notes: I feel like I kind of missed the mark with this one, but it's the first thing I've written in almost a year so it's going up here anyways.
notes2: FF's formatting is the bane of my existence.
open your mind and then your legs
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Hey, you want to hear a joke?
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It goes like this;
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who liked to skip rope in Cleveland, Ohio. This was because she lived in Cleveland, Ohio and had no means of skipping rope anywhere else, and also because skipping rope is something that most little girls like to do, especially little girls with wide brown eyes and teeth growing in crooked and no friends except a cat named Smucky.
The girl's stepmother liked to delude herself into thinking that she was her friend, but she was old and loud and talked too much and had makeup caked into the creases of her face. She only spoke to the girl to send her away, and she would call her hon, sweetie, darling, anything and everything except for Drew.
Honey, the grown-ups are talking.
Sweetie, your daddy and I need some Private Time, why don't you go play outside?
I don't care where the fuck you go, baby girl, just Get. Out.
(Even the cat never liked her much.)
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Alternatively titled, no one is born bad.
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Before the stepmother, Drew's father would take her places. The pool, the park. He was twenty-three and didn't have the first idea of how to be a dad, but he did his best, he really did- for a while.
The stepmother came when Drew was nine. She got her period the same year, sticky blood spotting her skirt during lunch, and she thought she was dying. She thought she was dying and the teacher pulled her down to the nurse's office, hand tight around her arm while Drew sobbed and screamed, and the nurse shook her roughly by the shoulders and told her to get ahold of herself right this second.
(Later, Drew would read Carrie, gritting her teeth through the jumbled letters of dyslexia, and she would laugh and laugh so that she wouldn't cry.)
The charmspeak came when Drew was ten and she loved it, this tiny seed of power inside her- even if she didn't know what it was, even if she hardly realized she was doing it half the time, even if it just happened and she didn't know how to control it- she loved it. She loved it.
Because she was Drew fucking Tanaka and if they didn't want to look at her, if they didn't want to love her, then with God as her witness, she'd make them.
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Alternatively titled, you can't make them love you.
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A few of the girls rolled their eyes when Drew was Claimed- of course, of course, another Aphrodite girl, another empty little giggling nothing to shove into the pink-painted cabin, wow what a surprise.
She wiped the smirks right off their stupid ugly faces.
Not one of her fellow demigods had ever heard of charmspeak before.
But it didn't- it didn't help, because fear does not imply respect. Fear implies resentment, hostility, hatred, and Drew certainly received plenty of all three. But it didn't matter, because Drew was beautiful and powerful and perfect- she was perfect, she had to be, she had to be.
She told the voices of doubt in her head to shut the fuck up, already, and Drew Tanaka could lie and cheat and manipulate everyone around her but she could never fool herself.
And so the voices said, you are beautiful but you are fake, you are straight from the plastic mold, you are perfect but you'll
never
be
good
enough.
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Alternatively titled, she never meant to listen.
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But Drew was an Aphrodite girls, and Aphrodite girls expect this, really. Because they live in the dollhouse, because they're the butt of every joke, the root of every punch line. Because the Aphrodite girls can never be, could never be anything other than empty-headed little Barbies, laughing and giggling over haircuts, makeup, magazines. Because Silena was the exception, the hero, but she only seemed to prove the rule, and all Drew could do was grit her teeth and suffer through it.
If they wanted her to act like a tyrant, if they wanted her to be the skimpy little slut hanging on the edges to steal all their precious little boyfriends (as if she wanted them- as if she couldn't do better), if they wanted someone to put on a pedestal of loathing and resentment-
Did she even have a choice, anymore?
And then there was Piper. Piper fucking McLean, beautiful and shining from her safety-scissor haircut to her unpainted toenails. Piper with her movie-star father, Piper who expected sympathy for being born rich and beautiful, Piper who stood so far above them without even bothering to look down, Piper with her Special Snowflake Syndrome, Piper who treated them like nothing more than sparkly airheaded dirt beneath her feet -and then Piper who accused Drew of being the tyrant. Piper who accused Drew of being the bad seed, as if there was any difference between them.
And Piper fucking McLean is the righteous one, here.
Piper McLean is the hero.
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Alternatively titled, go fuck yourself, hon.
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Predictably, the war ended. Predictably, they won.
Predictably, Piper came home.
With Jason Grace on her arm, parading him around the camp, sending little suspicious glances Drew's way as if Drew had even a flicker of want for that boy, as if he had been anything except a momentary distraction. As if this had ever been about Jason, as if this had ever been about anything except for Piper, Drew's sister, Drew's family. As if this had ever been about anything except for the plastic, the mold, the sickly sweet of charmspeak lies.
Because let's not delude ourselves, here- girls like Drew just don't get ahead.
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"I don't hate you," Piper said, smiling softly, sweetly.
Like she was doing Drew a favor.
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Alternatively titled, bitterness is a disease- take care you don't catch it.
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It goes like this;
Once upon a time, Drew Tanaka was happy.
And that's it. That's the punch line.
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