Chapter Text
***
Just find a purpose, don’t consume, produce a tune or something new
Use your hands to make a thing that won’t exist unless you do
***
“You need something to do,” Farah said after the second time Dirk heaved a dramatic sigh aimed in the direction of the book she was reading.
“I emphatically agree,” Dirk was nearly upside-down, lying across one of the steps on the amphitheater. They were doing their best to soak up the last days of sunlight and warmth. It was early October, the leaves gently changing from a verdant summer hue to the vibrancy of the fleeting Autumn. “What shall we do?”
“You, not we. I have to finish this book before tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you go get lunch?” She was holding a small, almost square book for her women’s history course, she’d said it was a series of essays or something. Many of Farah’s readings weren’t particularly interesting to him, not because he wasn’t a fan of women’s history (in fact, as he’d said to Farah before, he was emphatically a fan of women’s history, whatever that meant), but because many of them were very old. Dirk had learned the hard way that audiobooks, especially if they were on a faster speed, were the way to go for the optimal amount of information absorption, instead of it just entering his brain, bouncing off a few cells and dying a hasty death. And old books were usually harder to find in audio form.
“But lunch is boring. Lunch means I have to go to the dining hall."
“Uh huh,” she said, turning a page. Dirk sighed, rolling himself off of the limestone and grabbing his ID.
“Don’t you ever have homework to do?” She already knew the answer, but she still loved to ask it. It was less that she was asking Dirk, because she knew what he would say, but instead some god who might answer her call and realized that they’d misfiled some paperwork involved with assigning first year students homework, and promptly correct their mistake by slamming Dirk’s schedule with assignments galore.
“Not since Reg canceled every one of my first year seminars,” he said with a smile, knowing it infuriated her. They’d been through this conversation a few times.
“How is it possible that you managed to get the one professor? How is it possible that he isn’t fired yet?”
“Tenure. And enough sense to lie to administration.”
“Why hasn’t anyone complained?”
“Who would?” He shooed her back to her book, and resigned himself to walking to the quick dining hall.
He was distracted on the way, stopping at the pole in the middle of the walkway which had a flier advertising the next musical pinned to it. The flier held little information other than a guitar and the title in grungy letters: RENT. Underneath the guitar was the information: auditions 10/1, 11-5. Dirk had heard of Rent, but he hadn’t seen it. He was almost certain that it was the show responsible for that earworm “Seasons of Love,” but he’d only recently gotten into musical theater after falling down a late night rabbit hole about the Donner Party which ended in him finding a rather entertaining show by a group called StarKid about the Oregon Trail. For a solid week after finding that, he’d gotten himself caught up on almost everything the group had ever done.
There was very little to thank Riggins for, but at least he’d had the decency to set Dirk up with a laptop and a phone. A musical seemed like the perfect thing to occupy himself with. Excellent. Something to do. Dirk continued past the pole, going to the performing arts center instead. He pulled open the door to see a folding table set up outside of one of the theaters.
“Hey! Did you want to audition for Rent?” The person at the desk had wavy blond hair pulled into a braid to reveal a series of stars tattooed on their temple. They seemed cool.
“Actually, is there any chance you have crew sign ups?” He had very little experience on stage and had a feeling that he would take to stage fright like a duck to water.
“Yes!” They said, pulling a second sheet out of a folder with enthusiasm. “Did you want to do stage crew, lights, sound?”
“Wherever you need help.”
“I’d say we probably need the most help with stage crew, but we might end up asking you to help out with the other parts depending on who is available when.”
“Excellent,” he said with a bright smile.
“Okay! Well, thank you,” the person read his name upside down, “Dirk?”
“Yup, Dirk Gently!” he held out his hand.
“I’m Tina. We’ve got a line forming behind you, but it was great to meet you!” Dirk spun around, bumping into the guy behind him. He had startlingly blue eyes, and little blue studs in his ears which almost matched.
“Whoops, sorry about that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the guy said, quietly, not quite looking at Dirk.
“Todd, you made it! Head right on in!” Tina said after he’d finished signing in. Dirk awkwardly made to leave but made eye contact with Tina in the process. “Anywho, I’ll just be going now,” he said, giving Tina a hasty salute. On his way out of the performing arts center, his mind was going a mile a minute: a salute? You salute? In front of a cute guy? How are his eyes that blue?
He took a shortcut back towards the amphitheater, stuck in his head about that interaction the entire way. He slumped back down on the stones where Farah was still reading. “Where’s your food?”
“Oh, I never got there," he said with a laugh.
“What did you do instead?”
“Signed up to work stage crew on Rent.”
“Oh, of course, that’s a sufficient replacement for a meal.” She paused a minute and began putting her things away.
“Obviously. Didn’t you know that one can sustain themselves purely through the nutrition of the commitments that they sign themselves up for?”
“If that was the case, I’d never have to eat. Actually, that seems like a good outlet for you. You didn’t want to audition?”
“No, don’t think I’d be a good actor.”
“Well, thank you for sparing the audience then.. Come on, despite the surplus of my commitments, I’m hungry now. Why don’t we go down to the big dining hall?”
“Yes!” Dirk jumped up and grabbed his bag, excited for slightly less mediocre food.
***
I mess up all the time but you are doing awesome kid
Time to drop the pouty lip and learn to take a compliment
***
“Hello?” Todd asked, trying to hear Amanda over the din of a speaker blaring 2010s pop.
“Hey Todd!” She screamed into the receiver. “Hang on a sec, I’m going outside.”
“Where are you?” He asked when the background noise cleared up.
“We just stopped at a coffee shop. Coffee’s pretty bad but the scones are so good.” Much to the chagrin of their parents, Amanda had graduated from high school and immediately started traveling in a rickety van called the Oh No Mobile (for reasons he’d never figured out) with her band of slightly intimidating men of an indeterminate age. Todd didn’t know what to make of any of it, but his sister had always been guided by a sense of self far stronger than his own. “So, how did the audition go?”
“It was fine, I think. I got a callback.”
Todd’s only real friend at school was Tina, who was co-directing the musical, and was not above manipulating her friends into auditioning. Todd had no experience with acting further than the school musical in freshman year of high school, but found himself unable to say no to her when she reminded him that she knew where he lived (given that they lived in the same apartment), and that she could, in fact, put the methods that she’d learned in her science class on poisons into practice.
“Yeah? Who for?”
“Roger.”
“That makes so much sense.”
“What do you mean it makes sense? I can’t tell if that’s an insult.”
“It is. You are that asshole.”
“Rude.”
“Frankly I don’t think that selling all your shit to ignore your dying friends and move to New Mexico is that different in vibes from selling all your friends’ shit to pay back your parents for a stupid lie you made that came back to bite you in the ass. Though I’d say at least Roger had the excuse of dealing with dying himself. What was yours?” Though she was joking it had the tinges of an angry tirade, and after four years, the guilt still stung like a knife.
Todd caught his breath. It’d only been three years since his disaster of a freshman year where for a solid month he’d pretended to have pararibulitis, using the money his parents sent to get his band off of the ground. They’d taken themselves on the road for a crudely constructed “tour” which was merely a disguise for them to go see the east coast. Then, in a fit of guilt, he sold all of the things he’d bought (including several of his band-mates instruments - which he had not bought) and tried to repay his parents who had caught on at about the same time that Todd was still on their insurance and they should have been getting insurance letters right about then. That had burned all the bridges with his band, ending with a particularly nasty fight. He’d moved back home, tried to atone for his sins, and spent another full year at home before he’d saved up just enough money to feel justified for paying for a semester nearly out of pocket.
That second year at home he’d spent caring for Amanda whose pararibulitis — the supposedly completely rare nerve disease which his family members just kept getting afflicted with — manifested the year she turned sixteen. Amanda had constructed Todd’s house arrest as some sort of cosmic retribution, but she was ultimately the one to push him to apply to school again. Her, and a strangely timed anonymous letter. This school, liberal arts (and unachievable without the help of significant financial aid) was completely different from the community college he’d gone to outside of Seattle, but it was a necessary change of pace.
He supposed it was a good thing that she was joking about it, even if there was no actual way for him to ever repay the absolute disaster he’d made of his life and his family’s finances.
Amanda’s voice broke into the far too long silence. “Todd, that was a joke.”
“I know,” he said with a sigh. “It doesn’t mean I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for the things I’ve done.”
“Dude. You’re trying. Past you would have made fun of the idea that you would ever audition for a musical. Now you’re doing it because your friend asked you to. Look at you sacrificing yourself on the altar of dignity to even the score.”
“What state are you in?” Todd suddenly asked.
“Um, I think Nebraska?”
“You think?”
“Yeah, we drove in late last night. Got a show at a small club at nine-ish, then I think we’ll probably stay here for the rest of the weekend, see if we can find another show before heading out.”
“Just be careful, Manda.”
“You know I always am.”
“Yeah, somehow I don’t buy that. Also, can you call Mom? She’s worried about you, and when she gets worried about you, she texts me nonstop, either to complain or ask if I know where you are. I don’t need to be responsible for telling Mom your whereabouts.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll call her next.”
“Bye Manda.”
“Bye.”
Todd hung up the phone and laid back on his bed. He’d been avoiding his homework by way of calling family members, and he had no desire to go to the library to crack open his books. Callbacks were tomorrow, and he still needed to go to the music building for practice before that and his guitar class on Monday. He didn’t want to do any of it.
Sometimes he asked himself why he’d decided to go back to school anyway, when it was just an endless cycle of more assignments. Despite this, he pulled himself out of bed and went to the library. If he was as far as possible from his room, he might be able to drive himself into some form of concentration.
***
If I'm gonna speak up then I better impress
Make my diaphragm grow and my vocal cords stretch
And my voice'll get hoarse but my story will spread
***
The library was not Dirk’s favorite place to be. He was notoriously terrible at adhering to the noise level preferred by the librarians of the world. It was just the tragedy of his life that he needed to share the cool things he was learning with his friends, or anyone who would want to listen to him.
Rarely, Dirk would reach a much desired state of complete focus which allowed the library itself to simply melt into the background. That day, he was in the middle of one of those moments.
He liked to joke with Farah about never having anything to do, but that wasn’t entirely true. It was just that of his fifteen credits, only ten of them were running. He was in the process of working on a journalism assignment, or rather, he was researching something tangentially related to his journalism assignment. He hadn’t taken to journalism as easily as he thought he might. This was due primarily to the fact that his professor, Hobbs, had insisted that journalists needed to have “conclusions based on concrete evidence, regardless of how surprisingly well the conclusions you’ve jumped to fit within the given narrative.” He’d argued that the world revolved around coincidences, but Hobbs wasn’t quite convinced.
The assignment was to discuss a present day pressing issue in journalism. He was wildly invested in the true crime story of the Cardenas family which would not be remotely helpful for his paper, due to the unfortunate seventy years between the case and the present day.
Unconsciously, he had been drumming his pen against the desk for approximately seven and a half minutes. He’d just huffed a sigh, finally deciding that it might be time to close the tab when the person in the desk in front of him turned around exasperated.
“Can you please stop tapping?” It was Todd, the guy he’d seen earlier that day at the sign up.
“I mean I can, but you could also put on headphones. I’m just saying.” They were both leaning over the side of their desks into the aisle in order to talk to each other.
“Maybe I don’t want to wear headphones. Maybe I’ve lost my headphones. Did you think about that?”
“Have you?”
“No.”
“See?”
Evidently he did see because he didn’t press the issue but instead brought up a new and interesting point. At that moment, Todd had been staring at the jacket Dirk — who’s name he hadn’t actually caught earlier — was wearing. There was something familiar about it, and the guy for that matter, but for the life of him, he couldn’t put it together.
“Why are you wearing a blindingly bright yellow jacket? And a tie? Are you in a costume?”
Hmm. Yellow was a very sophisticated color, if Dirk said so himself.
“No. I happen to like this color. I think it’s rather dashing.”
At that moment, a librarian felt fit to glance pointedly at them with an eyebrow raise that reeked of a suppressed shhhhhh.
Dirk looked at Todd, chagrined, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’m Dirk Gently.”
Todd looked over at the librarian as well, but didn’t seem to fear them as much as Dirk did, as he continued to speak at his normal volume. “Todd. Listen. You seem like a nice guy — well, you seem like a guy, but I’m not really in the market for new friends right now. And I really have to get this assignment written.” He tried to turn back to his work, but Dirk stopped him by laying a hand on his arm.
“Well that’s rather rude.” Dirk didn’t say this out loud, but this having been the second time he’d seen Todd in the same day, when he’d never seen him before, something was calling to him, telling him that Todd was important. The Universe liked to do that, nudge him in the right direction. Oftentimes the “right direction” led him to disaster, but occasionally, It felt bad.
Occasionally, It rewarded Dirk’s service to It with friends. That’s how he’d gotten Mona (currently on an acting retreat. She was playing a chair in his room). It tried to soften the terrible curve balls it threw into his life with some good ones.
Todd paused. Dirk could tell that there was something going on in his head that he wasn’t planning on sharing. “You’re right.”
“Thank you. Anyway, I’ll stop the tapping.”
“Thank you.” Todd turned away, and while Dirk felt a stab of panic that the conversation was over, he didn’t do anything about it this time. The coincidental meetings hinted at a potential friendship, and he wanted to make sure he didn’t screw it up.