

“I don’t understand what the big idea is,” he says. “We learned about this in biology. Mistletoe is just a parasitic plant. Everyone’s freaking out about a parasite.”

“It’s Christmas,” Blair says. “It’s part of what people do.”

“Yeah, but should they?”

He breaks a wreath-shaped cookie in half and pops it into his mouth. Anything to keep from explaining himself. Blair gets so angry at him these days. He’s not even sure what he’s doing wrong. Chris swallows the cookie and prepares for his spiel.

“It’s like this,” he says. “Mistletoe is a parasitic plant, just like love becomes a parasite.”

“Love is a parasite?” Blair asks, getting angry again.

“Yes. Well, romance, anyway. One person decides it’s a good idea, and suddenly, it’s like they can’t see anything else. And then they give it to everyone. It’s contagious.”

“I think you might be mixing your metaphors. Better keep that in check, writer.”

Chris rolls his eyes and eats the other half of the butter cookie. It never used to be like this between him and Blair. They’ve been best friends since Blair transferred to St. Elizabeth in fourth grade. Best friends. Practically joined at the hip. Then … shit, Chris doesn’t know what happened in the past two years. When he grew taller, and Blair stayed the same, they stopped fusing. They’re still together all the time, but it’s different. It’s …

The only word Chris has for it is taut.

“Look, I’m gonna prove to you that this is just parasitic nonsense,” he says.

“How so?”

He pulls Blair to the doorway … under the mistletoe … and kisses her.

This is not like their first kiss when they were in the seventh grade. This is more purposeful, the kind of kiss you share when you’re pretty sure you’re grown up. It’s not raunchy – Chris only knows the dictionary definition of that word, not the embodied one – but it’s something. He can feel it. But that can’t be. This is Blair, and they’re best friends.

When he pulls away, it’s not easy to play it cool.

“See?” he says. “Parasitic nonsense.”

Blair wipes her mouth, but Chris is pretty sure she doesn’t want to.

“Right,” she says.

They don’t speak of it for the rest of the night.

(part of @nosebleedclub march challenge -- day 23!)

[irishhills]

various theories

It’s only been a few hours, but already, Eliza has various theories about how in the hell she just became the queen of the prom.

She’s pretty sure this has never happened before. A once-loser-y-ish kind of girl without a date to the dance gets a crown on her head. It sounds more like a low-budget movie that Blair and Chris would make fun of. Not Eliza’s real life. She was up against some pretty tough competition. Girls who had been lobbying for prom queen since practically the first grade. She’ll probably never forget the look on Bridget’s face when they put the crown on Eliza instead. She likes to think of herself as more evolved than this, but it was pretty satisfying.

Really, she has three theories about how it happened. The first must have been paranoia because it’s been two hours already, and no one’s dumped a bucket of pig’s blood over her (or any type of blood, for that matter). Nobody even laughed at her. They cheered, sure, but no one laughed. It was the weirdest thing. People seemed happy that she won. One of the other girls on the court even congratulated her at the sundae bar. Even Blair and Chris seemed pretty pleased. No pig’s blood in sight. No cosmic joke. Just a crown that Eliza’s mother would be proud of.

Her second theory is that Amy must have mobilized the senior class. After their conversation in the bathroom on the day the court was announced, Amy seemed to understand her. At least, she seemed to want to understand – a big step in a frozen friendship between two girls who used to wish they were sisters. Where she had once mobilized the class to embarrass Chris on the homecoming court, now, maybe she used her power for good. She looked thrilled when they called Eliza’s name over the loudspeaker, after all. Yeah. Could have been Amy.

But that’s not Eliza’s favorite theory, not the one she hopes for. The last one is a bit of a long shot. Doesn’t change the fact that she wishes it were true. Luke might be a sophomore in college already, but he still holds a lot of influence over this senior class. For one thing, he’s Chris and Amy’s brother. For another, he used to be the coolest kid at St. Elizabeth, a school for popularity contests. Maybe when he heard that Eliza was on the prom court, he was the one who mobilized the senior class to vote for her. Maybe he was the one who convinced Amy. Maybe it shouldn’t matter. Hell, Eliza knows it’s just plastic and lies, a pretty way to keep you under the control of the patriarchy. Give me glitter, and I’ll forget all about why I said I was going to college. Something like that, anyway. Eliza hates how well it almost works on her.

When the prom is over, and students stumble into the parking lot, Eliza’s not really sure what she expects to see. Her mother is picking her up. She didn’t get a fancy limo, and she doesn’t have a date, so that’s all it is. That’s all it can be. A late-night drive with Mom and a long nap into senior skip day.

Except Luke is there.

Like, Luke is really there.

Eliza hurries a little toward him, ignoring the strain in her heels from standing and dancing all night long. She’s not sure how long it’s been since she’s seen him. Definitely not long enough to justify this stupid little gallop across a dark and crowded parking lot. But when he starts to jog toward her, too, it doesn’t feel so dumb. Doesn’t feel so desperate.

It just feels like Luke.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Eliza laughs, too excited for her own good. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to make sure Chris goes to a party with Blair. My mom mentioned he was thinking of bailing on her, and I’m sick of him doing that.”

“God, he really can be the worst, can’t he?”

“Absolutely.”

She’s not sure if he’s disappointed or relieved that he’s not here to see her. When he notices her crown, he lights up a little.

“Hey,” he says. “I didn’t know I was talking to the prom queen.”

Eliza does a little twirl, still ignoring the pain in her heels.

“Well, now you do,” she says. “It was a total shock. I thought maybe I was dead, but I couldn’t tell if it was heaven or hell.”

“Yeah,” Luke says. “I’m not shocked, though.”

Eliza thinks about asking him if he had anything to do with her win tonight. She thinks about asking him a lot of questions. But she doesn’t. She just lets the words she thinks to herself all the time come pouring out. Quickly. Painfully.

“I miss you.”

Luke gives her a look like he’s been waiting to hear her say it. He doesn’t touch her – doesn’t even move to – but he exhales. In a good way.

“I miss you, too.”

She takes his hand and leads him to the curb, where they sit and talk about the night, about the past school year, about the upcoming summer, about why they didn’t do this sooner. Eliza never learns whether Luke had anything to do with the crown on her head.

But when he kisses her, there on the damp curb of a dark parking lot, she realizes she doesn’t need to know that. She doesn’t need to know anything else.

(part of @nosebleedclub march challenge -- day 20!)

[irishhills]

detente

Jane is the detente between Amy and Chris now. She never used to be. That was always Luke, who could probably make friends with Satan himself. But since Faye broke her little arm in Luke’s car, Chris won’t talk to him. He’s never really spoken to Amy, save for about two years of peace in high school. And Jane is sick of it. She arranges for her brother and sister, the twins that never truly were, to come over to the museum. Neither of them knows the other is going to be there. Both think they’re meeting Jane independently. She asks both of them to meet her at Love Flight of a Pink Candy Heart, which was Amy’s favorite painting when she was younger. When they get there, of course, Jane’s not there. Not right away.

She thinks about stepping in when she hears Amy call Chris a “good-for-nothing freeloader,” just for being adopted by their mother when he was a year old. But she doesn’t. They’ve had this conversation a million times since Mom and Dad told them about Dad’s affair, about the woman who gave birth to Chris, about how their family came to be shaped like this. If Jane stays out of it just for a little while longer, maybe they’ll finally move past the oldest fights on the books. Maybe they can move on. Give Luke a call. He’s always open.

As she watches her big sister and brother navigate their way through a fight, possibly for the first time since they were babies, Jane realizes just how badly she’s always wanted them to like each other. When she was a little girl, she used to hear all these stories about siblings who got along and liked each other. And the Egans could have had that, really, if Amy didn’t hate Chris for being born. Jane stands far away, watching them squabble, and she fantasizes about what life might be like after they get past everything that’s passed. She thinks about movie nights with families, hanging out with both of her nieces at the same time, taking family trips like they used to, meeting up for family dinners at nice restaurants in the mall.

She grins as she thinks of her favorite memory with all three of her siblings. It was 1988, and Mom and Dad took the kids Christmas shopping at Jacobson’s. But because they were at Jacobson’s, they ate lunch there, and if you ate lunch there, you had to have the cheese soup. Jane remembers sitting at the table with Luke, Amy, and Chris, taking the rolls on the table, hollowing them out, and dipping little balls of bread in the cheese soup. Dad told them to be civilized and eat the soup with their spoons, but they didn’t do it. Jane laughs as she recalls the incredulous, almost horrified expression on Dad’s face that afternoon. Rebelling against your parents is always fun, but it’s even more fun when your siblings can do it with you.

She snaps back to the present. As she watches Chris and Amy, something changes. Amy’s laughing, and it’s not one of those arrogant witchy laughs, either. Jane leans forward to see if she can glimpse Chris’s face, too. Sure enough, he’s laughing. And they’re both laughing. And it looks like joy – joy in a way Jane no longer thought was possible.

They start to look around, almost certainly for Jane, who books it down the hallway like she was never there. She’s the detente, and she can’t screw this one up.

As she runs away, she starts thinking about where they should go on their first family dinner. Maybe she’ll even call Luke.

(part of @nosebleedclub march challenge -- day 15!)

[irishhills]

rumored lover

Amy still remembers all the things people would say about her rumored lover. Some people said he was a professional baseball player from one of those cities on the Coast. They never said which coast, but folks would nod like they completely understood. Some people swore it was Emmett Mulaney cheating on his wife, Bridget, just like he’d cheated on Amy with Bridget when they were in the tenth grade. Some people said her lover was Tom Cruise. Amy’s still not sure how that one got started, but all these years later, it still makes her laugh. Imagine her with Jerry Maguire. It could never be.

She’s still the only one who knows the identity of Poppy’s father. Maybe one day, she’ll tell people. Starting with Poppy, of course. But at four years old, she’s still not very interested in the idea that she might have a dad. Mommy is enough. They go to see Aunt Jane at the museum, they swim in Uncle Luke and Aunt Eliza’s pool, and they call Uncle Chris and Aunt Blair to tease them about living in Milwaukee.

Amy almost wishes one of those rumors were true. She almost wishes she would have told people who Poppy’s father was. But she kind of liked the way it rocked people’s worlds. Not her mother’s, of course. Mom’s far too liberated to freak out about her daughter getting pregnant by an anonymous body. But her grandparents, cousins, colleagues … people like that. It was like they’d never heard of anyone getting pregnant out of wedlock before. It was like they completely forgot about the way Chris was conceived. Bullshit, honestly.

But Amy loves being a scandal. It gives her … life, like she’s made of glitter and glue. She loves being the talk of the town, and she loves when people assume she’s bad. It just gives her every excuse to play into it, to fuck up, to give the people what they want. And people want to see homecoming queens fall hard.

They don’t need to know that Poppy’s biological father is some art historian that Amy met during one of Jane’s exhibits in Detroit. They don’t need to know that their first and only date was a long drive to the Toledo Museum of Art because he wanted to show her Oath of the Horatii. They don’t need to know that Amy was actually impressed, which was why she took him home … which was why she wound up pregnant before she even knew it. They don’t need to know that he just went back to his life in Chicago. Not with animosity. Just with ignorance.

Amy didn’t want to blow up his life. But more than that, she didn’t want to blow up her own. What was she going to do? Risk everything for some guy and one date? No. She’d been that girl dreaming of one love for too long. She wasn’t going to rope a stranger back into her life. She already had one stranger coming into it.

But she still lets people whisper about her rumored lover.

It’s a good time, really, when she thinks about it.

(part of @nosebleedclub march challenge -- day 11!)

[irishhills]

persnickety

Luke knows he’s being persnickety, but he swears it’s only out of love. Chris wouldn’t have come to him for help on his college admissions essay if he didn’t want it. After all, Luke’s been through this before. He knows what to say and what to do. It’s a big brother’s job to guide the little brother through new territory, even if the little brother is sure to travel farther.

Chris is applying to schools that Luke used to dream about. Yale, Cornell, Stanford. Hell, even Michigan, where Luke wasn’t “a good fit” two years ago when he mailed in his materials. But even though Chris has higher test scores, better grades in the long run, and more of a vision for what he wants to do with his life (besides wake up and make money and impress people), he still needs his big brother. And Luke is going to milk that for every oddly placed comma.

“And look at this,” he says as he pores over Chris’s third draft. “You’re using the word very. You write, ‘I would be very excited to continue my literary studies.’ That doesn’t tell the reader anything!”

“Sure it does,” Chris says, twirling a pen around and around in his left hand. “It tells the reader that I like literature. A lot.”

“‘Very excited’ is vague as shit.”

“But excited by itself just isn’t enough.”

“Then try something different. Thrilled. Delighted. A third word that I can’t think about when I’m this frustrated with you! Dammit, Chris! You’re supposed to be the writer.”

Chris stops twirling his pen and looks at Luke for real. For serious. Luke gulps. It’s a rare thing when Chris really looks like he wants to get down to business … so rare, it’s actually a little bit terrifying. Luke takes a step back without realizing it.

“I should probably talk about the authors I like best,” Chris says. “Show more of a story. Don’t describe one.”

Luke grins. There’s that kid who read Ira Sleeps Over in five different voices. Of course, he was always there.

“Sure,” Luke says, gruffer than he intended. “But if you use another useless adverb, I’m gonna storm out on you.”

Chris laughs. He’s not afraid. He’s never afraid. Luke just hopes he knows that underneath all the annoyance, all the precision, there’s really only one thing he’s trying to say.

I love you, Luke thinks, and I want you to be better than I am.

Starting with the adverbs.

(part of @nosebleedclub march challenge -- day 7!)

[irishhills]

drive up the hill

Blair mostly gets her driver’s license out of convenience. Her parents don’t have time to chauffeur two kids around town, nor do they have time to do all the shopping. If Blair can drive, she can run errands. But, as Mom and Dad say, she can also have a little bit of freedom.

It’s just that Blair doesn’t really see the whole “operating heavy machinery” thing as freeing. Really, it’s more like a burden. She never pushes past the speed limit, always stares straight ahead, never forgets to use a turn signal, never fools around. For most parents, she would be the perfect child. For her parents, she’s a robot who needs to remember how to live.

Mom gives her an assignment on Friday evening, now that the sun is staying out longer and longer. She says that Blair has to take a drive up the hill, listen to the radio, and try to feel like a real person.

“I am a real person,” Blair insists.

“You are,” Mom says. “But you don’t feel like one, and you know exactly what I mean.”

Blair sighs. She’s been trying to pretend she has no feelings ever since Chris went with Eliza to the homecoming dance. They’re not a couple, and Luke insists that Chris is in love with Blair instead. But she doesn’t believe anyone. She doesn’t believe anything good. But she does take her mother’s word seriously. She takes the keys and goes for a drive.

The sunlight is beautiful. It envelops the whole road in gold, and Blair’s never really seen it from this angle before. She turns on the radio, just like her mom said she could do.

It’s safe, she thinks. You’re not going to die of music.

She turns the dial to the college station – the one she and Chris love to listen to in his backyard, or up in his bedroom, which Blair is surprised by. It was one thing when she hung out on Chris’s bed when they were ten. Now that they’re sixteen, why isn’t anyone kicking her out? Is she not that much of a threat? Have they ever kicked Eliza out? Has Eliza ever been in Chris’s room without Blair? Was Eliza telling the truth when she said she didn’t actually like Chris that way? She only thought she did?

Blair turns up the music. It’s the only way to drown out these insipid teenage thoughts. Why must this be her body? Why must this be her brain?

The Smithereens are singing “Cut Flowers.”

They can do her thinking for her.

For now, Blair tries to enjoy the pull in her stomach as her car makes it up, up, up the hill.

(part of @nosebleedclub march challenge -- day 5! i know i'm so behind, especially on this blog, but i am doing my best)

[irishhills]

blog appearance changed for march here, too!

[irishhills]

samurai

Chris stays home with Faye after she needs four stubborn baby teeth pulled. Blair can’t cancel the conference she’s hosting, but she calls home about every half hour to see how Faye is doing. She’s only six, and she doesn’t even realize that getting four baby teeth pulled at once – getting any baby teeth pulled at all – is unusual.

“You’ve got strong roots,” Chris tells her as he scoops her another bowl of peanut butter cup ice cream. “You should be proud of that.”

“Hmm,” Faye says. “Can I watch TV?”

Chris puts down the ice cream and slides her the remote.

“As much as you want.”

Giving a six-year-old girl the remote control at any time is a dangerous game. It becomes even more dangerous when that six-year-old girl recently had four baby teeth pulled. But Faye is Faye, his own sweetheart, and he will deal with whatever TV shows she flicks on and off the screen. She dismisses Days of Our Lives and SpongeBob Squarepants, but she holds on Samurai Jack for a little longer than Chris expected. It’s just two guys on a bridge, and Faye can’t stop staring at the screen. It’s funny. She’s usually like him – big into talking, scenes about talking, people in rooms talking. But it’s just two guys on a bridge.

“Faye?” Chris asks.

“Yeah, Daddy?”

“Do you like this?”

Faye nods and clinks her spoon against the edge of the bowl.

“Peaceful,” she says.

Chris laughs a little. He wraps his arm around her and holds her close. Maybe she’ll always let her folks hug her and adore her. He doesn’t know. But for now, he’s enjoying being the dad of a little girl. A perfect little girl with melted ice cream on her shirt. Oh well.

“When your mom gets home, we should ask her when she thinks you’ll be ready to watch Seven Samurai,” Chris says. “She’ll be through the roof.”

But Faye’s falling asleep in the melting peanut butter cups.

Peaceful.

(part of @nosebleedclub february challenge -- day 26! yes, i'm going to finish february before i start march)

[irishhills]

fragility

Eliza goes about the day in a stupor after finding out she’s on the prom court. The Class of ‘92 got together to vote on five prom princesses before they choose their queen, and she’s one of them. She’s not sure how to feel when they put that plastic tiara on her head. Two and a half years ago, she would have been desperate for it. She would have thought it was the best and only way to get noticed in all the right ways. For boys to think she was beautiful, for other girls to think she was worth talking to. So she could relate to her mother.

But now … now, she’s not sure what to feel. Everything’s happened in such a weird way. She hasn’t had a real boyfriend since Luke, and that was two years ago. But as of last month, she’s not a virgin, either. She’s not a virgin, but she hasn’t talked to the boy she slept with since the night she slept with him. She hasn’t even told anyone, except Blair, who swears she would never tell Chris, no matter how much she might want to. Two and a half years ago, Eliza thought this little plastic tiara was her ticket to love, beauty, sex … all of it. It doesn’t seem to mean much now. Just a sign that being the yearbook’s main photographer puts you at the front of people’s minds, even if you’re the one behind the camera. People want your lens to notice them, so they notice you. Even if they didn’t mean it.

She asks to go to the bathroom in the middle of fifth period, which feels like a silly thing to do. In a few months, she’ll be in college, and if she asks a professor the same question, they’ll look at her like she’s nuts. But these are the last weeks of high school, and hall passes are a necessary evil. She takes a slip of yellow paper from her teacher’s desk and wears the crown all the way down. When she gets to the bathroom, she grips the sink and stares at herself in the mirror. A real cinematic moment. Part of her expects “About a Girl” to start playing out of nowhere. Isn’t that the kind of song that would go here? Blair would know, but she wouldn’t understand the stress. The stress of a cheap tiara.

Eliza hears one of the stalls swing open. Over her shoulder, she sees Amy in the mirror, too. They politely smile at each other. It’s been a long time since they were really friends, but Eliza has never stopped loving her. She has never stopped hoping they could be friends again.

“Nice move on the prom court,” Amy says, and she really means it. Eliza can tell.

“Thanks. Sorry. I know you would have liked to be on it.”

“Eh, maybe. But homecoming court makes you ineligible, and I’m good with being homecoming queen. Don’t know how I pulled out that win.”

“Couldn’t have anything to do with you being popular and beautiful.”

Amy laughs like she doesn’t believe it, but Eliza knows she does.

“You don’t like it,” Amy says, almost out of nowhere. “Do you?”

Eliza’s heart stops.

“Don’t like what?”

“Being on the prom court. Having that kind of attention. Any of it.”

Eliza doesn’t say anything. There’s really no use in lying to Amy. After spending all of third, fourth, and fifth grade telling each other ridiculous secrets about TV star crushes, dream careers, and fantasy outfits, she knows Amy can see right through her. There is a kind of transparency that only comes from being children together. It never goes away.

“It’s just weird,” Eliza says, “to have that many people looking at me. I’m the one who’s usually looking at them, and now … I don’t know, do they expect me to take pictures of myself?”

Amy laughs a little. She shrugs, takes out a tube of lip gloss, and applies in the mirror like this is a normal conversation. Perhaps it is.

“The thing that got me,” Amy says, “was the fragility. You take off that crown, and it’s so cheap. It just … breaks without you even having to bend.”

“Did yours break?” Eliza asks. “Your homecoming crown?”

Amy shrugs again.

“I think so,” she says. “I kinda don’t remember.”

She waves goodbye and leaves without another word. Eliza still stands over the sink, and the crown still rests atop her head.

She’s not going to do anything on purpose, but she wishes it would fall off and crack in half. Just because.

(part of @nosebleedclub february challenge -- day 16!)

[irishhills]

memory of the cliffs

Jane doesn’t know how to paint mountains. Mr. Mills says it should be easy for her (“For puuuurple mountains’ majesty!”), but she doesn’t know if it works that way. She can paint all the purple skies she wants. When it comes to a mountain, she’s stumped. This is what she gets for being born in Michigan. The highest peak she’ll ever climb is a hill.

She doesn’t know why Mr. Mills wants them to paint mountains, anyway. Does he think they’re all going to grow up and paint portraits exclusively for waiting rooms and boring men’s corporate offices? Maybe he does. It sure would keep you employed, Jane thinks. Dad recently said he’d pay for her to study art in college, but only as long as it was art history. There seemed to be something more legitimate to that, more academic, more written. Jane kept painting.

Mr. Mills allows her to take her canvas home. He says she can work from all the inspiration she needs. Jane locks herself in her room and puts on Kate Bush. She stares at the album cover, trying to make it all work. Purple, she thinks. Running up that hill. But this is not a hill. This is a mountain, and she doesn’t know mountains.

Perhaps she should focus on cliffs. They seem more accessible. After all, she watched Dallas and Dynasty, and she is very familiar with the art of the cliffhanger. Maybe there’s a metaphor in there, but she doesn’t know. Chris is better at metaphors, so maybe she’ll knock on his door and ask him. He’s the only one of her siblings who’s ever home anymore.

But trying to picture cliffs doesn’t work, either. Jane only has one memory of the cliffs, and it isn’t even real. It was just a dream.

She had the dream last year on a Friday night. The kind of dream that becomes a memory, so baked into your subconscious that you have to think for a second about whether or not it really happened. Jane knows this one isn’t real. It’s too unbelievable, too good to be true. In the dream, she was on a hike with Luke, Amy, and Chris. She’s not sure where they were or if that part even matters much. They were together, they were wandering through the cliffs, and no one fought. No one fell. All they did was laugh. They weren’t headed anywhere in particular. No mention of trying to find Mom or Dad. Just walking through the cliffs. All they did was laugh.

Jane closes her eyes and tries to paint those mountains, those cliffs.

She hasn’t figured out if it will work, but she’s hopeful.

(part of @nosebleedclub february challenge -- day 15!)

[irishhills]

amy egan 🤝 daniel deluca

seeking their

individual selves through

sex with apathetic partners