![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Trent is a ballet student in Eden. You can find his best friend, Ru, over at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
runeden, and, of course Eden belongs to the talented cicirossi, who very kindly invited us to play there.
***** ***** *****
Somewhere in the past two years his bedroom at his parents house had stopped being home. His mom hadn’t touched anything, except to clean and dust, and yet somehow when he did end up spending the night, it still felt like a hotel room. The posters on the wall were no longer his heroes and the bookshelves were so much storage. He knew he had whined and pleaded until his mum had had the wall behind his bed painted a rich royal blue before they’d even moved in, but he couldn’t remember the desire behind the begging any more. The disbelief and pride that had received most of the awards on the mantle shelf he did remember, but it was strange how faded and distant some of the ribbons and medals looked now.
He’d never been much of one for nostalgia. They’d moved every year, every eighteen months or so throughout his whole childhood, so there was no box of childhood exercise books and nursery drawings sitting in the attic. He wasn’t even sure if his parents had his baby photos somewhere – it had never occurred to him to ask. His Gram – his dad’s mother – had one of his very first ballet slippers preserved in some kind of bronze-a-like that always reminded him uncomfortably of Lucite.
Fortunately that was all the way over in Maine where he only had to see it once in a blue moon. She had handprints from all three of her sons, and creepy sculpted body parts from all his cousins. It was a toss up which house he liked to sleep in less, Gram’s with all the baby – bodies, or Uncle Robert’s with all the stuffed dead things. The first time he’d watched Lost Boys it had taken him a couple of minutes to calm down enough to explain to Ru what was so funny about the grandpa. Uncle Robert’s place also had the dubious enticements of sharing a bathroom with Kara and Shelly, his two elder cousins, whereas most of the time Gram’s place meant sharing the guest room with Tam – Uncle Simon’s son – who was only six, and wriggled. Uncle Simon and his wife would have the pull out bed in the living room, which meant they got the ring side seats for the baby freak show. You had to be grateful for small mercies when you were stuck with a weeks worth of family togetherness.
>Sitting on the bus late at night, trundling back towards the city center and the school, though, was the perfect opportunity for such musings. He adjusted the volume of his Discman so that the vocals mainly faded out, just leaving a soothing buzz of rhythm, let the engine vibrate up through his shoulder where he was leaning against the window just let his mind wander. Sometimes he could spend the whole journey listening to other people’s conversations, or just watching how people were.
One time he’d missed his stop and stayed on all the way to Jackson and spent nearly half an hour finding the route back, because he got so involved in some couple and their final argument. At least, he assumed it was their final argument, seeing as it got so loud, and so cruel, and then the guy had thrown himself out of the bus doors just as they were closing on one of the clubs along that route. Trent had watched out of the back window as the guy hailed a cab to take him who-knows-where while his fiancée sobbed in the front seats, surrounded with instant friends who had been listening intently since the bus left Redwood.
Other nights no one caught his eye, and he just lost himself in the music and the light-shade-light of the street lights as they plodded past. That was another thing he missed when he let his mum talk him into staying the night. She worried, she said, that the long bus ride wasn’t entirely safe so late at night, and that surely he’d disturb his roommate coming in late, and he wouldn’t like it if his roommate did that too him, now would he?. Sometimes it was easier just to stay put, take advantage of having a real, civilized bathroom, and someone to bring him a glass of OJ when they woke him up, and then talk his dad into giving him a lift most of the way back so he wouldn’t miss classes. Except when he did that, his room wasn’t quite his, and the silence where his hi-fi should have been always nibbled at the edges of his consciousness as he fell asleep.
His uncles had clubbed together for his sixteenth birthday and given him a decent mini-system – the sort where you could plug in proper tin-can headphones to listen without disturbing his parents. Each of his cousins had given him a CD, mostly music that they thought he’d like to dance too. All except Shelly who’d given him some incomprehensible Mexican folk CD, that had probably ended life as a Frisbee. The mini hi-fi now had pride of place on the drawers in his room, where he could go to sleep with those same tin-can earphones blocking out the sounds of Russell snoring and wrestling his pillow. Sometimes it was the music for a piece he was preparing to dance, or he had a bunch of film scores that you could turn down real low and drift off to. It wasn’t the sort of thing he particularly wanted to listen to sitting on the bus though, so if he did stay at his parent’s he normally had the choice of one of Ru's fast paced stompy mixes or listening to the house settle, and neither really led to a good night’s sleep.
runeden, and, of course Eden belongs to the talented cicirossi, who very kindly invited us to play there. ***** ***** *****
Somewhere in the past two years his bedroom at his parents house had stopped being home. His mom hadn’t touched anything, except to clean and dust, and yet somehow when he did end up spending the night, it still felt like a hotel room. The posters on the wall were no longer his heroes and the bookshelves were so much storage. He knew he had whined and pleaded until his mum had had the wall behind his bed painted a rich royal blue before they’d even moved in, but he couldn’t remember the desire behind the begging any more. The disbelief and pride that had received most of the awards on the mantle shelf he did remember, but it was strange how faded and distant some of the ribbons and medals looked now.
He’d never been much of one for nostalgia. They’d moved every year, every eighteen months or so throughout his whole childhood, so there was no box of childhood exercise books and nursery drawings sitting in the attic. He wasn’t even sure if his parents had his baby photos somewhere – it had never occurred to him to ask. His Gram – his dad’s mother – had one of his very first ballet slippers preserved in some kind of bronze-a-like that always reminded him uncomfortably of Lucite.
Fortunately that was all the way over in Maine where he only had to see it once in a blue moon. She had handprints from all three of her sons, and creepy sculpted body parts from all his cousins. It was a toss up which house he liked to sleep in less, Gram’s with all the baby – bodies, or Uncle Robert’s with all the stuffed dead things. The first time he’d watched Lost Boys it had taken him a couple of minutes to calm down enough to explain to Ru what was so funny about the grandpa. Uncle Robert’s place also had the dubious enticements of sharing a bathroom with Kara and Shelly, his two elder cousins, whereas most of the time Gram’s place meant sharing the guest room with Tam – Uncle Simon’s son – who was only six, and wriggled. Uncle Simon and his wife would have the pull out bed in the living room, which meant they got the ring side seats for the baby freak show. You had to be grateful for small mercies when you were stuck with a weeks worth of family togetherness.
>Sitting on the bus late at night, trundling back towards the city center and the school, though, was the perfect opportunity for such musings. He adjusted the volume of his Discman so that the vocals mainly faded out, just leaving a soothing buzz of rhythm, let the engine vibrate up through his shoulder where he was leaning against the window just let his mind wander. Sometimes he could spend the whole journey listening to other people’s conversations, or just watching how people were.
One time he’d missed his stop and stayed on all the way to Jackson and spent nearly half an hour finding the route back, because he got so involved in some couple and their final argument. At least, he assumed it was their final argument, seeing as it got so loud, and so cruel, and then the guy had thrown himself out of the bus doors just as they were closing on one of the clubs along that route. Trent had watched out of the back window as the guy hailed a cab to take him who-knows-where while his fiancée sobbed in the front seats, surrounded with instant friends who had been listening intently since the bus left Redwood.
Other nights no one caught his eye, and he just lost himself in the music and the light-shade-light of the street lights as they plodded past. That was another thing he missed when he let his mum talk him into staying the night. She worried, she said, that the long bus ride wasn’t entirely safe so late at night, and that surely he’d disturb his roommate coming in late, and he wouldn’t like it if his roommate did that too him, now would he?. Sometimes it was easier just to stay put, take advantage of having a real, civilized bathroom, and someone to bring him a glass of OJ when they woke him up, and then talk his dad into giving him a lift most of the way back so he wouldn’t miss classes. Except when he did that, his room wasn’t quite his, and the silence where his hi-fi should have been always nibbled at the edges of his consciousness as he fell asleep.
His uncles had clubbed together for his sixteenth birthday and given him a decent mini-system – the sort where you could plug in proper tin-can headphones to listen without disturbing his parents. Each of his cousins had given him a CD, mostly music that they thought he’d like to dance too. All except Shelly who’d given him some incomprehensible Mexican folk CD, that had probably ended life as a Frisbee. The mini hi-fi now had pride of place on the drawers in his room, where he could go to sleep with those same tin-can earphones blocking out the sounds of Russell snoring and wrestling his pillow. Sometimes it was the music for a piece he was preparing to dance, or he had a bunch of film scores that you could turn down real low and drift off to. It wasn’t the sort of thing he particularly wanted to listen to sitting on the bus though, so if he did stay at his parent’s he normally had the choice of one of Ru's fast paced stompy mixes or listening to the house settle, and neither really led to a good night’s sleep.