In Progress Aeone

Decided on a title, didn't know how to edit it in, therefore, repost. I'd actually like feedback on this if you don't mind, I keep seeing the view count go up but not the post count. I'm always looking for opinions good and bad.



Nobody sits by Annie when she’s wearing red.

Annie is a wonderful friend. She is always available to give you a ride if you need one or help you complete any number of tasks and she can even tell you when the teacher is looking in your direction so you won’t get caught cheating from her work, and she doesn’t ask for anything in return, at least not directly, and even then only when she’s wearing red. On any other day she’s the center of attention, or at least never alone, because everyone wants to talk to her, and who can blame them? She’s beautiful, Annie, kind of short with black wavy hair, and the kind of smile that could light a room in a power outage if you really needed it to, between two full soft lips all under two deep brown eyes that you could just sit and exist in. She’s a wonderful friend to have. She always knows what advice to give and she can come up to a solution to any problem you could throw at her and she doesn’t ask anything from anyone and she never takes anything unless she’s wearing red. She doesn’t wear red too often. I used to count the days in between, eight, nine, ten, it was usually ten, though once it was twenty and another time it was only two days after the last time she wore red and we didn’t know exactly why so we were all a little more cautious, on account of what happened to Duchamp, the day she hooked up with him in the bathroom at lunch with her red scarf and all and he came out grinning and she looked all casual and as far as we can tell that was the last time any of us saw him, though with Annie there’s no real way to be sure except to trust her, which most of us do, because she’s been there for at least one major event for all of us, and many more than that for most of us. Duchamp hasn’t shown his face around this town since, which I suppose makes sense, since the official last person he had contact with was Annie and she was wearing her red scarf that day, which he didn’t consider because how would he know anyway, he wasn’t really one of her closer friends, he was mostly just a guy who thought Annie was attractive and thought he’d take a swing at her, and we’ve all had those thoughts before, we’ve all just known better than to act upon them with such a sweet friend as Annie, and especially when she’s wearing red. Charles Duchamp was officially reported missing around a week afterwards on account of his mom was a drunk and no one knew his father and you would be lucky to see him around school more than once a week if that and it would be alarmingly easy for him to disappear for a while, which people had assumed he’d done for even a few weeks after he was reported missing, except for me and my friends and Annie and her friends, who had all seen the red scarf and knew that it meant that today was a dangerous day to be a friend of Annie’s, and we would be a lot safer if we would limit our contact with her for just that day, and tomorrow things would continue on as they normally would and we could forget all about it until the next day we saw her wearing red. It’s easy to forget about it sometimes, because she’s such a wonderful girl, so beautiful and kind and smart and funny too—but it’s always at the back of your head, and you can force it away but it will come back and remind you that it’s there and we can’t get rid of it at all. It usually comes when she wears red. She doesn’t wear red very often, but when she does what she’s really doing is sending a message, which is really more like a warning that tells us that she wants something, that she needs something, and she knows that as her friends and especially considering all that she’s done for us that we would do anything to help her but the something that she needs is a something that we aren’t sure we can afford to give to her.

And that’s why nobody sits by Annie when she’s wearing red.

Nobody’s gone missing in a while, but we’re all aware of the possibility. Any contact with her when she’s wearing red is dangerous, because if she’s wearing enough red, that is to say metaphorically, if she needs it too badly, it’s dangerous to even look her in the eye sometimes, because you never really know what she could be doing at any given time even if you think you do, like when you’re talking to her you could actually be following her somewhere and you wouldn’t realize it until it’s too late, or at least we assume it’s too late, we’re not really sure what happens then. But we’re sure of one thing, and that’s that we could probably go our whole lives without finding out and that would be just fine with us. Some days she has someone take her phone because she’s afraid of texting us. It’s usually me; actually it’s always me, and that’s weird to me because I’m not one of the absolute closest people to her. Maybe that’s why it’s me, because maybe she knows that I won’t just give the phone back to her if she asks me nicely, or maybe it’s because I only have the two or three classes with her per quarter as opposed to her closer friends who have almost every class with her, but either way it doesn’t make sense to me because what can you do in a text besides talk? But there’s a lot about Annie I don’t understand, and that’s just fine with me, because after what happened to Schmoozy Suzi a year or so ago I won’t be taking any unnecessary chances.

Annie tells us her name is actually Aeone, and we have no trouble believing that. She won’t tell us where she’s from, though it doesn’t seem to come up in conversation much, but the name Aeone sounds Greek to me and she’s pretty pale so I don’t know maybe she’s from Greece. She also tells us she’s seventeen but given what we know about her and who she is that doesn't seem likely to us, or at least to me, but I trust her, Annie, because she’s never been anything but nice to me and she’s never done anything but good for me, except for if she had what she might have had to do with Suzi a year or so ago but even then it’s not as if me or anyone else hasn’t realized what could happen or wondered if it already has and they just don’t know about it yet, even if we did forget about all of the times she’s reminded us to keep people we know away from her when she’s wearing red.

Her personal life isn’t really something we discuss very much, and that always seemed weird to me so I keep trying to remind myself to as her about herself but I always seem to forget by the time I talk to her next. Just the other day I wrote myself a to do list in my planner for the day and just for no reason at all I wrote down, ask Annie about herself, and I looked at it before and after every class that day and every day besides and I got to lunch and sat down with the intention of following through but by the time I had the opportunity to say anything I had completely forgotten. I remember her looking at me like she was surprised that day too, but I can’t remember why. Actually that whole conversation is mostly blank to me, though I think we talked about the school’s football team and cheerleaders and things and I remember Lissie asking me if I had a date to Homecoming and I said no, not yet, but I’m looking and open-minded. I don’t remember if anyone said anything back and sometimes I wonder if I even said it at all. Having Annie as a friend is weird like that because you can never be sure of anything when she’s involved but at the same time you can’t help but trust her because she’s such a wonderful friend, Annie is, and no matter where you go it’s hard to find as good a friend as she is. But it’s weird.

A lot of times I wonder if it’s weird for everyone else in the group. Most of us except for me and like only a handful of others are girls, so maybe it’s a girl thing—well obviously it’s mostly an Annie thing because I’m absolutely certain that she’s the only one like her around but either way maybe it’s easier for girls to relate. I sure as hell can’t relate but I’m not a girl so maybe that means something.

I've been reading Go Down, Moses for English and I gotta say as hard as it is to understand I really love William Faulkner's style. Stream of consciousness is really fun to do. Anyway, that's where the style comes from with the enormous sentences and lack of punctuation and the whole second paragraph being over one Word page long in 11pt font.

The story itself was inspired yesterday by a shirt a friend of mine wore. I don't remember at all what was on the shirt except that it was black on very very dark grey and it had a little red on it somewhere. Anyway it gave me the first sentence and I ran with it. Every character so far has a real-life counterpart, at least in my head, there's a lot of creative licensing.

Feedback, C&C, anything will do, just please reply.

You just edit the starter post.
There should be a Title thing

there wasn't that I saw but it's no big deal anyway

This was cool. Very cool.

Your opinions on Faulkner's (never read him) style are mine on yours (you've emulated him well, it would seam)-it was, at times, hard to follow, but it had a vivid creativity to it that I read the entire thing and didn't notice time at all. I can't think of any one thing that was exceptional to this, but overall I know it was. The atmosphere and general creepiness of the whole piece was exceptional. Yes, Annie, Aeone, whichever, and her character, and how muddled the mind of the protagonist became, was picture-perfect nightmare fuel.

I loved every minute of it.

Thanks! Anyway for anyone who cares meaning Coroxn I've done more to the point where I feel like it's enough to post. Have at you!
____________________________________________


I think it’s safe to assume that anyone who sits at our table knows about Annie. Actually I guess if you want to be the most correct you would call it Annie’s table since every ten or so days she’s the only one that sits there. That’s not to say that everyone who talks to Annie knows about Annie; she talks to at least half of the school and most of the other half is wishing she would talk to them, and the more adventurous ones try to make that happen, but Duchamp sure as hell didn’t know about Annie and look where that got him. And sure, people walk by and say hi or talk to someone at Annie’s table but they usually don’t stay for lunch, so you can assume that everyone who sits at Annie’s table for lunch knows about Annie. Some probably know more than others, and if that’s true then I’m sure I’m one of those who knows less and that’s perfectly fine with me.

Sometimes I wonder why we’re still friends with Annie. I mean if someone you knew was arguably and probably responsible for the disappearance of at least two other people that you knew, you would think that you would keep your distance after that or at least have some sort of resentful sentiments about it. But I don’t, and as far as I can tell neither does anyone else. I wonder if that’s our fault or hers. It would make more sense the other way so I suppose if I were her I would try to make sure my friends didn’t hate me, too, and I guess nobody got hurt either way so I really don’t think I can blame her if that’s the case. I don’t think I could have it in me to hate Annie anyway because she’s been nothing but good to me. I’m not one to hate people anyway, I’ve only ever lost the one friend out of anger or anything and even then it wasn’t on my part, it was on hers because she didn’t seem to be able to be friends with anyone for very long and especially not after being in a relationship with them. But she was kind of a bitch so I didn’t care so much.

I’ve also lost a few friends to things like cancer and car accidents and stupid things they tried to do when they were drunk but they weren’t all that close to me. I like to consider myself as friends with everyone because it makes it easier socially, not to have a lot of drama to deal with and not fighting with anyone and not giving anyone a reason to say anything about me behind my back. That’s the way I like it. Seems to me people talk about me behind my back whether I like it or not but at least it can’t be anything really incriminating, seeing as I haven’t done anything incriminating at all ever except that one time I accidentally stole a pack of gum on account of I forgot to take it out of my pocket but even then I brought it back and came clean to the guy who just kind of laughed and let it go. Then he gave me a free stick of gum, which was nice. He’s got a kid at school I think, I mean it would make sense since he owns the little convenience store just like a block away and he has a kid so it would make a lot of sense for him to send his kid to the school a block away from where he works. I wonder if his kid’s met Annie. They probably have because it’s kind of hard not to. I hope she wasn’t wearing red at the time. She’s usually really good about avoiding people in general when she’s wearing red but then there’s those sometimes with the people like Suzi and Duchamp and some other people too, except Suzi and Duchamp are the only two that have gone missing and Duchamp’s the only one that was never officially accounted for.

It’s not like any of us really knew Suzi anyway, Suze Horner, or Horny Horner or Schmoozy Suzi as she was known as per her reputation as the easiest girl in school, willing to try anything with anyone for any reason and for no charge. She wasn’t shy, Suze, always hanging off of at least one different guy every week and never the same one twice in a row, though she sometimes revisited old hookups a few weeks apart. Even when she was Clevelanding, as we called it, she still had at least one other guy on the side and more often than not she was fooling around with a girl, too, and maybe that’s what happened to her, she tried to fool around with Annie when she was wearing red and that’s why no one’s heard from her in three years. Officially she moved to Alaska and the few friends that still talked to her after she slept around with all the guys in school just up and never heard from her again and as far as I could tell, and I wasn’t paying much attention anyway, but as far as I could tell they really didn’t care a whole lot. Or maybe they did but they didn’t know they did. Even as far as people go Suze wasn’t a real close friend of mine and we didn’t even talk much, but I still noticed when she wasn’t there and sometimes it still bothered me. I remember back in sophomore year when she was new and hadn’t cemented her reputation yet I was the first person to say hi to her and we hung out a couple of times. I could never tell if she wanted my nuts or not but she never got them either way because once she became known as the school’s whore every other guy with a libido wanted to talk to her and that was more or less okay by me. We went to the drive-in in the next town once just for the hell of it and they were showing the Matrix trilogy back-to-back-to-back. That phrase never made sense to me because if you’re back-to-back with something you can’t really be back-to-back with something else, unless you had two backs, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense. I suppose a turtle would have a stomach that works every bit as well as its back but a movie isn’t a turtle. Anyway I forgot my wallet that day so I had to ask her to buy the drinks and I never did get a chance to pay her back and now I guess it’s probably too late for that. I wonder if she really did move to Alaska, since her parents did come into the school and talk to the principal the day before they announced it. I remember because I was late for English and her mom recognized me from the one single time I met her as I was hurrying down the hall and I got sucked into a conversation about God-knows-what—hey, I’m fine, thanks, and you?, not much, a lot of work, you know, oh yeah, that’s right, how is that going? oh that’s too bad, I hope she’s feeling better, you don’t say! Alaska?, well that’s too bad, I’ll sure miss her, yeah, I gotta get to class, too, so I’ll see you later, well maybe not actually—then I stopped at the drinking fountain to calm my nerves, because I had seen Horny Horner approach Annie just the day or so before when she was wearing that maroon scarf, which after all isn’t really different from a red scarf at all, and we all knew what that could do to someone, and then I rolled up the end of my left sleeve that had somehow gotten water on it and powerwalked to class. Annie had saved me a seat, which was nice. She was wearing a green turtleneck and a gold chain with something on it that I couldn’t see because it was in the turtleneck, but either way it wasn’t red because it never clashed with her earrings, which were blue. Sometimes I feel sort of queer analyzing her entire wardrobe for no apparent reason except that I have an apparent reason, it’s just only apparent to a few people, most importantly me. It hasn’t exactly gone unnoticed by everyone, because my English teacher Mr. Biukowski sometimes tells me that he knows Annie’s real pretty and all that but I really should pay attention to the things he’s telling me because if there’s one thing he’s going to get through my head by the end of the year it’s this or that and sometimes the other thing too, it changes every day but mostly it’s been the difference between a phrase and a clause, which is that a phrase has either a subject or a verb but a clause has both which means it can usually stand alone. That’s easy to remember now because this one kid kept referring to independent clauses as dominating clauses and that’s the sort of thing that sticks with me the most, when people make idiots out of themselves because they think they’re funny. I do that a lot too but people actually laugh at most of the stupid things I say so maybe I’m not as bad as this that and the other kids.

We wrote a paper that day in English class. English class is my favorite class because a lot of my friends are in there with me and I always get to sit next to Annie and the teacher is really cool. Mr. Biukowski’s been to Japan and Africa and Scotland and all sorts of cool places, and he’s always got a great story to tell because he’s worked at other school where kids bring ice pick for self-defense and he got arrested once because he was speeding on a day where he accidentally forgot his wallet so the cop tried to look his name up but they had the name spelled wrong in the file so he went to jail and some guy offered him twenty dollars to do him a favor but he said no, thank-you. I would have at least wanted to know what the favor was out of curiosity but I suppose Mr. Biukowski was busy wondering how the police managed to spell Biukowski right but Frank wrong. The paper was only a couple impromptu paragraphs on whether we would have taken the blue pill or the red pill in the Matrix if we were Keanu Reaves. I wrote about the red pill, because I’m a person that’s big on honesty and I like to know what’s going on so I can be prepared for whatever trouble might come at me instead of everything taking me by surprise without any warning or anything, because I hate surprises. Now that I think about it though I’m not so sure.

And no replies, surprise surprise. Anyway, here's more; not sure if it's enough for a post but I'm doing it anyway.
_______________________________________________-



I’ve tried to remember everything Annie wears ever so that I can identify them faster and save myself some embarrassment. She’s got a lot of cool things that nobody else wears too much so it’s not too hard, like her gold top with the frills and one bare shoulder or the sort-of-like-fishnet leggings that have a neat flower pattern on them or the black-and-white sweater she usually wears in the winter or her white jacket with the faux fur hood lining. It makes it a lot easier on me when I can glance at her and be able to assess the situation immediately without ogling and feeling like a creep. It’s not like a hobby of mine or anything but it’s really a good idea to know what she has and whether or not it has red on it so you don’t slip up, because sometimes it’s really subtle and you don’t notice it until either someone points it out to you or you happen to be close enough to notice it yourself, but by then you could be too late so it’s better to just take note of things and keep track.

Sometimes she wears this dark gray shirt that almost looks black but doesn’t because if you look a little longer you can see actual black on it in some sort of design. Nobody knows what this design is, or at least I don’t because above the design right in the top middle of her chest is a red blotch of some sort and that means that I shouldn’t be too close, especially not close enough to make out a black-on-dark-gray design. It’s not something that runs through my mind constantly but whenever I see her wearing it I do wonder what the design is but I guess I’ll never know and putting it in perspective I’m okay with that. Maybe I’ll ask her sometime but probably not because it’s always nice to have a bit of mystery in your life, even when you have all the mystery that’s in our little circle of people it’s nice to have at least one solid thing that you just ponder that you actually have a choice not to ponder if you feel like it, which you don’t if you think about it like this because then you’d just be stuck with frustrating things that nobody can tell you even if you were sure you wanted to know.

You’d think that you’d rather not know at all what happens behind the scenes with a person like Annie, but to tell you the truth sometimes I really really want to. It’s like a completely different world out there with her and it’s mysterious and otherworldly, or at least that’s how I imagine it, because how would I know, nobody talks about it and I’ve never asked her about it because it probably makes her uncomfortable or something but there are so many questions that I would want to ask, like is she the only one and if so how did she get where she is and does she mind it and so many other things but at the same time it’s scary, because if I knew what was going on behind the scenes in this place and possibly in the whole world there’s no way I’d have any chance to stop it and that’s worse than a mystery you’d never be able to solve ever. If there’s one thing worse than everlasting pondering of an impossible riddle like the afterlife or higher power or things like that, it’s the truth that you know and that you know is bad and needs to be stopped but at the same time you’re powerless against it and you know you are and you feel terrible because you should try even if you know it won’t work but if you do you’ll look stupid for the rest of your life. Or dead. And nobody wants to look dead for the rest of their life, nobody at all. So they have to just live with themselves forever knowing that they’re either mindless automaton servants of the system and blind eyes to outrageous factors or they’re dead for as long as they live. Me, I have to live with the eternal pondering of the unsolvable mystery of whether or not I might have a sort of outrageous factor that I know I would be powerless against if it exists, and that’s as many as two of my least favorite things, in fact my two least favorite feelings in the world, and that’s terrible.

Life is all about having control over a well-defined set of options with a slow trickle of new options on the way but it can’t be too many because then you get confused or overwhelmed. I read that somewhere in some book a cartoonist wrote.

I like this :o)