"The Doom Statues" - Chapter 5
Emily is uncertain about a great deal concerning her background. By all rights, she should probably be one of the snobbish popular girls. And even as things have always stood, most would probably agree that if not quite in the inner circle of the uppermost clique, she’s still not far removed from it. Yet she has conflicting emotions about all this anyhow, which might be factor enough, causing by itself exclusion from the high priestess clique. They surely don’t trouble themselves with these matters.
She’s quite aware that most of what popularity she does possess is a direct result of being a) one of the prettier girls - though speaking objectively as she can, if being candid she knows this is true - in her grade, b) living in the Threaded Oaks subdivision, the finest their small town has to offer, a result of her parents’ lustrous careers, c) involvement in all manner of school related and extracurricular activities, which is its own reinforcing feedback loop, in a way, stemming from the confidence and opportunities brought about by point b, continually increased the more she continues at it, with maybe a pinch of two of d) her intelligence, thrown into the mix, although even this is somewhat a byproduct of some previously listed factors.
And yet, despite all this, things hadn’t quite turned out how you would draw up the cliché. First off there’s the matter of her painting obsession, which manifested itself in substantial fashion somewhere around the age of six. While she supposes her parents are technically kind of artistic themselves in their chosen professions - her dad some kind of imperial tech wizard, her mother one of the area’s top two or three interior decorators - nobody on either side of the family, stretching back as far as anyone living is aware, has shown so much as an aptitude with stick figures, not until Emily’s arrival in this world. Her mastery of not just painting but a whole slew of other art forms is therefore one of the family’s treasured though perplexing delights.
Her tall, slender frame is also a bit of a mystery, and to a lesser extent her cascading falls of curly, bright blonde hair. True, her dad, Randy Garverick, does still maintain that basic shade himself, into his early 40s, although in his case it’s more of a wispy, often vaguely greasy, straight and ever so slightly orange tinted bowl cut that went out of fashion decades ago. To go along with his giant gold tinted, wire framed glasses which are also stylistically challenged, ditto his seemingly ever-present uniform of black dress slacks and long-sleeved white business shirt with some sort of ill-advised vertical striping pattern happening there.
Sure, without question he is a brilliant man, but even so, she has picked up far more genetically from her mother – yet that too wouldn’t seem to extend very far. Kathy Garverick does have a handful of inches on her husband, height-wise, granted, but she’s also a little more prone to maintaining some excess pounds. True, maybe this doesn’t bode well for Emily in later years, but her mom was never exactly skinny at any age, nor has Emily’s younger sister, Denise, ever been. And so even if already slightly taller than even her mother is, Emily did at least pick up the height gene there, and likewise a tendency toward social interaction, a breezy, inclusive chattiness, as well as the prevailing fashion sense of if not quite hippie attire – God no – then at least a fondness for wild, colorful schemes and loose fitting clothes.
Kathy is much more of a straightforward, networking extrovert, however. Emily considers herself a skilled mingler, as evidenced by her popularity with both teachers and fellow students alike, though she also feels more analytical and withdrawn, cautiously studying a scene more even while ostensibly taking part in it. If not coming anywhere near Randy’s rampant, introspective nerdiness, a trait which he blessedly has not imparted upon either of his girls, Emily is still capable of the odd Friday night where she’s ignoring every text and phone call (even those from Jeremy, although typically she’ll just tell him in advance not to bother, and he’s cool with it) in favor of blasting music in her attic bedroom while she paints.
Still, though Emily’s somewhat of an oddball within her family tree, nothing yet considered will even begin to explain Denise. Emily feels as though she’s mostly the complete opposite of her parents, and then Denise is the opposite of that, somehow, which doesn’t flip her back to the other side, rather into some other far flung realm.
Nobody really knows what happened with Denise. There are of course endless theories about everything. But in Emily’s estimation, her parents are neither too lenient nor too overbearing. At some point you maybe do have to chalk it up to just hanging out with the wrong crowd, with possibly a dash of some distant family tendencies thrown into the mix.
Shorter than their dad, even, her hair naturally a wavy shade of sparkly brown which she nonetheless has always hated, almost always straightens and dyes raven black. Denise also possesses by far the most alluringly curvy body of them all, too – even if she takes great pains to downplay this physique, both in dress and, Emily believes, a calculated effort at obnoxiousness which nonetheless, however accidentally, has bled into the real thing, after so much extended practice at it.
So the smoking and drinking at a very young age, yes, as well as a near total lack of interest in school, further enhanced by occasional suspensions from said school, up until she just completely dropped out. And then also a tendency toward boyfriends who were a little more on the thug end of the spectrum. Whereas Jeremy has always been a handsome, well-liked guy of roughly the same popularity as Emily, throughout high school and beyond, Denise continually displays far less interest in social ranking than even her sister does, and has definitely trolled downward from there in her selection of dudes.
Clay, her current find, actually might be the best of the bunch, so there’s always hope – and yeah, Emily suspects, as might her parents if they don’t want to actually vocalize as much, that Denise will someday outgrow these rebellious outcroppings and turn out just fine. But two or three major boyfriends ago she wound up pregnant, in the tenth grade, and if eventually making what was surely the correct decision in opting for an abortion, she sure worked everyone else up around her into a nervous frenzy, wringing her hands about it for an awful long time. Admittedly, her mom and dad handled this situation with considerable aplomb. They were much calmer throughout that ordeal than they have been about Denise’s decision to stop showing up for school, early into her senior year. Currently Denise enjoys a semi-pariah status, half crashing at Clay’s parents’ house, home some of the time, sleeping on the couches at various friends’ the rest.
Ever since stumbling onto that artist retreat the other day, Emily can’t stop thinking about it. While it does sound like a great opportunity for possibly advancing her own artistic pursuits, mostly she’s trying to think of a way to get Denise excited about it, too. Though losing interest in formally expressing such, at a very young age, Denise is actually pretty skilled with poetry, and even better with pencil sketches. She still fiddles with both, in her diary, or graffiti-esque bursts around town, on coffee shop bulletin boards, and so on, but prefers to keep it on the down low. If anyone displays interest in her work, she shuts down and as far as anyone knows won’t touch it again for a month. But this retreat, it could really reignite Denise’s creative side, Emily feels.
领英推荐
Like the story so far? Pick up the entire tale from your favorite store below!
And of course please stop by and check out my other sites!