(<---prologue is that way)
Second Head of the Sleeping Hydra
“…the speaker tonight. You coming along?” She wouldn’t shut up. I was trying pretty hard to tune her out, too, but I swear she never even stopped to take a breath. Beth, or Elizabeth. Probably Elizabeth, but we called her Beth. Bethany? I don’t know, I was never really close to her. You know how you just click with some people, and other people you just don’t? That’s how it was with us. Or with me anyway. It was always hard for me to spend too much time around anybody, but every time that girl started talking my eyes just glazed over.
There was a writer giving a talk at the college. A poet who wrote about the prairie. Don’t ask me why. To me it was always just corn and soybeans. This was senior year, so I was pretty ready to get out of there by then, and that anyone had reverence for the area was an alien idea to me. This was two years after David died, way before I knew anything about why. In the months after it happened, some people shared their own letters with me. I told them about mine too, but never mentioned the last two pages. It was more romantic to think he died because he was sad than because he was crazy, and I didn’t want to ruin that for anybody. Besides, nobody else had anything about the Dragon in their letters. Or nobody who felt like sharing it with me. Of course, I didn’t ask.
But where did I leave off? Oh yeah, there was a speaker. I didn’t want to go, really, because to be honest I hate poets. And poetry about fields and farmhouses? Don’t even get me started. I lived in a house off-campus by that time, with five other people… six one semester, but that one slept on the couch and didn’t pay rent. Half of them didn’t pay rent until they were three months behind. Yeah, I think I hated them all in their own special way. But I went to listen to the speaker anyway, since they always managed to drag me along. Usually because I was the only one who didn’t drink back then. I’d be useless to them today.
“Or are you just going to sit in front of the TV all night getting fat?” I hated Beth with a vengeance. “Because you’ve been working hard at
that all week and look like you could use a break.”
“Fine!” She’d won that round. I was hoping to get through it without responding to her, but I just didn’t have the will for it. “I’ll expand my horizons with the rest of you listening to words that rhyme with grass.” It was the wittiest thing I could come up with, but not so hot in retrospect.
It was literally two blocks to the college, but a couple of the roommates refused to get further away from the house than the lawn unless they were in a car. We all have our faults, I guess. Didn’t really hurt anyone either, in the big picture, but sometimes it made me feel like throttling them. I was pretty lazy, myself, but that was just obscene. Whatever.
So we drove there in about five seconds, got inside the auditorium, sat down, and made ourselves as comfortable as we could in the school’s shitty chairs. The talk was supposed to be an hour, with some question/answer stuff afterward. I made it through the first two or three poems. I don’t know, I’m not going to say it was bad. One of the poems even made some people cry. I think those sort of people go to things like that hoping to cry though, maybe I’m a pessimist. Maybe it was meaningful to them, but to me it was just a guy describing a prairie and a sky. I walked out partway through the next reading. Not trying to be rude or anything. I didn’t kick open the doors and hightail it, I was quiet about it.
I didn’t even want to be in the building. They always kept the places too hot in the winter, to compensate for the temperature outside. I was pissed, though. No good reason, even. I’ve always been like that, even today. It just comes out sometimes, and the only thing I can do is get away from everybody for a little bit. So I put my hands in my coat and went out into the winter air.
The sun was down by now, it was like seven or eight at night. The school had lights all over though, like literally everywhere. There were some incidents a year earlier and the people in charge figured they could make the campus safer by putting up lights instead of finding the people responsible. I thought they should have tracked them down and broken their legs, but that’s me. I barely even remember what that place looks like anymore, but I remember it was snowing. I remember because I was thinking how nice it looked, with snow coming down from the black sky and the little flakes floating in and out of the yellow and orange lights all around.
Precipitation is high on my list of beautiful things, really. I don’t understand what people see in those stereotypical cloudless, summer days. And I’m not even talking about beautiful in that attention-grabbing “look how depressed and sensitive I am” way that all those teenagers like to act out with. Rain, snow, not hail so much, but you know, I think it’s relaxing. It cools things off, people stay inside, take a break instead of going out and working their fingers down to the bone like usual. But I was never really active, so maybe I just like it because it slows the world down to my pace. I get confused when things start moving too fast, but you know that already.
The snow wasn’t important, really. I stopped thinking about it because it made me feel too much like the poet I left inside the building. I hate that dramatic kind of garbage. The important thing was Sunny. Her name was literally Sunshine, God forgive her parents. Pretty sure they were hippies back in the day, but I never met them, so who knows. I kind of knew Sunny from some of my previous classes. It was a small campus, and I’m not saying everyone knew everyone else, but if you took a good number of classes in any area of study you got to know certain cliques.
I didn’t recognize her at first. Didn’t even notice her at first, but even once I did I didn’t look too closely. I don’t tend to look at people. The campus had a policy that you couldn’t smoke within twenty feet of any building, but nobody really followed that rule, especially not Sunny. Like most of the art majors, her time was divided pretty evenly between smoking and drinking, with a little extra time every now and then for actually doing art, and sometimes sleeping on the weekends. As usual, she said something first.
“Hey.” I loved her voice. It was hard, somehow, without being harsh. I looked up at her, realizing finally who it was. Ratty jeans, a black tank top underneath a ripped, severely stained button-up dress shirt. Anyone else and I would have known they’d just come from the studio, but Sunny was different. She’d wear that sort of stuff all day and not think twice about it. She had short hair, a different color almost every time I saw her, and a pretty good collection of spiked bracelets and that kind of thing. The best part was she wasn’t even pretentious about it. Too many people like her spend all their time trying to prove how alternative they are and garbage like that. She was just past all that. One of the few people I respected, because unlike everyone else she seemed like she was free. I wasn’t even sure what she was free from. I can’t describe it to you. I can’t even figure it out myself, but too many people I look at have this invisible cage around them. I don’t know. She was smoking, anyway. Cigarette in one hand, half-empty pack in the other, because one is never really enough.
“Sorry, I didn’t see you.” It was dumb to say. With all those lights they put up. It got a smile, though. She puffed again on her cigarette and looked out across the campus’s central mall.
“Done with the prairie poems already?” she asked, not looking back at me.
“The poems aren’t done, but I am.” It was safe to look at others as long as they weren’t looking at me. I don’t think Sunny knew that, but I was thankful. I realized that she didn’t have a jacket or anything. It wasn’t too cold, really. I mean, winter in Minnesota isn’t warm, but when you live there I think you get a different sense of what’s warm and what’s cold. I thought for half a second about giving her mine. That’s a socialized reaction, I think. Kind of illogical, too, since then I’d just be cold. Besides, she hated that sort of thing as much as I did. She said once, and I agree even though it’s kind of depressing, that chivalry was invented for the sole purpose of getting women in bed. Maybe it’s true. At least the wind wasn’t blowing. “I just don’t get that sort of thing. I listen to it for too long and I just get frustrated.”
“Everything makes you frustrated.” She looked back and half-smiled. I turned my eyes, looked off to the side like I was thinking about what she said. I was never able to meet her gaze. Not even at the end.
“Not everything. Just people. Every single one of them.” I tried to smile too, like I was making a joke. But I meant it, and we both knew it. “It’s why I prefer dogs. They’re easy to understand, easy to get along with. Even the mean ones.”
“You calling me a bitch?” Sunny raised her eyebrows in mock disbelief.
“I never said I got along with you.”
“Well, some day you’re going to have to do something about that, you know. You’re gonna end up in a cave or an asylum if you keep up like this. Geeze.” She shook her head and lit another cigarette, laughing as she put it in her mouth. “And stop acting like an idiot. We get along just fine.”
We did, really. Every time I told someone I hated people, they’d ask me if it included them. I hate being rude, too, so I always tried to sidestep the question. Sometimes I had to lie outright. But I did. Hate them too, that is. Nothing they could do about it, not their fault at all. It’s just how I am. I hate people. But Sunny wasn’t a person to me. She was like something from heaven.
Or something from hell. I don’t know. Sometimes they seem like the same place. That's cliche, but I think it makes sense. It all depends on how you decide to look at it. That’s just how I am.
