intellectual greed, chanel
Jan 10, 2023 18:44:38 GMT -5
Post by 🌱 kaitlin. on Jan 10, 2023 18:44:38 GMT -5
I show up at the office and the first thing Hume does is cut my story.
My morning has been shit enough already, this seems like something that might have actually made me fucking laugh and roll my eyes before expressing a visceral, honest thank god to the nearest listening ear. Not today though. Not after the bullshit I had to cut through at La Papillon. If I wanted a reminder for why I drink, this morning was perfect.
In my experience, the Capitol is great at catering to whatever kind of drunk you are, regardless of the sort of drinker you might be. There’s somewhere out there for you. Whether you’re an onion blossom with your beer sort of drinker, or you’d rather pay $24 for what amounts to a wine spritzer just so that you know poor people can’t afford to drink with you, there’s a bar out there to drown your dreams.
My mother tended towards the ridiculous, upscale restaurants with a theme they manage to execute without grace, no matter how gentle the company it keeps is. Why she needs to go to a million fancy restaurants just to order a Caesar salad at every single one of them has always been a question that baffled me, but I’m not in the business of pointing things out to her that would end up with a pill crushed in my bourbon. Her cult of society is populated by women who want to be just like her, drinkers who like their tiny boxes they call a comfort zone. They get drunk on their expensive wine spritzers at lunch, then munch on enough leaves to feel good about the liquid sloshing around in their bellies. La Papillion has this awful butterfly theme, sentimental and dainty. The dishes are all served on porcelain made to look like expensive fine dining china. Ridiculous.
It was the first place that my mother took me out to lunch, with her and all the little women she kept around to make herself feel better. I can remember her dressing me up in these little black mary janes, remember the way the sweater itched around my neck. It left red, blotchy skin in its wake.
La Papillon is not the best restaurant in the Capitol, not by a mile, but the espresso bar serves a killer cappuccino I’ve never been able to find a match for. The only thing that sours the taste is the clientele I have to avoid whenever I decide their roast is worth the effort.
“Chanel!” A woman exclaims at me from across the entrance where she stands with the hostess, and my neck itches like it did a lifetime ago, uncomfortable sweater choking me to match. The dreaded feeling of being recognized settles in the pit of my stomach, a wave of near nausea rolling down my spine as Octavia’s eyes settle on her target. I resist answering to my called name for a long second, have to take a deep inhale to settle myself before turning to look at the woman who spotted me. She doesn’t relent. “Chanel, honey!”
She looks the same as she ever has, Octavia Fournier. Pearls around her neck, hair done up like it’s still the 20’s and flare skirts are in style. I don’t hate her, have never taken to hate when it comes to the women my mother pretends are friends. I would have to care about them too much for that, I suppose, don’t want to waste time on them in the first place.
“Your mama told me you were back in town. When did you get back?”
I grimace at the overshare out of my mother, regret that last Sunday phone call where I talked to her about traveling to Five to cover the plague. I’ve already written and published a couple pieces talking about as much, but having to listen to the opinions of the people reading my shit has never exactly settled that stomach for me.
“Few weeks ago,” I say, looking her in the eye the way I was taught, and then down at the tips of my boots. Delayed defiance, just for me. “But you don’t wanna hear about all that, O.”
She likes to think she’s my mother favorite of her friends, I think, but she’s delusion if she thinks Ren Tanaka cares for any of them.
“Come! Sit with us; we’ll open a fresh bottle for you. Lower the age range for us, sweetheart.”
Sitting down was my first mistake. Doing it before I ordered and paid for my cappuccino was my second. Grave errors, the both of them.
“I think your job sounds fascinating, Chanel,” Ama Binard opens with after I get pinned down to a chair, mimosa plopped in my hand before I decide better. Birdie, girlish, my hostess walks all over her, but I can see the ways she hungers for the things Ive always been too comfortable talking about, at least by their fragile standards. Deep down, they want to know every awful, intimate detail I can give them about those poor folk in the districts. “It’s important, knowing what that disease is doing.”
“It’s not exactly as if they didn’t deserve it.”
“Truly, surely they could’ve gotten a handle on it better if they’d simply paid better attention.”
And the conversation continues on like that. For ten very painful minutes, I pander to the notion that this is a valuable viewpoint, that this is part of my reader base and what they care about matters. A ridiculous notion that I usually know better than to indulge, but call it a sense of mortality that tells me I ought to use them to understand the world better. Maybe its my time in Five spent wearing what felt like a hazmat suit just to be able to see the plague up close without being in danger. Maybe I’m just a soft touch, and I’m too tired not to get steamrolled.
That’s always a recipe for disaster with me though. I don’t remember now what it was that set me off, think it was about that serial that’s been terrorizing the working girls on the south end of Style Street. I bottle until I explode, so I drank their champagne instead of caffeine and I politely excused myself when it got to be too much. Took the flute with me, threw it as hard as I could against the brick wall outside, and then went to work like a big girl.
Anyone willing to judge a girl trying to make ends meet by weaponizing her pussy is just angry they don’t have the guts to do the same. It’s easier to turn that anger on the prostitute than it is to admit their own shortcoming.
Still, it left me storming away in a huff. A little drunk from downing more mimosa than was entirely appropriate on an empty stomach, and I didn’t even get my goddamn cappuccino. I get more and more tired of this city every day that passes and I have to keep on living here. The rational part of my brain understands I’ve got it as good as its ever going to get here. Publishers that wont drop me, a boss with a sore spot for fuckups, the freedom to get drunk before work on a Tuesday and not have anyone blink when I come crashing into the room. The door to my office slams against the wall inside with a hard thwack, making the glass vibrate. There’s already a little spot on the wall where the drywall has the outline of the door handle, a cracked circle where there should be smooth, beige paint.
“Hume wants to see you in his office,” comes Vespers voice when he pokes his head around the doorway. He looks like a floating torso when he does that, and I mentally will him all the way into my line of sight. Something grins in my chest when he actually does it, leans his shoulder against the frame, as if afraid to cross the invivible boundary into my office.
I can’t blame him.
“Any chance you got a cappuccino in your purse?” I groan from my place slumped in the spinning chair. I use my foot to push it so I’m facing him directly. “Got ambushed my Mom Squad at La Papillion.”
“Ugh, gross. No cappuccino, but I can get you the nasty stuff from the pot,” a grimace, a light in his eyes that never goes out. He crosses his arms, shrugs. “Even restocked the creamer.”
My hero.
He leaves and it takes me a long minute to push back up out of my chair. I saw the fucking article in Victors View; I know the meeting is going to be about one of two things, if not both. He is going to tell me the original direction for the Patricia death piece isn’t going to work anymore, that the sympathetic angle is going to fall flat. Then he’s going to tell me to write some bullshit about Patricia inciting rebellion, insinuate she’s got some nasty ties to Thirteen.
And you know what he fucking did?
Exactly that.
So I flip him off and tell him to shove it before walking away. Sometimes, it feels like I know everything, but I don’t. I just know this place, and all the ways its damned us. All the awful, intimate ways. At least Vesper left a mug of coffee on my desk, which I burn myself chugging before demanding Hailshams personal line.
My morning has been shit enough already, this seems like something that might have actually made me fucking laugh and roll my eyes before expressing a visceral, honest thank god to the nearest listening ear. Not today though. Not after the bullshit I had to cut through at La Papillon. If I wanted a reminder for why I drink, this morning was perfect.
In my experience, the Capitol is great at catering to whatever kind of drunk you are, regardless of the sort of drinker you might be. There’s somewhere out there for you. Whether you’re an onion blossom with your beer sort of drinker, or you’d rather pay $24 for what amounts to a wine spritzer just so that you know poor people can’t afford to drink with you, there’s a bar out there to drown your dreams.
My mother tended towards the ridiculous, upscale restaurants with a theme they manage to execute without grace, no matter how gentle the company it keeps is. Why she needs to go to a million fancy restaurants just to order a Caesar salad at every single one of them has always been a question that baffled me, but I’m not in the business of pointing things out to her that would end up with a pill crushed in my bourbon. Her cult of society is populated by women who want to be just like her, drinkers who like their tiny boxes they call a comfort zone. They get drunk on their expensive wine spritzers at lunch, then munch on enough leaves to feel good about the liquid sloshing around in their bellies. La Papillion has this awful butterfly theme, sentimental and dainty. The dishes are all served on porcelain made to look like expensive fine dining china. Ridiculous.
It was the first place that my mother took me out to lunch, with her and all the little women she kept around to make herself feel better. I can remember her dressing me up in these little black mary janes, remember the way the sweater itched around my neck. It left red, blotchy skin in its wake.
La Papillon is not the best restaurant in the Capitol, not by a mile, but the espresso bar serves a killer cappuccino I’ve never been able to find a match for. The only thing that sours the taste is the clientele I have to avoid whenever I decide their roast is worth the effort.
“Chanel!” A woman exclaims at me from across the entrance where she stands with the hostess, and my neck itches like it did a lifetime ago, uncomfortable sweater choking me to match. The dreaded feeling of being recognized settles in the pit of my stomach, a wave of near nausea rolling down my spine as Octavia’s eyes settle on her target. I resist answering to my called name for a long second, have to take a deep inhale to settle myself before turning to look at the woman who spotted me. She doesn’t relent. “Chanel, honey!”
She looks the same as she ever has, Octavia Fournier. Pearls around her neck, hair done up like it’s still the 20’s and flare skirts are in style. I don’t hate her, have never taken to hate when it comes to the women my mother pretends are friends. I would have to care about them too much for that, I suppose, don’t want to waste time on them in the first place.
“Your mama told me you were back in town. When did you get back?”
I grimace at the overshare out of my mother, regret that last Sunday phone call where I talked to her about traveling to Five to cover the plague. I’ve already written and published a couple pieces talking about as much, but having to listen to the opinions of the people reading my shit has never exactly settled that stomach for me.
“Few weeks ago,” I say, looking her in the eye the way I was taught, and then down at the tips of my boots. Delayed defiance, just for me. “But you don’t wanna hear about all that, O.”
She likes to think she’s my mother favorite of her friends, I think, but she’s delusion if she thinks Ren Tanaka cares for any of them.
“Come! Sit with us; we’ll open a fresh bottle for you. Lower the age range for us, sweetheart.”
Sitting down was my first mistake. Doing it before I ordered and paid for my cappuccino was my second. Grave errors, the both of them.
“I think your job sounds fascinating, Chanel,” Ama Binard opens with after I get pinned down to a chair, mimosa plopped in my hand before I decide better. Birdie, girlish, my hostess walks all over her, but I can see the ways she hungers for the things Ive always been too comfortable talking about, at least by their fragile standards. Deep down, they want to know every awful, intimate detail I can give them about those poor folk in the districts. “It’s important, knowing what that disease is doing.”
“It’s not exactly as if they didn’t deserve it.”
“Truly, surely they could’ve gotten a handle on it better if they’d simply paid better attention.”
And the conversation continues on like that. For ten very painful minutes, I pander to the notion that this is a valuable viewpoint, that this is part of my reader base and what they care about matters. A ridiculous notion that I usually know better than to indulge, but call it a sense of mortality that tells me I ought to use them to understand the world better. Maybe its my time in Five spent wearing what felt like a hazmat suit just to be able to see the plague up close without being in danger. Maybe I’m just a soft touch, and I’m too tired not to get steamrolled.
That’s always a recipe for disaster with me though. I don’t remember now what it was that set me off, think it was about that serial that’s been terrorizing the working girls on the south end of Style Street. I bottle until I explode, so I drank their champagne instead of caffeine and I politely excused myself when it got to be too much. Took the flute with me, threw it as hard as I could against the brick wall outside, and then went to work like a big girl.
Anyone willing to judge a girl trying to make ends meet by weaponizing her pussy is just angry they don’t have the guts to do the same. It’s easier to turn that anger on the prostitute than it is to admit their own shortcoming.
Still, it left me storming away in a huff. A little drunk from downing more mimosa than was entirely appropriate on an empty stomach, and I didn’t even get my goddamn cappuccino. I get more and more tired of this city every day that passes and I have to keep on living here. The rational part of my brain understands I’ve got it as good as its ever going to get here. Publishers that wont drop me, a boss with a sore spot for fuckups, the freedom to get drunk before work on a Tuesday and not have anyone blink when I come crashing into the room. The door to my office slams against the wall inside with a hard thwack, making the glass vibrate. There’s already a little spot on the wall where the drywall has the outline of the door handle, a cracked circle where there should be smooth, beige paint.
“Hume wants to see you in his office,” comes Vespers voice when he pokes his head around the doorway. He looks like a floating torso when he does that, and I mentally will him all the way into my line of sight. Something grins in my chest when he actually does it, leans his shoulder against the frame, as if afraid to cross the invivible boundary into my office.
I can’t blame him.
“Any chance you got a cappuccino in your purse?” I groan from my place slumped in the spinning chair. I use my foot to push it so I’m facing him directly. “Got ambushed my Mom Squad at La Papillion.”
“Ugh, gross. No cappuccino, but I can get you the nasty stuff from the pot,” a grimace, a light in his eyes that never goes out. He crosses his arms, shrugs. “Even restocked the creamer.”
My hero.
He leaves and it takes me a long minute to push back up out of my chair. I saw the fucking article in Victors View; I know the meeting is going to be about one of two things, if not both. He is going to tell me the original direction for the Patricia death piece isn’t going to work anymore, that the sympathetic angle is going to fall flat. Then he’s going to tell me to write some bullshit about Patricia inciting rebellion, insinuate she’s got some nasty ties to Thirteen.
And you know what he fucking did?
Exactly that.
So I flip him off and tell him to shove it before walking away. Sometimes, it feels like I know everything, but I don’t. I just know this place, and all the ways its damned us. All the awful, intimate ways. At least Vesper left a mug of coffee on my desk, which I burn myself chugging before demanding Hailshams personal line.
CHANEL
SATO
SATO
