(c) Place Called Space. (PG-13)

by **rock and/or roll** Mon 02 Feb 2009, 4:26 pm

Title: Place Called Space
Author: Me (currently Smashed Pumpkin)
Rating: PG-13 for swearing and some sexual references.
Fandom: None.
Pairing: Evangeline/Amelia (femmeslash)
Type: One-shot/complete.
Note: This was written for the Title Challenge over on meebs.
Summary:
Evangeline Kay Jeffries was a girl. She spoke like a boy and chewed tobacco like a boy, but she was very much a girl; her C cup breasts and hour glass physique were enough to prove it. She wore boxer shorts and singlet tops, scuffed trainers and a silver nipple ring. Evan was sunshine and storm clouds and windy afternoons.

Amelia Heather Atwood was a girl. She spoke with a high-pitched voice and didn’t like tobacco or cigarettes. She wore boxer shorts or briefs and old band tees her brother passed down to her. The trainers she wore, once white, were now tatty and dirty, and decorated with silver duct tape. She thought piercings looked tacky. Aha was candy floss and first-date nerves and strained communication.

Evangeline and Amelia were girls. They spoke about grunge and pop and rock. They shared pyjamas and popcorn and cosy nights. Evan and Aha were friendly smiles and troubled looks and silence.

Place Called Space.

Evan K. Jeffries is the dirtiest angel this side of the world.

Ask any senior citizen, and they’ll go on a spiel about the sweet but odd adolescent who wears the scuffed trainers. Ask any adolescent, and they’ll harp on about the “hell cool chick” who drinks and smokes and chews tobacco and has a “fucking nipple ring, dude.” She’s pretty enough to be a movie star! They say. The next Angelina Jolie!

If she’s the next Angelina Jolie, I’m the next fucking Brad Pitt.

She’s lying over me, pretty shampoo-ad ready hair splayed all over my too-big jeans. Pale knees break through the rips in hers as they reach for the cracked ceiling, as she laughs like a fucking sped and uncouthly asks me for, “some more crackers. They’re fucking addictive, man.”

We’re listening to some old record, no fucking clue what. I doubt she knows either, but it’s jazzy and there’s trumpet and slap bass and she’s moving her leg like a small dog humping a bigger dog. The LP’s cover is blurred and weather-beaten beyond recognition, propped up between the battered stereo and a week old green tea left stewing and putrid in its glass.

I grab her precious seaweed crackers from next to me and hand them to her. She whoops and flings her feet into the air, slender legs further apart than her slutty mother’s. A crushed cola and rum can is lost somewhere in the fray, dropping to the floor to join the clutter of mangled cans and leaking bottles. The place is a dump. A depressing dump. Evan digs her blunt little turquoise nails into the cracker packet, dusty crumbs dropping all over the pitifully saggy couch and her denim jacket. And all over my hand that’s holding Evan around her laugh-trembling stomach. She’s laughing at her own ineptitude.

“These things are better than sex, I swear to God.” Evan looks up at me, all innocent lips and crossed eyes. “No offence, Aha.”

“Amelia, Evangeline.” She narrows her eyes comically at her full girly name, but doesn’t mean anything by it. “Or Amy or Ames. Fucking Aha...I’m not an exclamation of discovery, or a lame boyband, m’kay?”

“No.” She munches on a cracker, pretty eyes still gazing up at me from my lap. “But you are lame. Super lame. You’re like the epitome of lame. Like, if I typed ‘What is lame?’ into Yahoo answers on my mom’s crappy laptop, it’d say ‘Amelia Heather Atwood,’ and there’d be a picture of you with that lame smile of yours, exhibiting your lameness.” She sighs with seaweed breath and fumbles for her cigs, laid next to the rancid ashtray on the cracked glass table. Her mother got it from some garage sale. “But it’s okay. ‘Cause we can be lame together. Ain’t that dandy?”

“Your mom’s dandy,” I mutter, picking at the glow-in-the-dark moons stuck to my finger nails.

She doesn’t like the little moons, or the little stars or the cute little strawberries that I glue on with such precision. But she accepts them in her own awkward and nonsensical way, because they’re me. She may be a pretty face with a sometimes repulsive tongue, but she’s her. And I’m me. And we’re us.

Evan chuckles, a cig jammed in her mouth. “My mom’s a whore. She could be pretty if she didn’t fucking dress like a teenager and wear make-up like a hooker. You know, it’s hard to believe I came out of her sometimes. I’m still demanding a DNA test, but daddy says we can’t afford it and to stop being a brat and eat my Brussel sprouts.”

“You hate Brussel sprouts.”

“Oh, they know. They’re just playing on my left over teenage angst.”

-
We end up climbing the basement stairs, hands jammed together like the broken sandwich maker stashed in a cupboard somewhere. She sways into me. She’s drunk. You can see it in her pretty eyes shining an angry brown under the dappled light filtering down the steps. The alcohol doesn’t impediment her speech in the normal way of slurs and hiccups. She swears a few times, mumbling something about the seaweed crackers and “fucking awesome,” her eyes slightly vacant as she stares ahead and stumbles upwards, but she’s smiling. She isn’t an angry drunk or a sad drunk or even a drunk. But she is drunk.

She spins around to face me at the top of the steps, a demented ballerina in her torn jeans and oversized jacket, tatty sneakers and alcohol-stained singlet top. She smiles - she really does this time - and its big and its endearing and plain lovely. But not plain. No, never plain.

“I wanna go to the park, like, right fucking now. And then I want to buy some more sex crackers, and then I want to go back to the park and eat them... And last one to the park has to make-out with me!”

She runs off down the musty hall, cackling as I hurry to overtake her.

Evan ends up making-out with her hand.

The sun shines feebly as we walk across the park. Evan’s pants are heavier than mine, her tongue lolling crudely out of her mouth. She’s still wobbly on her alcohol legs, but manages to collapse atop the itchy grass as gracefully as possible. We rest our backs against a tree, one that’s been there since I was learning how to ride a tricycle. Its branches reach high, near perfect for climbing, each one acting as a stepping stone. Of course my mother would protest it unladylike to climb trees and dig for worms and make mud pies in a skirt.

There’s an old archway a few yards over. Little boys and little girls use it to stage their pretend weddings, when their innocence is still in abundance and monsters are creatures who live under the bed and in wardrobes, and aren’t just people in disguise. The paint’s peeling off the archway in big strips, opaque white coming off to reveal the dull wood. Nothing is perfect, not even Evan. She’s a dirty angel, remember that? But she’s perfect for me.

Evan hums, dainty little hand twitching in mine, as if she’s fighting not to break out in a hearty singfest. I’ll never say that to her of course. She hates words like that; dainty, elegant...all those words that she is. She’s pretty, but resents it. She says she’d much rather find the cure for cancer or be the best thing since Picasso than be prom queen.

“Cig?” She’s looking at me, a playful little grin morphing her little mouth. The box is open and waiting in her hand.

I hate cigarettes. She knows I hate cigarettes. I know she knows I hate cigarettes.

“Put them away if you want to keep all your teeth.”

She chuckles again. She has many different laughs, it’s quite incredible. There’s her small chuckle, her witchy cackle, her tinny giggle and her silent laugh. “That would look pretty badass, I reckon. Maybe you could give me a black eye too. It’d pimp up my image a little.”

-

The week drones on in its customary way. Evan spends a third of her classes at the park by herself, chewing and spitting tobacco, chain smoking and swigging from a bottle of her dad’s best wine, yet still manages to produce a B+ worthy essay for Art. Something about comparing art of this artist with art of some other artist. Van Gogh. Monet. The hell if I remember. History never was my thing, art or not. Evan knows art history like the alcohol percentage of the drinks she disintegrates her liver with. Ms. Compare-and-Contrast makes sure to slip in some variation of, “You’d make an excellent Art teacher,” or some fucking drivel about “natural talent,” every time the two are in the same room. Evan just smiles in her angelic way and shrugs it off.

I’ve seen her sitting under the same ancient tree across from the same peeling archway on my trudge home from school before. She sits with her knees propped up and her legs apart, sucking on her cig as if she was giving a particularly rough blowjob. She never has though. Evan’s kissed boys before and maybe there was some occasional under the shirt action, but that’s all.

“You stalking me, Aha?” she smirks as I stride up to her that Friday afternoon. Her cig dangles between two fingers, end burning bright. “ ‘Cause I’ve seen you in my basement the past...three years and I couldn’t think up a polite way to tell you to get out.”

I smirk back and shut her up the only way that works. Lips on lips and arms wrapped around her shapely hips like a fucking trap. She climbs on top of me, right in the middle of the fucking park, knees digging into my ribs as if I’m a wild mare she’s determined to tame. Her mouth claims me as her own, all teeth and lips and tongue and wet wet wet. That old denim jacket presses against my faded t-shirt, chest upon chest, hers with more to hold on to, but I don’t give a shit. It’s damn near impossible to focus on body image issues when there’s a horny and half-drunk Evan trying to rip apart my clothing in public.

She never tells me what she thinks about while drinking or smoking or chewing. Just “stuff” or “shit” or “How about I inconspicuously change the subject now?” She loses her sparkle, that Evan sparkle that says she’s about to jump me or come out with something extremely witty or suggest we do something crazy like ride an abandoned shopping trolley down the largest hill we can find. I grazed my knee and Evan twisted her ankle, but it was an experience to remember.

Evan’s not quiet. She’s loud and sometimes crude. She’s the girl my parents wish I’d kept away from. Apparently any grandchildren who come with the “misfortune” of being raised by that “rude Jeffries girl” were children they would rather pretend didn’t exist. As if Evan is going to have children anyway. She’s not the type to settle down. She’s a firecracker ready to explode.

-
We watch the little kids running through the grass, trekking through the sand and climbing over the play equipment like little spiders on a web. Some are digging in the dirt with plastic spades or building hills with their little hands.

“Pay attention here,” Evan mutters in my ear. Her lips brush against my cheek and it’s sensual and sweet and I’m almost wishing she’d jump me again. “You could be looking at one of the world’s future archaeologists and architects. And...this may just be a personal thing, but I wouldn’t want that kid designing anything that I plan to live in...not until he’s gone to fucking uni like a good little scholar.”

I snort, resting my head heavily on her bony shoulder. She likes that, she says. I have a dainty snort, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Evan snorts like a truck-driver with the flu.

“Hey, have you given anymore thought to what you want to do in future?”

I lift my head and her eyes turn to me, wide and deceptively vacant. She looks down with her cig held defensively in front of her face and her fucking mudslide eyes glaring at my fingernails. Little watermelons this time.

“We’ve already talked about this, Ames.” Her eyes remain fixed and I can’t fucking figure out the emotion spreading across her skin and twisting her muscles. It’s...it’s downcast and so caught-in-the-headlights that I almost wish my mouth hadn’t of opened.

“We haven’t.” I bite into my lip. “I ask questions that never get answered or you artfully avoid them with your diversion skills.”

“Maybe you should take the hint. I don’t like talking about the future...my plan, all that shit. It’s so bleak.” She rubs at her nose with her bare wrist, holding the ember away from her body. And I feel rage burn my insides.

“So...you don’t care about our future?”

She looks up, eyes shocked, and that scares me. Her cig hangs limply in her dainty hand.

“What?”

“Our future, Evan.”

It’s quiet. Children are laughing and chattering happily in the background, but it’s quiet. I look at her and she looks right back.

“Our future? Us...Ames, you...” And her eyes see me. They take in my face and my shocked mixed with curious mixed with hurt expression; just as stupid as the moons and the stars and the strawberries and the watermelons that I’m digging my nails into. “You really think we’ll be together after graduation? Me and you? You’ll go off to college or uni or...whatever the fuck and take on a low paying job to get by while you study your little heart out to get a degree and to pay off the mortgage to your first ever house so you can continue to be a member of the community, and me...I’ll stay me.”

I blink.

And stare.

She begins to suck on her cig again, the foul smoke flowing through her lips, and I feel like screaming and tearing my hair and ripping the god damn fucking cig from her traitor mouth. My eyes water and I try to tell myself that it’s because I haven’t blinked for half a minute, but then I’d be a liar as well as a fucking idiot. The truth is, Evan is beautiful. She’s just the right balance between skinny and curvy and her eyes...they don’t flit, they waltz. But of course, with every beautiful girl, there must be some deal-breaking flaw.

“I hate you.”

They’re the final words that leave my mouth before I stand. Evan doesn’t even have the fucking decency to look surprised or even wounded. She just sucks and she sucks and she sucks, all while staring straight into me with those mudslide eyes. Evan’s pretty like some Greek Tragedy, and I hate her for it right now. I feel like yelling, letting out all the air in my lungs until my throat can’t take it.

“Why can’t you pretend you care about our relationship?” And I’m sniffing.

I glance away. Tears are stinging behind my eyelids, and they’re hot and fat and unwanted. Fuck my emotions.

“It’s always those we love that hurt us the most, hey?”

When I look back, my eyes probe hers, wanting to hurt her for making me hurt, and I see a change. They’re bright with fluid.

Her face cracks.

Evan’s finally crying. The tears are anything but beautiful as they scar her face and dampen her smile. She looks a fucking mess if I’m being honest, but I stoop all the same and claim that sarcastic mouth for my own. It’s wet in more ways than one. I taste her tears and feel her mouth let me in. I lick at her ash and smoke flavoured tongue, but I don’t care. She whimpers. It’s the smallest sound I’ve ever heard come from another human being.

She’s imperfect, but she’s perfect, because she’s her and I’m me and we’re us.

We’ll always be us.