september graham
penned by blue
❛ i am not a stranger to the dark – hide away, they say 'cause we don't want your broken parts. i've learned to be ashamed of all my scars – run away, they say, no one'll love you as you are ❜
NOTE TO SELF: i love you does not mean i will never leave you
september sat in the corner of the café, back turned to the window so she could observe the people coming in and out. the paperback book she’d been trying to read for two and a half months was turned upside down in front of her, the cover curling and the spine mercilessly broken. she was tearing the corner off her croissant when she called out to the person a few feet away – “ why are you standing like that? do you know you’re making people uncomfortable? ” she’s never really been one to mind her own business – but over the last few years, it got much worse.
Ophelia couldn’t help but snort when the male began to say something she wasn’t too fond of. Impulsively, she threw the contents of her drink on the male and began to slide down the stool in order to occupy another one, further down. Though she was angry she’d wasted a perfectly good drink, it was needed to ensure she could continue to drink in peace. With a flick of her hues towards the person to her left, she tilted her head towards them. “Get them another round on me, and I’ll have the same thing.”
september wasn’t exactly proud of her habit of weekday drinking, but whenever she went to bars on the weekends, she inevitably ran into a student. as if she wasn’t unfiltered enough, alcohol just made her a whole new level of inappropriate, and she always had some explaining to do to the department chair by tuesday afternoon. nosy bastard. and then she’d have to bring it to her therapist. she’d usually start those appointments by announcing “ i’m a fuck up! ” as she collapsed onto the center of the couch, popping her feet up on the coffee table in front of her ( her therapist had long ago given up asking september to take her feet down ).
so there she was, getting plastered on a wednesday night, opting for a wicked hangover in class rather than another berating meeting with russ - the - evil - department - chair. she was on her third cocktail when she watched a sleeze try to hit on a woman who looked all business, and she was ready to swing in with ‘ are you hitting on my girlfriend ’ when the woman took care of it herself. september stared, mouth agape and grinning, awestruck at the woman’s actions.
“ killer throw, ” she said cheerfully, turning to face her new friend. “ last time i pulled some shit like that i got a ‘ banned forever ’ notice from the haunted house manager. he didn’t listen to a fucking word i said about the killer clown that came running at me or how it was entirely self-defense, that fucking prick.” she winked at the bartender as he mixed two new cocktails. “ so. you look too businessy to be a wednesday drinker. what is it? divorce? cheating husband? bad diagnosis? ” all invasive questions, september realized, and hit the table with her fist. “ jesus christ. sorry. you don’t have to answer that. i’m really fucking rude sometimes. ”
Being relatively new in town had its perks — Victoria was at that point where everyone would politely tell her ‘good morning’, but no neighbor was kind to the point of being overbearing. It had been a few weeks since she started to honestly enjoy her solitude, and a few days since it started to suffocate her. Temperance, it seemed, wasn’t her biggest strength, which would explain why she drowned in both the approximately seven cups of coffee and the notes and outlines scattered across her corner table at the Café. When a new customer opened the door, they brought the winter breeze with them, blowing a probably unimportant piece of paper near the neighboring table. However, since her mess was hers, it could be either the number of the new pizza place or the opening line of a promising plot. “Excuse me— would you mind handing me that blue piece of paper over there?”
aside from inter-departmental drama, september believed that the worst part of her job was grading papers written by students who were half drunk, half asleep, or both. she may not have been a prime example to them, but at least a little effort would have been nice to see. she’s in the middle of writing ‘come see me’ and ‘review case charts’ when an icy breeze runs through the entire café, sending a chill down her body and her pages turning. “ fucker. ” she muttered – to no one in particular, except perhaps father frost himself.
it turns out she was not the only one victimized by the new customer’s arrival. she looks up at the woman sitting at the neighboring table, taking in her tired features and scattered papers. she looked down at the blue piece of paper at her feet skeptically. “ am i about to get iced? ” september asked, raising an eyebrow and smirking. “ because let me tell you, i’ll go through with it. i got iced twice in one day during undergrad, and it was finals week. ” a brief pause while she got lost in thought, then a shake of her head. “ on second thought, nah. my therapist would kick my ass and she has some kind of superpower where she can always tell when i’m lying. so if you’ve got an ice down here, someone else is taking the knee. ”
knowing she’d already spoken too much, and not really caring, september bent down and picked up the paper in question, holding it out with an ingenuine smile. “ are you supposed to be writing a thesis or something? because you’re not gonna get very far if that’s how you organize. ” the words left her mouth, and immediately she knew she shouldn’t have said them. “ fuck, SORRY. that was rude. i mean, true, but rude. ”
Staring at the patterned wallpaper of her favorite coffee shop near the hospital, Maysoon tapped her pen against the surface of the table as she mulled over the upcoming day’s challenges. Her thought process was rudely interrupted by three unnecessarily loud notification sounds. “God fu—,” she muttered, glaring at her phone in a way that was almost comedic in its sheer annoyance. Feeling the need to explain herself, she glanced at the person sitting right next to her. The look on her face barely shifted. “If I ever go missing, everyone should know it’s the damn Duolingo owl punishing me for not being diligent enough with my French course.”
september would have heard the all-too familiar notification from the other end of the coffee house, and her head popped up from marmaduke on high alert, half expecting to see one of her students. lawrence, probably, who insisted on using that stupid app. the woman responsible didn’t seem any more pleased than september was, and she rolled her eyes in response.
“ oh man, FUCK duolingo. i hate when students download that piece of junk. emotional manipulation aside, it is so far from the best way to learn a language. i can’t even fucking imagine. want to learn a language fast? spend a month in a small town where the locals aren’t required to learn english. you’ll pick that shit up so fast from the moment you can’t find the public restroom on your own. ”
“Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas and all but there’s a point where the music is just too much and I can’t stand it anymore. Like, is it really necesarry to play the same song on every radio station at the same time? A guy is just trying to listen to something other than ‘Jingle Bells’, I’ll even listen to some hardcore gothic music to change things up.”
𝗑. september raised her eyebrows skeptically at the man as he spoke. truthfully, she didn’t completely disagree – the christmas playlists at most stores were woefully repetitive – but she couldn’t resist the opportunity to be at least a little contrary. “ well, you festive fucking maniac, ” she said, extending each word into a sigh. “ i sure hope you weren’t expecting any great gifts under the tree this year, because you are definitely getting a fucking lump of coal, mr. grinch. ”
hey, hi, hello !! this is blue again, giving into the temptation i intended to so valiantly fight. this is september, a 26-year-old english ta and russian instructor !!
meet the hot mess below ––
september is a twin; she and her brother sawyer were born to diana and james graham
they were super fun children, spending their days exploring and playing with other kids on the block, doing reckless things like pushing each other around in shopping carts and seeing how many stones they could throw into henderson’s backyard before he would notice and chase them off
they were on the lower end of middle class to the higher end of low class, often struggling for money and keeping things tight around the house
when september & her brother were 6, their father was diagnosed with lung and brain cancer. they paid for the treatment for as long as they could, putting themselves in endless debt, but even that wouldn’t have been able to stop the inevitable. he died within months.
her mother took a second job, so september spent a lot of time with her second family, the lyskovtsevs
the lyskovtsevs are originally from russia, but immigrated to the states as soon as it was safe and legal to do so with the collapse of the soviet union
they immediately took september and sawyer into their home, becoming a second family to them
when they turned 17, september’s mother told them that she would be moving bangor while they stayed in portland, living full time with the lyskovtsevs, visiting bangor only on weekends
this escalated, and after a while, they would spend holidays with their mother, and a week during the summer, but the rest of their time was spent with the lyskovtsevs – and the majority of the summer weeks were spent in moscow to visit the lyskovtsevs’ extended family
their lives were constantly being uprooted and moved
so the twins grew super reliant on each other, coming to believe that, despite the lyskovtsevs, they only really had each other
they were never exactly booksmart as kids, but they were hard workers, doing everything they could to better themselves and prepare for the future, always with each other
honestly they came as a unit – if you were friends with one, you were friends with both, and if you fought with one, you fought with both.
so they pretty much lived with the lyskovtsevs through the rest of their education, knowing they wouldn’t be able to afford a home on their own with living costs, school costs, and minimum wage. they started to visit bangor less and less, a feud forming between themselves and their mother over the situation. they assumed she abandoned them out of grief – which turned their pity into anger
but when they were 23, freshly moved into neighboring apartments in portland, they received news that cancer killed their mother. she’d left them a letter explaining herself – the fear of making them watch her decay like their father all over again, and how she wanted them to remember her as the person she was and not the person she would become
the news hit september hardest. something inside her snapped when the truth came out, and the only way she could explain it was that she felt like she was going crazy. most attributed it to grief - their mothers death being the triggering force in her break
her new boss insisted on therapy, which she happily attends. before long she’d accumulated a laundry list of medications they’d tried. most of them she refused to take, some of them she just stopped taking, and others she claimed just didn’t work. her behavior didn’t get worse, but it didn’t improve – she became self destructive & on edge. her filter had mostly vanished and she became blunt, often struggling with mood swings.
she’s pushed away a lot of her friends because of this & turned to meaningless sex and one-night-stands as a way of coping with lost connections
she feels as though she’s left only with her brother at her side, and resents most people because of it
anyway i want 2 apologize for her in advance she’s a Ride
