Catcher in the Rye Adaptation - Gina Hwang

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  11:30am

  Catcher in the Rye Adaptation by Hye Jung Hwang
  March 2014
  
  
  The following is my adaptation from parts of Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 of ‘Catcher in the Rye.’ The story is set in KMLA. The narrator is a female character. The use of the pronoun ‘he’ is deliberate; he is not ‘Edward’ nor is he God.

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  I walked all the way up to the cafeteria after honjung. Twenty-six gorgeous flights. I didn’t do it because I felt like walking or anything. It was more because I didn’t feel like getting in and out of another elevator. Sometimes you get tired of riding in elevators the same way you get tired of riding buses. All of a sudden, you have to walk, no matter how far. When I was a kid, I used to walk all the way from the subway station to our apartment very frequently. A helluva big, fat hill.
  The stairs had a terrible stench. Although it wasn’t that dark, with those sensor lights turning on as they traced my movement, it seemed that an ominous cloud of the smell was surrounding me. I wished that I could buy a helluva giant perfume that could purify all this smell. Those stairs meant more than an escape from the elevators. They reminded me of the old days. I wished I’d appreciated everything better, because things had actually been better. I’d never imagined things to turn out this way.
  
  I’d reached the cafeteria. The guys’ honjung, it seemed, hadn’t ended yet. I bit my lips and fingered the corner of the book I’d brought. The book was for camouflage. ‘I’m taking this so I can study while I wait for Edward,’ I’d thought, knowing that it’d never work that way. I bit on the side of my fingernails, where the flesh had grown white thorns. I tore them and it bled. I fingered my ponytail. “He” had told me that I looked better with my hair tied up. I wanted to buy barrettes. Pretty ones with colors that weren’t too superficial.
  
  Anyway, I kept walking around the cafeteria, waiting for Edward to show up. I went deeper into the cafeteria, towards the vending machines. At the very end were happy couples nested in their seats. I wondered if they were giggling just because they felt like it or if they were being superficial, smiling because the other was. Then I sat down on an empty table, facing the entrance. My eyes kept searching for Edward as I gnawed on my fingers. I hoped that Edward’d be willing enough to listen to me. I didn’t care too much, though. I sort of just wanted to get it over with. Finally, when Edward emerged in a yellow coat, and when I tried to stand up, my feet stumbled over the chair’s legs and damn near fell over it. I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a chair or something.
  

  *     *     *

  
  After old Edward was gone, I came back to my damn room, sat in the damn chair for a while and glanced at a couple of shopping mall pages. My roommates were already up on bed. One began talking suddenly. I thought she was saying something to me, but she was calling her boyfriend. The other one began snoring. Not that loudly, but just so you can notice that she’s well asleep. Boy, I felt miserable. I felt so depressed, you can’t imagine. What I did, I started typing, conscious of the clack-clack sound of my fingers on the keyboard, Facebook messages. I do that sometimes when I get very depressed. Of course, I knew I couldn’t send them. “He” was out of the option, first of all, Edward I’d already talked to for the last hour, P was offline, and I didn’t think S would have enough free time to listen to my trivial depression. I know that writing these messages is useless, since I don’t send them anyways, and that it keeps redirecting my mind towards the gloomy things that haunt me, but I keep thinking about it anyway, when I get very depressed.
  
  Finally, though, my roommates had both fallen asleep, and the lights went out, so I got undressed and got in bed. I felt like praying or something, when I was in bed, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t always pray when I feel like it. In the first place, I’m sort of an atheist. I feel like a turncoat, like those Disciples that kept letting Him down, because I’d ditch Him as soon as I’m feeling better. And then there are those ministers who sound so “superficial” – the word itself sounds so “superficial” but I can’t help it – in their Holy Joe voices. I don’t see why the hell they can’t talk in their natural voice. Maybe it’s because a mortal, feeble, and insignificant human can only reach Him through borrowing an extraordinarily superficial voice.
  
  Anyway, when I was in bed, I couldn’t pray worth a damn. Every time I got started, I kept picturing old Edward asking me whether if I had clinical depression. Edward’d tried to show me a Youtube clip on the symptoms of clinical depression. Finally, I sat up in bed and surfed over to another shopping mall. The site was lousy. Still, I must’ve ordered around two dozen packages from that site since this semester began. The dorm parent scolded me for wasteful spending because I’d had too many packages. Maybe I’d become a superficial shopaholic. I couldn’t help it.
  My eyes started getting watery, having strained to gaze at the blinding light of the phone through the pitch black darkness, and my fingers hurt from having chewed on them too much. I closed my eyes and I pictured myself going into a giant shell. Smooth, like a snail shell, but not so gooey. Clean and dry, just pleasant. I’d crawl into it, like I were two years old, into the spiral and settle myself in the deepest heart of the shell. Then I’d roll up into a ball and close my eyes, hopefully my ears, too. Why weren’t humans able to close their ears as they close their eyes? Then the ghastly thoughts wouldn’t be able to find and bother me. Then there’d be no dorm parent to bug me about shopping.