Sentence 6

Just had a nice little chat with MS Word so here's the sixth sentence story. The suggested sentence is the first line of the piece

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"…And now I wonder--did I really fail, or in some obscure way did I actually succeed?"

I stared at her for a minute to see if she were serious. From the contemplative knit of her brow and the languid way she raised the beer to her pursed lips it became obvious that she meant it.


"No, you definitely failed." I said.

She continued staring out through the barred railing of the balcony, lowering the bottle and handing it to me without glancing over. Her head tilted to one side and her eyebrows went up in what I assumed was supposed to be a philosophically questioning way.

"Did I? Did I…really?"

I grabbed the bottle and tilted it only to find she had finished the last of the beer. I stuck my arm out, between the rail bars, and let the bottle drop. Three stories later it smashed into the concrete below. At four in the morning I was reasonably certain no one was going to be under it. Though I wouldn't have been upset had Randy been walking by just then. Asshole.

"Yes, K, you did, you failed, you really failed. Really." It was brutal, if you didn't know K. But two semesters of her bullshit had made me unwilling to mince words with her anymore. Just being willing to talk to her at all could be taken as a sign of my own masochism. No one else in the residence hall would come near her anymore.

She turned to me, straightened her head and then tilted it again with a small shake. "But…" she began.

"No! No buts!" I held up both hands and waved them back and forth like signal flags. "Failed! Failure. No obscure anything. Very clear failure. Jesus, K!" I ran both hands into my hair and gripped it. "Are you even here? Like, in this world? Do you know the meaning of the terms 'success' and 'failure'?"

I paused just long enough for her to open her mouth, then interrupted. It was a trick I used a lot with K. Not very nice, but it was cathartic and kept me from killing her.

"I mean, shit! Look at it. You set out to complete a four-year degree in two semesters. One quarter of the time! You took more classes then they actually ALLOW anyone to take. How you managed that I'll never know. Some of them overlapped for fuck's sake!" She wasn't looking at me, which just fed my rant.

"What the hell was it all about? Some kind of fucked up attention getting device? Oh, look at me, I'm doing the impossible, aren't I weird! As if being a vegetarian who eats beef jerky or those goddamn shoes didn't already prove that." I pointed to the jester toed high-tops that she wore everywhere. On special occassions she put bells on the tips. She wouldn't tell anyone where she got them, I suspected she made them. "I mean you couldn't have believed you could do it so what was the point?"

I leaned forward and tapped the small pile of paper that was between us, neatly printed letters and numbers were in the light and dark colored horizontal lines that covered the middle of the pages. "You couldn't do the work, you couldn't attend all these classes and so you got F's in at least half of them."

I sat back and held out one hand, palm up. "And as we all know, F…" I stuck out the other hand, palm up, "equals 'Failure'." I bounced my hands up and down to mime a set of scales. "And so your dad is insisting you go home. Back to the small town, right back where you started, accomplishing NOTHING."

K didn't say anything. She looked at the grade sheets on the concrete between us. With a thumb and forefinger she riffled through them. Then, crumpling them up in her fist, flung them over the rail and into the early-morning air. The papers didn't float or catch in a passing zephyr. They stayed crunched together and plummeted to join the shards of beer bottle below us.

Her hair, shaved short on one side and kept long on the other, swayed forward with the movement of her arm. It swung back and forth, revealing her profile and then covering it before settling. I watched the line of her nose, followed it down to her lips and over her small chin.

"Fuck!" I crossed my arms and looked away, through the vertical bars that cut the facing residence hall into strips.

K turned to look at me. "What?"

I stared at the dark windows across the way, "I'm going to miss you." I pulled my arms tighter around my middle. "Goddamnit."

K stood, stepped over to my side of the balcony and sat next to me. Her right side pressed up against me as she scooted in closer and tilted her head again so she could rest it on my shoulder. For a moment I did nothing, not wanting to uncoil from my snit. Then I shifted and put my arm around her.

"Or in some obscure way," I sighed, kicking at her shoe to make the bell jingle, "did I actually succeed?"