A Monologue from a Melodramatic Pencil Olivia Chu

Life The Happiest Day of Mommy’s

He frantically shifts his position to pathetically cover himself and the whore with the thin, white bed sheets - the same bed sheets she methodically hand-washed for hours like he asked her to- and his gleeful, playful smile, the one she never got to see again after their marriage, disappears and is replaced by a sheer look of panic. He scrambles to explain himself and stumbles on his words, an uncommon sight to see for someone whose job purely depended on people skills and charisma.

“Oh darling, don’t you worry about me! I’ll be just fine.” She laughs to herself, politely and girlishly, on the verge of tears from how funny it was to see her husband in bed with the same Mary Lou down the street. It was just ironic (and she loved a good irony) how that whore of all people could seduce her husband but not her. The same whore who was now gasping and profusely apologizing as if she felt sorry for her and didn’t know her husband was married. Well of course he was married, and to her, and he was hers and only hers, how silly of her not to know!

The tendons in her petite hands tighten around a piece of the broken dinner plate and she hurls it at the slut’s pretty face, hitting her right in the forehead as she emits a cry for help, the fragile pieces breaking upon impact. At once, one of Mary’s ocean blue eyes that she always envied were bleeding, and wouldn’t open completely. Good, that way she would never attract his attention ever again.

God, was that the reason? That Mary Lou was prettier than her? That lying, two-faced home-wrecking fucking bitch! Next, she grabs the flower vase and slams it against Mary’s feeble arms, raised to protect her deformed, ugly face. She giggles at the pathetic act of self-defense and reaches for her own bedside pillow to muffle the woman’s childish whines, staining the white with a blotty scarlet and suffocating the last gulps of air from her former friend out of her. Her husband attempts to stop her, dragging her back with his hands but she wins the struggle, somehow kicking him in the groin in the process. When she’s finished with Mary Lou, she turns to him, a sympathetic, but crazed look in her eyes.

It was a shame really that he had to die too, but if she couldn’t have him, then neither could anyone else. Except, maybe it would have been easier for her to swallow her anguish if he wasn’t actively fighting against her.

She goes out of the room only to return with Marley’s prized bat, and thankfully, he’s still reclining over his injury and leaving himself susceptible to her aggressive, repetitive bashing of his head. By around eight hits, her lucky number, it splits open, but she continues until he’s unconscious and after that, just for good measure, she strangles him with her passionate, unrequited love. She looks at the two dead bodies and makes no effort to cover up her amateur work, if anything, parading the deed as a personal accomplishment.

She’s still shaking after the murder and she calms herself with a cigarette, smoking it while pacing back and forth and finally, she heads outside, gets into her car with the first genuine smile in years and drives off to pick up her kids.

Daddy wasn’t coming home for a long time.

The Happiest Day of Mommy’s Life

September 7th, 2011 I’m 6 years old. Standing in the driveway with my parents beside me. Mom’s teary eyes are looking at the car backing up. I don’t really get why it’s such a big deal, it’s not like you’re leaving us. You just got your license. You get out mom’s old car, it’s beaten down and ugly. I don’t think you care, you’re just happy you got freedom. I wonder if mom’s going to be like this when I get my license. Probably not. My dad’s making some joke about everyone staying off the roads now. I tune him out. I focus on the white tail end with a small sticker on the back. I think the car would look better if it was bright yellow. August 25th, 2013 I’m 8 years old now. You’re off to college and, once again, I don’t get it. It’s not like you’re leaving forever. You’ll be home for Thanksgiving and Winter Break. It’s only a couple states away. Mom’s really crying this time. Tears falling off her chin and mascara smudged. You hug each of us and drive off in your red truck. I know you don’t like it but it was the cheapest thing we could find. It rattles as you drive away and you can tell it’s probably going to break down before you even get there. But maybe you’re just happy to be going away.

November 16th, 2020 I’m 15 now. You’ve been living back at our place for the past couple months. It’s been nice and we’ve gotten closer. I knew I needed someone to remind me that you wouldn’t be here forever, but I clutched onto the naivety that I had. I came home to find that all your clothes had been packed away in boxes. You were leaving for a guy you met a month ago. I’m alone now in the house that used to feel too full. And I didn’t even know. I get it now. This one is permanent. You didn’t even have to say it for me to know. Mother’s not crying this time. I watch as the small grey car pulls out of our driveway.

NEW CARS

Guinevere Reaume

On My Love-Hate Relationship with Glee Paige Munroe

I started watching Glee in middle school, probably 7th grade. My parents decided that a theatre loving nerd, such as myself, would probably enjoy a show like Ryan Murphy’s Glee. They were right. I remember sneaking our family iPad into my room to watch more episodes after my parents had gone to bed. I got caught. They gave me some lecture about how there were adult themes and how I shouldn’t be watching without them. They didn’t let me watch it at all after that. Then, a yearish later, I started watching it again. This time on my own, and this time I was hooked. I have since re-watched the show countless times, started Glee Discussion Clubs with friends, and formed strong opinions about every happening in this wonderful mess of a TV show. I think an important place to start explaining my connection with Glee is by telling you a little bit about myself. I am a high school cheerleader and in choir and in theatre and gay (Santana Lopez who!?). Because I have real life experiences that correspond so directly with the show’s major plotlines, I feel that I see the show from a vastly different perspective than the “average Joe”. I see the choir room scenes from the perspective of a kid who has choir almost every day, I see the cheerio scenes through the eyes of someone who has taken tumbling her whole life and has been a varsity cheerleader through high school, and I see the LGBTQ characters and issues from the perspective of a lesbian. All these intersections are hard to come by and Glee was somehow able to highlight all my highlights. Now that some context has been established, I can go more in depth to my linkage. I am a junior in high school. When I first started Glee, I was in middle school, and as I have continued to watch the show while growing up, I see my ideas and thoughts about the high school setting change. To start, Glee is generally related to the average high school experience. The characters go through the struggles of balancing school and social life, applying to college, and other cookie-cutter high school situations. As a now current high schooler though, there are some glaring issues that anger me to no end. One is present in almost every episode: stagnant hallway conversations. Many important issues are conversed in this way. Some include romantic troubles, ending friendships, and even proposals. There are scenes where characters make up during what seems to be class changing times, and hug in the middle of a hallway. I cannot fathom that this is a common thing. If I saw any of those situations play out while on my way to 5th period AP Lang, I would purposefully run into them. It is incredibly unrealistic, and it makes me think the Glee higher ups just used an easy short cut to move plots along. A specific scene that makes me want to rip my hair out is when Will Schuester and Emma Pillsbury kiss in the hallway, marking the start of their relationship. For all the non-gleeks reading this, Will is the Glee club teacher, and Emma is the school guidance counselor. The discomfort that would rip through my body if I saw two of my teachers profess their love to each other while I’m on my way to calculus is unexplainable. A further extension of my relationship with Glee is my being a cheerleader. I will give the Glee lords slack for most of the issues with the Cheerios. Anything that involved the cheerleading coach, Sue, was overdramatized, so much of the dramatics about the team and their performances make sense. I do, however, have a very large problem with how the team is categorized. Apart from the pilot episode the team rarely does difficult stunts. They often perform intricate dance routines instead. For this reason, I fully believe that the cheerios are not an actual cheer team and should be called a dance team. This shouldn’t bother me nearly as much as it does, but as someone who has dedicated a fair portion of her life to cheerleading, I hate that the team is so blatantly not a cheer team. While cheerleading and high school do allow me to connect to the show well, my heavy involvement in my school’s music department is what I believe is the largest factor in my love-hate relationship with Glee. As I said before, I have a music related activity almost every day. Whether it’s choir, musical rehearsal, or a theatre elective, I’m jamming in the music hallway at some point. Through this, I have a very good idea of what high school music is, and it’s not how Glee describes it.

As an example, real show choirs prepare for months prior to competitions, unlike in Glee where they go so far as to fly to nationals without a set list. Everything in Musical theatre is planned and rehearsed. To say that it isn’t is an insult to those who spend so long perfecting their craft. The writers of Glee deciding to rarely show actual repetitive rehearsing highlights how unrealistic the team is. The remaining factor in my uncanny similarity to Santana Lopez is my sexuality. I want to preface this paragraph by saying that I don’t think it’s statistically possible for a town as small as the town Glee is set in to have the amount of minority characters that it does. While the representation is wonderful, it becomes unrealistic at a point. The most outward example of this is Coach Beiste coming out as transgender in the final season. To me it seemed like the writers just wanted another minority group represented. Beiste’s character arc throughout the first 4 seasons he was in had no suggestions of him being trans, and I personally think it was short sighted. With that said, Glee did help me accept myself and if the weirdly large amount of minority groups also represented helps other people, then that’s awesome. So, let’s talk about Santana Lopez. She was a cheerio and begrudgingly joined the Glee club as a spy in season one. In season two, she becomes a series regular, and the audience learns that she’s a little fruity, if you will. In season three, she starts publicly dating her best friend, Brittany Pierce, and has a combination of being outed and coming out on her own. As someone who was outed—never severely just some friends told other friends—it made me feel less alone. I remember watching her coming out episode for the first time in eighth or ninth grade. I was sitting on my basement couch, deep in a binging period, at around midnight. My dog was asleep beside me, and I was fighting off sleep myself. The cluster of episodes I had been watching were all centered around Brittany and Santana, and I couldn’t pull myself away. Seeing Santana feeling so vulnerable and betrayed was abnormal. She was a self-identified “bitch”, but that attitude was not at all present in this episode. Because I relate so much to her character, it hurt to see her so exposed. Seeing her process everything just felt so real. Tears escaped my eyes. I lost it. I was in a place in my life where my confidence about my sexuality was mainly a façade. I had jokingly shaken it off when I found out that people that I hadn’t told knew my deepest, darkest, and scariest secret, just months before. Maybe I didn’t realize it at the time, but it hurt. Seeing my favorite character go through something similar broke my fragile façade. I was incredibly angry that she had to go through coming out on other people’s terms, but there was a bigger part of me that felt comforted by the fact that she got through it. After she comes out, Santana continues to be her regular bad ass self. Perceiving this, so shortly after completely breaking down, helped me so much. She was gay, everyone knew it, but she was so many other things too. I think the reason I love Santana so much is because of that. As a young kid figuring myself out, seeing such a strong role model helped me in my self-confidence and individuality. I saw that I could be exactly the person I already was, and gay. As Santana’s story line progressed, so did I. With all of this in mind, I still connect Glee with my music department the most because everyone watches it. When I entered High school choir and began making friends within it, I realized that I was far from alone in my obsession with Glee. There are debates at the beginning of class about if Mr. Schue is being creepy towards the kids, or if he just cares a lot. Just this week, my best friend and I used Matthew Morrison (the actor who plays Will) as our Microsoft Teams background in Choir. The Glee discussion club I mentioned at the beginning of this was formed as a result of Glee discussions at Musical rehearsal. A few of my friends and I, that had already watched the show many times, convinced a few other friends to watch. We re-watched as the newbies experienced the mess that is Glee for the first time. For anyone that has not watched Glee, I would claim that the best part about watching it (with friends, or without) is screaming at the TV when something stupid happens. This weird club that I formed with my then close friends, now very close friends, bonded us through venting and yelling about how much we hated certain characters or situations. Months later now that we have all finished, we still Facetime on occasion to talk about an episode that one of us re-watched and a scene that we hated in it.