a/n: this chapter is vaguely pooey. it just didn't want to be written. the first part was fine, that was easy, but the rest...whoo. hard stuff. and it is quite silly, humour-wise and the like. sorry about the late update, but i've been working my ass off lately at work, doing the close-shifts, and because i usually write at night, i haven't been able to :( but good news!! for me, at least, heh. i'm going to see My Chemical Romance on wednesday!! whoo!! so excited!! --do a little dance-- so i've been listening to them all day and decided to write this.

and a note about my character names. i don't just pluck a random name out of thin air or search for the weirdest i can find. all the character names i use are from people in my life. donelda is the name of a lady i work with, and from emery&me, bronwyn is my cousin's name. but i don't know an emery, unfortunately, and i really don't know where that name came from... --shrugs--

thanks a bundle for the reviews!! they give me inspiration. i'll try not to take so long to update next time, but it depends on how long e&m takes. sigh... thanks again!!

.three.

— —

I was being followed. And not the good kind of followed either, the ‘Oh, he’s cute, I’m glad he’s heading in the same direction as me’ type of followed. No, this was the, ‘Oh my God, that guy’s following me! Stalker!’ type of followed. I was walking through the campus of Netherfield University and this black haired guy was taking all the same turns, all the same stairs, all the same weird-ass shortcuts as me.

And my shortcuts were pretty long, so no one in their right mind would take them. Except me, of course.

And this guy, this sketchy, dark haired, broad shouldered guy was following me. I’d never seen him before in my life. I was starting to panic when I came out of the bathroom to find him loitering in the opposite direction, just casually leaning against a brick wall. He even looked at me when I paused in the restroom doorway, too shocked to move. But once he actually looked at me and even gave this odd half-smile thing, I was really starting to get paranoid.

What type of stalker actually lets you notice them and smiles in return? It was like he practically said, ‘Yes, yes I am stalking you; look at my stalker smile.’

Without giving him any sign of acknowledgement, or Hell’s Slippers, encouragement, I turned in the opposite direction and power-walked the hell out of there. I got to my Literature class with a heaving chest and a slick, sweaty brow, and sank down in the seat in the corner. I thought I was safe; I was just this sweaty, red-faced girl in the corner, only a left-minded person would even glance at me more than once, let alone stalk me.

I relaxed back against the chair, safe in the knowledge that no one without being under heavy duress would willingly sit a lecture with Mr Mark, who was once again droning on about some sort of literature. I really didn’t even known why I was taking an English class, being an Art Major. There was an empty slot in my schedule, though, and it was either Literature & Romanticism in Literature or Physics, and Donnie Spencer and Science just did not mix without dire consequences.

Ask my high school science teachers; they would know all too well.

I was just dozing off, listening to a random song on my iPod when who else but Stalker Boy appeared in the doorway. He turned his head in each direction, as if searching for someone, and when his eyes landed on me, I sat upright. Oh God, I thought as he started making his way towards me. What can I do? He wouldn’t try anything in an almost full lecture hall, would he?

But he was still coming towards me, and I was still panicking about what to do, when Mr Mark spoke up from the front of the room. “Mr White, I presume?”

Stalker Boy paused in surprise and looked down at the Professor. “Um, yes sir?”

“Because you’re only just beginning this class, late I should add, I think you should sit at the front, don’t you?” droned Mr Mark.

“Um.” Stalker Boy had the audacity to look at me and I shot him wide-eyed, ‘Don’t look at me!’ signals.

Mr Mark noticed the direction of his gaze and made a sweeping motion with his hand. “And I guarantee sitting next to Miss Spencer will only get you an over-abundance of eagerness—” the class tittered as one as Mr Mark eluded to the snorting incident. Stalker Boy just looked confused. “—and not good grades, I think sitting at the front is for the best.”

I started nodding in eager agreement before what the Professor said clicked into place and I turned a glare towards the front. The teacher had actually just insulted my intelligence, right in front of me and all of my classmates! But I was afraid speaking up would mean Stalker Boy would sit next to me, and who wanted that? So I clenched my lips closed and battled with the Angry Donnie that strived for dominance.

“Um,” said Stalker Boy, glancing at me again, but shrugging a single shoulder. He sighed, “Whatever,” and changed his direction to head down the middle of the aisle to the front of the room. I gave a great sigh of relief, gaining the attention of the girl in front who chewed her gum extra hard to show how impressed she was. I gave her a grin and popped my earphones back in.

No one stalked me and got away with it.

-

-

After hurrying out of my class that day before Stalker Boy could even turn around to look for me, I spent the rest of my day skittering around the outskirts of the university, taking all the long ways to class just to avoid him. But I never saw him again; either my superb avoidance tactics were working or else Stalker Boy had given up.

I was hoping on both, just to be safe.

When Chelsea walked into the apartment that afternoon and joined me in the kitchen to eat ice cream, I greeted her with the announcement, “I got stalked today.”

She frowned wearily, and for the first time I noted the unusual droop to her pretty hair and the net of fine lines in the corner of her eyes. “Oh yeah?” she murmured. “The good kind of stalked?”

“Nope,” I hummed, “the bad. He was creepy and followed me right into Literature.”

Chelsea perked up at that. “With Professor Mark?”

“Yep,” I said, licking the spoon clean. My upended reflection stared back at me; too big brown eyes and puffy black hair and a little, little chin at the warped end of the spoon. I flashed my teeth and was mildly frightened at the creature I created in the silver utensil. “Apparently Stalker Boy transferred into my class. Oh!” I added indignantly, “Professor Mark called me stupid! In front of the whole class!”

“Did he say, ‘Donelda Spencer, you are stupid’?”

I frowned. “Well, no. But he told Stalker Boy that sitting next to me wouldn’t get him good grades.”

Chelsea pondered that for a moment, slowly licking the mound of vanilla ice cream on the spoon. “He didn’t exactly call you stupid then, just…not healthy for anyone sitting next to you. He was probably calling you a distraction.”

“A distraction? Me?” I blinked.

She gave me a laughing look, and I was glad the worry lines around her eyes lifted away. “You are kind of distracting, Donnie.”

I screwed up my face. “How?”

“Well, let’s see…” Chelsea held up a hand and started ticking things off her fingers. “You can never sit still, for one, look—” She pointed to my swinging legs, which I quickly stilled. “—and you have to either speak or sing or hum, or make irritating tapping noises with your fingers or pens or pencils or any object you have in your hands—”

“I do not,” I muttered.

Chelsea carried on, undeterred. “You have the weirdest sense of humour. You’ll laugh at a ceiling fan, for God’s sake.”

“It wasn’t just a ceiling fan!” I defended quickly. “It had a ribbon hanging from one of the blades and every time it turned, it hit Monica Roberts on the back of the head, and she kept turning around, thinking it was the kid behind her!” I started laughing. “Oh, shit, that made a whole class of Maths bearable, even fun!”

Chelsea was shaking her head. “You’re just making my point.”

I tried to stop laughing. ‘Tried’ being the key-word.

“And, let’s not forget that you have the distracting habit of being able to draw the oddest sorts of people towards you.”

I frowned. “What?”

Chelsea stared at me. “Oh, come on! Why do you think people stalk you? Why do you think you keep getting these oddballs on your dates—?”

“Um.” I gave her a look. “You set these dates up for me. Hence the ‘blind’ that gets tacked before them, meaning I’m walking into these dates completely unprepared.”

Her pretty blue eyes rolled. “Yeah, but these guys agree, don’t they? Even before you’ve met, when I tell them some things about you, they’re immediately drawn to you.” Chelsea frowned wonderingly at her empty spoon. “It’s rather strange, actually.”

“Strange? I call it down right crazy.” I shook my head. “I must have animal magnetism, but it only attracts weird animals, like those red-assed baboons, and meerkats.”

“Don’t forget aardvarks,” added Chelsea with a solemn nod, “they’re the weirdest animals.”

“Oh yeah,” I nodded, too, “along with echidnas and platypuses.”

Chelsea was staring into her ice cream bowl. “Park duck, part weasel.”

“They have a word for that. Um…monotrain, or something…”

“Monotreme,” fixed Chelsea, “an egg-laying mammal.” And then she turned to face me quickly, her eyes wide and bright. “Donnie, imagine if we laid eggs!”

I cringed. “We do, in a way, except not the whole nesting, squeezing out a hard-one, egg-laying.”

Chelsea was still staring at me with a face of utter curiousness. “Yeah, but imagine if we actually laid an egg that a baby hatched out of! How awesome!”

“Um, Chelse, it wouldn’t be awesome. Especially if you were the one laying the egg, which would be roughly the size and shape and consistency of a watermelon.”

Chelsea’s face slowly lost its curiosity, instead paling to an unflattering shade of curdled cream. She winced, “Ouch.”

I nodded in agreement. “Very ouch.”

-

-

I was studying. I had a paper due in Literature about Romanticism in the nineteenth century and its various themes and connotations. I had three textbooks propped open on the desk, my note paper was spread out in front me, there was a pen poised in my fingertips.

I was totally absorbed in the life of a fly on the windowsill.

It had been there for the last twenty minutes, just flittering from one space of clear glass to the next. At each landing, it would walk around for a bit, more than likely regurgitating onto the glass and sucking it back up, trying to find a tasty patch, before taking off again. And this, this was more interesting in my schoolwork.

After putting my Nineteenth Century Romantics book to use, and leaving a squashed fly corpse on the carpet, I left my studies for a food break. I found Chelsea in the Lounge Room, curled up on the couch and watching a sappy chick-flick on the television. I looked around curiously, and upon discovering no one else in the room, asked, “Where’s Will?”

Chelsea didn’t look up, which was one sign of distress. “Not here,” she said helpfully.

I sat down next to her and poked at the cushion. “Where is he?”

She shrugged.

I started poking her knee instead. “Is that overseas?”

She looked at me with a blank face. “What?”

I mimicked her shrug and asked, “Is that in one of those non-speaking countries, that use hand and bodies motions as communication? Is that where Will is?”

Chelsea just sighed and looked away. “Will’s…not here.”

Upon hearing the hurt in her voice, I bit my lip. “Did, did you guys have a fight?”

Chelsea half-shrugged and made a non-committal noise in her throat.

“I take that as a yes.”

She sighed again. “We’ve just been having some little problems lately. Nothing big.”

I rolled my eyes. “Considering William practically lives here and he’s currently not here, I’m thinking it is something big. Am I right?”

Another shrug, another weird throat-sound.

I poked her harder and she jerked away. But at least she looked at me, albeit it with a very annoyed scowl. “Tell me if you need his arse kicked,” I said, nodding eagerly, “I have some memories involving a G-string and male genitalia that I need to repress with violence.”

Chelsea gave a weak smile. “Thanks for offering, Donnie, but I’ll be OK.”

“You better be,” I said as I stood, cracking my knuckles menacingly. “Or Will-I-Am will have one less ‘I’, if you get my drift…”

I winked, and Chelsea chuckled, and I felt mighty proud.

-

-

My Dad always said I was smart at all the dumb things and dumb at all the smart things. What he meant, I figured, was that I had no common sense and too much uncommon sense. What you needed to know about Dad, though, was that he retired from work ten years early due to pesky back problems, and was still receiving compensation. And due to this, he had a lot of spare time on his hands. He tried all the usual things like painting the house and, when that failed to help his need for change, he started renovating the house.

This lasted seven years, and was yet to be fully completed.

Now, I loved dad. Who wouldn’t? He was one of those pot-bellied (from too many beers), apron-wearing (from mum’s ‘If You’re Going to Be Home All Day You Might As Well Make Dinner’ tirade), wrench-wielding (from his Mr Fix-It never-ending phase) men who thought they knew everything when in fact knew nothing.

Every time I went home for the holidays, or when I was running short on cash and needed a quick fix, he would be waiting with a head full of answers to questions he thought I was going to ask. And because he said I was without an ounce of common sense, he had comments on the most inane of things, things he thought I couldn’t know.

Last time I had seen him, at Christmas, as soon as I’d walked in the door he’d said, ‘Don-Don, did you know that the petrol is more expensive on Thursdays?’ And I’d said, ‘Yes, dad, I did, in fact, know that’. And then he’d added, ‘It’s because it’s Pension day; they try to rip all the old people off.’

And I’d said, ‘You mean they try to rip you off?’

And dad, being the brightest crayon, hadn’t picked up on the sarcasm and instead carried on to say, ‘And I hope you haven’t been cooking any baked beans.’ I told him I didn’t even like baked beans, but he hadn’t listened, finishing with, ‘Because I know you’ll forget to take the beans out of the can, and just put the whole thing in the microwave.’

‘Like you’ve done before?’ I’d asked, and dad had gone strangely deaf and walked away.

Now, what I’m trying to say, is that maybe he was right. About me not having common sense and all.

Because do you know why?

That night I went grocery shopping, knowing our freezer only had Neapolitan ice cream, which had the chocolate and vanilla portions missing and the poor strawberry crusted with ice. Chelsea had been sulking on the couch, missing Will, and I couldn’t face her sad, sad face without a bowl of ice cream to comfort us both. So I was pushing a trolley in front of me, humming an idle tune as I scrutinised the fruit, minding my own business when it happened.

Stalker Boy appeared at my side, grinning as he said, “Hi.”

And instead of feigning dumbness, instead of walking casually away, Hell, instead of saying a polite, “Get away from me, Stalker!” like any person with common sense would do, I did something only Donelda Spencer would do.

I screeched, pushed my trolley into the stand of apples, sending them flooding onto the ground, and turned on my heel and ran. I didn’t stop to check whether Stalker Boy had been sucked down into the tumbling mass of fruit, or hang around to help clean up the avalanche of crushed apple bits and people who hadn’t escaped in time, or rescue the poor trolleys which had crashed and spilled their delicious innards across the floor.

No. I didn’t stick around.

I ran right out of those automatic doors.

Like Donelda Spencer did best.

— —

chapter soundtrack: various My Chemical Romance songs because i'm too psyched to listen to anything else ;)