❝I know it's hard for you to be friends with a girl without objectifying her - but lucky me, not everyone's you!❞
❝Oh yeah. 𝙁𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙨. The lady goth protest too much.❞
❝𝘿𝙤𝙩𝙝, Gavin. Doth.❞
→ From Van Zandt family disappointment and Grade 8...
A/N: So, this chapter was heavily reworked and I personally like the unexpected cameo, given how few of those we get on the show as time goes on. Sidenote — while not as dramatic as the previous entry, I think the long-term arcs (Audrey and Ellie's friendship and Audrey's future plans specifically) this begins will lead to some pretty interesting choices.
An open mind, that's all I ask.
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The streets flood burnt orange light from street lamps, drowning the haggard houses and townhomes in sepia tones. Making everything it touches older than it is, buildings on dry, sparse lawns and held up on rotting beams.
The light continues in a sort of gradient past my block, onto the newer homes. The identical development houses cast shadows over them and their neighbors longer than the foothills or the old stadium. Like the rest of town, boxing in the ever-shrinking affordable housing in favor of a new aesthetic. The perfect town for the perfect, well-off family from anywhere but here.
The wailing passes, right to left and into the distance. Not too far.
The neighborhood shifts from rot to clean lines. Dry patches of dirt to ultra-green lawns, saturated even at night. A different kind of quiet, the kind that meant problems could wait until morning. Far enough away where sirens function more like the songs of crickets, something tiny and hardly bothersome on the other side of tastefully decorated walls.
Houses less like buildings and more like ships passing in the night as children flail and gasp in dark water.
* * *
"Stuck?" I frowned, staring my the B+ on my paper. "What do you mean?"
"What I mean is your characters — they're not growing. They have no agency. They're...stagnant."
I gaped at Ms. Kwan. "But Vincent literally changes to fight the monster in the final paragraph. I made sure of it."
"But where's the motivation for the change? He exists on the page, but there's no conflict."
