Tangerine Grove Avenue wound through the back half of the apartment complex Clarissa had spent the adult half of her life becoming intimately familiar with. Well, ””””””adult”””””” infinity air quotes compared to the little thing she’d once been in elementary school.
Driving the route was a compressed moment of comfort, like the crumble of an Oreo cookie snapped clean in two with one half to be promptly nibbled at. The two lane no lane markers road horseshoe-d, four-way stop intersected with Palm Springs Road which was the central artery feeding the bulk of Skyline Height’s buildings, horseshoe-d again. Passed a small park on one side, an undeveloped stretch of rocks and dust on the other side.
Second left hand turn, rear entrance of Skyline Heights 60. The building was a six story sort of white stucco facade that pretended to be pristine and to gently sparkle in the Vegas sun. It did in well framed photos, or if she squinted really hard and played make believe.
Ten parking spots in, left side, just barely peeking out from under the awning enough that the passenger side of her car became a hibachi in minutes during the peak of summer. 638, the parking spot her parents had paid extra for when big bro had still been home. The parking spot she had inherited.
Clarissa Shoemaker sliiiiiid into her parking space with a perfect right for space left to chop in. Even amount of white parking space marker on each side. Done with two hands, though she honestly could have easily done it with one finger.
[[Top up. Parking gear, parking break, ignition killed, keys in hand.]]
Her parent’s car on her right side, parked at a bit of an awkward angle that made opening her door a bit of a shimmy and a squeeze. She never bothered Mom or Dad about it when it happened. A black 2017 Nissan Altima that her parents had bought from a used car lot when business had picked up after the pandemic.
She’d rest a moment, then bounce out of the driver’s seat with purpose and intent even when she had nothing to do. But like, never the case. Clarissa always had something to do. Even if it was messaging friends or mindlessly scrolling YouTube videos. All work and all play.
Door firmly shut. Just the right amount of thump, not too loud or sudden. One of the few things she’d really learned during the spring of ‘23. Things like math and English and such less so.
The door to Skyline Heights 60— there were definitely not sixty buildings worth of Skyline Heights, so she was noooot sure where that came from— nearest to her parking space was a bit of a walk. No ramp just stairs, so it wasn’t the friendliest to, like… the non able bodied, which, uhhhhhh?? But also, generally, it was difficult to move things up and down. Which did not affect her at all, because Clarissa never changed the furniture in her room unlike her friends because she was not cool, etc. But it was definitely the cause of her parents cussing in her presence at least a couple of times.
Clarissa preferred the stairs, because six flights of stairs, eighteen individual stairs, two steps at a time, nine Clarissa-shaped movements per floor. Fifty four medium impact cardio Clarissa-shaped motions between herself and her apartment. Good leg burn, a bit of sweat. It relaxed and soothed her mind after a long day.
And she did it, like so:
Step step step step step step step step step, and now she was on the second floor.
Windows flanked one side of the stairwell, so it was absurdly hot in the summer like what Clarissa roughly imagined an oven would become cranked to the max. Maaaaaybe she considered using the elevator on the worst of those days. Maybe. If she was a coward!!!!
Five flights of stairs later. Sixth floor, by stairs or by one of two elevators. Apt 602. Home. Welcome mat, vacuumed once every other week. Bristly weird to step on texture, so Clarissa had spent almost eighteen years of her life walking over it… minus however many years she hadn’t known how to walk because skill diffed by natal development. Fourteen months, according to Mom.
The mat said ‘Shoemaker’ in black. That was her last name, duuuuuh.
The Collector
tools, cars, toys, dolls, addresses, faces, names, hearts (Spring Semester '25, Multishot)
- taylor (the v9 character)
The door opened. Mom yelled out hello! from the living room where she was ninety percent of the time watching Animal Planet. Mom took the afternoon shift off and Dad worked that one, Mom would prepare the Mom and Dad dinner plus one of Clarissa’s pastas in a rotating order, and then she’d take the evening shift while Dad stayed home. Or, on Thursdays or holidays she’d stay too. On Thursdays they closed early because… Clarissa wasn’t sure, but they always did that.
Clarissa yelled out HELLO back. One hundred percent of the time after greeting the Mom she stopped at her own room first, even if she wanted to grab a snack or hang out with Mom for a bit or something. She needed to do everything in the right order. It was an important part of relaxing for her.
Clarissa yelled out HELLO back. One hundred percent of the time after greeting the Mom she stopped at her own room first, even if she wanted to grab a snack or hang out with Mom for a bit or something. She needed to do everything in the right order. It was an important part of relaxing for her.
Clarissa lived in the bedroom closer to the front door. There was a short hallway to the left with two doors. The door at the end was a tiny closet where Dad kept camping and road trip gear that hadn’t been used in years. The door to the right was for her bedroom.
Her door had a set of dangly things hanging off the top of the door frame, chains with a bunch of fist size acrylic lanterns— regular (eight iron nuggets, torch in the middle), soul (eight iron nuggets, soul torch in the middle)— that Mom had helped her 3D print down at the library in her freshman year. The chains were about ten inches, ten of them side by side.
Dad was the only one in the house tall enough for the lanterns to get in his way when he tried to enter her room. Mom was 5’2”, big bro was 5’6”. They were a pretty small family in the literal, haha, sense.
The door hinge was a bit cracked and splintered at the corners, because Clarissa had a habit of slamming doors too loud sometimes. It wasn’t as bad as it had used to be when she was younger. Clarissa would prooooobably fix the hinges as a summer project. They weren’t even sort of a problem, but, it did give her something fun to do when she no longer had to do homework or cheer practice or dance practice or those other school-related things.
Her room, on the other side of that door, was clean, smelled vaguely of artificial sterile green tea willow and late night Oreos. Pleasantly lived in, reasonably tidy.
Well maintained. Everything had to be in its place!
Her door had a set of dangly things hanging off the top of the door frame, chains with a bunch of fist size acrylic lanterns— regular (eight iron nuggets, torch in the middle), soul (eight iron nuggets, soul torch in the middle)— that Mom had helped her 3D print down at the library in her freshman year. The chains were about ten inches, ten of them side by side.
Dad was the only one in the house tall enough for the lanterns to get in his way when he tried to enter her room. Mom was 5’2”, big bro was 5’6”. They were a pretty small family in the literal, haha, sense.
The door hinge was a bit cracked and splintered at the corners, because Clarissa had a habit of slamming doors too loud sometimes. It wasn’t as bad as it had used to be when she was younger. Clarissa would prooooobably fix the hinges as a summer project. They weren’t even sort of a problem, but, it did give her something fun to do when she no longer had to do homework or cheer practice or dance practice or those other school-related things.
Her room, on the other side of that door, was clean, smelled vaguely of artificial sterile green tea willow and late night Oreos. Pleasantly lived in, reasonably tidy.
Well maintained. Everything had to be in its place!
The windows were to the left and other side of the room when the door opened, two facing where the sun set at night. Always a pleasant temperature because of that. She used curtains in the exact same pale peach color— same hexcode, if GIMP was to be believed— as her phone case. The curtains had come first, she’d picked them out on a shopping trip with big bro when she’d graduated into middle school and he’d been passing the room onto her before heading to college. The phone case, cute peach pattern, had been a Christmas exchange gift with Sylvie in freshman year.
Her desk was also on the left side wall, on the third of it that had no windows. It was one of those alcove desks built into a floor to ceiling shelving unit, painted in a palette of soft pastel oranges and whites. She, Dad, and big bro had built the whole thing, assembling the frame and then bolting it into the wall, putting in the shelves. Putting in sliding glass panels the middle two shelves, because, well. She was a collector of cool things and cute things! Sometimes both! She liked having places to put the things that mattered, where she could feel they were safe.
She could not reach the top shelf without a stepladder, and that was where she put a couple of trophies from dance events that she had definitely been the teams MVP benchwarmer for. By choice on the sidelines despite coach insisting she'd be good on the team every year without fail. It was funny to think she'd won these things by literally not doing anything. Since the trophies were not her priority she only pulled them down occasionally for dusting off and polishing. Liiiiike, once every three weeks or so? It was the part of her cleaning schedule she was the loosest with.
The next two shelves down from the top were the ones with glass. She kept the most expensive of her dolls here, because the main display case was significantly less protected since it was not bolted into a wall. Her dolls smiled down on her when she was working, a line of faces and names and price tags and exact dates she could remember having bought each of them to take home and love forever. Cleaned at least once a week. More if she had a lazy night and time to kill, and maybe a Raya or a Sylvie to put on speaker phone or to spam text while combing, brushing, dusting, polishing.
The actual desk part of the construct was a really nice little cubby for a Clarissa to put herself in when she was studying, or, as likely, avoiding studying. The shelf above had a panel of LED tubed lights affixed to the bottom that she could flip on for anything from a nice moody deep orange to classroom ‘wake up you idiot’ excruciatingly bright and sterile white.
The inside wall of the desk had some nailed down corkboard and a built-in picture frame. In the frame was an archival quality print, one photo, a memory that Clarissa could look at with the kind of smile that felt like tears or the kind of quiet sobbing that felt like a tiny relieved smile as the sun broke through the storm clouds. Clarissa’s seventh birthday. IHOP, as all birthdays. All of the Shoemaker family, her big bro casually slinging bunny ears behind her smiling face. All of the Loux family, Raya accidentally halfway through blinking.
Auntie Sophia, with a small and tired smile because she’d just gotten there from the shop.
The corkboard on the other side of the photo frame had a bunch of pins. No notes for those pins to be pinning up. Not common for Clarissa to use paper notes since phones existed and she was a Zalpha girl who only had good-ish handwriting incidentally. What she did keep were a few friend-shaped photos, the most recent of which had been a Yearbook picture by… Inessa, that was her name, better known to Clarissa as @IHR_PhotoArc. Mid bucket toss, it seemed. Sylvie looked beautiful, Clarissa looked constipated. Many such cases!
A few of the other pinned up phooootos included one from the Connect Pour date with the girls and Claude (not an honorary girl, or they’d have no choice but to let him in on the Claude/Sylvie Agenda, etc), a selfie she’d snapped with herself and Ingrid M toasting cocktail glasses in the kitchen during the New Years party, a… barrel, which she vaguely recalled was a joke or something, a selfie with Soumitra from a football sideline in October…
The corkboard was running out of space! She usually had to take down a couple of photos every few months and put them in a scrapbook.
Right under the corkboard was her little dude, a fist-size plush croissant going : )
An agent of the enemy…
… Sylvie had noticed over time that Clarissa tended to most love the cute novelty plushies out of her entire collection. Jellycat had a sun, and grapes, and a toilet paper (not in Sylvie’s collection, but the two of them had definitely ideated owning it at length when researching the catalog) and in the end, the very sneaky Sylvie had gotten Clarissa the croissant for her fifteenth birthday. Planting a secret agent…
Name, Francis (heeheeheee); date of birth March 2 (the two of them shared a birthday), no favorite clothes because Francis had a weird body shape! Maybe a little hat? But Clarissa did know that Francis liked his morning coffee with two creams and a sugar. The same way Clarissa knew she liked her morning coffee as not existing, because coffee was gross tasting and coffee enjoyers were old people coded.
On the desk in one corner she kept her dad’s old laptop he’d upgraded out of when she’d graduated middle school. A skinny 2016 Macbook Pro, an ancient dinosaur going RawrXD in comparison to the laptop she got to use at school. Mostly just for writing assignments and stuff. Very unfortunately not capable of running Minecraft at the render distance she preferred!
In the non laptop corner she kept a small terracotta bowl with a sliced-open orange design. She’d gotten it while visiting big bro out at his college in Houston in her sophomore year summer. It was the designated keybowl, her set of keys to the auto shop, her car keys, mailbox keys. All the most important things in her life, really.
She had, like, a lot of fruit motifs for something she rarely ate… Though she did like sliced apples and peaches! She’d learned to be okay with having them sooometimes after her middle school coach had emphasized the importance of nutrition to her and Clarissa had realized that, whoops, she was not eating in a very nutrition way.
She kept the bowl on top of a seafoam green jewelry box- it had originally been white, but she’d repainted it because Favorite Color, et cetera. The jewelry box had been from Pottery Barn or that’s where Mom said she’d got it when Clarissa got into middle school. Mom had said that she'd need somewhere to keep all her favorite rings and necklaces. She did have a lot of those, the fun colorful kind, like a broccoli hair clip she’d used to wear a lot in freshman year, and a pair of teal-lens sunglasses Marcy had gifted her and winked when Clarissa had asked her where she bought them. Badass, etc.
Clarissa kept her absolute favorites in the box and rotated through them whenever the mood struck her. She hadn’t worn any today because it was a work day. For school, starting tommorrow, she was cooking. She’d probably go for two rings and a hair clip she’d wanted to wear out for a while: a steel Pacman ring for her ring finger, a smol ring for her pinkie that had the cutest amber bits arranged to look like a honey bee kind of, and a leopard print clip but the brown hues were replaced by reds. She’d found them all in her past few months of thrifting and she’d figured she’d waited long enough without using them, so into the ‘wear these’ box they went!
Beside the box, also the perfect amount of smol and cozy shaped to fit in among all the other similarly aesthetic items, a small fuzzy UE bluetooth in a serene blue palette. Clarissa’s music was very important to her, and while she rarely ran the speaker at more than a conversational volume, it still filled up the whole space of her room, she could bring it on the go, it had seemed like a great purchase when she’d eaten up part of a paycheck from last year on it. Like… her paychecks were technically her parents money anyways, weren’t they? Was it technically them paying for her speaker through proxy?
More booooringly, though still fitting the picture of her room well enough by way of a carefully curated color scheme (Clarissa liked greens and oranges, was the gist of it. If she wasn’t very attached to the color of her car as it was, she would have happily done it up in a cool green shade in her free time) was the file organizer where she kept books from school where she was working on them, and the desk drawer with supplies. Of note, she guessed, were the drafting supplies she kept in the back of the desk. Rare she and Raya drafted schematics for things, they usually just talked it out and made scribbled notes in their phones that were totally incomprehensible save to them and maaaaaybe their parents.
Clarissa’s desk chair was one of those wide enough to sit criss cross on ones that had been a TikTok trend for a while last year. Dusky orange, pretty got dang comfortable. It was a pretty large chair, and Clarissa had the sense she probably could unironically sleep on it curled up like a cat or something. The back leaned all the way back, and at no point in the lean did Clarissa ever feel like the chair would tip over. Solid design. Totally worth the impulse purchase because she’d been bored of chairs people sat in like normal people. Probably didn’t have the best back support? Like Clarissa needed back support! She was pretty sure between being active and genetics she was going to be doing cartwheels into her sixties… weird to imagine unironically being old, but there it was. Maybe a bit arrogant of her. But it wasn’t like she didn’t work on her health religiously!
Okay maybe her diet needed a liiiiitle more diversity. They needed to release Oreo flavored vegetables or something. With the mouthfeel of pasta.
Under the desk there was plenty of space for her bag and her books to be hidden and out of the way. Floor space wasn’t really at a premium in her room by design, and she more or less had enough space to annoy the downstairs neighbors with whatever flavor of cheer or dance drills she was interested in that particular day. But like, keeping her backpack out in the open would remind her of academics! For the good of all involved it was best it stayed more out of the way.
And all that was one little corner of her room. Easy to maintain. Plenty of little things, all of which mattered so so so much to her. Memories she could cherish, see from any angle, hold and feel.
All kept in their place.
Her desk was also on the left side wall, on the third of it that had no windows. It was one of those alcove desks built into a floor to ceiling shelving unit, painted in a palette of soft pastel oranges and whites. She, Dad, and big bro had built the whole thing, assembling the frame and then bolting it into the wall, putting in the shelves. Putting in sliding glass panels the middle two shelves, because, well. She was a collector of cool things and cute things! Sometimes both! She liked having places to put the things that mattered, where she could feel they were safe.
She could not reach the top shelf without a stepladder, and that was where she put a couple of trophies from dance events that she had definitely been the teams MVP benchwarmer for. By choice on the sidelines despite coach insisting she'd be good on the team every year without fail. It was funny to think she'd won these things by literally not doing anything. Since the trophies were not her priority she only pulled them down occasionally for dusting off and polishing. Liiiiike, once every three weeks or so? It was the part of her cleaning schedule she was the loosest with.
The next two shelves down from the top were the ones with glass. She kept the most expensive of her dolls here, because the main display case was significantly less protected since it was not bolted into a wall. Her dolls smiled down on her when she was working, a line of faces and names and price tags and exact dates she could remember having bought each of them to take home and love forever. Cleaned at least once a week. More if she had a lazy night and time to kill, and maybe a Raya or a Sylvie to put on speaker phone or to spam text while combing, brushing, dusting, polishing.
The actual desk part of the construct was a really nice little cubby for a Clarissa to put herself in when she was studying, or, as likely, avoiding studying. The shelf above had a panel of LED tubed lights affixed to the bottom that she could flip on for anything from a nice moody deep orange to classroom ‘wake up you idiot’ excruciatingly bright and sterile white.
The inside wall of the desk had some nailed down corkboard and a built-in picture frame. In the frame was an archival quality print, one photo, a memory that Clarissa could look at with the kind of smile that felt like tears or the kind of quiet sobbing that felt like a tiny relieved smile as the sun broke through the storm clouds. Clarissa’s seventh birthday. IHOP, as all birthdays. All of the Shoemaker family, her big bro casually slinging bunny ears behind her smiling face. All of the Loux family, Raya accidentally halfway through blinking.
Auntie Sophia, with a small and tired smile because she’d just gotten there from the shop.
The corkboard on the other side of the photo frame had a bunch of pins. No notes for those pins to be pinning up. Not common for Clarissa to use paper notes since phones existed and she was a Zalpha girl who only had good-ish handwriting incidentally. What she did keep were a few friend-shaped photos, the most recent of which had been a Yearbook picture by… Inessa, that was her name, better known to Clarissa as @IHR_PhotoArc. Mid bucket toss, it seemed. Sylvie looked beautiful, Clarissa looked constipated. Many such cases!
A few of the other pinned up phooootos included one from the Connect Pour date with the girls and Claude (not an honorary girl, or they’d have no choice but to let him in on the Claude/Sylvie Agenda, etc), a selfie she’d snapped with herself and Ingrid M toasting cocktail glasses in the kitchen during the New Years party, a… barrel, which she vaguely recalled was a joke or something, a selfie with Soumitra from a football sideline in October…
The corkboard was running out of space! She usually had to take down a couple of photos every few months and put them in a scrapbook.
Right under the corkboard was her little dude, a fist-size plush croissant going : )
An agent of the enemy…
… Sylvie had noticed over time that Clarissa tended to most love the cute novelty plushies out of her entire collection. Jellycat had a sun, and grapes, and a toilet paper (not in Sylvie’s collection, but the two of them had definitely ideated owning it at length when researching the catalog) and in the end, the very sneaky Sylvie had gotten Clarissa the croissant for her fifteenth birthday. Planting a secret agent…Name, Francis (heeheeheee); date of birth March 2 (the two of them shared a birthday), no favorite clothes because Francis had a weird body shape! Maybe a little hat? But Clarissa did know that Francis liked his morning coffee with two creams and a sugar. The same way Clarissa knew she liked her morning coffee as not existing, because coffee was gross tasting and coffee enjoyers were old people coded.
On the desk in one corner she kept her dad’s old laptop he’d upgraded out of when she’d graduated middle school. A skinny 2016 Macbook Pro, an ancient dinosaur going RawrXD in comparison to the laptop she got to use at school. Mostly just for writing assignments and stuff. Very unfortunately not capable of running Minecraft at the render distance she preferred!
In the non laptop corner she kept a small terracotta bowl with a sliced-open orange design. She’d gotten it while visiting big bro out at his college in Houston in her sophomore year summer. It was the designated keybowl, her set of keys to the auto shop, her car keys, mailbox keys. All the most important things in her life, really.
She had, like, a lot of fruit motifs for something she rarely ate… Though she did like sliced apples and peaches! She’d learned to be okay with having them sooometimes after her middle school coach had emphasized the importance of nutrition to her and Clarissa had realized that, whoops, she was not eating in a very nutrition way.
She kept the bowl on top of a seafoam green jewelry box- it had originally been white, but she’d repainted it because Favorite Color, et cetera. The jewelry box had been from Pottery Barn or that’s where Mom said she’d got it when Clarissa got into middle school. Mom had said that she'd need somewhere to keep all her favorite rings and necklaces. She did have a lot of those, the fun colorful kind, like a broccoli hair clip she’d used to wear a lot in freshman year, and a pair of teal-lens sunglasses Marcy had gifted her and winked when Clarissa had asked her where she bought them. Badass, etc.
Clarissa kept her absolute favorites in the box and rotated through them whenever the mood struck her. She hadn’t worn any today because it was a work day. For school, starting tommorrow, she was cooking. She’d probably go for two rings and a hair clip she’d wanted to wear out for a while: a steel Pacman ring for her ring finger, a smol ring for her pinkie that had the cutest amber bits arranged to look like a honey bee kind of, and a leopard print clip but the brown hues were replaced by reds. She’d found them all in her past few months of thrifting and she’d figured she’d waited long enough without using them, so into the ‘wear these’ box they went!
Beside the box, also the perfect amount of smol and cozy shaped to fit in among all the other similarly aesthetic items, a small fuzzy UE bluetooth in a serene blue palette. Clarissa’s music was very important to her, and while she rarely ran the speaker at more than a conversational volume, it still filled up the whole space of her room, she could bring it on the go, it had seemed like a great purchase when she’d eaten up part of a paycheck from last year on it. Like… her paychecks were technically her parents money anyways, weren’t they? Was it technically them paying for her speaker through proxy?
More booooringly, though still fitting the picture of her room well enough by way of a carefully curated color scheme (Clarissa liked greens and oranges, was the gist of it. If she wasn’t very attached to the color of her car as it was, she would have happily done it up in a cool green shade in her free time) was the file organizer where she kept books from school where she was working on them, and the desk drawer with supplies. Of note, she guessed, were the drafting supplies she kept in the back of the desk. Rare she and Raya drafted schematics for things, they usually just talked it out and made scribbled notes in their phones that were totally incomprehensible save to them and maaaaaybe their parents.
Clarissa’s desk chair was one of those wide enough to sit criss cross on ones that had been a TikTok trend for a while last year. Dusky orange, pretty got dang comfortable. It was a pretty large chair, and Clarissa had the sense she probably could unironically sleep on it curled up like a cat or something. The back leaned all the way back, and at no point in the lean did Clarissa ever feel like the chair would tip over. Solid design. Totally worth the impulse purchase because she’d been bored of chairs people sat in like normal people. Probably didn’t have the best back support? Like Clarissa needed back support! She was pretty sure between being active and genetics she was going to be doing cartwheels into her sixties… weird to imagine unironically being old, but there it was. Maybe a bit arrogant of her. But it wasn’t like she didn’t work on her health religiously!
Okay maybe her diet needed a liiiiitle more diversity. They needed to release Oreo flavored vegetables or something. With the mouthfeel of pasta.
Under the desk there was plenty of space for her bag and her books to be hidden and out of the way. Floor space wasn’t really at a premium in her room by design, and she more or less had enough space to annoy the downstairs neighbors with whatever flavor of cheer or dance drills she was interested in that particular day. But like, keeping her backpack out in the open would remind her of academics! For the good of all involved it was best it stayed more out of the way.
And all that was one little corner of her room. Easy to maintain. Plenty of little things, all of which mattered so so so much to her. Memories she could cherish, see from any angle, hold and feel.
All kept in their place.
The fiiiirst thing she’d done after saying hello to her Mom was she'd shoved her door out of the way, and of course shoved it back into the way immediately after.
DOOR EXPLODING NOISE, one she was very used to.
The first thing she had done in her room had been sitting at her desk. Carefully putting everything where it belonged, the car keys in the keybowl, the homework she would definitely get done in time centered on the desk space so it was right there where she couldn’t forget it. And heaven knew she couldn’t possibly forget it, the itchy guilt and shame and ‘this could have been done yesterday’ voice in her head that would just tempt her all the more to arrange to hang out at Sylvie’s place or work a late shift with Raya at Autovet or a little something called ‘anything else but the goddamn Dostoyevsky please’.
She double checked. Slow sweep of her eyes, drinking in the familiar ambiance, the way the lights of the late afternoon sun starting to bleed all over the horizon formed gentle patterns over the surfaces.
Photoboard, Francis, desk lights flipped on, speaker light off, bag and textbooks ready for a fresh school day tomorrow.
Everything in its place.
DOOR EXPLODING NOISE, one she was very used to.
The first thing she had done in her room had been sitting at her desk. Carefully putting everything where it belonged, the car keys in the keybowl, the homework she would definitely get done in time centered on the desk space so it was right there where she couldn’t forget it. And heaven knew she couldn’t possibly forget it, the itchy guilt and shame and ‘this could have been done yesterday’ voice in her head that would just tempt her all the more to arrange to hang out at Sylvie’s place or work a late shift with Raya at Autovet or a little something called ‘anything else but the goddamn Dostoyevsky please’.
She double checked. Slow sweep of her eyes, drinking in the familiar ambiance, the way the lights of the late afternoon sun starting to bleed all over the horizon formed gentle patterns over the surfaces.
Photoboard, Francis
, desk lights flipped on, speaker light off, bag and textbooks ready for a fresh school day tomorrow.Everything in its place.
Clarissa had then leaned back into her chair before loudly squealing like she was pig-shaped, hands squishing her cheeks down flat while she erupted the built up fuzzies under her skin like a fresh volcano had just breached the skin of the earth, or a fresh zit had just breached the skin of the Clarissa.
Mom shouted, asking if she was okay? Clarissa, smile as loud on her face as she’d just yelled, yelled back that she was OKAY.
She’d been needing to vent out like this, like, pretty much from the moment she’d dropped Michael off. It had been a critical to-do item on the schedule. It was the right place and the right time to let the fact sink in.
Boyfriend boyfriend boyfriend
She haaaaad
A boyfriend!
Sylvie could never!
Okay to be fair, that particular Agenda item was also priority on the to-do list. Now with a plus one on the list of co-collaborators.
Who was her boyfriend aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
She had already gone ahead and penciled him in on the VIP shortlist. A designated survivor in the event of a Mustang fireball wrecking on the I-15 because of some jackass forgetting how to turn signal correctly. Michael would be riiiight up there with Marcy and Vivian. A bit above Joanne because to be honest Joanne had never made it that high in the grand scheme of things. A best friend, but not like, a best friend Clarissa felt comfortable turning to for advice. Historically Michael’s name had already been on the list, it had been since they'd first started chatting waaaay back in... how long had Clarissa loved the baseball boys, now? Since birth? Michael had always been a face and a name she'd cherished, but now it was in elite company.
Clarissa felt it reasonably fair that Sylvie and Raya were still the top two. No amount of boyfriend-invoked cuddle lust could possibly dislodge them from their historical positions.
History, after all, was a powerful force exerting it’s gravity on the minds of the innocent and impressionable. Whatever had come before them in their short time on earth, primacy, prominence in a mind mostly clear of the grand mundanity of life unless you were a Stella or a Sylvie and were trying to stuff whole textbooks into your brain in the few short months you had before college.
Much as Clarissa had been mediocre in History classes! The idea that on an itty-bitty causality had built her into what she was present day present time and that on a grand scale the people who had come before her had scraped together little dustballs in New Mexico and Nevada for politicalsocialeconomic reasons or whatever, where her grandparents had lived, where her parents had lived, where the proooobably great American Dream had been lived by them against a backdrop of more and more city light and more and more commuter infrastructure (peak!) and would soon be lived by her, to some extent because everything sucked, per her news feed headlines…
It all made her feel a certain reverence.
Memories. Names, faces. She held onto all of them dearly.
Mom shouted, asking if she was okay? Clarissa, smile as loud on her face as she’d just yelled, yelled back that she was OKAY.
She’d been needing to vent out like this, like, pretty much from the moment she’d dropped Michael off. It had been a critical to-do item on the schedule. It was the right place and the right time to let the fact sink in.
Boyfriend boyfriend boyfriend
She haaaaad
A boyfriend!
Sylvie could never!
Okay to be fair, that particular Agenda item was also priority on the to-do list. Now with a plus one on the list of co-collaborators.
Who was her boyfriend aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
She had already gone ahead and penciled him in on the VIP shortlist. A designated survivor in the event of a Mustang fireball wrecking on the I-15 because of some jackass forgetting how to turn signal correctly. Michael would be riiiight up there with Marcy and Vivian. A bit above Joanne because to be honest Joanne had never made it that high in the grand scheme of things. A best friend, but not like, a best friend Clarissa felt comfortable turning to for advice. Historically Michael’s name had already been on the list, it had been since they'd first started chatting waaaay back in... how long had Clarissa loved the baseball boys, now? Since birth? Michael had always been a face and a name she'd cherished, but now it was in elite company.
Clarissa felt it reasonably fair that Sylvie and Raya were still the top two. No amount of boyfriend-invoked cuddle lust could possibly dislodge them from their historical positions.
History, after all, was a powerful force exerting it’s gravity on the minds of the innocent and impressionable. Whatever had come before them in their short time on earth, primacy, prominence in a mind mostly clear of the grand mundanity of life unless you were a Stella or a Sylvie and were trying to stuff whole textbooks into your brain in the few short months you had before college.
Much as Clarissa had been mediocre in History classes! The idea that on an itty-bitty causality had built her into what she was present day present time and that on a grand scale the people who had come before her had scraped together little dustballs in New Mexico and Nevada for politicalsocialeconomic reasons or whatever, where her grandparents had lived, where her parents had lived, where the proooobably great American Dream had been lived by them against a backdrop of more and more city light and more and more commuter infrastructure (peak!) and would soon be lived by her, to some extent because everything sucked, per her news feed headlines…
It all made her feel a certain reverence.
Memories. Names, faces. She held onto all of them dearly.
But disregarding all that boring dramatic stuff.
Boyfriend.
With the beautiful warm brown eyes and the tan (how did people do that without burning up, seriously) and the cute ears with the little sideburns and the fringe of tangly bangs over his forehead that she wanted to sweep aside with her palm so she could kiss him right on the forehead and the smelling like the warmth of the sun billowing through her core with each breath and aaaaaaaaaa etc.
Simple desires, for a simple girl.
She reeeeeally wasn’t asking for much. Just a bit of his attention. Just a bit of his time. Just a bit of his smile.
Just a bit of him speaking to her, something like
Boyfriend.
With the beautiful warm brown eyes and the tan (how did people do that without burning up, seriously) and the cute ears with the little sideburns and the fringe of tangly bangs over his forehead that she wanted to sweep aside with her palm so she could kiss him right on the forehead and the smelling like the warmth of the sun billowing through her core with each breath and aaaaaaaaaa etc.
Simple desires, for a simple girl.
She reeeeeally wasn’t asking for much. Just a bit of his attention. Just a bit of his time. Just a bit of his smile.
Just a bit of him speaking to her, something like
“You know- uh. I never admitted this before,”
His heartwarming giggle. Cotton candy fluffy.
Just a little biiiite.
“I just really like looking up from the dugout and seeing you. It’s really hot in there during the game and all the guy smell gets trapped. I’m used to it, but it’s not pleasant.”
A conspiratorial look. One for a lord and his retainer, or a spymaster and his agent. The Agenda, etc. Some form of knowledge that existed solely for two, and for nobody else, kept entirely to the confines of the world's coziest 2015 V6, where every scent was so familiar that her neurons didn’t need to work to recognize it.
Michael’s scent was now so familiar. A warm Vegas day, his tan, her need to stare at the sun.
“It makes it so much easier when I catch your eye. And then…”
Tongue lightly trapped in by his teeth. Her two hands in his own. Perfect fit, knuckle to knuckle.
“Y-you know. Your eyes glow. Your face lights up. You smile and it’s like a beacon.”
He leans in a bit closer. The scent of him, like cologne on his collar. But she hated cologne, and she didn’t at all hate him. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“I’m thankful. Everything happens for a reason. You show up sidelines at our games for a reason. Supporting your friends. And then we talk more. You start being there to support me, and, and you find my eyes out of the crowd more and more, and you see…”
He glanced away. Did that thing where he blushed and she wanted to throw herself at him and shape her cheek with the impression of his ribs.
Their personal space was a shared space, after all.
“You see you and me. A-and… y’know. You tell me my eyes are beautiful. And I don’t think anyones ever told me anything like that in my life. Honestly, I don’t know what you see in them. I guess we don’t need the specifics.”
Nervous smile. Gentle. With time he’d get more confident.
Or not. She’d love him either way.
“Gosh. You’re just so cute… y’know? You’re
His heartwarming giggle. Cotton candy fluffy.
Just a little biiiite.
“I just really like looking up from the dugout and seeing you. It’s really hot in there during the game and all the guy smell gets trapped. I’m used to it, but it’s not pleasant.”
A conspiratorial look. One for a lord and his retainer, or a spymaster and his agent. The Agenda, etc. Some form of knowledge that existed solely for two, and for nobody else, kept entirely to the confines of the world's coziest 2015 V6, where every scent was so familiar that her neurons didn’t need to work to recognize it.
Michael’s scent was now so familiar. A warm Vegas day, his tan, her need to stare at the sun.
“It makes it so much easier when I catch your eye. And then…”
Tongue lightly trapped in by his teeth. Her two hands in his own. Perfect fit, knuckle to knuckle.
“Y-you know. Your eyes glow. Your face lights up. You smile and it’s like a beacon.”
He leans in a bit closer. The scent of him, like cologne on his collar. But she hated cologne, and she didn’t at all hate him. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“I’m thankful. Everything happens for a reason. You show up sidelines at our games for a reason. Supporting your friends. And then we talk more. You start being there to support me, and, and you find my eyes out of the crowd more and more, and you see…”
He glanced away. Did that thing where he blushed and she wanted to throw herself at him and shape her cheek with the impression of his ribs.
Their personal space was a shared space, after all.
“You see you and me. A-and… y’know. You tell me my eyes are beautiful. And I don’t think anyones ever told me anything like that in my life. Honestly, I don’t know what you see in them. I guess we don’t need the specifics.”
Nervous smile. Gentle. With time he’d get more confident.
Or not. She’d love him either way.
“Gosh. You’re just so cute… y’know? You’re
You’re so cute, Clarissa.
Click click.
Smile for the camera.
Click click.
You feel an uncomfortably heady dopamine rush.
You know I’m watching you with nothing but the lighting and composition on my mind.
Mugshot pictures, y’know? Need them for the database.
Wink. All eyes, no smile.
M’wah. Love ya.
Not that way.
Click click.
Smile for the camera.
Click click.
You feel an uncomfortably heady dopamine rush.
You know I’m watching you with nothing but the lighting and composition on my mind.
Mugshot pictures, y’know? Need them for the database.
Wink. All eyes, no smile.
M’wah. Love ya.
Not that way.
She checked her phone, once.
She checked her phone, once.
The butt of her chair was a bit stale.
Clarissa did not update her Facebook relationship status because literally who the fuck did that except Really Old People?
[[Clarissa Shoemaker continued in Hullabaloo.
She’ll be back. This is her safe space, after all.]]
((OOC Note: For TIME CRIME Reasons since Hullabaloo is set in February but this thread is Not set in February (yet) this OOC exit tag and associated re-entry tag will probably get shuffled around at some point))
She checked her phone, once.
The butt of her chair was a bit stale.
Clarissa did not update her Facebook relationship status because literally who the fuck did that except Really Old People?
[[Clarissa Shoemaker continued in Hullabaloo.
She’ll be back. This is her safe space, after all.]]
((OOC Note: For TIME CRIME Reasons since Hullabaloo is set in February but this thread is Not set in February (yet) this OOC exit tag and associated re-entry tag will probably get shuffled around at some point))