Fandom High Dormitories

Astrid had laid some of the first layers of paint onto her mural and, knowing she'd have to wait for it to dry before adding more, she figured it was a good time to take care of some laundry, especially since she could appreciate the fact that she even could do laundry, unlike a few weeks ago. She separated the dirty clothes, colors from lights, cold from hot. It was something she always liked doing, the sorting, dropping the coins, the soothing smell of detergent and dryers, rumble of the machines, the snap of cotton and denim when she folded her clothes, her newly fresh sheets. It was a lot quieter here than the laundromats she was used to growing up, filled with children playing games with their mothers’ laundry baskets, wearing them like cages, sitting in them like boats. Astrid always wanted to sit in them, too, pretend she was sailing.

But her mother hated any chore, especially the ones that had to be performed in public. She waited until all their clothes were dirty, and sometimes washed their underwear in the sink, so they could put it off another few days. When they finally could not get away with it one day more, they'd quickly load their wash in the machines and then leave, go take in a movie, look at some books. Each time, they'd come back to find it wet,thrown out on top of the washers or on the folding tables. Astrid hated it that people handled their things. Everybody else could stay and watch their laundry, why couldn’t they? “Because we’re not everybody," Ingrid would say. “We’re not even remotely like everybody.”

Except even she had dirty laundry.

But now Astrid could stay and watch the laundry, and no one would handle her things and leave them like a damp mountain on top of the machines. She might be too big now to sit in a basket like a boat, but she could watch the tumble of colors in the dryer, or just close her eyes and be lulled by the steady, thumping rumble of the machines, slightly unbalanced, in the quiet of a room in the dorms that, like the pool, she suspected not a lot of people spent much time in, which almost made her feel, in that moment, that it was simply hers.

[[ look, when canon hands you a nice little vignette about laundry, you use it, and Astrid has been so loud to me lately. taken mostly from Chapter 27 of White Oleander by Janet Fitch, which is being all sorts of scrambled and rearranged at the moment, and definitely open! ]]