Charlene opens her eyes. She is in class listening to the droning of her professor. Her first semester had gone generally well, but now, in her second semester, she has had more and more days like this, thinking about the fun times she and Rolph had before he shot himself. She wants to give up on her law school at this point. She has already cut her hair short and shut many people out. She thought of the few friends she had, only other people like her. Quiet. Lonely. Not standing out. She doesn’t see herself passing the classes, but something burning deep inside her helps her continue. She dozes off again, thinking of her brother.
Rolph wakes up at 2:30 in the afternoon. He doesn’t move, instead just sits there and mopes. He looks outside, surprised to see Lou is not fucking some chick who is much younger than him. Ever since Jocelyn left, he hasn’t called Lou father, and he hasn’t spoken to a single one of these girls, seeing them as pathetic, stupid shells of people who don’t understand the real world. Lou always uses them. He shows them off like treasure, and once he beats away the shine, they are thrown out. Forgotten. Rolph, despite hating these women, remembers them all, waiting to see their obituary that outlines their wasted life after getting dumped by Lou. They always seem to die early. Rolph last saw Mindy’s obituary, which said she dropped out of school and inevitably overdosed on drugs after Lou threw her out. She became just like the poor lion from the safari trip fourteen years ago. In her attempt to protect what she believed was hers, she was shot in the heart, and her world faded away. Now, she would be rotting away, nothing but bones left, just as the lion did.
Just then, he saw Lou taking his new girl (Rolph didn’t even know her name, and wasn’t sure if Lou did either) to the pool. Rolph turns away, not wanting to see or hear. He wishes Charlie were there, but he figures she is at work. For every ounce of hatred he had towards Lou, he made up for with his love for Charlie. They were extremely close, but lately she has been disappointed in him for doing nothing but sit around and gain weight. Rolph doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything at this point. This new girl is louder than the others. He can hear her and Lou getting it on. He wishes Jocelyn were still there. He turns on the Flaming Dildos mixtape he has. It isn’t good, as the band never made it anywhere and broke up about 6 months after they tried selling these tapes, but it reminded Rolph of Jocelyn. He can still hear this stupid girl. He turns up the music but it won’t help. He looks out the window and slams on it hoping the dreadful noise would stop, and is taken aback when he sees Jocelyn at the pool side, riding Lou like there’s no tomorrow while staring directly at Rolph. Rolph can’t move. He turns and finds his gun under his bed, screams, and pulls the trigger.
Charlene shakes back awake. Only a minute has passed in this dreadful class. She thought of Lou’s reaction as she told him Rolph had shot himself in the head when he returned home the next day. He seemed changed, older, almost sick. He realized just as Charlene did that it was because of Lou that Rolph had shot himself. She hadn’t talked to her father since she got to school, but she thinks of him daily as she remembers that he was the reason her brother was lost. She would make her brother proud by forcing herself to get through college, no matter how much she hated it. She dozed off again, this time thinking of her future, and hoping to have a son that reminds her of Rolph.
This section would go at the end of chapter 5, The Safari, after the section titled Grass. I enjoyed this chapter and the characters in it, and wanted to see more of Rolph and Charlene in the novel, however they were not there. This passage goes into detail Rolph’s suicide as well as how Charlene is handling the loss. I used the chapter title in the section like most of the chapters do, and tried to keep the same general style as chapter 5, although this had much less dialogue. I used sections of chapter 6 and chapter 5 to allude to the things being talked about in chapter 6 and to continue the safari location of the chapter, although this doesn’t completely take place in the safari, it mentions it and shows the rest of the chapter as a memory. Also, I mention the band in chapter 3 to continue the interplay of the previous chapters within other chapters. This is mostly in Charlene’s POV, yet portions of the suicide would have to be imagined, as there was no note to say what was going through Rolph’s head. It can be assumed by their closeness discussed, however, that Rolph talked about everything that was going on to his sister, which is how she would know what was going on previously in the chapter and how she would know about Rolph’s hatred to the women his father takes home. Finally, The fact that Rolph kills himself after seeing Jocelyn and Lou doing it would have been in Rolph’s head, showing some hallucinations or psychosis in Rolph’s life.
Thank you for being an awesome teacher Wasowski. I hope to see you in the future and wish you luck with all this crazy shit that they’re trying to do with the schools. Hope you have a good summer.
AP English Blog 