someone who belonged in the story.
“What the hell are you trying to pull?” Julianne looked angry. She really was turning into a bit of a diva these post-narration days.
“What?” said Libby, bewildered and innocent, her best emotions.
“That italicized crap at the top of this section! Was that from the damn dictionary? It was! It’s freaking Webster’s, isn’t it? Are you trying to make a mockery of my poignant and intellectually stimulating tale? I don’t believe you! What right do you have? The stain of experience weighs heavy on my pen and I know how to use quotes to actually enhance the story! Quoting material just for the sake of quoting material . . .” Libby tried to fight the glaze instinct and finding herself losing, interrupted Julianne’s rant with a weak apology. Excusing herself and promising to find her own original way to transition between scenes, she began to walk away quickly, fairly certain that the content of her story did not lie in the debate of her style. She ducked behind a familiar information board and stopped to catch her breath.
There was something nagging inside her now, an approaching sense of urgency that took a little bit longer than usual to ignore. She wanted to hide from it in the narrative. Once her story got started, things would just take care of themselves, she hoped. So she began to walk all the quicker to Leslie’s room.
It seemed that the other boys on Leslie’s hall had decided to play a joke on him, for the doorknob of his room was tied tautly to the doorknob of a locked closet across the hall. Since his door opened inward, this would make it impossible for him to open the door unless by pure brute strength he could break the twine. Thus the skinny weakling would be trapped there until his hall mates judged their trick served.
Though seemingly cruel, to Libby, this seemed the logical way to treat someone like Leslie. He was the sort of person she imagined didn’t exist beyond homework and attending class. He was hardly human in her mind, an inconvenient smudge of unpopularity that she had to address now only because he was the only other character left that she had not interacted with and she was still quite without a narrative. She was mildly annoyed that she had to take the extra step and untie the door before entering.
The opened door found Leslie, clad only in that infamous towel, hopping around his rooms, shadowboxing. Libby quickly averted her eyes, terrified that the hopping action would cause the towel to expose more than she ever desired to see of Leslie’s nether regions. She cleared her throat and he stopped, glanced over his shoulder and upon seeing that it was only she, returned to his boxing.
“What are you doing?” she said, hand shielding eyes, hoping the gallons of disgust she poured into that question had saturated it sufficiently.
“Getting psyched,” Leslie panted impatiently between hops. “Big scene coming up.”
“Riiiiiiight . . .” There was a long pause as Leslie hopped and Libby fumed, unable to imagine what gave this dweeb the audacity to not give her his full attention. She’d seen Leslie stammer shyly when speaking to Julianne, what made him so damn confident around her?
She was about to give up entirely and just figure out the rest of the story on her own, when Leslie began to sing the opening measures of Eye of the Tiger loudly on the syllable of “do” to compliment his boxing. This being the final insult, Libby spun back from the door.
“So,. it’s supposed to be my turn now but I have no narrator and no clue what is supposed to happen and you are the only character I haven’t interacted with yet so if this is what the story is supposed to be like please tell me! What the hell does you in a towel have to do with MY story?” she blurted.
Leslie suddenly stopped with his back to her and leaned over, hands on knees, (causing the towel to travel terrifyingly higher) and turned his head to really look at her for the first time.
“You really don’t know what happens?” Libby nodded in the negative and Leslie began to smile. It was as if he was trying desperately not to laugh at her and his face started to turn red with the effort. He averted his eyes and coughed to cover. Like she was too stupid to notice. He composed himself and looked at her.
“Well, that really sucks. . .” The sentence had begun as if it was going to be understanding but the end found Leslie silently laughing to the point where he couldn’t breathe. In frustration and inexplicable nervousness, Libby spun around on her heels and marched out of the room, pausing only on the way out to retie the twine on the door. As she walked away, she heard Leslie through the door, talking to someone about her through loud laughter.
“I know I shouldn’t laugh, Juls, but she doesn’t know what she’s heading towards! She wants to tell her story. Don’t you love that! HER story? I mean, does she actually think that she is an important character in any of this? You had to see her . . .” But she was down the hall and never heard the rest.
Her thoughts raced and she darted outside. She began to really wish that she had been paying more attention this whole time. What the hell was going on? How did they expect her to do what she was supposed to do in the story if no one told her what happens? Why was she, Libby Whatever, rising theatrical star, and one of the most popular people in the theatre department, being talked down to and ridiculed behind her back? And why was she suddenly so damn scared? She found herself pacing back and forth in front of the information board that used to be Bill.
Controlled conflict. That’s the way to go, she thought to herself. This would all have been so much easier, if I had just had a damn narrator from the beginning.
“Why couldn’t you just narrate?” Libby leapt back at the voice, her eyes darting defensively to the information board to seek the source of Bill’s voice. But the board was still just a board and the voice had originated from Bill himself, who was standing in front of her looking a little less frantic, but frantic none the less. He waited for her to respond and when she greeted him with only a blank stare of shock, he spoke again as if repeating, “You needed a narrator. So, why couldn’t you just narrate your own story? Eugene, Leslie, Julianne, they all told their stories. Why not you?”
“I think ... I don’t know...must have been a style choice,” Libby said weakly.
“That’s what they want you to think! But that can’t be why. You can’t be the narrator because of the end. It’s the only explanation. Which is why you must stop it! The narrative must not unfold. The tragic and senseless waste of character. Your big scene! Together we can rewrite the end!” Silence. “You do know, don’t you?” Bill paused for a moment and suddenly his eyes widened with realization. “By the genres! You don’t know the ending, do you?”
“No! OK? I don’t know the ending. I never got around to reading the other stories. I’m sorry! I don’t understand why everybody is making such a big deal out of this! I don‘t know what I‘m supposed to do! Nobody seems to want me to tell my story because nobody will help me . . .” Libby’s yell began to morph into a whine and soon she was sobbing and complaining loudly, yet Bill was oblivious and just talked quietly to himself.
“For the love of passive voice! It never occurred to me that she didn’t know. How could she not know? Is the story repeating itself? Caught in a loop? The other characters are aware of their role. It isn’t even fresh for them anymore. How could she ever forget that end after having lived through it? Blocked out the memory? Or maybe that’s because there is always a new one . . . Zounds! She is perhaps only the third in a long line of Libbys lined up for the slaughter! Maybe every time the tale is told she dies anew. Martyr!” He had worked himself up into a frenzied pitch by the end of his speech and his last word came out as a desperate cry directly to Libby, causing her to stop her loud sobs and hold her breath in terror.
Bill looked around him nervously, searched for escape and then grabbed Libby’s arm and attempted to pull her away. Being the same size as her, however, he succeeded only in annoying her. She pulled her arm away forcefully and he hit the ground.
“What’s going on here?” The voice belonged to Julianne, who laden with textbooks and ob
viously on her way to class, glared at the grounded Bill with a very hazardous look. “He’s not in this story,” she said cold and dangerously.
Bill jumped from the ground and stared across Libby at Julianne. “Murderer!” he cried. Julianne never took her eyes from Bill’s but said coolly to Libby,
“We’re going to be late for Constantine’s class. I just wrote a great play, Libby. I’d love for you to star in it.” It was a challenge.
There was silence. A tense and pregnant silence, broken only by a weak sniffle from Libby. She turned to look at Bill on her right and Julianne on her left, both poised for battle and realized that the time for choices was now. Bill had told her to resist the narrative while Julianne had just clearly challenged her to assume her role in the story, whatever that may prove to be. There was something about the way Leslie and Julianne looked at her, something that made her feel like a mouse near a cat licking its lips. But now there was something familiar there too. A sense of belonging. Of duty. So, Libby made her choice.
“Really? I can’t wait to read it. Tell me all about it on the way to class.” She shot the sugary toned comment directly at Bill and his jaw fell. He dropped to his knees, suddenly the outsider, looking less like he
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