FictionPress.com - let the words flow| FictionPress.com - let the words flow |
| Home Just In Communities Forums Beta Readers Dictionary Search | Login Register Extras |
#¤#¤#¤#Seven Days a Week#¤#¤#¤#
...:.:.:.:.:.:.By: Cimmy.:.:.:.:.:.:...
Summary: Suspended Motion is selected to play at a rock festival. In his plans to make Lex fall in love with him, Fred decides that it would be a great idea to help out, so to Kate and Daniel's absolute horror, he signs them all up as crew members - with disputable results.
Rating: PG-13 (for language, fist-fights and almost-sex)
Timeline: The summer between junior and senior year in high school.
Thanks To: Kristine, for nagging me, or I would have given up after the first chapter and written a story about a monkey instead.
Cimmy's Notes: My NaNoWriMo Project of '07. I hadn't written anything in almost two years when I started this, so my hopes weren't high on finishing anything. Now, two months later, the sequel to this story and the sequel to that story was finished and started, respectively, a few days ago. You never know, right?
Kristine wrote one part in this story; the first scene between Daniel and Anna. But she's my official co-writer on all the other stories, so I guess it's a bit redundant to point out that she worked on this one with me as well.
Disclaimer: Lex O'Leary, Matt McDougal, Sammie Blackburn, Anthony Nicholson, Chris Mitchell, Jeff Delricci and Anna Eukovich all belong to NYgoldfish54.
This is not how I wanted my summer break to turn out. I wanted to travel to some exotic place where people don’t barf publicly. I wanted to be my friends' center of attention and right now I would even settle for being greeted on whenever they see me.
But here I am, sitting in the middle of nowhere, camped next to a tree and a porter pot (right there is a big eww, but it did come in handy to have it so close by), listening to some hippie guy’s own rendition of Kumbaya while my best friend is digging holes in the forest big enough to bury himself in, and while Danny is drunkenly hitting on some fourteen year-old Goth.
I’m such a loyal friend. That’s why I keep putting up with this for the sake of other people’s happiness. And I’m going to explain exactly what brought on this disaster, so people in the future will now why Kate McKinley sacrificed her own well-being and hair-do for several nights out in the woods.
It all started because of love. Naturally.
(Actually, to be completely truthful, it started because of a guy’s obsession with a girl, not necessarily love. And it just had to involve my best friend, which of course includes me and my plans for the summer.)
Anyway. Ahem. From the beginning:
The story began all the way back in September. Fred (my hockey-playing best friend who likes ceilings but doesn’t like bugs) came back from last summer break all flustered with mixed feelings. He had gone and met a girl during the month I was with my parents in Thailand, and since Danny (obnoxious friend of Fred’s who keeps hanging out with me all the time) had to visit his family in Italy, no one was around to keep an eye on Fred.
The disaster’s name was Lex (known as the disaster in my story; she can sing, don’t know if she can dance, and sometimes she reads books for no reason) and not only was she Fred’s new crush, but the girlfriend of one of Fred’s friends on the hockey team. Fred had no initial knowledge of this, so who can blame the guy for falling? Apparently they hit it off right away, talking and hanging out every day until school started. Fred knew that she had a boyfriend, but she had confided in him, telling him that she didn’t think it would last.
What a surprise it was for Fred when school started and his new crush worked things out with her boyfriend. I mean, mope if you’re depressed, but this guy really took it personally. He moped like there was no end to it all. The only time he didn’t mope was when he spotted Lex and had to act all natural and happy for a while.
I told him how unhealthy this obsession was. Fred didn’t care, though. He spent the entire fall semester forcing himself to listen to Lex and her boyfriend’s yappity-yap about their relationship. It drove me mad, honestly. Fred was behaving like a wimp, fawning over Lex and her stupid boyfriend. It was pathetic to see.
So, therefore, I thought all would be well when Lex came back from Christmas break, announcing that she had finally broken up with Dexter (I made that name up because I can’t remember what it was, but I’m sure I’ve dated him at least once). This was the perfect opportunity for Fred to admit to his feelings, sweep her up in his arms and carry her all around the school like a trophy.
However… My current situation wouldn’t be so awful if that’s the way life had turned out.
Fred’s first unsuccessful attempt was during his own birthday party. He had specifically invited Lex, but there was no way she could’ve known that. Over the past term, we had all become close friends with her and her friends, so there was nothing at all weird in Fred personally inviting her to his party.
Lex also has a best friend, Jeff (red-haired guy with a relaxed approach to life who likes to play basket and listen to weird music and says he doesn’t like when I follow him around but I see right through such lies) and he was introduced to the group almost at the same time as Lex. He and I became friends, at least good enough friends so we could speak with each other. Jeff knew about Fred’s crush on Lex as soon as Fred’s desperate cries of attention became too obvious.
Danny, Fred and Chris (Lex’s friend, who unfortunately doesn’t seem to be at all interested in me for whatever reason – the nerve) played a stupid drinking game during the party, and Fred got so hammered that he ended up slumped against the wall in my dorm room. Fred told me to go get Lex so they could ‘talk’, which I thought was a stupid idea. After all, impressing a girl is better done when you’re not drooling copiously on your own shirt. Luckily, depending on whose point of view you follow, Fred was so drunk that when he grabbed Lex’s hand and told her exactly how he felt from the bottom of his heart, all that came out was ten different kinds of groans.
Lex patted him on the head and asked if he needed help to get to his room, and when he frustrated declined, she told him to drink some water and call her tomorrow. And off she went.
Jeff, who had followed the scene from the doorway, had immediately went up to Fred and asked if he liked Lex. Finally, a guy with some sense and the ability to notice obvious things! From that moment on, Jeff knew what we had known for six months. Fred was an idiot.
Fred’s second, almost successful attempt at declaring his love was on Valentine’s Day. Unaware of Fred’s feelings, Lex had started to date again. Fred treated this occurrence as the plague. And since their friendship was so ‘platonic’ (if you were Lex), Fred got all the details as soon as Lex was back. And if she didn’t visit him afterwards, Fred took it harder than ever because that meant that she could have spent the night with the guy. This never happened, though, but Fred was a nervous wreck every time she left the school grounds for longer than five minutes.
And so finally, he caught himself a break. Lex got stood up right before the Valentine’s dance, and it took Fred less than five seconds to offer to be her date instead. Up until now, I think that was the happiest day of his life. I went with some guy I can’t remember the name of right now, but I kept watching Fred and Lex dance all night. I really thought that would be it; that the moment had finally come. They seemed so happy together, and it looked like they were about to kiss several times.
And then Lex collapsed. Not in a dangerous way, though, but in a drunkenly manner. Apparently Danny thought it would be funny to spike her drink, for which he got yelled at by Jeff and Matt (one of Lex’s other friends, tall and muscular guy I would totally date if he weren’t so obviously interested in someone else) while Lex was carried off the dance floor by Fred and Anthony (you guessed it: Lex’s friend, who seems to be normal until you ask him about the latest episode of any cop show). Very Cinderella-like in a bizarre sort of way.
Since then, all opportunities to talk to Lex again have been lost. She started dating someone else for a while, but it was never serious. I tried to convince Fred to date someone as well, but everyone who tried to go near him was turned down before they even opened their mouths.
More and more people started to catch on to Fred’s infatuation. Lex’s friend Sammie (blonde girl who is excellent to hang out with and knows how to accessorize everything), who was probably the one closest to Fred of all Lex’s friends, started to poke at his secret. He blabbed immediately, of course, but begged her not to mention it to Anna (pretty girl with big eyes who charmed the hell out of Danny while Fred never glimpsed at her twice) or any of the others. Sammie wasn’t much help, unfortunately. She tried to give Lex hints, and Jeff tried to beat her over the head with proverbial signs with the text “Hey, Fred likes you!” but nothing helped.
Summer break was drawing closer, and so was Fred’s nervous breakdown. The thought of being apart from Lex for three months while she went home to New York was too much for him to bear (even though it only takes like one hour to drive up from school) and so he had to come up with a brilliant plan to avoid this tragedy somehow.
Being that Fred is Fred; his plan didn’t turn out brilliantly.
It turned out with me smack damn in the middle of this stupid muddy forest!
One day, in the middle of May, Lex burst into Fred’s room with the announcement that her band had been picked for the lineup at a concert. Notice how at that point, it was still referred to as a ‘concert’. Nothing advanced.
Fred was happy for her, and for her friends, because he’s genuinely nice to the bone which could drive anyone crazy. Lex told him a long-winded story about what a great opportunity this was for them and even though they didn’t have a real crew they would work twice as hard at pulling this off. And suddenly this god-awful plan formed in Fred’s head as he offered not only himself, but me and Danny as well, to go along on this concert and help out. Help out! Have you ever heard of something so preposterous?
Lex loved this idea, gave Fred a hug, and ever since then, Fred has looked at this concert with a distant gaze in his eyes and nothing we said could make him consider it as less than a fantastic way to spend the summer.
Over time, we found out that the concert wasn’t really a concert, but a big ass festival in the middle of nowhere in some damn forest only known by its previous inhabitant, the Blair Witch. The others acted like this was the greatest event that had ever taken place in the history of the world, while Danny and I was considering mass-suicide to get out of it.
I’m from friggin’ Sherman Oaks, we are not raised to know the concept of a festival, and we are definitely not fit to spend several days in a mud hole with a spirit stove as the only companion!
Yes, I keep mentioning the forest and the mud and the general insanitation but there are no words in the English language to describe the toxic living conditions you have to put up with here. Mud up to your knees (and I have to wear rubber boots! Me!), no clean bathroom, no shower, no decent food, no sane people, and worse of all: everyone else are enjoying this! Having fun!
I’m an island. A muddy island.
