Category: Writing

To start this story from the beginning, click here.

“Yeah.” I examine my nails. “Do you ever wonder where all that youthful fun went?”

“It’s been a long year away at college.”

“And a cold winter,” I agree.

I think of things, memories, those wonderfully long summer nights we spent rocking out. I don’t need to see the photo to replay the scene. They started a band, the guys did. Everyone except Steve wanted me to sing for them. Steve hated my voice, which was fine because I hated his drumming even more. So we’d argue, then one of us would tell all the others to shut up. Then we’d plug in all the instruments and crank it up. None of them knew how to play and I certainly couldn’t sing, but it was a complete blast. Of course my parents didn’t always enjoy the ambush of sludge, but that didn’t bother us any.

“Is it me, or has everything changed?” he asks quietly, breaking the silence of our thoughts.

 ~~~

Bonus points if you know where this title comes from. The album is from 1994. A previous album from the same band had a (fictional, presumably) story about a girl poisoning her parents to get to a show. Or something like that.

~Chrys

Next Installment: You Think You Know Somebody

To start this story from the beginning, click here.

“If you say so.” Steve looks very doubtful, wearing a kind of half frown. He can be an airhead sometimes. I turn back to my photo. Jerry and Sean sit behind Stacy, giving her bunny ears. That was when they thought it would be cool to have blue hair and write band names on their arms. Tattoos they called them. Sometimes they thought it was awesome to walk around with straws in their noses, but luckily they hadn’t done that in the picture. They were constantly together, doing whatever the other did, almost identical. But Jerry had a more adorable face.

“Yes I do say so,” I mumble, my mind turning back to the conversation at hand. “I can’t believe our parents never caught on, even though the bush got all beat up. I also can’t believe none of us ever got hurt. I mean there were pricklers and all, but it was just too much fun to notice.”

“It was all about the euphoria of the music,” he agrees.

 ~~~

So, I knew right away that I wanted to use this picture. I think it might have been this page of the Bleach booklet that gave us the whole crowdsurfing idea. Or at least it inspired the idea that the euphoria of music could make you feel good flinging yourself into things–bushes, drumsets, same diff, right?–and might make you a little invincible. Which, by the way, was a completely valid and sound inference to make. Just for the record.

~Chrys

Next installment: Where Did All the Little Kid Go?

To start this story from the beginning, click here.

“Hey, was she the one who suggested the crowdsurfing thing?”

I turn to look at Steve, my train of thought interrupted. “Huh? I’ve never crowdsurfed in my life. I barely even go to shows anymore.”

“The bushes…”

“Oh!” Giggles erupt from my mouth. “That was so much fun! We’d wait until we could see through the front window that Mom and Dad were watching TV, and then we’d jump into the bushes and pretend we were surfing a crowd. What a zany idea that was. Remember that one time we all jumped together?”

“Not really.”

“Well it happened.”

~~~

And here, the autobiographical in this fiction becomes obvious. Especially if you’ve read Warding Off Eclipses with Sex and Music. Yeah, I really used to do this “crowdsurfing.” Some people’s kids, I tell ya.

~Chrys

Next Installment: Sweet Euphoria

To start this story from the beginning, click here.

On impulse I get up and walk to the table in the far back corner. It’s covered in old puzzle pieces, love letters, a few books and some dust. Digging through the memories, I pull out a photo. There we are, the seven of us, immortalized in our youthful bliss and trauma. The picture was taken by my parents; they always thought we were such a “cute” bunch of friends.

First I study May, short and spunky with short red hair, sitting as close as she possibly can to Brad, the tallest and oldest of the bunch, wearing a leather jacket and spiked hair. It’s obvious he’s trying to sit apart from the group. He always was too cool to smile for the camera, I think, seeing his calculated look of nonchalance.

Most noticeable in the picture is Stacy, wearing a black band shirt, dyed black hair and an expression that conveys her superiority and her need for attention. She was an enigma to say the least, always in everyone’s face. But we loved her for that. She told it like it was.

~~~

Another quick installment from a story from late 1999.

~Chrys

Next installment: Crowdsurfing

To start this story from the beginning, click here.

Steve’s smile widens to a grin. “And that first night, we played all the songs with dirty words and the door was closed so we didn’t have to censor anything.”

“Oh yeah!” I exclaim. “What rebels we were! Somehow I just don’t get the same pleasure out being able to play nasty songs in my dorm room.” Steve laughs. “And then they made us keep one of the big overhead door open every time. The parental trust was overwhelming. They were paranoid and they didn’t even know that Jerry and I were supposedly going out.”

“God, you always did steal all my friends away from me, didn’t you?” he asks.

“Sure, but it wasn’t my fault they all thought I was cooler than you.” I punch him playfully. “Anyway that is what you get for having a twin sister.”

“I guess so. Besides, it went both ways.”

“Yeah, man, Stacy was my best friend until the time she came over and met you. She never bothered to hang out with me after that.”

Steve grins. “Yeah, I know, but it’s not my fault she thought I was cooler than you.”

“Whatever,” I reply.

~~~

Another installment of the last short story I wrote during my first semester freshman year of college. Early shit, yo.

Next installment: I’ve Got Pictures on My Mind

~Chrys

To start this story from the beginning, click here.

“What is?” Steve asks after a long pause. He is sitting on the chair next to me, which has taken far more abuse than the couch.

“I think I was happier when I was depressed.”

“Huh?”

“I know that sounds nuts, but if I think of the good times I had back when I was in that whole teenage angst stage, and then think about how I feel now that I’ve, grown up a bit shall we say, I think I’d pick the teenage angst deal over this.”

“But, Sara, you wanted to kill yourself every other day.”

“I know, but that was because everything that happened was the end of the world back then. Now, I have real problems and I know that suicide is no solution to anything. What a paradox! I don’t really mean I want to be depressed, though. I just miss all the fun we had, in here especially. Do you remember the first night we claimed the garage for us kids?”

“Yeah,” he says with a smile. He is starting to get that far-off look in his eyes, the same one I feel. “That was so cool. Dad had just finished building it, and they’d thrown the old couches and chairs back here, and then they put in the electricity. Was it you who thought of bringing a CD player?”

“I think so. And Sean, Jerry and Brad were with us.” Sean and Jerry both lived across the street and were still juniors in high school. Brad was the boy in the green house. We hadn’t seen him in awhile.

~~~

The second installment of an old short story.

Next installment: The Trouble with Twins

~Chrys

“It’s weird,” I say. I look around me. I’m sitting on an old couch, long worn out and starting to tear, that my parents got before I was born. Across the back part of the large driveway that has seen countless games of rollerblade hockey and an abundance of chalk drawings, sits my bluish gray house. There are angles and lines everywhere, a window now and then. I used to think it looked unfriendly, kind of aloof, but then was when I had an imagination and houses had personalities.

Inside the garage, the one my dad and his friend built that one summer that I thought I discovered who I was, are so many scattered things a cyclone may as well have hit. My sister’s rollerblades and a pile of bike helmets in one corner, a table covered with pieces of different puzzles in another. The telescope that broke the first time I used it is against the back wall, in a jungle of bikes and scooters. The windows have collected dust, so much so that it’s hard to see through them to the green house with that cute boy my friend May was always chasing after. The walls are unpainted and a bit uneven. The two small lights on the ceiling, which is also unfinished, still work, and that is a good thing.

~~~

This is the first section of a story I wrote during my first semester away at college. It’s sort of autobiographical fiction and was probably the first thing I wrote that wasn’t sci-fi or other-worldly in some way.

Next Installment: Only Happy When it Rains

~Chrys