𝔞ᖱ𝒆l𝔞𝔦ᖱ𝒆 💞

FUCKING

BELIEVE

𓆩 ♔ 𓆪 @laperlina ( 𝒛𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒌𝒂 ) . . . various kisses ↳ accepting

in boy world, halloween is the 304th night of the year where a guy can walk into a room dressed like a total sim and still think he's the main character — except on leap years. or if you so happened to be the rarely spotted 6'6" ballerino cryptid from the sister school across the lake. in that case, you were most definitely the villain. well-loathed and well-loved at a diametric spectrum that depended mostly on everyone's relationship status or tolerance for beautiful men in tights. it was nothing koschei cared to complain about. he'd spent weeks grueling to prepare for the fall showcase; and after the standing ovations he'd received on his choreography tonight ( a near guarantee that he'd survive the cuts for next semester ) he deserved a chance to finally let loose and celebrate. away from the troupe. whom he'd sooner have see him expelled than shitfaced.

when the text came, tatia's invite had been accepted in a heartbeat. even if it meant betraying his dearest little cousin. the macabre skeleton she'd helped transform him into had been a showstopper, but after hitting the showers and striking her last nerve, he had no means of recreating the look. the best he could do then was keep to a black tee and joggers, re-wax his hair to match, and try for something closer to the crow. near and dear and good enough for him. see, in boy world, it didn't matter what your costume was either. in fact, it'd be best not to give a fuck about it at all. but after five rounds of beer pong and the ninth flirt cozied up to ask if he was the joker? he'd started having some regrets.

❛❛ yeah. ok, rachel — excuse me for a second. ❜❜ with no intention of actually coming back, he'd forfeited the match to some quarterback and walked off toward the kitchen in search of a knife. ( bullet holes and party people with some culture — maybe, that's what he was missing. ) amidst the thick wafts of spilled alcohol and pheromones, koschei rummaged through the drawers until he found what he was looking for. leaned against the counter, long legs protruding, you'd think he'd have as much body awareness as a great dane. especially as he'd lifted his shirt some to start puncturing through the fabric. over the thrum of music and chatter in the next room, he thought he heard someone snickering. didn't mean he'd risk losing a finger to see what that was all about. but then came the staccato click of heels, marching straight toward him. . .

Everyone, every year, wants an invite to Nightmare at Tatia's. The girl's crazy-stupid rich, popular in part because of it, and her parents are always out in West Palm Beach this time of year, not answering her calls and pretending that their marriage vows don't exist. They're neglectful parents. They're even more neglectful as spouses. But nobody cares because the alcohol's in surplus, good music is hijacking the senses, and they're in the kind of house that deals out king-sized candy bars to trick-or-treaters.

-> THE DRUNK ONE.

[ TXT ] : where r uuuu

[ TXT ] : come get me plz plz plz

[ TXT ] : i dont know where i am

[ TXT ] : the ceiling is so pretty tonigjt

[ TXT ] : wait unblocked i need 2 say smth

[ TXT ] : tell me something u never told anyone

[ TXT ] : is it bad i threw up in a bush

[ TXT ] : keep me company.. cant sleep

[ TXT ] : wish u were here ;;;))))

[ TXT ] : answer me coward

[ TXT ] : u left without saying bye. that was rude

[ TXT ] : tell me im okay

[ TXT ] : i'm gonna throw up brb

[ TXT ] : alcohol is a scam but a good scam

[ TXT ] : everything is loud and soft at the same time

[ TXT ] : do fish know theyre wet

[ TXT ] : u probably hate me lol

[ TXT ] : can u bring me mcdonalds

[ TXT ] : u ever think about how weird existing is

[ TXT ] : uber so expensuve rn :(

[ TXT ] : come save me hero

[ TXT ] : everyone else is so boring

[ TXT ] : ur face. god. ur FACE

[ TXT ] : ur too good for me anyway

[ TXT ] : oh ur answering now yay!!!

[ TXT ] : my hand is so far away rn

[ TXT ] : ur name is so pretty

[ TXT ] : u dont even care do u

[ TXT ] : ok i'm gonnna pass out now

[ TXT ] : someone bought me a drink

[ TXT ] : i love u so muchhhhh (u dont have to say it back)

[ TXT ] : keys inside. stuck outside. help

[ TXT ] : i miss u can u come over

[ TXT ] : what if we ARE the aliens

[ TXT ] : come over. wear the shirt

[ TXT ] : bed too big. need fill it

[ TXT ] : why didnt it work between us

[ TXT ] : u get me. like actually get me.

[ TXT ] : listening to our song n cryin a lil bit

[ TXT ] : just wanted to say ur amazign ok

[ TXT ] : i hate ur fuckign face soooo much

[ TXT ] : sorry if im annoying u

[ TXT ] : ok i forgot what i was sayign

[ TXT ] : i think i ruined everythign

[ TXT ] : thinking abt u. thinking abt ur hands

[ TXT ] : FUCK U

[ TXT ] : that's it. that's the text.

-> THE SOBER ONE.

[ TXT ] : lol where are you

[ TXT ] : you're gonna regret this tomorrow.

[ TXT ] : send me your location

[ TXT ] : i'm not playing these games.

[ TXT ] : are you safe??

[ TXT ] : drink water. actual water.

[ TXT ] : let me call you.

[ TXT ] : i'm not playing guessing games

[ TXT ] : stay PUT.

[ TXT ] : send me a selfie so i know you're alive

[ TXT ] : you're adorable when you're like this

[ TXT ] : you're annoying when you're like this.

[ TXT ] : i'm not bringing you tacos at 2am

[ TXT ] : screenshotting this for when you deny it happened

[ TXT ] : you're spiraling. drink water.

[ TXT ] : DON'T text your ex!!

[ TXT ] : next time i'm taking your phone

[ TXT ] : look at who you're texting right now.

[ TXT ] : i'll still be here tomorrow, i'm not going anywhere.

[ TXT ] : get your mind out of the gutter

[ TXT ] : i'll tell you tomorrow

[ TXT ] : nevermind i don't wanna know

[ TXT ] : text me when you wake up

[ TXT ] : you're a mess. my mess tho

[ TXT ] : go home!!!

[ TXT ] : you're lucky i love you

[ TXT ] : you still have your wallet? check your pockets

[ TXT ] : too late isn't it

[ TXT ] : where did your other shoe go

[ TXT ] : are you writing a novel?

[ TXT ] : go to bed before you confess something

[ TXT ] : that's either sad or brave

[ TXT ] : you owe me breakfast and an explanation

Yeah. It's 2006, the era girls in the 2020s will look back to as the shimmery gloss, butterfly clips, and beaded hair crème de la crème. Private Grace, recently drafted, burns. Here, he can't Amazon Prime his dignity back, and he can't tweet a dramatically long exposé on Mark's very cancellable actions. But forget that. It's not yet culturally acceptable to just up and leave, apparently. It's a shame. No social distance rules. He can't flee to Mombasa.

Screw Mark. Texas won't take him. He should go to Florida.

"Why are you so red, Marzanna?" Jen asks. The quiet, awkward types do it for you? Really? It's just Ryland!"

Laura cackles as Mark catches a Chex treat with his mouth. "He has dreamboat abs, though. Ever seen? I get it."

What abs?! The girls (and Brian, who he's suspected as not batting rather entirely for the other team) swivel their heads around like whippits. He wants to die. "I think she can speak for herself!" he mortifies.

"Relax, Mark. And it'll be fine, Ryland." Isaiah. "I've got it on good authority that Marzanna's a killer kisser. She does this thing with her tongue that—"

"I have my own voice, too!"

The chair skids back. Grace, having vaguely heard suck somewhere, has all but jumped out of his seat by now, paling even that Turkish Delight carnation burnt like a palace's garden in those cheeks of Ms. Kazakhstan. He's what liquified cherry Starbursts looks like, and the cavity he's boasting is eating clear through his sanity.

He. He doesn't know what this is about. He looks nervously to Marzanna. His friend. Good friend, even. She seems ready to melt into the gap between the couch's cushions, icy blues caught stubbornly on some microscopic point in the dorm room's carpeting. Grace swallows. She must be sick. Violently. She must be wondering why him of all people. He reasons her terror for all the wrong reasons.

"You don't have to do anything." Grace scratches his mess of hair nervously. "It's fine. They're just teasing."

Mark champions her. "What? You don't like Marzanna?"

"No, I do!"

"Then you don't think she's pretty?"

"I've got glasses. I'm not blind!"

Isaiah cocks his brow. "Then what is it?"

Marzanna's tied tongued. Which, coincidentally, pretty accurately describes the expert services Isaiah was about to allude to. It's been four months since her breakup with that dark-eyed, perfect-toothed political science major, Isaiah's study buddy, and gossip travels fast when you're young and dramatic. And to be honest, the fact that it's still a secret that poli-sci guy was a failed attempt to distract herself from the most futile, but budding-anyway crush of all time relies both on the science of flukes, and the miracle that Grace is kind of. like. completely oblivious to the language of girls. If she's lucky, right now, he's mistaking her red beet sugar blushing as a sign of utter disgust, and not the truth -- that, yeah, JENNIFER (who should SHUT THE HELL UP), the quiet and awkward thing is really, lethally, doing it for her. In fact, he's stumbling now, peer-pressured into polititudes such as calling her pretty, and she feels another dose of it -- manifested by the sudden surge of adrenaline and norepinephrine reducing blood flow to her stomach.

Commonly known as butterflies.

This ridiculous inability to read each other probably will become way more upsetting in the future, but for now, they're in college!, and everything's supposed to be funny. Even the hole her stare had burned into the floorboards.

❝ He likes you! ❞ Whispers Maya.

Suddenly, Marzanna yearns for a cigarette. ❝ He also likes Twizzlers. ❞

❝ The rules don't work like that. ❞ Mark is lecturing. You'd think this is Russian Roulette -- actually!, to Grace, it might as well be. ❝ She chose dare, dude. If she forfeits, then it's two truths in exchange. What d'you say, Mars? Up for getting secrets off your chest? ❞

❝ I will kill. everyone. in this room, except for Ryland, and then myself after that. ❞ Jeez. The Slavic accent's heavier than ever. Some cool party trick, maybe.

❝ Two truths then, got it! So. What do y -- ❞

Her atoms undither. Her skeleton's solid again. Then, Marzanna springs up from her seat fast, like black hollyhock flower, and makes long, purposeful paces to the kitchen.

❝ Come. ❞ She coaxes quietly, secretly, holding out her hand to him. ❝ I'll make them shut up. ❞

❝ She's doing it! ❞ Clamors Laura, throwing popcorn into the air like Chinese fireworks.

❝ Closet's right there! ❞ Mark again. He's instructing. ❝ I'm timing it! ❞

❝ Oooh, like high school? I miss high school. When did we all get so old? ❞

Her back's to the crowd, and they're too busy to notice the covert way in which she assures Ryland, her friend, her good friend, and nothing more, that it'll be fine. That everyone's too stupid to notice that nothing's gonna happen. Seven minutes of heaven? Nope. Seven minutes of amicable chit chat, possible notes-exchanging, and having your dignity returned to you via USPS.

“Naturally. Any girl worth her salt can,” she agrees, looking down to Marzanna.

“I told her the teachers wanted her to take first class—when we arrived.” The Irish first grade, a year behind. “I think she thought I was flying her home.”

Caroline laughs, her eyebrows rocketing for the clouds. “Did she enter first class?”

“No. The third,” he tells her. “And she will be applying for Harvard.”

Caroline smiles at their conviction. “And what will you be when you’re a woman, Marzanna?”

A tiny tea kettle yelp. This ladybug’s wings fan out, and she releases a pitch heard only by anthills. Marzanna wants to see Gandhi, and she takes off.

The chase is afoot. One step for him is eighteen of her millipede scuttles, and they spear through the planetary atmosphere of homegrown cucumbers and organic stop light cherry tomatoes, Nicholas attached to her like a poltergeist. A subway rattles the street. A man steers his poodle. They breach gravitational pull, and in T-minus fifteen seconds, they’re here.

Caroline huffs a breath. She pushes back her effortlessly tousled hair, which rustles her real mother of pearl earrings.

“You would think it was Christmas.” She glows, looking up.

“I wouldn’t,” he tells her. “It’s quiet.”

Gandhi stands at a bronze eight foot, as tall to Marzanna as the Statue of Liberty, and the moon, and the Empire State Building. He’ll burst the sky like a sewing needle, unleashing Biblical floods.

Nicholas stands in the intervening silence, feeling the question already radiating off of Caroline: why Gandhi? She’s only ten.

But for now, Caroline's eyes are free to twinkle fondly.

Standing before them is the identical twin of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and Marzanna, for once, is behaving quite mannerly -- perhaps on account of her deep, subject-matter knowledge on his ability to orchestrate Biblical floods, and also his history for freedom fighting. She just stands there staring at first, for what seems like an eternity, evaluating his willingness to be interviewed by a ten-year-old, and/or gifted with her most unscrungled pipe cleaner.

This is how it usually goes, really; Marzanna the Line Leader's famous flaw is her silent and infinite-blue staring. It's been brought up numerous times at Parent Teacher Conferences, yet Nicholas does not one thing about it.

He's blue-eyed himself, and loves her too blindly.

Her meditation is interrupted when she's rocked off her axis by familiar sound waves, ones that had first made themselves known to her from a VHS tape purchased at the gigantic Macy's. Marzanna gasps, but doesn't whip around. Her first instinct is to check her Little Mermaid lunchbox-turned-crossbody -- she does so carefully, wondering whether or not her Ariel printed in PVC-film had sprung to life.

Hm ... her mouth isn't moving.

So she happens upon a second guess. Turns around to find that Miss Caroline Honey is the culprit, humming the tune of Disney's newest, red-headiest princess ... though she looks a touch more Walt's Silver Age. More 1950s, imagined by Mary Blair.

More Cinderella.

❝ ... I know all the words. ❞ How Marzanna manages to sound proud and shy both at once is anyone's guess. Even Gandhi's. She wiggles her pink-buckled shoes nervously, clutching her lunchbox for dear life, and barely looks up. ❝ I learned it all right away the first time I watched it. ❞

She has a song in her -- many, in fact, but for much too long, she's been supposing that songs are meant to only be sung by real princesses in the TV. Children learn the value of their voice most easily if their parents respond to it warmly, and Nicholas, for all his efforts, has only been in her life for barely two years. The first eight were spent entirely differently.

dialogue prompts from the first season of prime's off-campus.

you are intolerable.

do not give me the silent treatment.

nobody is expecting you to be _____.

take a shower. you smell like shit.

it'll come back to you. like riding a bike.

did anyone ever tell you that eavesdropping is rude?

has anyone ever told you your references are dated?

i'll pick out your outfit, you just do your makeup.

i plead the fifth.

i am always telling you to wear your jacket. you never do.

how do you suddenly know my name?

you can't just kiss me out of the blue.

you blush whenever i come near you.

get over yourself. i don't blush.

my single ass needs another drink.

this is the part where i tell you all the things i want to do to you when we're alone.

you're just giving me the bed because you feel bad for me.

i wouldn't know who i am without it.

you centered me.

you're overthinking. get out of your head.

you can put me down now. we all know how much you can bench.

i don't need your pity. i don't need you to be my therapist.

what if i'm broken?

if you're going to chase an impossible dream, chase one that actually matters.

this party's kind of dead, right?

are you driving, or shall i?

i think people can change, if they want to.

if i go, will you come with me?

you can't let the bad memories erase the good ones.

do you never have a shirt on?

people who care about you will understand. if they don't, they're not your people.

you said this wasn't a date. it feels like a date.

god, it's so hot when someone knows what they want.

this is a party. parties are supposed to be fun.

stop fucking with my head.

i'm a girl. i have to think about what everybody else is feeling before i can figure out what i'm feeling.

don't think. tell me what you want.

you scare the shit out of them, you know.

look how hard they're trying to please you.

you really can't be alone, can you?

can we hit dairy queen on the way home?

i can't take on anyone else's stress today. i'm emotionally raw. i'm a shell of a woman.

i don't know what your problem is, but i suggest you do whatever it takes to work it out.

we have to cling to the people who see us and smile.

just let me know you're okay.

we're on the same team. don't you get that?

don't you want to know what being single and slutty has to offer you?

let's start with the small stuff and work our way up, okay?

you didn't do anything wrong.

it has recently come to my attention that i'm a serial monogamist.

i'm actually so proud, i could cry.

what kind of _____ do you want to be?

have fun. do stuff just 'cause you want to.

i told you to stop opening my mail.

who says print media is dead?

i don't want you to look at me differently, or treat me differently.

i always knew. i just thought you'd tell me when you were ready.

you're not just one thing. you're everything.

the words will come when they come.

you reminded me of who i used to be.

you could be anywhere, doing anything, but you're not. you're here.

hey, look at me. i got you. i got you, okay?

i don't want to be that guy.

you're not as dumb as you look.

stop being chicken shit and tell _____ how you feel.

i know i said i was dropping out, but can i maybe drop back in?

i couldn't miss your big moment, could i?

[ fish major ] : i whimper

[ fish major ] : there's a difference.

[ fish major ] : if you stopped listening to inna and the blogsphere you'd know it

. . .

[ fish major ] : you keep saying you don't like me but

[ fish major ] : allah'a şükür box dye exists [ fish major ] : so does the block button

[ fish major ] : i fail to see your real problem here [ fish major ] : we should talk about it after your psych eval [ fish major ] : i can pick you up tues 8pm

[ ➵ rothbart ] : as much shaytaan as can be contained in a yellow peanut m&m.

. . .

[ ➵ rothbart ] : you KNOW why i cant block you???

[ ➵ rothbart ] : [ Me_And_Zhanka.heic ]

[ ➵ rothbart ] : [ Me_And_Zhanka2.heic ]

[ ➵ rothbart ] : [ Me_And_Zhanka3.heic ]

[ ➵ rothbart ] : [ Me_And_Zhanka4.heic ]

[ ➵ rothbart ] : as for tuesday 20:00

[ ➵ rothbart ] : im already scheduled for gutting myself with my housekeys.

[ ➵ rothbart ] : go ask tatia

[ ➵ rothbart ] : she always looks at you and says the most disgusting things

[ fish major ] : you are deeply unwell.

[ fish major ] : i am reporting this to the dean so you never have to grade a paper ever again

[ fish major ] : still need you to explain this aversion to my blondness though

[ ➵ rothbart ] : which is infinitely worse than my thing

. . .

[ ➵ rothbart ] : STOP

[ ➵ rothbart ] : TEXTING

[ ➵ rothbart ] : ME.

[ ➵ rothbart ] : I DO NOT LIKE YOUUU.

[ ➵ rothbart ] : i hate yellow hair

[ ➵ rothbart ] : yes

[ ➵ rothbart ] : it achieves for you nothing beyond the look of a blini

[ ➵ rothbart ] : vanilla, milk, werther's originals, malibu barbie, and other signs of weakness.

[ ➵ rothbart ] : can you pls go. text the eight THOUSAND other girls that are dying to suck you off

[ ➵ rothbart ] : i said please