You know what? I'm just going to post the workings of my next novel on here. If you choose to read it, fine. If not, that's okay too. But if you do happen to read it, would you mind giving me some feedback? Because that would make you just rock even more than I'm sure you, little anonymous xangan, already do. Be forewarned that it's pretty fucking long for a xanga entry, but not so long when you consider that it's the bare framework for a book.
Chapter 1
The name “Candra,” coming from the Greek, means “pure and chaste, virginal.”
Candra hated it.
Granted, it wasn’t as if she was particularly impure, other than a few slipshod encounters with Mike McKay in the 10th grade, which was dumb on her part. It was more that she resented the idea of having this particular burden placed upon her for the rest of her life- no matter what she actually did with herself, she would always continue to be Candra the Pure, Candra the Innocent, Candra the One Who Would Always Be Influenced By Her Staunch Catholic Mother and Continue In Path of Righteousness.
That was shit and she knew it.
She much preferred to sit quietly in the back of high school advanced classes, being the silent weird one amongst the pearl earrings and popped collars. She tended to give sneaky glances in the general direction of people she didn’t care enough about to dislike, and really only for the purpose of seeing whether or not she could make them uneasy, but not uneasy enough to say anything about it. She lacked the energy to fight with her twelfth grade English teacher, who informed her that she would never succeed in college because her essay on Randle Patrick McMurphy did not technically answer the proposed question, “Was McMurphy a good person or was he a manipulator of others? Explain.”
Sometimes people would see her on the swings in the park late at night, swinging away and sometimes humming to herself. But this happened rarely, because most people in that town went to bed at a reasonable hour. Sometimes people would see her making friends with the regulars at the 24-hour diner. But this happened rarely too, because normal kids went to house parties and restaurants that closed at 11 pm. Sometimes people would see her in the Salvation Army, and later wonder why she had taken someone else’s old shirt and painted poetry that no one bothered to read on her clothes. But that’s just because no one really cared enough about her to bother to read it.
She was really glad when she wandered into Zack and Sara’s lives one day. Zach tended to do that, just wander into people’s lives. It was a good thing. He had a beat-up old car from 1988 that was remarkable due to the fact that it was covered in spray-paint. He had painted song lyrics, pictures, his own poetry, random words that he enjoyed, quotes from movies, everything, in neon green and pink letters all over his car. People gave him funny looks sometimes too, but he just ignored them and figured they must be jealous because his car was so cool. He had a fabulous best friend named Sara, and they spent most of their time driving around in the car laughing out the window at everything they saw passing by them. They drove around and drove around and drove around, mostly late at night, and would take pictures of everything and talk about sex but always in the abstract and get hungry around 2 am and make friends with Steve the waiter at the 24-hour diner in the small town. They also thought it was really cool that they were best friends that had a pre-made best friend song, “Zak and Sara,” by Ben Folds, but they weren’t so uncool that they bragged about it to people. They just both thought they were the most hipster-slink-cat-jazz-riff-cool people, and planned to do it professionally one day.
Zach a fair amount of his time being bitter at the world. He was in the middle of a bitter rampage when he and Sara met Candra for the first time.
“Hello,” said Candra as she walked in her furry coat and pinstriped fedora to her favorite swing on the playground, walked right past two fabulous-looking-hipster-slink-cat-jazz-riff cool people sitting on the tires and then decided to say hello.
“If you ask me my name, I’ll bite your fucking head off,” said Zach, and then cordially extended a hand from the inside of his jean jacket that Sara had helped him make cool by safety-pinning patches from his favorite bands to the back.
“Don’t worry about him. He goes on bitter rampages about his name every once in awhile,” said Sara, shifting her polka-dotted skirt over on the tires as an invitation to Candra to sit. Candra thought about asking him what his name was, but then decided against it.
“I don’t like my name either, but that’s because no one else has it, and I have this stupid picture frame in my room with my name all spelled out in purple hearts and flowers and it’s meaning printed beneath it, and I can’t get rid of it because my grandmother would get offended,” said Candra, taking a seat and peering at them over the rims of her cat-eye glasses. They peered back. She liked that.
“I hate my name. You would too, if your parents were on crack when they named you.” Candra stared in confused horror. “Okay, they weren’t REALLY on crack,” Zack said, “But really, who in their right mind would name their child ‘Zack Jack Slack’ and try to get away with it?”
“I think I understand why you might have some issues with that,” said Candra.
Zack smiled. Candra smiled. Sara smiled. The swings creaked. They spent the night talking and laughing and realized that they could easily fit three in the front seat of Zack’s car.
Chapter 2
“I want a house with a balcony,” said Candra one day, as she was getting misty-eyed over the Target Christmas catalogue in their favorite coffee shop, even though it was only October.
“I want a house with a gigantic bathtub. Maybe the bathtub can look onto the balcony,” said Sara, getting equally misty-eyed over the happy family opening Christmas presents under the all-too perfect tree.
“I want a house where I can fling paint on the walls with reckless abandon and then put posters up on the walls and put holes in them or whatever, just because they’re MINE,” said Zach, paying attention to his coffee and not really thinking about Christmas, but only because he was on the opposite side of the table from the girls and the catalogue.
“Let’s do it,” said Candra.
“Okay,” said Zach.
They didn’t actually buy a house that day, but that’s because Candra had to work in the morning. However, they talked about it a lot, and began to pile things in Sara’s basement.
Sara’s parents were the coolest. Bernard was an ex-hippie who spent most of the seventies high on life and every kind of drug imaginable, and ran a jazz club in New York’s Lower East Side. He then spent a few years in the Merchant Marines sailing around the world, just talking to people and becoming fluent in Spanish and converting to Buddhism and writing fabulous poetry. He settled down a little when he met Carlotta, who was a classically trained opera singer who happened to love little Jewish-turned-Buddhist men who write poetry and love jazz. They were in Paris when they found out they were pregnant with Sara. Carlotta framed the pictures of her next to the Eiffel Tower pregnant with Sara in her belly, and put them in the living room. Paul wrote poetry about how beautiful Sara was as a baby, and then kept writing poetry as she grew older. He also was pretty good about reading to her whenever he wasn’t writing poetry or being a psychologist, which he got around to being eventually. She loved their little tiny house with its little tiny Buddha on the TV and her room that her parents let her paint by herself and therefore was purple with pink handprints on the walls and clouds that spelled “Sara” on the ceiling. She loved that her parents had a great collection of vinyl records, and she loved their little tiny kitchen where the stove clanked when you turned it on and there was never the kind of food that she wanted when she wanted it, so you had to go to the store or else just order food or go to the diner because no one ever felt like going grocery shopping. She loved that her parents snuggled up on the couch to watch stupid movies, and she loved that they trusted her to come home with her friends late at night, and didn’t care who stayed the night so long as they knew who they were and trusted them. As a result, Zack and Candra and Sara spent a good many nights in the basement pull-out couch, surrounded by all the things that they’d stockpiled for their house, as soon as they bought it and moved in.
Every time it was time for bed, the couch cushions would be piled on the fireplace in the basement that was never turned on, and the springs would have to be re-fastened to the frame so that it could hold the mattress up. They would pile pillows and blankets and the old unicorn sheet that was tattered but beautiful onto the bed and fall asleep in a giant tangle of arms and legs and wishful thoughts. In the morning, Carlotta would make coffee and Candra would always get the penguin mug and Bernard would take Hairy Harry Dog for a walk and they would pile in the spraypainted car, all three in the front seat, and go to school just to sit and observe and cope in their own ways. Zack spent it by staring people down and daring them to make comments on the nature of the combat boots or the spiked hair. Sara would fake like she was taking notes but actually be filling her sketchbook with whatever ideas came tumbling out of her head, and Candra would write down the dumb things that she’d heard dumb people say in order to laugh at them later with Zack and Sara. They thought that their system was pretty great.
They spent weekends driving at night as far away as possible, and buying hair dye at 5 am at the supermarket just so they could talk to the midget transvestite who worked there. The car never broke down, and they trusted it to never let them down. They drove into abandoned fields in the middle of the night and frolicked in the fields and stared at the stars and sometimes they had a few drinks but most often they didn’t because the ends were always the same- that they were just living life, high on one another and the way that grass smells after the rain and the way words just jump off a page like firecrackers that light up the sky when you read something really truly fantastic and want to repeat it for all you’re worth. They would drive and drive and sing to “Diamonds of the Soles of Her Shoes” by Paul Simon even though they wouldn’t tell people that, but it was just such a happy song for happy people. And sometimes they were sad because the world would just get them down and they didn’t know how they could live in a world populated by idiots and homophobes and racists and zealots and that they didn’t want to grow up to be their parents (at least Zack and Candra were vocal about this one) and they would do all they could to convince one another that they would never be that person that they most feared becoming because they were just so amazingly perfect together and nothing would ever stand in their way.
Chapter 3
One day, right after driving up the hill which looked over the small town and enjoying the sunset, they passed a driveway that none of them had ever noticed.
“Pull over,” said Sara. Zack had already started to do so.
They walked through a fantastic overhang of trees until they saw it- their house.
“Wow,” said Candra.
“Wow,” said Zack and Sara.
“What do you want?” said the crazy old woman.
They jumped at this. They had met crazy old women before, but never ones who snuck up behind them.
“We just love your house. We had never seen this driveway from the road before, and we just wanted to explore,” Sara said. She was about to say she was sorry for trespassing, but the woman cut her off and walked up the wraparound porch steps and into the door. She disappeared for about 20 seconds until she noticed that they hadn’t followed her.
“What are you waiting for?” the crazy old woman asked, and beckoned them inside, her white hair flopping about like dandelions ready to be wished upon.
Inside, it was even more slinkster-cool than either Zack or Candra or Sara could have pictured. There were curtains made of gossamer sheer purple fabric, that just perfectly matched the lilacs in a cracked vase made of chunks of old credit cards. A coat of armor guarded the entrance to the back porch, and the living room décor consisted of an old victrola, a mannequin decorated in sequined polka dots and a top hat, elaborate candelabras, and several old microphone radio stands, of the sort that Candra had seen in “Singing in the Rain.”
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” said the crazy old woman.
They hesitated for just a second, but just one.
“I guess we do, but then again, so are we,” said Sara. The woman smiled.
“That’ll do. Care for some tea?”
They sat around her kitchen table, which was actually a door that had fallen off its hinges and had been mounted on four completely different table legs which had been altered to the same length. They drank tea from chipped mugs and jelly jars and handpainted wine goblets and stared at each other and at the room around in them in fairly comfortable silence before any of them started to speak. When the woman did finally speak, she told them about her theory of aliens actually being humans from the future who had figured out how to travel through time and space, and how she was very close to being able to travel through time and space herself, as she had been building a time machine in her basement for the last 26 years. Zack and Sara and Candra listened, and nodded and agreed in the right places and asked all the right questions at the right time. The crazy old woman was happy about that, because she had a feeling that they would. They didn’t press her to find out why she was there or what her name was or if she had grandkids, they just wanted to listen to her stories. She liked that, which is why she was happy that they came to her kitchen to drink her tea, and was happy when they came again and again and just never stopped coming.
Chapter 4
Eventually, it was time for Thanksgiving, and Candra had to actually spend time at her house.
“Why don’t you spend time here anymore?” asked her mother. Candra wanted to tell her that it was because she hated the house, hated how her mother judged her, hated how her uber-Catholicism got in the way of having a rational conversation- but she didn’t. Instead she just shrugged and said, “I’ve been really busy.”
“Well, I’m cooking, and I would like some help, so I’d like you to be home for that.”
Candra didn’t have the heart to tell her mother that all she could cook, really, that pertained to Thanksgiving was mashed potatoes, but she didn’t. Instead she just nodded and straightened up the magazines littering the living room.
Candra’s house didn’t have a bed with faulty springs that hid in a couch, or a dog named Hairy Harry Dog, or a T.V. with a Buddha on it. It had mahogany furniture with Persian carpets and real fireplaces in which you could build fires and leather couches and decorated walls which a real decorator named Sandra had been paid to design. It had small statues of Mary and Jesus here and there, and books on Catholic parenting on all the bookshelves. It had a basement with hard cement floors and old tools and buckets of paint that had been left by the previous owners. It had rosaries scattered about, as if they had been secretly sneaking off to a corner and reproducing when no one was looking, and a desk in the kitchen for Candra’s mom to use the computer while she was cooking. Mostly, she just knew how to use email and would email priests around the world, because she had to find out what she should do about the thing that her house was missing.
Candra’s dad was missing.
He moved out on New Year’s Eve of her freshman year of high school, because he was having an affair with a nurse that he met when he was ten and roller-skating at a rink on Long Island, and then met again when she worked in the same hospital as he did. Candra was numb for awhile, then she didn’t talk to him for awhile, then she did talk to him and screamed at him and told him that she hated his guts. Eventually, she listened to him, and realized that he had done what she had always dreamed about- he moved out because he hated all the things that she hated about her mother.
The problem was that Catholics don’t like divorce. Ever since then, Candra’s mom had been spending a large portion of her time praying to God that Candra’s dad would come home and decide to be a happy family again. She told Candra every day to pray for her dad to come back. Candra didn’t even know what she believed as far as God was concerned, but she wasn’t about to tell her mom that. Instead she said, “okay” and secretly spent the time thinking about how her dad actually laughed now that he wasn’t in their house any more.
When she got depressed, she would find the scrapbook of notes from her childhood. When her dad was still in med school, he would leave for work every morning before she woke up. In the mornings, she would run downstairs and at the table would be a piece of paper with a cartoon character or a character from a book she was reading, and a speech bubble coming out of the cartoon’s mouth that said things like, “Good Morning, Candra! Love, Daddy and Tigger.” She would flip through the book and look at Cinderella and the Seven Dwarves and Eloise and Mary Poppins and tear up a little and then remember that her dad was laughing again. That was important.
But Catholics don’t like divorce. Therefore, her parents were still married, which was stupid, because they didn’t even like one another very much anymore. And Candra spent Thanksgiving with her mom, who cooked a gigantic dinner for the two of them, and then asked to be excused, and snuck upstairs to call Zack.
“Seriously, this is awful. I’m going crazy. I wish this was my dad’s year, only then I would have to see that nurse, and that might suck just as much.”
“Yeah, it was just my dad and Janice and myself here. Ew. Shoot me in the face,” Zack said. Janice was Zack’s stepmom. She was a former gymnast who ran the gymnastics center in town and would rent the building out for birthday parties. Zack didn’t like her almost as much as he didn’t like his dad, the conservative republican who had at one time procreated with his hippie mother who disappeared just after naming him Zack Jack Slack.
Candra started to get teary because she hated her house so much.
“I’ll be right there,” said Zack.
Candra jumped in the car with Tupperware brimming with her mother’s leftovers, and they picked up Sara, who explained to Bernard and Carlotta, and promised to walk Hairy Harry Dog later that evening. They drove and drove until they found the crazy old woman’s house, and microwaved the leftovers, and had Thanksgiving dinner on chipped china plates, all in completely different patterns. The crazy old lady liked the food very much. Zack and Sara liked the food too. So did Candra. Her mom might be a religious zealot, but she could cook. They had stuffing and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce from the can and pumpkin pie and leftover jambalaya from Sara’s house and red wine Zack stole from his republican conservative father and sweet potato fries and grilled cheese because that’s the food that the crazy old lady liked best, and, just for good measure, stuck a pumpkin in the center of the table that they found growing on the side of the road because they needed a thanksgiving centerpiece.
“Much better,” said Candra. Everyone else agreed, too. It was a pretty good Thanksgiving after all.
Chapter 5
High school was fraught with absurdities. Every week, mysteriously, the bin of newspapers would disappear almost as soon as the newspaper staff filled it, and the next morning, would contain all the papers, but with comments in red ink in the margins. The grammar and spelling would be corrected, but the real pleasure happened when the strange editor would attack the subject matter or the writing abilities of the authors. From time to time notes would be scribbled in the margins, “Dear Editor, It is highly recommended that you learn how to use a fucking apostrophe if you continue to publish this shit. The sentence, ‘All the cat’s are out of the bag,” just fills my heart with dread and makes me want to vomit every time I read it. Please call your third-grade teacher and ask her for a quick review session. Thank you ever so kindly. Sincerely, a loyal reader.”
No one ever knew who was behind all of this, but Candra would smile her mysterious smile and peer over the rims of her cat-eyes and count the days down until she could just up and leave everyone at this school behind forever.
Then again, some days she just couldn’t deal with the sub-mediocrity. She would sit in the booth at the diner and bring along her favorite notebook, the only one she bothered to bring to class any more, the one with the pictures drawn in pen and obscure poetry written on the cover, and she would record the most cringeworthy solecisms, hoping one day to become a Discovery Channel star going undercover in the dangerous jungles of a public high school, clutching a microphone and wearing a safari hat. “Crikey! There’s a freshman girl now who can’t tell a pronoun from an adverb!”
Zack and Sara would slide into the booth next to her and Steve the waiter would sit and laugh and bring them their orders of fries and honey mustard and coffee and water, and they would just laugh at their own surroundings because they had no other recourse.
“This was honest-to-god a fucking question on my anthropology test. ‘Language is a window on the world that has a glass that distorts the thing that the person is looking at. Explain.’ I didn’t even know how to deal with that one.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I actually heard one of the English department teachers saying, ‘That shows a complete lack of disrespect for someone else’s property!’ as she was disciplining one of the freshmen today.”
“I heard Mr. Marblemouth today say, ‘English is great language!’ and then he paused for a second, and then realized what he said, and then corrected himself: ‘I mean, English is NOT great language.’ No realization whatsoever that he is a complete moron and left fairly important words out of sentences about the greatness of the English Language- but he did manage to mispronounce ‘vocabulary’ only twice today.”
They would sit and drink coffee and laugh and plot for the day that all the assholes and the idiots were exposed and bemoan the state of the world and the educational system as a whole and Steve laughed with them and the crazy old lady did, too, when they told her the highlights later, and the notebook just grew and grew with stories that just made you laugh instead of crying.
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When I have time to continue, I will. Until then, please please please let me know what you think. Thank you. | 
