burning skin

Steph tries to make a roast chicken for Valentine’s Day. She’s trying very hard to make up for the summer (with Daniel, whom she still can’t look at, even six months later), and she decides that a roast chicken is the way. It feels romantic. Domestic. Something she’s not good at, but she should be. She should be, she should be.

Before her mother leaves the house, Steph does not ask her for help. Susie Armstrong, of the “I just swung by Kentucky Fried Chicken” dynasty, would be no assistance here. Any roast chicken she’s ever had is from Boston Market, or someone else’s kitchen. She figures she can do it herself. After all, she can read. How hard can it be?

Apparently, it can be very hard. Steph stands in the kitchen, miserable and sad, pulling at a failed chicken with burning skin. She was going for crisp, but it didn’t have to be like this.

She decides it’s karma. For the past six months, Steph has been very big on karma. Karma for cheating on Sam with Daniel, karma for not telling him, karma for not being able to fake it when she has to see Daniel at parties and dinners. She doesn’t know how Sam hasn’t noticed. He’ll be here any minute, expecting roast chicken, like Steph promised. She swears to herself she’ll never be this stupid again. You don’t tell your date what you’re doing. You tell them it’s a surprise. That way, they can’t be disappointed when you make a phone call to the Chinese restaurant one suburb over. Surely, everyone else in the world knows that.

Steph is not everyone else in the world. If she was, she wouldn’t be a cheater.

For a second, she thinks about picking up the phone and calling Daniel. Apologizing for what she put him through for not turning him down when he kissed her in the park last summer. She thinks about asking him what the hell he was thinking, making a move on his best friend’s girlfriend. She wonders what the hell is wrong with her, too, thinking about one of her boyfriend’s best friends when he’ll be here in any minute for the roast chicken that isn’t.

She knows none of them are thinking at all. That’s how Lucy Callaghan wound up pregnant at the end of the summer, and that’s how Steph ended up with a chicken with crispy burning skin. Delicious.

She sees some movement outside her window. When she pulls back the curtains, she sees Sam walking up the porch, carrying a large pizza box. It makes her giggle. And it makes her terribly sad.

That’s always how it is.

She opens the door for more of it.

(part of @nosebleedclub february challenge -- day 1!)

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Thomas Ian Griffith as Catlin Ewing in Another World series 1984

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Que buen libro....

Aún estamos en 1 9 8 4 en el 2 0 2 3 👁️

‘The Homecoming’ (1984)

NME [New Musical Express] (1984)

1984 Harley-Davidson Jerry Garcia FXST

syrupy

Steph shows up five minutes late for her shift at the St. Catherine’s Annual Pancake Breakfast, and Mrs. Noland, biology teacher and the head of the senior class, is pissed. She tells Steph to stand in the back of the kitchen and clean up bottles of maple syrup. She says it like it’s a punishment, but as far as Steph is concerned, it’s the best job anyone could have. She gets to stand in the back, alone, and no one has to gawk at her in her uniform skirt. She could turn on the radio, and no one would notice. Mrs. Noland is one of those characters who pretends like she hates “secular music,” but when “I Saw Her Standing There” comes on the classics station, she’s suddenly cool with all kinds of unmarried seduction. Sounds a lot better than fornication. Maybe they give it such a gross name to keep people from doing it. Oh, well. No use in questioning it too much when Steph’s already very, very guilty of it.

She knows guilty is the wrong word, except when it’s not, except when she thinks about Daniel DeLuca last summer.

When everyone outside the kitchen seems distracted, Steph reaches up to a high shelf and pulls down a radio. The lunch ladies have always had one in here, to keep themselves from going battily bored with tweenage gossip about note-passing and backstabbing. Steph remembers walking back to the kitchen to get away from Kim, Vicky, and Gina, and there were the lunch ladies, listening to “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” like they were almost sort of cool. She’s not sure why, but the memory has stuck to her like nobody’s business. And it is nobody’s business.

Carefully, Steph turns the radio on. She flips through a few songs she’s not crazy about. If there’s one thing she’s learned from Sam, it’s how to hold out for the right song, how to let the right song come to you. It always will.

And it does.

She stops right at the beginning of The Byrds singing “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

Steph’s not sure why it’s the right song. She likes The Byrds, but she’s not crazy about them. Not usually, anyway. Today, she can’t get enough of them. And as she cleans every bottle, getting syrupy arms and fingers, she has never felt more connected to anything in her life. And she means anything.

She dances, light as ever, and no one stops her. No one sees. She’s an aphorism, and she doesn’t even care.

She dances.

(part of @nosebleedclub january challenge -- day 25!)

Happy New Year!!!

MTv (1984)

I'm talking to a machine

Sbarro Super Eight, 1984. Presented 40 years ago at the Geneva Motor Show, a relatively modest looking hatchback body covering the mid-engined drivetrain of a Ferrari 308 GTB. It remained a one-off

Sephiroth ┼ FINAL FANTASY VII: EVER CRISIS

The prettiest high school freshman in the history of the planet.

Me and you, forever and ever

Phoney jumpscare