From the Fan Fiction Unbound Archive,
posted by conTessaofthecastle:
The two of them made camp in silence. They worked efficiently, each anticipating the other’s motions and each moving around the other comfortably. Astoria cleared a space for a campfire and unpacked some bread and cheese for their supper. Meanwhile, Daphne collected firewood and made note of the nearest stream for water. It wasn’t until the fire was built and they sat watching the flames that Astoria asked, “What happens if we fail?”
Soph.
I’m late, of course, but it’s not my fault. The little airport in New Hampshire is all jammed up because a big snowstorm is coming, and private planes don’t have priority. After I air-kiss the Pecketts, Freddy smacks his lips suggestively in my ear and actually winks at me, as if he’s up to something.
I immediately text Gordon.
[From Soph to Gordon] F may be a better prospect 4 U than I thought—he vamped it up with a wink and a kiss!
Gordon responds by repeating himself.
[From Gordon to Soph] If U don’t want him, I get him.
Then I discover that I was wrong to expect a line of yellow taxicabs waiting at the arrivals area. Google to the rescue, but there’s no Uber up here and it takes almost an hour to find someone from the local taxi company to pick me up, so it’s after three o’clock when I finally arrive at the MacMorrow Retreat. The sky is overcast, and the weather is getting colder. The cab driver tells me they expect ten inches of snow to fall tonight. I imagined something more Adirondack-style, with pitched roofs and porches on each level, but this is a basic ski lodge: a single, squat, three-story brick building up a long, wooded driveway. I’m disappointed that the retreat is not on the Minerva campus, but I’ve never been closer before, so who cares? Excited to be here, I bound up the few stairs to the entrance.
The lobby is tiny and marked by a card table with balloons over it. Phew, at least there are a few girls as late as me waiting to sign in. I stand at the back of the line, behind a tall, long-limbed girl with beautiful dark brown, shoulder-length hair pulled back with a thick cloth headband. She turns around when I stand behind her.
“Hi, I’m Soph.”
“Orly Erwin,” she says in a soft, low voice. She’s wearing dangly gold earrings which hang almost to her shoulders.
“Great to meet you. I was afraid I’d be the last one.” I can’t help checking her out. After all, I’m already a junior in high school but still have no experience. You’d think in New York I’d be able to meet someone, but only Mibs did. Gordon says, “The bigger the pond, the fewer the fish worth looking at.”
There aren’t even any other lesbians on the literary magazine at school. Lally, who fences, claims that the only other ones are on the field hockey team and we have nothing to say to each other. Anyway, Orly is decent looking, very put-together, a little too hair-and-makeup for my taste. She’s in loose purple harem-y pants and a heavy purple sweater—like something you’d see on an old TV show, fluffy, with a high collar—under a lightweight maroon coat. She coordinated the color of her headband with her coat.
Orly smiles a little, as if she’s shy, and says, “You are the last one in. But the van from Boston was very late, and I think Joan here is ready to get out from behind her table.” Her voice is friendly, and she has a Southern accent, warm and welcoming. She steps back, revealing Joan, a frowning woman with glasses who is seated at the table, handling registration.
“Hello, you’re the twenty-fourth, Sophie Al-CAY-sah.” Her tone is flat, as though she doesn’t care if I’m Gertrude Stein herself.
“Yes. It’s Soph. Al-cah-ZAR.” I don’t mind if people screw up my last name—which is shortened from Dad’s super-long one that never fits on any form—but I am not a Sophie.
“Yes, Soph. Room E. You’re sharing with Tess, next to Orly and Chris. On the second floor. Go up the stairs over there.” She hands us both old-fashioned brass room keys on tags and nametags in clear plastic. Mine says “Sophie.”
Orly and I grab our luggage. Joan calls after us, “Don’t forget the Mocktail Party at five p.m.” As we climb the stairs, I notice that we’re both carrying floral-print, quilted duffels from Vera Bradley. “You too, huh? My mom loves this flowery stuff.”
Orly says, “Huh? You mean my ‘Tar-zhay’ special?” She smiles a little.
“Oh, um, yeah,” I say without understanding what she means.
“Isn’t it cute? I have a matching makeup bag to go with it.” She holds up her other hand and, sure enough, she’s carrying a smaller matching bag.
“Neat,” I say as we reach the second floor. I don’t wear much makeup, but whatever. “Where are you from, Orly?”
Orly pauses. Avoiding my eyes, she says, “Georgia. You?”
“New York.”
Orly gets to her room first. “Soph, darlin’, will you hold my makeup bag for me?” She hands the bag to me and fumbles for her key.
Before she has a chance to use her key, the door opens, and a girl our age stands in the doorway. She’s very short, probably less than five feet tall, and sturdily built with short, jet black hair and black, plastic-rimmed glasses. She’s barefoot and wearing a pair of worn jeans and a navy-blue fleece pullover. She’s staring intently at us.
“Hi. I’m Chris. You can’t both be Orly.” She says it without smiling.
Orly is frozen; she doesn’t say anything, just looks at me, eyes wide. I say, “No, I’m Soph. This is Orly. I’m in the room next door.” I’m not waiting around for them to figure out what to say to each other, so I hand Orly her makeup bag. As Orly goes in and closes the door behind her, I stroll over to Room E.
I knock, figuring that I might as well warn my roommate in case she’s all abrupt like Chris. I can hear someone in the room talking and then footsteps. The door opens to reveal a girl my height with long, straight, dark blonde hair. She is wearing a pink sweater, shell pink polish coats her fingernails and—oh, brother—a charm bracelet encircles her left wrist, one of those Pandora things that went out about five years ago. I had one in sixth grade. All the charms on it are either silver or set with pink stones. I notice hot pink fuzzy socks on her feet. I haven’t seen this much pink since elementary school. I almost feel as if I’m meeting Barbie in real life—or My Little Pony. She holds a cell phone to her chest.
I push into the room past her, since my bag is getting heavy, and say, “Hi, Tess, right? I’m sorry I’m late.”
Tess puts up a finger, turns around and says into her phone, “Hey, Joey, I’ve gotta go now. Things are starting up.” After a pause, she says, in a voice I can barely hear, “Yes, yes, you’re a great boyfriend. Be good while I’m gone, okay?” Then she puts her phone down and turns to me. Butterflies flutter in my chest. She’s obviously a girly-girl and crazy about her boyfriend. I should be able to respect that.
“Hi, Soph, right? Or is it Sophia or something?” I fiddle with my bag, put it on the bed, and then move it to the floor. When I look up at her again, I notice her eyes. They’re blue, but with flecks of green. I’ve never seen anyone with eyes that color. Too bad about the boyfriend.
“Just Soph, short for Sophronia. Definitely not Sophie.”
“It’s pretty. I never heard of it. Is it Russian or something?”
I get this a lot. “Nope, Greek by way of Spain. Sophronia is a family name. My dad’s family is Spanish. My full last name is Borbón del Alcazar. But it got shortened, for obvious reasons.”
“Ah.”
Tess seems puzzled, but doesn’t add anything. I babble, which I always do when I’m nervous. “Dad’s family is Spanish, but they got booted in the Civil War. You know, Franco made it a monarchy again, but he didn’t want anyone to challenge him, just Juan Carlos at the end.”
“Juan Carlos at the end? But I thought the Civil War ended somewhere in Virginia…”
I try to rein myself in. “Oh, well, yeah. So where are you from? Desmarais sounds French.”
Tess blinks at me. “Ummm, it’s pronounced Dess-mare-iss, not Day-mah-ray. I’m from nearby, Castleton, New Hampshire, in the next county over. My name is French-Canadian. I don’t think anyone’s been worried about us challenging the king lately.”
Embarrassed, I change topics. “I’m here to work on poetry. How about you?”
“I want to learn as much as I can. I still can’t believe this kind of workshop exists, and that they accepted me. Someday I want to write a whole novel, but the piece I sent in is part of a story I write online.” She pauses. Her next sentence comes out slowly. “It’s fan fiction.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve read some of that.” It surprises me that fan fiction impressed Professor Forsythe enough to let her in. My guidance counselor suggested I apply to this workshop to boost my college applications. Everyone at my school is flying around the country this spring, doing special “invited” group activities like Mock United Nations and Junior Theater Festival to increase their admissions chances. Don’t people outside the City do that too? I mean, I read some fan fiction every now and then, and I like it, but people are snobby about it. I wonder if this workshop will be serious enough to include on my applications.
I ask, “Fan of what?”
Tess hesitates, then answers, “The Witches’ Circle. You know, the television show?”
I don’t know it, so I nod and change the subject.
Tess.
I pull on my loafers just before five o’clock so we can go to the Mocktail Party. Soph’s arrival has made it a little awkward, more than a little awkward. Everything she says and does leaves me feeling sort of diminished, as though I shrink an inch or two every time she mentions something casually that I’ve never heard of. The whole explanation about her name is confusing but apparently I’m supposed to know who her family is.
She plops her bag down and pulls stuff out, making a pile of clothes on the floor by her bed. She takes out a black pen and pulls her name tag apart so she can delete the “ie” they added to the end of her name.
Soph is from New York—the real city part, Manhattan. She lives in an apartment and took a private plane to get here, which is why she’s late. I’ve never ridden on a plane. She’s wearing dark-wash skinny jeans pushed into black suede boots, which the snow is going to ruin, and a soft black wool sweater with an asymmetrical neckline. She’s got sparkly studs in her ears that may be real diamonds, but not chips. They’re, like, the size of peas. Also, she talks almost nonstop from the time she arrives until we go downstairs. My mom would call her a “Chatty Cathy.” I’ve never met anyone like her. I mean, I know that was the point of coming to this whole workshop, but I’m still figuring out how to act.
She tells me about going to a private school near her house. I ask her if she walks to school, and she says, “Yeah, everyone walks to school together.”
She tells me that she writes poetry. I don’t know much about poetry. I’ve read some, obviously, in school, but it seems hard to write, as though you need to spill your innermost secrets out on paper in fragmented sentences and make them rhyme, either that or write about nature, like Robert Frost. I’m not really sure how any of that works, but I figure she must be good if she’s here.
She went to the Caribbean over Christmas with her family, to a resort on Saint something—I didn’t recognize him. When she asks me if I ever go to the islands, I shake my head no.
“We can’t leave the herd to go on vacation,” I tell her, before I realize what I’m saying. Oh. My. God. I am such a loser.
She purses her lips and asks, “You mean your posse?”
We’re from different planets, and now I need to spill it, even as I shrink another two inches. “I live on a dairy farm,” I admit. “We raise cows.” Once I say that, she actually stops talking. She looks at me through these long, dark eyelashes and just blinks a couple of times.
I’m pretty nervous after all this, so I text Joey to reassure me, but I don’t get an answer. Then I google some of what Soph told me about her family on my phone so I won’t sound so uninformed later. Unfortunately, that makes me feel smaller, because it turns out her family used to be royalty in Spain. Great. The first time I dare to go away from home, and I end up rooming with a real princess. I feel like Cinderella. Before the ball.
When we get down to the lounge where the party is, all the other girls are already there. A tall girl with a name tag that reads “Orly” comes over to Soph, and Soph introduces us.
“Orly, this is my roommate, Tess. Orly was in line just ahead of me when I got here.”
“Hi, Orly. Where are you coming from?”
“From outside Atlanta. It’s never this cold at home!” She has a soft voice and she speaks slowly. I guess it’s her accent, but she sounds friendly. I can’t believe people came for this workshop from so far away.
“You get used to it. I’m from nearby, well, an hour away.”
Orly raises her eyebrows. “Don’t tell me it’s north of here and even colder?”
We laugh, and then Orly’s roommate Chris comes over. Chris is short and kind of loud. She makes me nervous the way Soph does, even though they aren’t the same at all.
Chris is from Dallas, Texas. She goes to a charter school and she says she is a journalist for her school newspaper. Not a reporter or a writer—a journalist. I hope Soph doesn’t mention the herd to her.
“I’m also working on a longer investigative piece about misogyny toward high school athletes which I intend to submit to the Times.” I guess she means the New YorkTimes, but I don’t want to ask. The shrinking feeling comes over me again. Some of the other girls introduce themselves. Janaye is from New York too, someplace near Manhattan. She writes fiction, like me. She’s talkative like Soph and they chat about a new band they both know; they pull out their phones to find a video, but the cell reception is bad up here.
“I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore, huh, Janaye?” asks Soph, with wide, excited eyes. Janaye laughs with her. I cringe, but I don’t think they notice. Orly goes to ask Joan, the organizer, about something, and Chris turns to me with a fixed glare. She’s about three inches shorter than I am, but I feel as though she’s taller. I sip at my Sprite, hoping I won’t say something stupid, when suddenly she hisses in my ear.
“Two things.”
I’m not sure if she is asking me a question or making an announcement. She’s right up close to me, her short, dark hair is gelled up straight off her head, and I can smell something herby, the way the kitchen smells when Mom roasts a chicken. I want to back up, but before I can, she speaks again. I guess she’s making an announcement after all.
“One: They let writers in who write fan fiction, for fuck’s sake. What kind of a joke is that?” I hold my breath. I can feel my face turning red. I want to leave this room so much. But Chris isn’t done.
“And two: My roommate’s really a guy.”
* * *
From Soph Alcazar’s Writing Journal,
February 10, 2018
I try with second and first, roommate, friend?
But despite our efforts, none comprehends.
So recall, Soph, concentrate on being
Here. What’s important is your succeeding.