Greta 2 [en]

[fr] Exercice d'écriture: personnage Greta.

She left Greta on a Tuesday, and she needs to fill in her week before she meets up with Sam on Sunday evening. It doesn’t have to be tricky. The nice thing about writing stories is that you can choose to skip telling parts of it. You can compress or zoom in, whenever you feel like it.

The next day, the kiosk is still closed. And the day after. On Friday, Greta expects it to be closed, and files the fact away in the “let’s not worry about this” part of her brain. The Selecta machine at the station will have to do for her sugar fix, and she’ll remember to buy cigarettes at the other end of her train journey as she heads home. She misses the interaction with the kiosk lady, though.

Saturday is spent marking tests and preparing classes while Raphaël goes for a run and sees some of his friends. His friends are OK, but she doesn’t feel particularly close to them, and they realized early on in their relationship there was no sense in trying to force their respective social lives onto each other when things didn’t click.

So on Saturdays, Raph goes off and Greta gets some extra quiet working time. He shops for groceries on the way home, cooks dinner, and then they have an evening to themselves. Sometimes they go out for a movie, but most of the time they stay in. Greta used to hang out at Captain Cook’s a lot when she was still seeing Sam, but bars aren’t really Raph’s cup of tea, so she stopped going.

She’s having an evil thought right now. What if she made the Cook disappear for Sophie? Would she manage to reconcile that with the rest of the story? Could she have, in the same story, Sam with a missing Great Escape, Sophie with a missing Captain Cook, and Greta with a missing kiosk? The Great Escape seems to be missing for everybody — it would be hard to make the Captain Cook disappear for everybody as Sam and Sophie and Robert just spent the evening there but… Who knows? That would be really twisted.

Sunday is Raph and Greta’s day together. There’s not much to do on Sundays in Lausanne except hang out and spend some quality time together. It’s a quiet day. Greta likes quiet, now. Actually, that was one of the problems with Sam — he always had to be out and about.

She’s at the point now where she keeps going back and re-reading what she’s already written about Greta and Sam, to make sure she doesn’t say anything contradictory. For example, she’s decided Sam was always out and about, but what has she said about that earlier? Actually, she sees that she’s written that Sam ate out a lot. Compatible. She’s happy with how this is going.

She doesn’t think about Sam that often anymore. It was hard when they broke up, but time has passed and she’s really happy with Raphaël. It’s a much better relationship — at times she wonders why on earth she and Sam stuck together for so long when things were obviously so difficult. She knows Sam has had a harder time getting over their relationship. To her knowledge, he hasn’t moved on to anything else yet. She might be mistaken, though. They barely talk anymore.

So, she’s a little surprised when Sam calls her up on Sunday evening.

“Hi Greta, how are you doing?”
“Hey, Sam! Haven’t heard from you in ages…”
“Yeah, well…”
“I’m good — busy with work, you know, but overall everything is fine. What about you?”
“Well, listen… I know this may sound a bit odd, but would you mind coming over to Café de la Place for a coffee?”
Greta is a bit taken aback. “Why, what’s up?”
“I’d rather talk about in person. Could you be there in 30 minutes or so?”
“Sure.” She’s a bit worried. “Are you OK?”
“Yeah, pretty much. I’ll explain when I see you. Thanks.”

Greta is not very enthusiastic about dragging herself out of her cozy flat to have coffee with her ex when she starts school early the next day. But she still does care for Sam, and knows he wouldn’t ask this of her if it weren’t important for him. He didn’t sound that good on the phone, either.

She promises Raphaël she’ll be back as soon as she can, and catches the bus to Sam’s and Café de la Place.

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