Torsade Literary Space Yoharie (part twenty)
Yoharie
Savannah
(part twenty)
Mostly people were in their world, they were fake, and you hated talking to them. You’d be like, “Hey, awesome!”
You’d get thx. A poor lil heart.
Yeah, bitch.
If Savannah still wrote essays for the Oppressors, she would work in all the full-grammar English her Mom could wish. She would buckle down. What Dad said.
“Buckle what?”
Savannah joked, but it was always the Pained Look these days. Her father, who wanted her to wear makeup like a girl, had got lost when she started wearing makeup like a goth. She peered in the tablet’s black screen, until it woke and lit. She tapped the camera and studied herself in color.
Maybe she should let her eyebrows grow back.
“Easily, they won’t even.”
Rae, always cold. Cold lil bitch. Savannah admired that in her kid sister. No stopping Rae. They could be friends. They just weren’t.
I’m the loser.
She pushed back her chair. Something caught under the wheels…her black sweater, fallen off. She jerked the thin lambswool out of the metal. She didn’t say fuck. She said fuck for Kate and Jer. She would have to tear that sleeve more until it was falling off, then not say anything.
“Oh, what did you do to your sweater?” On the word sweater Mom’s voice would pitch up.
Savannah pictured bright pink yarn, Frankenstein stitches. That would be weirder.
You were supposed to picture (for this “biography”), that you’d become whatever it was people who knew what they were going to major in in college knew they’d be doing for the rest of their lives.
Jer didn’t have any college degree, too bad.
Kate had told her, “Maybe OSU. Not Penn. No way L.A. Not unless you take the SAT again.”
Never in life.
Savannah Hibbler: Female Assassin. Savannah Hibbler: Doctor of Death. Savannah Hibbler: Dictator for Life.
She used glitter pens.
She drew a skull wearing a tiara of flowers.
She said, “Jesus!” out loud, and rolled her eyes.
She glaive lies… Did she? Fucking stick-on nails. Stylus…stylus…
She began life as a normal girl.
Then those people came.
Savannah felt bad for Valentine Yoharie. He had moved in with his dad…that was sweet, wasn’t it? Poor Mr. Yoharie. Sweet Dawn, too. Snooty Giarma…
I wish I had all her stuff.
20
Val had dropped out of school, decidedly awesome. He was goth, too, sort of—spiky tri-color hair and thick liner. Covered with a cap, uppers only, when he rode his bike off to work. Unbeknown, he was a Hibbler house example of what weird kids turned into, shitty at their studies, filming in their heads…
Getting BFAs. Dad joke: burger and fries
Unbeknown. She subscribed to Trevor’s blogs because her father hated him.
She bent to type, using Totem-speech. I would not have asked to be born
A freaking Hibbler.
At Roberta Witticombe’s blog, she looked with envy. So much Femme power; so much crafty-gardeny. If you were friends with the professor down the street, maybe she’d be your priestess and tell you how to get in.
Like, donors’ kids, they get in. Like, if my father was someone completely different, and had an Oscar, or my Mom, and I could stand going back on Instagram, and everyone would say, her work is
Promising. Reflective of a perspective both informed and
fresh-eyed
(Fresh-eyed, Savannah! Can you be fresh-eyed?)
But come on, Roberta, you don’t always have to follow rules, everyone knows it.
“I am an experimental archeologist. I can’t recommend you for film school.”
Someone posting on Roberta’s blog had put up a link, and a picture—a plate of mini bunt cakes. Drip icing, dusted in purple sugar, each with a sugared flower, a candied violet.
Seriously? [someone wrote] Just like the ones in the yard?
Check out the link! Easy-peasy.
Yeah…but it’s the peasy that gets you.
You could make things…learn faultless technique, like Martha. People would say, “Oh, that’s so great! Can you make one for me?”
It would be a whole thing to do for a living. And you could leave right away.
21
Yoharie
Yoharie (part twenty-one)
(2019, Stephanie Foster)