riverviewlogs | October Catch-All

It was obvious from the start of this dream who it belonged to, a vast wide open space in a school, and off to the side watching everyone was one Lola Pacini... and behind that Lola Pacini was a second Lola watching her younger self. Equally obvious was which girl was 'real' and which one was an echo of the girl's younger self.

The Lola with snow colored hair was the real one, she was dressed like she usually did in bright florals and pretty colors, but her hair was the color it was as she slept. She was watching from the background as her younger self went through... this. Although the pair were perfectly matched in their expressions. Clearly jealous, clearly angry. All the pretty little girls with their pretty moms to spend the afternoon with them. Sitting and talking and having tea cakes and tea. Too lost in watching things play out again, the way they always do, to really see who was in this memory with her.

While it's certainly not the most... intense of dreams that she's seen during this strange week, Lola's dream is one of the ones that hits closest to home for Beverly. Not only does she remember the trials of being a teenager, she remembers all too well what it was like not to have her mother (or her father) around and she thinks of Wesley too, without Jack there. Granted, the reasons they weren't there were different than they appear to be for Lola, but she feels for the girl nonetheless.

"Lola?" She calls out to the real Lola softly, not wanting to startle her.

Lola was pretty sure she wouldn't be alone in here, cause that's how this works, right? She glanced over and then did what anyone would do when faced with a humiliating past moment on display for someone who has no need to know about this. It's called playing it off. Lola shifts to being a little more cool, a little less angry.

"Is that really how my hair looked from the back? I really shouldn't have done that style for so long," Totally smooth, totally calm, totally false. It didn't help that her in the moment, this phantom of her past, was just as angry and just as bitter as always with this sort of thing. Letting hope crawl in and letting reality smash it with a hammer. Lola was younger and not as good at hiding things as when she grew up a little, had more things to hide. More weaknesses to cover.

"Lola..."

It's hard to know how to approach this, when neither of them asked for Beverly to be here and she's certainly not looking to push Lola into talking about anything that she's not ready to talk about, yet she can hardly pretend this is nothing.

"I'm sorry that I saw something that you didn't want me to see, but you don't have to pretend everything's okay."

"It isn't a secret or anything." Lola hopped up and walked over to stare at, well, herself. Watching the other her dismiss Shay and sit there, waiting. Lola's easily pushed into talking about things. To her this is just... the truth, of who she is. She's accepted it she just doesn't like it. Being in this memory, seeing the afterimage of herself and friends, well that makes it a little more than just talking about it.

Being reminded that it hurt this much.

"She left when I was eight, but she kept promising to be there. And I kept believing her." This wasn't the first, nor last, time Lola had been left waiting for a woman who never had the time. Lola wasn't sure if it hurt her, or if she didn't care, but that woman never showed up.

"She's your mother, why wouldn't you want to believe her?" she says, her voice soft. "I know we haven't known each other very long but in my opinion, she's missing out."

"Because believing in her gets me hurt, and you gotta be really dumb to let someone hurt you like this over and over." Lola being all serious and real is weird, she doesn't do it too often. There's always that moment she gets excited, or distracted, or both, and hairs off in a new direction putting her troubles aside.

"That doesn't make you dumb, it makes you human. It's not your fault she's failed you - that's on her."

"Then why is it I get hurt, and she's okay? Why is it they always end up okay and I get hurt?" Lola didn't want to see a pattern to how this worked, but at the same time Lola couldn't help but have a pattern she saw.

"Probably why I'm here. I mean, the Quarantine, not... this."

"I don't know the answer to that." She suspects they are not in fact okay but she's refraining from voicing her assumptions out loud for now. "But... do you like it better here, then? In the Quarantine?"

Lola's wandering out into the room to the tables, "I miss my friends. I mean... I got one of those memory canisters before this all went wrong, so I did remember seeing them. Even if I've been here for a year."

Lola sits on one of the tables, the young woman and her mother couldn't really be more different. The mom clearly put a lot of work into her outfits being in public. But her daughter was just... annoyingly cute, without even trying. "This is Frankie and her mom, and you saw Shay walk up to me. This is the longest I've been without them since we met. But... I'd rather they were here, then I went back."

Beverly follows Lola, looking more closely at her friends. Frankie and Shay. Not for the first time, she wonders what becomes of the people in their home worlds if they choose to stay here.

She takes a seat near the table Lola is sitting on. "Do you think they'd like it here too?"

"I don't know," Lola really wanted them here, and she'd totally make it easy for them. But she could only do so much. There was also that thing, where it wasn't just a matter of who they are, but who they were. Lola's heard about people not always being... at the same time. "Shay's bad at change all around so I can't think of a single when she'd be okay coming here. Frankie... last I saw her, sorta started dating a couple. But there are a lot of times she was really out of her element and might like to be here with me."

Lola's friends have just as complicated lives as Lola, sometimes. "So long as Frankie isn't here when she did that horrible skunk stripe in her hair. She was so moody and wouldn't talk to me. And her hair was awful."

Lola priorities!

Beverly has to duck her head to hide her amused smile, remembering all too well her own terrible hair dying adventures as a teenager. "Hair can always be easily fixed. You're supposed to experiment with it - and sometimes make really bad decisions."

"The first time I tried to style my own hair was a disaster. I was ten," Lola closed her eyes, frowned, "I guess my hair doesn't work in a dream. I'm just the me sleeping out there. Anyway, Frankie's look was not her. It took my stylist all afternoon to fix what she'd done."

Of course Lola had her own stylist as a teenager. She had to look gorgeous and trying to handle it herself was... a lot of work. She'd learned to cut hair at least! In the past seven years, so she had that.

"Yeah? What did yours look like?" She wrinkles her nose. "I tried to go brunette once. Never again." She shakes her head in disappointment at her past self.

"The color wasn't too bad, it was a shade of lavender that I really liked. But I cut my hair all wrong and ended up with a pixie cut to fix it." Lola did intend to make her hair shorter but she went a little... far, or rather she didn't know how to do it straight so it had to go a lot shorter than she meant it. "Also I kinda ruined two towels and the upstairs sink was never white again."

See, that was the disaster, hair can be fixed, she accidentally left permanent markings on some bathroom fixtures that could not be undone. That was where she had really overdone it. "Why go for brown? I did all of this to get away from brown hair. It's so... dull."

"My hair stands out well enough on its own! So I suppose I wanted to blend in more. Sometimes it felt like the only thing people ever paid attention to was my hair." She shrugs. "And I just wanted to see what I would look like with something different."

Lola looks kinda confused at the idea. She tries to put 'blend in more' into her own life. Nope. Not a thing Lola can understand. Of course, the snow white hair of present Lola, and the bubblegum pink of past Lola, suggested she never wanted to blend in ever. "It's not wrong to want something different. Then again, my hair can be whatever color I want now. So maybe that's just me."

Beverly's confidence was not so solid then as it is now. That was something she had to learn. Back then, she just wanted to fit in. "Well, it suits you!"

"Thank you, I kinda miss how I wore my hair when it was pink." Lola doesn't lack confidence when it comes to appearance. "And your hair is lovely, I still can't get why you'd change it."

"I wasn't as confident back then - I didn't want people to notice me. Except onstage, I suppose. I always did like theater, where I could be someone else."

That again doesn't make any sense to Lola, but she doesn't know what Beverly might have had to deal with as a teen. Maybe she had braces, or a really bad haircut. Maybe it was just she wasn't who she is now, "Theater is fun, although the only time I was cast in a play I was sorta playing me."

"What do you mean? What play was it?"

"A short play that Mi- a classmate, wrote. About how he dealt with a trauma in his life. His boyfriend being in a coma," Lola wasn't trying to hide her role, she already said who she was in the play. But how best to phrase it, "And the person he met to help him get through it."

October Catch-All

CLOSED - Beverly

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sorry about that autocorrect smh