greetings from the stepmania netherverse. as none of you know, i've been working on a first novel these past few months, and though the task in unprecedentedly daunting (before now all i've written are a handful of short stories and crappy poems none of which exist anymore), i've hit something of a stride and have some 60 pages of drafty stuff done so far. however, i've only shared any of this with one other person so far and so haven't been able to get the critique of fresh eyes. ffr seems a suitably anonymous place to try and do so.
the basic premise is the deterioration of a tight-knit group of early-college age narcissists around the time of the youngest of them accidentally getting pregnant. it's alternately told from roughly five first-person perspectives, but is bookended by two chunks in the third person which are a good deal denser--the first of which i'm sharing (in part) here.
this first segment takes place about three months before the pregnancy occurs and shows the main cast in a setting in which they're comfortable prior to their respective fallings out. MAJOR THANKS to anyone who slogs through it or, better yet, provides some input. i'm a thoroughly insecure/anal-retentive fella when it comes to writing so it seems important to get some thoughts before i pump out another 300 pages...
here goes!:
---------------------------------------------
Andrew Emde's Birthday Party
31 December 2009
I
(11:41)
Out back a bonfire shot blue and red with every gasoline spurt set to the embers. A half-circle of green plastic chairs in the grass--puff, puff and pass again, clockwise and counter-, two at a time. Charles sat to Rebecca Rime's right and held one of them out to her. She inhaled, held an instant and released, breath billowing high, absorbed in smoke and sulfer. "You trying to keep it lit a little longer?" he said. He touched her hand with his, stroked the side of her palm. His, darkly tattooed: a winding serpent-figure which came to a point at the juncture of his middle two fingers. They were secluded, almost, from six or seven others in the fog of the fire.
"I'm good, I think," she said.
"All right." He threw the remnant, wetted mouth-end to the flames and watched it catch briefly bright before burning to ash. Music trailed out from somewhere inside. Rebecca sat wordless and listened, looking forward.
This Boy, she thought... he spoke soft and concedingly but his skin shone still darkly hard with lines of ink that would never fully fade. Bare-armed in winter.
"What time do you think it is?" he said at length. The others in the circle sat screened in smoke but Rebecca heard their voices.
"I don't know. Eleven, eleven thirty?" she said.
"You want to get out of here pretty soon, then?" He turned toward her. "Lotta kids in there acting their age. And it's getting dry." Someone shouted Rebecca's name sharply from inside but the call was suffocated, trapped miles away or drowned. "I know another place we can hit."
"Andrew wants to give a big speech or something at midnight," she said. "We should stay for that." At her feet her cell phone buzzed once and lit, and fell to the grass from where it sat propped against her chair. She examined the screen from where she was:
NEW TEXT MESSAGE: JACKI WONG
WHERE ARE YOU?? WE'RE UP NEXT IN PONG BRIT AND KYLE JUST WON AGAIN. CALL ME!!
She nudged one side of the phone with her foot, dimming the display, and she locked Charles's fingers in her own. He looked at her through the gray-blue plumes, then kissed her gently on the mouth. "Okay then," he said, "we can stay awhile."
Rebecca smiled peacefully and watched the fire. "Thanks," she said.
II
(11:18)
Casey Rime sat euphoric. Absorbed, like a lone watchman in his couch-cushion trench, he observed with pleasant stillness his surroundings, undisturbed by even his own principled disapproval of the celebration.
It was New Year's Eve and Andrew Emde's house protested, its frame quivering against so many compacted, restless bodies ricochetting uninhibited. Andrew was Casey's oldest friend, and the festivities compounded in celebration of his coming of age--an anti-climax to what seemed, in a time sucked away in idle wait, to be twenty years' trudging accession to some substantial, yet arbitrary fulcrum of maturity. And yet here Casey was, attendant servant to the cause--but no, still the lesser volition: a lab mouse, subject to scrutiny and left scuttering before a laughing godhand. The dynamic had worked well enough, so far.
Casey sat reclined conspicuously on the center-piece futon in the well lit, high ceilinged living room, gazing dilatedly up at a catwalk which met the stairhead at a single bedroom and which meagerly passed as the second story. There, an assortment of younger guests comingled amiably and drank to earnest excess from little red cups, bobbing about with every innocuous, gossiping gesture. Casey watched their flickering feet shuffle about in double and triple and noted their blurred, embellished movements, the euphonical merriment of their virginal voices twining, unintelligible, in convivial harmonies; and he watched Vicky, the newest among them, and her black hair's blithely shimmer sweeping sweetly about one shoulder, let regally down, and radiant like he had never seen it before.
And then he felt the dampness of his right palm, bracing just tensely at the edge of one cushion, and the tightness of his jaw which he clenched without knowing, and he heard his heart: slight and irregular, just barely over-rapid. He fixed his eyes on the wood-cast shadows of the railing beams above, dancing about as spritely figures hid them, and revealed them and hid them again.
These sensations were not altogether unfamiliar--at least individually. But Casey had been tasked with discerning (anecdotally, though, for Andrew, credibly enough), and then evaluating the effects of a mostly unexplored drug: an as-yet-unscheduled psychedelic which Andrew would order through mail and which, he hoped, might establish a niche market to further augment his already thriving hold on soft-drug traffic on and around Fairview campus. Specifically, he wanted to know the drug's potential in a party setting--because that was where he flourished best of all, coasting along on his calculated sort of charisma and a nonpareil capacity to network vigorously, unquenchably, until his reach and his clientele extended web-like for miles around.
He was the man of ten thousand acquaintances: the ostensible prince of Auburn in his high school years without so much as picking up a football or attending a school dance, Andrew dated high-profile and hosted the right parties with the right people and graduated valedictorian in the doing--all with such benignity and efficacy that he emerged, somehow, without a single animous peer, poised to transpose his success to the somewhat grander stage of college-town Ohio.
After a time sitting quietly watching Casey grew anxious, and he began scratching idly at his knee, reading his watch and tracing the display up and down with ardent fascination: an infallible depiction of Time in which he could have total confidence, no matter how nebulous and arbitrary those minutes seemed in the throes of a psychedelic peak.
It was forty minutes from midnight then, and so forty minutes till the great dependable Times Square ball drop to be televised from the kitchen. And then, just as dependable, would come the illustrious address which Andrew himself would no doubt provide. In commemoration: his hour of ascension into adulthood, however hazily defined; the ushering of a new era, a clean-slate decade to follow one of overbearing, spirit-crushing stasis.
Casey went on staring down, fixedly, at the dispassionate display in front of him which flickered now and then with pure, linear constancy. He watched it extend and retract with his hand's reach, tracing along the stitches of his pant-leg which to him felt rough, calcuous. Agitated, he scooted forward along the couch and crossed his ankles neatly below the edge, sitting slightly hunched, and withdrew a cigarette from the case he kept buttoned in his shirtpocket--not lighting it, but twirling it distractedly between the now perceptibly damp fore- and middle fingers of his right hand, observing the repetitious motion with restless ardor.
He continued this way for some time before Nikhil Verma interjected, from startling proximity, "So where'd that hot friend of yours go, huh? The blonde one?"
Jarred from catatonia Casey looked sideways and up to find Andrew's sole housemate claiming suddenly the cushion to his left, and he wondered bemusedly how long he'd had this company. Nikhil leaned closer and half-whispered where Casey could feel the words on his neck and ears, eager and hungry-sounding, with an aroma of alcohol: "You know, the one who's always giving me those looks all the time. I figure, tonight's as good a night as any to make some kind of a move, right? And I heard Damien got with her--I mean, f[color="black"]ucking Damien. At least I should talk to her or something--establish some goodwill, you know? God, how amazing would that be." He sighed wistfully, and glazed over in fleeting fantasy before looking back at Casey, full of hopeful intensity.
Portly and spectacled, Nikhil was a graduate student averse to most sorts of revelry--or at least those sorts which didn't mean some chance of his lascivous appetite being satisfied. He sat gazing intently at Casey with a pitiable look of comaraderie, almost winking, expecting a response which would somehow assist him in achieving what he had to know he could not. Casey looked into the round expectant face and found himself curiously reflected in those glasses; distorted and bent, and dark. He looked away and leaned backwards slumpingly, stretching one leg out in front. Then he withdrew a small Bic from his jeans-pocket and lit his cigarette thoughtfully, considering his answer as the first smoke wisps escaped and made their dissipating climb to the room's vaulted pinnacle. He watched the ceiling fan make short-lived ribbons of them.
"Florence--" he began, slowly, tasting the words getting twisted with smoke around his tongue and nearly choking. He stopped to exhale, and went on. "Florence was just here a minute ago. Said she wanted to put together one last drinking game, before the ball drop. Probably she's downstairs doing the roundup."
Nikhil made a motion to rise, leaning both palms onto his knees. "Oh," he said. "Thanks for the heads up."
"--But, hey, I wouldn't get your hopes up on her, okay?" Casey stopped him. "She's really not the sort for that kind of... casual thing, whatever you heard. Besides--" he paused, and dragged. "--I think she's wingmanning it with Rebecca tonight."
"Rebecca, huh?" Nikhil said vacantly, sinking back and putting his hands behind his head, drawing his gaze up into the ceiling. "I see." His voice still carried some irrepressible buoyancy--the sort that comes naturally with systematic disappointment, a salve against total despondency. Then suddenly he sat upright again and locked his small, glassy eyes upon Casey, incredulous. "Wait," he said sharply. "Your sister Rebecca?"
Casey did not speak or look back at him, but patiently blew a concise, impeccable series of smoke rings and watched them float away, one after the next.
--------------------------------------------
these are 2 of a total of 7 parts to this chapter but didn't want to dump all too much. let me know any initial thoughts yall, it's much appreciated
also, shoutout to 2c-e!
the basic premise is the deterioration of a tight-knit group of early-college age narcissists around the time of the youngest of them accidentally getting pregnant. it's alternately told from roughly five first-person perspectives, but is bookended by two chunks in the third person which are a good deal denser--the first of which i'm sharing (in part) here.
this first segment takes place about three months before the pregnancy occurs and shows the main cast in a setting in which they're comfortable prior to their respective fallings out. MAJOR THANKS to anyone who slogs through it or, better yet, provides some input. i'm a thoroughly insecure/anal-retentive fella when it comes to writing so it seems important to get some thoughts before i pump out another 300 pages...
here goes!:
---------------------------------------------
Andrew Emde's Birthday Party
31 December 2009
I
(11:41)
Out back a bonfire shot blue and red with every gasoline spurt set to the embers. A half-circle of green plastic chairs in the grass--puff, puff and pass again, clockwise and counter-, two at a time. Charles sat to Rebecca Rime's right and held one of them out to her. She inhaled, held an instant and released, breath billowing high, absorbed in smoke and sulfer. "You trying to keep it lit a little longer?" he said. He touched her hand with his, stroked the side of her palm. His, darkly tattooed: a winding serpent-figure which came to a point at the juncture of his middle two fingers. They were secluded, almost, from six or seven others in the fog of the fire.
"I'm good, I think," she said.
"All right." He threw the remnant, wetted mouth-end to the flames and watched it catch briefly bright before burning to ash. Music trailed out from somewhere inside. Rebecca sat wordless and listened, looking forward.
This Boy, she thought... he spoke soft and concedingly but his skin shone still darkly hard with lines of ink that would never fully fade. Bare-armed in winter.
"What time do you think it is?" he said at length. The others in the circle sat screened in smoke but Rebecca heard their voices.
"I don't know. Eleven, eleven thirty?" she said.
"You want to get out of here pretty soon, then?" He turned toward her. "Lotta kids in there acting their age. And it's getting dry." Someone shouted Rebecca's name sharply from inside but the call was suffocated, trapped miles away or drowned. "I know another place we can hit."
"Andrew wants to give a big speech or something at midnight," she said. "We should stay for that." At her feet her cell phone buzzed once and lit, and fell to the grass from where it sat propped against her chair. She examined the screen from where she was:
NEW TEXT MESSAGE: JACKI WONG
WHERE ARE YOU?? WE'RE UP NEXT IN PONG BRIT AND KYLE JUST WON AGAIN. CALL ME!!
She nudged one side of the phone with her foot, dimming the display, and she locked Charles's fingers in her own. He looked at her through the gray-blue plumes, then kissed her gently on the mouth. "Okay then," he said, "we can stay awhile."
Rebecca smiled peacefully and watched the fire. "Thanks," she said.
II
(11:18)
Casey Rime sat euphoric. Absorbed, like a lone watchman in his couch-cushion trench, he observed with pleasant stillness his surroundings, undisturbed by even his own principled disapproval of the celebration.
It was New Year's Eve and Andrew Emde's house protested, its frame quivering against so many compacted, restless bodies ricochetting uninhibited. Andrew was Casey's oldest friend, and the festivities compounded in celebration of his coming of age--an anti-climax to what seemed, in a time sucked away in idle wait, to be twenty years' trudging accession to some substantial, yet arbitrary fulcrum of maturity. And yet here Casey was, attendant servant to the cause--but no, still the lesser volition: a lab mouse, subject to scrutiny and left scuttering before a laughing godhand. The dynamic had worked well enough, so far.
Casey sat reclined conspicuously on the center-piece futon in the well lit, high ceilinged living room, gazing dilatedly up at a catwalk which met the stairhead at a single bedroom and which meagerly passed as the second story. There, an assortment of younger guests comingled amiably and drank to earnest excess from little red cups, bobbing about with every innocuous, gossiping gesture. Casey watched their flickering feet shuffle about in double and triple and noted their blurred, embellished movements, the euphonical merriment of their virginal voices twining, unintelligible, in convivial harmonies; and he watched Vicky, the newest among them, and her black hair's blithely shimmer sweeping sweetly about one shoulder, let regally down, and radiant like he had never seen it before.
And then he felt the dampness of his right palm, bracing just tensely at the edge of one cushion, and the tightness of his jaw which he clenched without knowing, and he heard his heart: slight and irregular, just barely over-rapid. He fixed his eyes on the wood-cast shadows of the railing beams above, dancing about as spritely figures hid them, and revealed them and hid them again.
These sensations were not altogether unfamiliar--at least individually. But Casey had been tasked with discerning (anecdotally, though, for Andrew, credibly enough), and then evaluating the effects of a mostly unexplored drug: an as-yet-unscheduled psychedelic which Andrew would order through mail and which, he hoped, might establish a niche market to further augment his already thriving hold on soft-drug traffic on and around Fairview campus. Specifically, he wanted to know the drug's potential in a party setting--because that was where he flourished best of all, coasting along on his calculated sort of charisma and a nonpareil capacity to network vigorously, unquenchably, until his reach and his clientele extended web-like for miles around.
He was the man of ten thousand acquaintances: the ostensible prince of Auburn in his high school years without so much as picking up a football or attending a school dance, Andrew dated high-profile and hosted the right parties with the right people and graduated valedictorian in the doing--all with such benignity and efficacy that he emerged, somehow, without a single animous peer, poised to transpose his success to the somewhat grander stage of college-town Ohio.
After a time sitting quietly watching Casey grew anxious, and he began scratching idly at his knee, reading his watch and tracing the display up and down with ardent fascination: an infallible depiction of Time in which he could have total confidence, no matter how nebulous and arbitrary those minutes seemed in the throes of a psychedelic peak.
It was forty minutes from midnight then, and so forty minutes till the great dependable Times Square ball drop to be televised from the kitchen. And then, just as dependable, would come the illustrious address which Andrew himself would no doubt provide. In commemoration: his hour of ascension into adulthood, however hazily defined; the ushering of a new era, a clean-slate decade to follow one of overbearing, spirit-crushing stasis.
Casey went on staring down, fixedly, at the dispassionate display in front of him which flickered now and then with pure, linear constancy. He watched it extend and retract with his hand's reach, tracing along the stitches of his pant-leg which to him felt rough, calcuous. Agitated, he scooted forward along the couch and crossed his ankles neatly below the edge, sitting slightly hunched, and withdrew a cigarette from the case he kept buttoned in his shirtpocket--not lighting it, but twirling it distractedly between the now perceptibly damp fore- and middle fingers of his right hand, observing the repetitious motion with restless ardor.
He continued this way for some time before Nikhil Verma interjected, from startling proximity, "So where'd that hot friend of yours go, huh? The blonde one?"
Jarred from catatonia Casey looked sideways and up to find Andrew's sole housemate claiming suddenly the cushion to his left, and he wondered bemusedly how long he'd had this company. Nikhil leaned closer and half-whispered where Casey could feel the words on his neck and ears, eager and hungry-sounding, with an aroma of alcohol: "You know, the one who's always giving me those looks all the time. I figure, tonight's as good a night as any to make some kind of a move, right? And I heard Damien got with her--I mean, f[color="black"]ucking Damien. At least I should talk to her or something--establish some goodwill, you know? God, how amazing would that be." He sighed wistfully, and glazed over in fleeting fantasy before looking back at Casey, full of hopeful intensity.
Portly and spectacled, Nikhil was a graduate student averse to most sorts of revelry--or at least those sorts which didn't mean some chance of his lascivous appetite being satisfied. He sat gazing intently at Casey with a pitiable look of comaraderie, almost winking, expecting a response which would somehow assist him in achieving what he had to know he could not. Casey looked into the round expectant face and found himself curiously reflected in those glasses; distorted and bent, and dark. He looked away and leaned backwards slumpingly, stretching one leg out in front. Then he withdrew a small Bic from his jeans-pocket and lit his cigarette thoughtfully, considering his answer as the first smoke wisps escaped and made their dissipating climb to the room's vaulted pinnacle. He watched the ceiling fan make short-lived ribbons of them.
"Florence--" he began, slowly, tasting the words getting twisted with smoke around his tongue and nearly choking. He stopped to exhale, and went on. "Florence was just here a minute ago. Said she wanted to put together one last drinking game, before the ball drop. Probably she's downstairs doing the roundup."
Nikhil made a motion to rise, leaning both palms onto his knees. "Oh," he said. "Thanks for the heads up."
"--But, hey, I wouldn't get your hopes up on her, okay?" Casey stopped him. "She's really not the sort for that kind of... casual thing, whatever you heard. Besides--" he paused, and dragged. "--I think she's wingmanning it with Rebecca tonight."
"Rebecca, huh?" Nikhil said vacantly, sinking back and putting his hands behind his head, drawing his gaze up into the ceiling. "I see." His voice still carried some irrepressible buoyancy--the sort that comes naturally with systematic disappointment, a salve against total despondency. Then suddenly he sat upright again and locked his small, glassy eyes upon Casey, incredulous. "Wait," he said sharply. "Your sister Rebecca?"
Casey did not speak or look back at him, but patiently blew a concise, impeccable series of smoke rings and watched them float away, one after the next.
--------------------------------------------
these are 2 of a total of 7 parts to this chapter but didn't want to dump all too much. let me know any initial thoughts yall, it's much appreciated
also, shoutout to 2c-e!