bridge it! (kurios) wrote in fableless, @ 2016-07-25 08:16:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! narrative, bridget kluge |
WHO: bb Bridget Kluge (+ various family member NPCs)
WHEN: 1996
WHERE: Art classes / home in Napa / random street in Napa
SUMMARY: BINGO PROMPT: First use of powers.
WARNINGS: ---
STATUS: Complete
"Draw what you see," instructed the woman, as she wrote out the sentence on the blackboard as a reminder for her class. In the middle of the classroom table, she had carefully arranged a still life composition: a curved vase that had accrued a filmy layer of dust, a book whose yellowed edges hinted at mildew, a chipped teacup that had not been used in the past decade, and a cluster of grapes that would likely be thrown out after this lesson. A harried imitation of a Claesz painting, if you will. And around the table sat her art students, with their sketchbooks and graphite pencils at the ready. Fifteen minutes of sketching time later, she quietly made her way around the room, observing each drawing. An approving nod here ("Mm, good job, Jason."), a small critique there ("Try not to rest your entire hand on the paper, Hannah. You create smudges that way."). Some drawings consisted of asymmetrical circles to represent the grapes, some had crudely drawn rectangles and lines that were meant to illustrate the book if you had a wide berth for interpretation. And then there was one girl, with the dark blonde hair and sleepy eyes, whose shoulders curved inward to hide her canvas as she drew. The woman slowly walked in her direction, such that her shadow would be the biggest giveaway that the girl was being observed. Where others had more or less drawn the objects resting on the table, the girl was intent on finishing a cross-hatch pattern for what appeared to be ... an animal? Not just a nebulous blob that was meant to represent an animal, but a well-drawn rabbit ... with glasses. The woman inched forward to afford herself a closer look. There were grapes in her drawing. There was a book. There was definitely a teacup. And there was most definitely a rabbit. A rabbit with -- was that a monocle? "Bridget," the woman began, quite sternly. "Bridget." Matching frowns formed on both their faces, as the young girl turned around. "Please pay attention to the instructions." She directed her finger towards the blackboard. "But I am--" the girl responded, pointing to the middle of the table. Her defensiveness was only exacerbated by the glint in her eye and the curious stares of her classmates. "I'm going to have to ask that you follow the prompt or start ov--" And the rabbit that had once been a vase jumped off the table in a magnificent leap, leaving shards of dust and a broken monocle in its imaginary wake. "Bee, I need you to repeat exactly what you did in class." "I was just drawing!" "Mrs. Hartman wrote me a note about you being a disruption." "But I was--" "Bee. Bridget. I can't keep sending you to these classes if you don't listen to the teachers. Do you know how much I --" A slight pink flush blossomed across Johanna's cheeks. She lowered her voice to a whisper, even though nobody else was in the room. "Do you know how much we pay per lesson? You're going to need to behave, or else they will kick you out. No daydreaming. No goofing off. Mommy doesn't have money to keep sending you to classes." "But Chris does! Why can't you just ask him?" Something in Johanna's face faltered. It always did, every time the combination of money and Chris and Daddy was mentioned. She knew that she needed to be strong and capable for her daughter and wear that brave face so long as Bridget was with her, but she knew exactly how dispiriting the truth was. "Daddy's busy. He also doesn't have money to pay for you to daydream in class." A partial truth, but still a truth. "So what's this about your art lessons?" "Nothing." "Nothing?" Chris' voice was incredulous, in the way that he talked to his own colleagues during end-of-year review meetings, and not his daughter. "So your mom called me to come over all the way from San Francisco, for nothing. That's what you're telling me." Bridget had few regrets in the almost three decades of her life, but sometimes she would go back to this moment: sitting shotgun in her dad's car as he drove her to his office for their quarterly "meetups". Because there was, actually, plenty more that Bridget wanted to tell her father that afternoon in the car. She wanted to tell him that she -- honest to god -- was following the directions and there was a rabbit. So what if her teacher had been so dreadfully boring that she stopped paying attention and started dreaming of bespectacled rabbits and cats with stripes and caterpillars who smoked cigars? So what if that was more interesting than some vase and a teacup that nobody was using? That didn't stop the fact that there was a rabbit that she had seen with her very eyes. That didn't stop the fact that even her teacher and the other students had seen it too. Or the fact that in the blink of an eye, there was no rabbit, and only that ugly vase. "Apparently, I 'didn't follow her instructions'." The air-quotes only sharpened the snideness of her voice. "I was supposed to draw what was on the table, and I saw a rabbit, so I drew it. But the teacher didn't see the rabbit, so I told her to look again, and a rabbit hopped off the table." Indignant, she was already getting sick of repeating the same old spiel. If she could go for the rest of the day without having to say the word rabbit again, she'd be a happy girl. "And then a second later, it was gone." The car screeched to a sudden halt. The back of her head hit the seat with a dull thump. "Don't be ridiculous," her father snapped. "There was no rabbit." Bridget couldn't tell if he was irritated by her story, or at the cars that now honked angrily in their direction. But she would mostly remember what he said next, or rather, what he truly meant to say. "You just drew what was in your head." |