tell-tale heart

“No, I know,” Catalina nodded her head. She often felt guilty about leaving her son, but she knew that in the end, this would be what would benefit them the most. “I just… my moms didn’t want me to give up on my dreams, you know?” She shrugged. “Yeah, I’m excited to see him. We’ll make sure to stop and see you.”

"Nobody ever wants the people they love to give up on their dreams,” they said, shrugging. “But you should be able to have both.” They knew how idealistic it sounded, and how hard it actually was to achieve that, and they hated that part; the idea that she couldn’t be going to the best school and still have her son be close. “You spoil me, Cat, you really do.”

“I mean, whatever you had to say, you know I’d listen,” Catalina trusted Ethan, tended to go to them for advice, and while they didn’t know anything about kids, Cat wouldn’t put it past them to have at least a small piece of good advice. “Well he’s with Julian’s parents next weekend, but I think he’s coming the weekend after.”

“Just that, I don’t know,” they shrugged, “I think a kid is a pretty good reason to stay somewhere. Even if it’s not the top notch option, it isn’t like NYU is a bad school, by any means.” They thought, at least, Henry would have been a good reason for Cat to stay closer to home. Nobody would think twice about something like that. “But I get why you didn’t, so.” At her next words, they smiled. “Really? That’s great!”

“Yeah,” Cat breathed out. She knew she was doing what was best for Henry–going to school and getting a degree was what she needed to be doing, so that she could eventually move back to New York and get a job. But for now, it still hurt. “Uh, Lockwood had better programs,” she shrugged. “I only wanted to stay in the city for Henry, but my moms knew that I needed to go.”

“I don’t know,” Ethan hummed, thoughtful. “I don’t have any kids, though, so what am I able to say about it?” They thought, a son is a good enough reason to stay close, right? And sure, the city was barely a day’s drive away, but it must feel like a million miles. That’s what their mom always said, and Ethan wasn’t a little kid anymore. “You should try and see if you can get your moms to bring Henry up sometime. I think he’d love to see where his mom goes to school, especially if he’s starting now.”

“No no, I am happy,” Catalina chuckled. “I just.. wish I could be there is all.” She paused, catching herself before smiling at Ethan. “God, she must be having the time of her life. I almost went to NYU, did you know that?”

“Yeah...yeah, I get that.” Maybe not directly, but Ethan could understand wanting to be there. They had family they wished they could see all the time. Nothing compared to a child, sure, but - they had a shadow of the feeling. “She loves it there, begs me to transfer all the time.” Their eyebrows raised, curious about the information. “What stopped you?”

“Well he’s growing up way too fast,” Catalina said definitively, nodding her head. “He starts school this week, which… God I think if I talk about it I’ll cry.” She couldn’t help but smile when talking about her little boy. “How’s your sister?”

They laughed a little, listening. “I’m sure he’s very excited, even if you’re not,” they teased, running a hand through their hair. “Taylor’s doing great! She’s starting her next semester at NYU, so she’s rubbing the city in my face like she’s been doing every year since she got in.”

Catalina chuckled as they hugged, pulling back with a smile on her face. “Everyone’s good. I actually spent some time with my dad, which was nice. He wanted to see Henry. What about you?”

“That’s awesome! And how’s Henry?” They didn’t mean to sound so excited to hear the answer to that question, but they did always love to hear about little Henry. He had charmed Ethan the first time they ever even saw his photo. “It was okay. Spent most of the summer bothering my little sister.”

it was so nice, having someone hug her like that right when she needed it, that riley managed to stop her sobbing faster than she’d expected. “i’m sorry,” she repeated herself, putting some distance between them so she could smile at whoever was being so good to her. “i’m okay, just sad, shocked a little? but i’m fine, thanks for being so nice though,” she said, suddenly aware she was still holding onto them and dropping her hands from their waist. “i’m riley, by the way, so you don’t go around refering to me as crying girl from the party.”

Sunny looked up at Ethan as if to say ‘of course,’ stealing a laugh from Olivia. She almost catches herself saying yes, but instead she shakes her head, “When he’s done training, yes. For now he’s a little busy.” 

Laughing a little, they stood up straight again, caught Olivia’s hand in theirs. “I think Sunny disagrees with you about the petting thing,” they said, smiling down at their shoes. “If you’re busy, babe, I can leave you to dog training...and after, we can do something?”

Catalina rolled her eyes at them. “Such a freshmen like response. Maybe you are one of the underclassmen,” she smirked at them before standing, nodding her head. “It’s been a long summer,” she moved around the table, giving Ethan a hug.

"I am offended at the insinuation,” they laughed, hugging her back. Pulling away, they hummed, gave a soft squeeze to her shoulders. “It was an incredibly long summer. How was it for you? How’s your family?”

Cat rolled her eyes when she looked up and saw Ethan, leaning forward on her laptop. “You wish you were cute enough to be a freshman,” she smirked at him, licking her lips. The two of them always had this kind of banter, and over the summer, Catalina had almost missed it. 

Doing their best to look hurt, Ethan put a hand over their heart. “Excuse you, Miss Catalina, I am very cute. Just ask my mom.” They couldn’t help their laugh then, easy as anything. “But - seriously, Cat. Long time, no see.” It had been a long summer and Ethan couldn’t help but miss her.

“Shh—” Cat held up a finger to hush the person speaking to her, typing away on her computer. “I need to post this before all the freshmen have time to check their phones.” She continued typing for a second before pressing send, looking up from her laptop–she had volunteered to direct people on campus for move in, and knew she should’ve been doing her job, but Pensamentos was more important–and smiling. “How can I help you?”

Ethan grinned, leaning against the desk Cat was working on, waiting patiently for her to finish. They knew that whatever it was she was writing, they were going to read it later, anyway. “Uh, yeah, miss, I seem to be having trouble, uuhh, locating my dorm? Is this where I come to ask for directions?” They tried to make themselves sound nervous, intimidated, but the truth was, they hadn’t felt that way around Cat in so long, it was hard to fake.

“I don’t think people really call it ‘partying’ any more,” Bradley commented with a brief lapse of amusement, the kind that glimmers through the waters of a murky pond like a bright orange goldfish. Then, chased away by that same sense of disconnect in her chest that always suffocated anything hopeful, her expression returned to something of mute observation. “Unless you’re a geriatric go-go dancer thrusting around on bingo night, trying to get Albert to notice your new dentures, I mean.” Stretching out a lone leg from the counter she was perched on, Bradley’s eyes flit down to inspect the crud of dirt covering the toe of her Dr. Marten boot, one she didn’t care enough to stoop down and wipe clean. It was one of those characterising qualities about her that always made it seem as if she’d been reared in the woods by a pack of wolves, a feral child of the moon with unkempt hair and a snarl on her mouth where a smile was supposed to be. “Are you hitting on me?” Meeting their gaze once more, her face possessed the kind of all knowing amusement that indicated she knew they weren’t. Really, she just wanted to test whether they’d get flustered trying to explain themselves. “Bit bold,” she continued, allowing no real room for a response as she flipped the lid on her cigarettes and sniped one out from the rest of the pack, balancing it between the pale pink of her lips. Ignoring the fact that the host of the party probably wouldn’t appreciate her smoking inside, Bradley produced a lighter and rolled a flame to life, a lazy waft of her hand seeing it extinguished once she’d had her first drag. “Okay, then,” slipped out once she’d plucked down her cigarette, blue eyes assessing as they drank them in. “Come in and close the door.” Deliberately not clarifying what it was she was about to suggest they do, Bradley leaned back on her hands against the counter, worn denim of her cut-off skirt hitching an inch atop her thighs. “Welcome to my office.”

“If you don’t call it partying, then what do you call it?” Though, if they were being really honest with themselves, they didn’t think they’d get an answer. Something told them that she wouldn’t be the kind to give him a straight answer on anything; she was all shadows and ellipses, bits and pieces of information scattered enough that nothing concrete could ever be put together. Ethan had sometimes dreamed of being a person like that, someone that was the human embodiment of a mystery. Much too much of themselves was always out, heart on their sleeve, or in their hand, or right there in the pocket of their shirt. Once, they were told that their face was as easy to read as an ABC book, and frankly, they knew it was the truth. “Maybe I am,” was all they said, because it was about as close to the truth as they could honestly muster. Even they didn’t know what they were expecting, what they were even doing here. So, wordlessly, they closed the bathroom door as they stepped inside, leaned against the wall opposite to the sink and watched. Waited. “It’s a really small office. Who do you work for? ‘cause if I were you, I’d demand a change.”

“He was a total dickwad. Would spit on his grave if I could,” Saskia said a little too emphatically, an older man in glasses near Ethan raising his eyebrows at her foul language. He was probably a fan of Fitzgerald, the girl’s dismissal of him offending him, the thought of which made her smile. “They probably both kind of sucked, at the end of the day. Probably never got a woman off in her life. They seemed like the type.” She leaned her elbows on the bar to get closer to Ethan, her dark hair swinging in loose waves over her shoulder, the contrast with her pale skin making her look like a washed-out angel. Maybe the angel in heaven that had gone rotten. “What kind of writer are you? Short stories? Poems? Give me an approximation of length here. Like, Kafka or e.e. cummings?” Most people probably would have been surprised that she knew these names, her personality not indicating at al that she was an avid reader. “And by length I didn’t mean, like…” She trailed off, holding her hands out a few inches apart and lips twitching in a smile at her own joke.

“You know what, that’s fair.” Ethan conceded, nodding as they took another sip of their drink. “Both of them were pretty fucking awful dudes, and as a lit major, they’re overhyped.” They’d read plenty from them both, and never got it, the undying love people had for those works. Sometimes it was just an old guy and an ocean. Grinning up at her, at the girl that had something like an angel face, even with her red red lips, they thought, yeah. Coming to this bar was a good idea. “I write mostly poems and short stories, but I’m actually working on my novel right now? It’s an ongoing project,” they explained, flipping through the notebook, biting back the way their grin widened at the joke. “I don’t exactly think that’s a good thing to talk about when you first meet somebody.” They turned their head up, showed her their grin so she knew they were teasing.

Light eyes made dark by pupils more swollen than a pregnant belly, Bradley studied Ethan in mildly amused silence. He seemed, to her, to possess all the innocence of a schoolboy that still clung to his father’s trouser leg when he heard the boom of a stranger’s voice at the front door. Unsure of himself, almost, in a way that was so foreign to Bradley it almost left her barking out a laugh. Regardless, her expression remained unreadable, even as she sidled closer and burned her gaze intently on his. “Don’t know. Bigger than a coin. Smaller than a decent dick. That kind of size, I’d imagine,” she floated airily, testing for a reaction in the way a child pokes a sharp stick at a dead thing on the roadside. “Just one of those things. A classic Dyson, gerbil slurp sort of situation. You know how it is,” slipped out along with a faint smile, as if that were a regular, staple thing of society and her saying so would incite a soft nod of recognition from him. It was often she was saying these things, urging people into reflexive agreement without really trying to, paving a new normal for those drunk enough on her to indulge it. “You’re shy,” she observed, more statement than question. “Do your cheeks go all pink and blotchy when you get changed in a public place? A locker room?” Hopping up to perch on the bathroom counter, her dark hair draped her cheeks like theatre curtains, smudges of kohl around her eyelashes taking centre stage. “I bet you have to clear your throat three times if a girl shows you her thigh. Raunchy,” she murmured, offering up a lie in the form of a compliment next. An act of charity, one you’d never read as anything but genuine. “Sweet.”

Everything about her seemed - intense, for lack of a better word. And at the moment, Ethan couldn’t be bothered to think of one, anyway; they were a little busy trying to keep up with her in the first place. She seemed to be agreeable but...unreadable, still, something that they wanted to unpack. The trouble of it was, they weren’t sure what they’d find or if they could even handle it. “Wha - I’m not shy,” they argued, arms crossing, fighting to keep their voice even and not whiny or defensive, even though that was how they were feeling at the moment. Like a child that got accused of something they did do. “I’m just not used to this whole environment. I don’t really party, I’m mostly here because -” A pause. A brief moment where they didn’t know how to explain that they were only here because writing about kids in college meant wanting to observe other people’s way of life. “I’m here ‘cause I wanted to do something different.” There. Not a total lie. Just not a total truth, either. “You could test that theory any time you want.” It was a moment of stupid bravery, putting a challenge forward. They weren’t even sure where they wanted that one to go.

It was somewhere after a casually murmured “Hey, does this coke smell weird to you?” and an accompanying shriek heard through the bathroom door by all the party guests outside of it that Bradley knew, perhaps, she’d taken a joke too far, and yet she couldn’t seem to find it within herself to care that much, even as said door was flung ajar and a redheaded girl was storming out of it, cocaine freckling her eyelashes and tear ducts hissing up a monsoon. “Angela, relax. It was a fucking… Michael Cera reference. Let’s all just cal–… Whoa. And she’s gone. Jesus… Fastest woman alive,” she uttered in sheer disbelief, remaining blissfully unaware that she’d gotten ‘Angela’s’ name wrong as her eyes flit to register the pair blinking back at her from the corridor outside. “Oh. Hi.” Drinking them in like a shot of absinthe, hard and bitter, Bradley eventually relented enough to flash a hint of a smile. “Wild, right? Don’t know what the fuck that was about. I hear her gerbil got sucked up by a Dyson and she hasn’t been the same since.”

So, Ethan had heard that sometimes parties got a little bit out of hand, but had always, somehow, managed to miss that part of any party they were at. Until now, apparently, watching a girl storm out of that bathroom they were passing by. Well. That was certainly something new, and part of them was urged to go follow her, make sure she was okay. But the bigger part was - well, nervous, maybe, terrified of what they’d find. They didn’t know the first thing about...any of this, really. “How the fuck would that happen? How big is a gerbil, anyway?” Better to distract themselves with a strange conversation than think too hard about what just happened.