Dishpig and Snowball, Matchstick and Bookmonger Chap. 6 pt. 1 (original) (raw)
Title: Dishpig and Snowball, Matchstick and Bookmonger
Author: grayglube
Pairing/Character: Freeze Girl/Warren
Rating: M
Summary: Life turns out to be more than busing tables and thesis statements, more than dysfunctional behavior and cigarettes on school property, more than superheroes and villains. It's life like microwaved leftovers; a hot skin, a cold center, and a soggy aftertaste.
Spoilers/Warnings: None. Post-Movie by two years.
September 11th (Friday)
7:33pm
“Nice room.” Layla perked.
The blonde looked around and took in the books bristling with the spines of bookmarks, the haphazard stack of folded laundry that she was too lazy to have put away for company, and the assortment of shoes thrown wildly about and couldn’t really see much ‘nice’ behind the organized mess.
“Thanks.” She answered shaking off her own opinion like a clod of dust.
“Looks different from the last time I was here and what’s with the couch?” The last girl coming into the room asked after depositing herself with sprawling ease across the blonde’s bed.
It was a fair question and the blonde smiled and looked sideways at the lounger. It really was too big for the too small room, but she liked it, and she needed something to lay on when she watched television.
“I got it at a yard sale; it didn’t fit so I just rearranged the whole room.” She lay down on it, her chest and stomach flat against it, her lungs compressed and tight and warm, and her legs thrown over the top. She let her fingers take a walk across the ragged carpeting.
Across the room Magenta smiled roughly, her head tilted sideways against the bed an arm and a leg draped half off the mattress.
“Well that’s the way to do it, bay-bay.” Her intonation was butch and made Layla chortle and try to smuggle the small laugh behind tight lips.
The blonde closed her eyes and hummed in acquiescence to the other girl’s answer.
Layla took up a post in the heavy chair at the desk.
It was quiet for awhile as all three tried to shake off the remnants of conversations and worries and assignments that the school-day had thrown at them for six consecutive hours with rapid paced teenaged drama and frustration.
“So what are we going to do first? I told Zack the naked pillow fight would start at eight so maybe we should paint out toenails and oil ourselves up so we look good on camera,” came from the bed.
“Could you be any more of a man, Magenta? You said you had a project to do, right Lo?” Layla asked all tired cheer and half-interest.
Smirking into the fabric of the lounger the blonde mumbled out some reply that made the girl curled in her chair flick her hair and send the girl on the bed a look of distaste.
“I’m frozen in shock and awe, that she never mentioned it.”
The occupant of the bed looked up and then shifted her gaze from one girl to the next, they didn’t return her stare and finally she huffed and sat up, boots wrinkling the bedcovers severely.
“What?” She asked.
“I just told her that you have the same project to do, but I’m guessing an overachiever like you already did it, plus the rest of your overdue homework,” the figure on the lounger turned her cheek to look at the girl with dirty boots on her bed.
“You’re an ass. I’ve got like two more weeks, that sucker’s going to stay undone until the night before it’s due, so suck it. And she’s only Lo during the school week, Layla. On the weekends she’s Lola.” She flopped back down with flourish and stared up at the ceiling.
The blonde groaned and sagged weakly against the cushions.
“Wait. What? Lola? On the weekends? _Oh-kay_…” The chair squeaked as she shifted position, her legs were tingling.
Lo rolled over and let her socked foot tattoo a rhythm into the carpet. “It’s from Lolita, Miss ‘I’m not allowed to read books my mom hasn’t already read and approved of because I’m an impressionable youth.’”
Magenta snorted and looked sideways to observe the redhead’s reaction.
She did not disappoint. Raising a finger and hefting her chin to a loftier and ‘holier than thou’ position she started in at the blonde.
“First of all,” she paused for effect.
“She stopped doing that when I was fourteen…,” another pause for self-indulgence. She opened her eyes and glared at both girls waiting on her conclusion.
“And secondly I have no interest in reading pornographic works that involve the sexual abuse of children.” She then lowered her chin but kept the glare and crossed her arms, awaiting the rebuttal.
Magenta and Lo exchanged amused glances, Magenta nodded assent to the other girl, offering her the opportunity to cut the redhead down by an inch or two in the name of once-banned-greatest-publications of literature-ever to be known by man.
“First of all…,” Lo mocked.
After a moment of silence she continued on beat.
“Lolita has been praised as one of the most socially important and literature changing works ever written.”
She stopped and looked to Magenta, she nodded and the other girl went on, happy to be appreciated.
“And secondly, it is not by any means fit to be described under the term ‘pornographic’ mainly for the fact that it does not and never has fit the definition of the word pornographic, and there is in fact one scene of blatantly carnal activity in the whole book and it doesn’t even involve the sexual penetration of a minor. The only real act of fornication that takes place in the book is at most a paragraph long, and is delicately handled and involves no vulgarity. It is a story of misdirected love due to severe ardor for a childhood image of what love truly is, but, alas, I digress.”
Layla made a sound in her throat and rolled her eyes.
“Well thank you ‘Miss Book Critic.’”
“Oh, shut up. You got learned, Lay. And anyway, you missed the point.”
“Well what is your point Magenta?” Layla had leaned forward in irritation and viciousness.
Magenta raised herself up on her elbows and returned the look with a small smile.
“My point is on the weekends Lo is Lola. It’s a joke. In the book there’s a part where the guy starts saying how the girl, Dolores, is Dolly at school and Lo in the morning with one sock on and Lola in slacks and every other version of her name. Except we don’t call Lo ‘Dolly’ because is debasing because she’s not a fucking five. Get it, girl?” She smiled at the blonde, she smiled back and across the room Layla relaxed and laughed.
“What?” Lo looked over, her foot stopped its motions.
“You’re not wearing slacks, though.”
Silence seeped into the space between all of them.
A moment ticked by followed by another.
Magenta laughed.
Layla laughed.
Lo laughed.
And then the two smokers started to hack and left the other girl ready to pee all over the chair she was sitting in.
“That’s not the point either!” Magenta yelled between coughs.
Layla settled down and sat on one of her legs and bit at her lip trying to hold in giggles as the blonde choked to death.
“What it means is we call her ‘Lola’ because on the weekends is the only time she ever wears any of her cute stuff, and slacks were the most fashion forward thing for women to wear at the time the book was published. Not that you would know because all you read is ‘Winnie the Pooh.’”
Chocking loudly Lo made a face and silenced the room from everything but her throaty hacking. When her lungs stopped cramping and only the burn was left she looked at both worried faces and gave a small unwarranted sneeze and sniffle.
“Bless you!” The unison gave way to another fit of light girlish giggles.
“Please don’t call me Lola.”
“Why not?” Magenta’s cried out in childlike aggression.
“Because it’s fecking dumb,” was all the blonde said in reply.
“Hey! I just thought of something.” The redhead perked up, drawing her knees up to her chest in her excitement.
“What?” Magenta groaned expecting the worst.
The blonde lay back down on her stomach and fanned her fingers across the carpet.
“You know the girl in Atonement?”
Magenta hummed and Lo rolled her face into the cushions.
“Her names Lola right?”
A muffled ‘yes’ came from the lounger.
“Well there’s that scene where she’s talking to the candy guy and he goes ‘I like your slacks’ that’s a reference, since she’s so young and he’s so much older and she ends up getting attacked in the movie, that’s so cool.”
Lo didn’t have to look up to know the look Magenta had in her eyes. Mischief.
“You mean the rape was cool? Now I know why your mom has to approve of the books you read, Lay.”
“Oh, shut up! You know that’s not what I meant, but that makes sense right. I mean you guys read the book. You should know.”
With a cheek pressed firm against the couch the blonde looked sideways at Layla.
“No, you’re right. It makes sense. I’d never even thought about that before. Nice catch, Lay. Can’t believe you mom let you see Atonement.”
“I told you she quit being such a book and movie Nazi when I was in like the 9th grade. I watch what I want, okay. I’m not that sheltered. I even know what sex is and how to shave my legs.”
“Oh, don’t be such a little liar. I’m in gym class with your dumb ass, and I know for a fact that your legs didn’t become that forest of fur overnight, Lay.”
There was a gasp and a hiss of anger.
Then there was a laugh from the blonde.
“Heeeey! Like you’ve never skipped a few days because you’ve pulled an all-nighter and only had time in the morning to wash your hair and gargle with toothpaste.”
“God, she just described my morning routine for the past month.”
Magenta laughed at the blonde.
“So what are we going to do? Eat? That’d be nice. You promised you’d feed me.” She whined.
With a growl Lo rolled over and planted her feet firmly on the ground and blinked away the head rush and black dots the change in position brought to her vision.
“The chicken is thawing. I’ll poke it in a little.” She answered the girl on her bed.
“We could watch a movie.” Layla offered.
“Nah, later. We’re gonna play Egyptian rat screw too and then me and Lo will teach you how to play Kentucky Rummy, Lay.”
“Okay,” was Layla’s soft reply.
“Oh! So tell us how your first day at Max High was Lo,” she chirped a moment later.
“Yeah Lola tell us all about it. Especially the parts about the creatures with penises, and how good they looked in uniform. And the food.”
The blonde looked warily over in the direction of her desk at Layla. The other girl rolled her eyes and called Magenta a ‘fat-ass’ before leaning back and stretching out her legs.
Slowly the girl spread out on the lounger rolled. She swished the thoughts of the day before in her head, her brain became a flask that sloshed memories of sights and scents and sounds she was familiar with, and yet not, over the sides. It was so much like a normal day at Sky High it had been too odd to place, to catalog and file away as normal.
Maybe because it was and it was easy to fit with normal. The first thing super-parents taught super-kids, keep your nose down and your eyes up when in public. The duality of secret identity and alter ego was ingrained as deeply as DNA.
It was exactly like school with Magenta and Layla was, except everyone was sans powers, but not, surprisingly, sans egos. It was highschool. It was typical. It was nice.
Above all it was work, hard work. The type that left no leeway for powers to make up for smarts. She liked that.
She didn’t tell them that. She didn’t think they’d get it, not even Magenta.
One person might have gotten it. He would have gotten how it felt. She wondered if she’d ever get a chance to talk to him about it. She wondered if he’d care about her first day at Maxville High, wondered if “normal” was something he thought was nice too, like sheets warmed up before you slipped under them at 3am or sitting half-in half-out the kitchen window above an empty and dry sink, smoking, when the morning was fresh and wet or the way studying for a test and not knowing whether it was the next day or next week and then finding out it’s that day and acing it with nothing more than a forty-five minute cram session felt.
With quick apprehension that she pushed towards the peripheries of her brain with a process that was made perfect by practice she knew somewhere that she wanted to talk to him about it.
She could have had the same talk with Magenta, but it was different. It was one thing to know the girl’s mind worked the same way as hers did, knowing his worked the same way, though, was different.
Because he was a different creature altogether.
He wasn’t a girl she could gab with on Friday nights in her room; he was a guy, undeniably male. She’d be lying if she said such a distinction didn’t freak her out sometimes. Where could such distinction go, where would they, how could they. She didn’t want that, she liked friends and goldfish and cinnamon disk candy, not romance. Romance was boring, romance was for people with jobs and cars and apartments and health insurance and birth control.
Romance wasn’t made for teenagers, fucking around was for teenagers. She didn’t want to fuck around. The concept was crass and off-putting.
It scattered her thoughts like a puzzle whacked off a table, like a cards being shuffled, to think of him in terms of boy. But ever since their “forced” encounter at the Paper Lantern, via a purple streaked girl with a streak of pure vicious glee running through her moral fiber, there was something there.
Something that wasn’t friends or goldfish or cinnamon disk candy or romance or fucking around.
Not connection.
Understanding.
Like there’s “no loyalty among thieves” understanding, like soldiers fighting separate battles but knowing what was in each other’s heads, like wolves sniffing out the same prey. It was competition and kinship.
“…-s’ out, care to share?” Magenta cut through her flimsy thoughts like hot steel through a limb. It hurt to stop her line of thought.
“Yeah, I’m just thinking of where to start.” She answered and eyed both the girls.
* * * * * * * * * *
Maxville High (September 10th, Thursday)
The bus had eight other kids on it.
Three were in her British Literature class.
None were in her AP European History Class.
One was in her Latin class.
She paid little attention to the other four, she listened just enough to know two girls that seemed to be close friends were in Calculus together and that the solitary boy on the bus was in AP US History after he’d been asked what he was going for by a waif of a girl who offered that she herself was in AP English Composition.
When she entered the school she could tell three things from the first five minutes alone.
One: They really liked their school colors, blue and silver were on everything from the floor tiling to the doorframes.
Two: They liked things big. The pillars as markers every ten feet down the main hallway, and the large rotunda with their library as the focal point proved that. The excessively long driveway leading to the school had left her speechless, she found herself rolling her eyes every time they went over a speed bump. There were eight. She knew, she’d counted.
Three: That cost had not been an option when they built the place. From the televisions in the hallways and classrooms that were plasma LCD, and the electronic sign in front of the school driveway that told the date and upcoming events and even the temperature.
It was cold in the entrance way and she would later mark the temperature change as something that had to do with all the windows they’d put in. The stairwells were the worst, every one of them had floor to ceiling paneled windows going up the thirty to forty feet of the wall. She didn’t like it; it made her breath puff out of her mouth like tiny, sad clouds.
They all had come in through the front doors, holding them for whoever was behind them with an air of nonchalance and flippancy.
The woman in the attendance nook in the space next to the nurse’s office on the left told them to sign in and gave them each a schedule that had been banded together with the others in a small manila envelope. She told them, as they huddled together in front of the built in barrier that served as a receiving while she went over the bell schedule, that they would all be called down into guidance later in the week to ‘chat’ about their new school experiences.
She followed up by reaching out for a walky-talky that lounged in its charging stand next to her computer and pressed the button.
“Chess, Bill, Rocky, Sam, can two of you come down to attendance. I have eight students in the work-study program that need to be taken to their classes. Over.”
There had been a crackle of static and then a beep.
“Hey, Elise. Tim’s out in the parking lot right now and Rocky subbing in the study hall so me and Bill will come down. Ten-five on how many.”
The woman, Elise, let one long red fingernail clack on the metal of a clipboard on the counter. She pressed the side of the device to reply and repeat.
“There’s eight of them. So you and Bob can each take four.” She let go of the button on the side and waited.
“Ten-four. We’ll be there in a few minutes, can you tell them to wait for awhile. Bob doesn’t have a walky on him and he’s down over by Sharron. I’ll tell you when I get him.”
“Not a problem. Thanks.”
She put the walky-talky back down in its cradle and smiled at all of them. Lo decided that she liked the woman. She was small and a bit plump and might have been a mix of Greek and some Latin or Spanish descent, had spectacular nails, dressed very smartly for a woman her age, and had done her eyeliner beautifully. She looked aged but competent in her job. She seemed to be a woman who could be either pleasant or dismissive depending on who you were and how nice you were.
“Well. They’ll be here soon. You can wait on the benches.” She pointed at the benches at the opposite wall placed in front of a bulletin board with plaques that noted who was on honor roll and principles honor roll and who was an AP Scholar and a Regents Scholar and so on and so forth until they had run out of space for plaques with names on them.
Lo noted the expensive television hanging above the board that played a loop of the same slide presentation on school regulations about their “no smoking” policy and the bell policy and the lateness policy and five other policies that she couldn’t remember.
She sat for a moment by herself and soon thought that her time would be better spent talking to the attendance woman. She left her large duffel on the bench and went over.
Standing at the counter she waited to be acknowledged. After a few seconds the woman stopped her fingers with a final click of the mouse, probably X-ing out of whatever she was doing, attendance records probably.
“What do you need?” She asked with a smile.
“Nothing. Just came over to say hello. Hello.”
“Hello back. Is this your first year in the program?”
“No. I was just at Long Point last year. That’s where they send the juniors. It was a lot smaller than this school.”
“So what do you go for at the magnet school?”
She avoided answering quickly in order to come up with a lie that sounded good. She just spit it out, not thinking about it very much.
“Nursing.” She blurted thinking of Spex.
“Oh! Good for you hun! My sister’s a nurse over at the nursing home past the supermarket up here. You know the one?”
She didn’t.
“Oh yeah! I think that’s where we start our clinical rounds later this year.”
The lie was so easy to tell; normal was an easy enough disguise to slip in to.
“Nursing’s a tough job, but there’s always the need for them. Especially now. Do you think you’ll go for your RN?”
“Yes. Definitely.”
Lie.
“That’s really grea…-”
The ringing of the phone next to her computer cut her off. She let it go unanswered and it stopped mid-ring as someone else in the main office next door to her post answered it. She could hear a muted ‘Maxville Junior-Senior Highschool, this is the main office how can I help you,’ through the open door at the back of the attendance woman’s small cubby-like ‘office.’
“That’s great.” She finished her thought and continued on.
“What are you taking here? Going for the credits huh?”
“No, actually. I just always wanted to take some of the classes. I mean, I have to try to get the credits, but I really like to learn. I’m taking British literature, European history, and Latin.”
“Those are some very heavy classes girl. But if you want to get something you always have to start with a good education.”
“I totally agree!”
Lies, lies, lies. She was getting good at putting them all together and making something sweet out of them. It was a bitter pill to swallow knowing that in her world made out of superheroes and powers and saving the day that being good at lying meant you were growing up enough to put on a mask that wasn’t made out of spandex to disillusion the world of citizens out there.
Lying effectively was like learning how to make the soufflé rise; a recipe made out of careful ingredients and careful care and a dash of truth to make it savory enough o swallow.
The walky-talky crackled with the static of a screwy voice. Radio interference.
Elise motioned Lo to hold her thought with one perfectly veneered finger and answered the walky.
“Ten-five on that.”
“I said me and Bill are coming down now. And when Sam comes in tell him to go down to the cafeteria to meet Rocky.”
“Okey Dokey. Will do. See you in a minute.”
She set the device down and returned her attention.
Lo sagged and crossed her arms on the counter and played with the pen attached by a stringy coil to the sign-up sheet.
“Well, they’ll be here soon. I’m glad you came over to chat with me, gives me something to do besides check off ‘lates’ and ‘tardies’.”
“No, it’s alright. Just glad to have someone to talk to.” She smiled. Her stomach churned.
Two men in navy windbreakers came around the corner. One was a shorter than average, large white man with sandy hair and a tired look on his face, the other was a taller, but no less large black man with a shaved head, mustache, and bulbous eyes too large for his head. The first looked a bit like the bald third of the three stooges except not bald and the second looked like an aging bouncer who was no longer young enough to be a bouncer, he looked very squamous which she liked to think meant frog, because it sounded like a word that someone could describe a frog with even though it had to do with frogs.
She retrieved her duffel bag and was split up into a group that had the only boy from the bus, a girl with horribly dyed raccoon like hair, black underneath and bottled chemical blonde on top, and the girl who would be in Latin with her, she had been cursed with a horrible teenage case of splattered acne all over her face in red bumps and pocked skin, and it wasn’t the type of thing a girl could recover from it seemed.
They didn’t have lockers.
They didn’t have “classmates.”
They didn’t have affiliations.
They had their book bags to carry around all day.
They had strange people with nasty eyes staring at them.
They had the types of connections prisoners of war had, they looked after themselves but only talked to each other.
Her Latin class was taught by a plump woman with hair kept up by a pencil in an attractive but tight looking knot.
She knew no one but the girl with bad skin in the class.
The girl told her that her name was Cora and tried to initiate conversations that ended after one or two follow-up replies from the blonde. The class was small and there was little on the ‘boy menu’ to interest herself or Magenta.
She planned to tell her as much.
British Literature was slightly better with three other girls from the bus in it. They all seemed to be close friends. The raccoon haired girl was among them, she was by far the least attractive in the trio. One girl in the group was tall, her face structured and odd in a way that made her look pretty but her build was man-ish along with tall, she looked like an Amazon and that killed what was pretty about her face. The last girl was short, under five-foot, and she was the leader of them whether they knew it or not. She was the iron fist inside the velvet glove.
Lo couldn’t help but be a bit jealous of that one.
She spent the period listening to the heavily mustached professor go over why they would be focusing on Beowulf and Chaucer in the first quarter, King Arthur in the second, Shakespeare and his Titus Andronicus in the third, and Romanticism in the fourth.
The blonde hoped they would watch “Titus” it was good movie it was blood and violence and revenge and things that were good to watch a play act out in movie form.
She almost ‘squeed’ in girlish joy when her teacher told the class the only reason he taught Titus Andronicus was so they could watch the movie.
AP European History was the best. It had two other people in it and they spent the period taking notes themselves, they got a paperback textbook companion. She was going t o defile it with annotations when she got home.
She handed in her summer assignment, carefully annotated and correlated with highlights of florescent green and painful pinks and vivid oranges.
It pleased her to get the look she got from the middle-aged softball coach/history teacher. It was surprise and astonishment and shock and awe and maybe even a little fear that the assignment was not only done but overdone and then overdone with joy.
She liked leaving that impression. She did what she decided to do well, and she knew it and wanted people to know that she knew it.
After classes she had found out that the buses they went on had everyone on them. She nixed the idea of going home at two-ten in the afternoon. Three-fifteen bus it was. She killed the hour by finding out where kids went to smoke.
The parking lot was too empty, she would not risk sitting between cars that could pull out at any moment. She didn’t think anyone else would either.
It took her twenty minutes, not because she searched for twenty minutes but because it took that long for a boy with a cigarette tucked behind his ear to walk by. She tailed him as he made his way over into the parking lot at the very far side of the school by a chain-link fence by the tennis courts she.
Beyond the fence was a maintenance back-road for an apartment complex, no cars drove on it unless they were from the apartment complex parking lots. She deduced that they were at the back of the apartment complex. She decided that the reason he gate was unlocked to get there was because many students lived in the apartment complex and walked to school, and that it was where juniors who didn’t have parking privileges on school grounds left their cars when they drove to school.
Once there she found that the boy had met up with a group of girls that looked like they were smokers. It wasn’t just their cigarettes that gave them away either. They really and truly looked exactly like what you thought the kids sneaking off school-grounds for cigarettes looked like.
They didn’t speak to her and she didn’t initiate a pointless conversation either.
She smoked and left and didn’t look back and got on her bus and went home.
* * * * * * * * *
“So that’s it. Bo-oo-oo-or-ing.” Magenta sing-songed.
“Well it was, it was the first day Mag. It’s supposed to be boring. If it was fun they’d call it ‘carnival’ instead of ‘school.’”
“That was dumb.” Layla stated while picking at her cuticles. She gave up and bit it off and then sucked on the finger when blood welled in her nail bed.
The blonde groaned.
Magenta snarked something that Lo didn’t quite hear and then flopped back on the bed without grace.
“I’m hungry.” Layla announced loudly.
“I need a smoke. I don’t wanna get up.” Magenta whined, twice as loud.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shaddup.” Lo huffed, tired and lethargic against the lounger.
It was the start of a long night; they marked it with a small space of lazy silence.
Magenta rolled off the bed, her knees hit the floor hard and she crashed down onto her stomach and crawled like a worm over to Lo.
Opening one eye to study her friend, the blonde smiled.
“What?”
Relaxing on her stomach with a closed fist propping up her chin Magenta just looked up from behind her fringe.
“I was just wondering where Miranda is.”
The blonde opened her eyes quickly and bypassed Magenta to look at Layla who had turned around in interest.
“Who’s Miranda?”
Pregnant silence filled the small room.
“She’s my…aunt.”
Lie.
Layla looked confused and ran a hand under the length of her hair and fluffed it out with a nervous gesture.
“Oh.”
There was a pause.
“I thought you lived with your mom.” Layla finished her thought.
The conversation had taken a wrong turn, the type of turn that made things fall off cliffs.
“My mom’s not around…, she’s sick. She stays at the lab. My aunt stays to make sure I’m okay. When I was in tenth grade she let me stay here by myself and she showed up once or twice a week to check in on me and called every night and it was just too weird to stay in the house by myself. So now she just lives here instead of at the base and goes in every few days when they call her in.”
Not quite a lie, it had a flavoring of truth. It was too long to be a complete lie, she’d explained too much. She wasn’t as good at lying with the big stuff, she babbled when faced with the issues that took the lying skills of lie-masters to weave.
Layla looked deeply saddened for a moment; she knew she’d asked something taboo. Lo knew Magenta hadn’t meant to bring it up, the girl couldn’t blame her for asking an innocuous question.
Layla would have asked eventually, she was a curious girl; the type to wonder why no one who filled a parent position was home.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” Layla apologized.
There was a strange turn of the moment where no one breathed, as if the first one who did would lose a boob or something equally important.
“Can I ask you a question?” Layla asked softly, her gaze was heavy lidded and her tone was solemn.
The blonde didn’t want to say yes, but she did.
“Yeah.”
“Where’s your dad?”
With the flick of a switch the moment shifted. Lo laughed loudly and for real.
“What’s so funny?” Layla was shocked, at first the outburst must have made her think the blonde was yelling.
Sitting up and scrubbing her face with a palm Lo put her elbows on her knees and let a strand of hair fall into her face.
“No, sorry. It’s just…well, hmmm. My mom and my dad, well it’s kinda weird actually.” Lo didn’t know how to say it.
Magenta who’d lay silent for a few minutes rolled onto her back and propped her torso up with her elbows, smirked at Layla and then tossed the same look to the blonde.
“Her mom was lesbo.”
“Magenta!”
Lo laughed.
“No, it’s okay.” She unhooked her glasses from the belt loop at her hip and put them on. There was a smudge.
She cleaned them and put them on again.
“She was. That’s why it’s weird to talk about. I mean, I don’t mind, but, people look at me like I’m just a mistake. I’m not saying I wasn’t, but, my mom always said I was a ‘happy mistake.’ She always wanted kids anyway, so it was okay with her and dad worked on the same task team for awhile so they were friends. When my mom was still active she worked at Global Guardians and I was born…no, wait…conceived during the annual post-induction ceremony party. I’m pretty sure booze was involved. I see my dad every once in awhile, though it’s weird because he’s not really sure where he fits into my life. And I don’t think I’m sure either.”
“Oh…” Layla nodded.
It was an awkward conversation to be having.
“You should tell her what you told me about how when you grew up you didn’t know what boys were.” Magenta suggested.
The blonde groaned.
“What!?” Layla squeaked.
“Yeah, so anyway when I was little I didn’t go to the base and the only one who came over was Miranda and the only neighbor we had at the time was a single mom with a little girl. So until I was like seven I thought there was no such thing as boys and when I saw them in my class I came home and told my mom I had some really ugly girls in my class. And that’s how I discovered boys. The end.”
“Wow. That’s…” Layla had no idea what to say after she’d started.
“Sad.” Magenta added while biting the inside of her cheek.
“Wait a second. So, if you’ve lived here since you were that little how come you getting go to grade school with us? We don’t live that far away from you; you’re in the school district.”
Pausing, the blonde tilted her head and looked at Layla, as if processing the question.
“Well, I got my powers when I was really little, so I stayed at the base. They have a program for kids like me. It’s kinda only really for active supers that work for globe-guards, though.”
The cordless phone on the dresser rang, the ring was “ode to joy” it was preprogrammed into the phone. She answered and the conversation was put on pause.
It was Miranda.
Layla put her feet on the desk and closed her eyes.
Magenta not-so-stealthily listened in on the conversation by pressing herself up against the blonde.
“I’m hungry.” Magenta whined.
“You’re annoying.” Lo hissed, her hand over the phone’s mouthpiece.
“She tries. Hard.” Layla elaborated from the desk.