Crossed lines

Background

The other character in this story is Leah, from Dennis Kelly’s 2007 play DNA. From what I have seen of American drama departments here and in the news, I feel like it’s the sort of play that would face heavy challenges from parents if performed in the US. We performed this play in GCSE Drama at my previous secondary school, so sincere apologies to everyone who was in that. Fortunately, there’s like no way you could see this.

 Leah and Holden are similar in that they both object to things or say they will do things, but then don’t take much action to do things, or stop the things they object to. Anyways, Leah’s also pretty messed up, and is on the opposite side of “boy fall” from him in some ways. Think of this as less a dialogue and more two occasionally overlapping soliloquies.

“Why does Leah talk like that?” The play’s meant to have naturalistic dialogue and I’m trying to emulate that. 

“Why does Leah talk so much?” See play. Also has a nice dynamic because we have Holden, whose principal mode is to narrate while commenting on events around him, and Leah, who spends a lot of the play monologuing in an attempt to get her amoral nihilist quasi-cult leader boyfriend(??) to pay attention to her.  

Don’t even question the fact that DNA is set in the 2000s and tCitR is set in the 1940s. Man I can’t suspend my own disbelief help. Leah’s here after her fourth monologue, but before the third Jan and Mark scene. They’re probably both wildly mischaracterized here, Leah especially because I haven’t read DNA for three years.

Note: I do not necessarily support views expressed in this piece. 

Run story.exe???

It happened on a miserable day. The sky had opened up and it was pouring rain like the clouds were afraid of the air. I was standing under a bus shelter, waiting for a ride to somewhere I didn’t want to go. The bus shelter had one of those skinny narrow benches with those armrests in the middle that are too small for you to rest your arms on, and that are only there to stop bums from sleeping on them. The benches are too narrow to sleep on anyways, but that’s cities for you. They’re always doing some stupid thing because they’re scared of regular people seeing how many bums there are around. 

Anyways, I was checking the bus schedule when this girl showed up at the station. She was wearing this weird newfangled shiny windbreaker in a garish shade of yellow. She walked in, and we just sort of stood there without saying anything for a few moments. She spent a long time looking at the bus route maps. 

            “You from round here?” she spoke with a bit of a British accent, one of those fancy ones like you hear from the English radio announcers. God, I hate those phony airs they put on for US radio. No one even talks like that. I told her I wasn’t really, and was just taking the bus back to school. Then she asked me what school I went to. I said Pencey, which was true, although it probably wouldn’t be for much longer. “You’re new round here, then, huh?”

            “No, just in the States to visit family.”

            “You like it here?” I didn’t think I’d met many English teens before. No clue what it’s like there. 

“I mean, like, I don’t think I hate it. The weather’s miserable now, of course, and it’s kind of cold, and I miss my mates, I mean, but it’s not so bad.” Huh. “It’s good to be out of school, though.”

            “Yeah?” 

            “Yeah. O-Levels are this spring and my teachers have been up my arse about them. And…” she trailed off and looked away from me for a short moment. Typical school stuff. No one else at Pencey seems to really hate school. I mean, there’s guys like Stradlater, but he doesn’t hate it, he just doesn’t care. 

“You go to a public school?” I asked. She gave me an offended look.

 “No, I go to a state school.”

“Same thing.”

“No it’s not!” We looked at each other confusedly for a second, and then she clapped her hand to her face. 

“Oh, right, you’re American. A British public school is a word for a very posh private school. A British state school is a free school that anyone can go to.” 

Oh. So a public school was like Pencey. No wonder she was offended, then. I think I’d be offended if some guy off the street looked at me and though I went to Pencey. 

“You want a smoke?” I offered her a cigarette. 

“No thanks.” I lit up. She coughed and moved away from me a little. There wasn’t even all that much coming out, but it still made me feel sort of bad. I looked at the bus schedule. There were still no buses coming to the stop, even though by now they should have been there. But they were always late. I thought about checking my watch to see when the bus would come, or at least was meant to come, but I remembered I had left it in my dorm. The girl started talking again. 

            “Well, I, I guess it’s not just the school, I mean, really, I don’t hate the teachers there or anything like that it’s just. Oh, why am I telling you this. I mean, you don’t care.”

She seemed really pretty upset about the whole thing. She breathed in and started coughing from the smoke. Now I was starting to feel really bad, so I put my cigarette out.  

            “Thanks. I mean, if you really want to know, there’s—there’s this boy. Adam. He went to my school, and, he, he, he, he vanished. And, well, no one knows what happened to him. He’s… he’s probably dead.”

            She got real quiet at the end there and kind of looked at the ground in front of me. That gets me, that really does. I was stuck there thinking about old James Castle, about D.B.’s war friends that went MIA. 

            “And, and now they’re going and naming a new gymnasium for him, and it’s all on the news. The teachers are having assemblies about it, and about unity, and there was a funeral, and everyone’s just going around being nice to each other and oh, god, it’s just horrible. He didn’t even do anything in particular while he was alive, he didn’t even have any real friends, he was just—he was just there, and now he’s dead and people are acting like everything’s fine, and, and people are happy. He died, and it’s made everyone happy, because they all have to act like they care, and have to go visit their old grandmas and pick up litter in the parks, and, and, work together, and I, and—it’s sick. It’s like him dying made everything better, like it’s grief that’s making them happy.”

            Poor old James Castle didn’t even get that. I can’t ever imagine Elkton Hills naming a gymnasium after him. “Goddam, imagine dying and everyone using it as some kind of crumby fake bonding experience. That’s depressing.”

            “Exactly! And you can’t—you can’t even say anything about it to anyone even though he’s dead because—because you’re expected to be happy all the time, and you can’t be, because—well, I don’t know why, because, because you just can’t, and you’re trapped in this cycle of failure because you know you’re meant to be happy but you can’t be, and it makes you miserable, so you have to pretend even harder to be happy, which only makes you more miserable, and it just spirals!” The girl was talking on and on about this madman stuff, like it was all spilling out of her like water out of a busted dam. She paused and took a breath.

            “Oh my god, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything, I can’t believe I—”

            “Then stop pretending! If you hate their phony bullshit, then stop playing along.” I said it like I was any better. 

            “I can’t! You think I want to be that… that girl who’s always crying? My friends would hate me, and they’re the only ones who understand, who I ever feel like I can actually talk to about, well, about anything that matters.”

            “You’re talking to me now.”

            “Yes, but I don’t even know your name.” Then why the hell was she telling me all this? Why was I talking to her? 

Because she got it. She got it, or at least some of it, and that’s more than I can say for anyone at Pencey. 

“And your mates are for real? They get it?” 

“Well, I mean, they don’t go along with what anyone else thinks. They’re a bit scary, if I’m honest.” She sniffed. “I mean, not really, not like that. Not really always in a bad way. Well, Cathy is, sometimes, well, usually, well, and Jan and Mark can be kind of…I guess what I say when I say I can talk to them is… I can’t talk to Cathy, or anyone like that. But I can talk to Phil…

“Phil’s my—Phil’s my friend. We always go out to this field on the edge of town, where they let the cows graze in the summertime, and just talk—well, I talk. He just listens…”

Her voice hitched and got a little higher, the way girls always talk when they like a guy. I could see how he’d be stuck listening to her. For all her nervous energy, there was something about her. In any case, it seemed more like she was talking to herself than to me. 

“I’ve never met anyone like him before, and when I’m around him… I feel like I can do things I would never normally do.” Man, I’m not super into girls being sappy about the guys they’re into, especially when it gets this clichéd. “He… he doesn’t care, and I wish, I wish, I wish that I didn’t care either, I mean, not that, not that there’s anything wrong with caring, but it just doesn’t do any good.” The way she kept going on and on about this guy was starting to grate. I bet you he was just some boring, conceited guy. 

“Well, most things just aren’t worth caring about. Like fancy cars, and school, and that phony Hollywood crap.” 

“No, I mean… well, it’s not, it isn’t, it isn’t just stupid stuff like that. He doesn’t care about anything. The gang is about the one thing he does care about, and he’ll always choose us, but… I want him to choose me, and he won’t do that. He won’t ever do that.” In my experience, girl opinions on guys usually miss the dartboard at best, and occasionally the barn wall, but judging from what she said, this Phil guy sounded kind of trashy. “I mean, I—that came out wrong, I think. If it weren’t for him the gang wouldn’t be together at all, and we’d probably be… I mean, well, well, we’d… we’d be alone.” At this point I was sure she wasn’t even talking to me, but I still pitched in. 

“He still sounds like a kinda trashy guy.”

“No! I mean, he isn’t, he doesn’t, he… he’s never cruel to me. He just wants what’s best for us. After John Tate left us, he was the one who made sure that… he kept us safe.” She still just sounded like any old girl talking about some guy she likes. Not that whatever she was doing was really my business anyhow, but the way she was going on was kind of demented, and a little sad, almost, so I tried to make light. 

“What sixteen-year-old calls himself John Tate? Is that his full name? What kind of kid uses his full name. ‘Oll-right boys, it’s yoh mayte John Tate hea-yah.’” She laughed, a few giggles bursting out of her mouth like little birds. “Now you mention it, it is quite stupid.” 

“I’m just back from wotchin’ Man United. Lahrst Friday I went to see it with me mates, an’ it wos a ree-aww show they put on. I cahrn’t believe they oolmost lost.” 

“I don’t sound like that!” 

“Never said you did.”

“Yes—but—but you—Brits don’t even sound like that.”

“What, a guy can’t have fun and do an accent? I was just horsin’ around!”

“Honestly.” She rolled her eyes. I was kind of disappointed and all, because if I had been her, I would have gone and mocked the crap out of the accents of all those rich Pencey kids. Gave me the idea that I might do it later, say, to Stradlater if he was being a douche. Of course, then I remembered that Pencey had kicked me out, and I felt like a balloon someone had let the air out of. Huh. I had forgotten about Pencey. 

“Oh!”

“What?”

“I think the bus is coming. Want to swap numbers?”

“Sure. Lemme get some paper from my bag.” I got a spare sheet out, and a pen, and we wrote each other’s numbers down in shaky handwriting on the cold metal bench. 

“That’s my home phone. Don’t call me until at least next week, unless you want my parents to pick up.”

“Sure. Honestly, about the same here.”

“Oh, wait, shit, I didn’t even introduce myself… I’m Leah.”

“Holden.”

“Nice meeting you, Holden.”

“You too.” She stepped out of the shelter, and onto the bus. I watched it drive off, leaving me to light another cigarette, and watch for my bus’s yellow headlights cutting through the gray sheets of rain. With my luck, it would have broken down somewhere. You’d think a town near a school as nice as Pencey Prep could get their buses to work, but I swear, they were always late.

End notes: 

I might update this. I can’t believe I wrote this. This is ridiculous. Dear non-extant reader, thank you for taking a moment to waste your time reading this.