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Being sort of kicked out isn’t easy, but Kristen’s adjusting.
Such adjustments include: cooking for herself, getting to and from school, filling up Sunday mornings, and figuring out what rebelling looks like, for her.
She’s starting to suspect that just existing as herself—the real one, the one she’s realizing more and more every day that she is and that, more excitingly and terrifyingly than ever, she wants to be—is rebelling enough, at least by her parent’s standards. But she’s decided not to operate under their terms anymore, so she has to go bigger.
Skipping school feels big. Fig tells her it’s not, so Kristen decides to believe her, but then the group chat has thoughts about it, which brings her back to big.
just fig!!!!: ME AND KRISTEN ARE SKIPPING SCHOOL TODAY!!! ANYONE WHOS NOT A LOSER CAN COME WITH US WE’RE GONAN WALK ON THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY TO LOOK FOR COOL ROCKS
Kristen?: not to sweeten the pot TOO much but i do happen to know how to identify quartz soooo
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster: im not sure you know what sweetening the pot means kristen
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster: but sorry gorgug and i have practice
just fig!!!!: you could come before practice??? is that not just after school??
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster: oh also i dont want to
gorgug:): That sounds fun but I have a test in my melee combat class today :(
Kristen?: thats okay gorgug:)
gorgug:): :)
coolest wizard in the whole world: pretty sure you know I physically emotionally mentally spiritually etc cannot skip school but thank you for the offer, grab a cool rock for me please
just fig!!!!: yeah we figured lol, all good addy
LICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak: you guys need to tell me this stuff before i leave to go to school already wtf
just fig!!!!: well maybe if you didnt leave before i woke up
LICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak: well maybe if you woke up before five minutes before we have to leave
Kristen?: ill grab you a rock riz
LICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak: thank you.
coolest wizard in the whole world: oh if you guys are planning on skipping you should probably call the school first? moreso for Kristen but
gorgug:): Yeah if you don’t want your parents to find out
Kristen?: what
LICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak: they call your parents if you dont show up to school??? this is common knowledge kristen
Kristen?: WHAT NO ITS NOT WHAT
just fig!!!!: oh yeah i forgot about that
Kristen?: WHAT!!!! SOMEOEN EXPLAINE!!!!
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster: yeah cathilda always says she’s gonna call the school to let them know im “sick” when i dont feel like going
coolest wizard in the whole world: and when my parents let me actually stay home when I was sick they made sure to call the school in front of me so I could see how disappointing and terrible it was or whatever
coolest wizard in the whole world: and for the record that was only one (1) time, every other time they made me go to school sick lol
coolest wizard in the whole world: wait who changed my name
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster: adaine no offense but im goign to kill your parents
just fig!!!!: yeah me too
gorgug:): Yeah me too
LICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak: yeahme too
Kristen?: yeah me too
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster: also i did not change your name but
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster changed LICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak ’s nickname to UNLICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak
UNLICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak: FABIAN IM GOINGGT O KIL LYOU
UNLICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak changed their nickname to LICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak .
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster changed LICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak ’s nickname to UNLICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak
UNLICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak changed their nickname to LICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak .
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster changed LICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak ’s nickname to UNLICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak
UNLICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak: Kristen you should come to school so you can see me kill Fabian live
UNLICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak: but yeah if you don’t you should really call and pretend to be your parents and say you’re going to be absent cause otherwise they’ll call your parents andsay you never showed up, good luck
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster: HA! GOOD ONE, THE BALL!
Fabian Aramais Seacaster, Son of Bill Seacaster changed UNLICENSED!!! Private Investigator, Riz Gukgak ’s nickname to the ball.
“Okay I don’t know,” Kristen says, bringing her hand up to her mouth to chew on the end of her friendship bracelet, “I’m not really a good liar and—”
Fig holds a hand up. “Kristen. Do you know who you’re talking to here?”
Kristen blinks, blanking in the panic. “Is this some sort of trick question? Are you—are you not actually Fig?”
Fig throws her hands in the air. “I’m the master of disguise, Kristen!”
“Okay,” she whines, pulling her shirt up so the neck hole frames her face like a weird baby, receding into the fabric. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry! Listen, we got this. We’ll call the school and I’ll just use disguise self to sound like your mom and then we can skip without your parents knowing!”
“Yay!” Kristen cheers, then, “Wait. Do you even know what my mom sounds like?”
Fig frowns.
“I can just go to sch—”
“No! You are not going to school! Not on my watch, young lady!” She puts her hands on her hips and gives a hard stare, unwavering.
“That was pretty good, actually.”
Fig spends a while warming up her voice with some sounds Kristen is pretty sure have nothing to do with anything, but then again, Fig is a musician and Kristen got kicked out of church choir for not being able to carry a single tune, so.
(She was, really, “redelegated” to working with pastor Amelia on prophet stuff during choir rehearsal times, which is just a nicer way of kicking her out of the choir. You know, getting older, important religious duties and all that. If religious duties include learning how to shuffle a deck properly—Kristen didn’t realize that was what was really happening until three years later when all she and pastor Amelia did during their special sessions was talk about if Kristen had spoken to Helio that week for five minutes then play cards for the rest of the hour, pastor Amelia conveniently starting a conversation whenever Kristen started to hum along to the rehearsal in the other room.)
They dial the number for the school with a minute to spare before homeroom, and in the end the woman that answers the phone doesn’t say anything beyond, Hello, Mmhmm, and Okay, I’ll mark her down as absent before hanging up. There’s a moment where they just listen to the dial tone, eyes wide in disbelief before both of them erupt into cheers.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it!”
Kristen shakes her head in disbelief as the entire day unfolds in front of her, ready for the taking. “I am so badass now,” she mutters. When Fig laughs, it sounds like bells.
*
The look that the pet store clerk is giving Kristen and Riz is not a kind one. “You’re looking for a pet that… doesn’t require a tank, or a kennel, or a litterbox, and doesn’t eat bugs, and doesn’t smell. And you only have twenty three dollars and it has to come home with you today and it has to be… hard to kill?”
Kristen cringes slightly. It doesn’t sound great when they put it all together and say it out loud like that.
“I think we’ll just browse,” Riz says, brightly but firmly, looping his arm into Kristen’s and pulling her off into one of the aisles. The sales person does not attempt to continue the conversation any further, which is just as well. “I don’t know if a Fig-proof pet actually exists,” he says once they’re out of earshot, “I mean, if she killed an oyster.”
Kristen pulls him over to the aquarium section, crouching down to check out the weird looking ones. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” she says absently, watching Riz smirk in the reflection of the glass. “Maybe I should get a fish though.”
“Maybe,” Riz says, in a way that really says, No you should not! He pulls them back up to standing and starts idly through the rest of the fish area, sighing deeply as he veers them into the aisles with supplies. “Like I think she for sure needs something, but I don’t think she would survive the grief of killing another pet. I don’t know, could we get her a plant?”
“We could get her a plant,” Kristen says, running her fingers through the plastic fish tank decorations. There’s a fine layer of dust on just about every one. “It’s less sad to kill a plant.” A puppy barks across the store and Kristen resists the urge to liquify.
They reach the end of the aisle and turn into the next one, which is full of dog toys. Riz picks one up and starts squeezing it like a squeaky stress ball. “I don’t know,” he says, “Maybe we should just—” He stops, looking down at his hand. “Oh my god, maybe we should just get her a toy.”
“A dog toy?”
“No, like—like a stuffed animal toy. Like a pet she can’t kill!” He tosses the toy—a yellow spiky ice cream cone—and strides out of the aisle, bringing Kristen along with him. She’s learned not to interrupt his train of thought or the actions they produce when he gets like this, mid-breakthrough. She’s honoured to be taken along for the ride; sometimes he gets frustrated that no one can understand the leaps of logic happening entirely on the inside of his brain that he just gives up explaining and goes off to do the thing, alone. But Kristen is there when they exit the store and walk into the one directly adjacent, which just so happens to be a toy store.
Riz takes them right to the stuffed animal aisle, and Kristen smiles wide. Amazing.
He gestures widely, only a little bit smug. “Now, the only hard part is figuring out which one to get her.”
“Do you think they would have an oyster? Or would that just make it worse.”
“I’m not sure. Maybe best to steer clear?”
They steer moderately clear, staying in the aquatic realm and landing on a stuffed whale. Kristen posits that it’s the most huggable shape of all their options and Riz adds that whales sing, just like Fig, and neither of them need any more convincing than that. When they give it to her that afternoon, she finally removes the veil from her face and says, morosely, “Thank you, I’ll name her Mildred.”
She doesn’t let go of it until they leave for school the next morning.
*
When Kristen comes home from squirrel club the next week, she comes home to Riz crouched on the hallway floor, trying to break into his own apartment.
“Practicing for rogue class?” she asks, a little wary, because she knows for a fact that Riz hasn’t gone to rogue class in like a week. He only grunts in response, and when she gets closer, she realizes he isn’t even using his lockpick—he’s using, quite unsuccessfully, his nails.
“Dude, what?”
“Shut up,” he says before she’s even finished, removing his hands from the lock and dragging them down his face instead. “I know.”
“Where are your thieves’ tools? Where are your keys?”
Riz sighs, stands up, and finally turns his attention to Kristen. “I lost my briefcase in the river,” he says, explaining nothing.
“You what?!”
“I was—ugh, this is the last time I try to do something fucking nice for myself. It’s a sign from the universe,” he rants, shaking his head before elaborating, “I was throwing rocks.”
Kristen blinks. “And that resulted in you losing your briefcase… how?”
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“This is why we never go to throw rocks in the river!” That’s not really the reason, but she supposes it is another one, now. The real reason they don’t go to the river to throw rocks is because there’s no tree cover and Kristen burns too easily, Adaine is afraid of getting ticks, Fig will try to jump in and swim to Bastion City because she swears it goes that far, Fabian thinks it’s lame (and is also afraid of getting ticks but refuses to admit it), and Gorgug will kind of just go with what everyone else wants to do and it’s never a majority yes to go throw rocks in the river for the aforementioned reasons, so.
Riz just looks at her miserably so Kristen softens, sighing as she uncrosses her arms and asks, “Did you at least have fun?”
“Yeah,” he says, nodding, eyes suspiciously shiny as they wander off into whatever memory he’s reliving, pre-briefcase calamity. “I fucking love throwing rocks.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
He sighs, one last second of reminiscing before he looks back at Kristen. “Well,” he says, clapping his hands together, “Now that you’re here I can stop hanging out in the hallway.”
“Oh, yeah, you can come over, for sure. Duh.”
Riz’s eyebrows draw together, walking the line between puzzled and amused. “No, I just need to get the spare keys I hid in your apartment,” he says, “I’m down to hang but I wanna shower first. My briefcase wasn’t the only casualty.”
Kristen lets out a little helpless noise in horror. “What does that mean?” she asks, searching Riz for any sign of… anything, before shaking her head and saying, “Wait, you hid an extra set of keys to your apartment in our apartment?” She’s almost too caught up in the unexpected warmth of saying our apartment to catch Riz shrugging like, duh! When it’s clear he’s not going to give a further explanation on any of the information she’s learned in the past five minutes, she rolls her eyes and give in.
“Okay, yeah, whatever,” she says, taking off her backpack to dig around for her keys. “I can check you for ticks, too,” she adds, waiting for her fingers to connect with the familiar shape of her tick key remover thats on her keychain.
(The entire set includes: one tattered blue carabiner, scratched up to show the silver underneath in more places than not, holding a key ring with her house key, printed with a novelty corn pattern; her key to Fig’s apartment, plain gold; the tick key remover she got her first year at camp; a tattered friendship bracelet her first ever crush made her, also her first year at camp, that’s now too tattered to wear without fear of snapping the threads; a puka shell sandal keychain she got on a mission trip two years ago; a little piece of blue ribbon Gorgug found and gave to her last month; and a random key she found on the sidewalk in the fifth grade that she convinced herself would open a door to a different dimension if she tried it in enough locks.)
“That’d be great actually,” Riz says, bending over to inspect his ankles.
“‘Course.” Kristen shakes her bag to bring the keys up to the top, or something. “Man, they’re really in there,” she notes absently, shoving books and papers around. She stops to sigh for a moment, looking up to the ceiling on instinct but not sparing any thoughts for Helio or Sol as she whines, “Come on.”
“Did you leave them in your sweater pocket? You were wearing it earlier today.”
“Maybe?” Kristen doesn’t think so, but she takes her sweater out of her bag and unrolls it anyway, sifting through the pocket to no avail. “What the hell, where are they?”
“Don’t you have your keys on like a clip thing? Why wouldn’t you just clip them on your belt loop? Isn’t that what all the cool gay people do?”
Kristen gives him a look. “Do you really think I’m a cool gay person, Riz?”
He shrugs. “I think you’re cool.”
Oh. well. “I think I’d be cooler if I could find my keys,” Kristen counters, mostly just fond.
“Well, yeah. That would help.”
It certainly would help, because after forty excruciating more seconds of searching, Kristen is forced to come to the conclusion that she somehow also lost her keys. Riz sits back down onto the carpet as she pulls out her crystal—fortunately still in her pocket—to call Fig.
“Hey!” she answers before the first ring is even done, “I was just about to call you! Are you home right now? I forgot my keys and—”
“Ugh!” Kristen scoffs, as forcefully as she can manage. “Are you serious right now?”
“Oh,” Fig says, voice falling off into dangerously sad territory, “I mean if it’s inconvenient I can just, I can just stay out or maybe ask Riz if he—”
“Riz doesn’t have his keys either.”
“Oh. Wait, did you also—”
“Uh huh.”
There’s a good five seconds of dead air, then Fig snorts. The snort fizzles into a low giggle, then a full-on laugh. “Did we all lose our keys on the same day?”
“Uh huh.”
“What the fuck, Kristen?”
While she’s trying to come up for an answer with that, Riz cuts in, not looking up from his crystal, “Adaine’s coming over. She’s gonna stay the night, parents.”
“Do you think she would have keys?”
Riz raises an eyebrow. “Did you give her keys?”
“Fig, does Adaine have keys to—to our place?”
“Shit, no. Maybe she could magic it?”
Kristen looks at Riz. “Maybe she could magic it?”
He hums, tilting his head to the side as he considers. “Maybe she could magic it.”
Adaine cannot magic it.
“You guys know most lock manufacturers ward against using magic to open without a key, right?” she informs wearily, giving the three of them a look that isn’t not judgemental.
Kristen, Riz, and Fig all frown in tandem.
“I mean, unless either of your parents set a specific unlocking spell as a backup when you moved in—”
“Yeah, no.”
“Gilear? Adaine, please.”
“I was just trying to be polite,” she admits, raising her eyebrows pointedly more to the floor than any of them. After a moment she looks back up, shrugging. “I think you’re shit out of luck.”
“You mean, we’re shit out of luck,” Fig amends with a wink.
“What does that mean?” Adaine mutters to herself while Riz turns to Fig, ignoring her bit and crossing his arms.
“Do you know when Gilear is getting home? My mom’s out of town on a bullshit conference thing until tomorrow, so.”
“Shit,” Fig says, kicking the door to the apartment as if that’ll do anything. “Shit,” she says again, quieter, disappointed it didn’t. “Goldenrod is having him stay late to prep for tomorrow’s gravy slop.”
Kristen and Adaine share a weary look. The monthly gravy slop is not something you can wing an hour before lunch bell.
“Shit,” Riz echoes, chewing at the dry skin on his lip. Fig slumps against the wall, defeated, and Adaine starts to pick at her cuticles, leg shaking. Kristen frowns, crossing her arms.
“Should we just go to Fabian’s or something?” Adaine offers.
Riz shakes his head. “They’re both away for the weekend for bloodrush.”
“Oh,” Adaine says, voice beginning to shake just slightly.
“Okay! No!” Kristen shouts, determined to fix it. “We’re going to have a good time about this! We’re the bad kids! We can do anything!”
“Yeah!” Fig yells, jumping up to stand beside Kristen with her hands on her hips, defiant. “Bad kids minus Fabian and Gorgug!”
Kristen nods her head forcefully. They can do anything. “Let’s get vending machine dinner and eat it on the roof! It’s a picnic!” she decides, turning to face Adaine, who is now more skeptical than anxious. Victory.
“In March?”
Kristen smiles. “In March.”
It’s as cold as they expect it to be, but with the four of them huddled close, watching the sunset with gummy worms and watery hot chocolates in hand, it’s not so bad.
*
The three of them successfully find their keys a few days later—Fig’s turned up in the school dumpster after tossing them with the contents of her cafeteria tray at lunch; Riz’s briefcase washed up behind Fabian’s house and Cathilda drove over to bring it to him the next day; and Kristen’s were actually in her bag the entire time, but she’s decided on telling everyone they were in her locker to avoid a verbal and/or physical assault on either her character or actual physical self. It isn’t long before the next minor crisis takes place.
“You know, I just think it would have been better if the prison break had been a little more realistic,” Riz is saying as he leans back against the elevator wall, hands braced on the railing.
Kristen laughs, out loud, throws her head back and everything. “Yeah, ‘cause you have so much experience with prison breaks,” she counters.
“I don’t, I’ll admit that, but I definitely wouldn’t have needed to wait around ‘till a bear showed up to make my plan happen. They were in there for weeks— if I was in prison, I would be out in a day. You’ll see.”
“I’ll see?” Kristen parrots, “What is that supposed to mean? Do you plan on going to prison soon?”
“You never know, Kristen! We commit crimes all the time!”
“Wow, the elevator is really slow today,” Fig notes then, ignoring their heated cinematic discussion. “You pressed the button, right Riz?” He only scoffs, to which Fig shrugs. “I mean, I know, but—it’s slow,” she continues, squinting at the panel.
It doesn’t look very lit up to Kristen, but she’s learned that that’s normal, apparently. It’s also normal for the screen not to show what floor they’re currently on as they travel. “Maybe we can—” she tries, attempting to be helpful and going to press the button for the third floor again before getting yelled at by a panicked Riz.
“No!”
She flinches back against the wall of the elevator, holding her hands up and breathing out a long sigh, remembering. Right. Another very normal thing is Fig and Riz’s elevator ritual, which Kristen is starting to think might just be Riz’s elevator ritual that Fig happily indulges: they get in, Riz presses the button for their floor three times, then Fig goes to town on the door close button until the door creaks to a close. Kristen is allowed to press the buttons on the way down, but when they all go up together, this is how it has to be.
That’s fine, but it means that—since the button was definitely pressed and they definitely should be on their way up—the elevator is definitely stuck.
“The elevator is definitely stuck,” Riz decides, earning a distressed sound from Fig. He turns to her with a determined smile as he opens his briefcase. “It’s okay, I’ve prepared for this situation,” he says, reaching his arm in deep— right, briefcase of holding, Kristen reminds herself—and pulls out a bunch of granola bars. “Well,” he adds, raising them up in a shrugging sort of motion, “Fabian prepared for this situation, these came pre-loaded in the briefcase. But regardless we’re prepared.”
“Nice,” Kristen mutters as he tosses her one, peeling it open and taking a moment to savour all the fun toppings she was never allowed to have—her mom only ever bought the plain kind, claimed the others were unhealthy even though the plain and the others were the exact same thing save for the marshmallows and chocolate chips she was now salivating at. Getting kicked out is fucking delicious, she decides, in this moment.
“You guys have service?” Riz asks, mouth full, half-scowling down at his crystal.
Kristen checks hers. “No.”
“Nope.”
“Alright, well, hope you guys are ready to die in an elevator that smells like piss.”
Fig sniffs the air, cocking her head to the side. “I don’t think it smells that much like piss.”
“No, but it will by the time we die, because I really have to pee.”
The emergency call button apparently hasn’t worked since the 80’s, which doesn’t surprise Kristen all that much. They end up just sitting there on the scratchy carpet, accepting their grave fate for twenty-five full minutes by the count of Kristen’s crystal until, miraculously, the doors open.
“What?” Sklonda says, rearing back slightly as she double-takes the sight of the three of them, defeated on the floor in a pile of granola bar wrappers. “Why? Guys, this—” She sighs, softening slightly. “If this is some cool new hangout spot, we’re gonna have to talk about it ‘cause people need to use this elevator to—”
“Mom!” Riz yells, the first to break out of the doom and sugar induced haze, “You saved us!”
Her expression falters. “Honey, what are you talking about? How many granola bars did you eat?”
“Oh, like six?”
She drags a hand down her face. Fig silently brushes her wrappers behind her. “I was gonna make din—I mean, it’s food, at least, which is.” A long sigh is let out before she looks up again. “Why are you guys sitting in the elevator?”
“We’re stuck?” Kristen tries.
Sklonda looks over her shoulder, then back at the open elevator. “Did you forget to press the button?”
“No,” Fig says immediately.
“We definitely did not forget to press the button,” Riz promises.
Kristen does not say anything.
Sklonda steps into the elevator, throwing one more apologetic smile over her shoulder for whoever might be in the lobby witnessing this, which is no one. “You wanna press it again for me?” she asks, looking at Riz then nodding over at the panel. He gets up wordlessly and presses it exactly three times, then Fig reaches over from where she’s sitting and starts jabbing at the close door button.
The doors close. The elevator begins to move upwards.
Kristen gathers up all the empty granola bar wrappers and shoves them in her backpack, trying to suppress a smile. At least this time it wasn’t her fault.
*
They’ve been keeping busy. They keep busy—school, the case, other assorted adventures and hijinks—but sometimes, in the quiet spaces between the laughter and the screaming and the big incredulous everything of it all, the sadness just catches up to Kristen. It’s in the little things, mostly: a faceless laugh down the hall that sounds a little too familiar, or a blanket pulled up to her chin, scratching in just the wrong way. Kids laughing outside the window, the smell of fresh-baked cornbread wafting in from another unit on the floor. The one time Fabian accidentally called her Krissy when they were going around Sklonda’s dinner table, much too small for six people, trying out new nicknames for everyone.
She doesn’t blame him—he couldn’t have known.
A lot of the time it feels like she’s finding out what sets her off at the same time as her friends are, if they happen to be there. A lot of the time they do happen to be there, but there are times they aren’t—mostly at night, mostly when she’s curled into the thinning mattress of Gilear’s futon, eyes focusing and unfocusing on the little hole in the fabric of the armrest from the time Riz and Fabian tried to swordfight in the living room. It didn’t end very well for either of them, Kristen having to heal both her friends and Gilear, who happened to walk in on the middle of it, but now it’s a welcome distraction from everything else fighting for attention in her mind.
And Fig is there, technically, sure. Kristen could wake her up, but she doesn’t. Instead, she turns over until she’s flat on her back, stares at the ceiling, and starts talking.
In her head, of course—she doesn’t want to give him—Him, whatever—the satisfaction of saying it out loud, as if it makes a difference. She tells herself it makes a difference. She tells herself she isn’t going to wake up the next morning to Fig’s morning breath saying, Dude, you were totally talking in your sleep last night, I woke up for a minute and saw your lips moving. If that happens, she can just say, Haha weird! and tell Fig she has to pee instead of doing something stupid like saying, instead, Yeah no, I actually was sort of praying which is either really sad or really funny but either way I don’t know what else to do to make the sad stop, and even then it doesn’t stop.
Because who’s gonna say that before school? Before breakfast? Not Kristen, that’s for sure. She’s not going to say anything—she’s going to wait for the next thing to pick her up and sweep her along, keeping her busy and keeping her afloat. Short of divine intervention—which, at this point, despite the prayers just in case, everyone knows—it is all she can do.
That, and the memories living between the stitches, watching her try to sleep. It’s enough.
*
The first time Kristen dumpster dives solo, she hits the motherload.
It’s winter, so the entire rim of it—and not to mention the ground all around her—is covered in a thick layer of ice, so she nearly eats shit (both figuratively and literally, in this case) with every step and maneuver she makes. The winter wonderland is very pretty, very picturesque even amidst the subdued stink of rotting trash, but it makes for a very dangerous event. A danger she fully accepts; a danger that is fully worth it for the jackpot she hauls out onto the icy pavement five minutes after spotting it from across the lot.
“A bike?” Fig is delighted when Kristen rolls it into the apartment, awkward in her attempt not to get any crushed up snow in the carpet. “Where’d you get a bike?”
“The trash!”
“Which trash?”
“One of the dumpsters out behind the strip mall.”
“Nice.”
Kristen did not ride it home because she did not feel like testing Sol when they were already on such shaky terms, so the first time she actually gets her feet on the pedals is right in the middle of the third floor hallway. It takes a bit of effort to really get it going at first, but altogether it’s not too janky to operate, at least not enough to understand why someone could have justified throwing it away. Maybe it’s melting dirty ice into the carpet and creaking like it’s being tortured with every foot it rolls forward, but hey. It rolls forward. It’s doing all the things a bike is supposed to do.
The two of them take turns riding it up and down the hall until Kristen rounds a corner and narrowly avoids steering it directly into a grocery-clad Sklonda and Riz.
“Ahh!” she yells, watching horror dawn on Riz’s face in slow motion as her elbow arcs over his nose, just barely avoiding decking him as she turns sharply and launches herself over the handlebars and into the wall.
Sklonda drops the groceries. “Oh my god, Kristen, are you alright?”
“Where’d you get a bike?” Riz asks as it wobbles to a stop and topples gently on top of her, just because it can.
“The trash,” she drones weakly from the heap she’s found herself in on the floor, “And yeah? Probably?” She gives Sklonda a lopsided smile and a thumbs up, smacking her knuckles on the still-spinning wheel in the process, letting out a small Ow as it comes to a stop.
Fig comes around the corner then, regarding Kristen’s whole situation with a low laugh before going, “Hey guys! It’s my turn next, but we can put you guys down for a spin if you want.”
Sklonda scoffs at the same time Riz says, “Fuck yeah.”
“Riz!”
They help put away the groceries first, because they were raised to have manners. Sklonda does little else but shake her head as they giggle their way out the door, and if she hears their cheering when Fig finishes the entire circuit of the floor in thirteen seconds flat and breaks the record previously set by Riz, then she does not come out to congratulate or condemn them for their efforts. She does come out to let them know she’s finished cooking dinner and that the girls are welcome to join them, which is great timing because Kristen has, at this point, just noticed that her finger is still sort of purple and she can’t really feel it, either, and also she has no heals left for the day, so.
“You know, you’re probably not gonna get that much use of out of that,” Sklonda says, just a touch of pleading detectable in her voice as she eyes Kristen carefully, nodding over to the bike parked against the wall. “In this weather, at least. The building has a bike storage room you could use until it’s a little safer on the streets,” she continues, slowing down as she says on the streets in a way that implies that’s the only place Kristen (presently resting her broken finger on her lap and clumsily eating her rice with her fork held in her wrong hand) will be riding moving forward.
“Really? I didn’t know that,” Riz muses.
Sklonda nods, taking a sip of her water before explaining, “It’s in the basement.”
“Oh, no.”
“Uh uh.”
“No way.”
“You guys are so—the basement is not haunted.”
Riz gives her a look, beyond betrayed. “Mom!”
She softens, turning to him with a pointed, “Sweetie.” It only earns her an eye roll.
“You remember Gilear,” he says, nearly whispering, as not to invoke the memory—but it’s too late, Kristen’s mind already filled with images of dripping wet combovers and drains gurgling with moss and thick, milky black water—if you could still call it water at all. She shudders as Fig shakes her head gravely. It took weeks to get the smell of chlorine out of their clothes.
Sklonda’s eyebrows knit together, skeptical. “That was just…” She turns to Fig, almost apologetic. “No offense, Fig, honey, but that—that was just another, uh.” She looks down, plucking her napkin from her lap and crumpling it up, throwing it on her plate as she finally admits, exasperated, “It was just a Gilear thing. It wasn’t a basement thing.”
Sklonda and Riz spend another couple minutes going back and forth about it while Fig turns to Kristen, grabbing her broken finger to get her attention (and subsequently apologizing one million times as Kristen nearly slides out of her seat onto the floor, vision going fuzzy at the edges, all of this going unnoticed by Sklonda and Riz) before starting, all business, “So storage room is out. Maybe they’d let us keep it with the management office? Plead our case?”
She sighs. “No, Rodalfo’s still mad at me for the clown thing.”
“Shit.”
“And we like, we can’t—I mean we could just park it inside by the front door or whatever, but it’s already pretty cramped with Gilear’s flip flops.”
“Yeah, no,” Fig admits, defeated. Then, a second later: “Oh! What about the balcony? We don’t use it that much, and it can be like another seat for when we have company over and it’s nice out!”
“Oh my god, yes!”
They take it out to the balcony that night, discuss installing a cupholder onto the handlebars, then go back inside because it’s way too cold. Then, a week later, when they remember it exists, it’s frozen to the railing of the balcony.
Like any reasonable people, Kristen and Fig go, “Aw, that’s too bad,” and decide to revisit the idea when it’s warmer, because who would want to sit out on a frozen balcony anyway? But unfortunately, not every member of their household is reasonable, because not even three days after this frigid discovery are they, on their walk home from school, met with the sight of Gilear hanging off the balcony and yelling feebly for help.
Because of course he is.
“Gilear!” Fig yells, “What happened?”
Kristen tries not to laugh as he looks down, exhales sort of panickedly, and explains, “I thought I might get some exercise on your new ah, stationary bike, but the pedals were frozen so I slipped and sort of just rolled over the railing and now I’m hanging here.”
“It’s a normal bike, Gilear,” Kristen calls.
“Kristen!”
“I’m just letting him know!”
“Ah, well, I don’t think that quite matters now, does it?”
“We’re gonna come get you!” Fig calls, moving to enter the building before Kristen grabs her arm and hums, questioning.
“Don’t you think he could just like—hey Gilear! Can you just let go? We can catch you!”
Fig smacks her on the shoulder, scoffing. “We can’t catch him!” She gestures between the two of them. “We’re not Gorgug and Fabian!”
Turns out, the issue with that plan is an entirely different one: “I can’t let go, my—my hands appear to have frozen to the railing, so.”
Kristen tries not to laugh. She doesn’t succeed. She continues to not succeed the entire time Fig is on the phone with Adaine asking her to come over and cast feather fall while she pours hot water onto Gilear’s hands, and when it happens and she accidentally gets a bunch of the water up his nose, which he sneezes out promptly before having a nose bleed.
When he’s finally down on the ground, Kristen throws him a heal and thanks him very much for the show.
*
Sometimes, they don’t have anything to do:
“We could go throw rocks in the river? You know, like, put a piece of wheat in our mouths and—”
“Forget about throwing rocks, Riz.”
“I’m just saying. I can leave my briefcase at home. It’s an option.”
“Not a good one.”
“Okay, let’s hear your suggestion, then.”
“We could go see if they have any new gossip at the front desk? I think Teith and his girlfriend are fighting again, that could kill like an hour?”
“No, we can’t do that. Rodalfo’s in today and he’s mad at me.”
“Still with the clowns?”
“No, this is a diff—it’s a long story. I might have accidentally left a bunch of turtles in his desk drawer? I was going to go get them after, but I sort of forgot and they ate his paycheque.”
“Okay, so bothering the front desk isn’t an option. Wanna go through the portal so we can use the ping pong table?”
“I don’t have enough heals for all of us to go.”
“Oh! What if we did like a jam session? Do either of you guys play instruments?”
“I played triangle in seventh grade band class?”
“I mean if you put any instrument in my hand I could make it make noise, but it wouldn’t be like, the correct noises. Wait—Kristen, how did you get away with just playing the triangle for an entire year?”
“Well I started on the sax, but then the teacher asked me to switch.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmmm.”
“Yeah. We could go to Basrar’s?”
“I kinda don’t wanna go outside.”
“Well.”
“God, I wish we could just, like, close our eyes and open them in another day.”
“Ugh, yeah. Okay, lemme try—”
*
“So you’re telling me you don’t have amenities?” Fabian scoffs, first thing he says after hearing them regale the tale of the whole fourth floor thing. Which—
“That’s your takeaway from all of this?” Adaine demands, incredulous.
“I think I’m more interested in Gilear and Gortholax apparently being together in that… alternate reality?” Gorgug says.
Fig shakes her head. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
Kristen doesn’t either. She would spend a cool thirty complaining about the lack of amenities with Fabian, though—which maybe is audacious for someone who doesn’t pay rent to live here and isn’t related to anyone that pays rent to live here, but still. There’s a whole other universe of Strongtower residents that have a ping pong table.
“Ew, me neither,” Fabian says when Kristen tunes back in, “I just—I know this isn’t, it isn’t, you know—” He makes some vague gestures, struggling to find the words. “—It isn’t a place I would ever want or have to live, but.” He pauses specifically to roll his eyes at Riz’s judging look, then throws his hands up in the air. “You should have amenities! It’s not right! Especially with the pool being fucking haunted—”
“I don’t wanna talk about that either!” Fig yells at the same time as Kristen shudders and whines, “Nooooo!”
“Even poor people deserve a fucking, I don’t know, a ping pong table!”
That’s what I’m saying, Kristen thinks.
“Gee, thanks Fabian,” Riz deadpans.
“Do you have a ping pong table? Gorgug asks softly, nudging Fabian with his elbow to get his attention.
He laughs, soundless. “Of course I have a ping pong table, Gorgug. I have everything.”
“Do you have an air hockey table?”
“Yes.”
“A pool table?”
“Of course!”
“What about a pool, not table?”
“I have two pools, Fig.”
“Well why the fuck haven’t we gone swimming in them?”
“You guys never asked!”
“You never invited us!”
“I didn’t know if we were like, invite each other over to go swimming friends yet!”
“Okay, okay, what about a movie theatre? My aunt’s rich friend’s building in Bastion City has like, a movie theatre inside it.”
“Yes, the ball, I have a movie theatre.”
“Again, waiting for my invite.”
So on and so forth, until they’ve made plans to go over to the Seacaster manor to try out all of the amenities the other fourth floor has, and many more. Kristen’s not sure if Fabian’s bluffing, can’t read him that well yet—but she can read the begrudged little smile on his face he is trying so, so clearly to suppress.
She catches his eye, and he lets the smile blossom.
*
“I wanna cook something,” Fig announces to the room one Tuesday after school, Kristen and Riz’s heads raising from their spots on the floor and couch, respectively. “Like for dinner.”
Kristen hums, interested. “Like from scratch?”
“Like not soup cubes.”
“We have been doing soup cubes like a lot,” Riz notes, nodding seriously before pausing and adding, “And saying like. Like, a lot.”
“Like, like a lot?”
“Like a lot a lot. Like—”
“We’re cooking!” Fig yells as she throws open the fridge, door rattling on its precarious hinges. She stands in the yellowy light with her hands on her hips then sighs, something Kristen sees more than she hears. “We don’t have ingredients,” she says finally, same can-do tone of voice as she turns back to face them.
“Mm-mmm,” Riz hums, shaking his head as he climbs over the back of the couch and walks over to the kitchen, “You always have ingredients, you’re just not—” His sentence stops short when he arrives at the fridge itself. Kristen strains her neck to see what has him doubting his own mantra, but the counter is in the way. She flops back onto the carpet, sighing deeply. If I can’t see it from here, then it’s not for me to know.
“Oh fuck, wow,” Riz is saying, “when was the last time Gilear went—Gilear! When was the last time you went grocery shopping?” He takes a couple steps out of the kitchen as he shouts, summoning a weak reply from the other room.
“I—” is just about all he gets, Gilear evidently giving up on himself before even starting.
Riz turns back to the girls. “Okay, so dumpster diving?”
Kristen cringes as the thought of touching frozen metal. She doesn’t want to end up like Gilear last week, and she’s probably used up all her successful winter dumpster diving points with the bike, so. “But it’s so coollldddd,” she whines, curling her legs into her chest.
“We don’t need dumpster diving,” Fig says, defiant as she crouches down to stick her whole head into the fridge. “Like you said, Riz, we have ingredients, we’re just not—”
Kristen sits up a beat after Fig’s sentence becomes dead air. “We’re just not what?”
“Well I don’t know, he never finished what he was going to say.”
Riz sighs, sticks his head in the fridge with Fig. The cold is starting to make its way over to Kristen, so she gets up on cracking knees and wraps a blanket around her shoulders as she shuffles over to the kitchen.
“Okay,” Riz says, sighing again, “Fuck it. We can make something with this. We’re just not looking hard enough.”
“Yeah!” Fig cheers, which is how they end up with the contents of Gilear’s fridge laid out on the counter, a sad spread under three pairs of scrutinizing eyes.
“So the lo mein noodles can be a big part of it,” Riz says, almost immediately cut off by Kristen and Fig’s perfectly in sync, “They’re gone bad.”
“Well.” He gestures to a container of vaguely red liquid. “The soup?”
“That’s actually salsa.”
“Soup looks like salsa,” he mutters.
Fig snorts. “Hot tip.”
“Okay, well we still have the eggs,” Kristen starts, frowning as she inspects the carton. “Expired. But not by that much!”
“And the leftover spaghetti should be good, that was only from last week.”
“Wait, are you sure?” Riz asks, not paying attention at all. Kristen watches as he grabs a spoon and dips it into the salsa, shoving it directly into his mouth like a good detective, or maybe just like an insane teenager that needs to know for himself that the soup really is salsa. Kristen watches it happen, watches his face contort in disgust and regret, watches it flatten into something bravely neutral as he meets her eye, too proud to be a bitch about it. “It’s salsa,” he confirms.
“Mmhmm.”
“Guys, I got it!” Fig exclaims, shoving all but a few ingredients perilously close to the edge of the counter. “We got hot sauce,” she starts, pointing at each item as she names them, “ketchup, eggs, and spaghetti. Let’s make hot ketchup egg spaghetti.”
“Hot ketchup egg spaghetti!” Kristen whoops.
Hot ketchup egg spaghetti, as one might predict, goes great until it doesn’t. It’s no one’s fault, at least not completely. If Kristen had to call it, she’d say it was 25% her fault, 30% Fig’s fault, 20% Riz’s fault, 10% Gilear’s fault, and 15% the restaurant they got the spaghetti at least week’s fault—which may all seem very specific, but here’s how it goes:
(Kind of how it goes. Kristen’s not 100% on all the events, because she’s sort of on her crystal the whole time, which is her 25%.)
Kristen’s on her crystal and Fig turns the heat up to the max on both the burner to fry the egg and the burner to heat the spaghetti back up, because I’m a demon, guys, it would be against my cultural heritage to cook on low heat. She’s also smoking a clove, because apparently all the best chefs are chainsmokers. While Fig is taking care of the egg spaghetti portion of hot ketchup egg spaghetti, Riz is taking care of the hot ketchup part, vigorously mixing the two components in an empty tupperware container. He’s sort of pacing as he does it, bopping his head along to the playlist Kristen has put on (something that she realizes, once and then again, doing a double take with a little flare of pride spiking up in her chest like, friendship!!!) so he’s not really paying attention to his surroundings, which is how he misses the little glob of spilled yogurt on the floor.
Kristen happens to be paying attention when it happens, and watches it nearly in slow motion as Riz steps right in the yogurt, somehow catching it at exactly the right angle to start slipping across the kitchen, foot sliding out from under him as the tupperware launches out of his hands, hot ketchup arcing across the room in a brilliant flash of red like a ribbon unfurling, Riz nearly parallel to it as he reaches the peak of his own arc and starts to fall to the yellowing, yogurt-slick linoleum. Fig’s mouth drops open as the hot ketchup reaches the end of its aerial journey and find a home splattered across the ceiling, walls, and floor—the floor which Riz hits with a low thud and a pained Oof, arm crunched up under his side as he immediately begins to roll around in agony. The world snaps back into regular time as the sizzle and pop of the egg spaghetti crackles in Kristen’s ears, all her senses catching up with the rest of the kitchen, in disaster.
(If we’re splitting the atom here, then Kristen’s blame can be broken down into 15% crystal, and 10% inaction, which is exactly what she does—or, rather doesn’t do—next.)
Fig drops her clove (this will become important later) and runs over to Riz, knees landing hard on the floor as she half-laughs half-shouts, “Are you okay?” to which he gives a weak, crooked thumbs up that could maybe even be a thumbs down, actually. Fig turns to Kristen with a look straddling the many lines between amused, concerned, mortified, expectant, and guilty (something she has mastered) and they hold eye contact for a confused, lopsided beat before Kristen realizes, Oh, right, and throws a heal over Riz’s way.
“Thanks,” he moans, tilting his head back to look, upside-down, at the mess of the apartment behind him. “Nooooo!” he yells, dragging his hands down his face before mumbling a, “Shit, sorry,” through them, looking back to Fig with panic all over his partially obscured face. “I can—I’ll fix it, I swear.”
She waves him off, snorting a laugh as she rolls her eyes. “No way dude, you’re good. We can just get Adaine to cast mending next time she’s over.”
His head hits the floor, relieved breath escaping his mouth as he breathes, “Right, magic.”
“Until then we just have a cool pop-up art installation, one of a kind.”
“Very underground,” Kristen chimes in.
“Yeah, and the red? Looks like blood, that’s fucking sick, dude,”
“Very punk.”
Riz smiles, grabbing to Fig’s outstretched hands and sitting up. Kristen smiles as she lets out a defiant Ha! at the last minute and pulls Riz into a surprise hug. She giggles as Riz cycles through confusion; flat, feigned annoyance, and then finally acceptance, overwhelmingly fond.
That thing fills Kristen’s chest once more, bubbling up like every fizzy drink she’s ever pulled out of the vending machine down on the first floor. It’s threatening to spill out, just like that first puny, thin little burp she felt so insurmountably rude for not being able to keep in, mid-October in the lobby. Her parents never kept pop in the house, never let her have it, so she wasn’t used to the feeling of it forcing its way back up and out like one last word— and another thing! it seemed to say, an impulse she’d spent so many years tamping down. She’d been taught to keep the other things inside. Not in company. Not in private, because there never really was a private, not with Sol watching over her. She’d burped that first time and, panicked and delirious for those three long seconds of echoing silence, convinced herself Fig would kick her out for daring to have such poor manners, in her home. Maybe it wasn’t Helio’s roof, but it was someone else’s, and suddenly Kristen was kicking herself for every little comfort she’d found in it up until that point.
But then Fig just laughed and said, “Nice!” before letting out her own burp—more of a belch, really, throat deep and resonant, strong— and giggling again, like it was funny, and fine, and then they got the mail and went upstairs and watched TV together, just like that.
It’s there, and it’s bubbling, and it’s threatening to spill over. Kristen lets it.
This is very well nice, and wholesome, and the crux of everything Kristen has found herself learning in these past few months, but unfortunately it’s now later, and we must move on to contend with the now-relevant importance of the dropped clove.
“What’s that smell?” Kristen wonders aloud, almost immediately answering her own question by shifting her gaze three feet to the left, where a neat column of wispy smoke is rising from the spaghetti pan, fully on fire.
(Fig dropped her clove and ran over to Riz, paying no mind to the fact that she dropped it directly onto the hot element. This would have been fine—incredibly unsanitary, but fine—had she been a little less sloppy of a chef. But she wasn’t, so there were a couple spaghetti noodles—incredibly dry due to their weeklong styrofoam vacation in the barren land of Fridge—hanging over the edge of the pan that, with the help of the burning cigarette, promptly caught fire, burning with a vigor that earned them the title of Most Effort Expended over this entire operation.)
“Oh,” she says, which is what gets Fig and Riz to look up from the floor and echo:
“Oh.”
Then, the spaghetti explodes and sends little balls of fire all over the kitchen, immediately making everything much worse.
Riz looks at Fig. “Okay, so, fire extinguisher?”
She jumps to her feet, holding her hands out like Adaine casting a spell. “No, no, I got this!”
Kristen, who notably has not moved from her spot at the counter, blinks. “You what?”
“I got this, I’m gonna control the fire with my demon powers.”
Riz stands up and starts opening drawers. “Okay, while you do that, I’m gonna find the fire extinguisher.”
Kristen is starting to feel like maybe they need an adult. “Gilear?” she calls tentatively, already regretting it before the word has finished leaving her mouth. She lets out a disappointed sigh as he comes dutifully trundling out into the hall a moment later, cautious look on his face.
“Ah, it’s rather smoky—Kristen, did you make cheese crackers? Is that why you—” He cuts himself off, looking genuinely touched at the idea that Kristen would go out of her way to make him his favourite snack, just the way he likes it (burnt).
She’s not sure how she feels about crushing the hopes of a man who’s had his hopes crushed so many times before, so she decides to just rip off the bandaid. “No, your kitchen’s on fire.”
Gilear’s eyes widen, and he takes one more step out of the hallway to where he can see the kitchen, then yells, “Ahhhh! My kitchen is on fire!”
“Great listening skills,” Riz mutters under his breath, so low Kristen almost doesn’t hear it over the sound of the flames whipping higher and higher. “You got a fire extinguisher?” He looks at Gilear and crosses his arms expectantly.
Gilear lets out another faltering, “I—” and that is all the confirmation Riz needs to walk right out the front door of the apartment.
“Gilear,” Kristen scolds.
“I… I lost it a couple of months ago when—”
“You lost it? How do you lose a fire extinguisher?”
Kristen does not get to hear the answer hanging pathetically off the edge of Gilear’s quivering lip, because then Fig is controlling the fire with her demon powers by starting a little additional blaze with the pile of dandruff on Gilear’s shirt, and now he’s on fire.
“Ahhhhh!” he yells, understandably.
“Shit,” Fig says, also understandably.
Kristen takes stock of the scene in front of her. Gilear is on fire, Fig is maybe meditating, and Riz is MIA. While there hasn't been any audible telltale wood splitting noises, there are char marks spreading over the bottom of the cabinets, now. There’s something on fire in the sink, and a pile of receipts has just exploded on the other side of the counter. Both the egg and the spaghetti are ash, and even the hot ketchup is starting to get a bit of incendiary action. Damn. Why am I more chill in the middle of this than I ever was at my parent’s house? she asks herself, deciding immediately that this is a problem for a later breakdown.
“Hey Gilear,” she starts, absentmindedly patting out the flaming receipts with the heel of her hand, “this can totally be a later thing ‘cause I know you’re sort of dealing with, uh, some other stuff right now.” She takes her ash-coated hand and gestures to the general all of him, a movement he attentively, desperately watches with panicked eyes that have not once stopped seeking (yet never receiving) the approval of teenagers who bully him. “Buuuut when you have the time, do you think you could order us takeout for dinner? I don’t think our cooking plan is gonna pan out—haha, pan—after all.”
He stares at her in disbelief for a moment before raising his eyebrows and half-hissing, “Certaaainlyyyy,” which is as close to anything approaching mean or disciplinary as she’s ever heard him.
“Thanks!” she says brightly, nodding like, Good for you, man.
At some point during this interaction, Riz must have returned because he is now standing in the hallway giving the back of Gilear’s head a disgusted-disappointed-annoyed look and pulling the trigger on a fire extinguisher half his size. Kristen is pretty sure she sees him mouth the word pathetic just before his face is obscured by a puff of bright white foam.
When the rest of the flames are extinguished and no immediate danger remains, Fig peers over into the remains sitting on the stove and shrugs.
“It’s technically a meal.”
*
A couple weeks after the fire, Riz makes a fun discovery. Kristen swiftly connects the dots.
“Hey guys, I think our guidance counsellor slash guy from that time at the Black Pit when Adaine almost turned into a werewolf lives in our building?” he says one day after school, shouting across the balconies—from his, where he’s evidently just looking for Fig and Kristen, to theirs, where they’re eating way too much cheese for two people. “Also, can you not hear me knocking on your door from out there?”
“Nah, we have to close the glass door so bugs don’t get in after Gilear broke the screen one. Want some cheese?”
“Wait, what did you say about Jawbone?” Kristen begins to experience the world collapse in on itself, but Riz has already yelled Hell yeah and gone back into his apartment by the time her mouth catches up with her brain enough to ask the question. By the time he’s out on their balcony snarfing down some cheese, she has put the pieces together.
“Jawbone O’Shaughnessy lives in this building?” She tries her best not to sound desperate for the answer.
“Yeah,” Riz answers, unphased.
“So, like, probably Tracker O’Shaughnessy also lives in this building?”
“Oh, shit,” Riz answers, phased.
“Oh my god,” Fig breathes, “This is totally your chance.”
Riz nods a little too hard. “Did you ever contact her?”
Kristen slumps down into her chair and briefly considers rolling herself over the railing. She would totally survive the fall—it’s only 3 storeys, and she could just heal herself then make a run for it to get out of this conversation. “Guyyssss,” she whines.
“Kristen! You have to contact Tracker!” Fig shouts. Kristen kicks her in the shoulder, weird angle from being all messed up in her chair. Fig only laughs, grabbing Kristen’s leg and hugging it to her chest. “Kristen! Come on!”
“Shhhhhh,” she shushes, looking around before whispering, “What if she’s on her balcony, too?”
“Perfect, that cuts out like half the work,” Riz says, totally serious.
Kristen throws a piece of cheese at him. “I hate you,” she lies, then buries her face in her hands. If Tracker lives here, that means she’s lived here, like, the whole time. The whole five and half months Kristen has been loudly being an idiot in every corner of this building. Where Tracker lives. And probably has heard Kristen having her weekly life crisis and her biweekly gay crisis, in addition to whatever other stupid shit is leaving her mouth at top volume at any given moment. And yeah, she probably doesn’t live on their floor because Kristen definitely would have seen her then, but it’s not like the floors or the ceilings are that thick—Fig and Kristen hear their downstairs neighbours watching The Fantasy Bachelor every Monday night, and they hear their upstairs neighbour practicing the violin every Sunday morning.
“Oh my god,” Kristen realizes, “Everyone we know in this building has come up to us to ask about the fire.” If Cran on the east side of the second floor knows about it, then Tracker definitely does.
“I mean, I’m pretty sure even the people we don’t know have come up to ask about the fire,” Riz says.
“Wait, the fourth floor fire, or the us fire?”
“The us fire—wait, have you been telling people here about the fourth floor?”
Fig shakes her head. “No, have you?”
“No.”
“Kristen, have you?”
Kristen sinks further and slides out of her chair entirely, back on the floor of the balcony with her legs up in Fig’s lap. “Nooooooo,” she moans, the sound of it muffled under her hands.
Fig sticks some cheese through her fingers into Kristen’s mouth with one hand and pats her head with the other. “There there,” she comforts, “Maybe Tracker thought it sounded really cool? Like, ‘woah, they survived an apartment fire! How badass!’”
“You think so?”
The silence is long enough for Kristen to remove her hands from her face. She does so just in time to catch the tail end of Fig and Riz sharing a skeptical look. They turn back to meet her gaze, caught.
“No,” Riz says, grimacing an apology as he leans down to pat Kristen on the head like Fig did.
“But it’s nice to hope, right?”
Kristen sighs, wills the blush out of her cheeks and the thoughts out of her head. “Can I have some more cheese?”
*
It’s not all that unusual for Kristen to wake up in the middle of the night, and it’s not uncommon for her to see Gilear wandering around when she does. The kitchen, adjacent to the living room, seems to be his favourite spot, eyes wide and vacant as he stares into whatever food storing receptacle captures his attention that night. At first, she used to get scared there was an intruder, and even when she inevitably realized it was just Gilear, she would have trouble falling back asleep because of the adrenaline. Now, she barely even startles when he does his nightly rounds, and that’s if she even wakes up at all. Sometimes he’ll notice her rubbing her eyes in the dim, shared twilight, and give her an embarrassed wave, but sometimes he’s so lost in the metaphorical sauce that he doesn’t even turn their way to check if anyone’s watching him. Whatever the vibe, Kristen has learned to roll with it as part of her nightly routine.
What’s weird is when, tonight, he lets out a gasp and falls to his knees in the rectangular, yellow glow of the refrigerator light.
Kristen sits up when she hears the low thunk of him hitting the floor, pulls herself as far back over the back of the couch as she can without falling or dragging the shared blanket up over Fig’s sleeping, blissfully unaware face. This is not part of the routine, and a morbid, gleeful curiosity takes over her as she sheds the blanket and carefully crawls over the couch and crouches on the floor, a much better vantage point for whatever unprecedentedly sad thing is about to happen.
Oh, she thinks when she finally gets a look at what his trembling hand is reaching for, right.
(After school, they went grocery shopping. Fig bought some yogurt drinks for Gilear, then they forgot to tell him about it.)
Kristen watches him pluck one of the little plastic bottles from the cardboard container and hold it up as if it were a Sunday service chalice. Take this, all of you, and drink from it, Kristen auto-recites in her head, I guess Helio died so Gilear could drink yogurt at two in the morning. He peels back the foil from the lid and brings it up to his lips carefully—almost hesitantly—and takes a tiny sip before what little Kristen can see of his eyes widen like saucers, and then he throws his head back to take the rest of it like a shot.
Kristen sort of just nods quietly to herself, like, Yeah, this tracks. She relaxes from her crouch and settles onto the floor, hugging her knees as Gilear goes for a second yogurt drink, completely lost in the no longer metaphorical sauce to notice her watching him. It goes on for a notable amount of minutes, until he’s made it through all six bottles from the pack, pale pink rivulets dripping from either side of his mouth down to his chin and finally onto his shirt, at home in the mosaic of other miscellaneous stains.
When he’s done he blinks hard, snapping himself out of his dairy-induced trance and calmly collecting the bottles back into the cardboard sleeve and tucking it all into the garbage beneath the sink before finally shutting the fridge and roaming back to bed.
Kristen shivers in the escaped chill of the fridge. Sure, I guess.
*
Sundays are tough.
Kristen is used to being up early, and her friends are used to sleeping in until noon, which only makes her skin more itchy, something inside her writhing against the inside of it, desperate to break out. What that is, she doesn’t know, but taking it for a walk helps, at least a little bit.
The church is about as far across Elmville as you can get from Ballaster. When she first moved in with Fig and Gilear, Kristen was almost scared to walk the streets around them, winding and unfamiliar and unimaginably large, like everything else in her life then, for better or for worse. It was too much, too different, which was confusing because different was what she was looking for, or at least that’s what she thought she was looking for. She’s not any closer to knowing, or finding it, but the familiar unfamiliarity of Ballaster is now a comfort more than anything else, she thinks. The flickering neon sign of Strongtower watches over her from several streets over, and she can breathe a little easier knowing it’s there. That her friends are there.
She doesn’t have to worry about running into anyone on their way to church, is the main thing.
She leaves her jacket at home. The chill of the morning air on her arms, swimming out from under one of Gorgug’s old t-shirts, is nice. Grounding, in a sharp sort of way that just nearly borders on miserable enough to be enjoyable in a way that is distracting. She likes the way her mind kind of just buzzes idly around the chill and the birdsong, a different kind of distraction than hanging out with the bad kids or working on the missing girls case. It’s quiet, which isn’t something she’s used to, either.
It’s nice. Different. New different.
Lately, she’s been following the path adjacent to the train tracks up to Clearbrook. Sometimes, Adaine meets her there, on the other side.
“Hey,” Adaine says. Her arms are drawn tight to her body, shoulders pitched up toward her ears, knees locked tight. A couple months ago, Kristen might have asked her what was wrong. A couple weeks ago, she might have asked if it was bad.
Now, she justs says, “Hey,” back and shuffles through the dew of the wild grass, moisture brushing onto her ankles and picking up the fine dirt beside the tracks as she lies down, linking arms with Adaine and sighing quietly.
(They started lying down on the tracks last month because Kristen was feeling rebellious, and because Adaine looked up the train schedule and confirmed they wouldn’t get run over. It was a strange sort of placeholder, a strange sort of sensation to be aware of—the knowledge that there was danger simply by virtue of choosing to exist where she was, as she was. She has not yet worked up the courage to examine why her Sunday morning activities past and present both make her feel this way.)
Each time, she is struck with the way the tactility of it thrusts her backwards. The dirt clinging to the soft hair on the back of her calves; the soft warmth of skin on skin, arms tangled up for no reason other than because it is simply the thing to do; the morning birdsong petering out like time running to a stop, inevitable fleeting calm before the day rattles forward, taking them along every which way with it. If she closes her eyes she can almost pretend the loudspeaker might crackle to life in a couple seconds, might call her to the camp director’s office to pick up a sticker-studded piece of intracamp mail, or maybe even a phone call from her parents.
She is struck with it and unphased at the same time. How could it not feel like camp? Maybe it’s messy to have two things at the same time, two lines running parallel, one good and one bad, both living inside her contradictory chest waiting to find out which one’s right—but that’s how it is. There’s the dread and the nostalgia and the church and the cabins and the train tracks, all intertwined. It’s the same thing and it’s a million things, a tangled ball of thread pulled taut by eight year old hands, trying to make a friendship bracelet out of nothing but knots. By fifteen year old hands, trying to make the best out of nothing but the worst. She’s at the centre of it, tied up into the patterns—safe and suffocating at the same time. Holding her secure, holding her back. She doesn’t understand it—isn’t sure if she’s ever going to understand it, but she doesn’t have to understand it for it to be true.
Adaine, lying beside her, doesn’t look unlike the girl Kristen now knows was her first crush. Same hair, same shy smile, same sad eyes. Same fire burning low and dim behind them. Kristen remembers her crying at the end of camp and thinking it was because she was just gonna miss Kristen and their friends that much, remembers her shoving a blue and purple bracelet into her hands on the last day—last day she saw her, too—before pulling her into a crushing hug.
Sundays are tough, but Kristen throws up a prayer to Helio for the eight year old girls of the world, anyway. Strongtower skirts the bottom of the clouds, stands steady in the distance.
Adaine’s voice is strained when she speaks, finally. “Do you ever miss them?” she half-whispers, arm tightening slightly around Kristen’s. Kristen turns to look at her and and sees something searching, question more a hypothetical she needed to put out into the world than something she needed to ask Kristen, waiting for an answer that doesn’t exist, at least not yet.
“Sometimes,” she tries, not sure if that’s what she’s looking for, or if it’s even true. She wants to find the words that will give Adaine what it is she needs, if not out of love then out of selfishness—to tamp down the baggage that comes with actually asking herself that question, steadfast avoidance kicking in like second nature. When was the last time her mom texted her? She wills her brain not to look for the answer. “I don’t know.”
“That’s okay.”
“I’m sorry—”
“No, no, it’s—I’m sorry. I don’t know what—I don’t know.”
“That’s okay.”
Adaine sighs, long and thin and uneven. Kristen watches a tear leak out the side of her eye and crawl down to her hairline. When it gets there, Adaine speaks again. “I just hate that I still want them to want me,” she admits, turning to face Kristen again, “I don’t—I don’t even know if they would notice if I, if I left. If I—” Her breath catches in her throat as she shivers, gust of wind blowing Kristen’s hair into her face. She doesn’t move to push it back.
“If I came to live with you guys,” Adaine finishes, a little while later.
Kristen feels like crying, not for the first time today. “You know Sklonda would take you in,” she says, “In an instant.”
“I know.” A sniffle. A far off screech—car skidding around that corner by the train station, the stop sign no one bothers to heed. Another sniffle. “She tells me like once a week,” Adaine laughs, bumping their knees together.
Kristen bumps back. If anything ever happens and you can’t stay with Fig, you’re always welcome here, Sklonda said to her two nights ago over dishes, I mean it. Seriously, Kristen. “Doesn’t really ever get old, huh?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
*
“Do we have to make up a cheer if they lose, too? Like a contingency routine?” Adaine has her hands on her hips in the parking lot, weight shifted to one leg. “Or would that just be rude, like, ‘Boo, you lost, now we’re all going to shout very loudly about it all at once’?”
Fig levels her with a glare, serious as Kristen has ever seen her. “The losing cheer is only for the other team,” she says.
Since they killed coach Daybreak, Kristen’s family friend, which she feels totally normal and well-adjusted about, just so you know—the bloodrush team just has not had their shit together. And not having their shit together means, more often than not, losing, which apparently Fabian doesn’t handle well. Which is why the four of them are standing on the cracked asphalt outside the Strongtower Luxury Apartments, trying to learn a cheer routine. A winning cheer routine.
(I feel kinda bad for them, Kristen had said in the bleachers after their fourth straight loss, I wish there was something we could do to cheer them up.
Cheer? I haven’t heard that name in years, Fig replied, flicking her cigarette to the ground and doing her best to look weathered by time as she crossed her arms and said, I got out of the game—by the skin of my teeth, I might add—but I’m willing to come out of retirement for one last job.
Then Riz said, What the fuck are you talking about? and Fig just sighed, shoving her half-eaten popcorn into his hands.
Fuel up, kid. You’ll need it.)
“Now,” Fig says, clapping her hands together, “the key to a winning cheer routine isn’t big tricks, or perfect uniforms, or clever rhyming—we are going to have all of that, but none of that is going to make us win. Do any of you know what is going to make us win?”
Kristen: “Being really loud?”
Riz: “Distracting the other team?”
Adaine: “If our team actually plays good for once?”
Fig sighs. “Guys. It’s synchronization.” There’s a dissatisfied grumble among them and Fig sighs again. “If we can’t be a united team when we’re cheering, then how can the boys be when they’re playing?”
“I mean,” Riz starts, “They’re—they’re not. That’s why our team sucks so bad.”
“Wait a minute, are we gonna have to perform this in front of like, other people?” Adaine asks.
“What is the point if we don’t perform it?” Fig asks, at a loss.
Adaine shrugs, uneasy. “Team building exercise? Friendship?”
“I like friendship,” Riz adds, “We are all friends.”
“Hell yeah we are,” Kristen says, giving him a thumbs up. Then, to Adaine: “Maybe we could perform it just for Fabian and Gorgug, like before the game?”
“I almost think that would be worse?”
“Do we not have an actual cheerleading team at our school?”
Fig glares again, scowl curling onto her lips. “That team doesn’t know a basket toss from a back handspring without me,” she mutters, staring off broodingly into the distance for a moment before shaking her head and saying, “But that’s—that’s not the point. You guys are getting too caught up in the details. Let’s just—let’s just try.”
She presses the screen of her crystal and an upbeat, decidedly un-Fig-like bubblegum pop beat comes blaring from her speaker on the ground. “Just follow what I do,” she says, turning around and starting a rudimentary sequence of movements in what looks to be, at least to Kristen, way too slow for the song that’s playing. She counts out the beats as she moves, looking over her shoulder to make sure the rest of them are following her steps.
“One two, three four, five six, seven eight!” she calls, stepping forward then back twice then switching to her other foot. The three of them mimic her easily, sound of their feet scuffing on the dusty asphalt ringing out in perfect synchronization as they rinse and repeat through the second chorus of the song.
This is easy, Kristen thinks, which is when Fig adds in arms, which is not easy. Fuck, Kristen thinks, flip flop catching under her foot not quite immediately but whatever closest measurement of time is after that—she stumbles, flailing for a minute before her feet slip out from under her, launching her straight to her ass.
Neither Fig nor Riz turn to the oof Kristen lets out—Fig too close to the speaker to hear it and back turned to any visual cues of failure (which, Kristen presumes from her general energy today, is not an option) and Riz is carrying out the movements with the militant, wooden precision of someone who is trying way, way too hard at dancing. The little look of concentration pinched between his eyebrows is almost amusing enough for Kristen to ignore the pain of falling to the ground—but as Fig informed them, almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, so.
Adaine has both the grace to notice Kristen on the ground and the desire to find any excuse to stop doing this routine, so she crouches down and asks, “You alright?” as Kristen’s sitting up and shaking the dust out of her ponytail.
She nods, defeated. “I think I’m just gonna do one part at a time,” she decides, half-hearted attempt at the arm motions Fig is still going at, down-clap-up-down. Kristen has to squint away the sun behind them to see it, but Adaine gives a little laugh and smooths her skirt out before sitting next to Kristen, mimicking her motions with just as much effort, which is not much at all.
“Maybe this can be the contingency routine,” Adaine mutters, earning a giggle out of the two of them just as Fig claps her hands together and spins around.
“How was tha—guys, what?” She frowns down and Kristen and Adaine, eyebrows drawn together in confusion. “Why?”
“I did the whole thing,” Riz assures, going through the moves one more time just to prove it. Fig gives him a weary smile.
“We’re dancing,” Kristen offers, letting her arms go limp so the moves look more like flailing but in a cool, modern dance sort of way.
(At least that’s what she tells herself.)
Adaine mimics her again and then Riz joins in, nodding enthusiastically as he starts to shake his shoulders with it, a half-beat off from the music still playing but giving it his all, anyway. It’s so endearing that even Fig cracks a smile, self-assigned way too intense cheerleading coach duties shirked, if just for this moment.
“We’re dancing!” Kristen repeats with conviction, whooping as Riz gives a Yeah! and commits even harder to whatever he’s doing with his arms. Kristen stands, pulling Adaine up with her and twirling her in a circle before reaching for Fig with grabby hands and a smile. The pop song Fig picked out is on a loop so there is not a breath for them to go, Oh, haha, that was fun but it’s time to stop now—there is in fact no time to stop now, Fig finally relenting and starting to bounce around with Kristen, giggling as they throw themselves around the pavement, the four of them stupid and joyful and perfect.
There’s no one around to distract. It’s not very loud save for the shuffling of their feet over the asphalt. It isn’t particularly good, technically speaking, and it certainly isn’t in synch, either—but they’re dancing. There’s music, and the blaring sun, and love and intention and choice that is deliberate and unquestioning and continued, over and over and over again, and there is dancing.
It feels more like a win than anything else Kristen’s ever known.