I’ve always been the ghost girl, the one on the outside of every group. I usually see things before other people do, the squirrel in the tree, the airplane, the constellation. Sometimes I walk on my toes, and it makes me faster, more agile, but never as much as I think it should. Never as much as I remember.
There’s a block in my mind, it feels like. I have muscle memories from things I’ve never done. When I was younger I told myself stories, trying to make sense of what I felt, drawing from books and mythology. I’m supposed to be something Else.
I was so excited when I heard about the university. It seemed to draw me, rich in mystery and possibility. The stories I heard seemed so amazing, so different, that they had to be real. And so I applied, and got in. I majored in industrial design with a minor in theatre, both of which I’d heard drew great interest from the Others, though I did have legitimate interest.
For a while it seemed like I’d finally found what I’d wanted. The stories, the superstitions, the disappearances. People changing. My roommate disappeared for a week, and came back drawing photorealistic images and completely unable to eat anything but pineapple. A friend of mine came out as trans, and the day later he’d gained a foot of height and a beard. He had the same mannerisms, the same sense of humour, the same expressions, though the body making them was different. Even his voice sounded familiar, though considerably lower pitched. It seemed like things were actually, legitimately happening. Just not to me.
All the stories were secondhand. I never directly saw anything even remotely fantastical happening, though everyone around me talked of their narrow escapes, their adventures, and I definitely saw the results, or at least what LOOKED like results. I went to class, I studied, I got decent grades — and I did like my classes, my work was enjoyable — but it was just a university, academic and mundane.
I began to question what I was seeing. What if it was a trick? What if I was reading too far into things, imagining what I wanted to be there? Maybe my roommate had just had a nervous break from stress, she had always been good at drawing realistically. Maybe my friend had been taking testosterone and slouching all the time, and only seemed to change abruptly because he stopped performing femininity, started standing taller, got a fake beard. He was a theatre kid, maybe he was just really good at makeup. I could always think of a mundane explanation, rationalize everything away.
In my third year I started looking for something that was just too fantastical, something that there was no other explanation for. I told myself that the reason I hadn’t had any experiences of my own was because I was being too safe, taking too many precautions. I left salt and iron in my room, and didn’t wear any protection. II started talking to people more, even the strange ones. I poked into dark corners. I got my friends to point out the Others to me, went over and spoke to them, but They were always normal people. Just, completely normal. My friends would go pale, whisper about how I was lucky to escape, mention cat eyes and goat legs and horror beyond comprehension, but I still saw nothing. I started losing friends. They seemed to think it was dangerous to be around me.
If everyone around you is hallucinating the same thing they’re still the ones who’re weird, right?
I toned myself back down. Started wearing iron again. Not for my own sake, but it seemed to make other people more comfortable. I took my courses. I got good grades. I made new friends. Eventually, I graduated.
I don’t regret going. I did learn a lot. Tuition wasn’t that bad, the professors were good, and I’m doing what I wanted to do.
I still have that block in my head. It still feels like something’s missing. I should be stronger, more agile, faster. Sometimes I catch myself planning, muscle memory supplying movements, and then stopping abruptly as my limbs find themselves unable to carry them out.
I’m human. Painfully, mundanely human. And no matter how hard I wish, everything Other is just a dream.
When I first started here, I called myself Ada, because my wordpress as a teen was adamantiumhalfdragonx523 and it was the first thing I thought of when they said I should pick a nickname.
...I know, it’s kinda ridiculous, and I was hoping to present a somewhat more mature persona at college. But at least Ada is an actual name, and I could claim it was after Ada Lovelace instead of my RP blog.
Anyway, I dove into class quickly. Engineering, with an accidental minor in physics: I liked the required courses so I took a few electives, then realized I was only like nine credits away from qualifying for a minor so I went for it. Got immediately bogged down by homework as usual, barely scraping C minuses through humanities requirements and getting extensions wherever I could. I’ve never been good with time management? It’s the adhd.
There were always rumours of strange things happening on campus, but I mean, it’s college. You get drunk larpers and people hallucinating moving shadows from lack of sleep and old buildings with confusing layouts and it’s enough for weird rumours to be spread for months.
There was this weird girl who moved in a couple doors down from me: she turned up around March, I think she was a transfer? Her roommate literally burst into tears and ran away down the hall when I mentioned her, so I didn’t push it. It was a bit weird but I guess they were close with their previous roommate? Don’t know why they left, maybe they dropped out. Anyway, near the end of the semester the girl — she went by hazelnut, I think — invited me to this pre-finals rager out in the woods. I think it was late April, maybe the first of May? Mysty (my roomie) said not to go but I was feeling pretty prepared for my exam so I figured I’d go check it out. She kept, like, tutting at me, and made a big show of pouring salt lines at the window and door and around her bed? I don’t know how you can pour salt sarcastically, but she managed.
It was a pretty decent party, honestly, all through the woods. There was obviously much wilder stuff happening deeper, bright lights and screams and music and stuff, but I met up with a group I vaguely recognized from some class or other, spent a good couple hours playing, like, a music-based chase game around this awesome spiderweb of a slackline rope course someone had set up in the trees, falling off laughingly as we got progressively drunker. Also Cuttlefish (trans dude, marine bio major) with the Bluetooth speaker started skipping erratically between songs with dramatically different genres and beat structures until we all ended up tackling him to make him stop. I was just thinking of heading back to dorm when this girl with really cool dark-fantasy makeup stumbled out of the trees, obviously in distress.
She was dressed in this kinda ragged-but-flowing translucent robe thing over incongruous muddy cargo shorts, barefoot, exhausted-looking, and screaming about being chased. Lark (short girl, I think geology major?) immediately grabbed some big hoola hoops I’d been ignoring (I mean, when there’s a huge multi-tiered rope course with ladders and slack lines and trapezes, hoola hoops don’t stand out) and threw one over Spider-makeup-girl immediately, who kinda collapsed to the ground sobbing in apparent relief, and Lark yelled for everyone else to sit in one as well. Something something salt circles? So we did, kinda bemusedly, two to a hoop.
Spider-girl’s chasers burst out of the trees a moment later, and, like, I had figured Elsewhere must have a pretty substantial cosplay community, considering the larping I’d heard people talking about, but damn these guys’ costumes were good. One had to have been like six and a half feet tall, but they were on tall digitigrade stilts that raised them closer to eight, if you included the mask, and the other had this really clean 4-arm rig and I swear the arms were moving separately. Like, I’m an engineer and I couldn’t figure out how either had put the costumes together, the movements were so smooth they looked practically natural. I hope they get into whatever film studio or props company they want, the prosthetics were definitely movie quality.
Anyway, they came bursting out of the woods, making growling sounds, but they both stopped abruptly when they saw the probably-ridiculous sight of nine twenty-somethings sitting in plastic circles on the grass. I expected them to start laughing, but they were really deep in character.
They kinda circled around us for a moment, sniffing the air. I wanted to comment on their costumes, but everything seemed super serious all of a sudden. Then one of them spoke.
“Have they trapped you, weaver? Do you take salt chains over calm oblivion? Do you think they can hold you against the hunt?”
Their voice was kinda deep and raspy, oddly resonant in the chill night air, like I was only hearing part of it. This was obviously part of some scene, but I dunno. Spider-girl was curled into a ball, shaking, and I felt these guys were taking it too far.
There were a couple moments of tense silence, then Lark spoke up.
“Our bargain is with her, not with you. Leave, or wait out the dark. We aren’t moving.”
The four-armed one literally hissed at that, raising up this ragged crest along their back and flexing all four of their clawed hands.
“If you take her, human, then you take her debts. How certain are you, that you believe yourself capable of filling them? Do you think her gifts worth the cost of her entrapment?”
I still couldn’t tell how the rig was working, there wasn’t much space in their costume for complex pneumatics or anything, which was kinda annoyingly obscure. Was it just puppetry? How the fuck did they get the arms to DO that? And the tall one’s mask, were those articulated eyelids AND ears?
“She is ours, human, hunted and caught. You mettle in affairs of what you know not.”
The big one was circling faster now, striding long-limbed on those stilts. They sounded ominous, but I saw a loophole there, so I spoke up.
“You obviously didn’t catch her? She escaped long enough to find us, and if I understand the setting of your game well enough, we count as scenery or props, not players on the same level as you. So it sounds like she got away on her own and found a hiding place she can wait out the sun, which means you lost and she’s free. Go bug someone else.”
They both roared at that, making charging motions towards us, but thy kept pulling up short about two feet away from the hoola hoops. I’m not gonna lie, it was super intimidating, but they didn’t seem like they were going to get any closer? After like five minutes of this, the tall one broke and ran into the trees and the four-armed one followed, both shrieking.
We stayed in the hoola hoops after that. I would have liked to go back to the dorms, but any time any of us moved Lark started shrieking at us to stay still because it was “dangerous” or whatever. Cuttlefish turned the music back on and we ended up playing a trivia game someone had on their phone. It was super uncomfortable but it could have been worse, especially since I was still pretty drunk, so it was all a kinda pleasant foggyness. I must have dozed off at some point because next thing I knew it was a bit brighter and spider-girl was standing over me.
Her makeup was even better in the twilight, extra eyes and weirdly-textured skin and everything.
“If you are, as you said, merely scenery in which I have found my own escape, then I owe you nothing.”
She looked around at all of us, then at Lark, who was getting up with a murderous expression, then back to me. Up close, I could see my reflection in her eyes, including the six fake ones. They looked intimately real.
“Your words unwind me altogether, even from your would-be friend,” she whispered, just to me, “and I owe you, gift for gift.”
Then, suddenly, she was gone. I saw her bolt to the rope course and up one of the support ropes, much further up than I’d noticed it went, until she disappeared into the treetops. It was impressive.
Lark yelled at me a bit, something something she could have made us all rich? I don’t know, I don’t understand the larp setting well enough to understand the context. And then I went back to my dorm and collapsed into bed. I only got three hours of sleep before I had to get up and take my exam, but I did pretty well on it anyway, got a solid 83%.
Couple days later I heard a sound at the window, and when I went to investigate I found a bundle of fabric on the sill. Unwrapping it, i found a hooded knee-length asymmetrical vest thingy with this really cool greyscale-geometric pattern on it, made from the same flowing material as spider-girl’s robe. It fits perfectly. Mysty made a bit of a fuss when she saw it, but calmed down a bit when I told her the context. I’ve been wearing it ever since, it looks really good over jeans.
Anyway, yeah. Probably the weirdest story I have, though there are some solid contenders, actually....College, you know. Stuff happens.
AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21751201 (wrote this back in December, forgot to submit it)
Hay que avanzar once años, 1993, para encontrar un nuevo LP de estudio de Holly Vincent, esta vez como cantante, guitarrista y líder de The Oblivious.
Recurro a la wiki de nuevo: "En 1990, Vincent se mudó a Los Ángeles, donde comenzó a escribir canciones para la industria cinematográfica. En 1992, Jane Scarpantoni, una violonchelista que había trabajado con Vincent en Nueva York, la puso en contacto con Amy Ray de Indigo Girls, quien le pidió a Vincent que grabara un nuevo álbum para su sello Daemon Records. Vincent formó una banda llamada The Oblivious, que incluía al baterista original de los Italians, Steve Dalton, y grabó con ellos el álbum "America", que escribió en su totalidad y produjo. El álbum fue lanzado en septiembre de 1993 y recibió buenas críticas".
Backstage Pass, Holly segunda por la derecha.
"America" es un disco de pop rock que muestra a Holly en buena forma, no perdió el tiempo durante esa década en la oscuridad, siguió componiendo buenas canciones. Incluso ciertas cosas como "Crush", la devolvieron a sus inicios punk en Los Angeles dentro del grupo femenino Backstage Pass que funcionó entre 1976 y 1979 (la estupenda web de Genny Schorr). Holly también actuó durante unas semanas con The Waitresses en 1984, sustituyendo a la cantante Patty Donahue.
Arriba "Witness", una magnífica canción con la que derretirse, y abajo el videoclip de la citada "Crush". Holly Vincent es uno de los secretos mejor guardados del rock femenino, que hay que desvelar y dar a conocer por el bien de todos. La gran rockera olvidada. Elitismos cero. Y aquí lo dejo por ahora... Ya subiré más adelante cosas de sus discos posteriores.
Nota: 5 entradas de esta chica con formidables canciones y 0 likes, lo cual quiere decir que los likes no significan nada. Kamikaze.
Remembering the 1990′s - Daemon Records poster 1 of 4 - Chicago, IL - America by the Oblivious - just read this morning that Holly Vincent’s relationship with Mark Knopfler (their break up) was the inspiration for the song Romeo and Juliet -
