8.22.2024 [1,096]
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pigeon / wrecker
BIRDSEED
[noun] ; any seed or seed blend for feeding birds.
This started in a million different ways, and I'm dreading how all this will end, but here we go.
It might've been the coffee I tried desperately to rub off of Beck, only to make it so, so much worse, and then the coffee after because she honestly saw me as a dog, I guess. Or the next day, when I did knot that whole entanglement together tight, and there was no undoing it, but the look on her face was worth flaying any good girl image I had.
Could've been the first time I got it right, and I passed something just to prove myself. The Bird Scene, though I wonder if it had been the chewing out Sikowitz part that got her attention.
The hundred little comments throughout the weeks, then the thousands between those when we'd just pass each other by…
It's easier to say it started the first time she knocked on my door, and her eyes were scheming, and that smile she wore grew wide. It wasn't gentle, or genuine. Nothing about her was. She just never bothered for anything better.
"I'll mug you."
So when you have someone like this say something like that, every nerve gets shot, the next few hours are a grueling crawl to figure out just what that glint in her eye is getting at, and that smile…twitches in the back of your mind.
Speaking from experience. Of course.
She came and went, though. Nothing happened.
Then I didn't hit Jade with a cane the next day. And if that honestly doesn't sum up everything about her and me, I don't know what does.
It's why I think this started right then. It's easier, because there is a line of logic, I swear. It just…doesn't have a word.
"I don't get it."
. .
"I know André told you that I faked everything."
. .
We were standing in what was supposed to be, was theoretically, the Blackbox Theatre, except it was hardly a black box and was instead the aftermath of someone taking a little too much inspiration from Sinjin's locker. I also wasn't wearing my best. They were less clothes and more rags, and it said too much that I didn't care how Jade West of all people was there, watching me, with sludge over my shoulder and plastered on the wall. All the walls. And floor. …and ceiling too.
"Why are you here?"
"Why are you here?"
Great question. It was, honestly.
For once it had nothing to do with me being this pushover. I was done with going around the same routine. Each week had something new. So I came up with something else. An idea. And it was born the night before, and conceived from André flagging me down between class:
I would back Jade into a corner. She had a reason at first, and it was a valid one. I did kiss her boyfriend, even if it was for the iced coffee over my head. But I would back her into a corner, because I had enough, and I would give Jade every last reason to not give me her cut of Hell. She would run out of reasons. She'd be stranded to fumble for her own. Run out of energy. Lose her voice.
This wasn't being nice. I knew her game, and I knew how to end it.
"You took detention, and a lower grade, and you're scraping crusty pudding off the wall on a Friday night just so that I won't get in trouble?"
"Pretty much."
A little too well, because I backed her into that corner with this one disgusting room. Which also had a security guard—Derek, since I had anger issues, apparently.
"Well y— You can't be nice to me when I've been mean to you! That's not how it works!"
I looked at her, heard the insistence in her voice—a near-desperation. Because her world had its rules, a logic, and it was very corporate, because Jade would do wonders in the family business. She operated on one equation: one input, then get its output; another input doesn't mean the same output; the same input doesn't mean another output.
Except when it came to me. And so I pissed her off. Confused her. Because I don't see the numbers. I don't read a black and white world in statistics.
I retorted to her a truth of mine, how tired I was:
"Well then try and be nice to me some time. Maybe that'll work." And then I turned around, dismissed her, to go and scrape off this onion puss from the wall.
Just as I felt my thoughts slog back to how long this was going to take…, I heard her. Scraping some other puss, off the catwalk pillar. Shock plastered a partial grin across my face, and in return, I got this…smile carved beneath narrowed eyes. I imagined it was the same kind of thing a crocodile would pull off. Which got me weary, because crocodiles preen before they sink beneath the surface, and they roll to maul. I didn't know if Jade was above that.
She isn't. For the record.
"This…might be more fun with some tunes."
I didn't realize what was brewing in her eyes. Believing in her stumble for the music—rag over her shoulder, bucket at hand—, it was a mistake of mine. She then smiled and turned to Derek, proclaimed that this was now fun, and he should join. Which was a mistake of his.
Jade schemed again. Off the cuff, she duped one to rip away the other.
Not a minute later, before the song finished, we were gone from the Blackbox Theater, and we left the security guard too stunned to follow.
She dropped the smile. Her eyes were serrated, and I walked carefully at Jade's heel. She worked her jaw.
"There. Happy?"
I gave you an inch. Now don't turn it into a mile…
I stopped listening. I read her eyes instead.
They were such a cold, lukewarm, brazen green that day.
. .
This whole thing— This dialogue between us.
It started then. That scheming, and the little things, and all the silent stage directions we were following because it was never in the dialogue.
There is no word for it. The most straightforward thing about Jade and I, it's in the glances, the promise to keep our mouths locked tight, the corners where nobody can find us…
And the soundless murmurs between us when we kiss, the ones I feel leak down my throat.
I devour her mutely.
Hope you enjoyed!
:)