LJ Idol Entry: Week 20: Intersubjectivity
Sep. 9th, 2014 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThis was written originally to be a companion piece to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bookishgeek's piece, but she doesn't seem to have submitted one. :-(
So-o-o, basically we'd interpreted "intersubjectivity" as mental telepathy! :-) This was intended to be a YA story about two kids who discover they have a telepathic bond.
---
The bookstore was in a strip mall on the very edge of town. The Hidden Door, it was called. From DeWitt Clinton Middle School, you had to take the Q-37 bus to Genesee Street then transfer to the F-14, which took you past fast food joints, cheap furniture stores and auto supply warehouses.
Matthew could hardly believe that Martina George, the reclusive author of A Song of Thrones, was doing a reading at such an obscure location in a town that was the second-to-the-last stop on the caravan to nowhere, but there it was on the author’s website: 2:30 p.m., on November 13th… Odysseus, New York.
It would mean skipping out from school during lunch period. Matthew liked school. But he liked A Song of Thrones better.
And school these days was not quite the sanctuary it had once been. Middle school was… complicated. Old alliances had shifted. New enmities had formed. The gang Matthew had been hanging out with steadily since his kindergarten days was no longer intact. Toby and Ryan had discovered Pop Warner, girls, and jacking off – not necessarily in that order. Matthew had nothing against football, masturbation or members of the opposite sex, but they were not necessarily priorities. He worried about that sometimes.
His elementary school had been only one of several that fed into DeWitt, and there were a lot more kids there. Kids with whom he had no history. Kids who only knew him as a shy, bookish boy who was good at things like physics and horses that most kids were not, and bad at things like talking about movies, music, and clothes that most kids were. It was embarrassing: The kids that picked on him the most were girls. Eloise and her gang.
The November wind was cold. Matthew huddled at the bus stop, pulling his hoodie up over his head, wondering what he would say to the bus driver when that adult asked the inevitable question, And why aren’t you in class, young man?
But the bus driver when he finally arrived, 18 minutes behind schedule, didn’t seem to show the slightest interest in the fact that Matthew was skipping school, and Matthew realized he had somehow slipped into another dimension, outside the realm of nervous hovering parents, slick pastors, laudatory teachers, encouraging coaches, where adults didn’t really give a fuck about what he did. It was exhilarating. But scary, at the same time. A little like listening to hip hop.
Matthew grabbed a seat by the window. Familiar landmarks through the windows of the bus loomed weirdly. He cleared his mind and played that game he always played at airports on family vacations, in crowded school hallways, or whenever he got dragged into rooms filled with strangers, following the strictures laid out in the third volume of Song of Thrones, when Eshtar the Hijra instructed Flip, the girl-boy hero, on how to connect with ambient telepaths floating about the region.
You use the Rituals of Samsafar to clear your mind, Eshtar intoned. You bait your mind with interesting thoughts about yourself and cast it out.
Matthew closed his eyes and thought.
Yo! I be Matthew Rice
My life’s a splice
Sometimes it’s bleak
When it oughta be nice
It’s so complicated
Ta feel so obligated –
You call that rap? came words in his mind. I call that bullshit. A vision of six snorting pigs flashed against his mind.
Matthew startled so hard that his head banged against the bus window. An old lady fingering rosary beads in the handicapped access seats two aisles away stared curiously at him.
Ouch! said the voice in his mind. Cool it with the self-harming, loser.
In Song of Thrones, when two telepaths discovered one another, they smelled something. The Aura of Intersubjectivity, the learned magicians at the Court of the Wandering Medina called it. In the books, the smell was described as a noxious odor that was somewhere between swamp gas and roses.
But Matthew didn’t smell a thing.
What the fuck? he thought.
The hell if I know, came the reply. You’re the one who pushed your way in. I was just sitting here practicing deep meditation techniques. Like Prowler in A March Through Madness –
Volume Two! thought Matthew. Song of Thrones!
Caution and bewilderment had a mental color. Somewhere in the blue scale. You know those books? Love and reverence had mental colors, too, and a texture like somewhat like the overlapping petals of a deep pink rose.
The voice in his head had an immediacy like it was coming from somewhere very close. Matthew turned around to scan the back aisles of the bus.
There. Sitting in the farthest corner. With a hoodie pulled down over her head that was a perfect twin to his own.
The dreaded Eloise.
bookishgeek's piece, but she doesn't seem to have submitted one. :-(So-o-o, basically we'd interpreted "intersubjectivity" as mental telepathy! :-) This was intended to be a YA story about two kids who discover they have a telepathic bond.
---
The bookstore was in a strip mall on the very edge of town. The Hidden Door, it was called. From DeWitt Clinton Middle School, you had to take the Q-37 bus to Genesee Street then transfer to the F-14, which took you past fast food joints, cheap furniture stores and auto supply warehouses.
Matthew could hardly believe that Martina George, the reclusive author of A Song of Thrones, was doing a reading at such an obscure location in a town that was the second-to-the-last stop on the caravan to nowhere, but there it was on the author’s website: 2:30 p.m., on November 13th… Odysseus, New York.
It would mean skipping out from school during lunch period. Matthew liked school. But he liked A Song of Thrones better.
And school these days was not quite the sanctuary it had once been. Middle school was… complicated. Old alliances had shifted. New enmities had formed. The gang Matthew had been hanging out with steadily since his kindergarten days was no longer intact. Toby and Ryan had discovered Pop Warner, girls, and jacking off – not necessarily in that order. Matthew had nothing against football, masturbation or members of the opposite sex, but they were not necessarily priorities. He worried about that sometimes.
His elementary school had been only one of several that fed into DeWitt, and there were a lot more kids there. Kids with whom he had no history. Kids who only knew him as a shy, bookish boy who was good at things like physics and horses that most kids were not, and bad at things like talking about movies, music, and clothes that most kids were. It was embarrassing: The kids that picked on him the most were girls. Eloise and her gang.
The November wind was cold. Matthew huddled at the bus stop, pulling his hoodie up over his head, wondering what he would say to the bus driver when that adult asked the inevitable question, And why aren’t you in class, young man?
But the bus driver when he finally arrived, 18 minutes behind schedule, didn’t seem to show the slightest interest in the fact that Matthew was skipping school, and Matthew realized he had somehow slipped into another dimension, outside the realm of nervous hovering parents, slick pastors, laudatory teachers, encouraging coaches, where adults didn’t really give a fuck about what he did. It was exhilarating. But scary, at the same time. A little like listening to hip hop.
Matthew grabbed a seat by the window. Familiar landmarks through the windows of the bus loomed weirdly. He cleared his mind and played that game he always played at airports on family vacations, in crowded school hallways, or whenever he got dragged into rooms filled with strangers, following the strictures laid out in the third volume of Song of Thrones, when Eshtar the Hijra instructed Flip, the girl-boy hero, on how to connect with ambient telepaths floating about the region.
You use the Rituals of Samsafar to clear your mind, Eshtar intoned. You bait your mind with interesting thoughts about yourself and cast it out.
Matthew closed his eyes and thought.
Yo! I be Matthew Rice
My life’s a splice
Sometimes it’s bleak
When it oughta be nice
It’s so complicated
Ta feel so obligated –
You call that rap? came words in his mind. I call that bullshit. A vision of six snorting pigs flashed against his mind.
Matthew startled so hard that his head banged against the bus window. An old lady fingering rosary beads in the handicapped access seats two aisles away stared curiously at him.
Ouch! said the voice in his mind. Cool it with the self-harming, loser.
In Song of Thrones, when two telepaths discovered one another, they smelled something. The Aura of Intersubjectivity, the learned magicians at the Court of the Wandering Medina called it. In the books, the smell was described as a noxious odor that was somewhere between swamp gas and roses.
But Matthew didn’t smell a thing.
What the fuck? he thought.
The hell if I know, came the reply. You’re the one who pushed your way in. I was just sitting here practicing deep meditation techniques. Like Prowler in A March Through Madness –
Volume Two! thought Matthew. Song of Thrones!
Caution and bewilderment had a mental color. Somewhere in the blue scale. You know those books? Love and reverence had mental colors, too, and a texture like somewhat like the overlapping petals of a deep pink rose.
The voice in his head had an immediacy like it was coming from somewhere very close. Matthew turned around to scan the back aisles of the bus.
There. Sitting in the farthest corner. With a hoodie pulled down over her head that was a perfect twin to his own.
The dreaded Eloise.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-09-09 01:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-10 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-09 01:40 pm (UTC)I'd read more!
no subject
Date: 2014-09-10 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-09 10:04 pm (UTC)"It was exhilarating. But scary, at the same time. A little like listening to hip hop."
This made me laugh out loud; it's a wonderfully apt comparison, especially for a bookish, slightly sheltered, kid.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-10 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 05:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 05:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-09 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-10 02:34 am (UTC)We were gonna write complementary pieces -- hers from Eloise's POV.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-10 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-10 12:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-10 02:37 am (UTC)Wait! You're not talking about politics! :-)
no subject
Date: 2014-09-16 06:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-10 05:56 pm (UTC)I'm particularly struck at how accurate you've painted the teen mind.
I would tell you how publishable this is but I'm not sure how you feel about YA. (This is PUBLISHABLE!)
no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 02:10 pm (UTC)Wait a minute. I see what you're doing there.
The coolest part of this piece is that the warfare between middle school students and cliques has exactly the same intensity of Martina George's epic.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-12 11:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-13 08:05 pm (UTC)A vision of six snorting pigs flashed against his mind.
See, now this is the kind of weirdness I'd like to know more about.
The idea that telepathy is sometimes as much a curse as a gift is one I've always found interesting. :)
no subject
Date: 2014-09-13 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-14 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-14 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-14 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-15 05:13 pm (UTC)