Lynn Elkin, D12 (done!)
Jun 6, 2019 12:49:27 GMT -5
Post by phunke on Jun 6, 2019 12:49:27 GMT -5
The Rapunzel of Appalachia lowers kudzu through the window, forearm after forearm of it. This is what happens when you have shoulder-length hair. What they don't have is any sort of safety system. But. But. This sounds worse in theory than it works in practice. On the day that her parents weren't home and she scaled the ladder up the side of her house, grabbed the longest section of vine, failed to pull out even the smallest roots, climbed down, climbed back up with a rock, failed to scrape off the medium roots, climbed back down, and climbed back up with a knife, Lynn deduced kudzu was stronger than a human and possibly stronger than a house. She hasn't questioned its safety since.
Nor does she question Redbird's climbing or vine-holding abilities. Lynn doesn't naturally lean either empathetic or anxious, and she doesn't think about 'moments of weakness' happening to others. If a vine is strong, it'll never break. If Rebirth can scale the house with his two feet and a dangling kudzu vine, there's no reason to think about it any further.
Rob, aliases Robbie, Robman, Robketman, Robert, Roberth, Rebirth, Redbird, Radbitch, etc. is her most honest friend and comes up here most nights to play cards or shoot the shit. He wedges an armpit over the windowsill and yanks his chest on next, wiggling like a displaced worm into the room. It's not graceful. He is never graceful, which is part of what makes him her most honest friend. At the end of a long breath, he chirps, "Hey Jeannie!" Some of their friends call her by her full nickname, Great Neck, which she got after a particularly loud and show-offy bit about preening over lunch a couple months back. Rangbang just shortens it to gn in written notes - "jeen" in person.
"Reuben sandwich! You are late. I almost perished." Lynn is the unquestionable Queen of the Friend Group, straight-backed at all times, dismissive, loud, rigidly ensuring everyone has a funny nickname and gets invited on bar runs. She is a tall blonde woman, except short, brunette, chubby, and fifteen. She reigns from her bed on these evenings in a way that she does not in any other part of the house.
Rob shuts the window quietly behind him. "I know I say this every time," he says quietly, sitting cross-legged as Lynn groans and wrinkles her lip at him, because he does say it every time, "but why do your parents have to be so strict. It's not normal. Mine are okay with me having friends over as long as it's before midnight." Great Neck hates explaining this, over and over again, especially because she has to act like she understands it: "They're not strict, their rules make sense. They're light sleepers. If I had a teenager I would also want it to behave."
The more her friends bring it up - the curfew she has to sneak around, the long groundings, the way her parents watch her walk into the door of anywhere she's dropped off - the more Lynn wants them to just drop it. Like they're rubbing it in. If they're going to judge a curfew this badly Lynn doesn't even want to know how hard they'd come down on her about other things: an upper arm grabbed hard when dad learned there were guys in her friend group, a raised open palm for knocking a glass off the counter. She doesn't like getting punished but her friends' judgement puts her in the position of having to defend it. And she's not going to argue with Roving Baloney about this tonight!
"But-"
"Drop it."
The first time she met Robtholemew, he huffed down next to her in the dusty recess yard, made entirely of buck teeth and bowl-cut shiny black hair. The other eight-year-olds were milling around lethargically, occasional spats of unnamed tag-like games flaring up and flaming out after a few steps. He asked her what her parents did. Honest and sweet but unfortunately given to smalltalk; that was Robbie. "My mom is a bartender, she's really good," Lynn said loudly, eyes in slits. "My dad works...in the mines. If you have a problem with that you're being rude. I can tell." Robbie just laughed. Her defensiveness rolled off him harmlessly and would for the rest of their lives. "Dads be workin in the mines, it's just who dads are. Dads love mines," he told her earnestly. She giggled. "Rob is too weird a name for a kid. You sounds like a One businessman. We gotta call you Robbie."
"Okay," he laughed, pulling two pencils out of his pocket. "But if I beat you in a sword fight, you must call me...Roberto, Prince of Appalachia."
The Appalachia thing is something Redbeard picked up from his parents' dinner table history lectures, and when he handed it to Lynn it ballooned in her mind. She thinks about that tonight while he deals out the cards: who lived in these mountains before, what they ate, what they sang about. She saw the word banjo once in a textbook and likes to imagine in a completely off-base way what they would've sounded like. Lynn's pre-Dark Days heritage is a vanity project, a fixation, an ocean so unknowable it might as well be a mirror. "Sir, you're disrespecting my heritage," she quipped once to a teacher who informed her she was wrong about a math problem. "For Appalachia, home of the brave!" she shouted once, leading her friends in a dash across a road that had all of one cart-puller on it and her mom's bar on the other side. "Loike," she says quietly to Robbie over a winning hand, "Oi'm toiking oin un Oippaloichun oiccent."
"Nuh, ut sunds muhr luk thus," he retorts, eyebrows together.
"Doin't doisroispoict muh hurutoige!!"
He'll keep not minding this until he's of age to mine, and she'll keep digging until he's of age to mine and they have real problems. For now, they have about 2.5 hands of play-all remaining until she falls asleep midsentence and Roberto heads home.
The Appalachia thing is something Redbeard picked up from his parents' dinner table history lectures, and when he handed it to Lynn it ballooned in her mind. She thinks about that tonight while he deals out the cards: who lived in these mountains before, what they ate, what they sang about. She saw the word banjo once in a textbook and likes to imagine in a completely off-base way what they would've sounded like. Lynn's pre-Dark Days heritage is a vanity project, a fixation, an ocean so unknowable it might as well be a mirror. "Sir, you're disrespecting my heritage," she quipped once to a teacher who informed her she was wrong about a math problem. "For Appalachia, home of the brave!" she shouted once, leading her friends in a dash across a road that had all of one cart-puller on it and her mom's bar on the other side. "Loike," she says quietly to Robbie over a winning hand, "Oi'm toiking oin un Oippaloichun oiccent."
"Nuh, ut sunds muhr luk thus," he retorts, eyebrows together.
"Doin't doisroispoict muh hurutoige!!"
He'll keep not minding this until he's of age to mine, and she'll keep digging until he's of age to mine and they have real problems. For now, they have about 2.5 hands of play-all remaining until she falls asleep midsentence and Roberto heads home.
