Chapter Text
Peridot had forgotten something. This something would prove absolutely critical to the fate of the rest of her life. She didn’t quite realize it at the time. Oh, stars, at the time, it really pissed her off. In fact, this was the worst part of her day. It would soon pale in comparison to the next few months of her life.
Deafening music played from earbuds hidden by fluffy bleached-blonde hair piled upon the head of one Peridot Santos. Her head was bobbing off-beat to music while she studied on her laptop. It was late at night at the university library, and Peridot was cramming for a big test in two days. She glanced at the time. It was almost midnight. Oh stars, it was late at night! Her first day was tomorrow, and the library closed in ten minutes!
Peridot froze with her arms out, eyes quickly glancing at all of her items spread across the table before her. After calculating with precision each item from behind her crooked and dirty glasses, she sprang into action. She closed the laptop and stuffed it in her bag, picking up the dozen pencils scattered about one by one, packing them into her pencil pouch.
Peridot grabbed her notebooks and put them away, then she rubberbanded and bagged her flashcards. She grabbed her remaining accessories and stuffed them into her backpack, flinging it over her shoulder, standing quickly as she did so. Music blasting, she turned to double-check the table for anything she might have missed in her rush. And then she saw the item she had forgotten.
She had forgotten the item since she set it down upon arrival to the library. After she made it to the table that evening, she set this particular item down and got her laptop out, blocking it from her view all night. For several hours this item sat, hidden from Peridot’s laser-focused vision behind her laptop screen. And now it lay bare upon the desk before its owner.
Peridot’s long-since iced matcha. She stared blankly at it. The ice had long since disappeared from the beverage, watering it down. Not that that mattered anymore. What does the taste of a beverage matter when it is spilled upon a desk?
Oh. My. Stars.
Her backpack had completely taken it out as she shouldered the bag. This. Stupid. Tea. Peridot spun in circles, her momentum carried by the heavy backpack upon her shoulders. Stomping, stamping, thrashing, her fury unbeknownst to any entity nearby save for the moths congregated among the lights. Oh, and the staff member turning off the lights to the back sections, who was curiously cocking an eyebrow from behind a shelf before continuing on their way.
Now, only the posters encouraging avid reading watched as Peridot jumped up and down before finally running out of steam. Tears had begun to form in the corners of the student’s eyes behind her glasses when she heard footsteps approach from behind.
The library staff member handed her a roll of paper towels.
Lapis Lazuli’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She braced herself against the dorm room desk, leaning against it and blearily checking the message from her manager at Steve’s Grocery, Brandon. He was asking if she can cover Ronaldo’s seven-to-four shift tomorrow morning. Lapis glanced at the time.
Eleven forty-nine PM.
She planned it in her head. She would walk home, making it there by twelve-thirty. After packing a quick lunch and brushing her teeth, she could be asleep by one. Getting up at six to shower and walk to work, she would get a solid five hours of sleep. She swiped away the notification, buckling over to laugh at the notion of following that ridiculous plan. Brushing her teeth? Showering? Covering a shift?
Fuck, no. Sorry, I was asleep.
Lapis’ eyes refocused on the task at hand after pocketing her phone. She grabbed the shot of vodka from the desk and turned around to the gaping eyes. She triumphantly held the glass up, stoking the crowd who had returned its attention to the stumbling drunk. “Last one! Down… the… hatch!” Lapis goaded herself into swallowing the burning drink.
She gagged, but managed to hide that from the spectators. She was surrounded by two, no, three other twenty-somethings. Lapis wasn’t close with any members of her audience in particular, but they were regular guests in her rotation of party-goers with whom she drank when she could afford to. Afford to, in that, she could either spend monetary currency to purchase the alcohol, or she could spend the social currency she had accrued to bum the drinks from her acquaintances. Amethyst cheered for Lapis as she pounded the desk in effort.
“Go Lap!” she encouraged from her perch on the edge of the bed. Buck, leaning against the nightstand, lightly pumped his fist with a small ‘woo!’ He passed a blunt to Lapis, whose eyes were already watering. She wasn’t one to pass up a hit of anything, though.
She took a big hit and immediately regretted it, coughing it right back up. The hit curled upwards, toward the ceiling. She passed the blunt clockwise to Garnet, who took it and began cooly puffing on it, showing no hint of effort. Lapis wiped a tear from her eye as she finished coughing. “And… done!” she proudly proclaimed to her audience: “three shots down, no gagging!”
Amethyst snickered. “You should get better at hiding them. Ow!” Buck elbowed her.
“She was doing pretty good until the last one. Give her more credit.”
“Psh, I saw her gag on the first one!” Amethyst rebutted and pushed Buck into the desk. He rebutted by shoving her onto her back on the bed, then opened another cider and took a sip.
Lapis swallowed her coughing and teased Amethyst back. “Psh, I didn’t even gag until the second shot, liar.” The world swayed around her. She took a hit of her vape. It had been almost an hour since her last, the nicotine flowing into her brain again was a relief akin to sitting after a marathon. She wanted a cigarette anyway.
“Officially proclaimed by the high council,” Amethyst suddenly exclaimed, “I: am bored.”
“You’re always bored,” Buck pointed out.
“That’s true,” Amethyst conceded, “but I want to do something outside of rotting away in this room,” her voice trailed. “We should go to one place on Ocean.”
“At this hour, on this day, Ocean Avenue is not popping,” Garnet stated matter-of-factly. “In fact, I have a test to cram for tomorrow. She took a couple more big hits of the blunt, handed it to Amethyst, and coolly walked to the door. On her way out, without looking at her audience, she said “and do not break anything.”
Amethyst grinned. “Let’s go break something!”
Buck looked incredulously. Garnet’s cramming had reminded him of his own early morning class tomorrow. “I don’t know. Getting caught vandalizing in my senior year? That’d be fucked.”
Lapis loved enabling. And she didn’t have to worry about getting expelled. Dropping out of college in your freshman year has its perks. “I would love to go break shit with you Amethyst.”
Amethyst high fived Lapis. “Lapis saves the night! Buck, love you man, but man, at least kill the mood on your way out, like Garnet.”
Buck laughed. “You’re in my dorm. She kindly reminded me that if I go to sleep now, I can get an entire seven hours of sleep. I haven’t seen that much sleep in two months. I’m not letting you two ruin that for me.”
“Hint taken,” Amethyst raised her hands in surrender. “I’ll just be having one more,” her voice trailed as she poured one last shot from Buck’s nearly empty bottle.
“My dad’s going to either think I have a problem or that I’m selling this stuff,” Buck lamented as Amethyst swallowed the smooth, expensive vodka his dad got him last week.
Amethyst released a tremendous burp, which caused Lapis to laugh. “Your dad would be proud of both of those options, Buck,” Amethyst told him as she walked towards the door. “Come on, Lap! Don’t want to bother the schoolboy any more than we are,” she called, waving her hand towards the door. Lapis wobbled as she followed Amethyst, calling out a farewell to their host of the evening.
Moths fluttered around street lamps and crickets played their song to the night’s audience of meandering students. A few tastefully planted trees swayed in the breeze, rustling their leaves. Clouds drifted in a great migration across the sky, watching the people below with great interest. Thin clouds muffled the already dim glow of stars in the sky, light pollution drowning out all but the fiercest of stars in the night sky. Red and green lights blinked back at the ground from planes flying thousands of feet above, joining the clouds in their great journey.
Only street lamps, moonlight, and a couple phone flashlights illuminated the campus around Peridot as she bustled along. There were a few other stragglers making their way in the night, some returning from studying like Peridot, others drunk and stumbling. An electric scooter whizzed past the pedestrian, its blue headlight steadily illuminating the path ahead in its cool, stark light. The scooter whirred along the sidewalk into the night, thumping with each crack, disappearing around a corner.
The act of kindness in the giving of paper towels quelled no part of the fury that flamed within the student. She was still burning with rage as she walked to the bus station. Her thumbs tapped unforgivingly at her phone’s screen as she described the “matcha incident” in detail that referred to the beverage in a very unflattering light onto her beverage in her notes app, stopping every few words to skip a song.
Nothing sounded right tonight. Nothing was going right tonight. Everything was making Peridot mad. The crickets chirping was upsetting her. Her dangly alien earrings were overstimulating. The texture of her jeans was rubbing her legs the wrong way. The comfortable temperature and cool breeze pissed her off. The hair bouncing as she walked scratched her brain backwards.
She inhaled, counted to four, and then exhaled. After breathing deeply a few more times, she had calmed down. It was easy to get lost in anger at the little things. They were still making her just as mad, but if she stayed focused, she could stay grounded. As grounded as she was, though, the crumpled beer can on the sidewalk wasn’t safe from her wrath. She pelted the clattering thing into the distance. With a satisfied hmph, she took a moment to skip a few more songs.
The matcha incident had cost her ten crucial minutes she could have spent sleeping in preparation for her test, but no, instead, she had to spend that time cleaning an entirely unnecessary mess! Peridot concluded that fate was most cruel to the prepared. Her fingers swiped at the screen to see when the next bus on her apartment’s route approached the station. Wait, what?
Several of the buses were under maintenance. Most of the routes closed early. Several stopped running early in the evening. Peridot’s route was closing soon. There was one more bus running, and it had one more loop left before it switched to a more critical route for the rest of the night. And the bus was approaching the station! No!
The bus station was right around the corner. If she ran, she could make it. Peridot broke into a clumsy sprint, wobbling beneath the heaving weight of her massive backpack. She carried a classroom of resources in the bag; she wanted to be prepared for anything necessary for her studies. She definitely wasn’t prepared for this sprint, though.
She checked her phone through her labored breathing as she ran. She was so close. She was going to make it. Just this last corner…
Wham!
As she turned the corner, she collided with someone else, completely disarming her of the ability to breathe as all air exited her nonfunctioning lungs. The world was a mess of bright, disorienting lights. Her glasses and music were gone. Wireless earbuds were so much more convenient until impact with someone else.
Peridot’s hands scoured the ground, trying to see which of the four earbuds, two phones, and two pairs of glasses were real. She looked up and saw the other person she collided with. They were a blurry mess of blue, sitting up messily in the street lamp light. Another person ran up and grabbed the hand of this blue mass. Her ears were ringing from the impact, but she could make out the person saying “Come on Lap, let’s go!”
She finally found her now crooked glasses and put them on, blinking the blurriness away. The two were gone, and she couldn’t see what direction they went. She stood up quickly and looked around, but they were long gone. She became conscious of an alarm ringing from the direction of the bus station, and the direction the pair were running from.
Peridot looked back at the ground. She gathered the two earbuds, one phone—wait. There were two phones. Her blurry, glassesless vision hadn’t lied to her. She picked up her phone in its usual thick black case with green-and-gray spaceships on it, and the foreign phone with a thin blue case on it. It had a wallet attached to the back of the case, with the edge of an ID and one other card visible. As she examined the phone, a campus police car pulled up to the bus station. She was definitely missing her bus. Anger crept back up her throat. Okay, ‘Lap’. You’re busted! She marched towards the car with flashing lights.
The clouds floated on and gazed as Lapis and Amethyst settled with their backs leaned against the bus tire. Lapis took her phone from her front pocket, it was jabbing into her stomach. Stupid fucking shallow pockets. She skipped a song and set the screen on the pavement by her. “Oh shit, Amethyst.”
Her counterpart was lost in her sense of smell. Amethyst was holding one last pre-roll beneath her nostrils. After a heavy, content exhale, she offered a smell to Lapis. “This is the last one of the night. I thought we should enjoy it before getting to work. To help us get in a productive… headspace!”
“Yeah, this really makes me feel like getting a lot done,” Lapis sarcastically replied as she took a deep breath, inhaling the potent scent. Amethyst lit the thing and inhaled deeply.
“That’s… the stuff,” Amethyst sighed, relieved. She passed it to Lapis, who inhaled a little lighter to prevent another fit of coughs. Amethyst noticed and laughed. “Lungs finally getting to you, Lap?”
Lapis took another puff and handed it back, barely suppressing a cough. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The two giggled.
The pre-roll was passed back and forth as smoke and light, quiet conversation filled the air. Lapis and Amethyst passed stories about old jobs, memorable coworkers, and school anecdotes as they passed hits.
They each had their own earbuds in, they each had their own taste in music that Lapis could appreciate. She could at least appreciate not being forced to listen to Amethyst’s loud, bumping music more than she already was. She could, of course, hear most of her songs from where she was sitting, despite Amethyst’s using earbuds. Lapis very much preferred her quieter, indie tastes. It wasn’t very often she went without listening to music, she worked to it, slept to it, and partied to it.
The blaze finally began to approach the filter of the joint, and Amethyst smudged it out on the asphalt, tossing the burnt filter away. She stood up and wiped her hands of the pebbles she accrued in her standing up, offering a hand to Lapis. Lapis didn’t notice and stood up quickly.
“Time to get to work?” Amethyst lazily asked through the haze of her high.
Lapis giggled and said “let’s get to it,” dragging her words out as she said them. “Do you have any spray paint?”
Amethyst giggled and began digging through her bag. “Do you think I’d drag you out here just to draw on these puppies with a Sharpie?” She triumphantly held a can of spray paint above her head after removing it from the bag. “I’ve got two colors.” She held out both her hands. “I’m guessing you want red?”
The two options before Lapis were red and blue. She laughed and took the blue can. “You know me so well,” she teased back. “Well, are we doing a collaborative piece or solo projects?”
“I didn’t haul you out here so I could doodle by myself, doofus. So what beautiful mural are we putting up this evening, Blue?”
“Well, I don’t think we can depict burning down the school in red and blue, so I’m open to suggestions.”
Amethyst laughed. “I like the way you think, but you’re right. Kind of awkward colors I grabbed, huh? I guess we could go the modern art angle?”
Lapis doubled over laughing. Amethyst was holding onto Lapis’ shoulder to stay steady, the two were laughing so hard, stoned out of their minds.
“HEY!”
Lapis and Amethyst shot upright, heads nearly colliding in the commotion. They were illuminated in light shining from a couple buses down in the row. A silhouette was standing behind the light, pointing it at them.
“You can’t be here! Stop right now and come here!” the voice called.
Lapis and Amethyst locked eyes and both formulated the same plan simultaneously. Amethyst slung her bag over her shoulder while Lapis jammed her phone into her stupid fucking shallow pocket. The two sprinted away from the security guard as fast as they could, feet pounding on the pavement. They could hear the guard behind them, diligently pursuing the intruders.
The pair wound around buses and whipped around corners, trying to lose the guard. It seemed like they could hear his footsteps getting further away. Finally, they spotted the way out of the parking lot. The two crossed the threshold and broke across the street, home free. For sure. Just one more corner and they were gone, out of this guy’s line of sight.
Lapis took the corner first, and at full speed, politely became acquainted with Peridot.
Her head was reeling and her ears were ringing. She was on the ground. She was running? She wasn’t running. She was supposed to be running. Fuck. What happened?
“Come on Lap, let’s go!” a voice cried out. She was dragged to her feet and she stumbled forward. The world swayed under her and spun in front of her. She was being pulled along by her arm, but she began running independently and kept pace with… Amethyst! She was running with Amethyst! They were running from… shit. Her head whipped around.
She saw a huge mass of blonde hair looking around in the opposite direction from where they were running. The person she was looking at then began looking at the ground and fiddling with something. Lapis returned her focus to not crashing and burning.
Who exactly was that person back there she was now sharing a concussion with?