Title: We are the subsect
Rating: M
Synopsis: The only way he found to make sense of their story and his life, was to write. The only way she could make sense of the world was to read. Words are weapons, words are shields. We are the subsect.
AUTHOR'S NOTE and Disclaimer: I will now commit the crime of admitting I have no idea where the heck this is going. Please know that as we embark on the crazy ride of where this fic will lead us. I will not be posting as often as I wish, but you tell me what you think…
Excerpts from The Subsect were born in my mind, product of too much rereading of Kerouac and Sallinger (no such animal!) and can be read in Italics… ah, you're too smart for me to be spelling this out.
Jess, Rory, and everyone from Gilmore Girls, I borrowed. Please don't sue. I own paperbacks. You do the math. On with it.
CHAPTER 1: The Reader's Corner.
We are the subsect.
We are the ones you ignored.
We are the ones you thought you would never have to fight against.
We are here.
We roam your streets, looking to pick fights.
We are young.
We are here.
You must face us.
You must see us.
We are bruised.
We are spitting in your faces.
We are an affront to all you believe in.
We are blowing your minds.
We are in love.
We are the subsect.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
It hadn't been an instant hit. It had just sort of… grown.
A kid had told another. College aged kids and high school kids.
It had rung a bell. It rang true, the reviewers had said.
Slowly, it built steam and it started getting attention online. Then in regular media.
He found himself having to do these stupid interviews. A journalist would ask, what inspired you to write this?
And he would invariably answer: "If I were able to sum it up in four or five sentences, why would I have written this book?"
The teenage crowd loved him. Truncheon started getting hate mail from parents, which made Chris and Matt terribly proud.
None of this bothered Jess Mariano, who was starting to find the title of author uncomfortable. It was good that he refused local TV interviews. He stuck to radio. That way, in the street, people would not say a thing. Matt and Christ, they enjoyed being the publishers of the mysterious hated Philly author who gave three radio interviews and riled up the young.
None of this shook Jess. None of this changed him. It had been almost two years since he'd published The Subsect, and the buzz was finally settling.
He still wore Chuck Taylor's, his beat up jacket was still beat up. He still drove the same god-awful car. He still bought the paper at noon in the same corner shop three blocks away from Truncheon, just so he could get away for lunch. He'd just say, I have to get the paper. And then he could go missing for one or two hours.
The front page of the paper was, of course, as politically minded as usual, but by noon this mattered very little, if at all. He'd read all the hard news online anyway.
The coverage of the campaign extended into the back pages of the first section. He eluded it, skipping over instead to the Reader's Corner.
It was a relatively new section, small and a bit hidden in between the hard news of the metro section. It had started maybe three or four months ago. The style of it was fresh and the reviewer had good taste in books.
The section would feature three books. Old, which was a shout out to the classics; New, a review of the recently published; and Discovering Philly, where the reviewer would give an opinion of a book a local reader suggested.
He'd been secretly hoping to find The Subsect there. Silently, he'd grown to respect the reviews of the Reader's Corner because they were not at all subservient. They were clear, concise, with a hint of poetic and a good measure of constructive criticism. And although he hated to admit it, he wanted to read what the reviewer thought of The Subsect.
It wasn't some narcissistic need for approval. It was more of a need of honest feedback. The response he'd been getting from the teen crowd was basically emotional, and he respected that. But there was something inside him that needed, for the first time, a critic's approval, an academic approval, if you will. He'd had it, once, but that time was long past and he would not let an interviewer dig it back up.
Once again, as he skimmed over the section, his book was not mentioned. He shrugged and sunk his teeth into the reviews, which he enjoyed anyway. Then he closed the paper, ordered a coffee to go, and walked back to Truncheon.
- - - - - - - - - - -
She stared at the book on her desk.
The Subsect.
It was an old copy, the copy he'd given her two years ago, with writing on the margins, his and her own.
Rory Gilmore, the Reader's Corner critic, faced a conundrum.
When her first column had gone out, she had asked readers to point her towards books they had enjoyed or hated and she would review the ones most recommended. It was what she called a Treasure Hunt. People would tell her about their treasured reads, and she would, in turn, learn about books she might not have heard of before.
The problem began with the first stack of letters.
Sixty-three percent: the percentage of readers under the age of 35.
Fifty-six percent: the percentage of readers under the age of 35 who had recommended The Subsect in that first stack of letters.
Thirty-three percent: the percentage of readers that had recommended one of the books mentioned in The Subsect.
As she stared at the book on her desk, the problem faded in and out of focus, intermittently replaced by the deep sense of pride at what Jess Mariano had accomplished.
He had gotten young people in Philadelphia to read again.
It was not quite the phenomenon of a Harry Potter. It was more of a creeping, word-of-mouth kind of triumph. Kids read it, passed copies from one to another, teenagers quoted it online, searched the net for the literature it referenced, and got reading. The parents hated the foul language, a couple of PTA committees in lower Pennsylvania had managed to keep the library from buying a copy. So kids would share copies bought on the sly.
The best way to get someone to read a book is to say it is forbidden.
All the while, Jess kept a low media profile.
And Rory reread the novel, once, twice, thirteen hundred times.
Every new stack of letters carried the same request. To talk about The Subsect. The parents asked her to condemn it, the college students asked her to praise it.
Unwillingly, Jess Mariano's characters had become heroes to a generation of Pennsylvania teenagers and young adults.
She had avoided it long enough. Two months of weekly columns, eight issues gone to print.
It had been easier to work the campaign trail. There had been no chance of bumping in to him, because she'd had no time. She had breezed through Pennsylvania on the first leg of the trail. But the second time around the city called to her, a job opening called to her.
And so she stayed in Philadelphia.
She had avoided him for two months, mapping trails that would take her as far from Truncheon as humanly possible. She bought her books online. She went to bed early. She brewed coffee at home.
But now, it was time to face the music.
She sighed as she ran her fingers over her old copy. She slipped it into her purse, along with the brand new one that had arrived in the mail inside a small manila envelope.
The envelope read, in block lettering: Truncheon. For your consideration.
And then, in his familiar chickenscratch. "Don't print it. Just tell me what you think."
Followed by his email address.
Her blood had stopped circulating, no oxygen had gone to her brain. She'd died for a fraction of a second.
But then it hit her.
He didn't know.
She was just another critic. Another reviewer.
She was nothing special.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
She was nothing special.
She had blue eyes, yes, but they were nothing special.
Neither was her reddish-brown hair, or the way she could speak without taking a breath.
She was nothing special.
So she would take the cigarette from my mouth and make it disappear beneath the heel of her shoe. So what? It wasn't magic.
She was nothing special.
So what if I could play connect-the-dots on her freckles? So what if my stomach bottomed out when I saw her?
She was nothing special.
I had to believe that.
Because I was nothing special, and if she was nothing special, then maybe we'd have a shot.
But she grew taller than I could ever grow, a pine tree, a forest.
And under her shade, all that I could ever be was moss.
- - - - - - - - - - -
It had been a whim.
It had been a stupid stupid stupid thing to do.
Chris would be upset. Matt would be angry. Why was he, Jess Mariano, published writer, almost begging for a review.
There was just something he needed.
A kind word. A foul word.
A true word.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Rory's pencil had managed to burrow down to the next page, leaving a tiny circular hole on the page she was supposed to be writing on.
She still hadn't decided exactly what she wanted to write.
Did she want to write a review? Or an apology?
Was it even ethical for her to review his novel?
Should she tell him? Should she ask him?
- - - - - - - - -
Dave and I pace the supermarket exit. Staying on the sidewalk, we hit up strangers for quarters.
He's faster, charming. He has a guitar and he brings it by some days. He gets a couple of singles, lucky bastard.
If I'm in a good mood, I'll sing a couple of Dylan. Sometimes I do Robert Frost, sometimes I do Allen Ginsberg.
Dave shakes his head and does little intros with a guitar pick he calls lucky cause he found it on a clean sidewalk, no gum stuck to it.
Dave still believes in luck.
The town hates us because we give it a non-suburban feel. That's alright, we don't like it here anyway. We're on our way, east to New York to hit up strangers for something bigger than change, then upwards to Alaska.
Because, why the hell not?
We want to see what it's like when there's nowhere to go but down.
Dave has lax morals: he plays church on Sundays. I have lax morals: I steal from the collection basket.
We eat and sleep where we can, the car windows rolled up and newspapers to keep us warm.
This is the life of the high-school dropout.
Not as fucking glamorous as it sounds.
Still.
Beats pronoun worksheets.
- - - - - - - - - - -
She volunteers at the soup kitchen because she can. That means she doesn't need the soup for herself, but she'll have some anyway.
She bites her fingernails.
She's hungry for something.
She sits across from me once, twice, before actually saying what she means.
She says, "I saw you."
"Seeing me right now."
"At church. Taking that money. There's one less bowl of soup because of you."
"Don't eat then."
She wants to grin but doesn't. She tells me her name.
I tell her mine.
I won't tell you her name.
I'll tell you mine.
I am Joshua.
This is not Canaan.
The promised land is further north, where winter has never met a spring it didn't like.
I am no leader of people.
She furiously throws her spoon at my left shoulder.
Dave strums on a nearby table, looking to score… whatever.
Dave, he's looking for his own promised land in this slumbering town.
- - - - - - - - - -
Rory hardly breathed as she typed.
It wasn't that it was hard to review his book fairly.
It was that she couldn't keep the tears from rolling down her cheeks when she wrote about his words. She had started writing the review at the office, but couldn't.
At home, what she now called home, two couches and a dusty TV, there she could cry.
How could she not cry?
- - - - - - - - - -
She eats only soup, I realize, and she's disappearing.
She leads me to her bedroom then pushes me away.
I know this for a lie.
Here's the truth:
I eat nothing but soup. I am wasting away.
I lead her to my car. I say nothing.
She says nothing.
We push each other away, we push our clothes out of the way, it is not so cold. Dave bangs on the fogged up windows that it is that cold, taps the pick on the hood as the car moves a little.
She bites my jacket to keep quiet.
I want to tell her that I will keep her warm.
But I know this for a lie.
I help her get dressed, she looks away.
Dave's driving tonight.
Away from the miserable town with the soup kitchen with the girl who is not special who I have not held millions of conversations with over hot soup with pepper.
I think we were in love.
We go away, and leave the town be. We allow peace to return as we hightail it.
We are the subsect.
TBC…
Author's note NUMERO DOS: So there you have it. Now you know what I mean when I say I have no clue where I'm going to go with this, exactly. I know, hooplah of a coincidence that Rory writes a column Jess likes. Don't kick my ass just yet. How about we stick with it?
Tell me what you think!
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