The Invisible Girl

[parallax23]

The Invisible Girl

Episode: 4x07

Summary: While serving out his punishment, Ivan accidentally wins over his fellow inmate – la novia cadaver.


Ivan wanted to kill Roque.  And he would bury the body under the barn.

It was the third weekend in a row that he was stuck cleaning the stables.  He could probably name every horse the school owned at this point.  For the amount of time he was spending in the stables, he was lucky that they didn’t move his bed in there.

Elsa still hadn’t given an end date for his and Julia’s punishment for sneaking out one night on Tony’s motorcycle.  Ivan should have seen this coming, but like everything else in his life, he had acted without thinking and now had to pay for it.  Anything involving Julia ended with him being in trouble.  Yet somehow he couldn’t say no to her when she wanted to find out the truth about her father.  They would have been fine if Roque hadn’t ratted them out.

As part of their punishment for escaping together, Elsa had Ivan and Julia serving different sentences at different times.  She declared that they would probably spend their time making out instead of cleaning, so she had them rotate between the stables and helping with other chores around school.  Julia had been assigned to help Maria with the laundry this Saturday, which Ivan imagined was almost as bad as the stables if Rodrigo’s gym sweater was anything to go by.  He would find out next weekend when it was his turn.

“Noiret!” called Antonio, the groundskeeper as he walked toward the barn.  “Since you are now the expert in shoveling, I’m leaving you in charge of our novice here.”

Ivan rolled his eyes and finally took notice of the girl trailing behind Antonio.  She was some shy emo kid with weird hair and more piercings than Julia.  The mousy girl’s presence annoyed him.  He could only imagine what inane thing that she had done to end up in the stables.

“Did Elsa add her to punish me more?” asked Ivan.

Antonio shrugged.  “Kid, I don’t know what you did to piss her off, but I suggest you not do it again.”

“I hooked up with the girl who tried to get her fired,” said Ivan.

 “You would,” Antonio chuckled.  “Anyway, back to work.  I’ll come and check on you in an hour.”

When he walked away, Ivan turned his attention to the girl in front of him.

“What did you do to get sent here for?  Playing Fall Out Boy too loud in your room?”

“What?” she asked, unused to Ivan’s twisted sense of humor.  While Ivan’s reputation preceded him at school, she hardly expected him to know who she was.  He was known for being unpleasant, but a grand master of mischief.

Ivan snickered. “Doesn’t matter, kid.  There’s a shovel and a bucket.  The crap goes in the bucket and you dump it in the bin out back when it gets full.  Repeat as necessary.”

She nodded and tried to seem cool.  “I know what to do.  I’ve been sent to the stables before.”

“Right,” Ivan said.  “How many weeks did Elsa sentence you for?”

“One week.”

“Rookie,” Ivan commented, and walked over to the barn to get a shovel.

The third year girl scurried after him.  He was right.  She wasn’t really in the business of making trouble, even though she liked rebelling against the rules.  Last weekend, she had gotten a new lip piercing that she refused to take out, so Elsa had assigned her one week in the stables.  She had only been to the stables once before, and it was for coming to school with her hair dyed green last year.  Of course, Ivan wouldn’t be impressed.  Her antics paled in comparison to his devious schemes, like running away from school for a few weeks or stealing the handyman’s motorcycle for a late night hook-up.

Ivan didn’t speak to her as they mucked the stables.  She heard him occasionally cursing Elsa, his father, his friend Roque and some other names that she didn’t recognize.  Well, he was certainly as everyone described him.  Not very friendly, but very charismatic. He had a rebel without a cause aura around him.  He was also hard to ignore, which was why she noticed that he had disappeared shortly before Antonio was supposed to return.  She walked around the barn and found him smoking alone.  Maybe they could be friends after this was over.

He glared at her when she appeared before him.  “Snitching on me won’t shorten your punishment.”

She paused.  “I wasn’t going to snitch.”

“Do you want one then?” he asked impatiently.

He was trying to buy her silence.  She paused again.  She hadn’t smoked before, but she could learn.  Of course, she was afraid to admit this to him.

“Are you always this slow or are you using something that makes you this slow?” he scoffed.

“Yes – I mean no.  No, I’m not using drugs.  But yes, I want a smoke,” she stuttered.  She wasn’t sure why she wanted him to think that she was cool and knew how to smoke.  Maybe if she was cool, someday he would steal a motorcycle for her.  But today, she would just get to smoke with him.

Ivan shook his head as he handed her a cigarette and lit it for her.  Then he turned back to stare off into the distance at the woods.  She held her cigarette for a moment, unsure how to begin.  She was glad that he was lost in his own thoughts and didn’t seem to notice that she was looking at him.  She put the cigarette in her mouth and took a short breath in.  The taste was alarming, but she hid it.

“This is all such bullshit,” he said finally.  “Mucking out stables isn’t going to make us think their bogus rules make sense.  If our parents actually gave a damn about us, we would be at home right now.  Our folks should be here doing this shit instead.  If you’re too lazy to parent, spare the world and don’t reproduce.”

She nodded.  This time she could participate in the conversation.  She knew how he felt because her father had sent her away when her mother passed away.  It was a vain attempt to please his mistress at the time.  He passed away on a race track two years ago, trying to impress another mistress.  She knew what Ivan was thinking about too well.  Even though he didn’t know her story, she knew his story.  She was lucky that her father wasn’t physically abusive, and that her story wasn’t splashed across tabloids in the same way.

“My dad left me here to make his mistress happy,” she confessed to him.  “When he passed away, there was no one left to take care of me.  So here I am.”

Ivan looked at her as he absorbed this information.  He didn’t say anything as he finished his cigarette, and then flicked the butt into a bucket of used cigarettes and ashes by the barn.  She would flick the remainder of her cigarette in there when his back was turned.  Her first time smoking was disgusting yet oddly comforting.

“And what part of this story inspired you to become Emily the Strange?”

She didn’t know who Emily was, so she shrugged.  She knew that he was making fun of her, but at the same time he seemed interested in her appearance.

“Well,” he said, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette.  “Next time you end up stuck here, you should learn how to smoke better.  It makes the smell more bearable.”

Ivan handed her the cigarette.

She took it from him. “Thanks.”

He acted as if she said nothing and walked away. While he wasn’t friendly, he didn’t treat her like she was completely invisible.  It was still a good place to start to something more.

“I’m Susana by the way,” she called as she followed him to the front of the stables.

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A/N: "The Corpse Bride" just started appearing in Season 5, and was in love with Ivan.  While the writers paid too much fan service to his character, it seemed like there was a story behind the girl that needed to be told.  The first idea that came to me was when she and her roommate have a discussion about Ivan, but I couldn't think of how they met.  Suddenly, the idea for this came to me.  There's second chapter (aforementioned) to this that needs to be edited, at the same time, I'm unsure if I want to write the third chapter which deals with how she was killed.

A/N 2: 9/17/2015 - I decided that I didn't like the second chapter because it lacked direction.