Fangirl

he’d been talking to a ghost. Or a yeti. “Why? What? ”
    “Not for me,” he said quickly, like he knew that the two of them getting back together was a horrifying prospect. “About you.”
    “Me?”
    “You and Wren.”
    “Stop,” she said. “Don’t talk to her about us.”
    “Cath … she’s your mother.”
    “There is no evidence to support that.”
    “Just listen, Cath, you don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
    Cath was starting to cry. “I don’t care what you’re going to say.”
    Her dad decided to just keep talking. “She’d like to see you. She’d like to know you a little better.”
    “No.”
    “Honey, she’s been through a lot.”
    “No,” Cath said. “She’s been through nothing.” It was true. You name it, Cath’s mom wasn’t there for it. “Why are we talking about her?”
    Cath could hear her dad’s keys banging against his leg again, hitting the bottom of the table. They needed Wren here now. Wren didn’t twitch. Or cry. Wren wouldn’t let him keep talking about this.
    “She’s your mother,” he said. “And I think you should give her a chance.”
    “We did. When we were born. I’m done talking about this.” Cath stood up too quickly, and a pile of papers fluttered off the table.
    “Maybe we can talk about it more at Thanksgiving,” he said.
    “Maybe we can not talk about it at Thanksgiving, so that we don’t ruin Thanksgiving—are you going to tell Wren?”
    “I already did. I sent her an e-mail.”
    “What did she say?”
    “Not much. She said she’d think about it.”
    “Well, I’m not thinking about it,” Cath said. “I can’t even think about this.”
    She got up from the table and started gathering her things; she needed something to hang on to. He shouldn’t have talked to them about this separately. He shouldn’t have talked to them about it at all.
    *   *   *
    The drive to West Omaha with her dad was miserable. And the drive back to Lincoln without him was worse.
     
    Nothing was going right.
    They’d been attacked by a venomous crested woodfoul.
    And then they’d hidden in the cave with the spiders and the whatever-that-thing-was that had bitten Simon’s tennis shoe, possibly a rat.
    And then Baz had taken Simon’s hand. Or maybe Simon had taken Baz’s hand.… Anyway, it was totally forgivable because woodfoul and spiders and rats.
    And sometimes you held somebody’s hand just to prove that you were still alive, and that another human being was there to testify to that fact.
    They’d walked back to the fortress like that, hand in hand. And it would have been okay— it would have been mostly okay —if one of them had just let go.
    If they hadn’t stood there on the edge of the Great Lawn, holding this little bit of each other, long after the danger had passed.

    —from “The Wrong Idea,” posted January 2010 by FanFixx.net author Magicath

 
    TEN
    Professor Piper wasn’t done grading their unreliable-narrator scenes (which made Nick crabby and paranoid), but the professor wanted them all to get started on their final project, a ten-thousand-word short story. “Don’t save it till the night before,” she said, sitting on her desk and swinging her legs. “It will read like you wrote it the night before. I’m not interested in stream of consciousness.”
    Cath wasn’t sure how she was going to keep everything straight in her head. The final project, the weekly writing assignments—on top of all her other classwork, for every other class. All the reading, all the writing. The essays, the justifications, the reports. Plus Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays writing with Nick. Plus Carry On. Plus e-mail and notes and comments …
    Cath felt like she was swimming in words. Drowning in them, sometimes.
    “Do you ever feel,” she asked Nick Tuesday night, “like you’re a black hole—a reverse black hole.…”
    “Something that blows instead of sucks?”
    “Something that sucks out, ” she tried to explain. She was sitting at their table in the stacks with her head resting on her backpack. She could feel the indoor wind on her neck. “A reverse black hole of words.”
    “So the world is sucking you dry,” he said, “of language.”
    “Not dry. Not yet. But the words are flying out of me so fast, I don’t know where they’re coming from.”
    “And maybe you’ve run through your surplus,” he said gravely, “and now they’re made of bone and blood.”
    “Now they’re made of breath,”