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I'm currently writing
I'm currently writing a story, and I would like to post it here. Unfortunately, on the first thread I made about it, someone impersonated me and told the Admins to delete it. So I'm going to repost everything.
I'm too salty to rewrite the whole original introduction, but I would like to point out that many of the main characters in this are LGBTQ+. If that was the reason whoever the impersonater was told the Admins under my name to take it down, then I cannot say how awful that is.
Please don't do it again. To me or to anyone. It feels super, super, super bad. It feels like you're being taken advantage of. Like you're not being regarded as a person.
If you don't like this story, don't read it. That doesn't mean you should steal someone's identity and demand for someone else's hard work be deleted.
Thanks. Here's part one again.
-----
It was one of those things that he never expected to change.
Suddenly it did, and it felt so right that he didn’t question it. And it changed again and again, but he scarcely noticed that everything was different because he was all caught up in the swirl and excitement and joy of living.
Then one day, he was hanging upside down from a branch on that big tree in the backyard that Liza joked would never stop growing and one day swallow up the house and all of Los Angeles. He was holding his phone (tightly, lest he drop it) and laughing as he typed out a text to Jack and Adri and Theo, when he realized that, indeed, he and his life had become very, very, different since the day three years ago that cute, red-haired, freckle-faced boy had come up behind him after Math and asked if he could draw him.
“You want to know if you can… what?” Alex blinked, bewildered, at his questioner.
“Draw you. Oh, sorry—” The boy said sheepishly. “That was weird, wasn’t it? I mean, you seem like a nice person, and you’re really interesting.”
Alex was at a loss for words, which he thought with a kind of amused awe. Alex Quinn, he had been told and acknowledged himself, was very difficult to shut up.
“No! No! Ugh, human interaction is hard, gosh, I’m sorry— Can we start over?” Flustered, the boy ran a hand through his long auburn curls, the other pulling nervously at the edge of his too-large “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt.
Alex grinned. “Sure. I’m Alex Quinn. Pleased to meet you.”
“I’m Jack.”
They shook hands. Jack’s palms were soft, and even they were covered in freckles, like someone had dumped cinnamon sugar on him.
Alex gathered his binders and notebooks, carefully stacking them in size order. It was a habit, he supposed, but he wasn’t sure where it had come from— Only that it made him uneasy to have it any other way. It was just one of those things.
“So, why did you want to draw me?”
Jack’s hands started fidgeting, fingers tapping his sides in some sort of rhythm. “I’m an artist, I guess, and I’m best at drawing people, and you seem like… I don’t know.” He paused. “You’re really alive, you know.”
Alex paused at his locker, dumping his supplies in it and kicking the blue metal door shut. After considering a moment, he replied, “I’ve been told it’s really hard to get me to stop talking and moving. Or doing anything I want to be doing, really.”
Jack opened his mouth, seemingly struggling with deciding whether or not to elaborate on that, for a moment before closing his mouth and saying, “That’s kind of what I mean.”
Alex could tell that it wasn’t all that Jack had to say, but he left it be.
They walked in silence for a bit, and Jack glanced over at Alex, trying to commit his appearance to memory, all of his expressive hazel eyes and baggy blue sweatshirt and scuffed up converse and easy posture, the way his mouth upturned slightly as if preparing to say something, and that when he did you’d gosh darn better listen.
“Are you new here?” Jack said finally.
“Yeah,” Alex said as they neared the dark oak double doors that led to the dining hall. “This is my first year at this place. I moved during the summer.”
“From where?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Alex replied, a little too quickly.
Jack also took note of the way Alex bit his lip and ducked his head so his dark brown hair fell into his eyes when he said this, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Catch you later, okay? I have work to do.”
“Okay.” Jack said, and Alex had turned and walked away, hurrying out of the cafe and towards the direction of the library.
Lunch was quiet. Jack sat at a corner table by himself, just like usual, and took out his sketchbook to draw, just like usual. He would sketch people, just glance around and pick the first person his eyes fell on, but this time he drew Alex.
In the first attempt, he penciled out the boy’s profile, trying to capture the peaceable line of his jaw and the way his hair hung down the side of his face, tucked behind his ears. He stopped to analyze it. It wasn’t a bad drawing, but it wasn’t... Alex.
Half an hour and four abandoned doodles of Alex later, he slammed his book shut in a fit of rare frustration. There was something about the guy that he couldn’t quite ensnare, something deep and quiet and real and ragingly beautiful.
Jack was determined to find it.
Keep writing, Abi! We're excited to see the rest. To the impersonator, we do not tolerate that type of behavior. ~Admin
submitted by Abigail S., age 12, Nose in a Book
(December 22, 2016 - 12:21 pm)
(December 22, 2016 - 12:21 pm)
(June 17, 2017 - 9:06 am)
(June 26, 2017 - 7:45 pm)
(June 27, 2017 - 9:38 am)
Amazing job. Keep going, I am looking forward to the next part.
(June 28, 2017 - 12:35 am)
To summarize the bits of the last couple parts that had edited portions, Jack, Adri, Alex, Angie, Jared, and Ben were all playing truth or dare. A couple slightly dangerous dares are suggested but don't occur, and Adri gives Jack a dare that makes multiple people uneasy.
Jared suggests they terminate the game and play Monopoly instead. Jack, still uncomfortable, hurriedly exits the room to get the Monopoly board. Adri follows him and apologizes. When they return with the game, Alex is missing.
———
The logical place to look was, of course, the bathroom, as it was apparently Alex’s original destination when he had departed the den who-knows-how-much-earlier, but Jack had never been logical and so this revelation occurred to him after approximately two minutes of distracted, ineffective searching.
Jack peeked into a few empty bathrooms before trying the knob of one and found it locked. “Um, hey, who’s in here?”
No reply.
“...Alex? Is that you?”
Nothing.
When Moriah was in fourth grade, she figured out how to pick the locks on all the bathroom doors with a pencil and exercised this skill whenever possible for the next few weeks before their dad put an all-out ban on it. During that period of time, the household lived in fearful anticipation whenever they went to use the restroom. The ban was being upheld with a punishment of either death or no dessert for a month, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
Jack slipped into Rachel's’ room and grabbed a blindingly neon pink pencil from her desk. After some fiddling, the door swung open and Jack tossed the pencil over his shoulder and didn’t hear it clatter to the floor.
The lights were off. Everything was still. Jack felt like he was intruding on something, as if he was walking into a tableau— Frozen mid-breath.
“Alex?”
His voice sounded unbelievably loud.
“Alex?”
“I’m not here,” came a familiar voice, slightly muffled, from the direction of the bathtub. Jack walked over. Alex was sitting against the longer, horizontal, edge of the bathtub, knees tucked into his chest and head tucked into his knees.
“Hi,” Jack said and plopped down next to him. He was too tall to sit this way and his legs folded into an awkward pretzel shape that he was no way flexible enough for. He used to like to lay down in here when he was little and run his fingers down the smooth white tile. The bathroom was so echoey that if he sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star loud enough, it reverberated around the room and almost drowned out mom and dad’s arguing.
“Go away,” Alex said.
“No,” Jack said.
Jack didn’t know how long he sat there with the wall pressing into his shoulder blades, listening to the indistinct sounds of people talking and laughing from elsewhere in the house.
“I hate Halloween,” Alex mumbled, barely audible.
“Hmm? What?”
Alex pressed his knees up into his eyes, painfully hard, and didn’t reply. He trained his vision at the purple fireworks exploding behind his sockets. It’s always a strange feeling to look at something that isn’t really there, he mused, like feeling a tap on your shoulder and turning around to see an empty room.
“When I was, I don’t know, five maybe? I really didn’t like carving pumpkins,” Jack said. “I used to think they were— sentient. That it hurt them to scoop their insides out.” He laughed, sort of, like something was supposed to be funny but wasn’t. “I would run and hide when my family got the little knives out. It scared me half to death. I thought that you could do just like that to people, y’know? Reach into them and rip out all their everything. Lay them out on a table, gooey and mushy and gross.”
“But that’s not how it works.”
“Now I know that,” Jack shrugged. “But I think I was maybe a little bit right. We can spill ourselves out. If we want to. Not, like, literal organs, that’d be really gross, ew, but all the stuff in our heads. The sad and emotional junk? All that?” Jack’s speech was becoming faster and faster paced with each word. “Sometimes it’s good to get it all out and… Gosh, I’m probably not making any sense I’m so sorry I’ll just shut up forget I ever said anything at all— Are you laughing at me?”
Alex snorted. “No. Well. Kind of.” He paused. “Was all that just a really roundabout way of asking me to talk to you?”
“Yeah. It’s— it’s what mom used to say.”
“Does she not say it anymore?”
“That’d be difficult, considering she’s. Not really around much,” Jack said.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’m over it.”
Alex shifted and lifted his head, turning to look at Jack’s face, blurred in almost-darkness of the bathroom.
“Your hair’s all messed up,” Jack said, poking his tongue out and reaching over to adjust it, crinkling his nose up in concentration. (That’s so adorable, Alex’s heart said. Shut up, Alex’s brain retorted.)
More silence, hovering on the line between comfortable and strained.
“You want to know why I hate Halloween so much?” Alex said finally.
“If you want to tell me.”
Alex let out a long, slow, breath. “My mum died on Halloween.”
(June 28, 2017 - 3:36 pm)
(June 30, 2017 - 12:44 pm)
Wow.
(June 30, 2017 - 9:38 pm)
Thank you. (I think... :P)
(July 1, 2017 - 1:32 pm)
(July 10, 2017 - 8:03 am)
(July 12, 2017 - 10:03 am)
(July 12, 2017 - 2:58 pm)
“Umm… Got any fives?”
“Go fish,” said Angie smugly, sticking out her tongue at Ben’s annoyed sigh. “I told you, I always win these things.”
“The game’s not over yet,” Ben reminded her. “I’ve got time for a comeback.”
Jared was sitting in Jack’s fancy leather desk chair playing a game about colored circles that Ben had downloaded onto his phone one day when he hadn’t been paying attention.
“Hey, are you actually using that?” Ben gasped, resting his chin on his shoulder to peer at the screen. ”I thought that those kind of games were ‘all money-sucking timewasters from hell’.”
“They are,” Jared said as his character died and dissolved into multicolored pixels. “I just don’t have anything better to do.” (It was crazy addictive, not that he would ever tell Ben that. He’d never live it down.) “Also? Get your face out of mine.” He shoved Ben’s head away.
“Aw, don’t you love me?” Ben pouted, displaying his signature stupid dopey grin.
“Stop flirting with Jared and get back over here!” Angie yelled. “I’m not done winning!”
Adrienne, cross-legged atop Jack’s desk, was fiddling with her watch, glancing down at it and up at the door in an odd, repetitive, ritual.
Jared’s phone rang. Somewhat reluctantly, he paused the game and accepted the call. Theo’s face appeared on the screen, sliding in and out of focus before settling itself. She appeared to be lying on the floor of her room, holding the phone up above her which gave Jared a wobbly aerial view of his cousin’s exasperated expression.
“You don’t even know how bored I am right now,” she groaned by way of greeting.
“It’s not my fault you didn't want to come with us,” he said, shrugging. “I’m not bored.”
(Ben threw the deck of cards at a maniacally-giggling Angie, who shouted, “Want me to beat you at fifty-two pickup now?”)
“Well that’s good for you,” Theo grumbled. “But it—”
“Who are you talking to?” Adri asked, becoming the second person in less than five minutes to look at his phone without his permission. Privacy was definitely dead.
Jared sighed. “This is my cousin, Th—”
“Oh,” said Adri, staring wide-eyed at the screen.
Theo, with a near-identical expression, fumbled with her phone, nearly dropping it onto her stomach before stuttering out a, “Hi, Adrienne.”
“Wait, you two know each other?”
“Unfortunately,” Theo said.
(July 12, 2017 - 4:12 pm)
Yay, new installment! Gah, cliffhanger!
Mexi says rpmc. Role play main character? Awa, you want more fluff, too!
(July 12, 2017 - 7:37 pm)
yay! That was awesome!!
(July 12, 2017 - 8:39 pm)
The things you miss when you go on vacation...
First off, YES! TWO NEW INSTALLMENTS! They are awesome! Secondly, a question--is each installment one chapter, or a half chapter, or some system like that there?
And they both have cliffhangers. How will Jack react? Why do Theo and Adri have such a strange reaction to seeing each other? Did something else happen besides the assignment? I also love that we get to see from the perspective of Jack's "enemies". It reminds me, at least, that they're people, too, and complex characters. I'm assuming that Adri was glancing down at her watch and at the door repeatedly because she was wondering what was going on with Jack and Alex, but is there another reason?
Thank you so, so much for writing this story, Abi! It is amazing, and I cannot wait to see more of it!
-Nianad
(July 13, 2017 - 4:18 pm)