MHA #2 | Friday Evening

[defenderofdesmoines]

Annie and Diego had passed a real rite of passage as a long-term, cohabitating couple this evening: they had gone on a date to IKEA.

(And yes, Annie had insisted that this shopping trip was a date. There had been golf pencils and lingonberries involved as well as picking out furniture with umlauts, okay? Date.)

And of course, now, they were back home with their spoils spread out on the floor in the form of a set of unassembled shelves, their associated little pack of hardware, beer (necessary), and the set of directions that Annie was now considering.

"Huh, this is fun. They just use this little cartoon man to tell you what to do," she said, flipping the page over to show Diego. "Probably so they don't have to translate it from Swedish."

Something like that, Annie.

[for the fella!]

Comments

[knife_bender]

Diego did not consider an Ikea trip a date, he didn't care how many Swedish meatballs were involved.

"This can't possibly be that hard," Diego said, already opening a beer. "Are this many instructions necessary?"

[defenderofdesmoines]

It had been an outing with food and an activity, and then they had gone home together. Date.

"Well, there's a few pieces, so they have to tell you what to do with all of them," Annie reasoned, flipping through the instructions. "But the directions don't, like, look hard or anything."

[knife_bender]

"I don't get why half this stuff is necessary," he said, picking up a dowel. "What the fuck is this?"

[defenderofdesmoines]

Like Annie knew the correct term.

"It's like, a little peg," she tried, peering from one of the shelves to the directions and then pointing to one of the holes in the shelf. "I think they go in there, to, like, take up space and hold stuff together along with the screw things."

There were way more dowels than there were hexagonally-headed screws, though. Hm.

[knife_bender]

"Weird." He did not trust a shelf to stick together with those flimsy things. "Can't we just add more screws to really make sure it holds together?"

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Well, we'd have to drill more holes, right?" Annie said logically. (She had no idea. Would they?) "They only included this many, but we could probably get more? But then they'd probably show more. That's probably why they use the peg things -- they're discreet."

Interior decorating, Diego!

[knife_bender]

"And when I think of Annie and Diego, I think discreet," he joked.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"That's us," Annie agreed with a smile, leaning over to press a kiss to his cheek. "Pure discretion."

They absolutely had made out in the middle of an IKEA earlier. Discreet people.

[knife_bender]

"What are we going to put on these shelves anyway?" he asked. "Not more plants."

There was a literal jungle on their balcony now.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Books," Annie suggested, though there were definitely not enough stray books to fill up a shelf. "Movies? Picture frames? Knick-knacks? Maybe we'll start collecting commemorative spoons and will need a place to store them."

Which all meant that Annie didn't have a specific plan for this shelf, no. Her vision was in constant flux, okay?

[knife_bender]

Diego chuckled. "Careful--too many knick-knacks and it'll turn into my dad's house."

[defenderofdesmoines]

Annie made a little face. "Tasteful knick-knacks," she amended, idly reaching for the little bag to inspect the weird plastic washers that had come with this thing, too. "Less on the stuffed-and-mounted side of things. And hey, as long as we make sure we don't cover every surface with a picture of my face, we'll avoid looking like my mom's house, too."

[knife_bender]

"I wouldn't mind lots of pictures of your face." But he was biased.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I'm okay with it as long as your face is in most of those pictures, too," Annie decided. She was also biased. "It's sort of weird seeing your own face everywhere in isolation."

Maybe part of the reason Annie took so many pictures with her friends was because she just wanted a record that Annie existed just as much as Starlight did.

[knife_bender]

"True," he agreed. "You wanna hear something weirder? There's, like, painted portraits of us all over the mansion. All of us except Vanya in our domino masks with Dad."

And that one weird portrait that he had put up of Five after he disappeared which Diego still didn't understand.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"What?" Okay, that actually was super strange, yeah. "You had to like, sit for a painting like it's 1850 or whatever? That's so weird. Kind of uber pretentious, too."

Also, like, kind of sad for Vanya again, there.

"Mom just has all my medals and posters and promotional shit up everywhere," she added. "It's more embarrassing than weird."

[knife_bender]

"My dad is super pretentious," he said. "So no paintings of us or promotional shit on the new shelves."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I would allow a drawing," Annie decided, considering this. "I don't want to rule out a cute caricature of us on a skateboard or something."

[knife_bender]

"Oh, I would love to see you on a skateboard." He had the feeling it would be hilarious.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I would be amazing on a skateboard," Annie decided, knowing this was completely, utterly false. "I used to love my rollerblades."

When she was, you know, nine.

[knife_bender]

"I bet you looked so cool," he teased. "You could add that to your syllabus to teach people."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I could," Annie noted thoughtfully. "Good excuse to make people wear some deeply sexy helmets and knee pads."

She was starting to understand that at least thirty percent of teaching -- at last, at this school -- seemed to involve activities designed to be mildly humiliating.

[knife_bender]

"You know what we should have done?" he said. "Put furniture building on the syllabus and have other people do this for us."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I mean, knowing some of my students last time, that's asking for some very mixed results," Annie noted with a wince. "But come on, this is easy. And we'll be able to say we built it ourselves!"

Assembling basic furniture: an accomplishment held by college freshmen across the nation.

[knife_bender]

"Okay, we can totally do this," Diego said, sitting his beer down. "...where do we start?"