SPN FIC - Dancing Girl on a Lost Autumn Day
Once upon a time, there was a girl, and a song, and a bright autumn afternoon. Remember what that was like?
She dances up the stairs and down again, fingers trailing lightly against the smooth wood of the banister, humming the song she thinks of as hers, as if it were written for her, dedicated to her, sung for her and no one else. Her bare toes curl around the edge of each step as she descends, surefooted, thinking she could do this blindfolded, or asleep. She knows this house, loves this house, loves its smells and sounds and colors.
September 1967. "Mary Mary" is by the Monkees, and is here if you feel like listening to it. And dancing.
CHARACTERS: Mary and Deanna Campbell
GENRE: Het (but only in her dreams)
RATING: G
SPOILERS: In the Beginning
LENGTH: 2051 words
DANCING GIRL ON A LOST AUTUMN DAY
By Carol Davis
She dances up the stairs and down again, fingers trailing lightly against the smooth wood of the banister, humming the song she thinks of as hers, as if it were written for her, dedicated to her, sung for her and no one else. Her bare toes curl around the edge of each step as she descends, surefooted, thinking she could do this blindfolded, or asleep. She knows this house, loves this house, loves its smells and sounds and colors.
Mary Mary, where you goin’ to…
Out in the kitchen, water’s running. Metal clashes together as her mother pulls pans out of a drawer.
“Mom?” she calls out.
There’s no answer, just water running.
She twirls across the living room, through the dining room, into the kitchen and flings slender arms around her mother. Her mother oofs a little in surprise and there are pans in between them, a pair of shallow round aluminum cake pans.
“Strawberry,” she says. “That’s what I want.”
“With the jam?”
“Mmmm.” She beams her delight, like a cat. No, a dog. A happy, grinning dog. She steps back, the linoleum floor cool under her feet, to allow her mother to finish her trip to the countertop where bowls and spoons and eggs and flour and the mixer are already assembled. “I hate my hair,” she announces, apropos of nothing, and reaches back to tug at the ponytail that bounces against her neck. “I wish it was straight.”
“No you don’t. Trust me.”
“I do.”
Her mother grins indulgently and cracks a couple of eggs into the bowl.
“Sharon Mullally’s sister irons her hair.”
“She’ll stop the first time she burns her head.”
Perched on one of the chrome-and-vinyl kitchen chairs she watches her mother work magic and hums her song.
Mary Mary…
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“Am I old enough to be in love?”
Her mother raises an eyebrow at that, but she’s less surprised than she was when they collided five minutes ago.
“I feel…” she says, and sighs.
“Head over heels with wings on your heels?” her mother replies, and chuckles softly as she blends flour and water and eggs together with a big blue spoon.
“What?”
“The King and I. Never mind.”
“I think I am. I think I’m totally and completely in love, Mom.”
Her mother hums something quick, a few bars, grins again and goes on stirring, the blue spoon clunking against the side of the bowl, musical but dulled, a muffled clapper striking a bell. “Been in love more than anybody else has, I guess,” comes out soft, because her mother’s the next best thing to tone deaf and only sings out loud when she thinks she’s alone.
“Which one is that?”
“The Music Man.”
“You don’t know any new songs, do you?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Well, am I?”
Another sigh as her mother plugs the mixer into the outlet, but it’s still indulgent. You, she thinks, I love you I love you I love you, and she watches her mother’s smooth, graceful movements, traces the line of her mother’s neck, the curve of her shoulder and the slim taper of her arm with her eyes before she says, “It’s for real. I know it is.”
She has been in love before. Like in the song.
But this?
“He smiled at me,” she says.
“Did he?”
“At me. Just me. He was walking down the steps at school and I was going the other way and he stopped for a second and he smiled at me.” All of it comes out in a rush, in one breath, as if down deep inside she’s afraid that if she pauses, the words will evaporate and what she knows is true will suddenly turn into a fantasy. A pretty dream. That’s what her grandmother used to say: That’s a pretty dream, sweetheart. But this is no dream. This is not her imagination working overtime (and that, that’s a hundred percent what her dad would say). There was no one behind her, no one beside her, and unless he was smiling at a tree, then he was smiling at her.
She fixed it in her memory like a Polaroid picture. That smile. Eyes squeezed shut she tries to reconstruct it, shape her lips just right.
“I love him, Mom, I do,” she moans.
“I’m sure you do.”
“Then what do I say? Do I say something? What should I say?”
I’d rather die than to live without you…
The mixer whirrs into life, blades clacking against the sides of the bowl. “Maybe you should let him say something first,” her mother says.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“What if he doesn’t say anything?”
Mary Mary…
“Give him a chance.”
She erupts from the chair, a ball of barely contained energy. She’s a bird, she thinks, and her cage is too small. This house is too small, her life is too small, her parents’ plans for her are too small. She’s thirteen years old, thirteen thirteen THIRTEEN, and sometimes her body catches her unawares. It tingles sometimes. It tingles and hums and throbs and when he smiled at her she felt like her insides were going to drop out onto the sidewalk.
“What do I do?” she whispers. But her mother’s turned away, and the mixer is running. No one hears her except herself.
She wants to cry then, because her life is too small and everything else is too big. Way, way too big.
Enormous.
If her mother had responded, if her mother had even been looking at her, she might have been able to stay there in the sunny warmth of the kitchen, but with her mother turned away she feels suddenly alone, abandoned, left to figure out the world all by herself. The weight of that makes her flee the kitchen, go pattering back up the stairs into the safety of her room, her small blue room with its white polka-dotted curtains and its white chenille-covered bed and its shelves of books and dolls and treasures and its wall of thumbtacked-up color pictures of the boys whose smiles make her spend her allowance on records and magazines and dream of being the one they sing about.
She flings herself face-down on the bed, nose buried deep in white chenille, and wonders if she ought to go ahead and cry.
She wanted to dance, a little while ago.
Wondered, looking at herself in the mirror, what it would be like to dance naked in the sunshine, in the warm wind, in a field of flowers.
When the door clicks open, she says into the soft chenille, “I’m stupid.”
The bed shifts and gives a little as her mother sits beside her and runs a gentle hand down her back.
“I love him,” she pleads.
“All right,” her mother says.
“I do.”
“I believe you.”
She flips herself over, one abrupt move, something she could do as a baby, according to her mother. “What do I do?” she whispers. “Please tell me what to do.”
With an odd expression on her face her mother gathers her up and holds her close. It makes her feel small again, makes her feel like the baby would could flip herself over on a blanket on the floor but couldn’t crawl, couldn’t quite master moving around in the world. With one hand her mother pulls away the clip that holds the ponytail in place and frees the soft waves of her hair, runs her fingers through it, caresses it. They sit that way for a while, her mother rocking her slowly back and forth, stroking her hair, crooning something that isn’t quite words, isn’t quite music.
“Does he have a name?” her mother asks finally, as if she’s asking to be let in to a place she’s never been before.
And her lips form it. Shape it. The sound of it makes her shiver. “John.”
“All right.”
More than anything, she wants to hear him say her name. She hears it from her mother and father every day, hears it from her teachers and her friends, hears it coming out of the speakers of her record player:
Mary Mary, where you goin’ to?
But if he could say it, if he would just say it…
“Is this what it feels like?” she pleads. “Is it? Because…”
Her mother looks so kind. So patient. I love you I love you I love you, she thinks. Please help me, Mommy, help me help me help me.
There are tears running down her cheeks. Smiling, her mother dabs them away with the tips of her fingers. “It’s the worst thing in the world. And the best.”
“But -“
“Smile back. The next time he smiles, smile back.”
“Shouldn’t I say something?”
“Just tell him your name.”
“That’s all?”
“You could recite the Gettysburg Address, but I think that would confuse him,” her mother says, and laughs a little. “Yes, that’s all. Say ‘Hi, I’m Mary.’”
“And -“
“Then wait. And see what he says.”
“But what if he doesn’t say anything?”
“That’s a possibility. He might be as nervous as you are. He might be shy. Don’t think about it too much. Pretend you’ve known him for a long time. Talk to him like you’d talk to - who are those boys from down the street?”
“David and Bobby,” she mumbles.
Her mother nods and kisses her cheek. “I need to check on your cake. Don’t make yourself cry, okay? It’ll be fine. I promise.”
“How can you promise? You don’t know what’ll happen.”
“Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea.”
A minute later she’s alone in her small blue room, staring at the bright rectangles of sunlight on the braided rug alongside her bed. She could write this down, she thinks, could pull the thick spiral notebook with its flower-decal-scattered cover out from underneath her mattress and write down what she thinks and hears and feels. The book is half used-up already, its pages full of song lyrics and poems and thoughts and tiny pictures she trimmed out of magazines. If she died, she thinks, if for some reason she left this house and never came back, someone could look at that notebook and know everything about her.
Maybe, she thinks fleetingly, she should give him the book.
Let him read her heart.
Mary Mary, she thinks. It sounds good coming out of her record player, every time she listens to it. She goggled like an idiot at the album jacket when it was new, when she saw her name in the list of song titles and thought she might be imagining it. The song’s about a girl who left, who broke the guy’s heart - but she won’t ever do that. Not ever.
He can have her forever, if he’ll just say her name.
She can hear her mother starting up the vacuum cleaner downstairs as she slides the LP out of its jacket and lays it on the turntable of the record player. Most of the time, when she plays it, she keeps the volume turned down low because if she doesn’t her father will yell up the stairs. “Hey!” And again, “Hey!”
But this time she turns the little volume knob almost all the way up. Places the needle carefully in the right spot. There’s a scratch of static for a few seconds, then her name, her name, Mary Mary, exploding out of the speakers. Too loud, she thinks, too much, so she turns the volume down a little, then moves to her feet. Curls her toes into the ridges of the braided rug.
“Mary Mary,” she sings, and those boys she’ll never meet, never know, sing along.
She sings, because the sun is shining and the world is huge and she doesn’t know where she’s going.
Maybe she’ll crawl.
Maybe she’ll just flip.
She sings, quietly at first, then louder, and it’s confident and strong and sure because this she knows. This song. These words.
Her name.
He’s going to say her name. Maybe tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. That would be a good start, the perfect start, to a brand-new year. Her best year, she thinks. Her very, very best, possibly the best in the entire history of the world.
She’s thirteen today.
THIRTEEN.
And she loves.
And she dances.
* * * * *
She dances up the stairs and down again, fingers trailing lightly against the smooth wood of the banister, humming the song she thinks of as hers, as if it were written for her, dedicated to her, sung for her and no one else. Her bare toes curl around the edge of each step as she descends, surefooted, thinking she could do this blindfolded, or asleep. She knows this house, loves this house, loves its smells and sounds and colors.
September 1967. "Mary Mary" is by the Monkees, and is here if you feel like listening to it. And dancing.
CHARACTERS: Mary and Deanna Campbell
GENRE: Het (but only in her dreams)
RATING: G
SPOILERS: In the Beginning
LENGTH: 2051 words
DANCING GIRL ON A LOST AUTUMN DAY
By Carol Davis
She dances up the stairs and down again, fingers trailing lightly against the smooth wood of the banister, humming the song she thinks of as hers, as if it were written for her, dedicated to her, sung for her and no one else. Her bare toes curl around the edge of each step as she descends, surefooted, thinking she could do this blindfolded, or asleep. She knows this house, loves this house, loves its smells and sounds and colors.
Mary Mary, where you goin’ to…
Out in the kitchen, water’s running. Metal clashes together as her mother pulls pans out of a drawer.
“Mom?” she calls out.
There’s no answer, just water running.
She twirls across the living room, through the dining room, into the kitchen and flings slender arms around her mother. Her mother oofs a little in surprise and there are pans in between them, a pair of shallow round aluminum cake pans.
“Strawberry,” she says. “That’s what I want.”
“With the jam?”
“Mmmm.” She beams her delight, like a cat. No, a dog. A happy, grinning dog. She steps back, the linoleum floor cool under her feet, to allow her mother to finish her trip to the countertop where bowls and spoons and eggs and flour and the mixer are already assembled. “I hate my hair,” she announces, apropos of nothing, and reaches back to tug at the ponytail that bounces against her neck. “I wish it was straight.”
“No you don’t. Trust me.”
“I do.”
Her mother grins indulgently and cracks a couple of eggs into the bowl.
“Sharon Mullally’s sister irons her hair.”
“She’ll stop the first time she burns her head.”
Perched on one of the chrome-and-vinyl kitchen chairs she watches her mother work magic and hums her song.
Mary Mary…
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“Am I old enough to be in love?”
Her mother raises an eyebrow at that, but she’s less surprised than she was when they collided five minutes ago.
“I feel…” she says, and sighs.
“Head over heels with wings on your heels?” her mother replies, and chuckles softly as she blends flour and water and eggs together with a big blue spoon.
“What?”
“The King and I. Never mind.”
“I think I am. I think I’m totally and completely in love, Mom.”
Her mother hums something quick, a few bars, grins again and goes on stirring, the blue spoon clunking against the side of the bowl, musical but dulled, a muffled clapper striking a bell. “Been in love more than anybody else has, I guess,” comes out soft, because her mother’s the next best thing to tone deaf and only sings out loud when she thinks she’s alone.
“Which one is that?”
“The Music Man.”
“You don’t know any new songs, do you?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“Well, am I?”
Another sigh as her mother plugs the mixer into the outlet, but it’s still indulgent. You, she thinks, I love you I love you I love you, and she watches her mother’s smooth, graceful movements, traces the line of her mother’s neck, the curve of her shoulder and the slim taper of her arm with her eyes before she says, “It’s for real. I know it is.”
She has been in love before. Like in the song.
But this?
“He smiled at me,” she says.
“Did he?”
“At me. Just me. He was walking down the steps at school and I was going the other way and he stopped for a second and he smiled at me.” All of it comes out in a rush, in one breath, as if down deep inside she’s afraid that if she pauses, the words will evaporate and what she knows is true will suddenly turn into a fantasy. A pretty dream. That’s what her grandmother used to say: That’s a pretty dream, sweetheart. But this is no dream. This is not her imagination working overtime (and that, that’s a hundred percent what her dad would say). There was no one behind her, no one beside her, and unless he was smiling at a tree, then he was smiling at her.
She fixed it in her memory like a Polaroid picture. That smile. Eyes squeezed shut she tries to reconstruct it, shape her lips just right.
“I love him, Mom, I do,” she moans.
“I’m sure you do.”
“Then what do I say? Do I say something? What should I say?”
I’d rather die than to live without you…
The mixer whirrs into life, blades clacking against the sides of the bowl. “Maybe you should let him say something first,” her mother says.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“What if he doesn’t say anything?”
Mary Mary…
“Give him a chance.”
She erupts from the chair, a ball of barely contained energy. She’s a bird, she thinks, and her cage is too small. This house is too small, her life is too small, her parents’ plans for her are too small. She’s thirteen years old, thirteen thirteen THIRTEEN, and sometimes her body catches her unawares. It tingles sometimes. It tingles and hums and throbs and when he smiled at her she felt like her insides were going to drop out onto the sidewalk.
“What do I do?” she whispers. But her mother’s turned away, and the mixer is running. No one hears her except herself.
She wants to cry then, because her life is too small and everything else is too big. Way, way too big.
Enormous.
If her mother had responded, if her mother had even been looking at her, she might have been able to stay there in the sunny warmth of the kitchen, but with her mother turned away she feels suddenly alone, abandoned, left to figure out the world all by herself. The weight of that makes her flee the kitchen, go pattering back up the stairs into the safety of her room, her small blue room with its white polka-dotted curtains and its white chenille-covered bed and its shelves of books and dolls and treasures and its wall of thumbtacked-up color pictures of the boys whose smiles make her spend her allowance on records and magazines and dream of being the one they sing about.
She flings herself face-down on the bed, nose buried deep in white chenille, and wonders if she ought to go ahead and cry.
She wanted to dance, a little while ago.
Wondered, looking at herself in the mirror, what it would be like to dance naked in the sunshine, in the warm wind, in a field of flowers.
When the door clicks open, she says into the soft chenille, “I’m stupid.”
The bed shifts and gives a little as her mother sits beside her and runs a gentle hand down her back.
“I love him,” she pleads.
“All right,” her mother says.
“I do.”
“I believe you.”
She flips herself over, one abrupt move, something she could do as a baby, according to her mother. “What do I do?” she whispers. “Please tell me what to do.”
With an odd expression on her face her mother gathers her up and holds her close. It makes her feel small again, makes her feel like the baby would could flip herself over on a blanket on the floor but couldn’t crawl, couldn’t quite master moving around in the world. With one hand her mother pulls away the clip that holds the ponytail in place and frees the soft waves of her hair, runs her fingers through it, caresses it. They sit that way for a while, her mother rocking her slowly back and forth, stroking her hair, crooning something that isn’t quite words, isn’t quite music.
“Does he have a name?” her mother asks finally, as if she’s asking to be let in to a place she’s never been before.
And her lips form it. Shape it. The sound of it makes her shiver. “John.”
“All right.”
More than anything, she wants to hear him say her name. She hears it from her mother and father every day, hears it from her teachers and her friends, hears it coming out of the speakers of her record player:
Mary Mary, where you goin’ to?
But if he could say it, if he would just say it…
“Is this what it feels like?” she pleads. “Is it? Because…”
Her mother looks so kind. So patient. I love you I love you I love you, she thinks. Please help me, Mommy, help me help me help me.
There are tears running down her cheeks. Smiling, her mother dabs them away with the tips of her fingers. “It’s the worst thing in the world. And the best.”
“But -“
“Smile back. The next time he smiles, smile back.”
“Shouldn’t I say something?”
“Just tell him your name.”
“That’s all?”
“You could recite the Gettysburg Address, but I think that would confuse him,” her mother says, and laughs a little. “Yes, that’s all. Say ‘Hi, I’m Mary.’”
“And -“
“Then wait. And see what he says.”
“But what if he doesn’t say anything?”
“That’s a possibility. He might be as nervous as you are. He might be shy. Don’t think about it too much. Pretend you’ve known him for a long time. Talk to him like you’d talk to - who are those boys from down the street?”
“David and Bobby,” she mumbles.
Her mother nods and kisses her cheek. “I need to check on your cake. Don’t make yourself cry, okay? It’ll be fine. I promise.”
“How can you promise? You don’t know what’ll happen.”
“Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea.”
A minute later she’s alone in her small blue room, staring at the bright rectangles of sunlight on the braided rug alongside her bed. She could write this down, she thinks, could pull the thick spiral notebook with its flower-decal-scattered cover out from underneath her mattress and write down what she thinks and hears and feels. The book is half used-up already, its pages full of song lyrics and poems and thoughts and tiny pictures she trimmed out of magazines. If she died, she thinks, if for some reason she left this house and never came back, someone could look at that notebook and know everything about her.
Maybe, she thinks fleetingly, she should give him the book.
Let him read her heart.
Mary Mary, she thinks. It sounds good coming out of her record player, every time she listens to it. She goggled like an idiot at the album jacket when it was new, when she saw her name in the list of song titles and thought she might be imagining it. The song’s about a girl who left, who broke the guy’s heart - but she won’t ever do that. Not ever.
He can have her forever, if he’ll just say her name.
She can hear her mother starting up the vacuum cleaner downstairs as she slides the LP out of its jacket and lays it on the turntable of the record player. Most of the time, when she plays it, she keeps the volume turned down low because if she doesn’t her father will yell up the stairs. “Hey!” And again, “Hey!”
But this time she turns the little volume knob almost all the way up. Places the needle carefully in the right spot. There’s a scratch of static for a few seconds, then her name, her name, Mary Mary, exploding out of the speakers. Too loud, she thinks, too much, so she turns the volume down a little, then moves to her feet. Curls her toes into the ridges of the braided rug.
“Mary Mary,” she sings, and those boys she’ll never meet, never know, sing along.
She sings, because the sun is shining and the world is huge and she doesn’t know where she’s going.
Maybe she’ll crawl.
Maybe she’ll just flip.
She sings, quietly at first, then louder, and it’s confident and strong and sure because this she knows. This song. These words.
Her name.
He’s going to say her name. Maybe tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. That would be a good start, the perfect start, to a brand-new year. Her best year, she thinks. Her very, very best, possibly the best in the entire history of the world.
She’s thirteen today.
THIRTEEN.
And she loves.
And she dances.
* * * * *