undergrad: the final frontier

2003 

[7:42 PM] porrima: simon using that line on krishna [7:43 PM] porrima: "I NEED THE D" "you do not" "I HAVE A SEVERE VITAMIN D DEFICIENCY ONLY YOU CAN RECTIFY IT" [7:56 PM] porrima: cat just there like "well mew heard him, krishna, he needs the vitamin d"'

2021 

September 2001

Your name is Rosario Lalonde, you are in the third grade, and all of your teachers have been acting strange since the morning. Your little sister sits beside you - she skipped a grade, so she’s in your year - idly drawing curlicues in her penmanship notebook. You’ve been trying to hold it for what feels like five years, because you do not like interrupting teachers, but you really do have to go to the bathroom.

You raise your hand. Your teacher, who seems to be at wits’ end, despite the fact that the other students have been blowing spitballs at each other less frequently than usual today, glances up.

“May I please go to the bathroom?” you ask, with your best seven year old enunciation.

Your teacher seems to need to contemplate this for a while until Roxy, of course Roxy, it’s always Roxy, chirps up that the bathroom is literally two rooms away from this classroom.

“Okay, then. Hurry back, Rose?” the teacher asks.

“Can I go too?” Dirk asks, from the back of the room. “Please? I’ve been waiting since 8.”

“Yes, yes, you both may. Stay together, okay?”

You both chorus your “yes ma’am”s in unison, even though it would be rather impossible for you to stay in the same place as each other and use the bathroom at the same time.

Not only is the classroom for Grade 3-03, the section of third grade for gifted and talented students, near the bathroom, it’s near the main office. 

So you hear what sounds like your mother shouting at the principal echoing down the hallway. 

Dirk’s ready to investigate, creeping slowly down the hall, before you even suggest it.

“What do you mean that I can’t take the Striders with me? I’m listed second on that card for emergency contacts, right under their own father, who cannot get here right now for reasons I’ve already explained!” she shouts. “Try to call him again! You won’t get him! I don’t know what’s going on, but I am not leaving this school until I have all four of those children! You can be sure of that!”

Your mother lets out an impressive string of curse words in Spanish, and then resumes her indignance in English.

“Mami?” you call down the hall.

Your mother pokes her head out of the principal’s office. Aforementioned principal is not far behind her. 

Dirk, as usual, is Dirk.

“Please, can me and Dave go home with Tia Roxy?” he asks, trying to sound as pathetic as possible.

You’re not old enough to know the meaning of the words “emotional manipulation” but you do know that Dirk has an unrivaled knack for getting what he asks for, from everyone except for his father.

Your mother has clearly been crying heavily. Not even the kind of crying she does after she and your father argue, where she manages to conceal it with carefully re-applied makeup. No, she’s near the end of her rope, and nobody has yet told you why.

The principal looks conflicted for a moment, but ultimate acquiesces to the guileless expression on Dirk’s face.

“We’ll need to leave a message with Derrick and David’s guardian, of course,” the principal says to your mother.

“Do, then,” Mami says. “After that, I expect Dave and Roxy to be released to my care.”

“Naturally, Ms. Lalonde. I apologize for the mixup, but there’s just so many things going on at once an--”

“It’s fine. I understand. Don’t worry about it.”

When you’re sure the adults are no longer talking - you know better to interrupt adults in conversation - you walk up to your mother and tug on her white jacket with the black sleeves, which she seems to wear year ‘round. She looks down, sees who it is, and manages a weak smile.

“Yes, mi luz?”

“Can I go to the bathroom first? Me and Dirk, well, Dirk and I--...” Your mother has a wet little smile for your eternally exacting diction. “We both have to go to the bathroom.”

“Where’s the bathroom?” she asks.

You point down the hall.

“Hurry up, then. Meanwhile, I’ll grab your sister and Dave.”

You take Dirk’s hand - he’s doing that thing where he goes blank as a freshly washed chalkboard - and lead him down to the boys’ room. You kick him in the leg, and then his eyes lose that glassy sheen.

“My mom’s taking all of us home, but she said we could go to the bathroom first,” you explain.

He nods, still slightly blank. You wonder if kicking him again would help. You decide against it.

Later, with all four of you in your mother’s car - Roxy gets to ride in the front passenger seat, she called first dibs - she struggles to explain what’s going on. She has to keep pausing to wipe her eyes, her hands gone white knuckled on the steering wheel. 

“Something happened in Manhattan. Planes crashed into the Twin Towers.”

Dave cranes his neck to look toward Manhattan, as if he can see something to confirm this, and your mother snaps at him to stop with uncharacteristic annoyance. Then, she apologizes. She even hands him her cell phone, and tells him to play Snake for a while.

“Where’s Bro?” Dirk asks. “He’s okay, isn’t he? He’s not…?”

“He’s stuck at work. His boss, well, his boss’s son works not too far away from there, over in the Financial District. So he went to go find out what’s going on with his son, and told Derrick to hold down the fort until he came back.”

You, you’re always attuned to the most minute changes in the way your mother speaks. She’s calling him Derrick, as opposed to Dirk, You Idiot, or Di-Stri, so it must be serious. But the Strider brothers and Roxy need not know that.

Her explanation seems to satisfy both Dirk and Dave.

“Say, do any of you want to get ice cream?” your mother asks, all of a sudden. None of you are going to argue with that proposition. All of you nod. “Good, I’ll take you to Baskin Robbins.”

You know that Baskin Robbins is right next to the liquor store on Rawson, and while you two are arguing over flavors and configurations of toppings, your mother will duck into the other store and get herself something to drink.

Your little sister may be the one named for the woman driving the car, but you will always be the one who better understands the cogs and gears driving your mother’s actions. When you were five, you asked her if she was ever angry that she had you and your sister, because of the way she always smiled when she talked about how she had wanted to become a scientist when she was younger. She assured you this was not the case.

Then, she read you a poem by Robert Frost, about roads and differences, and you fell asleep in her lap, the cadence of the verses lulling you into an easy slumber.

You think you know why your mother tells you and Roxy to stay in your room when your father makes his rare appearances. Roxy always likes it when he comes home, because you two hide in the closet and make a fort out of blankets and books. You think you hear screaming, your mother screaming that she’ll let him near you two over her dead body, but then Roxy reads from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, with different voices for each character, and you partially let the worry slosh out of your mind so you can hear about Buckbeak and the Grim.

Roxy is the outgoing headstrong kind one, and you are the quiet thoughtful wary one, as if each of you have been evenly given half of your mother’s characteristics. You two may be in the same grade, but Roxy is so much younger than you when you really give it thought.

It’s why you and Dirk get along so well. He and Dave are the same way.

You will protect them. You will protect each other.

===>  Be Derrick Strider I

You call Simon every hour and a half to two hours, because you’ve come to know the way his voice sounds when he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. You keep your conversation short, because you know he wants to keep the line open in case someone else calls, and you’re not much one to really shoot the bullshit.

You sit in your boss’s office, and tell… what’s his name. Krishna? that you want to speak to Simon. He puts his roommate on.

“Have you spoken to Katya yet?” you ask Si.

As if you need to ask. If he had, she would have probably answered the phone herself.

“I don’t know where she is,” Simon tells you. “Her phone keeps going to voicemail.”

“Maybe it’s dead,” you suggest.

“Maybe she is,” he replies in a strangled murmur. “She was at Ira’s last night.”

“Ira?”

“Irina. Her sister. She lives in Bay Ridge. She woulda had to take the N to get to class today. And she had early classes at NYU this morning, and that train goes to Cortlandt Street, right under where, right… where, where, where…”

You try to starve the flicker of of panic in his voice before it can ignite fully.

“Simon,” you say. “Keep it together.”

“How do you expect me to--?”

“The kind answer? Because I think she’s probably fine. You always used to bitch about how you never understood why she got a cell phone if she never bothered to charge the damn thing. The cynical answer? Because if anything has happened to her, having a nervous breakdown isn’t going to change it. Wait, Simon. Just wait. Keep it together, okay? That’s all you can do.”

Simon sighs. You think you hear the beginnings of a sob in his throat, that he fights down like a shot of pure absinthe.

“You’re right. I’m going to go now, because--”

“In case she calls,” you reply.

“Right. Thanks. For um. Checking up on me. How are your sons?”

“At Ro’s place, since I’m stuck at work. She probably took them to get ice cream so she could go next door and buy a handle of Stoli on her way home. Either way, they’re safe. I spoke to her before I called you.”

“That’s good, at least,” he replies.

Sometimes you just want to climb out of your skin and walk away for an hour or two. Sometimes you can. Try as you might, right now, you can’t. You’re worried sick over your kids. You’re worried sick about the world.

What the fuck even? How could some shit like this happen. You put your feet up on your boss’s desk because you can and the sheer fucking audacity of it might allay the creeping anxiety that threatens to strangle the life out of you.

It does, for a second or two.

So you call Ro back and tell her to get you a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream. 

Apparently, she’s already home, and all she has is vanilla and strawberry, so you’re just gonna have to deal with it. She asks if you want to speak to Dirk and Dave, and you do, just not yet. If you lose your shit in front of them, you’ll scare them, and you don’t want them to be scared. You want to put that off for as long as possible.

Although Ro seems more distressed than you do, after a pause, she starts to speak, her voice gaining confidence as she goes on.

“Dirk?” she asks. “It’s okay. We’re safe. It’s gonna be okay, alright?”

“I guess, Ro,” you say, trying to stop shaking, trying to keep it cool, keep it Strider cool. “Watch the idiots. Don’t let them eat too much junk food.”

“Mountain Dew and Doritos for everyone,” she says. “Got it.”

--

September 2002 to September 2009

Sometimes That Jackass tunes Ro up so badly that she can’t entirely conceal the aftereffects with makeup.

Sometimes she sends Rose and Roxy over to your apartment to stay for a while.

You start teaching them how to strife, but are not as hard on them as you are on your sons. You don’t want to terrify them. 

You’re trying.

You’re trying, you tell yourself, when Dave shrinks away from you whenever you enter a room.

You’re trying, Dirk.

Aren’t you?

November 2010

After you ring the bell for like eighteen times, Ro opens the door to her apartment, but only as far as the chain will go. She glares at you like you’re a piece of dogshit she’s stepped in.

“Derrick,” she says. “Get outta here. The kids’ll be home soon.”

She makes to close the door, but you stop it with one hand.

“Ro, will you just hear me the fuck out?”

“And why should I do that?” she asks, arms crossed over her chest.

“I want to talk to my children,” you say, trying not to sound as utterly broken as you feel.

She’s Dirk and Dave’s provisionary guardian for the moment. You can see them if she gives it the okay.

The first week you spent without your sons, you turned up your music as loud as it would go, neighbors be damned, and sat against your speakers, letting your teeth rattle with the backbeat. Then, you decided you’d just take on extra shifts at your job until you ran out of work you could possibly do. Even your supervisor didn’t want to give you any overtime pay, so after a while, he just told you to go home. The cars could wait another day, and besides, you looked like death warmed over.

You returned to your empty apartment.

You turned up the music again.

You start babbling at Ro.

“I never wanted to hurt them, if you can believe that,” you say. “I…”

“...wanted to make them stronger, you ended up scarring them for life, Dirk, and you’re really sorry about it,” she says, reciting the message you’d left, word for word. “Cut the shit, I’ve heard it already. I do listen to my voicemails.”

That’s an utter lie. The only time Ro listens to her voicemails is when her mailbox is full and she needs to clear it out.

You know you’ve fucked up, and you can’t take this shit anymore.You’re ready to fall to your knees and start begging. 

You take off your shades.

“What do I have to do for you to let me see them?” you ask.

Ro shrugs.

“If they want to talk to you, that’s on them, not me,” she says. “They’re old enough to make their own decisions. Shit, they’re almost as old as you were when you had--”

“Don’t remind me.”

Ro gives one great sigh, contained therein a thousand smaller sighs, for a thousand various reasons.

“I’m sorry, Dirk. Real sorry, but the answer is no,” she says. “I wish things had gone differently.”

A million ways your lives could have gone twenty years ago, and you never thought things would end like this. 

You nod.

“Me too,” you murmur, laid bare, utterly bereft of your usual pretenses and rationalizations.

You’ve hurt your kids. You’ve seriously hurt your kids. You may have hurt them beyond repair. The worst part is, you don’t even think they hate you. Instead, they’re scared of you. You may have been a better parent than your parents, but that’s setting your standards at the center of the earth.

Dirk and Dave deserved better.

You put your shades back on.

This time, when she closes the door in your face, you don’t ring her bell again. You walk out of her building, and back across the street to your own apartment, thinking of a girl who once gave you a cigarette on the corner of W 4th Street.

June 2020 - Dave Strider

The ride to Astoria is so quiet that it’s disquieting, although you should have probably expected that. It’s been three months since the bustling storefronts of Steinway Street gave way to a gray inactivity you’d have never believed this area capable of. You walk past no less than ten businesses whose windows have been nailed up with plywood.

There are few people on the streets, even relatively early in the evening, and nearly all of them are bound for elsewhere. There aren’t any kids out here turning jump ropes rhythmically, in double dutch configuration, or drawing multicolored murals on the sidewalk with plastic tubs of Crayola chalk, or playing in the fire hydrant spray.

Essential personnel, in their scrubs, construction vests, or fast food joint issued polo shirts stand waiting for the bus into Manhattan, each spaced several feet away from the next person. 

The tamale lady calls out her wares, her lined face kind and beckoning.

You walk past them, your arms full of groceries. True that Ro hadn’t asked for them, but you always felt bad going to Rose’s mom’s place empty-handed, after everything she’d done for you.

You turn the corner, enter an apartment building next to a boarded up storefront with rusting shutters and a fraying awning, and climb the stairs up to 7A - Lalonde, Roxana Sivan on the directory.

After digging your keys to this place out of you back pocket, you unlock the door one-handedly. 

The door swings open with a great creak, and you’re greeted by the combined and not in the least complementary scents of potpourri and some kind of slow-simmering meaty deliciousness. 

You can’t identify what, specifically, cooking never having been your thing unless Ro was right next to you, assuring you that knives could be used for a myriad number of things other than being brandished at you by Bro at 7:15 in the morning.

You take off your mask, and chuck it into the wastebasket a few feet away. “ “He shoots. He scores!” you think to yourself, archly. Were Ro in the room, she might say something similar.

Instead she stands at the crockpot, singing along to the 80s radio station playing in the background, her sweaty blonde curls plastered to her face. 

She tenses up when she sees you, her eyes gone wide as water crackers, but quickly relaxes. You’re surprised she didn’t hear you come in, even as loud as the music is. 

Usually she’s a lot jumpier than this. Either she’s taken something for anxiety, or she’s hit the bottle.

She does an excited two-step, clapping her hands once, and then placing them on her hips.

“Ay, mijo! “Lávate las manos y sientate!” After looking you over, she adds, “¿Has estado comiendo todos los días?”

You shoot her a half-frown in response, refusing to answer the question. She shakes her head, and gently admonishes you.

Yeah, you forget to eat every now and then. Such is the life of an itinerant DJ turned Uber driver, barely (and sometimes not quite) making enough to swing your half of the rent for the shitty studio you and June have over in Richmond Hill. 

You don’t need to tell Ro that though. She’ll insist that you move in, like she did in January -”June y tu, you two should stay over. James would kill me if I didn’t make sure you two were alright!”  

June’s dad generally takes a more hands-on approach to making sure you and his younger daughter eat, though, usually by leaving enough baked goods on your front doorstep to sustain an army. Not even quarantine has been able to stop the man. 

It’s not even that bad of an idea at first glance, staying at Ms. Lalonde’s on a more permanent basis. 

However, given how shitty Ro’s immune system is, you doubt it’d be good for her physical health if you stuck around, what with you driving people around all day and night and potentially exposing yourself to all kinds of fun pathogens.

Ro tells you, in similarly exuberant Spanish, to leave the groceries by the front door, that she’ll wipe them down and put them in the fridge when she’s done cooking.

“Yes, mom,” you respond. 

You press a brief kiss to her forehead and she lights up, chattering about how she got a great deal for the cuts of pork in the pot. She’s managed to prepare a veritable feast for less than ten bucks. 

You try not to wince at that. If Ro’s not keeping kosher, she’s definitely in a poorer state of mind than you’d initially assumed.

You’ve been promising to visit her ever since Rose let slip that her mother had fallen off the wagon yet again, driven to such measures by a severe lack of in-person interaction.

Apparently Zoom calls with her sponsor, and occasional FaceTime dates with her children could only go so far to fill a certain void, one she has elected to mitigate with eighty proof swill from the store over on Broadway. 

You’d tried to crack a joke about how ironic it was that liquor stores were considered essential businesses, one Rose had shot down with something like, “every drunk in New York City going through the DTs at the same time would turn into a public health crisis, Dave.”

Well, yeah, you guess. You never really considered it like that.

Rose had informed you of these developments last month, with narrowed eyes and a tone shot through with no small amount of exasperation. Why her mother couldn’t keep the promises she’d made to stay dry, promises she’d been making and breaking since Rose and Roxy the second were kids, continued to elude her.

“Your mom never did well with being alone,” you’d replied. 

Far be it from you to excuse behavior that had messed up the psyche of one of your closest friends, but considering that you grew up with a total asshole whose trauma manifested in violent outbursts and a knack for dueling you and Dirk with whatever sharpened implement happened to be closest, your upbringing was arguably even more chaotic.

Ms. Lalonde’s dreamy drunkenness, occasional negligence, overlain atop maternal concern and a genuine desire to be a good person, seemed to you - against Bro’s antics - like a walk through Central Park in springtime.

At worst, it’s the lesser of two evils.

Moreover, sober Ro always came off as tense and paranoid, as if looking over her shoulder for her ex-husband anytime someone raised their voice. Last time she tried to dry out, she’d insisted that her ex - whose brother worked out of the 102nd precinct - had told all the cops in Astoria to harass her whenever necessary. This because she’d been given a ticket for public intoxication in 2017, which somehow constituted evidence of a vast conspiracy created by aforementioned shithead and perpetuated by shithead’s brother, by way of driving her crazy.

“But they won’t kill me,” Ro had gone on. “I know Theodore wants me dead, but I’m not giving him the satisfaction. Que se vaya a la mierda.”

You agreed with the last sentiment, at leas.

But, having been raised by Derrick “the slightest wince will get you taken away by CPS” Strider, and having dormed for eight semesters with Sollux “what manic depression?” Captor, you’ve developed a fairly decent sense of when people are starting to lose their marbles. 

After one of her outbursts last year, this one on the W train platform, you’d begged Ro to go back to therapy. By all accounts, she even took you up on it. Then Captain Trips 2.0: Electric Boogaloo descended upon New York City, and Ro - like other people you know, Dirk among them - fell through the cracks in the system, and stopped going.

In your estimation, the only clinician she’s seeing for her mental health is a man by the name of Doctor Jack Daniels. But you’re not here to judge her. Not tonight, and not ever.

Ro seems to sense something in your contemplative expression as you fold her into an embrace, and stiffens in your arms.

“Are you mad at me?” she asks, gazing down at her feet. Her toenails have been painted in hot pink polish, cracked at the edges.

You shake your head, and offer her a small smile. Yes, she reeks of brandy and at least two days worth of forgotten showers. You’re going to see if you can coax her into self-care before you go home.

(Maybe you and June should come by more often, honestly.  Someone has to look after Ms. Lalonde, especially if Rose and Roxy are too overwhelmed to do so.)

“I could never be mad at you, Ma.” You pull away, and take her hands. Her fingers are freezing. You bite back the urge to sigh. “So what’s cooking?”

Her face crinkles up with a dimpled grin, as she leads you over to the stove. She uncovers the stew, and starts to explain to you the many ingredients and spices therein.

You nod at appropriate intervals, even though you’re a little too worried about her to properly pay attention to the conversation.

“Sounds delicious,” you offer.

“I’d hope so.” She shrugs at you. “You’re a good kid, you know that? You always have been.”

She was the first adult to say that about you and Dirk, and she’s always meant it in a way that kind of made you want to cry.

“I don’t know about that,” you joke, although you’re entirely not sure if you’re joking. 

You’re not a good kid.

A good kid would have checked sooner on the woman he’s come to view as his mother, who texts him every week asking after him and never once chides him for the silence she tends to receive in reply.

She opens the cabinet above the stovetop, extricates a glass bottle, and starts to pour herself a drink. 

April 2020 - Cecily Perlman

You remember the seventies better than you should, given the amount of amphetamine you used to forge through your doctoral thesis. 

You remember the shocked, if not patronizing comments you used to receive from the white men in your biophysical chemistry classes, as if you shouldn’t be there, with your brown skin and your wire-frame glasses, crunching numbers and taking up space with the best of them.

You wonder if some of the people with whom you studied biochemistry are studying cultures of this virus now.

You wheeze, anxious about, but not fearful of what may come.

Your name is Cecily Perlman, and you are going to die. You should be scared.

You should be pulling out your IVs, stumbling out of bed, getting into your car, and driving back to your Jefferson Avenue brownstone, since you are sure none of the drugs these doctors pump through your system are making an iota of a difference in your condition.

You’re not young. 

You haven’t been young since you got served your divorce papers in ‘75.

You haven’t even been what could be considered young since Carolyn told you to never speak to her again, in ‘91.

You’re a type two diabetic and an asthmatic who smoked a pack a day for decades. 

Alessio told you that you’d work yourself into an early grave back in ‘89, and while your sheer determination had told that proclamation to get fucked for thirty years, all the chickens are finally coming home to roost.

You think of asking a nurse for another blanket yet again, but decide they surely have better things to do than entertain fussy old women.

You start to doze.

------

June 1994

Sitting at his bedside in this depressing ward, you all but beg your ex-husband to stay here at St. Vincent’s, to hold on. Just hold on.

Eventually new drugs would come down the pipeline. They have to. Look at all the straight people dying now. So many that the FDA and the CDC actually give a damn about the numbers. It’s just a matter of waiting.

Holding on for long enough to get on the list. And with his name, with his family connections, even if he’s a black sheep, you know his parents love him enough to get him into clinical trials.

You know it. 

That’s why his mother contacted you, asking you if you still had any of your old friends’ information from graduate school, specifically the ones high up in the pharma sector. Why else would she deign to email you?

Shaking, his cheekbones more prominent than a Cosmo magazine covergirl’s, Matt points one bony finger at you, and tells you that if you don’t let him go home, he’ll haunt you, Cecily please, Cecily, this is no way to live, and certainly no way to die. 

“Matt, if you don’t keep fighting, I’ll kill you myself,” you lean down and say to him through gritted teeth, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

He smiles weakly, and pouts, a shadow of his old irreverent self.

“Cece, you promise?” he asks.

Eventually, he gets his wish. 

Nearly, anyway. 

There’s no way for him to return to California, being that he sold the house there after his partner passed in 1992.

So when he finally goes, months later, he’s propped up by a veritable mountain of pillows, in your place over on Jefferson and Hancock. 

Not in a bed, but in his favorite arm chair in your sitting room, looking out the window, at all the plants Lola has gotten you over the years.

He and Lola like plants. The only thing you ever seem to do with plants is kill them with your negligence. Thank God you never had children.

He breathes his last while you’re grading in your study, when you’ve taken your eyes off him only for a few moments, just to copy some of your students marks into your giant gradebook. 

Gazing down at him, you wonder if perhaps, Matt wanted it that way. If, at the end of everything, he didn’t want to scare you.

You’re not sure whether to kiss him or curse him for it, weeping, as you call 911. EMS will show up, and take him to the hospital, where some gentlemen in white coats will pronounce him, and set the wheels of death into proper motion.

-----------

April 2020

As if providence likes to mock you, your doctor’s a young white man, tall, brunet, and possessing something of a sense of humor.

He says that when you pull through, he’ll play a game of Blackjack with you in the recovery ward. He promises you this after watching you play another round on your phone while waiting for test results.

That gets you to laugh, even though it hurts to do that.

If you don’t focus too hard, he sort of resembles...

-----------

September 1966

“Stop trying to shoot from there and pass the ball to someone else for a change!”

“I could if you’d stop getting in my way, Matt!”

“Maybe if you played better, I wouldn’t have to!”

Breathing heavily from the bandages flattening your chest, you take a moment to catch your breath, and then sock him in the arm. He winces, shoves you good-naturedly, but admits he deserved that one. 

He shoots and scores.

Your team ultimately loses, but it’s a gym class match, no serious matter. The most significant part of the whole thing was when Matt convinced the guys to let you play with them.

--------

April 2020

“Mrs. Perlman?” the doctor asks, and even underneath the mask and all the protective equipment, if you squint, you see...

--------

October 1967

“You know, you look better in that suit than my dad ever did.”

“I look better in all his suits than he ever did. He wouldn’t know how to accessorize if a pair of gold cufflinks hit him square in the face.”

You check your reflection. Brown jacket, gray tie, beige pocket square, off-white dress shirt, and pleated dress pants. Matt adjusts the dark hat whose striped ribbon matches your blazer. 

You try your best not to preen, and fail miserably. You imagine walking down Astor Place with a girl on your arm, with Martine on your arm, and continue to strut across the parquet of Matt’s dining room. 

He conceals a snort in the sleeve of his blazer, and pours a sherry for each of you.

“His reaction to that would be interesting to say the least,” he says.

You quirk an eyebrow.

“To cufflinks hitting him in the face, or to witnessing me in his attire?”

“Either one. Admittedly, contemplating cufflinks - or anything - hitting him in the face is more viscerally satisfying,” he deadpans.

You laugh until tears form in your eyes.

---------

April 2020

You let out a rattling exhale.

“Yes, Matthew?” you reply. Then, you shake the hair out of your eyes, and the reverie from your mind, before the other man can question your sanity. You sit up. “I’m sorry, Doctor.”

“Don’t worry about it. I just need to check a few things, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“Of course.”

He asks you to lean forward so he can listen to your lungs, the diaphragm of the stethoscope feeling like he stuck it into a freezer before pressing it to your back. You wince and then shiver. He apologizes and lets you know that one of the ties on your gown has come undone.

You notice that he doesn’t offer to tie it himself.

God, why do these gowns have to be designed to make people feel worse than they do?

--------

April 1994

“If you talk to me about AZT one more time, I’m throwing you out of my room. AZT did this to me. I was fine before I started taking it.”

You roll your eyes at him and cross your arms over your chest. Half a minute, when your jaw starts to hurt, you realize you’ve been clenching it for a while.

“I saw your blood counts, Matt. None of them were in the general zip-code of fine,” you counter.

“They aren’t any better now, though, are they?”

You cannot look at him. You were always terrible at lying to him, even in the ten or so years after the divorce, when you hated him. 

“Are they,” he presses. He sits up so quickly that he nearly dislodges some of tubes he’s hooked up to. He grabs your wrist. “Answer me.”

“Can’t you please let it rest?” you ask. “There are other medications now, and they’ll probably be out in within a year so---”

“Do you really think I’ll live out the year?” he asks, lifting his gown so you can see the dark ink-like splotches on his stomach and back. “Do I look like I want to, feeling like this? Would you?”

Once again, you can’t look at him.

--------

April 2020

You peer up at the hospital fluorescents. You try not to look around this hallway full of the hacking, the wheezing, the babbling, the dying. Sick people never really fazed you much.

Being sick, though?

You can’t think of anything you hate more than this.

After listening to your lungs, this doctor sticks a pulse-ox to your index finger. Ninety-one again. You don’t know why it’s so low. 

You don’t feel half bad, honestly, if you ignore your temperature, which is all the way back up to a hundred and three.

Your blood pressure is...

--------

December 1970

“Yeah, and my father says if he catches me out with Martine one more time, he’ll throw me out. No inheritance, no nothing,” you tell Matt. “Same if I’m not married to an appropriate suitor before I hit twenty-four.”

“So then let’s do it, then,” your best friend says to you.

You quirk an eyebrow at him.

“Do what, exactly?”

He grins that silly lopsided grin at you. 

“Why, get married.”

You do your very level best not to laugh. You end up giggling so hard that the coffee cup in your hand slops brown liquid onto the saucer, and you have to dab it clean with one of the linen napkins on the table.

“It wouldn’t work, Matt. We’re both… well, you know.” 

You trail off, feeling that you’ve nevertheless made your point.

“Queer?” he asks. Before you nod, he goes on, “That’s exactly why it’ll work.”

There’s a million reasons why that isn’t the case, but Matt’s got this odd knack for getting you to believe the impossible.

Maybe it would work.

Maybe you and he could run off to San Francisco, and he could introduce you to his college friends as Cecil, some young man with whom he shared a homeroom in high school, and nobody would blink at the two of you there.

Maybe you’d find a nice girl later on and introduce her to Matt and his boyfriend, and…

You kill that reverie before it can take hold of you.

It won’t work that way, because you’ll have to be someone else - en pointe, long hair, pink lipstick, soft-spoken - for as long as you don’t wish to be disowned. 

Sometimes you do dream of striking out on your own. You’d be broke, but you’d be you.

Ultimately, a few years down the line, when Matt slides the ring onto your finger, and the two of you walk down the steps of some cathedral amid the ringing of bells, even if you’re stuck in a white dress that you hate, you see Matt beaming at you.

It isn’t the ideal present - both connotations of the word - but it’s good enough.

--------

April 2020

They’ve talked about putting you on a ventilator if your vitals don’t improve.

You Facetimed Dolores to tell her the news, and she took it with her usual steadfast grace. She said that if it would improve your chances of recovering from this virus, you should do whatever it takes it get well.

Half an hour after that, you contacted Krishna, asking him to keep an eye on his mother.

“When don’t I?” he asks.

“You also have a tendency to get lost in your causes,” you point out. “And I heard about Breonna Taylor.”

Krishna looks away at the mention of that, as if trying not to cry.

Something you never understood but always appreciated about him is that he never, ever became jaded. Instead of coming to expect injustice as a matter of fact, he stayed shocked and appalled, stayed demanding that institutions and the people running them be better than they were.

“Yet another atrocity from the powers that be,” he says. “Powers that must be held accountable. You know, she was born the same year as several of my old students?”

You understand, but he also needs to understand this.

“Your mother will never say that she needs you, but she does. Keep that in mind before you go running off to Louisville to demonstrate.”

Krishna nods, grinning somewhat sheepishly.

“As if I could. Devorah’s third birthday is coming up. If I missed that, Cat would never forgive me.”

You remember Krishna and Katya’s daughter as a loud, outgoing child who likes to grab your hair and yank on it if you tried to put her in the bath, which you did when you met her last year, as she was covered in dirt from Lola’s yard. You wonder if she has outgrown this yet.

“As she damn well shouldn’t,” you reply.

As you get more and more tired, you find that your mind jumps from place to place, era to era, with little provocation.

You had a nice life with her, didn’t you?

When you got over yourself and finally accepted her overtures. She cooked, you cleaned. Lord knows you couldn’t cook to save your life, and Dolores almost mixed bleach and ammonia when she got tired enough, trying to scour the bathroom toilet.

You think of Matt, fastidiously clean as a cat. 

You swore the man could smell dirt before he ever saw it, when you tracked it into his apartment on your shoes. He griped, you had any number of colorful four-letter word replies, and the world kept turning.

You miss him.

You miss Lola.

You’d call her again, but all you’d do is scare her. She wouldn’t act like it, but you know every single one of Lola’s tells, both obvious and subtle. She kept playing with the gold bracelets on her wrist the last time you spoke.

Last time she played with them so frequently and so openly was maybe an hour after 9/11, before she got a hold of Krishna. 

You wait for your doctor to come by, again. When he does, you’ll sign the ventilator paperwork.

You should be more afraid, but somehow, you just can’t be bothered.

Matt would laugh his ass off at that, if you told him.

TG: testing testing

April 2006

"C’mon Tavros, are you /scared/?” Vriska jeers, looking down at him from the roof, with the rest of you. “Just climb the damn fire escape!”

That makes the decision for him. He shakes out his hands and psychs himself up. You know the third to last step on the second story felt loose underfoot, so you try to warn him about that, but either he doesn’t listen, or you’re not loud enough, because you hear metal creak and twist, and then entire stair drops out from underneath him.

“Holy shit!” 

Eridan’s mouth drops open. Vriska shoves him aside, makes a beeline from the steps, and runs down to Tavros, who is trying to pull himself up onto the next step. Vriska kneels on the step above it and reaches out to him.

“Give me your hand!”

“Hang on, Vriska, hang on, hang on, I’m tryna--”

“Your hand!”

He takes her hand, but it’s not enough weight. He’s just pulling her down. You make a move for the stairs, as if you can turn the tide, but Terezi extends her cane in front of you, holding you back.

“Callie, the entire set of stairs is unstable, like I said,” she says. “Enough of it on us at the same time? The whole thing’ll come down.”

“We can’t just leave him!”

“We don’t ha--”

Vriska screams. Something hits the ground loudly. You look over the edge of the roof. Or… someone. Like Tavros. All you can do is stare silently.

“Tavros?” Vriska shouts.

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t respond.

“Tavros?!”

“Give me your phone,” Terezi says to Eridan, her face gone the color of spoiled milk. “We need to call 911.”

The child of a police officer and a nurse practitioner, Terezi is downright calm on the phone, given the situation.

"...The address is 121-01, 12th Avenue, College Point, New York. Yes, yes, the abandoned apartment building. He fell approximately two and a half stories. Currently unconscious…” A pause. “Well, it’s going to be difficult to tell whether he’s injured his head, since we are unable to get to him.” Another pause. “We’re on the roof of the building. He’s on the ground. The fire escape we used to get here is unstable. That’s why he fell. My name? My name’s Terezi Pyrope. My father is an officer out of the 109th Precinct.”

You struggle to gather your thoughts, and find that you can. You’re not freaking out. For some reason, you feel oddly calm. Calm, and detached.

“Eridan?” you say gently. He glances up.

You gesture at the beer and booze he and Vriska bought.

“We need to get rid of that,” you say. “Terezi’s calling an ambulance. The police might come.”

Chapters: 2/? Fandom: Homestuck Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: The Condesce & The Dolorosa (Homestuck), The Dolorosa/Original Character, The Condesce/Original Character Characters: The Dolorosa (Homestuck), The Condesce (Homestuck), Original Male Character(s), Original Female Character(s) Additional Tags: Humanstuck, Alternate Universe - 1970s, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - College/University, New York City, Period Typical Bigotry, Racism, Classism, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Sexism, Underage Substance Use, Mental Health Issues Series: Part 2 of The Collegestuck 'Verse Summary:

(rewrite/reupload of a previously deleted fic)

Your name is Dolores Estelle Martineau. You're Dolo to your friends and family, Lola to people you really like, and only ever Dolores when you're in serious trouble.

In 1970, you're fourteen years old, and the first black girl in a newly co-ed science and math school in downtown Brooklyn. That's not all you want to be. When you finish high school, you want go to college and study civil engineering, even if there are few people of your race and gender in that field.