Room 210; Wednesday Afternoon [02/06].

[white_oleander]

Good-bye, pinwheels. You were fun while you lasted, a blip in Astrid's amusement after a ridiculously long case of artist's block, and now she was so fueled with a new idea for her wall so soon after putting you up. Like flowers that wilted soon after plucking them from their life-giving stems, the joy of the bright colors and the unexpected moments when the light would catch them just right or a breeze from seemingly nowhere would push them to spin had faded, wilted, fell away, replaced b a vision she couldn't get out of her head since Monday. A memory, really, more than anything else, but the urge to get it out of her head and onto her wall was finally strong enough to pull her to drag out the tarps, pull her bed away from the ever-changing canvas, crack open all the windows, and get to work with white-washing the boxy geometric shapes that had complimented the pinwheels.

How much smaller would this room be by the time she graduated, shrunken by slowly building inches of whitewash and paint on this wall?

And then she'd get started on next vision, a blurry, somewhat impressionistic scene, cloaked in dark shadows. Dark blue background, bold black shapes in the foreground, stretching in a long line diminishing as it went to the horizon, but in the center, a sliver of bright, golden light. A burst of a star, the unrelenting sun, if not for the curves and lines to suggest the vague shape of a woman. She was already looking forward to figuring out how the light would cast itself against those shadows; that was always what intrigued her the most about a new piece, the distribution of light. And around the edges, starting in shadow, slowly growing brighter into a light pink at the edge, bunches of oleander, little bubbles of red dotting their petals, a bit like blood, a bit like dew.

In a way, it was nice to feel so absolutely driven and inspired again. But, considering the source, she wondered if it'd better if she wasn't.

[[open door, open post!]]

Comments

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae, never having been super good at "boundaries", wandered right on in through that open door.

"Woah." She tilted her head, taking in the painting. "That's . . . wow."

Astrid was clearly on a whole different art level than Mae and her scribbled journal.

[white_oleander]

"Hmm?" Astrid had definitely been wrapped up in her art bubble; she wouldn't have even realized Mae had wandered into the room if she hadn't said anything. Even as she turned her head, she did so at first without even looking, attention still on trying to figure out whether it was better to make the bright light vague and intistinguishable or to make the feminine form in it more obvious. And even when she saw Mae standing there, she had to blink a little before she realized what she was looking at.

"Oh." There it was, and she shook her head slightly as if to get it back down into the actual world. "Hey, Mae. What's up?"

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae shrugged. "I'm wandering around." She tended to do that a lot. Or hide in her room and ignore everything and everyone. There wasn't really an in-between mode for her. "You're making a mural."

She was well familiar with murals. Possum Springs was lousy with them.

[white_oleander]

"Yeah," Astrid agreed, turning her head to look at it even though she just was, brushing a loose strand of hair out of her face, getting a little splotch of dark blue paint on her ear as she tucked the hair behind it. "It's kind of what I do. Well, Sabine and me both." She nodded to the other side of the room, very different in style but no less bursting with a similar artistic energy, and she smiled, just a little. "So if you're ever wondering what smells like paint and turpentine around here, it's probably us."

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae turned to look at the other wall, then back at what Astrid had going.

Those were definitely some very different aesthetics in play.

"And no one comes in to tell you you're, like, destroying school property?"

Mae's side of her room was going to end up covered in weird graffiti now, just you wait.

[white_oleander]

Astrid just shook her head a little and shrugged. "Nope," she said, vaguely even remembering that faint moment of doubt she had when they'd first started. But Sabine hadn't seemed to care at all, and so Astrid followed suit, and now the both of them had probably gone through enough paint to coat the Great Wall of China.

"I honestly don't think they really notice stuff like this," she said. "I skipped almost an entire class my first semester, and didn't even get a shake of a finger."

And she was possibly thinking of doing that again, too. This semester was leaving her a little too exhausted to be so outright rebelious, though. Which, she realized, might have been the intention.

[thishouseishaunted]

". . . Wait, really? Did they just fail you?"

Mae had not yet grasped the whole "no grades, minimal rules" deal Fandom had going yet, no.

[white_oleander]

Astrid only shrugged again. "If I did," she said, "I didn't hear anything about it. I'm pretty sure they do a whole 'aternative school,' no report cards thing."

If they did, it had gone straight into a file and straight to her case worker, who hadn't said anything about it. But she wasn't about to say that to Mae, even if she felt Mae being in therapy would reduce the chances of her thinking a case worker was weird.

Then again, why was she even thinking about what a girl with a cat's face would think was weird?

[thishouseishaunted]

Because despite having a cat face, Mae was pretty damn normal?

"See, now you've got me thinking I should be skipping class more."

She actually kind of liked her classes though. And there were only the two of them. . . .

[white_oleander]

See, and that's where they got you. You actually ended up enjoying some of them.

Some.

Astrid considered cat-faced Mae for a moment before offering, "I was thinking about skipping Civil Disobedience next week, if you want to join me."

And now that she said it, she'd have to do it, right? She'd officially tied her own hands on the matter.

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae tilted her head. That one did tend to be more lecture heavy. . . .

"Were you going to do anything fun instead?"

[white_oleander]

"I was just going to hang out down in the pool," said Astrid.

To the cat person.

So she shrugged and added, "But I'm open to suggestions."

[thishouseishaunted]

"Pools can be fun." Mae might just dip her feet in, but truancy could be its own reward. "I didn't actually know we had one of those."

[white_oleander]

"It's not...great," Astrid admitted. "It's down in the basement, which is kind of depressing, but useful during the winter. I'm from California, so I'm used to being out under the sun and the sky, but I was thinking of maybe one day asking if we can put some sort of sky mural up on the ceiling one of these days. But I still like it; I miss just being able to drift around in a pool doing nothing for a while."

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae smiled a little at that. "I like to call winter the 'cozy months'. Great for reading books and indoor exploration. Not so much for being outside and getting sun."

Or for not slipping on an icy patch and falling off a roof.

[white_oleander]

Astrid found it a little hard to think of what might be interesting to explore indoors when one wasn't in a museum or something, but the reading part was definitely something she could relate to. "It makes me a little restless," she admitted. "This is the longest I've really lived in a climate like this, I think. Kind of makes me stir-crazy."

[thishouseishaunted]

"I'm pretty much from this area," Mae said. "Just, like, in the mountains instead of by the water. So it's pretty normal."

A beat.

"Weatherwise, at least."

Possum Springs had no gremlins.

[white_oleander]

That very telling pause pulled a snort of amusement out of Astrid and she swirled her paintbrush in a jar of cleaning water for a moment, wiping it with a rag once she pulled it out again.

"What do you think about this place so far?" she asked, because, yeah, for someone who looked like a cat, Mae did seem pretty normal. She almost wanted to ask about what had brought Mae here, but she knew that question could easily be turned around, and it wouldn't be anything she'd want to reciprocate.

[thishouseishaunted]

If it helped, Mae would quite possibly forget Astrid's story after she heard it.

. . . Well, okay, maybe not Astrid's story. But most people's.

"It's . . . interesting? It's kind of like home in some ways, but way different in others. Like. Bizaro-Home."

[white_oleander]

And that was why Astrid definitely like to keep her story as locked up as her mother was.

"Bizaro-Home," Astrid repeated almost thoughtfully. "I like that. It's accurate."

There was a slight, considering pause before she asked, "Are you from this time?"

Which was still a weird sentence that had somehow made it into her frequently used vocabulary.

[thishouseishaunted]

"Technically," Mae said. "But my hometown is at least ten years behind the rest of the rest of the world, like, socially and technologically."

They didn't even get cellphone reception. And it was entirely possible that she and her friend Gregg were the only queer kids in the whole region.

[white_oleander]

"That's still better off than mine, then," Astrid offered. "Mine is actually twenty-four years behind."

Nope, still hadn't gotten used to being a time traveller.

She just shook her head. "Bizaro-Home."

[thishouseishaunted]

"Wow. You're like . . . my mom's age."

That was helpful, Mae, thanks.

[white_oleander]

"If I had an ID," Astrid said, "I could even buy booze on the mainland."

Well, she could try, but she still had her own, very much not 42-year-old math is hard, pretend I said 27 this whole time face.

She might have better luck renting a car.

[thishouseishaunted]

"Wouldn't they just assume it was a fake?" Mae asked. In her town, if they cared enough to check, they tended to check real close.