Work Text:
Liminal spaces.
That’s what schools were meant to be after hours, right? Spaces not in their usual state, spaces in the in-between, spaces you feel like you’re not supposed to be in.
That’s what he feels when he walks through the empty corridors of Trucy’s school. And the feeling is amplified when he himself has been out of grade school for well over a decade, and only visits his daughter’s when it’s standing on the front steps to give her a hug and a forehead kiss for an 8:30AM goodbye or a pair of the same for a 3:30PM hello. Well, there was that one other time he’s been inside; a few months ago on Trucy’s first day. But it had been populated, other kids running around halls and bouncing off walls with too much vigor and not enough motor control for him to have sufficient presence of mind to philosophise how liminal the space had felt to him then, and Trucy, not used to the environment nor the sheer amount of other kids in it, had been clinging so hard to his hand that it had hurt.
He remembers not telling Truce to loosen off, though. Maybe it was because he appreciated the distraction her clamp of a hand was providing him- god knows he was probably more shit-scared of her first day at school than she was- but it was definitely because he’d been much the same on his own first day of elementary school; his whole body, not just his hand, feeling like a stubborn barnacle stuck to the hull of his mom’s side. And he remembers, the second his mom had told him to let go, he’d merely diverted to clenching his own fists instead, until they too had hurt, and he’d then subsequently spent his whole first period distracted by the little half-moon shapes his nails had dug into his palms. Crescents. He hadn’t known the word for them back then, but they’d fascinated him nonetheless, earning him the very early reputation of being the class daydreamer.
Q.E.D., probably, because he’s suddenly aware that he’s reached what he’s ninety percent sure is the final hallway on his journey to Trucy’s classroom.
There’s a classic solar system display running along the wall, complete with- huh, go figures, a crescent moon- and the Sun, and the Earth, and the all other planets, all of them sitting like little ducks in a row, in an order he’d once had committed to memory with a funny mnemonic but has now long forgotten. Something about a Very Easy Method. That’s Venus, Earth, and Mars, at least. He stops to study them, and wonders if Trucy’s painted any of them. They look like they’ve been painted with the enthusiasm of a school kid- overly-saturated colours thanks to an eye for whimsy over accuracy, and a limited colour palette thanks to a state school budget- and so they’re definitely not staff-made, at least.
Trucy hasn’t brought home much art from school yet, which is a shame, because the fridge is looking bare. But he supposes she is eight, and she’s in proper school now, where the kids only bring home arts and crafts they’ve made in school during holiday periods, like Christmas time. Christmas is soon, actually. That means he hopefully doesn’t have long to wait to look forward to a Santa with cotton wool balls for a beard, or a Frosty the Snowman with pipe-cleaners for arms, or whatever Christmas crafts the health and safety laws still allow kids to make these days. Maybe they’ve deemed pipe cleaners a choking hazard by now. Larry had nearly managed to swallow one back in fifth grade, and Trucy’s only in third. Then again, that was Larry.
And putting Larry’s bad decisions to one side, he’d like that. To have Trucy’s art adorning the fridge; the walls. Signs, accumulating, of her time with him. It would make him feel more like the role he’s trying to fill, and less like he’s filling a role he’s not supposed to. Less like an in-between.
Less like a liminal space of a father.