This is a small excerpt from the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo called <i>The Bluest Moon</i>.
*****

Ten minutes until eight. I had been quiet all day, but Stephen hadn’t noticed, filling our time together with talk about Jim’s latest work that he was unveiling tonight. Stephen, of course, had gotten a sneak preview because he was Jim’s closest friend. I wasn’t sure if this required a jealous reaction from me or not. I was sidetracked anyway, trying to figure out what Alex had meant when he said listen. Wasn’t I listening?

Okay, so at the present moment I had to admit that I was not listening. But I was listening the rest of the time.

“Bridge, you’re going to love it. It’s his best piece to date, even better than ‘Pain,’” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied absent mindedly. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders as we walked the last few paces to Café Bronte. Once again, the door opening occurred and I walked in ahead of him. We found a musty loveseat close to the stage, reserved by Jim especially for us. He was standing by the side of the stage looking worried or peeved, which one I couldn’t really tell. Alex was nowhere in sight.

“It’ll be interesting,” Stephen began, “teaching your friend poetry. Most freshmen come in here thinking they know it all from English class. It’s a lot of work to erase what they thought they knew and retrain them to meet our standards. But even if we can manage to turn out one poet half as brilliant as Jim, it’s worth it.”

It irked me that Jim was the end-all be-all standard.

“Who knows, maybe Alex will be really good,” I said. It wasn’t so much Alex I was standing up for but us freshmen. Just because we were younger didn’t mean we were automatically inferior.

“She’s a freshmen, Bridge,” Stephen said with a laugh. “She doesn’t know what it’s really like to be disappointed by life. She needs more experience to write poetry.” He looked at me with a puzzled expression, as if I was a stubborn child just talking back for the sake of rebelling.

I shrugged and turned toward the stage. From behind the faux curtains, Alex stepped out.

“Who’s that guy?” I heard Stephen mutter as Alex walked to the mic.

“Hey, I’m Alex Leaford,” Alex stated into the mic, looking out at the small crowd that had gathered that night. I followed his glance around the room and realized that Friday night had a lot more people than just members of the Free Writers. “This is just something I wrote when I met this girl a few weeks ago,” he said. “It’s called ‘Fire.’”

He glanced around again and found me. I wished, for once, that this was a real stage with harsh lighting that made the performers blind.

“Janie tires when she has time to close her eyes and think,” he began, his voice clear and strong. I waited for the next line to finish with sink and cringed at the idea of what that line could possibly be. “She manipulates the hours so they are rushed, always somewhere to go, something to do so there is no time to pause and wonder what is really worth doing.”

I felt Stephen stir beside me and he leaned over to whisper in my ear. “Is this your idea of a joke, Bridge?” he asked. I shushed him quietly and looked back toward Alex.

“But then she stands back up and continues running,” he recited. “When Janie finishes the tasks she assigns herself each morning, she allows someone to shove their agenda on her plate.” He looked at me again, but only for the briefest second so that no one else could guess he was staring at me. “And she is happy again, smiling.”

He didn’t perform like Jim did, with dramatic sighs thrown in between verses. He just read. And somehow, it was enough.

“In the morning, Janie wakens from a stunted sleep and lights herself on fire so there is something tangible and dangerous to run from,” he continued. I heard a sharp intake of breaths collectively around me, and I knew they were all picturing a girl holding a match to her skin. I wanted to turn and shout out “No! No!” and explain that it was figurative, that Alex’s poem wasn’t about a girl burning herself. I knew it was going over their heads.

But Alex kept reading and I remained silent.

“So that when someone asks where she is going, she will not have to answer:” Alright, so he did pause here. But for good reason.

“Anywhere outside of Janie.”

I felt goose bumps travel up my leg in the silence that followed. Alex looked out at the crowd, but he didn’t appear like he expected applause. In fact, it looked more like he was daring them to start their snapping. No one did, and after a minute Alex walked off the stage and kept walking right out of the café.

Only then did people begin talking, wondering out loud who the kid was and did anyone know a Janie that burned herself?

“Psycho…” Stephen said loudly. A few people around us laughed, eager to agree with anything Stephen Weston said. I didn’t. Instead, I turned toward him.

“What do you mean?” I demanded. “I think he’s pretty good.” He might not be a Frost, but I saw more in that short poem than I did in any of Jim’s epic-like emotional rants.

“Poetry should be about the writer, Bridge,” he said with a shake of his head. As if he couldn’t believe he had to explain this to me. “I mean, he doesn’t even say how he feels about this Janie girl. What’s it like to see her everyday and know she’s hiding those burns?”

I stared at him in disbelief.

“The entire poem is about what he thinks of her. It’s obviously commenting about how she lives, Stephen.” I tried to use his name like Alex used mine, as a teasing sort of weapon. It wasn’t quite as effective as Alex, but it clearly made Stephen a little uncomfortable.

“What, so you like this kid, Bridge?” he asked, his face showing me that clearly he disapproved. “He’s got mental problems. Girls that burn them—“

“Okay, what the hell? Stop with the girl burning herself already. Are you really that dense that all you can see is the literal words?” I asked, pushing myself up from the loveseat to a stand. Stephen’s arm fell limply to the cushions now that my shoulders weren’t there to support it. “Are you all really that stupid that you can’t see that Janie is just trying to cover up everything she’s doing emotionally with something physically taunting? Can’t you see that I— Janie, can’t you see that Janie has no idea what she’s doing so she just keeps following what’s expected of her and hopes it doesn’t catch up with her one day?”

Oh god. It was about me, wasn’t it?

Stephen grabbed my hand and tried to tug me back to the loveseat, trying not to make a scene.

“Okay, it’s… it’s not a horrible poem, but he’s got major work to do. I just don’t think he’s suited for the Free Writers,” he reasoned.

I pulled my hand back from him.

“The only reason he’s not suited to the Free Writers is because he has a brain. He can think out of your stupid little box and he doesn’t need someone to lead him around like a leashed dog,” I said. I felt the presence of someone behind me and turned to see Jim.

“What kind of trick was that, Weston?” he asked Stephen. “You put some random guy up there who wants to make this whole thing a joke after telling me it’s some girl who wants to be a part of us?” Stephen cowered under Jim’s gaze. Really.

“Sorry about that, it was Bridget’s friend here… I didn’t realize she wasn’t serious about us, that she was so… naïve.” Stephen gave me a harsh gaze as we sat under Jim’s watchful eye.

“It had better not happen again,” Jim said, this time addressing me. “We’ve put up with you hanging around here not pulling your own weight, but I won’t deal with that.” He gestured toward the stage where Alex had been a few minutes before.

“Excuse me?” I said, my voice rising and nearly cracking. “Naïve? Hanging around?” I said, turning to Stephen and Jim each as I used their words. “Who the hell are you to say I don’t know poetry?” I demanded as I turned back toward Stephen. “Have you ever written a poem in your life?”

“I write plenty,” Stephen said. I could tell it was a stretch. “I just leave the performing to masters like Jim.”

“Oh come on, get your nose away from his ass long enough to take a whiff of fresh air. Jim’s shit stinks like the rest of us,” I shouted. “Probably worse. Can you even take a step without consulting Jim first? Do any of you,” I said, turning to the rest of the group, “do anything for yourself? Are you all Jim’s cronies?”

“I don’t expect you to know about leadership,” Jim began, “but this is absolutely unnecessary. We have all worked hard here to produce poetry that really means something. Clearly you have yet to understand what it means to express yourself through word.”

I stared at Jim, shaking my head slowly.

“I’m the one that doesn’t understand poetry?” I said, laughing with disbelief. “That’s great. How about this,” I said. “When you can write a poem that doesn’t rhyme worse than Dr. Seuss, let me know.” I turned to Stephen, through with Jim. “And when you honestly have something in your pointless little life that qualifies as misery or hope or… hell, anything other than your rich boy mediocrity, then you can talk to me about life. Okay?”

I grabbed my purse from the floor in front of the loveseat and shook my head one final time at Stephen before pulling an Alex and walking right out the door.

“Bastards,” I muttered as I walked along the poorly lit sidewalk alone.

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