“Yeah,” she said. The two of them would say that word a lot. It was lunch and they sat on a long table next to one another, him with his laptop out, her with her carrot sticks. She took a sip from a carton of milk.
“Yeah I don’t know why,” he said.
“She’s like—”
“Yeah, I don’t know.”
“She was considering like...”
“She—” They couldn’t seem to really grasp what they were trying to say about their mutual friend. They didn’t really know where to start, and both of them were unknowingly trying to bounce off of each other’s sentences.
“Why? I mean she didn’t tell me. I mean, I feel like I’ve known her for a while,” the girl said. But she didn’t seem upset; her statement was more matter-of-fact with no sighing involved. She picked up a carrot stick, and bit it in half.
The boy wasn’t using his laptop, and the screen went black. He touched the touchpad to bring it back to life. “I guess, like,” he began, “she just like asked to see what they were doing, I don’t really know.”
“Yeah,” the girl said.
At first glance, it looked like the two of them were having a closed conversation. Across from them sat a tall blonde student, buried in a textbook, occasionally jotting down notes in pen along the margins. But then he suddenly lifted his chin up to look at the two across from him, and said, “I feel like finding out junior year would be really stressful.”
“Yeah,” said the boy with the laptop.
“I think usually you’re supposed to take the class even earlier,” said the girl, “but this year was apparently really hard.”
“Yeah,” the boys agreed.
“So I’m really hoping for us it’ll be better.” Her carrot crunched. The boy across from her went back to turning the pages of his Economics textbook, studying for his exam later that night. The other two didn’t have any academic pressures just yet, and continued their conversation.
The boy with the laptop said, “Yeah, I don’t know, I didn’t want her to stress about it.”
“That’s why I didn’t want to talk to her about it,” said the girl.
“No and I didn’t really have a stake in it, I just wanted her to be able to cool off.”
“I asked her about it and she was like ‘I just don’t want to’, so we didn’t, I don’t know.”
“Yeah.”
“And I mean, that’s fair, so…”
“Yeah sometimes she’s just like that. Also, yeah she pretty much predicted it last year.”
“I just don’t want to see her like shortening her life because she’s worrying herself away just incessantly studying.”
They took a pause, and two breaths turned into a longer silence than their entire quick conversation. The boy with the laptop clicked around the screen. The girl finished her milk and closed the spout of the carton.
You did a nice job of transcribing the situation. However, you did not really expand on what they were actually talking about. This is an opportunity to be creative and imagine the relationships between these people. The reader is just as lost as you were when you first heard this conversation.
ReplyDeleteYour imagery of the carrot crunching works well and invokes sensory images.
Based on your last paragraph, you indicate that this was a quick conversation. As I was reading it, it came across as a slow and labored conversation with a lot of pauses.
I like the way you portrayed the action here. When I was reading it, I felt like I was actually listening to their conversation in real time. That's sometimes hard to capture in text. It had movement. A great example is when the one guys pauses his sentence because he had to bring his touchpad back to life. Really nicely played!
ReplyDeleteI guess I would echo Julia's comments. I also got the impression that this was a slower conversation (longer than two breaths anyway). More importantly, I didn't feel like I quite knew what they were talking about throughout the piece. I thought you were building this uncertainty as a kind of dramatic tension, but then at the end, nothing was provided to even hint at the meaning (or maybe I missed a subtle hint). I would have liked to feel like I was brought in at the end.