wizened_cynic | OMG I wrote fic! (Reply)

See, the minute I come to realize that I have an exam in 2 days and I will definitely fail if I don't get off my ass and study about juvenile delinquents, I open up MS Word and start to type, "Abby and Neela go to the beach."

Or something like that.

So here is an untitled ficlet in which Grace goes off to college. Unbeta-ed because I whipped it up in 40 minutes, and also because I'm too embarrassed to keep making Hope beta fics that I write for her. SO HERE YOU GO, thenewhope, THIS IS A SURPRISE! Just, um, ignore all the run-on sentences, comma splices, and the Monterey Jack ending.

For Grace, college is a one way ticket out of Arcadia, and not very much else. She isn't against learning per se, but as she sees it, formal systems of education are inherently racist and sexist, and why should her professors have power over her, just because they went to school for an extra ten years and wrote hundred-page theses that nobody, except for maybe their mothers, has ever read?

Choosing a college is a pain to begin with. The red states are automatically ruled out, California is out of the question (because, dude --- sun, sand, and Schwarzenegger), and she isn't going anywhere near the Bible Belt. That leaves a handful of schools in New England, and she settles on a university in Boston that she feels she can live with.

Only now she has to continuously explain that she isn't choosing to go there because it's near MIT, and everyone knows who's going to MIT next year. Grace is not, and will never be, someone whose choice of universities depends on said universities' proximity to her boyfriend (so, yes, Luke is her boyfriend, but she'll never admit it out loud). She makes that clear to Luke, but he's already given up pretending not to smile about it. He wears this big, dorky grin on his face and is probably plotting some disturbing white picket fence crap, and Grace doesn't know whether she wants to punch him in the face or stick her tongue down his throat.

Joan whines about it, of course, because that's what Joan does. "I can't believe you're going so far away," she keeps saying, as if repeating it over and over will stop it from happening. "It's so final, Grace." And in August, when she and Luke go to see Grace off, she cries all the way to the airport, manages to hold it together for about ten minutes, and then breaks down again at the gate.

"Email, Girardi," Grace snaps at her, but more softly than usual. "Technology isn't completely useless." Grace has spent much of her adolescence making girls at Arcadia High cry, but when Joan does it, it's extra annoying. Unnerving. Sad.

To Luke, she utters a warning, "If you're going to give me any of that distance makes the heart grow fonder crap, I'll seriously have to maim you."

He fakes a look of abhorrence and says, "I was just going to give you this." He hands her a copy of The Portable Nietzsche. "So you can have something to make fun of on the plane."

Instead of telling him that she always has something to make fun of on the plane, she stands on her tiptoes and puts her arms around him. He smells like sandalwood and Irish Spring soap, and she wonders if she will be able to carry some of that away with her. God, she better not be turning into one of those PDA freaks. Damn Nerd Boy and his ability to compel her to do insipid teenage-girl things.

"Call me when you get there," Joan says as she dissolves into sobs again. Her hand reaches out for Grace's, and for some reason, Grace's throat begins to swell and ache. Grace looks away and lets Joan hold her hand for longer than she usually does. When the PA system announces that her flight is ready for boarding, she tries to think of happy thoughts: her twelfth birthday, when her father got her that skateboard; the science fair with the rail gun that nearly took the whole place down; the look on Price's face when he found out that she'd been awarded a full scholarship to her (albeit inevitably fascist) post-secondary institute of choice.

She can't think of Joan's attempts at cheerleading, or her Bat Mitzvah, or Luke's sixteenth birthday, because she is not the type of person who gets onto an airplane and starts losing it while other passengers stare and wonder whether they should ignore her or offer their own version of humanistic therapy. She just isn't.

So she jams her headphones over her ears, scowls at the child who keeps peering behind his seat at her, and tries to focus on something more pleasant. (Since when did she become this glass half-full kind of person? She blames the Girardis.) In a few hours, she'll meet her new roommate, whom she already dislikes because the girl is a Type A-personality who ended her only letter to Grace with "So, what did you get on your SATs?" In a few days, she will probably discover that course descriptions lie and she has inadvertently signed up for a class that requires a lot of human interaction. In a few months she will learn that Boston has many things the white-bread suburbia doesn't, but it doesn't have Luke and it doesn't have Joan, and as much as it begrudges Grace to even consider it, Arcadia will have its merits in the meantime.

She will email Luke and Joan about all this (except the last one) and complain. She may even call, once that newness has rubbed off and it won't hurt as much to hear their voices. She will not, however, allow Luke to re-negotiate their terms of correspondence, which states clearly that they will only exchange phone calls twice a week. She will not become one of those girls who call their boyfriends sixteen times a day or whose boyfriends call sixteen times a day, because college is not about that. It's about angst and overdue papers and profs who teach you one thing in class and test you on something completely unrelated on your midterms.

Grace thinks about this, and she knows she will be all right, even if her nose is burning and her eyes smart, and shut up, she's not crying. It's the poor lighting and the perfume the woman sitting next to her is wearing, an offensive mixture of hollyberry and industrial air freshener that's killing her sinus.

It hurts, but it's a good kind of hurt. Not the kind that breaks you into pieces and buries you in a dark place. It's more like jumping off the highest point of the jungle gym when you're little, and your ankles hurt like hell afterward, and maybe it stings because you've scraped your knees on the gravel. It hurts, but it's good because you learn that the fall doesn't kill you. It tells you that you're real, that you're alive, and maybe you're a little bit broken somewhere, but there are people in the distance who can hold you back together.

I might feel like continuing this later because, hello, I've got 5 exams!

ETA: Annotated version will be coming later. Because I hate corporate crime, and I love footnotes.

EATA: Annotated version is here. Shut up, I am studying Greek, ok?