⋆｡𖦹°‧🫧₊˚⊹♡ violet parr : self paras (001)
Was the room shrinking? It felt like the room was shrinking.
Violet stared at her date’s nose. He was talkative enough to fill any awkward silences (and there had been at least three), but it wasn’t even a problem of him being rude. He had asked her about herself so many times. How was your day? What do you think of Elias? Oh, wow, what was Metroville like? All open-ended questions. Really nice of him, all things considered. But the problem was, Violet was retreating. Feeling quieter and quieter by the minute.
So the room wasn’t shrinking at all, it was just her.
She should never have agreed to a blind date set up by her coworker, much less an after-work date. A literal thirty minutes after her shift had ended. Violet was the walking dead, all her energy depleted.
“...have you ever been here before?”
“Huh?” she asked, dazed. She told herself to see his whole face, not just his nose.
His smile faltered a little. “I just asked, uh, have you ever been here before?”
“I, um…” Violet hesitated. “I haven’t. No.”
If words could kill, that was a serial killer with its last victim. Hello, Sydney. She’d work this moment into her current play somehow; analyse exactly what made this conversation bad, and how could it have been better. Maybe if she had the energy, for one thing. Maybe if she actually wanted to be here, and she actually wanted to get to know him. She’d write someone more interesting in that conversation. Give it a good Nora Ephron workshop.
The next five minutes happened in a blur.
Her date started talking again, trailing into a story about how he was so tired from work – you and me both, buddy – and he had an early start tomorrow. Somehow he apologised and left, and somehow she found herself outside the bar in the fresh air. Thank God.
Violet stood there, breathing. She looked up and down the street, finding herself smiling and relaxing as she took in twinkling lights, laughter, the electricity of magic in the air. She tucked her hair back behind her ears. Now, the world was big again. Now, she could do something more important.
First, she headed to Bueno Nacho. Violet slipped out the little notebook from her bag; notes like these were too important to be kept on her phone, something hackable. She counted the employees. Noted the time. Everyone was accounted for.
She did the same thing at Sk8tes. Then at Pizza Planet. Each employee she’d written down in her notebook was accounted for at their expected shift, even the regulars. The friend groups who’d chosen Sk8tes as their hangout place. The families who made a habit of eating at Pizza Planet every Friday evening. Violet chose a spot to wait and observe. She ticked off every name she had already noted; she couldn’t know everyone, but she could know as many as possible. Maybe it was stupid. She could hear a nagging voice inside her going ‘and what’s all this meant to achieve?’. But she kept with her list anyway, and it was because of this that she noticed one name hadn’t been ticked on her Pizza Planet page.
Skeeball Guy. Stayed at least three hours every Friday night to perfect his skeeball game. He wasn’t here.
Violet frowned. The quiet little investigative bubble she made around herself popped. The world came at her in a rush. But it didn’t faze her. All she could do was stare at the skeeball area. She waited for a minute, thinking she’d just missed him and maybe he’d gone to the bathroom. But that minute passed and he still wasn’t here.
She scribbled a note next to her Skeeball Guy entry: missing?
She left Pizza Planet, her head teeming with questions. What was she going to do with this information? She didn’t know anything about Skeeball Guy, what his name was or where he lived. Was there someone waiting for him to come home? Did they even realise he was gone? What if he wasn’t missing at all and Violet’s notebook was all for nothing? Leave the investigations to the heroes.
Stuck in her reverie, Violet’s foot caught on an uneven path and she lurched forward. With a scream, she whipped her hand forward and a flickering force-field appeared to catch her, stopping her from a full fall. She groaned, cheek flat on the fizzing sphere as she leaned back to right herself. The force field dissipated.
“Well,” she sighed. “You work when it counts, huh?” Violet arched an eyebrow at her hands, shaking off the tingling aftershock as she made her way to the last destination
By the time she got to the Pit Stop Diner, her cheek was still a little sore from smacking against her force-field so hard. The Diner was on her notebook of places to watch over, but it also had the best pies in all of New Elias. After the underwhelming date where all she drank was sparkling water and all she ate was five pretzels, she needed the pick-me-up.
She waited longer than she needed to, letting three people go in front of her at the register just because it felt easier than speaking up to tell them she was there first. “Hi…” she began, with a tiny wave of her hand, “can I please have the, um…”
“Blueberry pie?” the waitress guessed with a wink.
“I – you – yeah,” Violet stammered, her face heating up. Her internal script was thrown off. “Yes. That’s what I was gonna say.”
“I remember everyone by their orders. You always get the blueberry pie, and a water. One time I think you ordered a lemonade too, that threw me off for sure,” the waitress chuckled.
The girl’s peppiness stunned Violet, but not more than the fact that someone remembered her. And her order.
“Oh,” Violet let out a breathy laugh, “well, y’know, it just looked really nice! And it was pretty warm that night –” she prepped to pay, fumbling with her phone, “felt like the right idea to drink something cold, but coffee felt too heavy so –” she finished paying, and gave another awkward wave. Her hand went invisible and she stammered, her voice going high as she hid her invisible hand. “AND – you guys just make great food here. Five stars! Seriously!”
And scene.
The waitress laughed once more, wishing her well as she got the order started and Violet got to internally combust while walking to her usual bar seat. The smile had looked so knowing it made Violet blush again. What did the girl see that Violet didn’t? Was Violet obvious somehow, showing …? Something? That she didn’t know how to talk like a regular human being? That she felt like an alien in the diner she’d been visiting every week and knew every patched-up pillow, poster, and the list of jukebox songs for the Friday crowd?
Once someone played Sweet Child O’ Mine, it was like clockwork:
Sweet Child O’ Mine. American Pie. Against All Odds. Radio Gaga. Violet’s pie was served and she said ‘thank you’ with so much earnestness it made the waitress laugh again. Smoke On The Water. And up next was going to be Don’t You Want Me. Except it never played.
Violet stopped and looked up from her pie. She wasn’t the only one. The other jukebox liners, they’d clearly noticed something too. They looked to each other with a question. They probably knew the man’s name, Violet only knew him as Don’t You Want Me Guy. But they just shrugged, and kept on lining up their songs.
Her notebook weighed heavily in her bag. She took it out, sighing as she flipped to the Pit Stop Diner section, writing a new note. This was all wrong – missing people was no joke, and this was only in New Elias. How many more were going missing in Old Elias? In places where no one cared to look? How long before the kind waitress was gone? How many more would it take for people to finally do something about it?
Did they have to be important people for it to be an important matter?
Violet finished her pie, leaving a larger tip than usual, with a wonky ‘Thank You!’ written on her napkin. She wasn’t the right person to be looking into this – she was barely investigating this, just noticing things, really. She hardly had the qualifications for it. Maybe someone already was taking care of it, Mr Stark or the City Council. Some detective. Someone magical who could examine for traces of disappearing magic or whatever. Someone who wasn’t just watching and taking notes and keeping it to herself.
The nagging voice returned: why even bother? Why even try?
Violet frowned, shaking off the voice. If she was a character in one of her plays, there would be some kind of monologue. A moment to let her ruminate, to let herself be heard. Here were all the reasons why she should stop. But all she needed was just one reason to keep going. No one deserved to feel like no one would care to look for them.
Violet would look. And if she couldn’t find them by herself, she’d get help. Already the thought made her palms sweat and feel clammy. But it didn’t matter.
No one was unimportant.