An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Do A Flip - chapter 7 (11.2k words)
chapter excerpt:
Shannon.
She’s always been a light sleeper, prone to waking up a few times a night, and the effect is magnified when she’s somewhere different.
Tonight, different is their backyard: Diego has been desperate to go camping, and sleeping out under the stars behind Shannon and Mary’s house is their trial attempt at the whole experience.
Beside her, Mary is still out, eyes closed. She tends to frown in her sleep, which Shannon finds charming; or perhaps what she finds charming is the way the frown clears when Mary wakes up, how she sees Shannon and her expression changes, first thing.
Shannon slips out of their makeshift bed and stands, stretching her arm, working through a couple of nerve glides. Sometimes, when the weather changes too much too quickly, her old shoulder injury still twinges. It’s not too bad, anymore, but it’s better to get ahead of these things.
From here, she can see the banked remains of the small fire they’d had in the pit, and the arrangement of the others, strewn out across the lawn.
Diego, Ava, and Beatrice are lined up on a collection of mats. Ava has curled around Beatrice, and the way the two of them are pressed close makes Shannon sure they’ve slept like this before, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Together, Ava and Beatrice have made an art out of avoiding change, or rather, of changing everything except that last little thing that makes it impossible to go back.
Diego’s head pops up from his nest of blankets. In the moonlight, Shannon can see him blink, rubbing the back of his hand across his eyes. He catches sight of her and squirms free, scooping up his water bottle from the ground nearby before weaving his way over to her.
He’s wearing a hoodie that he inherited from Ava recently — it features a graphic of a turtle in a judge’s wig, with the word TORTLE printed below. Shannon’s not sure he actually gets it, but he wears it all the time now anyway.
"You’re awake, too," he says — softly, so he won’t wake everyone else.
"Yep. Thought I'd check out the stars for a bit."
They sit down together in two of the chairs by the firepit and tip their heads up to look at the sky.
"How are you liking camping so far?" Shannon asks.
"It’s cool," he whispers back. "Definitely marshmallows are the best part."
Only Shannon, Ava, and Diego eat marshmallows — Beatrice is bothered by the texture and Mary finds them too sweet — but between the three of them, they’d managed to finish off a whole packet. Shannon had about three marshmallows total, so most of the credit has to be split between Ava and Diego’s industrious efforts.
"Marshmallows are the best part," Shannon confirms.
Diego’s attention drifts back to the stars for a moment, and then over to their campsite: the inflatable mattresses and the sleeping bags and the heaps of pillows — almost every single pillow from their house.
His expression shifts, and she can’t quite read him anymore.
"Everything okay?"
At Diego’s age, if asked anything about how she was feeling, Beatrice had a variety of responses. She’d inform Shannon, stony-faced, that she was fine, that it didn’t matter, or just change the topic completely. Occasionally, when she did open up, it was almost always accompanied by a preface: this is ridiculous, but —
It’s a habit that stuck through her adolescence, a sense that emotions could only be discussed after having gained distance from them, after positioning them as inconsequential or unimportant.
Shannon doesn’t really hear Beatrice talk like that anymore. Maybe it’s growing up and growing into herself, and being away from her parents. Maybe it’s Ava’s influence, and how she wants to put every one of Beatrice’s feelings under light and examine it and take it seriously. Or maybe it was a conscious choice, out of fear that Diego might pick it up, might start to speak and think in the same way.
"Yeah," Diego says. "It’s just nice, isn’t it? It’s really nice."
"It is," Shannon replies.
There’s a beat, and then Diego admits, "I wanted to try it because of what you said. You said that camping trips were your favourite thing when you were a kid."
Actually, what Shannon said was that family camping trips were her favourite, but this omission, it seems, has been made deliberately: Diego is watching her very carefully, now, his fingers tugging at his hoodie sleeve.
"Is this like the ones you remember?" he asks.
"Well, my brother used to snore like a tractor," Shannon answers, and Diego’s nose crinkles in amusement. "But other than that, they were exactly like this."
Diego nods, satisfied, and the two of them sit there a little longer, until Diego yawns, and then he’s off again, saying goodnight to Shannon before disappearing back into his nest, wriggling a bit closer to Ava before going still.