Author's Note: Woot, woot! Another chapter, basically on time. Enjoy!
Chapter Five
Pain.
Gabrielle was curled in a corner, trying to draw air out of room which seemed to have plenty just a few moments before and now seemed to have none. From what sounded like a great distance, she could hear a thin whoop-whoop sound, and she knew that this was her breathing in feverish little gasps, but that didn't change the feeling that she was drowning here in the corner of the science lab with blood staining her teeth and purple spots dancing behind her closed eyelids.
She didn't care so much. The pain was too great for her to care about such minor matters as breathing. The pain had swallowed her, and throbbed dully beneath her skin. Her face felt hot, her hand was slick with blood and sweat, and she couldn't open her eyes.
"G-G-Gabrielle?"
Gaby refused to move. The sour taste of blood was clouding her senses, and she could feel the small pain of a bitten tongue.
"Get u-up, G-Gabrielle," the girlish voice insisted. Amaya, Gaby realized, and considered sparing the energy to crack open an eye. She discarded the idea when a muscle spasm tensed her stomach.
"G-Gabrielle!'
A groan.
"Oh, d-dear. Where d-does it hurt?"
Another groan, this one gruffer than the first.
"C-c'mon, now." Gabrielle felt a hand grab her arm and pull, sending silvery sparks of up her flesh. "We-we need to g-get you to the nurse's oh-office."
"I'd rather not," Gaby said as coherently as possible. She fixed Amaya with a sociable glare. "I'm in a great deal of pain right now, and I'd greatly appreciate it if you'd let me go."
"Oh!" Amaya dropped Gabrielle's arm, sending another flash of pain throughout her body.
Amaya caught Gaby's involuntary wince and clucked apologetically. "I'm so s-sorry! Are yuh-y-you okay?"
"It's hurts…" Gaby spat blood onto the floor, then groaned again.
"I know, and I'm sorry."
"Eh, don't mention it, dama." Gaby managed a lopsided grin. "It just hurts like a bitch." She shook her head slightly to clear it and struggled to sit up. Amaya hurried to assist.
Gaby smiled her thanks, then gazed around the ruined classroom.
A blond boy was sitting across from them, cradling his arm, his back against the leg of a chemistry table. "That's a good question," he responded, his voice dazed.
Across the room, the purple-haired punk was still unconscious. Raven was kneeling over the other girl's prone body, leisurely pouring water onto the other girl's face from an Erlenmeyer flask. The water came out in a large gush rather than a controlled trickle, since her shaking hands were unable to hold the flask steady. But it worked.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" the girl spat, wiping her face with her sleeve and jerking away from Raven. A noise similar to a growl escaped from her throat.
"Oh, U-Ursula," Allison stammered, "shuh-she was only tr-trying to help."
The girl—Ursula, presumably— scowled.
"That was a great idea, opening that box," Raven said mildly as she primly dabbed at water that had splashed onto the skirt of her dress.
Ursula snarled. "You were the one who wanted to open it."
"No, actually, I wasn't. You challenged me."
"I challenged you? What are you talking about, challenged? Who are you, Hulk Hogan?"
"Who?" Raven said, eyes darkening. "Do I look like him, I wonder? I was always under the impression that I looked live Raven Francesca Rodriguez-Cook. You, on the other hand, look like a damned idiot!"
"Enough!" the blond boy shouted from his station at the front of the room.
Raven snapped at him, like a crocodile snapping up wading toddlers. "Don't you dare tell me what do, noob. And besides, you were the one that bought that stupid thing in here in the first place, so maybe we should be yelling at your ugly face!"
"Raven…" Gabrielle sighed. "Just, don't, okay." She very much preferred the quiet, pensive Raven to this yelling lunatic.
"Y-yeah," Amaya added weakly.
"Look," the boy said, ignoring the pleading girls and directing his attention to Raven, "we all decided to open it, so deal with it."
Raven stared at him for a moment, then went to examine Gaby.
"Are you all right?" she asked quietly.
"A little beaten up," Gabrielle answered, and spat another globule of saliva onto the ground. All white and all right this time. "I'm fine. Help me up." Both Amaya and Raven grabbed Gaby's arms and pulled, ignoring her small squeals of pain.
With Raven's support, Gabrielle went over to look through the tattered box. She turned it upside down and examined from the sides. Unlike before, the box was just a box. She remembered there had been a deep, dark hole, different than the bottom of the box that she saw then. There was no chasm into darkness, no explosions of light, even the thick, red ribbon was gone. The box was totally plain.
"Maybe this was some senior prank, like the first week of school thing," Gabrielle suggested doubtfully.
"Maybe," Amaya agreed half-heartedly.
"It probably was..." The boy's words trailed off and were lost in the sound of the classroom door abruptly opening. The kids looked around—the place was a complete mess! But it was too late to do anything about it.
From behind the creaking door, a school janitor peered inside. He wore large, black rubber gloves, held a mop at his side and pushed a garbage cart full of trash that leaked some sort disgusting and thick juice. His creepy and shifty gaze turned in suspicion as he saw the kids.
"What's going on in here?" he growled.
They stared at him, unable to think of any excuse for a full five seconds.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Amaya spoke up. "Uh, n-nothing imp-p-portant. Just doing some extra cruh-credit work for, uh, c-chemistry." The other kids nodded in unison.
The janitor sneered and closed the door. The kids breathed a sigh of relief.
"Are you sure?" the janitor barked at them, suddenly shoving the door back open with his clumsy garbage cart.
What was with this guy?
"Positive," Ursula said innocently, her eyes wide and soft.
The janitor glared at them all for a moment longer, then left.
The room was still.
"Well," Ursula finally said, stretching her bruised arms over her head, "while this was great fun—really, let's do it again some time—I have a real life to get back to."
Gabrielle scrutinized the clock on the wall. "Yeah, we've gotta get back to the audition."
"But we didn't even practice," Raven suddenly realized. "And you're hurt."
"I'm fine," Gaby insisted, making a face. "Quit fussing."
Raven scowled, but, after a nervous glance at the clock, held Gaby's arm and helped her hurry towards the door. The boy jumped in front of them.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Aren't you guys forgetting something?"
They shrugged, exchanging looks and making to edge around him.
"How about the explosion that just occurred?!" he exploded.
"Hey," Gaby said affably, "whatever your name is..."
"David," he supplied. "David Kent."
"Right." She smiled, and he saw that her bottom teeth were tinted red. "Okay. David, calm down. We're all fine. But tell you what—if I grow a third foot or something, I'll call you, alright?"
"How can you be so calm about this?" he demanded.
Ursula laughed, clicking her fingernails against the Formica tables. "What should we do about it? What can we do about it? Tell someone what happened? What're we gonna say?"
Raven nodded. It was the first time they'd agreed.
"I think we sh-should just keep it a secret," Amaya chimed in, her voice steady. "J-just between the fuh-five of us."
"I'm cool with that," the Ursula responded.
"Me, as well," Raven agreed.
"Yup," Gabrielle added. She cast an apologetic look David's way. "Sorry, Superman."
Before he could comment, both Gaby and Raven had disappeared, leaving him alone with two girls and a broken box.
Suddenly worried he might lose his job over this incident, he began to try to piece the mutilated scraps of black paper together, seeing if he could get the package to look like it did before all of the weirdness happened.
"Hey, chillax," Ursula said as she and Amaya began to straighten up the room. "Everything'll work out. Besides, man…it's Friday!"
The sky was miserably spitting rain by the time Gaby was able to leave the school. She checked her pockets without hope and found she had indeed left her umbrella at the house. Hatless, gloveless, and with only her plastic jacket as protection against the rain, she stood at the bus stop around the corner of the school with the school's secretary, Miss Meadows, in spite of Miss Meadows' protestations that it was really unnecessary. Gabrielle didn't like the way Miss Meadows looked, with all the color gone form her cheeks and dark smudges under eyes and little lines running from the corners of her mouth. Besides, it felt good to look after some one else, rather than the other way around.
The airbus pulled up in a cloud of exhaust, and Miss Meadows started off the curb. She paused, then turned to little Gaby with her hair sopping wet and a bitten tongue, and said, "Aren't you coming?"
"No, ma'am, Miss Meadows," Gaby said. "Great day for a walk."
Miss Meadows hovered awkwardly in the middle of the street, conceivably trying to decide if the student was being sarcastic or not, then slid up into the airbus.
Gaby waved jovially, then turned onto Watertower Boulevard, passed a collection of small shops. Many of them looked seedy, a trifle desperate around the edges. Gaby strolled passed secondhand clothing stores trying to pass themselves off as grunge boutiques and shoe stores with signs reading BUY AMERICAN and CLEARANCE SALE in the windows.
The house she shared with her mom was tucked in a maze of side alleys and walkways, sidling along the line between the rich and the poor. Pretty flowerbeds that had been carefully tended hid the wires of an incredible security system.
Gaby jammed her passkey into the lock and breezed inside, pitching her bag into the stairwell on her way into the kitchen. She programmed the AutoChef for coffee and toast, then, on a yawn, called for music.
To the tune of Traumerei, she brought up the Eden News on the kitchen's monitor and scanned the headlines while fake caffeine bolstered her system. The coffee tasted like boiled pencil shavings, and the AutoChef had burned her toast—again—but she at it anyway, with a vague thought of replacing the appliance.
She frowned over the article of the cats. Six cats and three kittens found that month, all dead the same way: hung upside down in trees. Their pictures were printed in black and white so that guileless civilians couldn't quite see the bloody froth that caked the cats' lips.
Her father's picture was in the News, Gaby recalled, when he died. But they hadn't shown him hung in a tree. They hadn't shown bleeding in the bathtub, either. They'd shown him in a police uniform instead, with his badge shining proudly on his chest. They'd shown him looking happy and clean and they'd said nice things about him, and Gaby could only wonder why it was any different for cats.
The unfamiliar buzz of the front door brought a frown to her lips and annoyance to her eyes. The computer monitor blipped off as she rose from her chair to see who was interrupting her. One glance at the security screen wiped the frown away. She called for the music to stop and rushed to open the door.
"Hey, Sinead."
"You forgot, didn't you?" Sinead Freeboot swirled in, a jangle of bracelets, a puff of scent. Her hair was wavy and glittery silver today, a shade that would change with her next mood. Her matching dress came to her thighs and was made of a sheer, synthetic material. Her elfin face was sharp, a triangle of pale gold dominated by large, deep-set green eyes painted with silver shadow and a wide, mobile mouth stained with red. She flipped her hair back to where it sparkled like stars against her impossibly thin waist.
"No, I didn't." Gaby shut the door and reengaged the locks, then grinned somewhat sheepishly. "Forgot what?"
"Dinner, dancing, and debauchery."
"Ooh…new word, eh?" Gabrielle teased. "What are you, good friends with a dictionary?"
Sinead poked her tongue out at Gaby and let out a long-suffering sigh. She eyed Gaby's loose shirt and ratty sneakers with disdain. "You can't be going out in that."
Feeling drab, as she always did within twenty feet of Sinead's outrageous outfits, Gaby nervously shuffled her feet. "I like these clothes. Listen—"
Sinead rolled her eyes and accusingly pointed at Gabrielle with an emerald-tipped finger. "You forgot."
"Sorry," Gaby apologized. At her friend's angry pout, she added, "You look great."
"You look tired," said Sinead, more in accusation than sympathy. "And you're missing a button."
Gaby's hand went automatically to her a jacket, which she had forgotten to take off after she had gotten into the house, and felt the loose threads. "Shit. I knew it." In disgust, she tugged off her jacket and tossed it aside, not caring where it landed. "Look, I'm sorry. I did forget. I had a lot on my mind today.
Sinead sat on the U-shaped sofa for a moment, tapping her fingers on the arm of the couch. Finally, she said, "School stuff, I bet." Gaby shrugged and nodded. "Here I was hoping you had a date. You really need to start dating guys who aren't crazy, Gabe."
"I saw that image consultant you fixed me up with, remember? He wasn't crazy; he was just an idiot."
"You're too picky—and that was six months ago."
Since he'd tried to get her in the sack by offering her a free lip tattoo, and was about twice her age, Gaby thought it wasn't nearly long enough, but she sagely kept her opinion to herself.
"It's fine, Gabe," Sinead said generously, then sprang up from her chair, the crystals in her ears sparkling. "Just please go get out of that outfit; it gives me chills. I'll order you some Chinese."
Relief had Gabrielle's shoulders sagging and sighing with liberation. For Sinead, she would have put up with an evening at a loud, noisy, crowded, obnoxious, and overall nauseating club, peeling randy pilots and sex-starved sky-station techs off her chest. The idea of eating Chinese food with her feet up was like heaven.
"You don't mind?" Gaby forced herself to say as she slipped into the spare bedroom where she kept her clothes. The room was papered with one-paneled cartoons and comic strips. Silk dragonflies of myriad colors hung from filaments tacked to the ceiling. The large bay window filtered in pale green light, illuminating a cramped room stuffed with boxes upon boxes of clothes.
Sinead waved the words away as she tapped the restaurant she wanted into the computer. "I'm the epitome of calm right now; don't kill it with your annoying questions. You want egg rolls?"
"Sure, but make sure it has meat that is good for people in the United States. No rabbit or squid or anything like that, okay?" Gabrielle pulled out some faded jeans and a red EPSD sweatshirt.
"Gotcha, Gabe." Feeling charitable, Sinead charged dinner to her father's R-World Card. "True. Got any of that wine I bought over the last time I was here?"
"Most of the second bottle." Gaby bypassed into the kitchen to program two glasses. "My ma got into it." To keep her voice light and silence from permeating, she pressed on. "So, are you still seeing that aspiring dentist?"
"Nope." Sinead half-heartedly examined a neatly-penciled cartoon tacked on the wall, then dismissed it. "It was getting a little too intense. I didn't mind him falling in love with my teeth, but he wanted the whole package. He wanted to get married."
Knowing her duty, Gabrielle intoned, "The bastard."
"I know," Sinead agreed. She slunk over to the couch and fell carefully. Perfectly. As though that dentist could see across the miles of streets that separated his house from Gaby's…as though he was watching Sinead at every moment, so that everything, every little way Sinead moved her hands or blinked her eyes, had to be pretty. "You can't trust anyone."
Silence stretched. The barest tick of the old-fashioned wall clock echoed against the soft sound of the girls' breathing.
"Well…" Sinead said. "See ya."
"Wait, where're you going?" Gaby struggled to keep relief from showing on her face.
"Club hopping," Sinead answered, as though her supposed best friend were daft. Those beautiful eyes in that beautiful face were as expressionless as shards of glass twinkling beside a country road. She tossed back the last swallow of wine left in her glass and headed for the door.
"You said—"
"I said you didn't have to go." Sinead combed a hand through her mane of hair and giggled. "I've still got places to be. You'll be fine on your own."
Gabrielle only sipped from her glass.
Sinead hovered for a moment, perhaps waiting for a good-bye, but she got none. The door closed silently behind her.
"Shutters closed," Gaby ordered. "Lights off. Music on." Obediently, the room darkened and was filled with the sound of sobbing strings. She closed her eyes and laid her head in the crook of her arm, allowing herself to be lost in the music.
