October 29: Excerpt

[kinetic_elaboration]

I was going to write about Final Destination tonight but I started it way late (as per usual! I’m like constitutionally incapable of starting a movie at a reasonable time, even on a work day) and I need some fucking sleep so, if I have anything to say about it, it will be tomorrow. I’ll watch a little more tonight but–this is my accountability post on this topic–not the whole thing.

I’ve been having a very autumnal, but in an overcast and rainy and chilly sense, Halloweek, reading scary stories and watching scary movies. And doing a few actually productive things. And getting back into the drawer fic!

I have been struggling so hard with this thing. This scene in particular has been kicking my ass for months. I think I’m finally getting somewhere with it, and getting to a fun part perhaps (?!), and though I worry that rereading it will reveal it to be a huge 10k mess, I’m still really proud of myself for actually settling in every day and working on it. I’m even getting into enough of a rhythm that I’m surpassing my word count goals.

Anyway, here’s a short excerpt from the scene I’m currently working on, but a little farther back:

 

“You think I want that? You think I’d ever want to hurt her?”

There’s screeching in her mind, an incoherent racket like nails on a chalkboard or instruments played out of tune. Some terrible cacophony of guilt and denial and anger. She wasn’t causing her best friend pain, she tells herself, she insists in her own head. She was protecting herself from it. She was accepting hard truths; she was letting Daria go; she was leaving her to the person she’d chosen back at the end of junior year: got in that car with him and kissed him and then went on that date with him; stayed with him even after Jane kissed her, got even closer to him. And maybe it did all turn out to be patented Amanda Lane holding-a-butterfly-tightly-in-your-hands bullshit, tried-and-true Lane avoidance, but she’d really thought at the time: Daria has him and she’s okay. The afternoon in the gazebo changed the whole calculation. In the best way. But also in a way she hadn’t untangled yet, but Tom just saw.

It’s so immensely irritating that he can stand there, not even from a distance, not even with the objectivity of remove, and still act like he knows everything. Because he’s dated Daria longer, actually dated her at all; because his relationship to her has a name; because he’s the boyfriend. The one for whom everything is clear. She wants to mess all that up, wants to take him apart like she’s being taken apart. She wants, more than anything, a distraction from that high, screeching, guilt-cacophony that’s still playing. 

“I think you did hurt her,” Tom snaps back. “I think you were playing around and unsure of what you wanted and she was falling for you. And I don’t know how you didn’t see it.”