Archive of Our Own ^beta

The books lied.

Girls wear insanity like dresses, taking them on and off, deciding which outfit works best and trading them in. The truly insane wore the compulsion like an undergarment, that final barrier, that hidden protection from a too frail psyche.

“You’re not as smart as you think you are,” Zelda says, applying a fresh coat of lipstick to her lips.

He goes to class drunk because that’s what everyone does these days. His notebook lies empty on the desk. Eyes half open in the harsh fluorescent light, and the professor’s words a dulling buzz in his ears.

Scott doesn’t need to learn how to write better; he needs to learn how to feel more. The Great American Novel isn’t written over weekly two page assignments; it’s the late night parties that cater to it.

“It’s Wednesday,” Ernest remarks, and Scott can hear the censure in his tone.

“I’ll be back before the first ray of dawn,” he says. Wants to say: remember freshman year when we made gin and tonics in our dorm room, and never slept because there was too much to do, and learn, and talk about? He doesn’t say any of it; it’s only been two years and Ernest has a better memory than he.

It’s only been two years, but to Scott it seems like a lifetime, caught in a civil war between his best friend and girlfriend. Ernest sighs and Scott can feel his disappointed gaze at his back.

University is about excess and drama, and Scott is determined to live his life the way it would be written in a book. It’s the experience, even if he can’t remember half of it.

“I hate you,” Zelda screams and throws her purse at his head. The purse misses, but its contents don’t—a tube of mascara hits him on the nose.

He doesn’t feel it connect, senses numb with alcohol. His lips are slick with lipstick that isn’t Zelda’s and everything is so bright and beautiful and fierce. Scott’s fingers itch for a pen to write down the words his mind can’t find. He grabs another drink instead and downs it. It doesn’t taste like anything, but the sour feeling in his stomach rises at an uncomfortable pace.

Someone’s hand is at his back, and Scott pushes his way to the front door just in time. Vomiting in the bushes is such a drunken cliche, he thinks, as the branches scratch at his chin.

Scott doesn’t know how he gets home. He has a vague impressions of Gertrude shoving him into the backseat of a cab and Ernest dragging him out of it.

“I can only write sober,” Scott slurs. There are words dancing around in his head, held captive by his fingers that can’t write them out.

“Well, then, you’re fucked.” Ernest manhandles Scott, dumping him onto sour-smelling, sweat-stained sheets. In the morning Scott will be quietly impressed; Ernest usually leaves him in a lump at the bottom of the stairs.

“I’ve never seen two people so ill-suited for each other,” Ernest says, throwing a packaged square of spinach over his shoulder. Scott catches it one handed.

“I love her.” He holds icepack to his jaw, wincing as it touches.

“But will you respect her when she’s thirty?”

Scott considers the question seriously. “Do you think I’ll live that long?”

Gertrudes slides into the seat next to him which is unusual enough, and slightly too complex for Scott’s hungover brain to handle.

It’s his first class of the day so of course Scott hasn’t done the reading. He barely even remembered to grab his notebook this morning, and finding a pencil is a lost cause. Gertrude hands him a pen, and Scott takes it even though the thought of writing notes makes his head spin.

She doesn’t even look hungover and he hates her a little.

“How are you so fucking awake,” he grumbles. The pen’s ink is cobalt and it writes smoothly. He has no clue what the professor is talking about, so he just dates the page and hopes for the best.

Gertrude eyes him for a minute, taps her pen against her lip. “It’s called moderation. You should try try it.” She shifts in her seat, looks straight ahead, taking notes, and doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the class.

Scott makes a list of bullet points that he has no intention of filling in.

Zelda doesn’t eat. Zelda doesn’t sleep.

It is 3am, and Scott watches as she dances her way across his bedroom floor.

“Dance with me,” she laughs. Scott shakes his head, even as her arms beckon him and pull him off the bed. His notebook falls to the floor, blank pages crinkling.

Capturing Zelda like this is impossible in words. And not for the first time, Scott wonders if he should take up photography. If the click of the shutter could capture everything his words cannot: the graceful weightlessness as Zelda sways, movements lit by the warm light of a desk lamp, and mirrored by her shadow on the wall, the squint of her eyes from where her contacts have grown dry. They twirl across the floor, his fingers between the notches of her spine, and her arms draped around his neck like a lifeline.

Vaguely Scott knows that it’s raining, and his shirt is unbuttoned, and there used to be a mixed drink in his hand. It’s the time between then and now that has been lost.

“Well maybe if you knew how to fuck it wouldn’t be a problem,” Zelda screams. She’s drunk, and so is he, and they are on the front lawn of somebody’s house, surrounded by snickering friends.

The time between entering the party and now is a blur. Scott tries to reconstruct, but everything is a blur of shadows and dampness, so he gives up. “Don’t blame me for your issues. Fucking is the least of your problems.”

He wakes up in his bed with no recollection of getting home. Zelda’s asleep beside him, sheets pooled around her waist and an angry bruise on her shoulder. Scott rolls out of bed quietly and carefully grabs a pair of sweatpants lying on the floor.

The bedroom door creaks a little as he opens it. It’s too loud for his aching head, but Zelda doesn’t move and Scott’s grateful for it. Zelda doesn’t do mornings. It feels like bits of gravel are embedded in the bottom of his feet, and he winces as he pads down the hall and toward the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

The coffee is almost worth the judgmental look in Ernest’s eyes.

“You need to break up with her,” Ernest says, tossing him a bottle of painkillers. Scott swallows one dry.

He’s failing math, and his literature scholarship ends in June and Scott can’t sleep at night because he still can’t find the words he needs.

Zelda keeps a diary. He finds it in her dufflebag, wedged between a pair of torn pink tights and a crumpled geology test from freshman year. If Scott was a better person he would ignore it and continue searching for a spare pen. But he’s not a better person; he’s desperate and jealous.

Scott isn’t proud of it but—he takes the pages from her diary. The lights are dim at the back of theater. Scott kicks his feet up on the row of seat in front of him, hiding the diary in his lap as he copies down the words. Bitterness welling up in his throat because Zelda’s letters loop across the page with frank originality and on stage her body moves to a language that is all its own.

He tucks the diary back in it’s place when he’s finished; kisses Zelda on the cheek when practice lets out, ignoring the stolen words weighing down his messenger bag.

There’s a party that night, but Scott begs off. Ignores Zelda’s pouting and the almost proud look Ernest throws him when refilling his cup of coffee. He stays in his room, door locked and phone silenced, adding characters to the quotes lifted from Zelda’s diary and fleshing out a plot to string the scenes together.

He slips a manila envelope full of neatly typed pages underneath his advisor’s door an hour before the deadline.

Another party. Ernest is in the kitchen holding court, and keeping the good liquor hostage. Scott’s been left in the living room with the cheap stuff-- not that anyone minds. It’s a quarter to two on a Friday night and everyone is multiple drinks past tipsy.

They sneak up to his room once the conversation grows stale.

“What are you most scared of?” Scott lazily runs a hand down Zelda’s side, fingers tracing each protruding rib, the swell of her belly, an angled hip.

The room is dark; they’d been in too much of a rush to bother with with flipping a switch. The only way he can read her is by touch, the truthfulness a byproduct of intimacy.

“Genetics.”

Scott makes an inquiring noise, runs a finger down her forearm.

“My sister is a basket case, my father had a nervous breakdown, and my brother committed suicide,” she says flatly. It’s always a performance when Zelda talks: hands, face and voice. But in moments like this, with no one looking, she’s truthful; her voice matter-of-fact and lacking inflection. Scott doesn't know which version he prefers best.

“I’m scared of myself,” he offers. A truth for a truth, that’s how they play the game.

Zelda rolls over, hand grasping his jaw. Her breath stinks sour of alcohol and disappointment and starvation. It’s too dark to see her. “I know.”

“I’m scared for you,” he whispers. She doesn’t answer, just pulls him close and bites his lip.

Ernest enters the kitchen, sees Zelda sitting on the counter and turns to leave.

“I don’t think he likes me,” she mock-whispers. She’s holding an ice-cream carton, though Scott doesn’t know why since she doesn’t eat.

“You’d be right.” Ernest doesn’t turn around, shoulder knocking against the doorframe in his haste to exit.

Zelda pouts at his retreating back. “I don’t know why you’re friends with him. He’s such a sourpuss.”

“He’s my best friend,” Scott corrects, stealing the ice-cream from her and helping himself to a spoonful.

She scrunches her nose at him and aims a leg at his shins. “You know what they say about keeping your enemies close.”

Scott moves out of reach—her toe nails are just as ridiculous as those high heeled shoes she wears—and helps himself to another scoop of ice-cream. “And you think he’s an enemy?”

Zelda kicks her feet against the cabinets. “I don’t think he’s a friend.”

The essay gets published in the university literary magazine. Scott should have expected it: a literature scholarship and a literature magazine, a disclaimer form he never read. It’s still a shock seeing his not quite words—Zelda’s not quite story—printed in high gloss.

He imagines it’s quite a shock for Zelda too.

“You read my diary.” She throws the offending object across the room, and it hurtles past his head. Scott ducks and it sails over his shoulder hitting the wall behind him. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Her lipstick is smeared, and hair pulled into a lopsided bun. She rubs at her nose furiously with one hand, and Scott can see the traces of tear tracks on her cheek. “I don’t go around broadcasting your words to the world. Or maybe you’re just so dull that originality is a novel concept.”

Everyone in the house can hear her, he is sure.

“Don’t be like that——” he says, opening his arms placatingly. “It was a bit of artistic inspiration is all.”

She spits at him and leaves. The door bangs shut behind her.

“That could have gone better,” Ernest says afterward, mixing martinis in whisky glasses. He pushes a glass across the kitchen table and Scott takes it gratefully; he’s frightfully sober.

It’s the most alive he’s felt in months.

He waits outside the theatre with lilies and peonies; she had once told him roses were too cliche.

Zelda accepts the flowers, but not the apology.

“There are plenty of pretty girls in the world.” Ernest should know.

Scott doesn’t look up from his essay. “They aren’t Zelda.”

“Your faithfulness endears you,” Ernest says dryly. Neither mention the girl in Scott’s bedroom who isn’t Zelda.

“She needs someone to take care of her,” he tries to explain to Ernest. They’re nursing glasses of gin and tonic, that are really mostly gin, and watching a wildlife special on lions in Africa.

Ernest waits until the lions are feasting on a bloody gazelle before answering. “You can’t even take care of yourself.”

He buys her a fancy designer label purse that he can’t afford with his student loans which he also can’t afford.

She dedicates a ballet piece to him: complex steps, pirouettes and melancholy.

“Gertrude says we have a mutually destructive relationship.” Zelda loops an arm through Scott’s as they walk across campus.

“I wasn’t aware you cared what she thought.” He guides them around a puddle left by last night’s rainstorm, steadying her when she wobbles on stiletto heels.

“I don’t,” Zelda sniffs as though the thought is offensive. It could be; Gertrude had written a glowing editorial for the lit magazine in response to Scott’s essay.

“Then why did you mention it?”

She grins at him, sharp and impish. “Because it’s a horribly romantic thought, isn’t it?”

Her eyes are hidden by large sunglasses, and there’s a plastic bottle filled with cranberry juice and vodka poking out of her bag. She’s the most lethally beautiful thing Scott has experienced, and his fingers tap against the soft inside of her wrist like he’s typing out a love letter no one else can see.

Zelda kisses him in her room. She hasn’t packed, dresses and shoes scattered about. “Come visit me this summer,” she requests. “We’re going to Paris.”

Scott’s never been able to say ‘no’.