Here's the fifth Vicissitudes story...there's a little cursing here but not too much, so I guess a PG-13 rating will work (hopefully *is suspicious*).
This is the story told through Dora's perspective, and again marks the general shift towards Laurence-centric stories, but I'm thinking Laurence's story (the fourth) needs more reviews, so take a look at that one before reading this one, okay?
Vicissitudes
5. Dora
Yesterday afternoon I punched Laurence Flannery in the face.
I hadn’t meant to do it but it sure as hell felt good when I did! And you have to admit, I had a pretty damn good reason for doing it in the first place!
I remember what happened, don’t think for a second I don’t. Hell, I can even play it in high-def in my head. It was near the end of the afternoon shift in McDonald’s and I was manning the cash register, as usual. It’s better than being a burger flipper, I guess, or worse, one of the drive-through guys! I really feel for them. It’s the least fun job in the world, having to listen to and decipher the static-garbled voices of the customers, and do it quickly to boot, ‘cause if you don’t they’ll yell at you even if it’s their fault for not talking clearly enough. Hello, ever heard of something called “enunciating”?
Well, I’m glad I’m just a cashier. All I have to do is talk to people.
But it also means I had to talk to Laurence.
He came, yesterday afternoon. I was surprised to see him because he hadn’t come to our Mickey D’s since we broke up the last time. Before we broke up he’d come in nearly every day and give me a lift when my shift was done. Then we’d go to his dorm or my dorm and make out and…go a little further than making out. That was fun. I have to admit I missed that.
What made me mad wasn’t when Laurence came in, though, sauntering as he usually does, hands in his pockets and a smirk across his face. What made me mad was that while one hand was stuck in his pocket, the other was—
The other was wrapped around the waist of a girl.
She was an okay-looking girl I guess, with red hair and blue eyes and glasses, and, I won’t deny it, an admirable amount of chest. She was dressed simply in a T-shirt with the letters “Brookridge High School Art Club” splashed across the front. That did cause a few alarm bells to ding in my head. What really caused them to go off was the way she and Laurence were looking at each other, with soft smiles and an emotion I couldn’t quite identify shining in their eyes—
Well, as luck would have it, Laurence approached me. He did it on purpose, I know he did. That S.O.B strolled straight up to my register, his hand still around his new girlfriend’s waist, and said, “I’d like a Big Mac and an Oreo McFlurry, please.”
I didn’t look at him. I glared at his girlfriend, who was glancing back and forth between Laurence and me, obviously confused. “Who the hell is she?” I said in as nasty a voice as I could summon. For some reason, I thought she seemed kinda familiar but I wasn’t sure why.
“Her name is Pearl Daniels,” said Laurence, a smirk shining in his caustic hazel eyes. “She’s my girlfriend.”
“Laurence, what is—” said Laurence’s new girlfriend, but I ignored her. I was too busy staring, slack-jawed, at Laurence, struggling to figure out the meaning of what he had just said.
“Dan…Daniels?” I sputtered. I looked at Pearl again, harder, and sure enough, she did look a little familiar…like I’d maybe glimpsed her once or twice while playing at the Daniels place when I was a kid. I don’t know; I can’t tell any of those Danielses from Adam. There’s too many of them. “Wait—is she Tyler’s—“”
“Shh,” said Laurence, lifting a finger to his lips and winking conspiratorially at me. “Tyler doesn’t know—and he isn’t going to know, you get me?”
I just glared as hard as I could at Laurence, hoping maybe I could bore holes in his skull by the force of my glare. It didn’t work, though. Laurence got his stinking Big Mac and McFlurry, and he went to sit down in a booth with his new girlfriend Pearl. They shared their goddamn sandwich—they cut in half—and got two spoons to eat the McFlurry with. I felt sick inside, watching them sharing their food all lovey-dovey like.
After my shift ended, I stormed as fast as I could out the door, not even bothering to say goodbye to my friend and fellow cashier Lisa. I found Laurence in the parking lot, leaning against his dented pickup, side-by-side with Pearl. He was holding a cigarette but it wasn’t lit; he was just twirling it back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. He seemed absorbed in conversation with Pearl, which pissed me off to no end.
I stormed right up to the son of a bitch and ripped him a new one right in the head.
I still remember the satisfying pop of my fist against his temple, the grinding of my knuckles on his skull. I remember him staggering backwards, swearing a storm, clutching his head in surprise. I remember Pearl rushing to his side, helping him up, remember him flipping the bird at me and screaming oaths and insults at me when he’d gotten hold of his senses.
“The fucking hell!” he roared. “What the fuck was that for, you fucking broad—”
“Have fun with your girlfriend, Laurence,” I said coldly, ignoring his swears. Then I turned around and flounced off, ignoring him completely, feeling satisfied with myself and at peace with the world.
I don’t get it. I shouldn’t have been angry—I mean, I just broke up with the guy! I didn’t like him at all. Why should I care if he had a now girlfriend? That was his problem, not mine.
But I was still mad at him. After all, for the past year or so, even though he’d been spending half the time breaking up with me, he still hadn’t had any girl but me. And now he’d gotten a new girl—and to add insult to injury, she was Tyler Daniels’s sister and in high school!
Was I mad at Laurence because I still loved him? Maybe…oh, I don’t know! I don’t know if I was ever in love with Laurence in the first place. I really thought I was back when we first dated. No, even before that, when I first met him…
I talked to Laurence for the first time when I was twelve, but I knew him long before that. Just not that well. He was almost two years older than me and lived across the street, and I didn’t know much about him except that his dad was apparently a cop, which was kinda interesting. Otherwise I didn’t really care about him. He was just another boy with cooties, and that was all.
The first time I really talked to Laurence was at Dad’s funeral. Dad’s death had shocked both me and Ludwig—after all, he seemed so healthy. He ran three miles every day and didn’t drink anything stronger than Sprite and had never smoked a day in his life. We’d had no reason to think that Dad was anything but in perfect shape, but that didn’t explain his death from a heart attack.
I wasn’t crying. I was too numb to really feel anything. I just kept trying to imagine life without Dad and failing. After Mom and Dad’s messy divorce ten years ago (which I was lucky enough not to really witness; Ludwig, on the other hand…), Dad had taken care of us. He’d grown flowers in the garden and took me shopping and organized all our birthdays…
Now he was gone, and I didn’t know what to think
I remember wandering aimlessly around the cemetery during the service, too lost and confused to notice what I was doing. I was startled out of my wanderings, though, by a voice, a boy’s voice:
“Hey!”
I turned around. It was Laurence Flannery, wearing a formal dark suit, his red hair slicked back neatly. I stared, surprised, at him.
“What’re you doing?” he said.
“Noth…nothing,” I said. I frowned at him, suspicious, but he just returned my frown with a smile. I had to admit…there was something about Laurence’s smile I liked. It wasn’t the falsely cheery “Oh you’ll be all right honey” smile the adults all gave me; it was a real smile, a sympathetic smile that glimmered in his hazel eyes. I was so caught up in his smile that I didn’t notice when he moved closer, closing the distance between us.
“I’m really sorry about your dad,” he said, his voice soft. “Really. It’s too bad what happened…he was a nice guy.”
I couldn’t even breathe, because if I did I would inhale his scent—a scent that reminded me at once of campfire smoke, the interior of an old leather-upholstered car, and cinnamon. Strange combination, but it honestly seemed to work, and it was intoxicating. I’d never thought of a boy like this before, but it didn’t seem wrong…he was so close…my heart was fluttering so violently I was almost afraid it would fly right out of my chest. He smiled at me, and I noticed the way his hazel eyes lit up when he smiled, like a cloud moving aside and revealing a sun-drenched sky…
That day, when I was twelve years old, I convinced myself I was in love with Laurence Flannery.
I really believed it, back then. I thought for sure I’d found true love with Laurence—but I never told him. I think I was afraid that he’d reject me, that he only thought of me as a silly little girl, not a potential girlfriend. I did hang out with him a lot, though. I’d come to his house and do my homework alongside him, and we would munch on his mom’s home-baked cookies and talk about TV, the weather, our classmates, anything that crossed our minds…
It wasn’t just because I was lovestruck that I took so much comfort hanging out with Laurence, though. I believed that was the only reason, but now that I think on it, I think I liked being with Laurence because he offered me stability.
Stability was just what I needed then, during my tender middle school years. Ludwig and Mom, you see, were spending all that time in a vicious custody battle over me. Mom had moved to Florida with her boyfriend and for all means and intents seemed to have forgotten completely about me and Ludwig, but apparently she hadn’t because the instant she heard Dad died, she requested custody over us.
Ludwig balked at that and I have to admire him for that. We did visit Mom sometimes, during the summers, and I never liked her. She was too—well, I couldn’t see her being a mom! Moms were supposed to be like Laurence’s; kind, responsible, living for their children. Mom cared more about making out with her boyfriend, sun-bathing, and buying fashionable clothes than us. I couldn’t imagine Mom bandaging a scraped knee, let alone cooking food for us and making our beds.
And so Ludwig took it to court. He insisted that, at nineteen, he was old enough and responsible enough to take care of me, and argued that Mom wasn’t even though she was thirty-seven. I had to agree with Ludwig, though, and testified this in court. I remember. Our attorney asked me if I would prefer to live with Ludwig or Mom.
I said, “Ludwig. I mean, he can actually cook and clean.”
Mom turned bright red at this comment, and then turned away, buried her face in her handkerchief, and began to weep. Not just dignified TV tears, either—huge sobs that shook her entire body. They had to escort her from the courtroom. I felt like shit inside.
In the end, Ludwig won custody over me. I was fifteen and we were both exhausted by years of trial and appeals and all that legal crap. All I wanted was some normalcy. I was sure most fifteen-year-old girls didn’t know their attorneys better than their own best friends, that for most fifteen-year-old girls life wasn’t spent waiting for their next court date.
I had Laurence to thank for keeping me sane through all that. Even with all the crazy trial stuff happening around me, I still visited his house as often as he could, and his parents would bake me cookies and play checkers with me and do all the things my parents were supposed to be doing, only one of them was too busy making out with her boyfriend and the other was dead. By the time all the trial stuff had wound down, I was convinced that not only was I in love with Laurence, but Laurence was in love with me. After all, he was always so kind and gentle and understanding with me, never judging me for not wanting to live with my mom, offering me a shoulder to cry on when things got too horrible for me to take. Why would he do those things, I reasoned, if he wasn’t in love with me?
Then came Vance Hikari and that just about punched me in the stomach from shock.
I was so angry at Laurence. It felt like a betrayal to me—how could he? How could he walk arm-in-arm with another boy, when he had spent so many years with me, munching cookies, playing card games, holding me when I cried? It didn’t make any sense to my love-drunk brain.
I did my best to avoid seeing Laurence and Vance inside, because I knew I’d feel like disappearing through a hole in the ground if I watched them for long. But I couldn’t avoid it. I always saw them, everywhere—it was almost like a curse. Everywhere I looked, Laurence Flannery and his boyfriend, walking together down the halls, talking quietly together…
I couldn’t stand it. Oh, I just wished I could have died.
What made it worse was that it went on for what felt like forever. Early on I reasoned that this was just a foolish whim of Laurence’s, that he was just doing this for fun, that he was experimenting like most teenagers were bound to. Soon he’d realize he didn’t like Vance and he actually liked me, and ditch the namby Asian nerd for the girl he really loved.
It didn’t quite work that way, though. Instead, for two and a half years, I stood in the background, steaming while Laurence and Vance played the perfect part of a couple.
Ludwig did his best to be supporting. He’s always been supporting, and I love him all the more for that. In a way, being with Ludwig was almost no different from being with Dad. He is, after all, the perfect picture of Dad—dark-haired, skin brown from constantly being under the sun, eyes midnight blue and understanding behind his glasses. He loves flowers, just like Dad, and is as good at dispensing advice as Dad was.
“Dora, oh, Dora,” I remember him telling me when I was so depressed about Vance and Laurence that I thrown myself into his arms, sobbing a storm. “Come on, now…if it gives you any solace, I doubt that their relationship will last for much longer…”
Turned out Ludwig was right, even though I got mad at him and even chucked my hair straightener at him. I felt awful for doing that afterwards, but at the time I couldn’t see that his words were true. I honestly thought that Laurence and Vance would be together forever.
They weren’t. Less than three months after Ludwig had said that to me and I’d brained him with my hair straightener, Laurence Flannery and Vance Hikari had broken up.
I was startled, at first, especially by the guy Vance chose next—Tyler. I mean, I knew Tyler. Everyone on our street knew the Danielses only ‘cause they had so many kids who were always running around wild. We all kind of snickered at them. I mean, who besides the Amish and Mormons have so many kids in this day and age? And here were the Unitarian Danielses with their twenty or so brats.
But then I was happy—because I realized this meant that Laurence was free. I could finally have him.
I was beyond happy when Laurence asked me to Prom. It finally confirmed what I’d long suspected—that he did love me. Well, it confirmed it in my mind, anyway. I remember feeling rapturous with joy when we danced together to the slow beat of the music, and I felt even happier when we took the limo to the town lake, where there was no one but us and the glittering black expanse of the water, and he took me by the shoulder, reached under the front of my dress, and—
Oh, it was so delightful. That Prom night, I felt the exact same magic I’d felt during Dad’s funeral, when I had first met Laurence. His scent was as overpowering as I remembered, as intoxicating and addictive. I couldn’t get enough of him. I thought that night was the beginning of something beautiful.
It wasn’t.
I never felt the magic of that first night again. I tried, so hard, to recapture it, every time we went to bed together and woke up in the morning tired and frustrated and feeling no relief. I struggled to catch any—any—whiff of his beautiful scent again, but mostly I smelled nothing but pot and sweat and alcohol. Not romantic in the least. He never beat me like he did Vance (thank goodness!), but he wasn’t exactly nice or chivalrous to me. He never opened any doors for me, and more than once I swear he stuck out his leg to trip me on purpose, though I never saw him do so and he always denied it afterwards. Pssh. I see right through you, Flannery!
We got into fights, more and more. I had never had a single night as magical as our first one and it frustrated me. Worse—he didn’t care. He just said to me, looking bored and condescending, “I don’t see what you’re getting so worked up over, Dory.”
Finally, I got sick of Laurence, and we broke up.
For the first time of seven, I mean! I don’t know why we kept getting back together when we both hated each other so much. He was lost too—I know this because sometimes he confided in Ludwig. I was never there to catch him when he was talking to Ludwig, but sometimes I saw him exit the flower store and Ludwig waving him goodbye. I confronted Ludwig about these incidents, but Ludwig just told me he was here to offer help to anyone who asked for it, and he wouldn’t deny Laurence just ‘cause I didn’t like Laurence.
I got mad at Ludwig but later had to admit this made sense. Ludwig almost always makes sense, though.
Even he isn’t able to answer why me and Laurence keep getting back together, though. Kept, that is, since Pearl Daniels had to come and ruin everything.
Part of me feelings the reason I keep returning to Laurence is because I’ve never lost my feelings for him. I know—it sounds crazy! I shouldn’t love a guy who just uses me and doesn’t give a shit for my feelings, and doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “chivalry”. But still…I can’t help but remember Dad’s funeral, and me at twelve, hardly daring to breathe in Laurence’s beautiful scent. And I can’t help but remember Prom night, when I shuddered in Laurence’s powerful presence and let him take me for the first time.
I can’t deny it. I was truly in love with Laurence Flannery, once.
And like it or not, even if I’ve purged most of those feelings from me, a trace—just the tiniest trace—of them remain. Every time, I couldn’t resist when Laurence approached me again, because I believed against anything halfway reasonable that we could make it work. Because, after all, I must have loved him for a reason! There must still have been something to love about the guy!
I didn’t even care that we just kept making up only to break up again. I thought that as long as Laurence was only making up and breaking up with me, it was fine. It meant that he only wanted to be with me, even though our multiple breakups were a signal that nope, things weren’t working out. Still, he was trying to work it out, and in the deepest part of my mind I thought that was romantic, of all things.
I’d just about convinced myself of this when Laurence showed up again with god freaking Pearl Daniels. Whoop! There went my carefully constructed house of lies, lies I’d been so close to believing, too! It all felt down in a single swoop, courtesy of Laurence getting a new girlfriend.
Can you blame me, then, for punching him? I had every right to! The bastard broke my heart seven times already and god be damned if I was going to let him break it for the eighth time! Well, he already did, but that’s another matter entirely. Either way, I was tired of sitting back and letting Laurence play so cruelly with my heart. You see, I’ve realized this—I was only a game to Laurence. Just like Vance was. It makes my blood boil to think about it this way, it does, but it’s true. Now I see he never loved me. He just thought I was fun to play with for a while and then ditch me for a damned high school student.
So I don’t regret punching Laurence Flannery one iota. In fact, if you pressed me, I’d have to say it isn’t punishment enough for the S.O.B.!
What is, then?
Well…I figure there’s a few things that a certain Tyler Daniels ought to know…don’t you?
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Haaaa, I feel like I have an excess of italics here...
Anyway, critiques are welcome, but whatever, they're even more welcome on the fourth story.
