the life of Evie

"I loved you," he said. 

"What?"

"Yeah, I did. I didn't know it then, but afterwards, I figured it out. I did love you."

"You don't have to say that," she said.

"Well, I think I was supposed to say it before, so like, backdated, or something."

"A backdated 'I love you?'" She laughed at him. "Well, I can't say I've ever had one of those before."

*****

February 2077

January 2079

September 2079

April 2081

May 2082

October 2082

May 2083

September 2083

Summer 2084

What Evie needed, after spending nearly seven years of her youth on a floundering and hopeless romance, was a fresh clean break. She wouldn't say that she regretted it, exactly. It was an experience to grow from. And she was ready to grow.

Also, two years delayed, she decided to attend college after all which her parents were happy about. She enrolled at Sierra Nova University in Arizona, hoping for something absolutely different from everything she'd known in every possible way.


But she was undecided in major, as she was in life. She heard others talking about what they aspired to and felt sort of broken that she didn't actually know what she should aspire to. She'd like a family, some day, but that was vague and far-off. Right now, she just didn't know. She aspired to an easy, comfortable life, if that could be an aspiration. To begin, she knew that she enjoyed public speaking and that she respected the law. She enrolled as a political science major and it felt as suitable as anything else.


She found work as a hostess at a popular bar in downtown Sierra Nova—the only part of Sierra Nova that she liked, she realized, one block long and with just enough to do to stay sane. Other students enjoyed camping in nearby Granite Falls, but camping wasn't Evie's style.

Summer 2085

In her second year, she decided to rent an apartment. She was older than the other students at her level, having taken two years out after high school. She couldn't relate to the brand new freshmen in the dorms, and the other students her age were in their final year now, moving on with their grown up lives, girlfriends and boyfriends and some even had babies already.


So she answered an ad for an apartment nearby. The landlord was tense and ferocious, in a beastly unreachable woodsman kind of way. This is, perhaps, why parents shouldn't tell fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast to young girls. A reasonable woman would have looked for another apartment. Evie, instead, decided that Hudson was kind of cute and she wondered if she could break through that bristly exterior.


But Evie was somewhat reasonable, she decided. This apartment was the only one in Sierra Nova that she could afford. And he probably wasn't actually a serial killer or anything. Who cares if he wasn't nice? She didn't need her landlord to be nice—she just needed him to fix broken pipes and keep out the rats and anything else that might like to crawl in.


The apartment was livable, barely. It was a short drive to school, it was cheap, though Hudson mentioned there were earthquakes here sometimes and that worried her slightly. There was always a fine coating of dust on her shoes and it just took so damn long to get to anywhere really interesting.

Perhaps she might have been better off on campus with the teenage freshmen, because she knew nobody here and it was sort of lonely. She left her parents and sister back home in Lake City, and she hadn't made any new friends here yet. In fact, the only person she regularly talked to at all was Hudson.


The fishy woodsman who hated talking.


"But how do you know you hate people if you never get to know any of them?"

Leave him alone, her better sense said. Let people be who they want to be. But she didn't leave him alone. She coaxed him to come sit with her one evening in the dusty twilight, the horizon dotted with far-off billboards promising far-off attractions and excitement that was just out of reach.

It was a nice conversation, so she thought. It was almost romantic, if you had your bar set really low. And if you took her seven mediocre years with Beau as an example, you might say that Evie set her bars pretty damn low.


"I have some social anxiety," he explained.

No shit, she didn't say. But then she felt bad for him and her feelings of sympathy felt squishy and warm. Like love. But it wasn't love. She knew better than that. Mostly.

But she didn't know better than to ask him on a date. She asked three times. The third time was a charm, as they say.


They went out to one of the few places to go in Sierra Nova. He said enough words to tell her that she looked very pretty, which she appreciated.


The date started out pretty normal. They went to see some live music, which was loud, of course, so they didn't get much talking done.

Just about the point at which he might walk her to the car, hands held in anticipation of something more, she noticed something.


"What is that on your shoe? It looks like..."

"Fish guts," he said. "Sorry. I just caught a couple this morning, had to clean them out."

"I was going to say vomit," she said, "but I think fish guts are worse."


They were never able to recover from the simple fact that the whole fishy woodsman fantasy was much more appealing in idea than in reality. They never had a whole conversation that didn't end up in cringes and apologies.

Gosh, it was such a shame he was so weird because he was really very handsome.

He was nice, probably, once you took the time to get to know him. He probably wasn't even a serial killer. But Evie decided that she needed to raise her bar just a little bit. She wanted to date a guy who liked talking and didn't like hobbies that involved knives and fish guts.

Awkward problem: he was still her landlord.

So come spring, she started to look for a new place to live.

Spring 2086

She took the train to California on the weekends, which was only about an hour each way. She stood by the bay and fell in love. It reminded her of home, in a way. It was much bigger than Lake City, where she grew up. It was noisier and busier and full of so many more opportunities.


She walked through the neighborhoods, picking up rental brochures.


By the end of a long day of walking, she found twenty-three possible apartments. She couldn't afford most of them, and she might not be approved for some of them, but she felt confident that one of them would become her next home.


It was a good day's work, so she went off in search of some quiet bar, dead in the middle of the day, to order herself something cold and fruity to drink.


A girl slid onto the bar stool beside her and said, "Yvette-fucking-Bachman."

Evie never would have called Summer a friend until seeing her familiar face in this faraway place. They each dated one of the Jackson twins for years and years, then they each broke up with one of the Jackson twins. They were practically in-laws, in a way, detached but so familiar, except now without the Jackson boys.


They caught up for a few hours, feeling like no time had passed at all. Evie told Summer about her weird landlord who enjoyed catching and gutting fish. Summer told Evie the long and dramatic story of Tyler and then James and then ditching it all to go follow her band.

Then Summer had an idea. "You need a new place, I need a new place. Let's be roomies!"

"Yes, let's do it! This is gonna be so much fun!"

Summer 2086

Yvette Bachman is now 22. Summer Phoenix is 21.

In the fall, Evie started her third year at SNU. Now she took the train into school on the weekdays and came home to Catalina every evening. It was true what people said about location being everything. It was a much better place to call home, even if the state of the place was just as barely livable as the last. A secret: Evie noticed a mouse hole in one of the bedrooms and chose the other bedroom before Summer noticed.

They threw together whatever mismatched apartment furnishings they could find, and they went flea market shopping for new pieces on the weekends. Summer's drums took up half of their living room.


"Check out this beat," Summer said and launched into one of her band's new songs.


It was rhythmic enough, Evie supposed, but a drummer without her band was a hard thing to appreciate.

"You know," Summer said, shouting over her drumming, "It sounds totally better with the rest of the band."

"I bet," Evie said. "I bet it sounds incredible. You go ahead and practice. I'm just gonna... I have some homework to do."


So Evie retreated to her bedroom and started work on an essay. Maybe the nice thing about having a musician for a roommate is that she'll be off touring and doing shows a lot.

—

extras: tour of Evie & Summer's apartment

notes forever and ever: there have been quite a lot of little unofficial mini stories that I've posted on Tumblr about Evie and Summer over the past couple of years. I couldn't stop playing them, even though I wasn't sure where in time they belonged. But now that I'm working EVERYONE into one tidy timeline, I wanted to put some dates and ages on things and make some of their stories official. 

This would be the time period when Summer is still trying to make her band thing work, very shortly after she finally told her dad to give up her mom's store. Her future has declared that she eventually quits trying and becomes a cop. I'm not sure that story will still happen all the way in 2091, maybe sooner, but I do still see her ending up there at some point. Also Ryanne finishes high school and comes to sleep on their couch, and Detective Hottie will show up, too. 

Given that TS4 *still* does not have real drums (those were deco and poses, unfortunately) or real bands, it won't be too much of a disappointment when I have to make her band fail, lol! For full disclosure, I don't even have the other bandmates made in TS4, and I probably won't bother to make them since it's going to flop anyway. 

Evie's LTW in TS2 was to become a professional party guest, lol! She was a pleasure primary, which does not exist in TS4 as you might have gathered from her musings on lack of life direction, and she hadn't yet declared a secondary aspiration, so I didn't have that to work with for her either. So, in the end, I decided on popularity (friend to the world) and family (big happy family) which were the two most laid back aspirations that matched her traits. I would have her work on the City Native aspiration, half of which she would enjoy, but it requires maxing the singing skill (wtf?) and I don't see her as a singer. 

Summer's TS2 LTW was to become a rock god, and she was popularity/romance. In TS4, she's popularity/creativity, with romantic and non-committal traits. But I really don't see her pursuing the serial romantic aspiration as a dedicated thing. She is scattered in romance, totally, but she certainly doesn't aspire to it, lol!  

And for a final note, the slow demise of Evie vs Hudson I think was due to their traits: squeamish vs loves outdoors, and loner vs outgoing. As far as anyone knows this game doesn't have romantic chemistry, but it does have a certain kind of conversation chemistry. Some trait combinations just cannot have a conversation together, so would obviously have a very hard time making a relationship work. Not to mention, squeamish sims cannot stand to live in a house with critters and Hudson has dead mounted fish all over his walls!

Poor Hudson! Will I ever find the right kind of girl to love my handsome fishy lumberjack?