she's a giggle at a funeral

Something inexplicable reminds Will of Freya – maybe it’s the smell of chlorine that hits him when a blonde with damp hair passes him in the hall, maybe it’s the unintelligible but pink graffiti someone’s painted on the exterior of the library, maybe it’s none of the above – and being reminded of Freya reminds Will of Lana, which compels him towards where he has a feeling she might be because it occurs to him that he hasn’t seen her in a long time and he can’t very well text her. She isn’t there, and she isn’t where he looks next, which should tell him that he does, in fact, need a phone, but he’s become so good at ignoring this over the years that it’s brushed off with nary an effort. He wonders where he’d be if he were Lana, which is maddeningly unhelpful because try as he might, he can’t get into Lana’s head, and then, as he’s turning in the direction of his dorm, torn between giving up and borrowing someone’s phone, when he spies her. “Lana,” he calls, volume dialed up just enough to carry the distance between them. “How the fuck are you?” He walks over. “You wanna get a coffee or something?” @lanajvmeson​

That day, Lana was wearing a fuzzy leopard bucket hat tugged down to her eyes. Typically, this indicated that she was attempting a covert operation, which made no real sense given the conspicuous pattern, yet somehow, in Jameson logic, it all worked out. She was really playing up to the role, in her opinion -- the spring to her step hardly read as undercover, neither did the hum below her breath, but these things couldn’t be helped. Hardwired into her DNA. A rampant sprite set free from a mason jar. Will’s call coincided with a red cowboy boot crunching gravel, chin lifting enough that a grin could instantly sprout. Tactile as always, as soon as Will reached her she gently grasped at a fistful of his sleeve’s fabric, almost as if she’d be able to detect all the events of his afternoon from this touch, the same way that cats gathered intel on the happenings of their garden by chewing plants open mouthed, gnawed militantly between back molars. “Hi, Wilbur. Wilson! Wilbo,” she rattled off various alternatives, eyes narrowing slightly in suspicion. Without warning, she poked along his scalp, almost as if she was searching for something. Then, her hand dropped. “Checking for a microchip. I mean, coffee? Totally thought you’d been hacked. Taken over by the KGB. It doesn’t work on me. Caffeine, or whatever. I’m, like, immune, or something. Anyways, wine tastes better. Like grapes that died in Victorian dresses. Like I’m drinking a period drama where everyone nuts over, like, the flash of an ankle.” Eyes flitting behind her, scanning for something, she jostled at his arm slightly, unclear whether this was even on purpose -- sometimes, Lana’s limbs rattled like the carriage of a vintage steam train, rickety with energy, surging along an invisible track to an unknown destination. Sitting still was almost as impossible as catching her frowning. “No. But you can help me, if you wanna. I’m on a mission. Top secret,” she announced with blatant excitement, expression static with it, eyes practically sparking. They pinged around his face without a fix point. It was a glaring contradiction, her immediately filling him in. “I’m heading to Winthrop. Jailbreak. A guy there’s a total panty thief. He has my favourite pair. Sometimes at night I can, like, hear them, in the wind. Crying out. Shaking the bars on his window, waiting for someone to free them. Lana, Lana, we miss your vag. It’s so sad.” Barely a pause. “Hey, do you know how to pick locks?”

He hadn’t slept, all too aware of the events from the night before. It wasn’t worth the risk of him demolishing the dividing line while he slept, and now he was cursed with heavy eyes and even heavier limbs and a knot in his stomach. It had been a miracle he’d wrestled her into the shirt and into the bed, and the whole night he laid on his back, stiff as a corpse, with his eyes glued to the ceiling, counting his breaths and counting hers. Pressing his lips tightly together, he brought a hand to his ear before rubbing his temples, the only indication of his reaction to her scream. He quirked an eyebrow. “Right, well, sorry to scare you. No promises it won’t happen again.” His words came out slowly as he tried to process exactly what was happening. He turned his head away from her to hide the blush that was creeping up his face as he recalled how they ended up here. “No, no nothing like that thank god. I think we would have much bigger problems if that was the case. You see…” He trailed off, gathering his wits before he continued. “Well, I walked you home and you couldn’t remember where your room was so we came here. And then you insisted on taking your clothes off, and I buttoned you up to stop you. Then we went to sleep. That’s all. Nothing…else happened.” He cleared his throat, still looking anywhere but at Lana. It hadn’t been his worst night, but it hadn’t exactly been a common situation for him.

The typical reaction to such a recount would be a full body flush, terribly embarrassed, pin pricks of it needling at her temples. Lana, however, was about as prone to embarrassment as her father was to holding hands. Her laughter came out throaty with how swiftly she tossed her head back, kicking feet beneath the covers in a fit of inappropriate, childish glee. “That’s--... God, wow. That honestly... Like, that does -- that really sounds like me. Ugh, she’s done it again,” she sighed as an end point, the cork to stop the wine bottle. A few more laughs bubbled up, stopped at lips still red from last night’s lipstick, and she turned again to face him, cheeks plump as a cherub. It was rather evident that her smile was itching to grow into a full blown grin, leash on the wild dog of her amusement tugged if only for his benefit. “Sorry if you saw, like, a nipple, I guess. Some people... care about that, or whatever,” slipped out with such shrugged off nonchalance that it could only imply she didn’t understand, fingers creeping across the threshold of his pillows to gently press an index to his cheek. Only the pad. She blinked as it withdrew, watching the pale oval it’d left behind, the skin as it slowly returned pink. “Bloop!” Studying him only lasted a few seconds until she was pushing onto her elbow, patting at the fort he’d made. “Did you, um... Did you make this yourself? Super sturdy craftsmanship. Maybe you should be a carpenter. The second coming of Christ. Do you own sandals?” Clearly, she wasn’t one hundred percent on what carpentry entailed. She was fully aware why he might’ve made it. Sleeping alone scared her. She didn’t feel real when she wasn’t being touched. Becoming a figment of her own imagination curled up on a mattress only meant that the bad dreams could sink their teeth. There was power in numbers. Even if she didn’t know him, she’d probably tried to snuggle closer than his own heart in his chest, arms tucked and nose against neck, no one limb distinguishable from the next. “I’m Lana, by the way.” Then, in a gesture she figured he’d appreciate, she stuck out her hand for him to shake. “Thanks for not being, like... you know, a serial killer. Would’ve been a total downer, honestly. I’m not really vibing with my skin being made into a lampshade, personally. Like, that’s just not on my calendar this week. Maybe next.”

When she was bored, Romy liked to download Tinder and swipe through the options. At best, she got herself a hookup and a momentary distraction, and right now she was getting a laugh out of the man that had messaged her a minute ago, already doing his best to turn the conversation to something more saucy. “Isn’t this the worst photoshop you’ve ever seen?” She asks the person before her, showing them the man’s photo. He was older, maybe late thirties, and had photoshopped himself onto a boat quite badly. She could see the strange cropping around his hair and shoulders. “Should I send him a nude? Kinda feel bad for him.” @yatesstarters​

Lana didn’t just crane her neck to inspect the phone, she all but snatched it from Romy’s hands, cradled close in both of hers like a hamster treasuring a sunflower seed. “Is his head edited, too? Like, I swear I can see a zigzag. His hairline looks like a totally jagged mountain in the Swedish alps that only the, like... super intense ski people can go down. An MS Paint job, for sure,” came with eyes flit up to find Romy, grin haunting her mouth at it’s edges. “I bet he’s one of those guys that goes on Omegle and stages a whole dramatic scenario. He’s, like, fully crying, right against the camera, snotting up a storm, blabbing about how he wants to end it all. His whole thing’s being talked down from the ledge. Someone did that to me, once. His boner pinged up and knocked his laptop off his desk. When he realised I was laughing he was, all, like, shwoop!” she gave the deflation sound effects, curling up a finger like it was a salted slug. Thumbing to see the rest of his photos, she let out various “ooh’s” and “aah’s”, laughter bubbling at the last shot. “Ask him for a video of him doing twenty push-ups,” she decided, holding the phone back with her mind made up. “I wanna see if he’ll do it. And he has to be baby oiled. No exceptions.”

There were already so few people Becca could tolerate on an early morning, and Lana most certainly was not one of them. There were too many things wrong with the image in front of her, so much so that she was beginning to feel a headache come on. She was already dressed, on her way down to make a protein shake, when she’d seen Lana rifling through the entire kitchen. To put it nicely, Lana looked like a homeless prostitute right now, and Becca had to resist gagging at the thought of her dirty hands all over her food. She knew Calloway boys had notoriously low standards, but the least they could do was pick up after themselves, which included their last night leftovers that seemed to get in the way of Becca trying to have a peaceful day. As she made her way into the kitchen, she made sure to sweep Lana’s clothing off of the counter with one of her hands and onto the floor. Opening up one of the cupboards and pulling out a bottle, she mentally groaned at the sound of Lana’s voice. Do we really have to make conversation right now? “The house isn’t up to your standards, Jameson? I’m so sorry about that, I can give you our customer service number if you’d like.” Her tone was as flat as could be, reminding herself to yell at whichever dog left their chew toy around the house. Seeing as it was her fridge, and definitely not Lana’s, she had no problem forcing her way in front of the fridge, nudging the unwelcome guest out of the way and getting some fruit out before settling the boxes on the counter. “They have Caprisun at Walmart, why don’t you go there right now?“

“Oh no, my cum stained jorts! My beautiful cum stained jorts!” Lana gasped after noticing her swept away clothes, abandoning her search to clasp at both cheeks in an impromptu rendition of Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream’. They weren’t cum stained by any means and they definitely weren’t jorts. Her lower lash line tugged so that her eyes displayed far too much white until, like elastic, everything pinged back, arms dropped and grin wide. “Ugh, I love it when you call me Jameson. Ruthless! Give it to me so good. Next step? Slapping my ass with a fly swatter. Begone, vile bug! Make me feel like a nasty little wasp, Becca. So sexy. So fres--,” didn’t even manage to make it’s way out of her mouth properly before Becca was pushing her, prompting a startled prance that could only be comparable to a demented little hobgoblin celebrating their latest potion. “And fin!” came as she landed the last step, arms up in a pose similar to those she’d assume at the end of a long rehearsed ballet. She even went the extra mile, conducted a bow in which her hair swished, ends whipping Becca on the way back up. “I call that my mating ritual jig. Did it work?” Lana breezed on, ignoring her suggestion. “You know,” she began, hitching herself up to perch on the counter besides the fridge, a cat drawn in to bat at a ball of string. Apparently this entire exchange was hideously amusing to her, the perfect cure for a hangover. “I’m sensing something electric here, Becca. Something we can’t let pass us by. I’d, like, even go so far as to say... You can be the peanut butter to my jelly. You can be the butterflies I feel in my belly. And, like... Ugh. You know what else? You can be the captain and I can be the first mate. And guess what, Becca?” Pausing before she continued to quote one of the worst songs she’d ever heard, she leaned in a little more, bracing the counter’s edge with gently furled hands. “You can be the chills that I feel on our first date.”

She was curled up in a cracked, leather booth, an old paperback she’d picked up with crinkled, yellowed pages was held open by her thumb and pinky as a half-drank cup of Earl Grey sat next to a half-eaten blueberry scone, a moment of respite from the daily rigors of everyday life. The soft croon of some piano ballad humming through an earbud, Leo was promptly torn from her reading as she noticed an eccentrically accessorized figure now occupying the space across from her, and, just as she expected, Lana’s voice followed shortly after. Plucking the earbud from her ear, Leo blinked as she attempted to follow Lana’s rapidly spoken tale, staring at her friend with bewildered eyes and a furrowed brow. Leo shifted, now sitting with a single leg tucked under her as she nestled her chin into the palm of her hand. It dawned on her then as she listened to Lana ramble on how opposite the two must’ve looked then, Lana’s attire akin to a famed 1980s rockstar and Leo donning jeans and a long-sleeve black tee. Leo began to think this was perhaps the thing that worked about the two, but she was torn from her musings as a man sauntered up to what was now the girls’ shared table. He wasn’t terrible looking by any regard, cropped blond haircut and large shoulders, probably on the football team. Leo thought she might’ve seen him once or twice before, but that was difficult to tell considering he reminded her of just about every future politician her parents insisted on introducing her to; all he was missing was the navy blazer and nauseatingly expensive cologne. Her brows raising as Lana grasped onto her hand, she turned to look at the man before narrowing her eyes. “Yeah, I… heard that he was found floating,” she played along, shooting Lana a look, “which might seem strange because he was… my fish, but you get it. You truly cannot imagine the devastation I’m feeling. Of course, you must understand this is a very private, serious matter.” She watched as he nodded in understanding and turned away, and Leo leaned back with a small laugh as she shook her head. “Right, so, what was that?”

“Tragic. So tragic,” Lana interjected, nodding along like a bobble head on a particularly bumpy journey. When he bought it -- or at least, publicly, had the manners to act like he did -- she pulled Leo’s hand to her lips, pressing a fleeting kiss to her knuckles. A barely there, tinged outline remained on her skin, the ghost of a serviette Marilyn Monroe used to blot in the fifties. She was always giving people souvenirs like these, stamps in their passport that meant they’d travelled Lana. Like the elastic in her composure had snapped as soon as he’d turned, a grin pinged to fruition. “Oh, you know,” came with an airily wafted hand, exchange so commonplace for a girl like Lana that it was comparable to putting your shoes on before you left the house, swallowing a daily vitamin. “It’s, like, your classic story. Girl meet guy. Guy invites girl back to house. Guy asks girl to ride a daddy saddle on his back pretending to be Woody and Bullseye ‘cause it gets his rocks off.” The reality was different but sometimes, when Lana didn’t want to reveal a truth, she revealed a smaller one. It’d happened to her, the story in question, at a different time with a different guy. This was her version of playing the shell game, three different stories hidden under cups, swapped around and left for Leo to tap one. When something wasn’t pretty, it’d always flip up empty. Lana didn’t like ugly. So she embellished. If the world gave her a jagged, bludgeoned rock, she’d sand down it’s edges and drop it in a vat of glitter. “I was just, like... I don’t know, I guess I wasn’t really feeling it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s really funny slapping his ass and yelling giddy up. Like, five stars, honestly. I think it’d be super lucra--... Um... What’s the word? Lucul--? Lucrative, or... I don’t know, Ludacris, the rapper -- whatever. You get it. All I’m saying is maybe Uber should invest in the daddy saddle market. I know I’d ride them places.” Reaching for Leo’s discarded book, she scanned the front. Nothing registered. Flipped onto it’s back, her futile attempt to read the blurb ended at the first line, brain vibrating like a shaken tray of marbles. Concentration wasn’t her strong suit. For a long time, growing up, her teachers just thought she was stupid. It only took one with a good eye to recommend an ADHD diagnosis -- her brother sorted it for her, not her parents, never her parents. Not that she took her medication for it, now. “What’s your favourite animal?” Leafing to the back pages, past acknowledgements, she neatly tore a plain one and held a hand up like a traffic warden, briefly apologetic. Smoothed the paper flat onto the table. Sizing up potential creases. “It’ll be worth it, promise. I have a superpower. The Avengers asked me to join their crew but I was all, like, you’re boring, Captain America, hasta la vista, bebe! So. Favourite animal? And if you say, like, Komodo dragon, then that’s just... I can’t help you.”