Tales from the Intermediate (gxg)

Chapter 1

Part 1: The Burrito

Charlie couldn't escape the letter F. It all started the night before her college graduation. Her black robes were hanging over the back of her desk chair in her cramped college dorm in which she had spent the last eight or nine months toiling away at her senior year. The fall semester was a relative breeze in comparison to her very last one. As spring came with budding flowers around campus and more parties being thrown down at all the frat houses, so went Charlie's life. She wasn't even a partier, actually. While her roommate was somewhere getting shitfaced every other night, Charlie was stuck at that tiny desk typing at her tiny laptop, doing whatever coursework had been assigned to her.

She couldn't remember exactly the moment the slip began. She couldn't remember how or why she slipped. She was doing all the right things—studying, working, going to the library, talking to professors and tutors, asking every question she had in class. There was a point in her memories where a fog blew in and clouded the last few weeks of her slow decline. It was a downhill slope, and Charlie was blindfolded and silent as she slipped to the depths of the valleys. In fact, she hadn't even noticed much until that night—the night before college graduation.

Charlie was usually a straight A student until last fall, when she started lowering into the B range. It was a crisis for a gifted kid like herself, who breezed through high school and ended up as the salutatorian of her class. She thought her life was over until she pulled her pants up around Christmas and decided a B was nothing to lose her head over. Then came spring, and now the end of it. She had spent the evening trying on her graduation cap and gown, christened by her golden Honors cord around her shoulder—she was even part of the Honors society at her university. This last semester had nearly killed her, and although Charlie wasn't much for cheesy moments of self-indulgence, she stood in front of the little mirror half her height, having to back up to the opposite wall of the dorm room to see her full reflection. She smiled. She was proud. It was all over now. She could put her Psychology degree on her resume, land some job at a clinic, and work her way up to her Doctorate. Doctor Reed. It always sounded so fitting to her.

When she gently discarded the robes over her desk chair and sat down to check up on her grades, she felt that seedling of anxiety sprouting in her stomach. She hadn't done so well this semester—she barely passed most of her classes with low C's. It vexed her slightly, but her burnout left her only shrugging at the low grades and just being thankful she passed them—but she waiting on one class—one specific, annoying fucking class that she needed to make a good grade on the final exam in order to pass.

The blue light of her laptop illuminated her face as she waited for the portal to load—the Wifi in her dorm was inexplicably shitty. Although her slow descent into apathy was still vastly present, she felt the tingle in her fingertips as she impatiently clicked repeatedly in stupid hopes it would make the website load faster. Then, it popped up. She saw all the C's tainted with yellow around the widget, the one light green B she scored because her professor felt bad and curved her grade, and then the color red seeped into her vision.

Red. It was red. It was a big fat F. Not just that—a 36.

"Thirty..." Charlie whispered, but something snapped in her throat, and she closed her mouth and tried to swallow.

The tingle in her fingertips was so strong now that it shook them. Her trembling fingers reached to her throat—it felt like her golden Honors cord had come to life and snaked around her neck to strangle her. There was nothing there but clammy skin, but the inside of her throat was shutting together, and the small college dorm room was closing in on her. The desk felt like it was sizing down, and she was about to fall off the chair. She was bigger than the room now, clogging the four walls as they clamped around her like jaws. There was not enough oxygen for her to breathe, and as short, wheezy gasps strung out of her tight throat, everything dimmed. She hit the dirty hardwood floor. The spiderwebbed popcorn ceiling was spinning around right in front of her face—she could feel it on her nose. By the time her roommate came home from her celebratory party, Charlie's eyes had closed, and a sticky film of sweat had grown on her forehead. Her face was cold, and all Charlie could see behind her eyelids was red—the big red F that had morphed into swirling ambulance lights—and the screaming in her head turned into shrill sirens.

That was the first F that Charlie's life was tainted by—failure, and it was a catalyst right into a second one—fainting. The first thing Charlie felt when she came to in the hospital was embarrassment. Her mother was sitting beside her bed crying, and her father was standing behind her with his hand on her shoulder, trying to console her. Her roommate was floating awkwardly in the corner of the cold hospital room, staring at Charlie with a look that made Charlie want to throw up—worry and shame. When the doctor finally came in, Charlie's mother was expecting to hear that she had a stroke, a heart attack, an aneurism, that she was doomed with cancer or some other terminal illness that would take her only child away. The doctor was blunt when he explained that she fainted from stress. She fainted. She saw the big fat red F, and her brain immediately refused it and decided to send her falling on the floor like an idiot. Everyone in the room looked a little disappointed that it wasn't something more dramatic and simultaneously cast a slightly irritated look to Charlie for making them get all worried and upset. She felt like her nose had turned red like the F and bulbous like a clown's.

The next F that presented itself was none other than finished. Charlie had failed the class and now did not meet the requirements to graduate, and she also did not meet the credit hour requirements for her prestigious scholarship that had allowed her to get through college nearly scotch-free—which was good because her parents were on the lower end of the shrinking middle class of America. She had to pay for the whole semester tuition and housing now because her scholarship was revoked, and she couldn't even get a diploma as compensation. She was done for, cut, crapped out, finished. And she couldn't even process it all.

Her advisor told her she could take the class in the summer and graduate, although her scholarship would still not be redeemed. Charlie could barely pay attention as she old man talked to her slowly, his voice and appearance reminding her of an old wrinkly turtle. She didn't give him an answer—she could think nothing and feel nothing other than the uncontrollable urge to flee. She had to get out of there. She had to leave campus and seek asylum in the only place she could go—home.

The summer was long and dreary. Charlie's hometown was small and dead. There were no therapy clinics (she would be the one receiving therapy instead of giving it, anyway), and all the community college folks filled up the slots as bank tellers or secretaries or desk jockeys. All she could do was get odd jobs babysitting the local brats or helping the dozens of old geezers mow their lawn or do random housework. She had barely any money, and the summer went by slowly like a broken train under which she was glued to the tracks. Her mother kept asking her if she was going to sign up for the summer class or the fall class, and Charlie always gave the same answer—"I don't know." The only good part of being back in her stupid hometown was being able to see her best friends again, Dani and Matt. They were the type of high school friends that you stayed friends with forever, and being with them didn't remind her of her horrific high school experience, but rather of the sliver of good times she had with them which were mostly outside of the school walls. In fact, every time she passed that dreadful school, she felt a chill all throughout her body.

All Charlie had to do that summer was work when she could, piddle around her old teenager-y bedroom, hang out with her friends, and avoid thinking about what happened at all costs. It was hard when she kept running into people she knew (everyone knew each other in that town), and they would always talk about the same thing. "How's college going? You getting that Doctorate's yet? All A's still, I assume?" Charlie was lucky she had a decent amount of self-restraint and did not slap them across the face. By God, she couldn't even run grocery errands for her mom without running into old teachers who would proudly ask her about her studies, remembering her as one of the best students, and see those wrinkled smiles fade into disappointment when she told them the curtailed truth that she was no longer attending. Some would ask why, and Charlie would have to make up something about taking a break, and then they would look disgusted and think of her as some yuppie who was planning on backpacking across Europe or something. She started becoming a real agoraphobe after that.

She was fucked. Another F. Charlie felt like nothing more than a fucked, fainting, finished failure. She couldn't imagine what other F's could come her way until the absolute worst one did. She would take every F in the world over this one, and when it came walking into her peripheral view that late September day, she thought that the past several months must have all been one big joke, a horrible nightmare, a dramedy that only happened in TV shows. It was the crown of all the F's, the real shrine of all Charlie's deceased hopes and dreams.

Farren.