Project One: Eric and Lydia and stuff

Okay so here's the first thing I want to finish. This one's been going on a while. I think I started this version of the story sometime in April, but there have been other iterations of Eric and Lydia floating around since almost a year ago D:

I DON'T KNOW HOW THIS HAPPENS TO ME

Anyway I'm feeling pretty cold-feetish right about now because I happen to have high hopes for these characters. Especially Eric. I think the closest thing I have to a specific ambition for them is that they're simultaneously exasperating and adorable. It's also hard to let this one out into the world because there's a lot of me and my life in it. Mainly it's seventeen year old Claire, but there's a bit of present day Claire too. Eric's anxieties aren't all completely invented, let's just say that.

So here it is. There's a few thousand words more of this and I have a few scenes still to write. I'm not sure how it ends yet, I've been struggling with that. I guess we're finding out.

Sometimes I’m not sure my brain works the same way as everyone else’s.

                  When I look back on things sometime after they happen, it seems like I just remember the most random stuff about them. Like the song that was in my head at the time or the fact that my shoes were untied. The only memory I have of 9/11 is that nine of the kids in my class that day were wearing red tops. I can barely even remember talking about it. It makes me worry sometimes that someday I’ll be old and looking back on the stuff that’s happening to me now, the actual important real-life adult stuff, and all I’ll be able to remember is the way some girl kept clicking her neck in front of me on the bus or something.

                  I guess I kind of drift off a lot, and maybe while everyone else is freaking out about terrorism and whatever I’m just thinking about the colour red and how it’s such a weird choice when you know you’re going to school that morning and Mrs Edwards said just like two weeks ago that they’ve done studies that show blues and greens are the most calming and creative colours and red is just likely to distract you from whatever it is you’re meant to be doing. And then I start thinking about whether they would say that the thoughts I’m having right now are proving them right about that, and how they even test something like that in the first place, and who they are and what colour shirts they were wearing when they were deciding what the best shirt colour was and what colour the men in the planes were wearing when they decided to fly them into the towers.

                  It used to get me in trouble in class, doing that. I kept missing questions and having to ask for things to be repeated for me. Mum kept saying I would grow out of it but I never really seemed to, and even when I got to high school teachers were still writing things in my reports about how I drifted off and didn’t pay attention in class. I got kind of worried about it for a while, just because I didn’t really know how to stop it, but mum said as long as I got good grades I could drift off wherever I wanted.

                  In high school I used to sit in the middle of the class, partly so I wouldn’t spend the whole of English looking out the window, and partly because four days out of five I knew I’d be sitting directly behind Lydia Pattinson. Sometimes she wasn’t there, but I didn’t mind that much. Honestly it was probably kind of good for my work ethic.

                  Lydia Pattinson had been in the same classes as me since we were like eight and she was all short and spritely with this blonde ponytail that would bounce behind her while she ran. Then at some point she kind of grew up and changed. I don’t mean physically, really, because she was still kind of small and wiry even in then, but when we were fourteen she’d cut her hair all short and started dying it weird unnatural colours. She had these big dangly hoop earrings she used to wear all the time for a while until the administration said they were a dress code violation and she had to take them off. Then she looped them round a chain and wore them as a necklace and said she was a Satanist and they were a religious artefact and they couldn’t make her take them off because it’d be religious discrimination. I heard she got suspended for that one.

                  Lydia’s not actually a Satanist, obviously. I don’t know what she is, except maybe an anarchist. But that’s not the point. What I wanted to say is that sometimes, when she’d come into class after I did, she’d be laughing at something one of her friends said and I’d see like a shade of her real smile under the one she put on for all of them, and in the light sometimes I could see little flecks of blonde in the pink of her hair, and sometimes – not often, but often enough- she would look at me as she walked past my seat, and for a second it felt like everything was going back to the way it used to be.

Yeah, so, hopefully have the rest of that one up by the end of the week. LEAVE ME SOME COMMENTS PLEASE :D