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31_days2008-06-27 10:47 pm
praiseofshadows.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2008-06-27 10:47 pm
[June 27th] [Higher Ground] (dys)Functionality
Title: (dys)Functionality
Day/Theme: June 27 - the thrill of the kill becomes your only law
Series: Higher Ground (television series)
Character/Pairing: Scott (Scott/Shelby, Elaine/Scott, Stepfather/Shelby implied)
Rating: R (for language and disturbing concepts, though no more disturbing than the show itself)
Spoilers: Set after Episode 22.
After the MORP and the whole sick thing of his dad blaming him, Peter comes up with a compromise.
He gets to stay at Horizon, and Bob agrees to let him on the Lawrence Hastings Prep team for the coming fall. Well, “agrees” is too mild a term. Bob likes to win. Bob likes Lawrence Hastings Prep in the rankings, and he especially likes the fact that Scott’s name on the roster will bring Division One recruiters he previously could only dream about.
Scott’s dad comes to all the games, and it’s awkward, and Scott hates himself for how much he still yearns for his dad’s approval, when it’s obvious his dad doesn’t and will never understand.
The Cliffhangers sometimes get permission from Peter to come see him play, and it’s weird because for so long football was such a part of his life and now it’s just an afterthought, a chore to be done – like kitchen duty or checking the gear. A means to an end, and he finds himself waiting for the game to be over and done so he can go back home.
But afterwards, without fail, his dad takes him out to O’Brien’s and tells him what a great game it was. How great a player Scott is, and Scott wishes he could reach across the table and bridge all the lies and hurt between them.
Shelby comes sometimes to dinner because his dad is anxious to pretend his son is normal and nothing apparently says normal to his father than having a girl his own age. Scott’s glad of her presence, her hand clutching his under the table. He knows she hates it, and if he needed any more reasons to love her, this would be just another in a list too long to even begin to write.
The first game of the state division playoffs, all the reps are there – from the Pac Ten to the Big Ten to the Southeast Conference. The rest of the team is jittery, but Scott does what he always does: grits his teeth and bears it.
He looks out at the stands, looks for his dad (bad habit, but even now he can’t break it), and wants to curl into a ball and die.
Elaine’s there. Hanging on his dad’s arm like nothing’s happened. And nothing did happen, not to her.
The world spins, all out of focus, and all he can think about –
He gets through the game somehow, afterwards, he can’t remember how, and they win, and he might have made a great play or he might have fucked it all up beyond repair. He thinks it was probably a great play because everyone’s patting him on the back, but he has to get out of here.
He just makes it to back behind the bleachers before he vomits up the contents of his stomach, hunched over like he’s just had the worst trip of his life, popped every pill in his stash.
Shelby’s hands are cool on the back of his neck, and through the ringing in his ears, he hears her say, “That bitch. That goddamn bitch.”
Sometimes he and Shelby joke that his stepmother should meet up with her stepfather. Start a little club or something. In hell.
But Scott’s the one who’s in hell right now, sitting in the back of his dad’s car while Elaine calmly applies more lipstick in the passenger sunvisor mirror as his dad tells him how they’re all going to “try again.” She’s watching him. Not even being subtle about it, but then even she can’t really wear shades this late at night. He splashed his face and washed out the inside of his mouth with water from the locker room tap, but he still feels dirty. And she knows it.
His dad is acting like they’re one big happy family, but Scott can see how white his dad’s knuckles are on the steering wheel. Shelby’s curled up on his right in the backseat, huddled in a tight little ball against the car door.
O’Brien’s has its normal Friday night crowd. Curtis is either on-duty or off-duty and still in uniform, playing with the jukebox and waiting for Annie to go on break. Bob and the rest of the Lawrence Hastings Prep team are in the back, waiting to dig into their pizza. Gracie is sitting behind the counter, already in her nightgown but not yet in bed.
Scott puts his hands behind his head. Walks like a man going to his execution as Annie leads them to their usual table.
Elaine is all smiles, like she always is, like she never, she never –
“Double bacon cheeseburger. Substitute the fries for onion rings,” he hears Shelby say. “Same for him, too.”
“I’ve always told Martin that the school really revs up you kids’ metabolisms,” Elaine says after she orders her salad, dressing on the side of course. “When I was your age, I wouldn’t have dared order something like that – let alone in front of a boy,” she says, folding her hands daintily on the checkered tablecloth. It’s the first time tonight she’s directly addressing Shelby, and Scott’s not sure if he’s relieved that it’s all going to come to a head or appalled that Elaine’s treating Shelby like she’s competition.
It’s sick and wrong and twisted, and she used to do it all the time whenever a girl would come over. It didn’t even have to be a girlfriend – he didn’t do girlfriends then, but the cheerleaders and the football team had always hung together, something about late nights on school buses singing stupid fight songs and trying frantically to get their homework done by shared flashlight.
He’d been embarrassed by it, but one of the cheerleaders told him she had just gotten a new (and younger) stepmother, too, and it was normal. That they just got worried because they were supposed to be trophies and mothers at the same time, and they just couldn’t deal with teenagers for stepkids. They were too close to being teenagers themselves.
It’s funny, but when he thinks back about it, the way she said it reminded him of Daisy’s manically droll voice, and he wishes he had been there for that cheerleader a little more. Cared a little more about something other than being state champion and that Elaine start buying potato chips instead of those god-awful diet rice cakes of hers.
He stopped caring about both of those things soon after. After the first time Elaine started coming into his room while his father was away on business, and Scott had started needing to get high to get himself numb enough to –
Shelby gives a fake sort of laugh. “Well, we already have one puker in the group. Wouldn’t want to step on her turf.”
His dad winces, and Scott wonders why his dad even bothers to come, go through this stupid ritual, week after week, when it’s more than obvious that he can’t stand even the slightest mention of just why kids are at Horizon.
Not that Scott’s grip on reality is any better than his dad’s at the moment. He wants to stand up and throw his chair across the room. Maybe at Curtis to make him stop choosing country-western songs.
Annie gets their food out in record time. She can probably sense their discomfort. After all, she’s dealt with the hell of Parents’ Week for years, and she’s already seen the spectacular fireworks of the Barringers’ dinner table on more than one occasion.
Shelby takes the bun off her cheeseburger and picks off all the bacon. Puts it on his plate, right between the onion rings and the pickle. That’s true love, right there, and had it been any other night he’d already be popping it in his mouth. Complete with those dorky over-exaggerated eating noises that make Shelby giggle like he’s never heard.
But he doesn’t have an appetite tonight. Neither, it appears, does anyone else.
“So…uh, Scott,” his dead says, finally breaking the way-past-awkward silence that’s descended over the table since Shelby’s reference to Jules, “How’s school?”
Scott stuffs a whole onion ring in his mouth, just so he doesn’t have to answer.
His dad, however, does not take the hint, and painfully continues, “Peter told me something about you kids putting on a play?” His dad says it like it’s a question, but, of course, it’s really not.
He swallows, but the chewed up onion ring just won’t go down. He reaches for his glass of water. Gulps at it frantically to try to keep back his gag reflex. Looks down and catches sight of Shelby’s hands in her lap, methodically twisting her paper napkin to shreds.
“Uh, yeah,” he manages to mumble down at his plate. “One of the guys – uh Ezra – said that since his play got…uh, canceled during spring Parents’ Week, he should get another shot for the fall one.”
“Peter says you and Shelby were quite the pair of star-crossed lovers last time around,” his dad insists on saying, and Scott wishes O’Brien’s would be held up in an armed robbery. Or the kitchen would catch on fire. Or the circus would visit.
Elaine has long discarded her salad and is eyeing his dad’s uneaten french fries. She’s going to start snitching them soon, Scott knows, and he hates how he knows and hates that he still knows, that even after almost a whole year out of her presence, he can’t forget her horrible, hypocritical little habits.
Elaine notices him looking at her and smiles, suddenly. That smile that says gotcha. “Is that how you two got together?” she asks, in that buddy-buddy voice of hers. The voice that always was saying I just want to be your friend, Scottie.
Friends don’t let friends do drugs, he thinks inanely, remembering all those stupid anti-drug commercials. Like she gave a shit about him using.
Or why he needed to.
Remarkably, Elaine is still speaking, this time leaning over the table towards Shelby, as if taking her into some-sort of woman’s only confidence. “Scottie can be a real charmer, can’t he?” she titters. “I can see how it would easily be a case of real life imitating art.”
She winks. She freaking winks. Like she’s five or in a daytime soap or something. And hell, maybe that’s where she got her twisted ideas about family life.
Shelby sits up straight. Leans her arms on the table. “Actually,” she says in that beautifully sarcastic voice of hers. That voice that says: no matter what you say to me, no matter what you do to me, you can’t get to me; I’m too far gone for you to reach. “We met at the weekly chapter of Molested by Our Stepparents Anonymous.”
And with that, Scott can tell Shelby is done for the evening. Period. Finito. The end.
She shoves her plate forward and stands up. “I’m going to call a cab back to school.”
“You told her?” his dad says, voice rising and face flushing in anger. And Scott remembers how much he used to worry that his dad would have a heart attack. He still worries, of course, but it’s different now. He wishes he could summon back that unconditional love he used to feel, but it’s long gone, lost somewhere between the first time Elaine slid herself into bed with him and the first time his dad told him he was making it all up.
“You told her?” his father repeats, oblivious to anything but his own anger. Elaine sits, white-faced at his side. “My God, Scott, who haven’t you told? The Seattle Times? CNN?”
Scott pushes his chair back. Rises. “Real sensitive, Dad,” he manages to bite out. He leans forward over the table, palms on either side of his dinner plate. Makes an effort to lower his voice because no matter how much he wants to shout out the truth about Elaine to the heavens, Shelby’s business is very much her own business. “Guess that means you don’t want to hear about people who just can’t –“ and here his voice breaks, and he doesn’t care because he read Shelby’s letters to Daisy, dammit “—seem to keep themselves out of their stepkids' beds.”
The night's over for him, too.
He knows this won’t be the last dinner he’ll have to have like this. Knows that next Friday he’ll probably be back at O’Brien’s with his dad and that skank in tow, but for now he takes cold comfort in the shattered look in his dad’s eyes and the way Shelby’s tight in his arms as they wait for their cab.
Day/Theme: June 27 - the thrill of the kill becomes your only law
Series: Higher Ground (television series)
Character/Pairing: Scott (Scott/Shelby, Elaine/Scott, Stepfather/Shelby implied)
Rating: R (for language and disturbing concepts, though no more disturbing than the show itself)
Spoilers: Set after Episode 22.
After the MORP and the whole sick thing of his dad blaming him, Peter comes up with a compromise.
He gets to stay at Horizon, and Bob agrees to let him on the Lawrence Hastings Prep team for the coming fall. Well, “agrees” is too mild a term. Bob likes to win. Bob likes Lawrence Hastings Prep in the rankings, and he especially likes the fact that Scott’s name on the roster will bring Division One recruiters he previously could only dream about.
Scott’s dad comes to all the games, and it’s awkward, and Scott hates himself for how much he still yearns for his dad’s approval, when it’s obvious his dad doesn’t and will never understand.
The Cliffhangers sometimes get permission from Peter to come see him play, and it’s weird because for so long football was such a part of his life and now it’s just an afterthought, a chore to be done – like kitchen duty or checking the gear. A means to an end, and he finds himself waiting for the game to be over and done so he can go back home.
But afterwards, without fail, his dad takes him out to O’Brien’s and tells him what a great game it was. How great a player Scott is, and Scott wishes he could reach across the table and bridge all the lies and hurt between them.
Shelby comes sometimes to dinner because his dad is anxious to pretend his son is normal and nothing apparently says normal to his father than having a girl his own age. Scott’s glad of her presence, her hand clutching his under the table. He knows she hates it, and if he needed any more reasons to love her, this would be just another in a list too long to even begin to write.
The first game of the state division playoffs, all the reps are there – from the Pac Ten to the Big Ten to the Southeast Conference. The rest of the team is jittery, but Scott does what he always does: grits his teeth and bears it.
He looks out at the stands, looks for his dad (bad habit, but even now he can’t break it), and wants to curl into a ball and die.
Elaine’s there. Hanging on his dad’s arm like nothing’s happened. And nothing did happen, not to her.
The world spins, all out of focus, and all he can think about –
He gets through the game somehow, afterwards, he can’t remember how, and they win, and he might have made a great play or he might have fucked it all up beyond repair. He thinks it was probably a great play because everyone’s patting him on the back, but he has to get out of here.
He just makes it to back behind the bleachers before he vomits up the contents of his stomach, hunched over like he’s just had the worst trip of his life, popped every pill in his stash.
Shelby’s hands are cool on the back of his neck, and through the ringing in his ears, he hears her say, “That bitch. That goddamn bitch.”
Sometimes he and Shelby joke that his stepmother should meet up with her stepfather. Start a little club or something. In hell.
But Scott’s the one who’s in hell right now, sitting in the back of his dad’s car while Elaine calmly applies more lipstick in the passenger sunvisor mirror as his dad tells him how they’re all going to “try again.” She’s watching him. Not even being subtle about it, but then even she can’t really wear shades this late at night. He splashed his face and washed out the inside of his mouth with water from the locker room tap, but he still feels dirty. And she knows it.
His dad is acting like they’re one big happy family, but Scott can see how white his dad’s knuckles are on the steering wheel. Shelby’s curled up on his right in the backseat, huddled in a tight little ball against the car door.
O’Brien’s has its normal Friday night crowd. Curtis is either on-duty or off-duty and still in uniform, playing with the jukebox and waiting for Annie to go on break. Bob and the rest of the Lawrence Hastings Prep team are in the back, waiting to dig into their pizza. Gracie is sitting behind the counter, already in her nightgown but not yet in bed.
Scott puts his hands behind his head. Walks like a man going to his execution as Annie leads them to their usual table.
Elaine is all smiles, like she always is, like she never, she never –
“Double bacon cheeseburger. Substitute the fries for onion rings,” he hears Shelby say. “Same for him, too.”
“I’ve always told Martin that the school really revs up you kids’ metabolisms,” Elaine says after she orders her salad, dressing on the side of course. “When I was your age, I wouldn’t have dared order something like that – let alone in front of a boy,” she says, folding her hands daintily on the checkered tablecloth. It’s the first time tonight she’s directly addressing Shelby, and Scott’s not sure if he’s relieved that it’s all going to come to a head or appalled that Elaine’s treating Shelby like she’s competition.
It’s sick and wrong and twisted, and she used to do it all the time whenever a girl would come over. It didn’t even have to be a girlfriend – he didn’t do girlfriends then, but the cheerleaders and the football team had always hung together, something about late nights on school buses singing stupid fight songs and trying frantically to get their homework done by shared flashlight.
He’d been embarrassed by it, but one of the cheerleaders told him she had just gotten a new (and younger) stepmother, too, and it was normal. That they just got worried because they were supposed to be trophies and mothers at the same time, and they just couldn’t deal with teenagers for stepkids. They were too close to being teenagers themselves.
It’s funny, but when he thinks back about it, the way she said it reminded him of Daisy’s manically droll voice, and he wishes he had been there for that cheerleader a little more. Cared a little more about something other than being state champion and that Elaine start buying potato chips instead of those god-awful diet rice cakes of hers.
He stopped caring about both of those things soon after. After the first time Elaine started coming into his room while his father was away on business, and Scott had started needing to get high to get himself numb enough to –
Shelby gives a fake sort of laugh. “Well, we already have one puker in the group. Wouldn’t want to step on her turf.”
His dad winces, and Scott wonders why his dad even bothers to come, go through this stupid ritual, week after week, when it’s more than obvious that he can’t stand even the slightest mention of just why kids are at Horizon.
Not that Scott’s grip on reality is any better than his dad’s at the moment. He wants to stand up and throw his chair across the room. Maybe at Curtis to make him stop choosing country-western songs.
Annie gets their food out in record time. She can probably sense their discomfort. After all, she’s dealt with the hell of Parents’ Week for years, and she’s already seen the spectacular fireworks of the Barringers’ dinner table on more than one occasion.
Shelby takes the bun off her cheeseburger and picks off all the bacon. Puts it on his plate, right between the onion rings and the pickle. That’s true love, right there, and had it been any other night he’d already be popping it in his mouth. Complete with those dorky over-exaggerated eating noises that make Shelby giggle like he’s never heard.
But he doesn’t have an appetite tonight. Neither, it appears, does anyone else.
“So…uh, Scott,” his dead says, finally breaking the way-past-awkward silence that’s descended over the table since Shelby’s reference to Jules, “How’s school?”
Scott stuffs a whole onion ring in his mouth, just so he doesn’t have to answer.
His dad, however, does not take the hint, and painfully continues, “Peter told me something about you kids putting on a play?” His dad says it like it’s a question, but, of course, it’s really not.
He swallows, but the chewed up onion ring just won’t go down. He reaches for his glass of water. Gulps at it frantically to try to keep back his gag reflex. Looks down and catches sight of Shelby’s hands in her lap, methodically twisting her paper napkin to shreds.
“Uh, yeah,” he manages to mumble down at his plate. “One of the guys – uh Ezra – said that since his play got…uh, canceled during spring Parents’ Week, he should get another shot for the fall one.”
“Peter says you and Shelby were quite the pair of star-crossed lovers last time around,” his dad insists on saying, and Scott wishes O’Brien’s would be held up in an armed robbery. Or the kitchen would catch on fire. Or the circus would visit.
Elaine has long discarded her salad and is eyeing his dad’s uneaten french fries. She’s going to start snitching them soon, Scott knows, and he hates how he knows and hates that he still knows, that even after almost a whole year out of her presence, he can’t forget her horrible, hypocritical little habits.
Elaine notices him looking at her and smiles, suddenly. That smile that says gotcha. “Is that how you two got together?” she asks, in that buddy-buddy voice of hers. The voice that always was saying I just want to be your friend, Scottie.
Friends don’t let friends do drugs, he thinks inanely, remembering all those stupid anti-drug commercials. Like she gave a shit about him using.
Or why he needed to.
Remarkably, Elaine is still speaking, this time leaning over the table towards Shelby, as if taking her into some-sort of woman’s only confidence. “Scottie can be a real charmer, can’t he?” she titters. “I can see how it would easily be a case of real life imitating art.”
She winks. She freaking winks. Like she’s five or in a daytime soap or something. And hell, maybe that’s where she got her twisted ideas about family life.
Shelby sits up straight. Leans her arms on the table. “Actually,” she says in that beautifully sarcastic voice of hers. That voice that says: no matter what you say to me, no matter what you do to me, you can’t get to me; I’m too far gone for you to reach. “We met at the weekly chapter of Molested by Our Stepparents Anonymous.”
And with that, Scott can tell Shelby is done for the evening. Period. Finito. The end.
She shoves her plate forward and stands up. “I’m going to call a cab back to school.”
“You told her?” his dad says, voice rising and face flushing in anger. And Scott remembers how much he used to worry that his dad would have a heart attack. He still worries, of course, but it’s different now. He wishes he could summon back that unconditional love he used to feel, but it’s long gone, lost somewhere between the first time Elaine slid herself into bed with him and the first time his dad told him he was making it all up.
“You told her?” his father repeats, oblivious to anything but his own anger. Elaine sits, white-faced at his side. “My God, Scott, who haven’t you told? The Seattle Times? CNN?”
Scott pushes his chair back. Rises. “Real sensitive, Dad,” he manages to bite out. He leans forward over the table, palms on either side of his dinner plate. Makes an effort to lower his voice because no matter how much he wants to shout out the truth about Elaine to the heavens, Shelby’s business is very much her own business. “Guess that means you don’t want to hear about people who just can’t –“ and here his voice breaks, and he doesn’t care because he read Shelby’s letters to Daisy, dammit “—seem to keep themselves out of their stepkids' beds.”
The night's over for him, too.
He knows this won’t be the last dinner he’ll have to have like this. Knows that next Friday he’ll probably be back at O’Brien’s with his dad and that skank in tow, but for now he takes cold comfort in the shattered look in his dad’s eyes and the way Shelby’s tight in his arms as they wait for their cab.