Moxie Mallahan & Ellington Feint - Why Can't I Stop Thinking About Her?
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Moxie hated her long before she ever met her. This was that girl, the horrible girl who stole the Bombinating Beast and lied to Snicket over and over, manipulated him and cheated him and betrayed his trust. She would not understand what possessed the boy to keep his promise when he had been treated this way. She wouldn't have, in his place. You lie to a Mallahan and you've gained an enemy, not a friend. It hurt her to watch, and it brought this fire in Moxie's chest that she understood as a hatred of injustice and of seeing her friend put through it.
Moxie met her for the first time on Offshore Island, and the journalist was half-asleep for the laudanum, but she knew, before she was even told, exactly whose acquaintance she was making. This was the girl, with her sharp green eyes like something predatory. This was the person who had stolen the Bombinating Beast, and would certainly betray them if she thought she'd gain from it. Moxie felt something stirring in her that she at first mistook for hatred, not for injustice but for this girl who had done so much harm, and in her sleepy state she couldn't do anything to analyze it.
The coffee helped, once it was given to her. It tasted like soil and she hated it. It reminded Moxie of Black Cat Coffee and the promise Snicket had made and all the lies he had gotten in return. And that made her bristle and burn as the stuff settled uncomfortably in her belly. Now she was awake enough to get a good look at the girl with her green eyes and black hair and disconcerting sneer. Her nail polish looked fresh. How had she snuck that past the staff?
Moxie dealt with it as best she could, pushing aside her feelings about Ellington Feint because there was work to be done, and as a journalist, she could not afford to be petulant. There was too much at stake, too many people counting on her now. But at the back of her mind, the girl's name continued to ring like a bell, and it made her feel strange. There was the same anger, but there was something else that stuck in her throat. She couldn't have said what it was.
When Snicket stumbled into Hungry's with blood dribbling from his mouth, the first person Moxie wanted to blame was Ellington. It didn't matter that she hadn't been present for the attack, or that she probably hadn't even had anything to do with it, it just seemed like the place to put her blame. When he got hurt at the library after executing the final stage of the fragmentary plan, Moxie knew that time it was Ellington to blame, too, even though she couldn't be sure she'd had anything to do with it. She hated it, hated letting him be anywhere near her. She wanted to protect him from her. Associates were supposed to protect each other from people who would do them harm.
The feeling stayed there, still stuck in her throat like a bad taste. Moxie didn't like it. She thought about that girl even more often than he did now, and she hated it even more than when she'd catch him at it. But the feeling would not go away, and neither would the thoughts of her, that awful, awful girl. It would only grow with time. It would only intensify. It would only change itself into something insatiable that would drive Moxie to want to confront that awful girl herself, to be around her, which turned to the need to be near her as she was drawn into those green eyes and that wicked smile. And just as Snicket shook himself out of Ellington's web, Moxie would willingly put herself right into the middle of it, and she would never again want to leave it.