If you know enough about hipsters to make fun of them, you are one

In the grand tradition, now, of non-linear novels, our story jumps not only across miles and state lines, but years. Because Vivian and Matty were born in exactly the same year, and so if she is in her early twenties as we speak, he now is, too. The past three chapter deviated from this, providing a look into how Matty came to be as you will find him for the remainder of the short time in which you will know him. As for Vivian, though, there isn’t really anything more you need to know about her besides what you knew when we left her--standing on a corner in downtown Seattle, watching snow fall on a sculpture park.

Having seen enough, she turned towards home and began to walk. By now I’m sure you’ve heard enough already about how the buildings and the shipyards and the cranes were all her relations, the former of the three bowing down their long, graceful necks to greet her as she passed, or about how the sleek, intelligent water-creatures popped up from the depths of the Puget Sound to tell her hello. The trick of it, though, was that she didn’t see these things because of the little blue pills that the kids at the pop clubs on Capital Hill took or the long, sparkly white lines that the acquaintances who lived in her apartment building offered her on nights that she came to their parties. Vivian wouldn’t touch any of those things for fear that if she tried them, such magical, secret friends as the cranes or the seals would disappear from her line of vision and never come back. The kids who took them never seemed to see anything at all, let alone beauty, or if they did they didn’t talk about it. Vivian doubted that they did, though. There wasn’t much to those kids’ eyes.

Inside now, she climbed the stairwell to her floor and let herself into the apartment where she lived alone. It was a small studio with three white walls and one exposed brick one. Set into the middle of the exposed brick wall was a large window overlooking first the street, and then the freeway, and then finally the water. Boats and planes were always going by, and the Boeing cranes that Vivian called Zoo Animals shone in the distance at night, their lights as pretty as anyone’s Christmas tree. Set lengthwise against the window was a bed, and the bed was neatly made up with a clean white imitation-down comforter, a worn old electric blanket with an African animal print, and four pillows in mismatched cases with things like animals or Disney Characters on them. Pushed against one white wall was a desk with a laptop computer and craft supplies in clear plastic drawers, and on the floor beside the desk was a sewing machine and several musical instruments. Set into another of the white walls was a closet filled with clothes and tiny shoes.

The lights in the laptop perked up and flashed florescent. Vivian has 173 friends, they spelled out on the screen. Vivian thought it funny then, since more and more lately she felt as if she didn’t have any. Of course there was always the world, which was her greatest friend of all, and the thought was one of amusement rather than melancholy.


Friends invited you out to the bars at night or bought your album when it came out or let you sleep on their floors, Vivian mused, but the world itself was something far more precious. The world was a mom who picked you up at the airport when you’d been away, so that when you stepped off that plane, so goddamn tired you could barely spell your own name, there was a whole bed set up in the back of the car for you; with your favorite whimsical pillows and blankets and a movie on a laptop to giggle mundane at until the freeway sang you to sleep. The world was that one shining friend who dressed in rags and wrote the most beautiful songs that you had ever heard and made everywhere you ever went with them your favorite place because they were tender and exciting all at once.

Vivian’s phone rang. It was the booking agent she had recently acquired, and she almost considered not answering, because he was a realist and she had come to find him mildly obnoxious. Vivian was signed to nice moral indie label that was just big enough, and her recent album’s sales had been such that paying her rent wasn’t as much of a struggle as if had once been, though she was still far from wealthy.

“Hey,” she said, eyeing the screen of her computer, a site where strangers from all over namelessly uploaded their photos. Two high school kids were hugging in a sunny backyard by a trampoline, dressed in formal wear. She thought up a little story about them in her head.

“Hey Vivian. Listen, I’ve got a tour for you this winter if you want it.”

“Oh, good. Is it that West Coast one I wanted with that band that dresses up like animals?”

“No, this one’s bigger. You listen to Pippin Noelle, right, you know who he is?”

“Yeah,” said Vivian, staring at the screen still. Two girls her age in Capri pants and brightly colored tank tops smiled with Mickey Mouse at Disney World. She wondered what their apartments looked like. Everyone knew who Pippin Noelle was.

“Okay, well I talked to his guy out in Wichita today, and if you want the gig opening for him this winter, its yours.”

An old lady looked out of the screen at Vivian, surrounded by balloons and hospital machines. “I want it,” Vivian said.

“Excellent. This is a nationwide thing, Viv, not some little local living room tour in some kid’s van. You’ll be traveling on a tour bus and staying in hotels and all the works. So you get to work on finding a sub-letter for that apartment of yours, and I’ll email you the dates and all.”

“Who else is opening?” Vivian asked.

“This new kid, Matty Madison, and his backing band. He’s about your age. Talented kid. Little blonde from Minnesota, looks like a strong breeze could knock him over, but he can fucking write, you know? You should check them out. Anyway, get to work on finding that sub letter, the tour leaves in a month and a half.”

“Holy shit!” Vivian shrieked, putting the phone down and getting up from the desk. She didn’t swear often.

Vivian had met Pippin Noelle once, a few years earlier. She had been eighteen and on a Septa train to Philadelphia. Pippin was twenty-five then, slouched rather sadly in a window seat, listening to an Ipod. Vivian thought that he looked just like her.

“Excuse me,” she’d said, sitting down next to him. “Are you who I think you are?”

Pippin had smiled. “I don’t know,” he said, “who do you think I am?”

“I think you’re Pippin Noelle.”
He laughed a little then. “Yeah, that’s who I am,” he said. “Come here.”

He said nothing more, not even goodbye save for a little smile when the train came to his stop, but he pulled Vivian in close to him and draped half of the jacket he’d been using as a blanket over her lap. He took out one of his ear phones and put it in her ear, and together they rode for the next half hour, wordless and connected. He had been listening to The Postal Service.


The apartment door slammed shut behind her and Vivian raced down the hall to a man named Taylor’s apartment, where the standard Friday night dance party was going on.

“What’s up?” Asked Taylor, all tight jeans and brightly colored sneakers, his hand on one skinny hip.

“I’m touring with Pippin Noelle in a month, that’s what’s up!”

“Nice. Girl, we need to get you some better clothes before if you’re about to be touring with big name indie kids like that.”

It was true, mostly. When they weren’t just given to her, Vivian got almost all of her clothes at the Seattle Goodwill Outlet, where they were dug halfheartedly out of plastic bins and selected mainly because they weren’t too full of holes and looked like they’d fit her. Her wardrobe was full of dirty Keds sneakers and old, shapeless striped shirts or awkward ones with wild animals on them. Occasionally, if she felt up to it, she liked to dress in themed outfits--vintage dresses with panels of fabric from 80s cartoon bed sheets sewn into them, bright tights, plastic heels--but mostly she just wore the aforementioned plain shoes and shabby tee-shirts. Taylor and his friends had a hard time understanding this, especially since she was pretty.

Vivian entered Taylor’s apartment, her eyes greeted with a few dozen kids dancing wildly as if they were at some sort of autistic 1960s beach party, dressed in brightly colored shorts or leggings, ugly sweaters, shiny tee shirts. Vivian, as you know, had no interest in drugs, but she wasn’t adverse to getting a small alcohol buzz now and then, when the occasional called for it. Tonight she sipped her Pabst Blue Ribbon more quickly than usual. Perhaps it was simply a product the elation of the news she had just received, but the dancing kids excited her greatly. She didn’t mind if they were contrived. Everyone worth knowing in their twenties was contrived at least a little bit, Vivian reasoned, because that was how interesting people figured out what they liked. It was an adventure to strip away the layers and see what the cute present was inside of hip kids’ hearts. Most of them were kind and some were vulnerable, when you did.


Three beers brought her to that perfect state in which your coherence isn’t gone but your legs feel a bit lighter than they did before, and more things are funny. She pulled Taylor outside onto the balcony, watching the freeway. “Look at all the lights,” she said to him, not because she especially thought he would understand, but because she wanted to say it to someone. “Every one of them is a life, you know.”

Taylor giggled. “You’re a trip,” he said.

Vivian would have none of this. “No, no, I mean it” she pressed. “Haven’t you ever thought about how each individual light out there, going past, is at least one person, and that person has a hometown, and a bed, and a favorite movie, and a best friend and all the other stuff? Every single headlight on the freeway is a beating heart, Taylor, at least one beating heart. You’ve thought about that, right?”

Taylor looked down at his shoes, which were bright pink high-topped athletic sneakers with neon yellow Velcro straps. The damn things had cost a fortune.

“No, I haven’t ever thought about that before” he said. “That’s really cool though, Viv.”

He looked sad, suddenly, which Vivian didn’t think she’d ever seen happen before. It made her a little bit sad, too, because she was reminded then of her own unfavorable habit of assuming things. Maybe there was something to the eyes of kids like him, after all, and they just weren’t tough enough to let it show on the surface. Maybe they were too sensitive. Vivian didn’t think that she was sensitive at all, expect for maybe in her songs.

“Well you’re thinking about it now,” she told him.

Taylor smiled. “I suppose I am. Well fuck, Vivian, Pippin Noelle. You’re going to be famous.”

“I’m kind of famous already.”

It was true. Several people had approached her already that night, asking her where she was playing next, or if she was who they thought she was.

“Yeah, but I mean famous. You’re going to be so much more famous now, on this tour. You’d better get me backstage on one of those dates.”

Vivian promised that she would, and the two proceeded to leave the deck empty. And when she finally returned to her own apartment in the little dark hours of that morning, she looked at the world map on her wall and noticed that the two biggest masses of land looked like Big Bird and Snuffleupagus facing each other. She opened up her laptop.

I have a story to tell, she typed, and I have to write it all down, before I get too old…