The next morning, Esther’s fever had gone down, and she was well enough to walk around. She, Amos, Carine, and Bryan underwent the hike to the main road, where they hitched a ride to the nearest hospital. By that evening, they were back at the hostel with Esther’s arm in a cast.

Amos was less than pleased. She managed to be maddeningly elusive about who she was and where she came from. Since last night, his curiosity had warped into obsession. He had taken her word that Esther was indeed her name; he definitely couldn’t check her back pocket for her passport now. And European hospitals cared less about identification than American ones, probably because they didn’t need to know who to charge if the insurance company refused to pay, since there was no insurance company that needed to cover treatment costs in the first place. On top of the whole lack of clear identity, she spoke perfect French (much to the delight of Carine) and excellent Spanish, of which Amos knew enough to recognize her superiority in the language. When pressed, she admitted to knowing a bit of Japanese and Arabic, and he could only guess where she’d picked that up. Carine and Bryan loved her, as did pretty much everyone else in the hostel, but Amos couldn’t shake the feeling that she was hiding something from them all.

The next afternoon, Amos was reading Camus again, this time in his own room. At a knock on his door, he looked up to find Esther standing in the doorway. She was prettier than he’d first thought — slight figure but surprisingly strong, long dark hair, an easy smile, and an assertive confidence of personality, something Amos himself had and took pride in, although many people disliked him for it. Even her clothes — the standard organic t-shirt or tank top with quick-dry shorts that all REI-raised American backpackers wore — couldn’t dissuade him from the idea that she must be stylish, at least at home.

“Come in,” he said, gesturing for her to enter.

She obliged, sitting down in front of him on the bed. “Reading the scorned Camus translation, I see.”

“Yeah,” he answered. “I can’t learn an entire language just for a book that’s been translated anyway.”

She shrugged, leaning back on one hand with her cast resting on her stomach. “I read them in parallel, so I can’t really say.”

“In parallel?” he asked, shifting so that he sat cross-legged to give her more room.

“I read it in my English class and started the French version about three chapters behind, so I already knew what was going on in the story. More of Camus’s diction nuances come out in the original text.”

“You’re crazy,” he said with a little admiration.

She just smiled. “What are you up to this afternoon?”

“Just reading,” he answered. “You?”

“Nothing really,” she sighed. “I was going to join Natalie on a hike, but I’m still pretty drugged up and tired.”

“Well… take a nap,” he suggested, patting the pillow next to him.

Laughing, she plopped down next to him on her side, her broken arm free. She propped her head up with her good arm and leaned closer to read the page he was on. He watched her sly smile grow as her eyes scanned Camus’s words.

“What?” he asked.

“End of part one. You’re about to hit the good part,” she answered.

“Meaning…?”

“You’ll see.”

They read in silence, Amos pausing for her approval before turning the page. She nodded, but stopped him to point out a line at the bottom of the page.

“See that? The translation isn’t quite accurate — it sounds awkward, right? Mersault is actually a lot more eloquent in the original French.”

“Is he any less of an emotionless creep?”

She rolled her eyes and replied, “No, not really…”

Vindicated, he glanced at her right hand hovering over the page, and the arm in its cast. “It’s a good thing you’re left-handed,” he remarked.

She eyed him for a moment. “Who said I was left-handed?”

He turned towards her, frowning a little in disbelief. “You filled out paperwork yesterday with your left hand. It didn’t really look awkward.” When she didn’t say anything and kept reading instead, he tapped her with the book. “You’re not left-handed?”

“Who said I wasn’t?” she asked, grinning.

“What the hell!” he exclaimed, only feigning annoyance as she goaded him. “Are you left-handed or not?”

“I’m ambidextrous,” she laughed, “although right-handed originally.”

“Crazy weirdo,” he muttered, turning a page.

The quiet of the hostel settled over them as they read for a time. A few pages later, Amos opened his mouth to ask her a question, but she had fallen asleep. He smiled at how her fingers curled slightly on the pillow in front of her nose, and how she cradled her arm in its sling against her chest. Quietly, he unfolded the spare blanket at the foot of the bed and spread it over her gently. She shifted slightly, but didn’t wake.

(A/N: You know what’s hard? Describing female characters from a male’s perspective when you’re a female writer. You know what, describing characters that other characters find attractive is difficult in general. So here’s a scene from Roosevelt shortly after the Terrible Trio that makes a stab at not over-the-top character description. Originally written 1/16/10.)

“Who’s that?”

Derek and Leo glanced down to where Jay was pointing. A girl was approaching along the deck, carefully keeping her gaze fixed on a point in front of her, not looking up at them.

“Damn,” said Leo. “She is hot.”

Derek bit his lip at this proclamation. Better face it, he told himself. She is. The Erica he’d known was pretty – and he’d known her in the braces years – but three years had done a lot for her. He was taller than her now, but she’d grown a few inches and stopped slouching the way her mother hated. She dressed better now, too, although that would soon disappear when uniforms were required for classes on Monday. Maybe it was her professional tone around him, maybe it was the particular lilt of attitude in her walk now – or maybe it was just that he knew how her face could light up when she laughed. To him, she was no longer pretty; she was beautiful. But apparently to Jay and Leo, she was hot – and they hadn’t seen her in a swimsuit this morning.

Derek cleared his throat. “That’s Erica.”

(A/N: continuation of this, written mostly all at once and needs some revising)

Jay hadn’t really cleaned out his car in about three years…which was about as long as he’d had it. The years of accumulated crap only made it a more daunting task each time he attempted it. He usually just ended up taking it to the car wash, where he skipped his chance at lemony freshness for fear of clogging the place’s vacuums.

He stood staring at his much beloved car, wondering just how to tackle this mess. It was worse than every June at the academy, when he and Leo had to empty out their room without losing the class work they’d need the next September. His car, affectionately dubbed “Wilson” by Leo, was a much-abused dark green Honda Accord that housed a not-so-tidy collection of his favorite away from school memories. Somewhere in there were the discarded sketches from his first internship portfolio, the coffee cup that he and Leo had spilled in the backseat (they claimed joint blame when they couldn’t decide who exactly had done it), notes from girlfriends, some choice summer readings, and very possibly his favorite dress shirt that had disappeared months and months ago.

Well, he’d cleared the entire driveway for this excursion, and he couldn’t exactly bring all this to his new apartment in Berkeley. He yawned and stretched, and finally approached Wilson with a sense of purpose. Gingerly, he opened the rear driver’s side door (imagining Leo declaring, “LEFT NUT,” at the top of his lungs). The precarious pile of papers gave way and slid out at his feet, a smooth cascade of personal history, previously arranged somewhat chronologically but now in a jumbled pile of recyclables on the ground. He sat down in the middle of it and sorted.

After half an hour, he switched to the other side of the backseat, which made a similar performance of paper waterfall. Bit by bit, he was slowly digging his way through the pens and pencils and pamphlets and movie ticket stubs and old boarding passes and gum wrappers and catalogs and plastic utensils. For the most part, he stacked them in a general trash pile, but a few things he kept. To his right, he’d accumulated a decent collection of books, including two years’ worth of Roosevelt Academy summer reading that, needless to say, was never read. Jay resolved to make another attempt at these books, since the discussions he’d winged in the fall were plenty interesting. He’d also found some not entirely G-rated magazines, presents from Leo, which he slipped under the books for safekeeping. No sense wasting good presents, outdated or not.

Some of this junk had to be worth something, he thought as he tossed aside a fourth Skymall magazine. He wondered vaguely how much a collection of them would fetch on Ebay—but given that two of them were stuck together with what looked like a combination of gum and soda and the cover of another was completely ripped off, the auctioning would probably top out around 25 cents. As for the Jack in the Box, Taco Bell, and White Castle bags that formed a three-year timeline of fast food promotional designs… it would deal his Ebay credibility a serious blow to even post those up for auction.

Not all of it was junk, necessarily. He’d found a good number of CDs—mostly unlabeled and mislabeled mixes he’d never bothered to catalog. The stack included the Jason Mraz album that Erica had wanted back last summer; the CD labeled HAVE FUN COMMUTING SUCKER in Cassie’s handwriting; a playlist better known as the “Barney Stinson Get Psyched Mix” that had shaped every party he, Derek, and Leo had thrown junior year of high school; and a mysterious CD labeled “for a good time call 834-2819” (with no area code) on the wrong side. Some were unsalvageably sticky, but he found a clean one that simply said “For the Trio” and popped it into Wilson’s CD player. An old song by the Darkness started blasting from Wilson’s feeble speakers as Jay turned back to cleaning.

The backseat at this point had drooled out most of the papers, save the truly entrenched bits from Jay’s early time with Wilson. He reached in to clear out the assemblage of clothing perched atop the remaining mess in the back—a motley collection of socks, Under Armour, soccer jerseys, capoeira pants, and a wine red dress shirt (not his favorite one, but a welcome find anyway). It took him considerable effort to reach under the driver’s seat to retrieve the deflated basketball he could just barely see, but when his hand came up, he found himself holding not the leathery exterior of a basketball, but of his first ever internship portfolio.

He actually whistled out loud at this find. If he remembered correctly (and when it came to his portfolio work, he did), this contained his redesign of the academy’s main atrium—a project that had kept him amused during his long internship hours at the graphic design company where he’d worked the summer after sophomore year. He leaned against the car and slid down to the ground as he opened it. Everything else in the leather-bound folder had been scanned or otherwise digitized for his web portfolio, and none of this had seen the light of day since he left it in the car at the end of the summer. Dazed, he flipped through logos and mastheads he’d designed (back before he’d branched out to fonts besides his standard Century Gothic, sans-serif and classy), sketches of Manhattan buildings outside his office, and last but certainly not least the mockups of the atrium. He’d known at the time that reconstructing the atrium to follow his design would require an impossible amount of resources that the academy simply didn’t have, but impossibility never stopped him from dreaming. He still remembered sitting at a bench on the third level with Derek, pointing out the revisions he’d planned on these sheets in his lost portfolio.

“So you’re planning on removing the staff residences over there to let more light in?” Derek had asked. “Just what do you think the tenured staff will say when you move them into freshman doubles?”

Jay waved him off as he laid out his plan for an asymmetric design across the far wall by constructing irregular balconies. After a while, Derek just sat there with a huge grin on his face. “I think you’ve found your calling,” he said.

And Derek was right. Two years of graphic design had grown to bore him, and his mild fascination with buildings soon erupted into full-blown enthusiasm for architectural design. He liked the challenge set forth in designing a building—the challenges in balancing functionality with aesthetics. Carefully he set aside the portfolio next to his stack of books and turned to Wilson’s backseat with a new sense of contemplation. What other entrenched mementos from his past were trapped amid the junk?

Most of the papers and trash in the backseat were easy to sort now: old maps, receipts, take-out menus, Spanish homework… but halfway through tossing out the maps he paused. Normally he kept his maps in the glove compartment (the one sanctuary of cleanliness in Wilson’s entire interior) so why weren’t these in there? He laid them out by geographical location on the driveway—NYC/New Jersey, Philadelphia and surrounding cities, Annapolis, D.C., D.C. Museums, Virginia/West Virginia/North Carolina… These were left over from his tour of the East Coast with Leo right before their senior year of high school. Their combined efforts led to the infamous joint coffee spill and the collection of sunflower seeds trapped in the floor mats, not to mention the stack of museum brochures accumulating next to the CD pile. Jay’s non-portfolio sketches from that summer had been scattered in the backseat, and Leo had riffled through them admiringly before accidentally sitting on all of it during one hurried escape from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Smiling, Jay gathered up the maps and tossed them in the trash pile. He wouldn’t need these in California.

The backseat continued coughing up bits of nostalgia while the upholstery gradually came unmasked. He found two paper report cards (this was before the academy emailed grades home) including his first and only C+, a result of his and Leo’s second-year Spanish final video project on the Cuban Missile Crisis in telenovela form. He also found the DVD of the project that he’d apparently saved for posterity. Wedged under his Humanities reader, he finally found his favorite dress shirt, although it could only have gotten there if someone (like Blair, his now ex-girlfriend) had hidden it there. The missing poker chips from Derek’s set turned up under a crushed 132-color set of Prismacolor pencils.

It was late afternoon by the time Jay lugged the vacuum cleaner out to the driveway. The car wash would be closed by the time he got there, and he didn’t mind vacuuming Wilson himself. It caught the receipts and post-its in the front seat, leaving Jay to throw out the empty milkshake cups by hand. Even over the droning of the vacuum, it sounded like gravel was coming up out of the carpeted floor mats and spastically bouncing up the hose to the bag. He didn’t want to think about how long the food crumbs had been there as he sucked them out of the backseat.

When he was done, the car was clean for the first time in years. There was still a weird stain from the coffee on one of the floor mats, and a piece of gum that wouldn’t part with the back of the passenger seat left a neon blue splash of color on the tan upholstery, but all in all the car was clean.

Jay made his way down the driveway, each hand laden with a trash bag full of junk that hours before had filled the backseat of his car to capacity. He couldn’t help thinking, as he looked back at his forlorn car sitting in the driveway in the last of the daylight that it wasn’t quite Wilson anymore. Soon this unfamiliar car would be shipped off to California, where his college friends would judge him for its Honda Accord-ness and nothing else.

He pulled out his phone.

“Leo, it’s me. Call Derek and tell him to book a flight—we’re taking a road trip to California.”

(Originally written 11/14/09)

Theylin stared out across the desolate battlefield, the sunset silhouetting each prone body in gold. He could just make out the Talian commander on an outcrop of the rocky hills across the field. His helm glinted in the remaining light, and Theylin could see him wiping down his sword.

The Talians were not barbarians. They fought like honorable men with fierce strength the Apacath soldiers could only match. “We each have our heroes,” muttered Theylin to himself as he watched the Talian commander. He was looking back now, so that the two commanders locked eyes over the devastation they had wrought.

“Sir,” interrupted Deskel. “Our archers have the Talian commander in their sights. Should they shoot before they lose the light?”

Theylin didn’t even bother looking down at his captain. “No,” he answered. “They haven’t shot me yet, have they?”

“No, sir.”

“Then tell the archers to stand down. The battle will resume tomorrow. Tonight we mourn the fallen.”

Deskel bowed. “Yes, your majesty.”

***

Weston sheathed his blade and looked across the battlefield. The Apacath commander was still poised at the crest of the low hill opposite, unmoving as their troops collected the dead and cared for the wounded between them. Weston wondered if the Apacath commander felt the same sorrow and regret for sending so many to their deaths.

“Weston!”

He glanced down to find his sister leaping from rock to rock up to his perch. Her hair glittered in the evening light — a reminder to him that she wore no metal armor.

“Get down, Azalea,” he commanded, but she ignored him and continued up. She had slung her bow across her back, which she only did when she sensed no threat.

“Their archers stood down,” she told him, halting a few paces below him.

His eyes searched hers. Azalea was, if anything, the most militant of his sisters, but even she would not press him to attack the Apacathites now. Her expression was soft, as if to tell him to take pity. Weston looked back across the carnage to the Apacath commander, still standing and watching in the last of the light.

“Come down,” said Azalea softly. “Tonight we mourn.”

(Originally written 8/3/09)

Replaying memories
Over
And over
The empty space
Where you belong
Fills with wisps and
Brushes, feather weight
Reminders of strong arms
Once wrapped around my sleeping form
We all seek comfort somewhere
But you
And I
Blown apart once more
Rewind—play
There we are again

(A/N: beginning of a new short story)

Charlotte’s morning began with a crash when the coffee pot slipped from her fingers. It bounced once on the linoleum, drenching the cuffs of her jeans in hot coffee. With a yelp, she jumped back but slipped, just barely catching herself on the counter. But suddenly she felt faint, and everything went black.

She woke up with Andrew’s concerned face hovering in the space above her. She blinked. His hair was still wet from the shower — that was the only thing she could focus on, even as his mouth moved and sounds meandered their way to her ears. She couldn’t make any sense out of it.

“Andrew?” she tried to ask, but his name came out like “uhhnoo?”

She felt a hand on her forehead. His hand. Okay. It calmed her to feel that pressure there, as if that touch would ground her and bring everything back to coherence.

“Andrew?” she asked again. It sounded better this time, more resembling “annoo?”

“It’s okay Pree,” he soothed her. She understood him this time. “You just fell and hit your head. Jamie will be here in a sec to check you out.”

She groaned a sentiment of assent. Everything smelled like coffee. Even her hair was soaked in it — or was it wet with something else? She tried to reach up but Andrew batted her hand away.

“Andrew?” His name finally came out right, though her voice quavered with panic. “What’s wrong with me?”

“I don’t know,” he answered quietly, taking her hand in his and squeezing it. “Just hold still.”

They heard the front door bang open. “I’m here!” bellowed Jamie as she stormed into the kitchen. She picked her way around the puddle of coffee, kneeling down at Charlotte’s side with her pack beside her. Her practiced hands quickly found Charlotte’s pulse and assessed her head and neck. “How’s that, love?” she asked. Jamie had been an army medic before college and medical school, and these days Miramonte called her before 9-1-1 because she was usually closer.

“Fine,” answered Charlotte. In the fringes of her vision, she saw the rest of the house had filtered downstairs, and suddenly she felt herself scrutinized at the focal point of no less than fifteen people’s attention. “Really, I’m fine.”

Andrew idly gathered her bangs off her forehead as he watched Jamie work. “She passed out for a bit and couldn’t talk to me when she came to.”

At this blatant contradiction, Charlotte frowned slightly but told herself to stop. Andrew always meant well — he didn’t mean to undermine her statement; he only wanted Jamie to know as she tried to figure out what was wrong.

Jamie nodded, consulting the monitoring device while she attached a blood pressure cuff and electrical leads to her patient. “Your blood pressure’s down,” she told Charlotte. “Everything else seems fine, but let’s get you to the hospital for a CT scan.”

They helped her up, although somewhere in the back of Charlotte’s mind, she wanted to protest and stand on her own — to prove that she could take care of herself and that she didn’t need to lean on anyone. But that defiance never made it to her muscles, which could barely grasp Andrew’s hand as he slung her arm over his shoulders to support her. They all watched as he helped her to the front door, Jamie close behind with her pack.

Then, with Charlotte gone, everyone drifted away to resume their morning routines. Charlotte’s mug stood empty and untouched on the counter.

(Originally written 7/30/09)

When Esther emerged from the bathroom, Daniel took one look at her and declared, “You are so confusing.”

She looked over at him, her arms twisted behind her back as she tied the straps of her dress. “What?”

“Okay, two hours ago, you were at the shooting range with the Bronzes, outperforming almost all of us. And now you’re—you’re…”

She watched him try to find the right words, her smile growing into a grin. “I’m what?”

“You’re… you’re in that amazing dress and flaunting… well you’re flaunting the fact that you’re female.”

She laughed at that and bent closer to the mirror to check her makeup. “So?”

“I don’t know… the guys are bothered because one moment you’re laughing with us, wrestling Snaps when he tells a bad joke, talking about crass things, rock climbing with us… Then next thing they know you’re—well, you’re off being a girl.”

“The guys are bothered?”

“Yeah.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

She slunk up to him and straightened his bowtie. “Are you bothered?”

He looked down at her hand resting on his chest. “Maybe.”

It has been rewritten and revised. It’s also 7,360 words. So comment/email me if you want to read it.

“Look, there are more sides to me than a dodecahedron.”

“… You mean twelve?”

“Shut up.”

(Originally written 4/6/09)

Saturday night found Leo and Jesse contemplating a takeout food menu that Jesse had rescued from the backseat of his car. Had it been earlier in the quarter, Leo probably would have rounded up some friends for beer pong, but he’d procrastinated enough on his midterm paper all week, and it was time to get cracking. Jesse, as usual, had been working studiously in his room—she had a midterm and a project due in the coming week, although neither prevented her from making snide comments at him all day. Not that he minded, really. Besides, she willing agreed when he suggested grabbing dinner and stocking up on caffeine for the night.

She shuffled through some more junk in his backseat, handing him things as she found them. “Here’s another menu,” she offered, tossing another folded pamphlet into his lap. “Also, this is disgusting.” She surfaced with a plastic cup in hand, its contents discolored and molding. “I think this was once a milkshake. I thought you usually brought shit like this inside.”

Leo grimaced at the sight, then the smell. “Toss that outside, would you?”

“Fuck you, I’m not your slave.”

“No. You’re my bitch. Go throw it away.”

Throwing him a nasty look, she opened the passenger side door and tossed the cup in the nearest trash. Upon returning, she reached over and wiped her hands on his shirt.

“Hey!” he exclaimed, slapping her hand away halfheartedly.

“You deserve it, you little—” They deteriorated into a slapping match, but it ended quickly once Jesse managed to shove a menu down his shirt and he had to go fishing after it.

“Hey, that was the good one…” he said, head inside his shirt.

“Which one was it?”

“The Thai place on University,” he answered, pulling the menu free. “There’s no parking close by though…”

“I’m starving. Let’s just go. We can park somewhere and walk—you know, use your feet, you lazy ass.”

“Fine,” he sighed. “What do you want?”

Frowning, she scrutinized the menu for about ten seconds, then covered her eyes and pointed at the page. “That,” she said, eyes still covered.

“You just pointed to the ‘Ginger Delight.’ You sure you want that?”

“What the fuck is a ginger delight?”

“No idea. I’m ordering a pad thai for you,” he said, dialing the number.