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In the one month that she’s spent at college so far, the most that Amity has done is discover hours that shouldn’t exist. There’s been a slow but sure slide down into the night owl nature she’s been actively repressing throughout most of her life- strict households with strict rules and strict schedules and parents don’t bode well for bursts of inspiration, especially not in the early hours of the morning- and that’s found her up and working at midnight on a good night, at two and three and four more often. Combine that with the sudden influx of work and the brand-new balancing act of academics-social life-newfound independence, and Amity can safely say that she has definitely been feeling some sort of way lately, but she couldn’t for the life of her say how.
Today the day has slid on past her in a slew of pages and paperwork and equations that took the place of morning, noon, and night as time turned itself first into a pulp and then into a slush before giving up and abandoning her to her own devices. Now she’s just finished up a set of problems for a class she couldn’t tell you the name of if she tried (she’ll figure it out one of these days, one of these days it’ll all fall in line) and she’s leaned back in her desk chair, looking up at the ceiling in a loopy sort of homework-induced haze. She stretches her arms high above her head and tries to reacquaint herself with the feeling of her own limbs, of her head and her arms and her legs as they are when she’s not caught up in the midst of whatever hellish project her professor’s cooked up this time. A click at her phone (and a near miss with gravity as she tilts too far back in her chair and has to pinwheel her arms to stay upright) informs her that it is 2:15, and Amity isn’t really sure that she exists anymore.
Hours that shouldn’t exist, she thinks wryly, hours that shouldn’t exist and then hours that she’s still not convinced do . Time that’s not real is quiet, apparently, filled with air that’s soft and static and light that’s a thin gray-white and the constant, pervasive thrum of silence. Her roommate is long asleep, huffing out snores and snuffles and rustling their blankets as they turn over. Amity could go to sleep like them, could and probably should , but it’s late enough that her impulse control is shot and little instinct-Amity that lives in the back of her head has taken over and is telling her that if she doesn’t go get herself some food right this second then she’ll be getting no rest at all because she’s going to be stuck in an amorphous half-awake state until morning rolls around.
And Amity sort of wants to be able to sleep for once
So she stands up as quietly as she can and stretches again, scrabbles at her desk for her keys and card and wallet. They’re shoved haphazardly into her pockets, and then she’s slipping out the door and closing it behind her with a click so soft as to barely be audible. The vending machines aren’t on this floor but residential halls are only so big, so Amity knows where to go; she climbs her way up to the fourth floor, speedwalks past the people in room 414 who are always, always awake and always, always loud about it, and then turns into the little room-off-a-room where the vending machines are tucked away. She’s not feeling all that great- her stomach is a little swoopy and her head’s a little achy and there’s a quiet, persistent pressure behind her eyes (because if you give a student an exorbitant amount of coursework, they’ll want some existential dread to go along with it), and all in all she’s felt better.
But she’s felt worse too, and she’s still functional so there’s no need to panic; instead she feeds some cash into the machine and then just stands there for a moment, palm pressed flat against the keypad as she scans the meager selection of snack foods and candies. There’s nothing good. Amity doesn’t know why she’s surprised. But sleep-deprivation and hunger make for a hell of a team, and the bright glossy red of the skittles packet in the corner (someone in marketing knew what they were doing) caught her eye at some point and hasn’t let go, so Amity gives in there and then and jabs at the keypad accordingly. This’ll help, she thinks and supposes and hopes as the vending machine dings at her and then starts to push the skittle packet forwards. The anticipation is already burning away the last few dregs of bad that had been clinging to her skin, and the quiet of the room is quelling the angry little storm that had been brewing inside of her. Things are calm in here, and there’s no more work to be done tonight so she can relax. Just the thought of some relaxation is enough to-
Ten seconds into her internal monologue, Amity realizes that said internal monologue has been ten seconds too long, it’s too late at night to be thinking this much, so she snaps herself out of it, shaking her head and zeroing in one the skittles package that should be in her hand right now. The skittles package that is stuck right there in front of her, one corner inched off into empty air but the rest held fast by the way the coil of the vending machine snakes around its side and holds on tight.
Alright! Okay! Alright! So nothing is easy and life is a nightmare and the world is out to get her! This is the beginning of the end and it’s all downhill from here and if she were to look outside, she’s sure that the sky would be falling in great big chunks down to earth- something around here has to be sensible she guesses, they can’t all have their heads in the clouds- and now everything is horrible and the planets are lined up in a row and some supervillian somewhere is cackling maniacally as they unleash their doomsday weapon upon a sleepy little college town. These are the end times. She’s finally seen the lowest of the low, has hit rock bottom. Her skittles are stuck . They’re stuck.
Amity lets out a noise that’s like a growl or a groan and slaps an open palm on the side of the machine with a thwack . It does nothing. The machine towers over her like a sentry, the little cheery touchscreen display prompting her to INSERT CASH HERE like she didn’t already INSERT CASH HERE and the dollar-fifty that she just threw away meant nothing. Well fuck that! Amity isn’t giving away another cent! She is Amity Blight, and she is here on a full-ride scholarship and she’s well-known around campus and sort of well-liked, the jury’s still out on that one, but she’s in several clubs and she is aiming for big things and she is not going to be defeated by a vending machine of all the things on this miserable little earth, especially not a vending machine on a college campus at two in the morning.
“Come on, come on, ” she grumbles, her voice harsh and cutting and too heavy for the small room. “Come on, come on, it’s two in the morning, just give me my skittles come on, come on -”
She shakes the machine. She rattles the machine. She thumps the machine and kicks the machine and swears at the machine until her face goes blue, but the machine is nothing more than a machine and the machine couldn’t care less about her plight; the machine has one job, just as it was made to, and that one job is apparently to make Amity’s life as difficult as possible.
She gives it one last shake- and oh, if they all could see her now, wild-eyed and seeing red, scowling and seething at a vending machine - before giving up and letting her head thunk forwards to rest on the glass. It’s smooth and cool and probably very gross, but Amity doesn’t care. This isn’t so bad, not as bad as it could be; the lights stuck beneath the last row of foods (the gross stuff, the gum and the off-brand chips) are a sleek shade of white-blue, and she can hear the machinery turning over somewhere deep inside the machine, and the skittles packaging is glinting a bright red, gleeful and lurid and innocent as can be in the corner of her eye. This is her home now. Amity will live and die here, and if the pounding in her head is any indication then she’s going to be doing it fast.
“Oooohhh, ouch,” a voice says from behind her, and Amity immediately whips her head around so fast that she near overbalances and falls straight onto the floor. And of course, because the world is out to get her and bad things come in threes, tens, and hundred-thousands, standing there beneath the flickering fluorescents, in a pair of soft, red striped pajama pants and an old-looking Azura t-shirt with a faded graphic sprawled over its front is the prettiest girl that Amity has ever seen. She’s short, but then most people are when next to Amity, and she’s rocking on her heels in a rhythm, back and forth and back and forth, and her eyes are big and earnest and her hair is cut short into thick black strands that barely brush the collar of her shirt and her skin is a warm brown. She’s smiling, half-curious and half-amused, more a quirk of her mouth up through the corner than anything, and she looks much too awake for two in the morning.
Now Amity, Amity looks like a zombie. She didn’t think that anyone would see her so she threw her hair up into a ponytail that was never meant to last, two turns of a hair tie around what’s probably three-fourths of her hair at best, she can feel strands coming loose and frizzing down around her face, and she still hasn’t changed so she’s in jeans and a rumpled old button-down that could pass for professional were she at her best but well. It’s two in the morning and her skittles are stuck in the vending machine and she was crying over homework five minutes ago. Her throat still feels raw and her eyes still feel raw and her skin still feels raw and now there’s a girl and that girl is pretty and she can hardly string two thoughts together, much less a coherent presentation of herself .
“You nearly had it too,” the girl says, moving closer (moving closer ) and peering down around Amity’s shoulder before reaching a hand out to rap at the glass. Her nails are painted in two different shades of blue, chipped near the base. “It’s just not your night, is it?”
“Uhhhhh,” Amity squeaks. “Uh. Um.”
“Oh! I can help though!” the girl says, shooting upright. She turns her head and brushes a chunk of hair behind her ear. She’s got earrings in, little black studs, and it’s getting warm in here isn’t it? Someone should probably look into that, call in a work order, get something fixed or something. Probably.
“I’ve always been real good at this sort of thing,” the girl continues, “If you’ll let me just-”
She stretches her arms above her head and cracks her neck from side to side, nudges closer to Amity and then past her so she’s situated in front of the machine. There’s a fire in her eyes and an air of stubborn pride lingering somewhere in the set of her shoulders (not that Amity’s looking), and it only grows more intense as she lets out a sharp yell- like a battle cry, but it’s two in the morning and they’re on a college campus so the only fight she’s going to be getting into is with this floor’s RA- and lunges forward, latching onto either side of the machine and giving it a big shake.
Two seconds. For two seconds random girl stands there and yells as she rattles the machine until it looks like several machines all lined up in a row and wobbling out of time as Amity watches on in shell-shocked silence, only half-aware- what exactly is going on here? She feels a hop, a skip, and a jump away from whatever dimension she’d been living in before she stepped into this room, feels miles away from being an actual, human person with the ability to function in actual, human ways. So when the girl gets the skittles package dislodged and it falls down with a thump, when she reaches down and pulls it out and then offers it to Amity with a big smile that slips neatly across her face to reveal a row of perfect teeth, the most that Amity can bring herself to say is “Um?”
“For you,” the girl says, poking it closer. “Since you paid for them and everything.”
The red of the package is redder up close. If the heat in her cheeks is any indication then Amity’s face is probably about the same shade by now. The fluorescents are bright as can be, and the machinery inside of the vending machine goes thump thump thump as it turns itself over again and Amity has gone completely blank. Thump, thump, thump, goes her heart, as the pretty girl rocks back on her heels. Thump, thump, thump like a machine, turned on over from the inside out.
“Um,” she says again. “Um.”
“Yeah man, I know,” the girl huffs, smile slipping into something more sympathetic. She reaches down, pushes the package from her hand into Amity’s colder, limper one. She barely finds it in herself to hold on; the only thing that keeps the package from dropping to the floor is the way that instinct drives Amity to curl her fingers shut all at once, the way her muscles seize up at the brush of skin and the way the girl’s hand lingers for a second longer than necessary, brushing over her thumb. “Homework, huh? Really does a number on ya, especially this late at night.”
“Chemistry,” Amity says, the word rolling off of her tongue even though she doesn’t actually know if she was doing chemistry. “I was doing chemistry. I am doing chemistry. Homework.”
“Ohhh,” the girl says, face twisting. “That sounds rough. I’ve gotta take calculus to fulfill my math requirement, and ugh , I hate it.”
She shudders, full-bodied through her back as she runs her hands up and down her arms and pushes her sleeves up in the idle, mindless way of a person moving for no reason other than to move. Her bangs are slipping down into her eyes and she flicks them away with one sharp movement as her face scrunches down into a well-worn annoyance. It’s cute. Amity is not looking at her. Amity is not looking at her. Amity is not, Amity is not, Amity is not.
“Anyways, I’m Luz. Hater of calculus and terror to vending machines everywhere,” Luz says. Even her name is pretty, and already Amity’s brain is eating it up and rolling it over, one syllable again and again until there’s nothing but amorphous sound and shape and nothing that could pass for a concrete meaning at all. Like alphabet soup; Luz, over and over again, L-U-Z and nothing else. She should go to sleep soon, she thinks, because everything is crashing down on her all at once and Luz is so pretty and Luz was so nice, and her skittles were stuck but now they’re not and the emotional whiplash has her brain coiling up into one big lumbering mass made up of equations from homework past and conversation topics that will never see the light of day so long as she’s as tongue-tied as she is.
“I’m Amity,” she replies, on autopilot. Luz gives her an encouraging smile; it’s very nice of her, and Amity wants to cry. “Thanks. For getting the skittles.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it!” Luz reaches out and pats her on the arm, and Amity just about dies. “You’d be surprised how many people I’ve helped out with these things. I don’t know if they’re like made to screw people over or if they just start messing up every time that I’m around, but it’s like I’m some sort of bad luck charm around vending machines. It’s like the world’s shittiest superpower.”
“That sucks,” Amity tells her, much too solemn for what is obviously a joke. She clutches the skittles packet close to her chest and wishes that there was some mercy on this cold, cruel, vending machine-laden planet.
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Luz says, nice and breezy. “Makes for some good stories, anyways. You’d be surprised at some of what goes down when there’s trouble involving vending machines. I met one of my best friends because he wanted to see how one worked so he just tried to-” she makes a gesture like she’s breaking something in two, makes a sharp sound to go with it. It’s much more endearing than it should be. “Open it up. It was a whole thing.”
“Huh,” Amity, conversationalist extraordinaire, says.
“I know, right?” Luz giggles. “And hey, look, this isn’t really like that but we still met because of a vending machine, and because that’s where I seem to meet most cool people anyways, whaddya say we skip right to it? Wanna be friends? I can give you my number, just give me a second- wait, will you take a picture with me? To commemorate the occasion.”
Amiy nods dumbly because Luz could ask her to go rob a bank and she’d begin digging through her closet for her cutest off-to-commit-a-crime outfit. Luz cheers and takes out her phone, throws an arm around Amity’s shoulder and smiles big and wide. She snaps the picture before Amity can do more than arrange her deer-in-headlights stare to the more normal dead-on-the-inside college student one. She shows the picture to Amity first- but she’s moving fast, so it’s more like a blur- and then opens up a new contact page, setting the picture as the contact photo before shoving the phone towards Amity.
“There ya go!” she says cheerfully. “And then I can text you and we’ll be all set! I can send you the picture too so we can match and everything, it’s gonna be great. ”
Amity enters in her number. Amity hands the phone back and watches in a sort of daze as Luz reads Amity Blight out loud twice before typing out hey, slow and painstaking, and sending it off with a flourish. Amity’s phone buzzes in her pocket and she takes it out, still in a daze, sends a quick hello back and then that’s that. Luz sends the picture a moment later- and it really is worse than Amity thought, she looks like she can’t tell up from down and the bags under her eyes are atrocious - but she sets it anyways and gets a happy little hum from Luz as a result.
“Well, Amity Blight,” she starts, “ I am going to get myself some chips, and then I’ve got a date with my calculus textbook. I’ll text you?”
Amity nods. She can’t find it in herself to do anything else.
“Great!” Luz claps her hands together, nods once. “Don’t let the chemistry get to you too much, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, alright,” Amity says, and then she nods too and then turns on her heel and walks right out. Luz calls one last goodbye behind her, one that sounds amused and much too knowing for Amity’s liking. Amity walks faster, all the way down the hall and to the stairs, all floaty and giggly on the inside but careful not to let it show. Once she gets back up to her own floor though she slows, lets herself pull out her phone and thumb to the contacts. There Luz is, right there at the very top of the queue, and Amity’s heart does a little flip in her chest. She casts a furtive glance over her shoulder and then the other one too, just in case- years of living with Edric and Emira have taught her that you can never be too careful- and then pulls up Luz’s contact and adds a heart next to her name. She looks at it for a second, pushes down the creeping feeling of mortification and the uncomfortable realization that she’s acting like a middle schooler, and then decides that fuck it, she’s an adult, and if she wants to put hearts next to Luz’s name then she’s going to put hearts next to Luz’s name. She adds a second one, just because she can. This one’s pink.
It’s embarrassing yes, but in Amity’s defense she did just meet the prettiest girl in the world, and the prettiest girl in the world did just give her her number, so she’s allowed to be a little embarrassing. Or a lot embarrassing she thinks, wincing as she remembers some of what she just said, and more importantly all that she didn’t- she’d been monosyllabic, borderline rude hadn’t she? Distant and tired, wavery and washed-out.
But. She’d gotten Luz’s number anyways. And people don’t expect other people to be at their best at two in the morning, especially not on a college campus because people at two in the morning are generally tired but people at two in the morning on a college campus are dead in all but name, and Luz didn’t seem like the type to be judgemental- in fact Luz seemed sympathetic. Luz was sympathetic. Luz shook a vending machine for her.
And Amity is sure that she’ll be very embarrassed about that in the morning- she’s already half there, and she’d be further along if it weren't for the steady beat of exhaustion that runs on through her like a bolt or a wire, live and humming and bright and blinding- but right now she’s got homework on the mind and pretty girls to think about, so the morning seems ages away. For now she’ll just float along on the feeling she thinks, will take the good and focus on it until she has the mental capacity to deal with the bad. She slips into her room with the same conviction, her phone clutched tightly to her chest and the giddy bubbles from before making a resurgence as she settles herself down at her desk, the skittles carefully opened and placed within reach as she gets ready to start her homework again.
Tonight has been a night, that’s for sure. But Amity’s got her skittles and a new number in her phone and maybe, maybe the beginnings of a crush, and that’s enough to balance out the homework, she thinks. That’s something she can work with, anyways, so it’s good enough for now.