"Hey.  You've reached Cal.  Leave a message."

*BEEP*

Having some time to kill before he stopped being lazy and tried to make it down to the gym as usual for a Sunday, Cal was lounging on his bed a little, glancing through the paper while trying to think of ways to improve. There was also a mostly empty pack of bubblegum beside him, as he was trying to make improvement on his own regarding the biggest bubblegum bubble he could manage. Like you do. Sometimes, it was just important to challenge yourself in things that mattered.

It was when he stopped reading the paper again to focus on the next big bubble that he seemed to be on the cusp of achieving that goal. Just a little bit more and he would have easily surpassed his last largest bubble, being careful not to rush it, put too much air in it, cause it to pop...

And then suddenly something smacked him in the face with incredible force, blinding him with not only pain, but also blood from his nose and the clinging shreds of what had just seconds ago been a bubble.

Cal managed to gain vision again just in time to see a squawking and confused goose fly out the window. He gingerly wiped the heel of his palm under his nose, drawing it back away with blood, and that's when he noticed all the pink, sticky gum clinging to his long hair.

"Son of a bitch."


[[ and herein marks the beginning of the end for the hair. The involvement of the goose is, naturally, all mouthy_merc's fault. Door and post are open, although I'm on SP today, although not nearly as cripplingly slow SP as usual. ]]

Any time now, the doe-eyed girl would be coming around to Cal's room so that he could, as promised, show her all about DVDs and how they worked, which, hopefully, would lead to the reasonable after effect of watching a movie together. He was nervous enough that he'd double checked to make sure he had the technology for it, while still wondering if they should park in the common room instead anyway for comfort's sake. Part of him would be grateful for the public arena alleviating pressure, but another part of him still coveted the privacy, adding to the continual swirl of thoughts and emotion that seemed to be invading him since he returned. Especially after Thursday...

...he wasn't going to think about Thursday. He was going to try not to, anyway, and just focus on the here and now. He didn't even know what kind of movie she would even be interest in watching, so he covered all his bases and got three. Zombies, romantic comedy, or blockbuster superhero because his mun thinks she is just hilarious.

So then it was just a matter of waiting for her to get there, and, in the meantime, reminding himself that it was just watching movies. He shouldn't be nervous.


[[ door's closed and he's expecting someone, obviously, but that's no reason that others can't come and bug him, either, so post is open before Hayley in the timeline! Whee! Up early because it can be, bitches. ]]

Eventually, Cal had fallen asleep last night, and he would have figured that that meant sleeping in a lot later than this, but no cigar. That was okay, though, he figured he could be productive instead.

Stop laughing. He was going to make a plan to go and see if he could get his other job back at the diner, too, one of these days.

And he was seriously going to have to talk to Merlin about how he was decorating this place. Seriously? Streamers? Flowers? At least there wasn't glitter.

..okay, the flowers were actually kind of nice. There was a very thoughtful bunch of them right by his typewriter as he settled down to hammer some keys, although he was half worried that they might be laced with some sort of weird ass poison or powder or stuff that would have some really bad consequences. But they were so pretty that he was going to take his chances.


[[ expecting a once and future king, but door and post are open for anyone else who might want to swing by because I'm actually around today and am very squeeful of this fact. ]]

Cal went to the fridge when he got to the kitchen, snagging up a carton of milk and forgoing a glass to put it in. Instead, he went straight to the table, pulling out a chair and dropping down into it with a tired sigh, and began chugging the drink straight from the cardboard spout. This almost immediately pulled a small sound of disapproval from his mother, but she didn't say anything, she just asked, "Packed?"

About half the carton was gone before Cal responded, and wiped the milk from his top lip with the back of his hand. "Yup. All ready to get going bright and early in the morning."

"And you're sure about this, Callie?" Tessie asked. "We could still get you in on a late admission to a school closer to home."

"Mom," Cal frowned at her, trying to keep a whine out of his voice. "We talked about this. I don't feel comfortable here, and I like it there..." Cal knew that his mother's reservations were seeded more in the fact that it was so far away and not that it was just so weird, because both of them understood that he would feel infinitely more comfortable someplace...weird.

Tessie dried her hands on a dishtowel, moving over to Cal sitting there and lifted a few strands of the thick, shoulder-length hair with her fingers. "I know," she said. "It's just been nice having you here to help with Yia Yia since you got back from Turkey, and I'll miss you."

There was the faintest of pauses, a moment of recognition for the comforting intimacy. But then Tessie added, "We can still make it to Sophie and get this trimmed, Callie."

Over the summer months, while living his father's debt in the homeland, it seemed that Cal Stephanides had gone back toward reviving his dream of one day living in his hair. It had made great progress, cascading past his shoulders, and he even felt comfortable with it since a lot of men did have long hair; it was the seventies, and he had found something natural in its length as he traveled the arid hills of Turkey. He felt connected to the earth. He felt strong, like Sampson. And now, again, as she had all summer, Tessie Stephanides had flashbacks of when Callie was just thirteen and a girl and she constantly had to pick through a rat's nest of tangled, sometimes chewed hair.

Protectively, Cal put his hands to his head to pull his hair back from his mother's fingers. "I like it," he said. "Yia Yia doesn't mistake me for Papou with it long like this."

"Your yia yia won't be around to make the mistake," Tessie reminded him and sighed, shaking her head as she tried a tact that might strike a little harder. "You'll never get another girlfriend if you keep your hair like that."

"Maybe I don't want another girlfriend." A blatant lie, but anything to get Tessie off the hair.

"Short hair's the style for any respectable male, Callie, both now and in the twenty-first century."

"Are you finished?"

A few final, frustrated strokes. Then, plaintively: "At least tie it back. Keep it out of your face."

Sing, oh Muse, on how some things just never changed.


[[ BEHOLD, THE RETURN OF CAL IS NIGH! Some dialogue taken from page 306 of Middlesex because I'm a nerd. OOC = yay ]]

Well, to be honest, a sombrero hadn't been a part of the entire packing plan, but it was there on Cal's head so he was going to embrace it, one last bit of Fandom insanity before leaving for the summer. It was kind of nice, really. And there was a wee tiny mariachi band providing music, too, and he finished putting the last of his meager belongings in his suitcase and then packing up the old Underwood, which had really just been collecting dust.

He did use it to type up a note for his roommate, though:

Merlin,
The room's yours for the summer. Keep it safe, don't burn it down, please take care of any lingering smells before I get back in the fall. I would leave for you all my pornography for you to enjoy, but I don't actually have any, because, unlike you, I'm not a total pervert. I'll try to bring you back something cool from Turkey.
--Cal.

And, yeah, that? Was pretty much that.


[[ I wasn't even going to do one of these for Cal, but then I thought up that note. Mwa ha ha. Open of course! Last one for him until fall. Though I may be slow (what else is new, right?) ]]

The travel through time and (air)space hadn't been so bad, and Cal realized that there were a lot of great things about going to California in a plane instead of hitch-hiking across America to get there. One, it was shorter and you realized you gained about three hours, despite the fact that they were already kind of going in the past, anyway (it was all still the future for him, thank you). And there weren't creepy men who picked you up and tried to get you drunk, just a cute redheaded girlfriend-for-at-least-another-week.

A girlfriend who was now off doing a bunch of college interview stuff, without a need for her little moral-support cheerleader to be breathing down her neck and making her nervous, so that left Cal with free range to explore a really cool and fairly big funeral home.

Of course he was going to poke around and try to find where they kept the dead bodies first.

Duh.


[[ Funeral home totes modded with permission, hum. NFB for distance and NFI unless you're in L.A., 2000-something, laaaaa ]]

Cal hadn't really expected swordfighting to be so...tiring. He was more than happy to just get back to his room, flopping on his bed with two bottles of Faygo, one for himself and one for Dinah when she got here. At least he hadn't tripped, though, and people seemed to really enjoy it. Dinah and Amber were good. And, really, he had to count himself pretty lucky as being the guy getting to cross swords and act with two cute blondes.

One who should be arriving....eventually. Cal was just going to close his eyes a moment. Rest them, so to speak, until she got there.


[[ expecting one, but post is open, though the door is closed. Details of the conversation between Dinah and Cal to be NFB, plz! ]]

So, he'd done some research and played messenger-boy, and then went and researched some more, so Cal figured he'd covered enough bases that, if he wanted to go back to his room, no one would give him crap about it.

There was a fleeting moment of wondering if there was something severely wrong with the fact that he'd thrown in his help to avoid people getting on his back than to actually help for helping's sake. After all, it would be cool if the whole thing was figured out, but, if not, it was no skin off hi--

Okay, it would be skin off his nose, and probably a lot of other places, but he could be cool with that. After everything he'd been through, zombies were not a bad way to go.

So he went back to the room, laying out on the bed and looking up at the ceiling, not really thinking about anything, waiting for one of the other to occur.


[[ door and post are open! ]]

Sitting at his desk, Cal let out a long, distracted sigh. A blank sheet of paper stared back at him, and he supposed he should be grateful. He had put out at least a story lately, and it was a good one, with the proper awful ending of the two main characters, impossible lovers, dying horribly of cholera after they were married. But now his mind was just as blank as the paper that taunted him and he sat sulking at the typewriter, as if that could inspire it to write for him.

So far, it wasn't working.


[[ mostly for the Ears, but the door and post are open if anyone wants to drop by before the roomie does *resists ominous music and/or plotting laugh ]]

After a pretty boring day at work (he'd actually finished up a book; that had to be a record), Cal cleaned up and went back to his room to do something even more productive: laying on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, and occasionally throwing a random red rubber ball up toward it. He caught it easily enough with his hand, but, then again, he wasn't even tossing it up that high, so it wasn't that impressive.

Productiveness was for losers.


[[ I am oddly bored and braindead and distracted, door and post are ooooopen ]]

Once everything like clubs and classes were over, Cal went back to his room, pulling out the chair at his desk in front of his Underwood and threading in a nice, clean sheet of paper. Beside it, opened up, was the much less clean notebook he'd brought with him on the cruise, still smelling faintly of sand and suntan lotion, although that might all have been in Cal's head. He flipped a moment through some of the notes and then, sighing slightly, he poised his fingers over the keys and a steady cadence was quickly pouring out of them, hammering out a story.

A story that was actually, if he was being honest, not bad.

A story that didn't at all involve Communist wasps or space ships or people dying or zombies or anything like that. In order for something that Cal was writing to be good, it had to have some simplicity and meaning, some connection to the simple fact of being.

It was a quiet little story about a seaside city called Smyrna, where all the buildings and airy terraces were reimagined with the brightly colored roofs and eaves and glistening walls of somewhere he'd been more recently. A simple story about an artist, taking sanctuary in a rented room with a window that looked over a small piazza, where he daily saw a girl, her hair bound in a thick rope of red braid, and fell in love...

...it was a story that he'd probably never let anyone see, even if it was good, because it was too embarrassing.


[[ door and post are open! I'm on a little bit of a SP warning for a handful of hours, though ]]

[[ ETA: Very sensitive subject matter in the comments ]]

Forget the 12th Street riot; that place could not hold a candle to the warzone that had become room 407. Cal had never been particularly neat in his room, not unless a girl was coming over, but, with his last roommate, it never got to be anything noticeable. However, it appeared as though, with Merlin, the powers of their individual sloppiness were merging into a great mess of a room that made it clear that two males definitely lived there, and at least one of them probably spent too much time cleaning up after someone else to pick up after himself.

So Cal was endeavoring, however futile, to pick up a bit. It was mostly consisting of picking things up off the floor and tossing them onto respective beds. Mostly clothes. Some papers. Pens. At least a few books. Most of them were his, but one of them that he came across just had to be Merlin's. The thing was as old as sin. Naturally, though, Cal was curious,and he took a break, drifting over to his bed, shoving aside some shirts, and cracked it open carefully, leafing through the pages. The fact that he couldn't understand a word of it only made it all the more fascinating. He supposed he should have felt bad for invading Merlin's privacy, but what did it matter if the book made no sense? And, besides, if he didn't want it messed with, he should have hid it better.


[[ for the roommate, initially, but the door and the post are still very open! ]]

Cal Stephanides? In his room? On a Monday night?

...Yeah, there wasn't new Rumor Gal tonight and Cal actually didn't feel like watching a repeat. No, for once in his life, he was being seemingly productive, opting out on the mind rotting television to sit in front of his Underwood with a fedora on his head, an empty pipe hanging from his mouth, and his fingers placidly typing away that the keys.

Of course, the story was turning out to be about Communist wasps, so maybe it wasn't that mind enriching after all.


[[ door and post are ooopen! the plot of Cal's story is entirely notthehulk's fault, btw. ]]

All things considered, it would probably be a very long time before Cal, upon waking up next to a redhead, would take a moment to stress out and panic in the quiet pause of still clinging slumber. It would take a while to realize the state of undress, the empty room, and the glorious (and, let's face it, Stephanides, inglorious, as well, with its fumbling and stumbling and insistence on lights being turned out and natural, unavoidable...shortcomings) details of the night before, settling in and making him realize that he didn't have to be shy or careful or pretend indifference as he slung his arm around the other body in the bed with him, nuzzling into all that gorgeous red hair.

"I swear to God," he muttered after a moment, "if you think you're someone else or even are someone else today..."


[[ for that girlfriend-y type persona, and SP is loooove;and NSW, la ]]

Cal really couldn't have thought of a better way to get his mind off of stuff that happened over the weekend than this. Well, there was something, but he knew better than to have expected it to actually lead to that. As promised, Claire had come back to his room with him after art club and, as promised, he gave her a back massage. She wasn't kidding about needing it, either, the muscles coming loose under his working fingers. Claire raised her stomach in order to free her shirt. Cal massaged her lower back, reaching under her shirt to knead her shoulder blades.

Claire got quiet after that, and so did Cal. He kept his mind off alternative realities by losing himself in the back rub. It wasn't hard. There were little white spots here and there, anti-freckles. Wherever he rubbed, her skin flushed. He was aware of the blood underneath, coursing and draining. Her underarms were rough like a cat's tongue. Below them the sides of her breasts swelled out, flattened by the mattress.

That, subsequently, seemed to have lead into relief. Relief lead into cuddling and the night went on, comfortable, and, even as it neared eight o'clock, he didn't even think that there was a weekly routine being missed.

"Okay," he said after a long while, "my turn."

But that night was like so many nights including back massages before this one. Claire was asleep. But she was in his arms, and so he didn't mind.

[[ I had to miss Gossip Girl tonight, so guess what! CAL HAS TO, TOO. Mostly establishly, Claire modded with permission and pieces of this swiped straight from Middlesex, the benefits of having an in-game girlfriend with similar traits to a canon one! But the post can be oooopen if you want to come by or if, you know, you live here or something, Merlin. ]]

Rehearsal had, at the very least, been really calm and quiet for Cal, especially since he was still just a bit too sick to have bothered to be too enthusiastic. He spent the last half of it just looking forward to shuffling back into his room, dropping face-forward onto the bed, groaning into his pillow, and trying to get some rest and stop feeling miserable.

"Being sick sucks," he stated.

And wasn't that the truth?


[[ door and post are both open, and definitely honest. I'm just being nice to him for a change and not throwing him into the fold, but I'm not nice enough to not want a chance to be evil. ]]

With how he'd been feeling yesterday, Cal would have figured that some heavy duty sleeping might have helped at least a little. And, well, it did, but the difference felt very minuscule. Moving in his bed to stare at the wall caused a bunch of sickly coughs to wedge their way out and he thought to himself that there was no way he was making it to his usual workout with this cold. There was still a glimmer of hope that he might still make it to the Superbowl thing, though not because he wanted to. But because it seemed the sort of thing he should be at, cold be damned, to preserve a certain reputation.

But those coughs were not heralding a good thing as he pulled his blankets around him tighter. He wondered if he looked as bad as he felt, because he felt like he'd been hit by a tractor, and, believe him, he knew what that felt like.

At least he knew he really was justified in having canceled his date with Claire last night and that he wasn't just being an idiot.


[[ door is closed, but post is open! I've got a chunk of SP in the afternoon, but, as always, any sp = looooove ]]

With yet another pointless, unearned detention out of the way (he knew it; he knew he'd get one, he'd been feeling it all week), Cal returned to the room with an inkling of hope that a cockroadblock would already be removed and his roommate wouldn't be in at all tonight.

No such luck, Cal discovered, upon opening the door. He sucked in a breath that he tried not to let out as an annoyed sigh and quickly shifted to Plan B.

"Don't tell me," he said, trying to sound casual, "that you plan on staying in and reading all day, Merlin."

Please don't tell him, Merlin, please.


[[ first thread for the roomie! Second for that girl that he likes! ...no, not that one. The other. No, the redhead. There we go. Second thread also going NWS ]]

Cal was still very firmly rooted in his sitting around doing absolutely nothing mode, even if his entire day yesterday had been filled with just that. At least earlier he had gotten up to go to class, right? He just didn't want to do anything else. He was lounging comfortably on his bed, listening through the CD Claire had given him for Christmas again, and then just staring into space and not really thinking about anything.

The door was open, though; Cal figured he could add talking to things he could do while sitting around and doing nothing, assuming anyone worth talking to bothered passing by.

[[ post is as door: open! ]]