The Teenage Hangout (1.2)

Someone had tacked a thin cotton blanket to the ceiling. It featured a pulsating geometric star, a tangle of concentric angles that reminded her of the tiling in mosques.  The room itself, which was papered in psychedelic posters of mushrooms, Jimmy Hendrix, and indescribable swirls of bright 70s colors, seemed to be some director’s conception of a teenage hangout. It was a carefully designed set pulsing with spacey electronic music. There was something sinister about it all: the blanket, the posters, the high school students. This was a scene in some unknown mediocre film where cardboard puppets murmured lines from a dead script. These stiff marionettes were conspiring to recreate a half forgotten moment from a half forgotten film. And she was incapable of acting. She was trapped in this television set.

It was time to stop smoking; the panic had begun to seep between the vertebrae in her spine. She closed her eyes, once, twice, and rolled her head, heavy with damp thoughts, toward the ceiling. There was the blanket, sagging in the middle, pulling the room down with it like a collapsing tent. Sharp red and blue diamonds radiated outward from a purple center, tempered with smooth golden knots that fed into one another seamlessly and endlessly. The blanket was a carefully studied imitator of Persian designs. The tightly knit geometric pattern, the deep vivid colors, were all thoughtfully selected and composed to recall the luxury of a Persian rug. But it wasn’t. The thin, wrinkled cotton and clumsy, generic design betrayed it. It was an imitation of an imitation of an imitation. It was fitting.