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Supplementary: Dominic Sessa in The Holdovers (2023) dir. Alexander Payne
CHAPTER FIVE - VICTIMOLOGY
Julien likes routine, and though losing the one he'd formed through high school had felt, to him, like the end of the world, it wasn't that difficult to construct a new one at Gotham-U. As it turned out, Kit expected him to pick her up for class every morning and drop her off every afternoon even though they had completely different schedules, Julien being a BCrimJus student and Kit being a social work major. A weaker man (read: stronger) would have put his foot down and refused, but Kit's audacity and entitlement was actually quite a concrete foundation for Julien's new life at university. If anything, he was grateful.
(If anything, he was an idiot. But whatever.)
Unfortunately, he can't liken everything to puzzles-memory, maybe, but not reality and not actual places, locations, on the physical plane. In lieu of puzzle pieces he uses objects, signs; not ones that have been put in place for general public use, but his own. In high school, it was the car parked on the street opposite his house; the big red maple behind the science block at Gotham-U, which he could also see from the baseball field (though at a totally different angle, which Julien found both beautiful and disconcerting); his father's license plate as it was attached to his car in the Gotham Academy parking lot, the cheapest vehicle by miles, but always there to pick him up after practice; Gwen's lilac-painted bedroom door, just down the hall from his own; and, finally, the moon outside his window and its clean, soft light.
Julien used these markers for the better part of his high school years, travelling between them like nerve impulses to neurones, cell bodies, the brain. They helped him make sense of things, helped him stay grounded. Kit thought it was stupid, when he tried to explain it-Can't you just be normal?-but he had markers for her, too. Expressions of hers he'd memorised and things to say after he saw them, to calm her down or curb her impending cruelty. She was labyrinthine, but he couldn't blame her for it; willingly, he played all three significant parts of their tale, Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur itself. The hero, the helper, and the reason he was in the maze to begin with.
That's what it was like with Kit, most of the time. One wrong word, one misstep, and you hear the bones of the ones before you crunch beneath your feet. Julien brought himself here, though, so who can he point the accusatory finger at but himself? His prerogative to enter, his responsibility to escape.
Escape plans, exits. He makes these mental maps for himself, to help navigate people, spaces, anything and everything he encounters. His Gotham-U map's first marker is, predictably, his and Taylor's dorm. The second is the baseball fields, which he scoped out the moment he got back from Kit's the morning after moving day. The third is Kit's sharehouse-this marker is visually more of a gravestone-which is so far out of Julien's way it throws him off. He doesn't need everything to be equidistant, but it helps when it is.
