So, 2020. The year of throwing kerosene on the fire.
Massive work deadline drained my juices but I’m back. When I say ‘massive,’ I mean if I disclosed what it was, you’d ask why the eff I was doing anything else, especially more writing, guaranteed. I had a BLM-type essay queued up but thought it was better to say what I had to as my actual self rather than an anonymous author of weird prattle. That being said, the worst thing stories taught us is that there’s a special person called a villain who causes all the problems. There is no special class of people called “racists” that we’re fighting against. Rather, each one of us fights a battle between logic and internalized bigotry in ourselves. White people, whether we chose to or not, regardless of our personal feelings, benefit from institutionalized racism. It is our job to end it. It is our job to not say “I’m not racist” but instead “How can I be better?” And this has given me the final push I needed to go from defensive to offensive, and that means making myself a meaniepants in my community—anyway, that’s why I’m publicly naming names instead of making some overarching, glib statement here. Just super done in general, and if you’re a victim of systemic bigotry remember that you don’t deserve ANY of this.
This post is relatively light for Catastrophe Theory, but it’s still 2020 and I appreciate that not everyone wants to read a bleak-as-all-get-out story right now. I’m going to try to supplement the last three parts of this chapter (not including this one; there are 11 parts total) with something fun, with the caveat that it has to be relatively low-effort or something I was going to do anyway. Fun side things may include:
– Reviewing Cardcaptor Sakura (not into anime, but it’s a nostalgia thing for my spouse and just too, too bizarre);
– Behind-the-scenes plans for a thing currently known as Haunted (previously “Project Ghost Rider”), and I love that everyone reading this knows who has the starring role, the caveat being that my current vision for P.G.R. requires drawing and I can’t do that yet;
– One of the listicles I was going to release between Books II and III;
– Early-release parts of a chapter in Book III I’ve been itching to write, working title is “Trials of the Modern Victorian Gentleman,” yes I know I have a problem.
And now back to the past.
The weight of it all was starting to get to Kendra. She hadn’t grown into her heavy prepubescent skull, and the dead weight pulled her forward into a slouch. It took all her willpower to push her forearm against the craft table, lifting her face with a dramatic eyeroll and bringing her latest drawing into view. No one else was in the study. But the half-baked sketch in front of her wasn’t enough stimulation. She needed noise. She let out an open-mouthed growl, unsure if she was getting anything out of the vocalization itself or if she wanted someone to hear her. The stillness rushed in, feeling as if it would swallow her whole. This time, she let her growl turn into a shriek.
Still nothing. Lifting her sleeve, Kendra realized she’d been rubbing against the drawing’s bottom-right corner; her non-toxic childsafe tools wouldn’t damage the fabric permanently, but some heavy graphite chiaroscuro needed redoing. ‘Chiaroscuro’ was a term she picked up from Xiyuan, of course, and she loved it because filling in dark areas gave her an excuse to wear her pencil tip down to the absolute nub before resharpening. And then that feeling of watching the fine point withdraw from the old-school wall sharpener her school had: heavenly. Every time, she’d poke the tip and pretend she was Sleeping Beauty getting injected with magic bear tranquilizer.
Realizing that the last fifteen minutes’ work was chilling on her sleeve, where it wasn’t supposed to be, caused her to growl again, and she chanted about how stupid her sleeve was, like it was the sleeve’s fault, using repetition to its full effect. The bathroom door opened, interrupting her.
“Hello, darling.” The words almost spilled out. Even in her animalistic state, Kendra found herself being soothed by her mother’s voice, as if the lithe melody of her words picked Kenny up and floated her downstream where she didn’t have this crap happening. She didn’t have to look up to place the voice; Mom’s sweater announced her presence for her, being the brightest thing in the house. In low light, you could read next to it. More syrupy words spilled out. “Did you finish your homework yet?”
“I need to finish this first.” These were words Kendra scratched, pounded, lunged at her mother’s voice like a cat at a songbird before it flitted away. If Mom’s mood had been affected in the slightest by this tantrum, her eyes weren’t showing it. Her pupils were full with affection and she swayed the same way she always did, the way that reminded Kendra of a mermaid, like she was swimming in the air rather than just trudging through it the way people without her joie de vivre did.
“What are you drawing?” Claudia was struck by how clean Kendra’s workspace was. Not that the surface didn’t have those dried-glue zits on it that make it hard to color things in with crayon unless you’re going for a rubbing effect—you know those rubbings with leaves that adults pretended were mind-blowing, and that never survived the kid’s actual-zit phase unless their parents had the shoeboxes and attic space to demonstrate to their offspring that nothing they ever did, ever, was worth throwing away—but usually Kendra also had some form of textbook open, anatomy or marine biology or mythology or one of those horrid infectious disease ones she’d begged for on her birthday, to use as a reference. Kendra’s drawings had a 50/50 shoebox chance. Glowing jellyfish: prime spot on kitchen wall above the cute fish Charlie brought home. Every bone in the human body lined up in a spiral: shoebox. Freya in a chariot pulled by cats: hung on the wall in the living room so Kendra and sometimes her parents had a visual for when they asked guests if they knew that the Norse goddess often rode a chariot pulled by cats. Half of Freya, where the other half was more necrotizing fasciitis than deity, drowning in an underwater chariot pulled by octopus-cat abominations: you called it. Shoebox.
So Claudia wasn’t surprised to find herself torn between encouraging her child and looking her in the eye the way you’d lock eyes with a lion while on a safari trip, knowing that if your gaze strays downward you’re going to be slapped in the face with a rotting gazelle carcass and have your brain flash the image of the noble creature’s dead eyes every time you think you’re going to sleep. That was another one of Kendra’s frequent subjects, hypothetical roadkill. Hypothetical because she saw a smashed grasshopper in the garden once and cried all day. While holding her, Charlie remarked that at least she wasn’t a total sociopath yet, at three. And Claudia realized she wasn’t getting an answer to ‘what are you drawing,’ or maybe she didn’t want one—or missed it, who knows—so why not switch gears. “Are you upset, honey? Did something happen at school today?”
“Trace Beam called me weird.”
“Well, that’s not nice!”
“He got the other kids in on it too. He got them to stand around in a circle in the playground and watch what I was doing, because he thought it was weird. But before that he got them to say I was weird every time I said something to anyone, and he made up this song about me that they sing on the bus and everyone laughs.”
“What?!”
“So me and Wyatt took the worms we were digging up—“
“—You were digging up worms?—“
“—and threw them at him. Yeah, we found a bunch of worms and we put them in my pencil case. So he and the other kids called me weird again. And now I’m having the monster eat him.” She turned to read the spines on the bookshelf. “Where’s my book showing where all the blood vessels are?” Charlie had it, but she didn’t know that at the time. This was the early period of sharing medical textbooks being an issue for the older J.-E. kids.
“Well, that’s not nice either. Did you tell a teacher?”
“I did! I told Mrs. Railey. She told me to just ignore him. She didn’t even tell him to stop! It’s like how the first kid could be poking you, like”—she mewled mockingly while jabbing her pointer finger in the air—“and they don’t do anything, but if you poke him back they’re like hey! It’s not okay to poke people!” At seven, Kendra couldn’t quite put her frustration into words. Her school’s got these bureaucratic assemblies out the wazoo about the abstract concept of Bullying but everyone seems to lose their damn minds once the word “bullying” gets dropped and it is, they seem to think, Kendra’s fault for slapping a label on it instead of coping in silence so that Trace’s crap doesn’t reach the school board. “Anyway that’s Mrs. Railey.” Kendra pointed to a black triangle behind the monster’s flank. “She tried to get away but it zapped her with its laser eyes. Pew pew pew!” Her index finger slammed into the triangle with each ‘pew.’
“Oh, Kendra. That’s not nice.”
“Why? It’s a much faster way to die than what the monster’s doing to Trace.”
“Kendra, no one should be dying in your drawings at all. Especially not people you know! How do you think they would feel if they saw that picture?” Knowing how Kendra’s developing mind was prone to parsing things literally, Claudia was careful not to phrase it as seeing through someone else’s eyes.
Kendra squinted at her handiwork. “Scared. And then Trace would stop being mean to me because he’s scared of the monster, and Mrs. Railey would say she’s sorry for not doing anything.” Because she knows what’s coming. Kendra, having the context her hypothetical viewers wouldn’t, failed to recognize that Mrs. Railey couldn’t possibly interpret the blacked-out pile of ash as the end result of her inequitable conflict-resolution practices.
“No, Kenny. They wouldn’t be scared. They’d be sad!” How her mother had more insight into the thought patterns of strangers, Kendra was unclear on. Could be one-way telepathy. She tried to rid her thoughts of anything not parent-safe while her mother brought her glass of nectar to her lips. Claudia exhaled the burning sensation from the back of her throat before continuing the lecture. “When you try to hurt someone who hurt you, you’re just bullying them right back.”
“But I’m not doing anything to him. What if he doesn’t see the picture? Does that count as bullying?”
“Well”—she walked past Kendra to the room’s comfiest chair—“when you think about doing bad things to someone, you treat them differently. They can tell. Look, you can believe bad thoughts are something you can keep to yourself”—more evidence in favor of moms having latent psychic powers, Kendra realized—“but your intentions always carry through to your actions. They always do. You can tell when someone doesn’t like you, right? Even if you don’t know exactly why, you can feel it in their tone. Their body language. And if someone’s acting distant and you’re still not sure, their actions make it crystal clear. Absolutely—absolutely clear. They’re going to start doing things that hurt you, that make no sense to you, because you didn’t do anything to provoke them. They’re responding to something in their head. But what I’m trying to say is that you’re like that too, even if you know how to look or sound nice, you won’t be able to hide it. And those are the sort of bad thoughts that make people do things they regret. And I want you to look back and feel proud of your actions, Kendra. If you treat him like he treats you, you’re no better than he is.”
“But I’m not doing anything! It’s just a drawing! And he’s so mean to me.”
“Look, I get it. It hurts! But you know what’s worse than being bullied?”
“Necrotising fasciitis.”
That had become her daughter’s stock response; damn that textbook, damn her reluctance to question a six-year-old’s wish list in fear of quashing her interest in medicine. “Yes, but that’s not what I’m getting at. What’s worse than being bullied is knowing you hurt someone else the same way they hurt you. And that’s the hardest thing to admit.” Because the room’s comfiest chair faced away from where her daughter was sitting, Claudia had been craning her neck to keep her daughter in view. But now she gazed inward past the room’s concave corner to deliver a message bigger than this conflict and maybe not intended for Kendra at all. “And because it’s the hardest thing to admit, it’s the hardest to fix. That might even be why he keeps going. That might even be why the teacher won’t help you. They don’t want to admit they did anything wrong. It’s because ‘bullying’ is a thing bad people do, and they don’t see themselves as bad people. It’s because if they admit it to themselves, they have to deal with the fact that they aren’t as good as they think. And it’s something even adults have trouble with, Kendra.” Short nectar break. “But you already know what bullying is and how much it hurts. You can’t hide it from yourself. And that’s why I don’t want you to live knowing you’ve done something wrong, hurt someone else, because knowing you’ve become the thing you hate is a pain far beyond being the victim.”
Kendra waited a beat to make sure her mother was done; she got as far as the first ‘bad people’ before her underdeveloped listening ability totally conked out. Everything beyond that was Claudia talking to the wall and Kendra waiting her turn to speak. “Then how am I supposed to get him to stop?”
Emphatic contortion toward the kid. “You can’t.”
“What?”
“You can’t control what he does, Kendra. You can only control what you do. So instead of trying to keep him from being mean, what if you changed how he reacted to it? What if the next time he called you weird, you owned it? Like, if you said ‘yeah, I guess I am’? It wouldn’t be fun for him anymore, but more importantly, it wouldn’t bother you.” Around here it became a monologue directed toward the bottom of the nectar glass, more so than it had been before. “Weird isn’t even an insult! You’re different, and you’re perfect that way.”
“That’s kind of like Mrs. Railey told me to do, ignore him and he’ll go away.”
“I’m sorry she’s not talking to him, but she’s right! He just wants attention. If you stop making it fun for him, he’ll lose interest and move to someone else.”
Hoping to find some emotional respite in the friction, Kendra rubbed her graphite-ed forearm, giving her hand a corpse-like grey sheen. “But it’s just not fair. Why am I the one who has to watch what I say and do? Why doesn’t he! I’m not the bully. You’re telling me what to do, and Mrs. Railey’s telling me what to do, and the school’s telling me what to do, and everyone’s telling me what to do. And not him. Because they can’t. Because I’m the only one listening.” She’d be lying if she said she weren’t pleased with the shiny dead palm look. Opening and closing her hand calmed her long enough to deliver her monologue’s conclusion, and at the same time she wiped the excess graphite on her shorts at an angle her mother couldn’t see. “Why don’t they just teach him how to listen? It’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair, Kendra.” A deeper voice, again singsong, but singsong in the way a playground taunt would be. Kendra’d gotten used to it and turned to see her father. “What’s going on?”
“Trace Beam called me weird. And got the other kids to call me weird.”
He scoffed. “Kendra, you are weird. You call yourself weird.”
“I know!”
“Remember when you were sticking suction cups through your braid to look like tentacles and then attached yourself to walls and started opening your mouth toward anyone who walked by? And if someone asked what you were doing, you’d say you were an octopus and were trying to eat prawns with your beak?”
“I know!” Kendra said. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to be friends with the other kids in my class.”
“Yeah, and I’m sure they want to be friends. I’d jump at the chance to be friends with a real octopus.”
“Yeah, well, Trace Beam doesn’t. He called me gross.”
“Well.” Hands to hips, authoritative but still hammy enough to be jovial. “Did you tell the teacher?”
Kendra sighed. Like that wasn’t the first thing she thought of after the school assembly skit where a rainbow of handicapped puppets taught Billy the Bully the error of his ways through the magic of telling the teacher. “Yes. Mrs. Railey didn’t do anything.”
“What did your mom tell you to do?” The grin he flashed at Claudia read to Kendra like a challenge, with the bared teeth and raised eyebrows. Even she knew he was only asking to set up his own advice, which would be punchy in its simplicity, neatly packaged like a Shamwow. But after seeing the way her father approached every person, every interaction, with that same smile, that life-is-like-a-game attitude not hiding the fact that for him, life was indeed like a game, in that every interaction had a winner and a loser, and that he considered himself a winner, which made everyone else, no matter what, a loser—even his own daughter—Kendra already caught on and had stopped listening to him a while ago. She could see what Mom was saying. If she ever ended up like that, lord, feed her to the monster instead. Not that she was on the Mom route. Mind you. Just the way her flowing mother seemed to fold into herself the moment that man entered the room, head angled downward but hiding her face like she was trying to prove to her daughter that controlling your own behavior works, trying to put her money where her mouth is, and show how happy she was. How little it bothered her that she was playing a game whether she chose to or not. True that her happiness may be genuine, and Kendra may see it that way—but something wasn’t sitting right. She couldn’t describe what.
If she didn’t give both parents a shot, though, they’d be allied in a lecture about listening to adults, and it was faster to let them tire themselves out besides. “Mom said don’t do anything I’ll regret. Laugh along with him and he’ll get bored and leave me alone. Right, Mom?” Mom nodded. See? Listening.
“So she said to start bullying yourself, too.” Nah, if anything she suggested Kendra could embrace her own weirdness, since by now Kendra’s weirdness is a universally recognized truth, at least in the universe comprised of those in Magnolia Promenade during the octopus-braid thing. “So you’re just gonna let him know he’s right? Doesn’t seem quite fair now, does it.”
“So what do I do?”
There’s a reason baring teeth is considered a threat to the rest of the animal kingdom. A leer, a warning, a sparkling grin—what was the difference anymore? “Ah, but Kendra, he’s handing you an opportunity on a silver platter! He thinks he can get away with it right now. He feels nice and safe. But what that little snot doesn’t know is that he gave you a gift. Kendra. Listen. He threw the first blow, and you know what that means? Total free pass to fight back however you want. Someone pushes you, you get to push them back. There’s no guilt. That’s self-defense, not bullying. And if you don’t do anything, he learns it’s okay to bully you, there’s no consequences, so he’s just going to get up and do it again until you stand up for yourself.”
“Isn’t that giving him the attention he wants?” She regretted the question as soon as she asked it. Now that she questioned him, he wasn’t going to let up until she’d been pummeled with every word in his head.
“No, he’s not going to want all his friends seeing him get smoked by a girl. And you have the advantage, being born in this family! Ha ha! You see, it’s like a game. And he’s winning, and he’s not going to leave you alone until you win. So? Win. It’s that easy.”
“Okay.” This isn’t fun abstract playtime for me, this is one-third of my entire day, she wanted to say. How do I convince him I’ve won when he’s the one playing this stupid game and therefore setting the stupid rules, she wanted to say. She didn’t. It’d rile him up more and she was already stuck listening to him repeat the same thing five times, so she’d say okay five times. So she didn’t dare think anything else.
“It’s not like you’re bullying back at all. You know you’re fighting back, doing something that has to be done, so you don’t have to feel guilt. All this stuff where you just what, let him get away with it? Come on.”
“Okay.” Let him keep going. “Okay. Okay.”
“So, you got all that? What are you going to do?”
“Let him have it,” Kenny mumbled. As if there were a way for her to speak out against the whole class sans Wyatt against the seriously incontestable claim they were attacking her with. They’d all seen her pull those worms out of her pencil case and throw them. She turned back to her drawing. This was the tool she had, so just—she’d have to wait for her parents to leave her alone, let up with the shoeboxes and concern over crayon bloodshed and let her have her one outlet.
Her parents started mumbling behind her, like she couldn’t hear when she was facing the opposite direction. Maybe they thought she was lost in her drawing. She did that a lot, pretended to be absorbed in crosshatching when it was muscle memory by now and there was some interesting stuff going on in the background she didn’t want to scare off. Of course, the lower voice spoke first. “There we go. That’s why we work better as a team, yeah? Can’t be all soft, it only works some of the time. Everything in moderation.” Kendra could hear the damn head swoosh when he said ‘everything in moderation’; each time he delivered his parenting catchphrase, she and Charlie looked at each other and did the swoosh along with him. Odd that he hadn’t caught them yet.
“Mmh.” Or at least that’s what Kendra heard.
“Well, it’s a good thing you ended up with me. You’re really easy to exploit with that attitude.”
“Sorry, it seemed like a good idea. It’s always helped me.”
A slight mistake; adding the clarification didn’t placate him enough and he said, not quite quietly enough for Kendra not to overhear, “You’re teaching her to be a doormat. Kids need to learn how to handle these things by themselves.”
And Kendra found herself grateful that she was facing the other direction while she threw this massive eyeroll. How are kids supposed to handle it by themselves if adults can’t agree on what to do? She knew the answer already: whatever she did, they’d find something wrong to pick apart and lecture her on. She could follow her mother’s advice and never hear the end of it from her father, or follow her father’s advice and hear an impassioned plea from her mother, or pick and choose parts from both their approaches and take heat from both for not following the exact orders. Another game, that’s what it was.
“Kendra,” Claudia mumbled.
She looked up from her drawing more easily than she should have, considering. “What?”
“Kendra, I’m not saying you can’t stand up for yourself. Just remember the Golden Rule.”
“Treat others the way you want to be treated.” She not only repeated the message the adults had taught her, she preserved its intonation as well, such that it took on a peculiar melodic quality.
“Yes.” Claudia was folding. This was her compromise and moderation, giving Kendra a way to follow both parents’ directions without explaining how, exactly, she was supposed to do that. But not impossible, Kendra realized, staring at Trace Beam’s legless form as it tried to push itself away from a snake-spider-skeleton hybrid. Loophole.
“So if I’m okay with something, it’s okay to do it to someone else?”
“Exactly! You can stand up to him without bullying him back.”
Kendra looked behind her. Both parents seemed placated, though it was surprising her dad wasn’t trying to get the last word in. But what was bullying, exactly, other than something that was bad? Hitting was not okay, nor was teasing or yelling. Anything that signaled outright aggression. They didn’t say anything about psychological warfare. God forbid, she’d tell Wyatt twelve years later while mixing a Dim & Gusty, lest the children have words for what the adults are doing to them and each other and learn to defend against it while they still have the energy. Kenny folded up her current drawing—it was a shoebox one and she knew it—to set down a fresh piece from her sketchbook. Nah, she wasn’t going to settle for coping. She was going to thrive.
“What are you drawing now?” Another hesitant pleasantry from Claudia; 50/50 doesn’t mean alternating, necessarily. Kendra could be having a weirdass idea day.
“An octopus.”
The last bits of juice in Claudia’s glass jumped along with her. “Oh, your favorite animal! Cute!”
Kendra’d lied about that. Her favorite animals were Eldritch Abominations. Duh. You get one of those on a leash, no one’s calling you weird; not to your face. And there’s no way you’d be digging your own worms. You’d get volunteers for that, and they weren’t called volunteers anymore, they’re something like followers or minions.
“Sure.”
Three words. Trace. Beam. Chapodiphobia.
“Cute.”
BONUS: Free band name of the week is Emo Macaroni Pour
OTHER BONUS: A bop to clean your kitchen to, Seven Minutes of ‘Where the Hell My Phone’
I remember how heavy my head was before I grew into it! And the annoyance of drawing over dried glue droplets!
Hey, where’s Charlie?
He’s upstairs reading the medical textbook he “borrowed” from his little sister! But more on that particular sibling conflict later.
(Btw, before I forget, my spouse had me play Morrowind, and that was my first Elder Scrolls game. I made an Argonian named Herpatia whose backstory is that she’s a priestess of a triangle cult and got arrested for vandalizing walls with geometric proofs. Of course. Her class is “Triangle Inventor” because she claims to have invented the triangle.)
This is my second time reading this. The first time I read this you pulled my feelings in so many different directions I had to leave it for a week. But I’m back haha. And as I was typing my comment I realised it became too long again. So I’m putting it on the forums instead. Unless you prefer long comments here. 😄
Ohhh goodness. I can only imagine what the next section did. Yeah, as the preamble says, feel free to step away if 2020 is being too 2020 for you. That’s high praise, though. Thank you!
And is there such thing as a too-long comment? Especially here, where I had to split a single chapter into eleven parts because it’s inching toward 30k total words? If you go back in the archives either here or in Xaos, you’ll notice donaeis and I leaving our fair share of essays on each others’ posts. So don’t worry about it! Haha.
I did miss this chapter!!
“hey seem to think, Kendra’s fault for slapping a label on it instead of coping in silence” :: looks directly into the camera::
As you know, a lot of the parents in my story are straight up monsters but whew boy, Mike and Claudia give them a run for their money. Somehow, because Mike’s abuse is verbal, it feels worse to me. Like the tension is unbearable and I wish, instead of just passive-aggressively making Claudia feel stupid, he would just punch her in the face so she could get it together to leave.
And Claudia. Sigh. The latest chapter hits even harder now. She is so desperate to absorb the bullying and abuse and tell herself a story about how it makes her noble, it’s crazy.
Kendra is my FAVE kid. I have a feeling her and Gwendolyn from BBD would get along so well. She is doing the right thing: do not listen to your asshole parents.
Almost spat my coffee out at “RUN FROSH! SHE’S IN THE WALLS!”
And for your statement in the beginning, I know we’ve talked about this, but yes, a thousand times yes.
Yeppppp yep yep yep yep exactly. I couldn’t have predicted how on-the-nose this chapter would be. The messages were already there, but I feel like the less I say, the better, since it’s more interesting to hear how everyone else puts it. Of course you’ve been picking out & expanding on the main themes since the beginning, which I do appreciate because they’re concise, also because writing this out makes me go OOF and I can imagine it takes a lot out of the readers as well.
I guess what I’m trying to say is GET OUT OF THE BUILDING, SHE’S COMING FOR YOU!!! But sorry for my actions almost wasting your precious, lifegiving caffeine.
It was worth it lol
Oops, it’s been too long. I’m finally back to continue to be perplexed, heh. Also, how crazy that you wrote the “dude, 2020 is a pile of balls” months ago, and yet it’s still valid? Man.
Aww, nice to take a little trip back to seeing Kendra as a kid. She is definitely still very Kendra, painting sad rainbows and people dying. Also, it’s incredible how kids operate, her finding Claudia soothing in spite of what a mess Claudia is. Though maybe that’s just a testament to Claudia’s mask, god knows she’s fooled grown-ups with it.
“At seven, Kendra couldn’t quite put her frustration into words.” It’s very satisfying to know that will not continue to be the case, heh.
“You can believe bad thoughts are something you can keep to yourself, but your intentions always carry through to your actions.” Damn. That’s quite the words of wisdom from Claudia there. I wonder if she truly understands her own lesson here. She doesn’t necessarily seem to be able to consciously verbalise the impact of some of Mike’s behaviour, but she understands it on a subconscious way, or at least she will, with all the timeline hopping we have going on here. So is she drawing from her subconscious to pass on this valuable lesson to Kendra, even though she herself doesn’t put it in perspective with her own life. Then again, we’re all much better at guiding and advising others than ourselves, of course. Even more interesting once she gets to her own coping mechanisms. And yet, she does let things bother her, just crumbling underneath…
Oof, and then when Mike enters the conversation… but look at Kendra, picking up on so much of her parents’ dynamic, she’s one smart cookie. Don’t get me wrong, I think kids generally notice more in their parents relationship than the parents realise as a rule, but Kendra is actually consciously aware of it. She really is something.
Ah yes, of course Mike would say that. Good on Claudia for getting in a bit more advice still.
“Well, it’s a good thing you ended up with me. You’re really easy to exploit with that attitude.” I see what you did there. This quote could easily be a summary of their whole dynamic.
Oh man, glad you agree that Kendra is absolutely killing it here. Though she’s not a perfect philosophy sponge and, as you’ve pointed out here, has a tendency to gloss over things she doesn’t understand yet rather than admit she doesn’t understand them. She’s also doing kid stuff like associating her mother’s swaying with pretty flowy mermaid princesses because she has no idea what alcoholism is.
Claudia is giving us a crapload of insight into her worldview, and I’ll say, for the most part, that she’s 100% spot on, IMO. (I also tried to make Mike’s view believable and not like a total straw man, but I, being the author, can’t judge how effective that was.) And she’s acting completely in accordance with her beliefs, because she doesn’t want her direct actions to hurt Mike or her kids. The problem is the execution and this chapter gives a couple clues why.
Keeping this short—because there’s enough philosophy in this section for an essay—you already called out the first one! We’re indeed wayyyy better at suggesting solutions to others’ problems than fixing our own. There are no consequences for Mike or Claudia if they get it wrong. This is all abstract for them. That dynamic ties in to the epistemology and culpability themes CT loves so much, but I don’t want to over-explain here.
Kendra also expresses frustration that everyone is piling responsibility onto her, not the bully, to stop the bullying. She’s dropping some bombs, including
and
She’s so close to calling out that no matter what her parents tell her to do, it will always be the wrong course of action. Everything they’re suggesting shifts the responsibility onto Kendra and puts her at risk, when she cannot solve the problem because she is not the one causing it. But it’s easier to advise Kendra because she’s the one who is invested in fixing things, so that’s what ends up happening. I’m guessing you already see how this ties into the main storyline.
And yep, that Mike quote is supposed to hit HARD. Glad it landed.
Makes absolute sense they they both give her advice where ultimately, the responsibility for the situation is her fault no matter what. How could they say anything else, knowing them? Each of them is coming from their own perspective of course, but their advice definitely reflects their viewpoints. I do love how consistent your characters are – and by that I don’t mean that they don’t develop or change, but that they always act in line with their convictions. It’s always rewarding to see that in a story (but I’m biased, characters and character development are my favourite part of any story, the plot itself is secondary in my mind hah).
Well, thank you! I’m glad you noticed! I do spend a lot of time—like an inordinate amount of time, it’s really not ok—making sure everyone has a unique value system/body of knowledge/set of priorities/voice, and it’s satisfying when someone picks up on that.
Smart!Fig struck again when I read the first part of this story and was like “Oh! First person perspective!” before realizing it was actually you the author speaking, Of course, I was more than happy to see its focus on Kendra, as she’s fast grown to be one of my favorite characters… which reminds me, do you have your characters on the gallery? If so, I’d love to add Kendra to this new save I’m making… which it’s actually shite of me to ask this on your blog when I can’t see your replies so lemme get back to you on that, lol. As always, you write kids perfectly, both in terms of their dialogue as well as their POV, and I love the small details in your story and screenshots, like Claudia sipping her wine (ahum, sorry Sims. Nectar) also in these flashback shots when the focus is on another character. It keeps things very consistent.
I really like how you use these other characters’ POV (kids, even, which makes it better) to explore Claudia and Mike’s relationship from other angles, including their parenting. It adds that extra level of detail, too, and reminds me of stories such as To Kill A Mockingbird that, albeit in a VERY different and way more serious setting, achieve something similar. I always loved To Kill A Mockingbird so much because it becomes that much more powerful reading the ‘nonsensical’ nature of racism from a ‘still innocent’s child perspective, and I realize I’m rambling so I guess what I’m trying to say is, I adore your using children’s POV, you do it so incredibly well and it really, really adds to the story, as well as to all these individual characters’ stories.
Sending you the link to Kenny! (And to anyone reading this, Eyebleach has links to all my dudes.) Man. By the beginning of Apotheosis, she’s going to be your favorite character even harder. I can see it.
It’s been forever since I read To Kill A Mockingbird. But thank you 🙂 Dunno about you, but I remember being a kid and wondering why everyone around me treated me like a fucking idiot. Didn’t get better with time and accolades. Unfortunately.
I’m sad.
As for the chapter as a whole, I don’t think I have anything insightful to add, really, because of how on-the-nose everyone’s dialogue is. Just wham-pow mic-drop one-liners all over the place, pure little distillations of how these characters operate throughout the story. And because I don’t think I’ve said this during my S&L reread comments yet: you’ve gotta read this chapter twice. It’s worth it. So much foreshadowing, so many nested themes, all wrapped up in some gloriously wacky prose.
(What can I say, I just really love when present/flashback structure has both timelines “talk” to each other. It’s a slick way to reveal information without saying anything outright.)
Random side note: I think that Kenny and P-Shep would get along well (if they were the same age). If Peesh were a kid, she’d probably beat up Trace for bullying Kenny. While also reciting obscure octopus facts. Just sayin’. Not that that’s the correct course of action here; this chapter makes it clear that there is no easy, “fair” solution. But Peesh is very much a “gonna succeed through the power of friendship, octopus facts, and my fists” type of girl.