Some days, when the chase is over and she and Fillmore are gasping for breath, for a moment, she feels clean.
She remembers what it was like to be innocent, upright, moral – whatever you want to call it – when she was a different person altogether, in another world wholly removed from the here and now. She remembers things that are good, are even wholesome, the way she laid in the autumn leaves and laughed and the icy mornings she and her sister would job together. She recalls gym class, preschool days spent chasing some boy whose name she's long forgotten, and kindergarten spent coloring with a girl who wore her hair in four pigtails. Memories play across her vision like soothing poetry, trying to take away the parts of her life that she regrets. When she is exhausted, victorious, alongside him she feels like she's normal for the briefest few moments in her life. Not normal as in ordinary, normal as in…
Well, Ingrid's not sure what she means. Happy? Good enough? Real? Something between all three, most likely. It's complicated. She hasn't atoned for the whole ordeal, but she feels like she makes progress when they do this. When they haul in the suspect and stop the pain and crime running rampant at this school she feels a little bit of the dirtiness leave her. She's never going to forget, as hard as she's tried. All she can hope for is moments of clarity and calm in the string of oddities that's been her life. Slowly, she's learning how live again in that time that comes after the aftermath, that awful period where everyone wants her to forget and so does she. Her father calls it moving forward. She calls it denial, at least in her head. Out loud she doesn't mention it. Maybe it's because then someone might see how she pushes herself to make up for what happened, and then they might try to stop her from working so hard.
Restraint is for those who aren't dirty. It's a luxury reserved for the people who don't lay awake fighting off their own conscience. Of course, it's not every night, but it's not as rare as people would think. Then again, even her family doesn't know the whole story. Ingrid's never been good at saying what she feels. She can't put it all into words. She wants to. Maybe it would help her come clean. She lays in her bed some nights and thinks over her options, over what she could do to make all of this go away. All she wants is to be able to look at herself in a mirror without feeling angry, to be able to be proud of herself again and smile without forcing it. The only person she knows who induces these emotions is Fillmore.
But he can never know. If he knew, she'd lose him.
She knows she can't take that. Neither can she take the entire thing tearing her apart from the inside out. Trapped between two warring sensations, the need to be honest and the need to lie, she has been indecisive for as long as she can be. She's growing up, now, a seventh grader with a brand new life, isn't it time she faced all this? The debate is a never ending circular argument in her head that goes nowhere very slowly. Maybe she's not as grown up as they all say she is. Wise beyond her years, Folsom commented once, not noticing the way Ingrid's father tensed visibly at the comment, not knowing the significance of her own words. In his reaction Ingrid sees she has never been forgiven. Things like this are never forgotten, never forgiven, corrupt and vile and all those other words she wasn't supposed to know back then. All the guilt and filthy feelings rush back into her in that moment.
Only Fillmore saw the way her eyes flashed in a whirlwind of emotion. He was the only one who saw the way her fists clenched at her side. For a moment she wasn't there, she was in another time, another place, and dark blue eyes were looking into hers as the rain came down around them. She remembered the way their breath had come out in foggy bursts in front of them. It was so cold that eventually it had turned into a rain and snow hybrid that they huddled in, too afraid of the consequences to return home, too cold to stay out here forever and too sentimental to leave each other's side. She blinked and returned to the office, to the parent student principal meeting and the award she would be receiving for her service to the school. Fillmore would be getting the same thing at the opening ceremony for the school's 'Spring Fling' dance. She looked over at him and knew she was caught in her lapse of reality.
She has had that same semi-psychic connection with someone before, an eternity ago, in a life that almost seemed like it couldn't be hers, that she wished wasn't hers.
When this meeting ends he's going to talk to her, ask her what's wrong. And she's going to struggle because lying to him hurts. Some part of her desperately thinks he might understand, in that way no one else does. No one understands her as it is. Her actions have always created confusion, her explanations, even more so. Only her partner has ever really grasped everything that she is, snark and harsh words and a combination of fierce loyalty and trust issues. Fillmore knows Ingrid in a way nobody has in a very long time. She hates lying to him. He's like family. He's the one person she knows she can truly trust. But she doesn't want to lose him; she can't take any more loss and pain in her life. So she'll say nothing is up and he'll keep pressing it and eventually they'll fight. A little while later he'll come over to her place, tell her he's sorry for butting into her business and they'll eat ice cream out of a carton while watching TV.
And though she'll smile and laugh at all the right moments, Ingrid will still feel dirty when the night is over.