Dream of Horses

[MethodicalSlacker]

Bert had never thought of herself like a detective before today, but if she really thought about it the description wasn't the most inaccurate. Back at GHHS, she had often traded gossip and rumors about people to try and get to the bottom of what was going on between her friends and classmates. It wasn't an entirely unfamiliar occurrence for her to have to do the digging herself, sometimes. Sure, it was a real pain in the ass, but most of the time it was worth her time to investigate, interrogate, and annoy people for answers. Plus, a lot of things just naturally got back to her. As treasurer, she knew what all of the clubs were doing, most of the times, since she often would just walk around to each one after school to say hi. She had everything in order, so she'd wander when she got the chance. Not as often as she'd like because of her busy bee schedule, but often enough that she felt well connected enough to practically everyone who mattered.

By all accounts, then, the girl she had come to the Newseum with was not someone who mattered, at least not in the traditional sense.

She—oh god, Darla? Daria? Dana?—was not the most unfamiliar face. Bert had shown up at Badminton Club to check in a couple times, but was mostly bored and left. People busy with sports didn't make the best conversationalists. She recalled seeing Darcy there a few times, enough that her face was not immediately unfamiliar, but the two had never exchanged so much as a "what's good." Bert avoided Book Club out of principle, but had peered in for a quick greeting once or twice too. Everyone there looked basically the same as Dorian—white, nerdy, and boring as hell. And she might have seen her at a music performance or something—looked like she played the flute—but Bert was usually faded during those because who the fuck wasn't.

Ostensibly, she had come to the Newseum with Delilah because she wanted to check it out, but honestly Bert didn't have much interest in the news. It just seemed like a suitably nerdy thing to invite someone like Daisy to. What was really interesting to Bert wasn't much about Diana as a person, but what she represented; a stone left unturned, a path sprawling unexplored, a person she had yet to get to know! Bert didn't know anyone she had yet to interact with at all during her senior year, besides this gal right here. It got her heated to think of what this meant, that she had failed in some way to be the most connected person there could be. If she was honest, Dahlia probably didn't offer much in the way of things to find interesting, but it was the principle that really mattered, god fucking damnit!

The Newseum wasn't the worst place, but there were a lot of words to look at, which Bert wasn't really in the mood for. She was squandering a really nice looking day to be with someone she barely knew, and she was going to spend that day not looking at words if she could help it. Thankfully, the Pulitzer Prize Photograph Gallery was really cool to look at. It was before the rest of the museum, so she went there first. Her level of interaction with Damaris was on the level of "hey this picture is pretty cool, isn't it?" and "oh-woah I know that one!" and "do you like taking photographs?", which was comfortable, but she didn't think that she was getting to know her any better.

As the pair exited the gallery, having spent a good half hour or so just looking at photographs, Bert turned to Daniella and tried to say something, but struggled. What was there to say to her? "Aw jeez, Dior, you're the best, I can't believe I didn't get to know you all four years, that sure was a swell time back there in the photo room, aw shit, sleep in my bed tonight please?"

No. That would be, um, factitious. Factious? Facetious, that was it. Instead, Bert just asked a simple enough question.

"So, what do you want to check out next?"

[MurderWeasel]

It turned out this was a huge mistake!

Darlene had thought that, given she'd dragged herself all the way to Washington DC from Chattanooga, and given she'd been forced to share not only a room but a bed with randomly-assigned classmates of hers, the least she could do was occasionally accept an invitation or pass a few words or something that implied anything besides the truth, which was that she did not one bit enjoy being in such close proximity with relative strangers for such long periods of time. And so, when invited to the Newseum, she had agreed to come along.

It had seemed like a totally safe bet. People didn't go to museums to talk, right? They were like movie theaters. The only safer place was the Library of Congress, which was what Darlene had planned for after this, but she hadn't really wanted to decline an invitation to one thing most of her classmates probably found boring just to replace it with another, so she was doing both. It would be a busy day.

But that was still a little while away. Right now, she was stuck dealing with this girl who kept making small talk about the museum stuff. And it didn't help that this was not a normal dry natural history museum. It was full of stuff relating to current events, and pop culture, and was especially focused on freedom of speech, which honestly Darlene had pretty mixed feelings about anyways. It was great that she could sing White Christmas whenever she felt like it, and less great that people could scream catcalls at girls on the sidewalk and that was somehow legal.

Darlene's companion was Bert, short for "My parents don't understand how getting teased works and so the name of a gay muppet from Sesame Street is the less embarrassing thing to be called." That was kind of a nasty thing to think, but Darlene couldn't help it! She would never say that thought out loud, because she didn't use her freedom of speech to do mean things, but whenever she had to say Bert's name, which was thankfully not a lot, she got worried she'd say Ernie instead.

The pictures had actually been cool, Darlene supposed. And maybe she was being too nervous about the talking thing. Other people were talking. Maybe museums were more social than she thought? She'd only ever gone to museums with either school trips or her family, and in school trips you had to listen to the tour guide or the teacher, while with her family they had their whole dynamic and knew not to bug her too much. She wished she could've gotten an audio guide. Then she could've pretended she couldn't hear Bert, while still being sort of polite. But there was no polite way to pick up an audio guide when your companion didn't, and Darlene hadn't even looked hard enough to know if it was an option because of that.

And now, it was her turn to decide what they would do. She didn't want to. Well, what she really wanted was to do what she'd been doing for most of the trip, slipping out of the proximity of everyone else to ride the elevators up and down or go sit somewhere out of the way and read. She'd heard that one of the elevators had gotten stuck, but even that didn't sound so bad. It would be an excuse to hang around somewhere and do nothing without feeling guilty about wasting this big special once-in-a-lifetime event.

"...I don't know," Darlene said, stalling for time. "You?"

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Hmm..." Bert mumbled.

What would the least boring and also least stupid looking thing to do be? There was that make-your-own-news thing upstairs, but that was probably for children and even if it wasn't Bert guessed that Darlene had the on-screen personality of a dead fish that had been left outside in the sun for a little too long. The world freedom index thing with all the countries on it with different colors and whatever, the one that the brochure pamphlet thing had made a huge deal of for some reason, looked like it would be fun for all of three seconds and then boring immediately after. The 9/11 memorial thing and the Berlin Wall fragment were sorta interesting, but the former was a downer and the latter was like, okay, there was one of those in Chattanooga right now and it wasn't even that cool.

That left some of the less permanent exhibits to check out, which would probably generally be better uses of everyone's time and more interesting. One in particular that seemed enthralling was this exhibition on disaster reporting called . Natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks—it was all about the dangers and risks inherent with reporting on things like that.

"Maybe we could go check out that Danger Disaster-y thing," she said, blanking on the actual name of the exhibit, "that should have some cool things to look at."

[MurderWeasel]

Danger? Disasters? That sounded alright. Or at least fitting!

Darlene had looked over the signs and brochures and so forth and wasn't repulsed by the idea, at least. Not that there was anything here that stood out too much either positively or negatively to her at a cursory glance. She had this tendency in museums or exhibits to just drift from thing to thing until something stood out, grabbed her with the same magnetic force as a blue Wikipedia link with a name she didn't understand. Then she'd zero in on whatever extremely specific niche she'd found and stay there until its secrets were exhausted or until she was forced to move on.

Maybe that was part of why the socializing was hard for her in this situation. Well, harder than usual. Socialization was never particularly smooth for Darlene, because it wasn't just navigating the mysteries of other people, but also having to act like she was more focused and interested in talking about herself than she was. But here it was also a force to pull her away, a branch to tug her free from the quicksand of knowledge, preventing her from slipping blissfully beneath the surface and out of sight.

Darlene shuffled her feet a little, scraping her shoes against the floor for absolutely no reason at all.

"Okay," she said.

That sounded painfully unenthusiastic even to her. Or only to her? Was she imagining it? Probably not. So she made herself smile a little bit and made herself add the tiniest hint of additional feigned enthusiasm.

"Sounds good."

[MethodicalSlacker]

"Cool!" said Bert with put-on enthusiasm.

It looked, for a little bit, like Darlene was happy with this outcome. She smiled and perked up a little, to really sell it. It only took a little while to tell that it was mostly fake, though, like Bert's own demeanor. She was a little excited for the exhibit, but she was getting a little impatient with Darlene's reluctance to really open up and be a person to her.

The really small self-analytical part of her was wondering why she had been having so many negative interactions with people lately. She was supposed to be this bright, energetic person, someone that was well-connected and well-regarded. Why were things suddenly on the downturn? Were people getting sick of the pep in her step? Her tireless smile? Her bouncing from party to party, door knob to door knob?

Nah probably not. She was just on a long string of bad days, and maybe a little salty from not having found a prom-date, but whatever. That was all fine. There were formals in college.

Bert indicated for Darlene to follow her and went up the steps the second floor of the Newseum. As she moved up the building, glancing at exhibits out of the corner of her eye, she came to the conclusion that most of these places were not interesting enough to draw someone as reclusive as Darlene out of her shell. The sight of the city through the wall of windows had started to grow old, for Bert, after so much time walking around its streets. It was just like any other city, but with older stuff. Bert wished she had brought her ice skates with her so that she could pay a visit to the local ice rink, but there wasn't space in the itinerary for that and she figured it wouldn't be allowed anyways.

The exhibit was on the third floor, through a set of glass doors that felt heavy to the touch. Bert tried to push them open, but they wouldn't budge. It took her a few seconds to figure out that she needed to pull the handle, and she gave an embarrassed smile to Darlene by way of "sorry I'm such a goddamn dumbass".

Inside were several televisions—old, big boxy ones, for effect—from various time periods, positioned in various places around the room, each showing footage of breaking news regarding various tragedies. A large television at the end of the room was playing on loop footage from CNN's coverage of the Gulf War. Display cases of newspapers with dramatically emphasized ("WAR!" "ATTACK!" "TWO HUNDRED DEAD!!") front pages lined the walls, and the room opened up in and to the right to an adjoining space with curtained off sections, marked with warnings for graphic and disturbing content. The floor was carpeted in such a way that every footfall was muffled, and the sound of chatter that filled the open, glassy space they had just come from was dampened. Something about the design of this room absorbed lots of sound—the mood was contemplative and library-esque, and aside from the faint chattering of television news anchors and whispers of the few museum goers that had made their way up here, all was silent. Bert felt a chill run down her spine as she saw missiles streak across the sky on the CNN screen.

"Oh, wow," she said, taken aback, "that's, holy crap."

[Somersault]

ADITI SHARMA - TRIP START

Sometimes, one needed just a bit of isolation, a bit of space, in order to get away from everything and just breathe. Here, surrounded by tattered papers with grim headlines emblazoned, visuals of missiles painting across a clear sky, Aditi had simply wanted to find some quiet. Well, perhaps not quiet, in the classical sense, considering the hubbub and commotion depicted all around her, but quiet from the inane rumors that her friends had wanted to chat with her about, the last party and whatever was going on. Yes, yes, gossip could be fun, yes, it could be entertaining, but all the while as she listened to them prattle on and on about Carter this or Ivy that, interrupted by that same Ivy glaring, all she could think about was whether she was actually going to stay in touch with any of these people after she graduated. Sure, some of them would perhaps be successful, at least in the companies their parents and ancestors had made before them, but the rest? Desperate suburban housewives, dreaming of their golden glory? People with prospect like those were the ones she couldn’t exactly keep long-term connections with.

Perhaps it was somewhat ironic that she was pondering her future in a space dedicated to the past, but considering that the entrance to the space also required a somewhat hefty fee, it was the perfect escape for her social obligations, at least for the day. There was no time like the present to simply think and wait, because everything was already fairly well set up for her already. After this trip, there was graduation, and after graduation, came Duke, and that meant goodbye Mom and Dad. That meant good things. Very great, perhaps even serendipitous things.

Regardless, she was standing here, in this “Newseum”, by herself, and that was her favorite way to be, at least at that moment. The where of this problem really wasn’t a specific place, asides from not close to her friends, and in the museum, brown-eyed gaze stuck solely on her screen, scrolling past update after update. Solitude was essential, yes, but it could also be so boring. Now, perhaps that was her fault, for having decided to go out alone and hope not to bump into anyone, but that was essentially the plan.

Part of that plan was so essential, however, was because Aditi wasn’t exactly wearing her finest clothing. Sure, a short jean jacket, paired with boots and a white lace sundress wasn’t horrifying, per se, but the low pigtails she paired it with, she had to admit, made her look somewhat more like an elementary schooler than she would have liked. It was in the heights of her grogginess that she created the outfit, though, and she supposed she had to make do.

If she wasn’t going to see any of her friends, though, she also supposed it wouldn’t matter that much.

When she had been going around an hour ago, still energized from coffee and natural adrenaline, she had taken the sights in with wonder, the photos upon photos of presidential pets causing her to react with some form of glee - or at the very least, a smiling acknowledgement. Now, though, surrounded what could by headlines which could only be described as ominous and no better, her enthusiasm had come to a standstill. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too late to text someone to hang out with, nod like all they said actually meant something, but an exclamation of surprise caused her to turn her head and see a semi-familiar face.

Liberty Wren, student council treasurer, was at least someone trying to do something with their lives, which as something Aditi could definitely appreciate. A bit too exuberant to spend much time around, the same way a can of soda could be just a little too effervescent, but on the whole? A pleasant presence. The girl who stood next to her, though? Someone, she didn’t know exactly who, who would amount to near-nothing. That was rude, yes, but it wasn’t as if she would tell that to her face, but everything about her, from her dress, to her seeming demeanor, to the fact that Aditi couldn’t for the life of her know her name - did not amount to a positive prognosis.

Seeing as she turned, though, conversation was more likely than not an inevitability, and with a small, neatly-pressed smile, she took her steps towards the pair, straight-backed and steady.

“Hey, you guys,” she said, motioning to the pictures and clippings and with a voice that carried trace amounts of actual concern but large amounts of such a feigned sentiment, “You enjoying the exhibit?

“I’d have to admit, though, it’s not exactly my favorite.” Aditi confessed, voice slightly higher in pitch as if sharing a particularly scintillating anecdote or speaking to a college interviewer. Pleasantry was always required.

[MurderWeasel]

"Yeah," Darlene echoed. "Wow."

So part of what sucked was Darlene did feel obligated to be nice, at least a little. Well, actually, she always felt obligated to be a little nice, just because that was how people got along. If you were mean, everyone hated you. If you were nice, some people also hated you, especially if you were too nice, but if you got into that perfect middle spot where you were just sort of nice people would instead forget you were there or treat you like you were normal and leave you alone. That was what she strove for.

But that was not why Darlene was obligated to be nice today. No, today she had to be nice to Bert specifically because Bert had paid for her ticket! Tickets to the Newseum cost fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents for those under nineteen years old, and it was not one of the places they got passes to as part of the trip, or that were just free, or however it worked. Darlene should've fought with Bert and paid her own way. She had fifteen dollars. She wasn't a total pauper! But there was this entire social dance to paying for someone or declining their paying for you, and it was one Darlene was no good at. Her dad could go around and around and always end up giving or taking hospitality and making everyone happy with the situation regardless of what they'd wanted to begin with, but that was not a skill passed down biologically, or else it was a recessive gene, or else Darlene fell into one of the weird twenty-five percent zones on the Punnett square.

Anyways, Darlene's vocalization was somewhere between muted shock and understated awe and marginal horror. The room was full of old TVs, and on them played all this history footage, and most of it wasn't that new to her, but something about the way it all lay next to itself made it feel different. She knew, of course, that history was a march of progress, but the timeline aspect could feel incredibly abstract at times. It was like clicking along a Wikipedia topic portal from one article to the next; each felt like a distinct chunk and sometimes nobody had made the page yet, so you got a redlink, or other times someone missed a step and before you knew it you'd lost your way and were adrift in an ocean of decontextualized knowledge.

But here, now, Darlene could see things she remembered right next to stuff she'd only seen in history classes. It was different when the footage was unvarnished, when it stood on its own instead of as part of some documentary, and it was different absent the customary YouTube frame. And there was too much for any single piece to properly penetrate, the focus on the mass, or maybe she just couldn't hone her attention properly right now.

At the very least, Darlene was not paying enough attention to her surroundings to realize there was someone who should've been familiar, maybe, at least loosely. The girl was pretty, playing up her youthful appearance with pigtails, an effect that was only a bit sabotaged by her big nose. She wasn't white, and she wasn't black, and she wasn't Chinese or Japanese probably, but Darlene wasn't quite sure where that left her and was not going to ask. The girl greeted them without using names and said she didn't like the room. Darlene shifted back and forth a little and pulled her fingers up into the sleeves of her sweater. She glanced at Bert, then at the TVs, then at Bert again. She hoped Bert liked the exhibit because it was cool and Bert had paid money for them to be here, but she also hoped Bert hated it so she could say she hated it too and nobody would have to disagree.

"Hey," Darlene said, and looked at Bert again, and didn't take a stance just yet.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Ah, here was someone Bert vaguely recognized! Aditi, right? She knew her from around, somewhere. Not quite sure where, but it was more to go off than the feeling Bert first got when she saw Darlene over here, which was a vague and palpable sense of having lost around, like, a few months worth of memory? Like there was a hole in her head. Seeing Aditi took her mind right off of that, though, and right off the exhibit too. Before Bert could offer her own opinion, Aditi set the consensus for what this place was like. Boring? What would be something like Aditi's "favorite"? If there were numbers in play, they'd be crunching alright.

"Yeah, it's sort of too much information," said Bert, looking around the room with distaste on her face, "I don't know where to start looking at things, and the lights from those old tee-vees hurts my head."

Maybe this is what weirdo shut-in people like Darlene saw the world like. Lots of weird pictures and information that they didn't know how to sift through, because their brains were gunked up with nerdy shit and all. Flashing colors and people talking and flickering pictures everywhere. If this was what Bert was exposed to every day of the week, every hour, she'd probably be a weirdo shut-in person too.

But she wasn't, because she had a head that worked properly. No gunk in these gears! That was just the hand she was dealt, and it was a hand that she was happy to play, most of the time.

"See anything cool, though?" she asked, "I mean, there's gotta be something worth looking at in here."

[Somersault]

So, somewhat irrelevant girl managed to further prove her inactivity by uttering three words before looking for guidance, a ship in a storm to guide her. That seemed about right, her wandering eyes communicating a kind of wariness that Aditi wasn’t exactly comfortable with. Being a nonentity meant tthat the girl was likely boring, and as earlier surmised, without future prospects, but being a non-entity also suggested a certain number of question marks around her identity. The scientific process was indeed all about seeking the unknown, but at least in this situation, it seemed much easier to regard the girl with a polite nod and instead turn her attention to the certainly known quantity.

Liberty, or Bert, as she oft liked to be called, concurred with her opinion, the constant bombardment of sights and sensations a bit too much for her as well. Good, even if she wasn’t sure whether the other girl was agreeing out of an honest opinion or of propriety.

It was what she would’ve done, anyways.

“Certainly seems like a bit of sensory overload, doesn’t it?” Aditi replied, nodding in the way her Amma told her to, the picture of politeness. She was listening, and would continue to listen, agreeing, offering her opinion, just a little to let them continue driving the conversation, no matter the topic.

Bert was the one asking questions, the one allowing more of herself to be shown, the one allowing the chinks in her armor to shine through. She was trying to engage, though, discuss things on the same levels as she, which was more than Aditi could state on the manner of their other companion, the aforementioned nameless girl, flitting around with the uncomfortability of a white girl at Holi. Her presence, was awkward, in a way, but more over, fleeting, as if at any point she would let herself be drawn into the screens and screens, submerged into a sea of war scenes and war stories, cast away.

At the very least, it did not seem there was much tying her to her present company. It was obvious by the distance between them, even the eagerness of Bert’s response, that there was a gulf between the unlikely pair, While she couldn’t have fathomed a reason as to why Bert in the first place brought this girl, Aditi reasoned that it was perhaps out of a misplaced sense of. Such a singular lack of ability to establish oneself in a room was quite a shortcoming to have, after all.

That was too much time to be spent thinking about someone she would never meet again, though, and Bert was speaking again, trying to continue a discussion which honestly felt as if it had died before it was ever born. The question was to be humored, though. Always.

“Well,” she began, voice steady as if to establish a yardstick for a debate. “There’s the presidential pets exhibit, if y’all are into that.”

In this case, victory would be measured by whichever side produced a more credible case for whether satisfying discourse could be achieved in this situation.

[MurderWeasel]

Okay. They didn't like it, then. That was okay! Darlene was fine with that. That made it easy because nobody had to disagree and there weren't any sides and they could just move on to whatever else there was to look at. Like presidential pets, which actually really honestly truly did not sound bad.

Darlene liked animals. She didn't really think animals owned by presidents were that much more special by default, but there were some pretty cool ones; she was trying to remember the story now but she could've sworn that Theodore Roosevelt had owned a bear and had saved its life and whether or not that was true she was totally sure that the president who'd owned a bear would be worthy of inclusion in the exhibit and then her question would be answered, with probably lots of other interesting things besides. It was the sort of topic she could spend a whole day reading about.

Just... The other two said it was like sensory overload in here, and Darlene didn't see that. Maybe she was weird, or scatter-brained, or spent too much time at her computer. That last one was almost certainly true! But this whole tidal wave of life and history and information felt like something bigger and more real to her, something that made her transient interests and fixations seem as nothing. She could stand here and stare for an hour maybe and not really see anything but still feel like she'd gained some indescribable perspective.

"I'm okay to try anything," Darlene said to the newcomer. Because, come to think of it, maybe that thing about the presidential pets had been teasing them or making fun of the exhibit? It was really hard to say, and she didn't want to commit to anything at all. This was Bert's idea so she could lead.

All throughout, Darlene had been looking back and forth between the faces of her classmates, and between their general direction and her feet, but most of all she'd been taking peeks at the endless flickering screens.

[MethodicalSlacker]

Presidential pets?

Bert suppressed a frown. No, no, not what she meant, not quite. She felt this happen sometimes. She just plain didn't say what she needed to say to get people to understand what she meant. Bert didn't go the whole way, not all the time. It didn't always bother her this much, but she had a guest this time. Darlene was right here, and Darlene would come away thinking that Bert was an imprecise, idiot person, and that wasn't quite true! She just thought that people would come around to what she was actually saying on her own. They weren't on that level, though.

"No, no," Bert said with a nervous laugh, "I mean, anything in here worth checking out? It's a bit much information, sure, but there's gotta be something here in the noise that I gotta see, right?"

Bert glanced over at Darlene, who had barely said anything the whole time other than, what, the most neutral thing?

She felt like maybe she did that sometimes. Bert did. When she was in groups and when she was in parties and at people's houses, she just went with the flow. She just let the common opinion take her somewhere and usually that went the right way. Darlene was doing something similar, but the group wasn't really big enough for that, right? It was all just Realm Dynamics. That was a term she saw in the comments to a Invader Zim video once and even though she didn't know what it actually meant, it sounded like a cool concept. Like, there were certain states of being that demanded different things than other states of being, right?

Not high enough for that train of thought, Bert looked around the exhibit once more for something she wanted to see and didn't know she wanted to see yet.