It's hard to be lonely in a house filled to the brim with people. People being women of all ages, varying levels of psychic ability, and more or less tenuous relation to the more permanent residents of the house.
The house is filled with bodies tall enough to reach for books on the highest shelf, hands and mouths to soothe scraped knees or fill a glass of milk, laps to sit in, mouths to press a goodnight kiss against her forehead, and arms to envelope her in too tight hugs.
It's also -- according to common knowledge in the little rundown elementary school with rusted swing sets and plastic slides, their color slowly fading in the sun -- filled with witches.
Blue Sargent is not lonely. Blue Sargent has no friends.
The two facts exist together as two indisputable truths.
There is always something going on at the house. A reading. A lecture. A practice in self-guided mediation. The laying of hands. Dinner being made in the kitchen while a veritable litter of children play on the floor. All of the above at the same time. There's laughter and screaming and only at night does a kind of stillness settle over the house and its inhabitants.
Blue Sargent loves her family. Blue Sargent hates the noise that fills every corner of her home.
In a house full of bodies and arms and laughter and crying, it's easy to overlook the absence of one quietly serious little girl who does all of her homework on time and carefully hides her broccoli in a napkin rather than kick up a fuss about its presence on her dinner plate.
The house is particularly loud today. Blue's shoulders are nearly to her earlobes, molars grinding together hard enough to shatter rocks by the time she slips out through the backdoor and runs to a crack in the fence that separates their backyard from the forest beyond.
The forest is her Fortress of Solitude. Her Forest of Solitude, if you will. A moniker Blue has never spoken out loud but is immensely proud of all the same. A secret that is just her own. In a house where most things are shared or handed down, it's a treasure in and of itself.
It's her favorite time of the year, when the sticky heat of summer gives way to the crisper warmth of autumn and the trees explode in a kaleidoscope of colors. The further she walks down the worn path winding between the trees, the easier she breathes.
Inside her hand-me-down rainboots (a faded yellow with water color sunflowers re-painted on them after each rainstorm washes them away) her feet are too hot in the two pairs of thick socks necessary to keep her from stepping clean out of her boots. Underneath her arm she carries a book that the school librarian said was Too Complicated for her age.
Blue stops short at her destination, a tall and wide beech tree that's the perfect shape to read beneath. The spot -- the Perfect spot, Her spot -- is occupied by a strange boy.
One she hasn't seen before.
For a moment, she thinks that maybe he's a ghost. Maybe everyone was wrong and her Sight is just finally coming in.
But Blue's pretty sure ghosts don't have black eyes or grimy looking casts or jeans with frayed hems.
"Who are you?" Blue demands sharply, her eyes pointed with accusation. "That isn't your tree."
One of the kids in the house mentioned that there were witches nearby. The thing is, he did it in this dumb spoooooky voice that left Jack pretty much convinced he was lying, and he's more or less forgotten the story. Even now with the sudden appearance of a girl, his mind doesn't go to witch house. It doesn't actually... go to anything at all, really. Completely blank, startled at being addressed out here in the middle of nowhere.
His eyes go wide, and he freezes with his hands clutching his book.
Jack got thrown out of the car because he couldn't stop hiccuping. Because noise set his father off. Because kids were meant to be neither seen nor heard, and saying the wrong thing could bring down a world of pain. He was safer not saying anything at all, particularly after being levelled with something confrontational.
That's the same strategy he employs here — no answer, total silence, just... staring at her.
He wants to say that he's pretty sure the tree doesn't belong to anybody, that she doesn't own the forest. Probably. He wants to apologize, maybe. Mostly, he just wants her to go away.
If prompted, Blue would be happy to discuss the particulars and implications of tree ownership and how they apply to this situation. But there's no reply to Blue's question and she takes a moment to re-evaluate the ghost theory. What that looks like from outside is intense staring followed by a narrowing of her eyes, a pursing of her lips and finally a decisive shake of her head.
No. He's not a ghost. Not only does he look like just a kid like her (if more accident prone) she's pretty sure ghosts don't read. Also, ghosts don't look scared. Again. Pretty sure.
(She'll have to ask her mom when she comes home. Or maybe Persephone. Persephone is less likely to ask any uncomfortable questions in return. Questions like "what were you doing in the forest?" and "what have we said about talking to strangers?")
"Are you mute or just rude?" she asks, testing her back-up theories out loud. Maybe he doesn't understand English. Everyone in town understands English. But one time, a lady came to stay with them for a month and she didn't speak a word of English that whole time. Persephone had to translate everything in her soft and unobtrusive voice.
Blue liked that lady. They spent some time in the cat/telephone/sewing room together. Blue playing with one of the cats and the lady sewing on the ancient sewing machine. The only sounds the rattle of the sewing machine and whatever spilled in through the doorway from the rest of the house.
But he's not giving Blue that blank, but polite, look the lady would always give anyone directing a question to her in English. And, now that Blue thinks about it, the raggedy paperback he's clutching is definitely in English. (Begrudgingly, she has to admit that it's a good choice. Even if he is mute or rude.)
"When someone asks you a question, you're supposed to answer."
He's supposed to answer, but he doesn't know what he's supposed to say. He doesn't know what answer is right, and it leaves him seizing up with some executive dysfunction — heart pounding, words stuck in his throat that just refuse to leave because if he can't say the right thing he'll say the wrong thing. She's just a kid, it's not like the consequences are the same here as they are with his dad, but it isn't really about anything so logical as that. It's ingrained, instinct, habit, automatic anxiety that he can't shut off.
He won't get in trouble, he won't get hurt, but he still can't... say anything.
Finally, finally, what he manages is a croaked out, "Okay."
It's said as he urgently climbs to his feet, and without waiting for another question or sticking around to find out if he got it right, he takes off into the woods. He'll just hide in that room they gave him and read in there. Again.
It sucks, though, because that was a really good spot.
Two days later, the memory of that mild confrontation has faded mostly to something benign. What are the odds she'll be out there again at the exact same place at the exact same time as he is? Probably pretty low, right? A couple of the older, troubled kids are having a screaming match that stresses him into breathlessness, so he decides to chance it. He heads out to the beech tree.
The forest has probably never seen such a strange standoff before. Blue staring down the silent boy, one hand on her hip (her other arm unfortunately busy keeping the too thick book from falling onto the leafy ground), and her chin jutting out defiantly, while the boys face twists in some internal battle.
Blue's brow creases. It's not like she asked him something hard. But he's acting like she's Ms. Marlowe asking him to do a math problem on the board in front of everyone.
Okay
Not mute then. Just rude.
Blue barely has a chance to finish the thought, much less ask another question, before the boy scrambles to his feet and disappears between the trees. Blue's creased brow turns into a proper frown. The tree trunk and the worn spot at its base are both warmed from his body. Try as she might, she can't quite get settled into her book after he's left.
Blue doesn't end up asking Persephone or her mother about the finer points of ghosts. Forest-boy is added to her carefully hoarded collection of secrets. Not the good ones -- like forest of solitude or the polished bit of green glass she picked up on a rare beach vacation and keeps beneath one of the floorboards of her bedroom-- but the ones Maura doesn't necessarily need to know about. Like the crudely drawn witch with a crooked nose and bird's nest hair someone shoved into her backpack last Friday. Or the Mickey Mouse watch she lost to the river last winter. Little pinpricks of guilt.
She tries to put him out of her mind. He's never been in the forest before. Odds are he won't be there again. Except something about him nags at her like a splinter stuck beneath her skin. Maybe it's just guilt. The look on his face before he ran off keeps snagging in her memory. She's not mean. Not like Jenna at school. But, he looked at her like she was.
Two days later, Blue sits at the base of the beech tree in a pair of artfully patched jeans, her sneakers stained with sharpie where she's drawn intricate patterns along the side of the sole. Some of it has smudged and faded, she'll need to redraw the lines soon enough. The book she's reading is significantly thinner than the one from the other day (but only because she finished the other one, thank you very much, and her class isn't going back to the school library until next week) a look of intense focus on her face. She twirls one of her tight curls around her left index finger, teeth working against the inside of her cheek as she reads, her eyes flickering across the words.
The air is getting cooler, but the sun is still warm.
Later, Blue won't be able to say exactly what makes her raise her eyes from the page. But she looks up from her book and there he is. Standing in front of her. Forest-boy. Just when she convinced herself she'd never see him again. She bites her lip and considers him like she would a wild hare or bird crossing her path in the forest.
"How did you hurt your arm? Has someone signed your cast yet?" That's what people do when you have a cast. Blue's never had one or signed one. But she knows these things.
He didn't mean to stand there staring at her, it's just that he stepped out around the path and only noticed her two seconds too late to hide. It drove him to utter stillness, frozen there with another book of his own, stuck like a deer in the headlights before she'd even looked up at him. Waiting for the flight instinct to kick in, except that it got delayed by curiosity. Too busy looking at her to remember to bolt.
He's been caught. His eyes go wide again, and it takes him a few too many seconds to answer.
How did you hurt your arm is complicated and embarrassing, but the concept of lying has been firmly beaten out of him. Honesty is a sharp, constant tug — one he can evade by not saying anything at all. The second question is easier. He looks down at his arm like he has to check, even though he already knows the answer.
"No."
It hadn't really occurred to him that anyone might want to. Actually, he wasn't even aware that's something expected of him, that he should have planned for. If he'd have known, he'd have asked one of the older kids to do it just to get it over with.
The silence stretches out for a few seconds (that might as well be an eternity) uninterrupted by everything but the occasional angry chirp from the birds flitting through the branches of the trees above and around them. (Blue could tell him, if he asked, that those particular noises are territorial. The birds above them are chasing off intruders from their tree.)
It seems, from the wide-eyed (frightened?) look on his face, that this might be a repeat of the other day. Blue's throat tightens around a barrage of follow-up questions to break the silence. But she's distracted by the glance down at his cast followed by the monosyllabic answer.
(Blue learned the word monosyllabic only two weeks ago, and she takes care to use it at least once a day. Even if just in her own head.)
Not rude today then.
Perhaps Blue would press on the unanswered first question, if she wasn't so thoroughly distracted by the confirmation of the latter. She makes a sound similar to what a mechanic might make after popping open the hood of a car and finding the engine in complete, visible disrepair. The kind of noise that makes it clear that there's going to be a problem here.
An unsigned cast at their age tells the whole world that the wearer has no friends. If Blue is ever so lucky to break anything and require a cast -- sadly, she seems to have been cursed with particularly hard bones; even falling from the top of a tall tree last year didn't break them -- everyone at the house will sign it and decorate it with their own little flourishes until there's simply no room left for anyone at school to leave their mark there.
From the back of her book -- tucked between the last page and the cover -- she pulls a bookmark. Even from a distance, it's obviously handmade by someone who does not have a great career in bookmark-making ahead of them: Light blue cardstock absolutely covered in stickers (ranging from obscure children's characters to little gold stars) with a silky dark blue ribbon threaded to a hole punched in one end. Arguably the top. Carefully, she tucks the bookmark between the pages to keep her place and then she shuts the book around it and puts it down on one of the exposed roots of the beech tree.
With one hand braced against the tree trunk, she carefully climbs to her feet. From a pocket in her jeans, she pulls a green sharpie with a flourish and holds it out to him to view.
"I can do it," she offers, like she's doing him a giant favor. "If you want."
Blue considers showing him her sneakers, as evidence of her artistic ability. But honestly, with no signatures at all, he probably doesn't care either way.
For as timid as he seems, he's equally sharp. His eyes flicker over everything from her bookmark to her sneakers to the cover of the book to her expression, keen like she's a puzzle to solve or like a wrong move might have her pulling out a knife.
Everything about her is colorful. Everything about her looks happy, except for the attitude. That, like the birds, seems territorial and barbed.
But she's offering to sign his cast, and that's probably a good thing, right? If it's something people expect him to have done? Maybe it'll make him look less like a loser showing up to school on Monday if he has someone's name scrawled on there. Who's that, your mom, your brother, your daddy? He'll be able to honestly, defiantly tell them no. He won't really be able to say that it's from a friend, but it's still better than the alternative.
Plus, maybe if she signs it she'll let him sit on the other side of the tree today.
"Okay."
He casts one last glance over his shoulder like he's saying goodbye to the version of events where he runs again, and instead takes a couple of slow, wary steps her direction. He stops maybe just a few feet too far away, and holds out his forearm in offering. It's a bright neon orange affair that doesn't remotely mesh well with his dark blue hoodie, arguably overkill for the largely perfect, mild weather. It looks like he probably ought to be too hot, but he's skinny, he's healing, he's a little anemic. He runs cold — particularly that arm, and the fingertips at the end of the cast.
Last year, everyone in the house piled into the aging Volvo (a vehicle without much going for it aside gets-you-where-you're-going and has-decent-cargo-space-I-guess) and Calla drove them to the traveling carnival. Blue rode every fast ride she was allowed onto -- argued (unsuccessfully) with a particularly disinterested ride-worker about the unfairness of the height requirements on the rickety rollercoaster -- and wished fervently that she could be having hot dogs and cotton candy instead of the homemade sandwiches Maura magicked up from her purse as the sun went down.
They played none of the midway games (scams, Calla scoffed) even though the stuffed animal prizes tugged hard on Blue's soul. Persephone paid five dollars to have her palm read in a rickety little tent with stars painted on it. The genericness of the fortunes told entirely made up by the showmanship of the so-called fortune teller inside.
But, most importantly, Maura took Blue down to the small petting zoo set up on the very edges of the carnival. They bought one small cone of animal feed and waded into the fray. The little enclosure smelt of saw dust and animal droppings and the cute baby goats were desperately outnumbered by the people wanting to pet them. The bigger goats roamed around eying white paper cones clutched in sticky hands, butting their heads against hips and elbows in their attempts to get at the little food pellets.
A deer stood shoulders above the rest of the animals with soft and gentle eyes. Disinterested in handfuls of animal feed offered out to her, she shifted out of the way of each attempted touch. Blue spent an eternity in that tent, slowly inching her way closer, letting the doe get used to her scent, before holding out a mostly-clean hand, and waiting until her arm trembled with the effort. Finally, the doe allowed Blue one gentle pet. Blue's fingers astounded by the softness of her ears before she darted away.
Forest-boy reminds her of that doe when he stops just out of her reach and offers his cast out. Every line of his body seems to signal that he's ready to dart back into the trees. So it's with a solemn look on her face that she steps forward, and tugs the cap off the sharpie. Decisively, she snaps it onto the back of the sharpie and reaches out her left hand to support his wrist.
"I'm going to add some vines and leaves too," she tells him. Fact rather than statement. He's a boy, so she won't do little flowers.
First thing first though, she neatly prints her name (B L U E) across a finger's length of the bright orange cast. There's a look of intense concentration on her face, her tongue trapped between her teeth and a frown bearing down on her brow. Once the letters are finished, she begins on the winding vines.
Fingers and eyes locked on her task, Blue's mind is left free to roam. Forest-boy is more of a mystery than she thought when she first saw him. He looks old enough to go to school, but he doesn't go to her school. Blue knows because everyone knows everyone in the little elementary school. And there are no other schools in town. Blue knows for certain because when she begged Maura to send her to any other school but That One, after her first day of first grade, they spent an evening researching the nearest elementary schools and marking them on a map. Children his age are required (by the law) to go to school. Blue knows that from the same evening when their pins on the map all proved too far to travel daily and she said she'd just not go to school then and learn everything she needed from books instead. Patiently, Maura helped her look up school laws, and by the end of the evening, Blue was resigned to her fate.
So, by not going to school, he is basically a criminal. Or his parents are. Maybe he's a runaway. Maybe his whole family are runaways. On the run from the law for some-- diamond heist or something.
With a flourish, Blue finishes the last leaf and looks up at the boy.
"You have to tell me your name now," she tells him. Her eyes dart down to her name on his cast and back up again. It's only fair.
For what it's worth, he wouldn't mind the flowers — though, it's better that she doesn't. His dad would mind the flowers, and whenever he gets around to picking Jack up again he'd be bound to hear another round all about how he's a pussy and a queer and a few other things Jack only understands the context of but not necessarily the actual definition. He thinks they were pretty on her rain boots the other day, anyway.
He stands patiently, passively accepting whatever it is she's set her mind to, not a word or a twitch of protest in him, even though his foot hurts a little from standing as rigid as he does. Not because he's afraid to move, necessarily, just that he doesn't think he's supposed to, and he doesn't want to mess her up. He doesn't want to mess this up.
Blue.
He's young enough still, insular enough still, that it doesn't occur to him Blue might be a weird name. His dad has a friend called Red, though that's mostly because of the color of his hair. Hers isn't blue, but that's none of his business.
When she finishes, he hugs his cast to his chest like it's something precious. Whether it's because he's defensive of his injury or defensive of his handiwork is impossible to decipher. It feels a little bit like she might've been trying to trick him, but he doesn't feel tricked. He's not keeping it a secret, he probably would have told her if she just asked.
"Jack," is the simple answer, but it's accompanied by a visible pause that suggests he's got more to say. Something about the part in his lips, the quiet preparatory intake of breath, steeling himself. "I'll leave you alone if you let me read on the other side of your tree."
He won't bother her. Won't mess up her spot. Won't even be in her line of sight, he'll go on the complete opposite side.
Please.
There are, technically, a thousand other spots in this forest to read. Twice as many trees. It's just that this one feels like the one. The correct and appropriate place.
It's a good thing that he stands still. Practically, because the cast is an uneven canvas and even the smallest motion could mess up the intricate (for an eight year old) lines she's drawing along its surface. More importantly, it makes Blue feel like it did when the doe stood still for her. Even if it was just for one tremulous second, and this stretches out for far longer.
Jack
Blue turns the name over in her mind and decides that (1) it suits him and (2) he is probably not a fairy. The book sitting forgotten at the base of the beech tree is a collection of faerie tales. Not childish fairy tales like Cinderella or Snow White. But tales from faerie where the fairies aren't dainty women with butterfly wings, and not knowing the rules can have dire consequences. Like returning after a day to find a hundred years have passed. But if he was a fairy -- the dangerous kind -- he probably wouldn't have given his name so easily. (Though it would've been a good explanation as to why he's in the woods.)
It wasn't her purpose to trick him into giving up his name. Unless he was a fairy, in which case that was a pretty clever trick. Wasn't it? Except he's probably not a fairy. Fairies don't have names like Jack.
Blue blinks when he continues and a rush of words (easily twice or three times as many as he has spoken to her across the span of two days) fall from his lips like they're in a hurry. She tugs the sharpie cap free and clicks it back into place. She has green sharpie stains on her right index finger and reflexively she rubs her finger over them.
An immediate and sharp NO sits heavy on Blue's chest. She's been brought up to share, to make space, to invite-- but she count on one hand the things she has that are both only hers, and have never belonged to anyone else before her. The beech tree is one of them. (Presumably, other people have read beneath it. But not in Blue's lifetime.) But her name is printed on his cast like a promise. Perhaps, if it was a trap, she's the one who fell into it.
"Is that a threat?" she asks, more curious than accusative. "Or a promise?"
See, with a conditional clause like that, it sounds a little like maybe if she doesn't let him read on the other side of the tree, he won't leave her alone, but bother her until she gives in. If it's a threat, she will never give in. Blue Sargent does not negotiate with terrorists. Even when it leads to her walking home with sopping wet sneakers for reasons she'd rather not get into at the moment.
Jack winds up invalidating his answer a little simply by giving it.
"Which one do you want it to be?" It's a genuine question, and the implication is it's that one — which doesn't make for a very good foundation if it's threat. He's not even sure how he'd follow through. Bug her, maybe, but he doesn't... actually want to do that. First, because it sounds resoundingly uncomfortable and would draw too much attention to him. Second, because he's pretty sure she wouldn't tolerate it even if he tried, and he's not sure how exactly it is she'd retaliate. Some boys find that to be a challenge, they find it exciting, they pull pigtails. Jack has a long history and a cast on his arm that has taught him not to poke things knowing they come with consequences. He still has bruises on his ribs and his toes are too broken for him to really run. If she decided to stomp on his foot there's a very good chance he'd piss himself.
He figures if threat is the right answer it means he won't have to follow through, and if promise is the right answer, well, obviously he won't have to follow through either. He doesn't have to know which one is right if he lets her pick it herself.
If the answer is neither, well, he'll just go home. Maybe try again tomorrow, but earlier this time.
Blue's eyes narrow at his counter question and she tilts her head to consider him. This is not, generally, how conversations go. At home, everyone is ready to argue any particular point -- sometimes for the hell of it -- or they have an answer ready to go. At school-- Well things quickly get heated at school. This sort of quiet surrender is new. She's not sure she likes it, but she's not sure she dislikes it either.
Up above them, a rush of leaves and sharp flutter of wings herald the crescendo of the territorial squabble. The ensuing silence an obvious victory. Blue sucks her lower lip in between her teeth and chews on it while she thinks. She turns the sharpie over in her fingers in a complicated little eight pattern.
"The one that's true," she says finally, having weighed the possibilities against the principle and philosophy of the thing. Obviously making threats isn't very nice, but if that's what he's doing, she'd rather know that. The truth is important, you see.
It's probably not the answer Jack expected or wanted. Maybe it's the look on his face or her name on his cast or Blue's natural sense of curiosity, but she shoves the sharpie back into the pocket from where she got it and retreats to the beech tree.
"You can pick any side you want except this one," she tells him over her shoulder, touching a hand against the smooth bark of the tree. "This one is mine. If you don't bother me, I won't bother you."
His eyes flicker momentarily from her face to the dance of the sharpie in her fingers — he clocks the green smudge, the wear on the brand label, the flourish — and then yanks them right back up to her expression again. Trying to decipher it, and having... not very much luck, admittedly. He doesn't get a lot of facetime with people — pun not intended but definitely enjoyed — particularly facetime with girls. Never outside of school, save the foster kids who don't spend much time around him if they can help it.
It's definitely not the answer he wanted, and he seems almost put out — precarious like a candle in the breeze — but he steadies when she round-about grants her permission. Perks up, even, if you know what you're looking for. Most people don't. He doesn't want to look too excited, lest she take it away from him.
Maybe he should think it's weird, that she's claimed a spot beneath the tree as her own. Maybe anybody else might have scoffed or poked fun. He doesn't; he accepts it as a written law and obeys it by picking his own spot at a nearly ninety degree angle. He could turn his head and catch sight of her profile if he bent right, but if he looks straight forward he can't see her at all. He tries it out for a few seconds, then gets up, walks around, and tries the spot at her other ninety degrees.
Better.
This one is officially his, in accordance with the Law of the Tree.
It takes a few minutes to let himself actually get immersed in his book. At first he's entirely too aware of her presence, and it takes deliberate effort not to glance over at her like a freak. Eventually her breathing and her rustling becomes a little familiar, his hackles slowly fall, and he can actually concentrate on the words in front of him.
As promised, he doesn't bother her. Quiet as the tree itself, he just sits and reads until he loses track of time. When he tunes back in again the afternoon sun has begun to slink precariously down, which means he needs to go. House curfew is dusk, even though that's designed with the freedom and autonomy of the older kids in mind. He doesn't cause enough of a stir for them to realize he probably shouldn't be wandering out into the woods on his own until the sun's almost down.
He doesn't plan on giving them a reason to today, either.
When he stands, there's an awkward moment where he looks at the path home, then looks at her, then hesitates. Not really sure if he should... say something, or if they're ignoring each other so much that even parting should go unremarked upon.
Ultimately, he settles on a simple, "Bye."
And leaves.
He doesn't come back on Sunday. On Monday, she'll spot him in school for the first time. Her grade, her class, but seated in the back corner in the last empty desk, quiet and focused in a way very few of their peers are. Even during their free time he keeps his head down, not reading but rather scrawling sentence upon sentence into a composition notebook without looking up.
It catches the attention of a few of their other classmates, which is probably why a couple of them knock him down and yank it out of his backpack after lunch.
Blue bends and picks up her book before settling back down to read. Almost a ritual, she cracks open the pages and moves the bookmark to its place in the back. Ready for whenever she might need it again. She holds the book up in front of her face, head aimed straightforward. The printed letters might as well be striped lines for all the attention she pays them. Instead, her eyes keep darting to the side, tracking his movements as he sits, then gets back up, rounds the tree, and sits again.
The first time Blue found the beech tree, she did much the same. Her side, of course, is the superior one. The tree trunk is a little wider, the dip just below it nestled between exposed roots just perfect for a person to sit curled up with a book. The other sides aren't bad just not as good. And this one is hers.
Eventually, once she is certain that he's settled -- judge from the lack of movement, and occasional rasp of paper against paper as he turns the pages -- she lowers the book into her lap and starts reading for real this time.
The story doesn't captivate her quite as it did when she first sat down. Her thoughts are too tangled up in the mystery. She wants to ask what he's doing in the forest, how old he is, what he's reading, if he has a last name, and a million other questions all bubbling up in her inquisitive little mind. But a deal is a deal and she doesn't want him thinking he can just disturb her. So she lets her mind drift between the twisted deals of the faeries and the boy sitting almost within arm reach of her if she just leans a little (or a lot) to the side.
Blue's just beginning to think that granting him permission to share her tree was a bad idea -- not that he's doing anything wrong, he's being very respectful, but the fact of his presence is distracting -- when he gets up and leaves with the barest of goodbyes.
Shortly after, Blue climbs to her feet as well and trots down the path that leads home. There's not a curfew waiting for her exactly, more a general understanding that Blue will not stay out late enough for Maura to worry. (Later in life, the fluidity of that time span will become a point of contention, but for the moment, it's been working just fine.)
On Sunday morning, Blue decides before she even gets out of bed that a little bit of quiet company beneath her tree isn’t so bad after all. If they finish reading their books at the same time, maybe they can swap for a while so no one has to go fetch another one.
Before heading out to the forest, she makes herself an egg salad sandwich on homemade bread, cutting it into two crooked triangles and wrapping them separately. She even grabs two little ziplock bags of chips from the pantry -- transferred from the Family Size bag that's cheaper than the 24 pack of individual snack-sized ones -- and jams them into a little back pack.
Three hours later, she's eaten both bag of chips while reading, her gaze darting between the pages, the spot that's his along the side of the three, and the place between the trees through which he appears and disappears. It remains empty.
Blue eats both sandwich triangles before giving up and heading home. For the best really, she tells herself; clearly she was too hungry to share anyway.
Come Monday morning, Blue is almost disappointed with when Jack turns up in her classroom. It means he’s not some kind of school-dodging criminal, the son of international art thieves, a runaway (either escaping the kind of unhappy home Blue has only encountered in books, or hiding from the mob after witnessing a particularly gruesome murder depending on how fanciful she’s feeling at the time), or cursed to walk the forests of the world, forever stuck in the body of a boy for centuries (probably as punishment for some kind of crime against the faerie). He’s just an ordinary boy.
They don't speak. He doesn't acknowledge her, and she won't do him the disservice of associating him with herself and her family on his very first day. See, Blue Sargent has committed the four capital sins of elementary school: she's the wrong kind of poor, her skin is too dark, her family too weird, and she won't just sit down and shut up.
It's not like they're friends or anything, she tells herself at lunch when he sits alone while she sits alone on a bench big enough to hold two. Her name is on his cast, but that’s not a binding contract. It’s just a kindness.
It's what she tells herself when Beauregard Frazer III and his crew rounds in on Jack after lunch. Maura's voice, asking if she might kindly consider getting into less trouble, echoes in her ears.
The smart thing to do, would be to ignore it.
But it's not the right thing.
The indecision doesn't last long.
“That’s not yours.” Blue’s voice is as sharp now as it was when she first found Jack sitting in her spot beneath the beech tree. She descends on the scene like an avenging angel in sneakers and a skirt that leaves her bruised and scabbed knees bare.
“Butt out, butthead,” Bo tells her. (Except it's probably meant to be Beau. All fancy spelling and that even though there's never been a single fancy person in the entire Frazer family.) His friends burst into laughter, repeating the word butthead like it's the height of wit. To be fair, for Bo/Beau it probably is.
"Give it back," Blue demands, jutting her chin out defiantly at him, her hands settled on her hips.
"Or what, little witchy-witch?"
Familiar anger roars to life like a mostly banked fire when you add a little bit of oxygen. It heats Blue's cheeks and dances in her eyes.
"Maybe I'll put a spell on you," she retorts like a whip crack, and a sudden unease spreads among the boys. "I have a whole book at home. All I need is a toad and some mouse blood to make your hair fall out and food turn to ashes in your mouth."
He stays on the ground a few seconds longer than he might have, not because he's hurt but rather because he's baffled by her intervention. It's wholly unexpected — actually, when he saw her in his class he figured she'd probably ignore him like she does at the tree, and he wouldn't blame her. He's doomed to be a social pariah. Between arriving a few weeks late into the school year, being too skinny, sporting a cast, and being weirdly too quiet to talk to anybody it was never in the stars for him to have a good first month here. Eventually he'll fade into the background and he won't even be remarkable enough to bully, but for right now he's an unfortunate novelty.
But there she is anyway — he recognizes her shoes before he recognizes her voice, and it takes another second for him to wrap his head around the fact that she's actually standing up for him. He's filled up with equal parts gratitude and embarrassment. Not, as one might suspect, because she's a girl, but rather because he's in a situation like this in the first place.
"It's okay," he says, pushing himself slowly to his feet. Foot, mostly, because three toes on his right side still twinge and ache when they're aggravated like this. "He can't read it anyway, he doesn't know how."
It's an unintentionally sick burn. Beau is in remedial language arts with a handful of other people officially-unofficially dubbed slow kids. Beau's face heats up to a furious shade of scarlet, and he bites out an enraged, "You stupid queer!"
Unfortunate timing; it's just loud enough and offensive enough to ping the radar of a nearby teacher, who storms over positively incensed by the language. That's all it really takes to get his groupies to scatter; they were already tentative allies after Blue's promise of a wrathful curse. Probably not true, but she has just enough of a reputation to leave them doubting. In his rage, Beau throws Jack's notebook at her... poorly, ineffectually. The covers flap open along the way, pages fanning out, slowing the momentum so it bounces harmlessly off her belly and lands pages-down, open, on the ground at her feet.
"It's not okay," Blue snaps back at Jack, like she's angry with him too. Like he ought to be shoulder to shoulder with her right now, defending his territory and his rights. Like he should know better than to let people push him around on his first day. But her eyes stay on their aggressors as if eye contact is the only thing keeping them at bay.
Blue's been the target of a composition book thrown to her head before (a particularly rowdy fight with Orla) and she braces for the potential of sharp corners. But Bo/Beau's aim is terrible and his throwing arm less than impressive. (As certainly as he'll never live up to the literary aspirations of his name, there's no baseball scholarship in his future.)
Blue looks down at the book, facedown on the ground, and then back at Bo/Beau. Entirely unimpressed. She hopes she's cocking one eyebrow. She's been practicing in the bathroom mirror and she gets it about fifty percent of the time. It's easier when she can see what she's doing.
"Wow," she says, "you throw like a girl."
It's not really an insult, Blue knows. Girls throw just as well as boys (sometimes better). But Bo/Beau thinks it's an insult and that's what matters.
Bo/Beau's face gets even redder, and his hands curl into fists. Maybe he would've let his hands do the talking (at least there's one thing he's good at other than being the worst human being in the whole school), but that's when the teacher bears down on them.
"Beauregard," she says, "we have talked about this! You come with me, right now."
On their way towards the door, the teacher pauses.
"Blue," she says, "don't encourage bad behavior."
Blue's jaw clamps shut. Sometimes, Maura tells her, it's better to say nothing at all. Even though none of this is her fault. It works, and the teacher disappears into the building with a not-remotely-contrite Beauregard.
Once the door shuts behind them, Blue crouches down and picks up Jack's note book. She turns it around and brushes the dirt off the pages carefully as she stands. Jack was right. Bo/Beau would not have been able to read it. Blue knows because she can't read it, and she's the best reader in her class.
"The kids here are jerks," Blue tells him. "Especially Beauregard. Don't bring anything you can't stand to lose to class."
Carefully, she closes it and holds it out to Jack.
"We go to the library on Tuesdays. I can show you which books are good."
There's a moment of uncertainty there in his posture and his features when her eyes sweep down over the pencil scrawl in his notebook. Not fear, not wariness, he's not particularly ashamed of the contents, it's just... weird, the idea that she might see what he's written. Then again, it's probably an unnecessary worry — his handwriting is undeniably awful. He's got some unfortunately underdeveloped dexterity in his hands still, and it won't improve much later in life. Once he's old enough to be able to do most of his writing on a computer, he won't bother practicing enough to make it more legible.
Truthfully, maybe he's a little disappointed she either wasn't interested or couldn't read it. He doesn't say it, tries not to look it, and diligently tucks it away in his backpack again with a soft, "Thanks. I don't really have anything to bring anyway."
At least that means he doesn't have to worry about it.
He shoves his arms through the straps of his backpack, then hooks his thumbs around them for lack of anything better to do with his hands — and suddenly way too aware of them. Where do people normally put them when they're talking? Their hips? That seems kind of stern. So does crossing his arms. Letting them dangle by his side would make him feel like a stupid caveman or something.
And now he's standing there, talking to her, feeling as awkward as ever — even though he wants to talk to her.
"I know which books are good," he says before he can help himself. It just struck on a tiny little mote of indignation at the thought that he needs somebody else to tell him which books to read. It sounded rude though, probably, which is not what he meant to do. She just stood up for him, of course he doesn't want to be an asshole to her, and he fumbles his way through his best attempt at saving it. "I mean, I just. I read a lot. And I know the library catalog system. I mean, I don't need any help- unless you're, like, recommending one, which is fine. It's cool. If you did. Not because I'm stupid, though, just... because you think it's... good."
When he finally stops, it's with his mouth pressed into a flat line. It was a whole journey, that weird apology-explanation-backpedal, and it ends on a note that reads very clearly how frustrated he is with himself.
There's a fine line between curious and nosy and Blue often finds herself on the wrong side of it. Perhaps with some time and effort -- growing familiarity with the lines of his writing -- she could read it. But he did not give her permission to read his private notes, so anything not visible at a glance is clearly off limits. She is nothing like Beauregard and his little crew of hoodlums.
It'd be a poor attempt at making a friend, she is certain, to invade his privacy right in front of him. Not, of course, that she knows much about making friends. In fact, so far, she has been infinitely better at making enemies.
Except her tentative attempt at friendship -- the school library is very bad, and requires some navigation to make it past the babyish books the school librarian is so keen on pushing -- is squashed near immediately. She didn't mean to imply that he's stupid or can't pick a book on his own. It's just that she knows the library like the back of her own hand and she thought it might be nice to share it with him.
Hurt flickers in Blue's eyes. Something soft and wounded. Before her expression begins to shut down entirely as he speaks. Eyes first. Then her mouth. Then the muscles in her cheeks and her shoulders. By the time he gets to his sorry she is already as shuttered as a store on Christmas day.
This is why she doesn't make friends.
Kids her age are dumb anyway.
"It's fine," she says, in that breezy way that means it's certainly not fine. She sweeps her hands down over her skirt -- a thick grey skirt that used to be Orla's and is safety pinned around Blue's waist, with a yarn border carefully (if somewhat unevenly) embroidered around the hem -- brushing away chips-crumbs from lunch.
"I'm sure you don't need my recommendations. Since you read a lot and know the library catalog system and all that."
With that, she turns on her heel and stalks into the school building where she proceeds to studiously ignore him.
That afternoon, she crashes into the house like a very localized thunder storm. Like a whirlwind, she storms up the stairs to her room where she picks a book she's read a thousand times before, then back down again and out the back door with a short "I don't want to talk about it!" to whoever might be in the kitchen.
Underneath her beech tree, she turns the pages of her book with such force it's a wonder only one of them rips. If he comes today, she tells herself, he'll have to find his own tree. She liked him way better when he didn't talk.
"Wait-" He starts, but it's as timid as the rest of him. Hardly weighted enough to break through her purposeful, determined stride away from him. He tries to catch her eye when they file back into class, but she doesn't flicker so much as a glance in his direction.
Great going, idiot.
Part of him is tempted not to go back to that tree. He's tempted to retreat into himself, write off this one sole potential friendship as an example that he's just never going to have any, and spend the rest of forever reading in his room beneath stomping teenager feet and bickering voices. He debates, because even if he wants to, should he? It's her tree, after all. If she doesn't want him there and he just shows up anyway, she'll either yell at him like she did Beau (daunting), pointedly ignore him while radiating dislike at him (awkward), or simply just leave at the first sight of him (guilty).
Linda, his foster mom, makes cupcakes. That's ultimately what helps him decide. He eats the one she gives him, then summons up courage he never would have had with his dad to ask her for another, so he can take it with him out into the woods. He's skinny, underweight, so it's not a very hard sell. She puts it on a paper plate, sticks some plastic wrap on top, and sternly reminds him to bring his trash home because littering is bad.
He already knows, and he promises.
It's not an easy feat, carrying a book and a cupcake while wearing a cast and hiking through the woods with broken toes. It's a lot of fumbling, a lot of almost smushing it, and he feels almost like he was juggling fine china that he finally gets to put down when he rounds the path to see the home stretch.
Then comes the awkward presentation — tentatively walking up to her across the grass, holding the plate out carefully balanced on one hand, forgetting he'd been carrying his book tucked up under his arm and consequently dropping it like a loser, and stumbling through a rushed, "Hi that's not what I meant and can I please go to the library with you?"
There’s no mistaking the sounds of Jack’s feet coming down the path. There’s something about his gait — a kind of hesitant shuffle almost — that’s both different from other people and instantly recognizable. Blue looks up from her book and the arguments she’s been having with an imaginary Jack — ranging from cooly dismissive to eviscerating him with her wit — when the actual Jack stops in front of her.
Even at first glance, this is already going nothing like she imagined.
The cupcake is unexpected. So is the contrite look on Jack’s face and the rustle-thud of his book against the forest floor.
Like most women in the little house nestled between two edges — the town’s and forest’s — Blue’s anger runs hot and close to the surface. Her ire is easy to wake. But it runs hot and bright and quick. Without further fuel, it dwindles quickly.
“Everyone goes to the library,” she tells him, needing to clarify that one misconception. It’s not a special invitation or anything. “The whole class. Every Tuesday. Right after lunch.”
Carefully, she plucks her bookmark — the same one from Saturday, though the book is new — from the back of the book and settles it between the pages to keep her place. She sets it aside on the same root as last time and climbs to her feet. She bends down near Jack, picking his book up from the ground and carefully brushing leaves and fresh dirt and little sticks from its pages.
Instead of handing it to him — he’s clearly out of hands — she tucks it against her body and considers the cupcake.
The frosting has gone flat where the plastic wrap presses against it. Little wrinkles in the plastic reflected in strange wavy patterns in the frosting. It looks almost store bought — the highest, almost unachievable luxury — and Blue’s eyes flicker between the extended plate and Jack’s face.
As far as apology offering goes, it’s a good one. Sweet treats are rare in Blue’s life. It’s not that Maura Sargent is leading the charge in a war on sugar or anything. But sweet things are for special occasions and frosting is a hassle. Banana nut muffins are Not, whatever Maura might think, a reasonable alternative to cupcakes just because she doesn’t want to deal with mixing or piping or cleaning up after frosting. (And Maura’ll be damned if she pays for ready-made frosting when it’s cheaper — and tastier — to make her own. Blue doubts both of those asserments. The tastier most of all. She’s had storebought cupcakes, every time a child that isn’t her has a birthday during the school year, and Maura’s lumpy frosting doesn’t even come close.)
”Did you bring a knife so we can split it?” A glance down at the cupcake to clarify it.
Well. That's good. Another reason to feel like an idiot. He was beginning to think he'd run out of them. It leaves him in a weird kind of limbo, stuck in purgatory holding a cupcake there until she slowly stands to set him free one way or another.
Not... exactly in the way he'd been expecting. Which is now sort of... what he's expecting.
"No, it's for you," sounding appropriately bewildered. He hasn't had a lot of interpersonal relationships, he hasn't owned a lot of material things. He doesn't really take himself into consideration when it comes to... well, anything, really but definitely not the distribution of goods, food, or money. It strikes him suddenly why she's asking and he's quick to try and set that to rest, "You don't have to feel... guilty, or anything. I already had one. I just brought this one for you."
Since when do people split apology cupcakes?
Well, since when do people give apology cupcakes, might be the better question.
On a sigh, he breaks down and admits, "I'm not really good at friends and talking and stuff."
There isn't, Blue thinks, enough time in the world to explain to Jack her upbringing and the importance of sharing. Or, for that matter, the difference between the vague concept of a cupcake earlier and the undeniable fact of a cupcake now.
"Okay," she says, perhaps a little uncertain, and takes the paper plate from his hand. As far as cupcakes go it's a nice one. Made nicer by the unexpectedness of its existence.
"Thank you," she adds in a mumble that's directed mostly at the cupcake and mostly out of obligation. She frowns at it, like it's a conundrum that needs solving. Like it's a symbol of their fraught relationship so far.
"I'm not either," she confesses. "Well. The friends stuff."
It's important to her that he doesn't think that she thinks of herself as a poor conversationalist. She's excellent at it. Far superior to her peers. Though, admittedly, she spends very little time engaging with said peers in friendly conversation. It tends to start semi-adversarial and escalate from there.
An elephant of silence sits between them, the pause lasting longer than is comfortable as Blue chews on the inside of her cheek and frowns at the cupcake and tries to figure out where they go from here. It's probably visible, when she makes a decision, determination sharpening her features before she holds his book out for him to take. It's a good one, she can tell. Both from the cover and the thickness.
"You can sit down, if you want," she offers magnanimously with a wide gesture towards her side of the tree. Between the roots, there is ample space for two eight-year-olds. (This summer, Maura and Blue fit side by side easy.) Given, of course, that one of them (Blue) is willing to share and the other (Jack) isn't too shy to take her up on it.
Cupcake plate in hand Blue makes a lap around the tree, eyes on the ground. Occasionally she leans forward and picks up a stick, considers it only to throw it away again. She's almost made a full lap around the tree when one of the sticks meets her approval. It's both thin and sturdy.
Next, she rounds on the giant tree stump (legend has it, the tree was diseased and about to fall and a local lumber jack took it down, but that was long before Blue's time, and she's only ever known it as a stump) a few steps away from the beech tree. She sets the plate down, tongue trapped between her teeth while she works to gently lift the plastic from the cupcake. Once free, she wraps it tightly around the stick and uses it to divide the cupcake into two roughly even parts. The crumbs held together by the frosting.
It's slow going and she ends up with a lot of frosting on her fingers. Carefully licking them clean, she returns to her side of the tree.
"The left one is a little bit bigger, so that one should be mine," she tells him, "But you should have the other half."
Like an apology accepted cupcake. Or the start of the kind of friendship she has only ever read about.
If he's sitting down at the base of the tree, she will sit down next to him -- only jostling him with her elbow once, and only by accident -- and offer out the slightly massacred cupcake for him to take one sticky half.
The offer to sit in her spot is met with all the appropriate reverence — to be honest, for a second there he thinks it's like a trick, or some kind of test. He's tentative about it, uncertain, but ultimately does slowly lower himself down at the very edge of the space, leaving ample room for her. He watches with keen interest as she fashions up a makeshift cupcake separator — truly impressive display of ingenuity there — and then obediently takes the smaller half as declared by Apology Cupcake Laws.
He doesn't eat it until she's in place, until after elbows have been jostled and limbs have been appropriately arranged. When they finally settle, it's with her left arm up against his right, his cast-arm tucked into his lap atop his book, and his cupcake hovering patiently somewhere around chest-height.
He'll take a bite after she does. It seems like the right thing to do.
After he swallows, he figures maybe... talking might be okay. Probably a good idea. Only one topic really comes to mind —
They don't know each other well enough yet, but Jack will come to learn that Blue nearly always means what she says. If there's ever a trick or a test to be passed, he's more likely to find it in her silence than in her words. Also, offering something as important as her spot without really meaning it would be Jenna-levels of mean.
Next to him, Blue peels the cupcake wrapper from the slightly-larger remnants of her cupcake and takes a bite. It's really good. Probably has real sugar in it and everything. In theory, you can sweeten cupcakes with honey, but in practice, Blue really, really doesn't recommend it. She transfers the cupcake to the hand closest to him, and licks the frosting off the fingers of her other hand carefully.
"It's called Hexwood." Blue grabs the book with her mostly-clean hand and turns it so he can see the cover with its twisted branches and the figures seemingly growing out of the wood.
"It's got knights and space travel and a forest that isn't really a forest in it." Blue takes another crumbly bite and chews it thoughtfully. "I've read it before. It's good. You can borrow it after you've finished yours."
A quick glance over in his direction. Maura would tell her that big gestures (like sharing library time or the spot below her tree or lending him her favorite book) don't always seem the same size to other people.
"If you want," Blue adds for good measure. It'd be a shame if they had a breakdown in communication this quickly. She sets the book down and twists around so she's half facing him.
"How about you?" She pauses to push the last of the cupcake into her mouth. "What are you reading?"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
It's hard to be lonely in a house filled to the brim with people. People being women of all ages, varying levels of psychic ability, and more or less tenuous relation to the more permanent residents of the house.
The house is filled with bodies tall enough to reach for books on the highest shelf, hands and mouths to soothe scraped knees or fill a glass of milk, laps to sit in, mouths to press a goodnight kiss against her forehead, and arms to envelope her in too tight hugs.
It's also -- according to common knowledge in the little rundown elementary school with rusted swing sets and plastic slides, their color slowly fading in the sun -- filled with witches.
Blue Sargent is not lonely.
Blue Sargent has no friends.
The two facts exist together as two indisputable truths.
There is always something going on at the house. A reading. A lecture. A practice in self-guided mediation. The laying of hands. Dinner being made in the kitchen while a veritable litter of children play on the floor. All of the above at the same time. There's laughter and screaming and only at night does a kind of stillness settle over the house and its inhabitants.
Blue Sargent loves her family.
Blue Sargent hates the noise that fills every corner of her home.
In a house full of bodies and arms and laughter and crying, it's easy to overlook the absence of one quietly serious little girl who does all of her homework on time and carefully hides her broccoli in a napkin rather than kick up a fuss about its presence on her dinner plate.
The house is particularly loud today. Blue's shoulders are nearly to her earlobes, molars grinding together hard enough to shatter rocks by the time she slips out through the backdoor and runs to a crack in the fence that separates their backyard from the forest beyond.
The forest is her Fortress of Solitude. Her Forest of Solitude, if you will. A moniker Blue has never spoken out loud but is immensely proud of all the same. A secret that is just her own. In a house where most things are shared or handed down, it's a treasure in and of itself.
It's her favorite time of the year, when the sticky heat of summer gives way to the crisper warmth of autumn and the trees explode in a kaleidoscope of colors. The further she walks down the worn path winding between the trees, the easier she breathes.
Inside her hand-me-down rainboots (a faded yellow with water color sunflowers re-painted on them after each rainstorm washes them away) her feet are too hot in the two pairs of thick socks necessary to keep her from stepping clean out of her boots. Underneath her arm she carries a book that the school librarian said was Too Complicated for her age.
Blue stops short at her destination, a tall and wide beech tree that's the perfect shape to read beneath. The spot -- the Perfect spot, Her spot -- is occupied by a strange boy.
One she hasn't seen before.
For a moment, she thinks that maybe he's a ghost. Maybe everyone was wrong and her Sight is just finally coming in.
But Blue's pretty sure ghosts don't have black eyes or grimy looking casts or jeans with frayed hems.
"Who are you?" Blue demands sharply, her eyes pointed with accusation. "That isn't your tree."
no subject
His eyes go wide, and he freezes with his hands clutching his book.
Jack got thrown out of the car because he couldn't stop hiccuping. Because noise set his father off. Because kids were meant to be neither seen nor heard, and saying the wrong thing could bring down a world of pain. He was safer not saying anything at all, particularly after being levelled with something confrontational.
That's the same strategy he employs here — no answer, total silence, just... staring at her.
He wants to say that he's pretty sure the tree doesn't belong to anybody, that she doesn't own the forest. Probably. He wants to apologize, maybe. Mostly, he just wants her to go away.
no subject
No. He's not a ghost. Not only does he look like just a kid like her (if more accident prone) she's pretty sure ghosts don't read. Also, ghosts don't look scared. Again. Pretty sure.
(She'll have to ask her mom when she comes home. Or maybe Persephone. Persephone is less likely to ask any uncomfortable questions in return. Questions like "what were you doing in the forest?" and "what have we said about talking to strangers?")
"Are you mute or just rude?" she asks, testing her back-up theories out loud. Maybe he doesn't understand English. Everyone in town understands English. But one time, a lady came to stay with them for a month and she didn't speak a word of English that whole time. Persephone had to translate everything in her soft and unobtrusive voice.
Blue liked that lady. They spent some time in the cat/telephone/sewing room together. Blue playing with one of the cats and the lady sewing on the ancient sewing machine. The only sounds the rattle of the sewing machine and whatever spilled in through the doorway from the rest of the house.
But he's not giving Blue that blank, but polite, look the lady would always give anyone directing a question to her in English. And, now that Blue thinks about it, the raggedy paperback he's clutching is definitely in English. (Begrudgingly, she has to admit that it's a good choice. Even if he is mute or rude.)
"When someone asks you a question, you're supposed to answer."
no subject
He won't get in trouble, he won't get hurt, but he still can't... say anything.
Finally, finally, what he manages is a croaked out, "Okay."
It's said as he urgently climbs to his feet, and without waiting for another question or sticking around to find out if he got it right, he takes off into the woods. He'll just hide in that room they gave him and read in there. Again.
It sucks, though, because that was a really good spot.
Two days later, the memory of that mild confrontation has faded mostly to something benign. What are the odds she'll be out there again at the exact same place at the exact same time as he is? Probably pretty low, right? A couple of the older, troubled kids are having a screaming match that stresses him into breathlessness, so he decides to chance it. He heads out to the beech tree.
no subject
Blue's brow creases. It's not like she asked him something hard. But he's acting like she's Ms. Marlowe asking him to do a math problem on the board in front of everyone.
Okay
Not mute then. Just rude.
Blue barely has a chance to finish the thought, much less ask another question, before the boy scrambles to his feet and disappears between the trees. Blue's creased brow turns into a proper frown. The tree trunk and the worn spot at its base are both warmed from his body. Try as she might, she can't quite get settled into her book after he's left.
Blue doesn't end up asking Persephone or her mother about the finer points of ghosts. Forest-boy is added to her carefully hoarded collection of secrets. Not the good ones -- like forest of solitude or the polished bit of green glass she picked up on a rare beach vacation and keeps beneath one of the floorboards of her bedroom-- but the ones Maura doesn't necessarily need to know about. Like the crudely drawn witch with a crooked nose and bird's nest hair someone shoved into her backpack last Friday. Or the Mickey Mouse watch she lost to the river last winter. Little pinpricks of guilt.
She tries to put him out of her mind. He's never been in the forest before. Odds are he won't be there again. Except something about him nags at her like a splinter stuck beneath her skin. Maybe it's just guilt. The look on his face before he ran off keeps snagging in her memory. She's not mean. Not like Jenna at school. But, he looked at her like she was.
Two days later, Blue sits at the base of the beech tree in a pair of artfully patched jeans, her sneakers stained with sharpie where she's drawn intricate patterns along the side of the sole. Some of it has smudged and faded, she'll need to redraw the lines soon enough. The book she's reading is significantly thinner than the one from the other day (but only because she finished the other one, thank you very much, and her class isn't going back to the school library until next week) a look of intense focus on her face. She twirls one of her tight curls around her left index finger, teeth working against the inside of her cheek as she reads, her eyes flickering across the words.
The air is getting cooler, but the sun is still warm.
Later, Blue won't be able to say exactly what makes her raise her eyes from the page. But she looks up from her book and there he is. Standing in front of her. Forest-boy. Just when she convinced herself she'd never see him again. She bites her lip and considers him like she would a wild hare or bird crossing her path in the forest.
"How did you hurt your arm? Has someone signed your cast yet?" That's what people do when you have a cast. Blue's never had one or signed one. But she knows these things.
no subject
He's been caught. His eyes go wide again, and it takes him a few too many seconds to answer.
How did you hurt your arm is complicated and embarrassing, but the concept of lying has been firmly beaten out of him. Honesty is a sharp, constant tug — one he can evade by not saying anything at all. The second question is easier. He looks down at his arm like he has to check, even though he already knows the answer.
"No."
It hadn't really occurred to him that anyone might want to. Actually, he wasn't even aware that's something expected of him, that he should have planned for. If he'd have known, he'd have asked one of the older kids to do it just to get it over with.
no subject
It seems, from the wide-eyed (frightened?) look on his face, that this might be a repeat of the other day. Blue's throat tightens around a barrage of follow-up questions to break the silence. But she's distracted by the glance down at his cast followed by the monosyllabic answer.
(Blue learned the word monosyllabic only two weeks ago, and she takes care to use it at least once a day. Even if just in her own head.)
Not rude today then.
Perhaps Blue would press on the unanswered first question, if she wasn't so thoroughly distracted by the confirmation of the latter. She makes a sound similar to what a mechanic might make after popping open the hood of a car and finding the engine in complete, visible disrepair. The kind of noise that makes it clear that there's going to be a problem here.
An unsigned cast at their age tells the whole world that the wearer has no friends. If Blue is ever so lucky to break anything and require a cast -- sadly, she seems to have been cursed with particularly hard bones; even falling from the top of a tall tree last year didn't break them -- everyone at the house will sign it and decorate it with their own little flourishes until there's simply no room left for anyone at school to leave their mark there.
From the back of her book -- tucked between the last page and the cover -- she pulls a bookmark. Even from a distance, it's obviously handmade by someone who does not have a great career in bookmark-making ahead of them: Light blue cardstock absolutely covered in stickers (ranging from obscure children's characters to little gold stars) with a silky dark blue ribbon threaded to a hole punched in one end. Arguably the top. Carefully, she tucks the bookmark between the pages to keep her place and then she shuts the book around it and puts it down on one of the exposed roots of the beech tree.
With one hand braced against the tree trunk, she carefully climbs to her feet. From a pocket in her jeans, she pulls a green sharpie with a flourish and holds it out to him to view.
"I can do it," she offers, like she's doing him a giant favor. "If you want."
Blue considers showing him her sneakers, as evidence of her artistic ability. But honestly, with no signatures at all, he probably doesn't care either way.
no subject
Everything about her is colorful. Everything about her looks happy, except for the attitude. That, like the birds, seems territorial and barbed.
But she's offering to sign his cast, and that's probably a good thing, right? If it's something people expect him to have done? Maybe it'll make him look less like a loser showing up to school on Monday if he has someone's name scrawled on there. Who's that, your mom, your brother, your daddy? He'll be able to honestly, defiantly tell them no. He won't really be able to say that it's from a friend, but it's still better than the alternative.
Plus, maybe if she signs it she'll let him sit on the other side of the tree today.
"Okay."
He casts one last glance over his shoulder like he's saying goodbye to the version of events where he runs again, and instead takes a couple of slow, wary steps her direction. He stops maybe just a few feet too far away, and holds out his forearm in offering. It's a bright neon orange affair that doesn't remotely mesh well with his dark blue hoodie, arguably overkill for the largely perfect, mild weather. It looks like he probably ought to be too hot, but he's skinny, he's healing, he's a little anemic. He runs cold — particularly that arm, and the fingertips at the end of the cast.
no subject
They played none of the midway games (scams, Calla scoffed) even though the stuffed animal prizes tugged hard on Blue's soul. Persephone paid five dollars to have her palm read in a rickety little tent with stars painted on it. The genericness of the fortunes told entirely made up by the showmanship of the so-called fortune teller inside.
But, most importantly, Maura took Blue down to the small petting zoo set up on the very edges of the carnival. They bought one small cone of animal feed and waded into the fray. The little enclosure smelt of saw dust and animal droppings and the cute baby goats were desperately outnumbered by the people wanting to pet them. The bigger goats roamed around eying white paper cones clutched in sticky hands, butting their heads against hips and elbows in their attempts to get at the little food pellets.
A deer stood shoulders above the rest of the animals with soft and gentle eyes. Disinterested in handfuls of animal feed offered out to her, she shifted out of the way of each attempted touch. Blue spent an eternity in that tent, slowly inching her way closer, letting the doe get used to her scent, before holding out a mostly-clean hand, and waiting until her arm trembled with the effort. Finally, the doe allowed Blue one gentle pet. Blue's fingers astounded by the softness of her ears before she darted away.
Forest-boy reminds her of that doe when he stops just out of her reach and offers his cast out. Every line of his body seems to signal that he's ready to dart back into the trees. So it's with a solemn look on her face that she steps forward, and tugs the cap off the sharpie. Decisively, she snaps it onto the back of the sharpie and reaches out her left hand to support his wrist.
"I'm going to add some vines and leaves too," she tells him. Fact rather than statement. He's a boy, so she won't do little flowers.
First thing first though, she neatly prints her name (B L U E) across a finger's length of the bright orange cast. There's a look of intense concentration on her face, her tongue trapped between her teeth and a frown bearing down on her brow. Once the letters are finished, she begins on the winding vines.
Fingers and eyes locked on her task, Blue's mind is left free to roam. Forest-boy is more of a mystery than she thought when she first saw him. He looks old enough to go to school, but he doesn't go to her school. Blue knows because everyone knows everyone in the little elementary school. And there are no other schools in town. Blue knows for certain because when she begged Maura to send her to any other school but That One, after her first day of first grade, they spent an evening researching the nearest elementary schools and marking them on a map. Children his age are required (by the law) to go to school. Blue knows that from the same evening when their pins on the map all proved too far to travel daily and she said she'd just not go to school then and learn everything she needed from books instead. Patiently, Maura helped her look up school laws, and by the end of the evening, Blue was resigned to her fate.
So, by not going to school, he is basically a criminal. Or his parents are. Maybe he's a runaway. Maybe his whole family are runaways. On the run from the law for some-- diamond heist or something.
With a flourish, Blue finishes the last leaf and looks up at the boy.
"You have to tell me your name now," she tells him. Her eyes dart down to her name on his cast and back up again. It's only fair.
no subject
He stands patiently, passively accepting whatever it is she's set her mind to, not a word or a twitch of protest in him, even though his foot hurts a little from standing as rigid as he does. Not because he's afraid to move, necessarily, just that he doesn't think he's supposed to, and he doesn't want to mess her up. He doesn't want to mess this up.
Blue.
He's young enough still, insular enough still, that it doesn't occur to him Blue might be a weird name. His dad has a friend called Red, though that's mostly because of the color of his hair. Hers isn't blue, but that's none of his business.
When she finishes, he hugs his cast to his chest like it's something precious. Whether it's because he's defensive of his injury or defensive of his handiwork is impossible to decipher. It feels a little bit like she might've been trying to trick him, but he doesn't feel tricked. He's not keeping it a secret, he probably would have told her if she just asked.
"Jack," is the simple answer, but it's accompanied by a visible pause that suggests he's got more to say. Something about the part in his lips, the quiet preparatory intake of breath, steeling himself. "I'll leave you alone if you let me read on the other side of your tree."
He won't bother her. Won't mess up her spot. Won't even be in her line of sight, he'll go on the complete opposite side.
Please.
There are, technically, a thousand other spots in this forest to read. Twice as many trees. It's just that this one feels like the one. The correct and appropriate place.
no subject
Jack
Blue turns the name over in her mind and decides that (1) it suits him and (2) he is probably not a fairy. The book sitting forgotten at the base of the beech tree is a collection of faerie tales. Not childish fairy tales like Cinderella or Snow White. But tales from faerie where the fairies aren't dainty women with butterfly wings, and not knowing the rules can have dire consequences. Like returning after a day to find a hundred years have passed. But if he was a fairy -- the dangerous kind -- he probably wouldn't have given his name so easily. (Though it would've been a good explanation as to why he's in the woods.)
It wasn't her purpose to trick him into giving up his name. Unless he was a fairy, in which case that was a pretty clever trick. Wasn't it? Except he's probably not a fairy. Fairies don't have names like Jack.
Blue blinks when he continues and a rush of words (easily twice or three times as many as he has spoken to her across the span of two days) fall from his lips like they're in a hurry. She tugs the sharpie cap free and clicks it back into place. She has green sharpie stains on her right index finger and reflexively she rubs her finger over them.
An immediate and sharp NO sits heavy on Blue's chest. She's been brought up to share, to make space, to invite-- but she count on one hand the things she has that are both only hers, and have never belonged to anyone else before her. The beech tree is one of them. (Presumably, other people have read beneath it. But not in Blue's lifetime.) But her name is printed on his cast like a promise. Perhaps, if it was a trap, she's the one who fell into it.
"Is that a threat?" she asks, more curious than accusative. "Or a promise?"
See, with a conditional clause like that, it sounds a little like maybe if she doesn't let him read on the other side of the tree, he won't leave her alone, but bother her until she gives in. If it's a threat, she will never give in. Blue Sargent does not negotiate with terrorists. Even when it leads to her walking home with sopping wet sneakers for reasons she'd rather not get into at the moment.
no subject
"Which one do you want it to be?" It's a genuine question, and the implication is it's that one — which doesn't make for a very good foundation if it's threat. He's not even sure how he'd follow through. Bug her, maybe, but he doesn't... actually want to do that. First, because it sounds resoundingly uncomfortable and would draw too much attention to him. Second, because he's pretty sure she wouldn't tolerate it even if he tried, and he's not sure how exactly it is she'd retaliate. Some boys find that to be a challenge, they find it exciting, they pull pigtails. Jack has a long history and a cast on his arm that has taught him not to poke things knowing they come with consequences. He still has bruises on his ribs and his toes are too broken for him to really run. If she decided to stomp on his foot there's a very good chance he'd piss himself.
He figures if threat is the right answer it means he won't have to follow through, and if promise is the right answer, well, obviously he won't have to follow through either. He doesn't have to know which one is right if he lets her pick it herself.
If the answer is neither, well, he'll just go home. Maybe try again tomorrow, but earlier this time.
no subject
Up above them, a rush of leaves and sharp flutter of wings herald the crescendo of the territorial squabble. The ensuing silence an obvious victory. Blue sucks her lower lip in between her teeth and chews on it while she thinks. She turns the sharpie over in her fingers in a complicated little eight pattern.
"The one that's true," she says finally, having weighed the possibilities against the principle and philosophy of the thing. Obviously making threats isn't very nice, but if that's what he's doing, she'd rather know that. The truth is important, you see.
It's probably not the answer Jack expected or wanted. Maybe it's the look on his face or her name on his cast or Blue's natural sense of curiosity, but she shoves the sharpie back into the pocket from where she got it and retreats to the beech tree.
"You can pick any side you want except this one," she tells him over her shoulder, touching a hand against the smooth bark of the tree. "This one is mine. If you don't bother me, I won't bother you."
no subject
It's definitely not the answer he wanted, and he seems almost put out — precarious like a candle in the breeze — but he steadies when she round-about grants her permission. Perks up, even, if you know what you're looking for. Most people don't. He doesn't want to look too excited, lest she take it away from him.
Maybe he should think it's weird, that she's claimed a spot beneath the tree as her own. Maybe anybody else might have scoffed or poked fun. He doesn't; he accepts it as a written law and obeys it by picking his own spot at a nearly ninety degree angle. He could turn his head and catch sight of her profile if he bent right, but if he looks straight forward he can't see her at all. He tries it out for a few seconds, then gets up, walks around, and tries the spot at her other ninety degrees.
Better.
This one is officially his, in accordance with the Law of the Tree.
It takes a few minutes to let himself actually get immersed in his book. At first he's entirely too aware of her presence, and it takes deliberate effort not to glance over at her like a freak. Eventually her breathing and her rustling becomes a little familiar, his hackles slowly fall, and he can actually concentrate on the words in front of him.
As promised, he doesn't bother her. Quiet as the tree itself, he just sits and reads until he loses track of time. When he tunes back in again the afternoon sun has begun to slink precariously down, which means he needs to go. House curfew is dusk, even though that's designed with the freedom and autonomy of the older kids in mind. He doesn't cause enough of a stir for them to realize he probably shouldn't be wandering out into the woods on his own until the sun's almost down.
He doesn't plan on giving them a reason to today, either.
When he stands, there's an awkward moment where he looks at the path home, then looks at her, then hesitates. Not really sure if he should... say something, or if they're ignoring each other so much that even parting should go unremarked upon.
Ultimately, he settles on a simple, "Bye."
And leaves.
He doesn't come back on Sunday. On Monday, she'll spot him in school for the first time. Her grade, her class, but seated in the back corner in the last empty desk, quiet and focused in a way very few of their peers are. Even during their free time he keeps his head down, not reading but rather scrawling sentence upon sentence into a composition notebook without looking up.
It catches the attention of a few of their other classmates, which is probably why a couple of them knock him down and yank it out of his backpack after lunch.
no subject
The first time Blue found the beech tree, she did much the same. Her side, of course, is the superior one. The tree trunk is a little wider, the dip just below it nestled between exposed roots just perfect for a person to sit curled up with a book. The other sides aren't bad just not as good. And this one is hers.
Eventually, once she is certain that he's settled -- judge from the lack of movement, and occasional rasp of paper against paper as he turns the pages -- she lowers the book into her lap and starts reading for real this time.
The story doesn't captivate her quite as it did when she first sat down. Her thoughts are too tangled up in the mystery. She wants to ask what he's doing in the forest, how old he is, what he's reading, if he has a last name, and a million other questions all bubbling up in her inquisitive little mind. But a deal is a deal and she doesn't want him thinking he can just disturb her. So she lets her mind drift between the twisted deals of the faeries and the boy sitting almost within arm reach of her if she just leans a little (or a lot) to the side.
Blue's just beginning to think that granting him permission to share her tree was a bad idea -- not that he's doing anything wrong, he's being very respectful, but the fact of his presence is distracting -- when he gets up and leaves with the barest of goodbyes.
Shortly after, Blue climbs to her feet as well and trots down the path that leads home. There's not a curfew waiting for her exactly, more a general understanding that Blue will not stay out late enough for Maura to worry. (Later in life, the fluidity of that time span will become a point of contention, but for the moment, it's been working just fine.)
On Sunday morning, Blue decides before she even gets out of bed that a little bit of quiet company beneath her tree isn’t so bad after all. If they finish reading their books at the same time, maybe they can swap for a while so no one has to go fetch another one.
Before heading out to the forest, she makes herself an egg salad sandwich on homemade bread, cutting it into two crooked triangles and wrapping them separately. She even grabs two little ziplock bags of chips from the pantry -- transferred from the Family Size bag that's cheaper than the 24 pack of individual snack-sized ones -- and jams them into a little back pack.
Three hours later, she's eaten both bag of chips while reading, her gaze darting between the pages, the spot that's his along the side of the three, and the place between the trees through which he appears and disappears. It remains empty.
Blue eats both sandwich triangles before giving up and heading home. For the best really, she tells herself; clearly she was too hungry to share anyway.
Come Monday morning, Blue is almost disappointed with when Jack turns up in her classroom. It means he’s not some kind of school-dodging criminal, the son of international art thieves, a runaway (either escaping the kind of unhappy home Blue has only encountered in books, or hiding from the mob after witnessing a particularly gruesome murder depending on how fanciful she’s feeling at the time), or cursed to walk the forests of the world, forever stuck in the body of a boy for centuries (probably as punishment for some kind of crime against the faerie). He’s just an ordinary boy.
They don't speak. He doesn't acknowledge her, and she won't do him the disservice of associating him with herself and her family on his very first day. See, Blue Sargent has committed the four capital sins of elementary school: she's the wrong kind of poor, her skin is too dark, her family too weird, and she won't just sit down and shut up.
It's not like they're friends or anything, she tells herself at lunch when he sits alone while she sits alone on a bench big enough to hold two. Her name is on his cast, but that’s not a binding contract. It’s just a kindness.
It's what she tells herself when Beauregard Frazer III and his crew rounds in on Jack after lunch. Maura's voice, asking if she might kindly consider getting into less trouble, echoes in her ears.
The smart thing to do, would be to ignore it.
But it's not the right thing.
The indecision doesn't last long.
“That’s not yours.” Blue’s voice is as sharp now as it was when she first found Jack sitting in her spot beneath the beech tree. She descends on the scene like an avenging angel in sneakers and a skirt that leaves her bruised and scabbed knees bare.
“Butt out, butthead,” Bo tells her. (Except it's probably meant to be Beau. All fancy spelling and that even though there's never been a single fancy person in the entire Frazer family.) His friends burst into laughter, repeating the word butthead like it's the height of wit. To be fair, for Bo/Beau it probably is.
"Give it back," Blue demands, jutting her chin out defiantly at him, her hands settled on her hips.
"Or what, little witchy-witch?"
Familiar anger roars to life like a mostly banked fire when you add a little bit of oxygen. It heats Blue's cheeks and dances in her eyes.
"Maybe I'll put a spell on you," she retorts like a whip crack, and a sudden unease spreads among the boys. "I have a whole book at home. All I need is a toad and some mouse blood to make your hair fall out and food turn to ashes in your mouth."
She's proud of that last one.
no subject
But there she is anyway — he recognizes her shoes before he recognizes her voice, and it takes another second for him to wrap his head around the fact that she's actually standing up for him. He's filled up with equal parts gratitude and embarrassment. Not, as one might suspect, because she's a girl, but rather because he's in a situation like this in the first place.
"It's okay," he says, pushing himself slowly to his feet. Foot, mostly, because three toes on his right side still twinge and ache when they're aggravated like this. "He can't read it anyway, he doesn't know how."
It's an unintentionally sick burn. Beau is in remedial language arts with a handful of other people officially-unofficially dubbed slow kids. Beau's face heats up to a furious shade of scarlet, and he bites out an enraged, "You stupid queer!"
Unfortunate timing; it's just loud enough and offensive enough to ping the radar of a nearby teacher, who storms over positively incensed by the language. That's all it really takes to get his groupies to scatter; they were already tentative allies after Blue's promise of a wrathful curse. Probably not true, but she has just enough of a reputation to leave them doubting. In his rage, Beau throws Jack's notebook at her... poorly, ineffectually. The covers flap open along the way, pages fanning out, slowing the momentum so it bounces harmlessly off her belly and lands pages-down, open, on the ground at her feet.
no subject
Blue's been the target of a composition book thrown to her head before (a particularly rowdy fight with Orla) and she braces for the potential of sharp corners. But Bo/Beau's aim is terrible and his throwing arm less than impressive. (As certainly as he'll never live up to the literary aspirations of his name, there's no baseball scholarship in his future.)
Blue looks down at the book, facedown on the ground, and then back at Bo/Beau. Entirely unimpressed. She hopes she's cocking one eyebrow. She's been practicing in the bathroom mirror and she gets it about fifty percent of the time. It's easier when she can see what she's doing.
"Wow," she says, "you throw like a girl."
It's not really an insult, Blue knows. Girls throw just as well as boys (sometimes better). But Bo/Beau thinks it's an insult and that's what matters.
Bo/Beau's face gets even redder, and his hands curl into fists. Maybe he would've let his hands do the talking (at least there's one thing he's good at other than being the worst human being in the whole school), but that's when the teacher bears down on them.
"Beauregard," she says, "we have talked about this! You come with me, right now."
On their way towards the door, the teacher pauses.
"Blue," she says, "don't encourage bad behavior."
Blue's jaw clamps shut. Sometimes, Maura tells her, it's better to say nothing at all. Even though none of this is her fault. It works, and the teacher disappears into the building with a not-remotely-contrite Beauregard.
Once the door shuts behind them, Blue crouches down and picks up Jack's note book. She turns it around and brushes the dirt off the pages carefully as she stands. Jack was right. Bo/Beau would not have been able to read it. Blue knows because she can't read it, and she's the best reader in her class.
"The kids here are jerks," Blue tells him. "Especially Beauregard. Don't bring anything you can't stand to lose to class."
Carefully, she closes it and holds it out to Jack.
"We go to the library on Tuesdays. I can show you which books are good."
no subject
Truthfully, maybe he's a little disappointed she either wasn't interested or couldn't read it. He doesn't say it, tries not to look it, and diligently tucks it away in his backpack again with a soft, "Thanks. I don't really have anything to bring anyway."
At least that means he doesn't have to worry about it.
He shoves his arms through the straps of his backpack, then hooks his thumbs around them for lack of anything better to do with his hands — and suddenly way too aware of them. Where do people normally put them when they're talking? Their hips? That seems kind of stern. So does crossing his arms. Letting them dangle by his side would make him feel like a stupid caveman or something.
And now he's standing there, talking to her, feeling as awkward as ever — even though he wants to talk to her.
"I know which books are good," he says before he can help himself. It just struck on a tiny little mote of indignation at the thought that he needs somebody else to tell him which books to read. It sounded rude though, probably, which is not what he meant to do. She just stood up for him, of course he doesn't want to be an asshole to her, and he fumbles his way through his best attempt at saving it. "I mean, I just. I read a lot. And I know the library catalog system. I mean, I don't need any help- unless you're, like, recommending one, which is fine. It's cool. If you did. Not because I'm stupid, though, just... because you think it's... good."
When he finally stops, it's with his mouth pressed into a flat line. It was a whole journey, that weird apology-explanation-backpedal, and it ends on a note that reads very clearly how frustrated he is with himself.
This. This is why he shouldn't talk.
"Sorry."
no subject
It'd be a poor attempt at making a friend, she is certain, to invade his privacy right in front of him. Not, of course, that she knows much about making friends. In fact, so far, she has been infinitely better at making enemies.
Except her tentative attempt at friendship -- the school library is very bad, and requires some navigation to make it past the babyish books the school librarian is so keen on pushing -- is squashed near immediately. She didn't mean to imply that he's stupid or can't pick a book on his own. It's just that she knows the library like the back of her own hand and she thought it might be nice to share it with him.
Hurt flickers in Blue's eyes. Something soft and wounded. Before her expression begins to shut down entirely as he speaks. Eyes first. Then her mouth. Then the muscles in her cheeks and her shoulders. By the time he gets to his sorry she is already as shuttered as a store on Christmas day.
This is why she doesn't make friends.
Kids her age are dumb anyway.
"It's fine," she says, in that breezy way that means it's certainly not fine. She sweeps her hands down over her skirt -- a thick grey skirt that used to be Orla's and is safety pinned around Blue's waist, with a yarn border carefully (if somewhat unevenly) embroidered around the hem -- brushing away chips-crumbs from lunch.
"I'm sure you don't need my recommendations. Since you read a lot and know the library catalog system and all that."
With that, she turns on her heel and stalks into the school building where she proceeds to studiously ignore him.
That afternoon, she crashes into the house like a very localized thunder storm. Like a whirlwind, she storms up the stairs to her room where she picks a book she's read a thousand times before, then back down again and out the back door with a short "I don't want to talk about it!" to whoever might be in the kitchen.
Underneath her beech tree, she turns the pages of her book with such force it's a wonder only one of them rips. If he comes today, she tells herself, he'll have to find his own tree. She liked him way better when he didn't talk.
no subject
Great going, idiot.
Part of him is tempted not to go back to that tree. He's tempted to retreat into himself, write off this one sole potential friendship as an example that he's just never going to have any, and spend the rest of forever reading in his room beneath stomping teenager feet and bickering voices. He debates, because even if he wants to, should he? It's her tree, after all. If she doesn't want him there and he just shows up anyway, she'll either yell at him like she did Beau (daunting), pointedly ignore him while radiating dislike at him (awkward), or simply just leave at the first sight of him (guilty).
Linda, his foster mom, makes cupcakes. That's ultimately what helps him decide. He eats the one she gives him, then summons up courage he never would have had with his dad to ask her for another, so he can take it with him out into the woods. He's skinny, underweight, so it's not a very hard sell. She puts it on a paper plate, sticks some plastic wrap on top, and sternly reminds him to bring his trash home because littering is bad.
He already knows, and he promises.
It's not an easy feat, carrying a book and a cupcake while wearing a cast and hiking through the woods with broken toes. It's a lot of fumbling, a lot of almost smushing it, and he feels almost like he was juggling fine china that he finally gets to put down when he rounds the path to see the home stretch.
Then comes the awkward presentation — tentatively walking up to her across the grass, holding the plate out carefully balanced on one hand, forgetting he'd been carrying his book tucked up under his arm and consequently dropping it like a loser, and stumbling through a rushed, "Hi that's not what I meant and can I please go to the library with you?"
Followed by a knit brow and held, bated breath.
no subject
Even at first glance, this is already going nothing like she imagined.
The cupcake is unexpected. So is the contrite look on Jack’s face and the rustle-thud of his book against the forest floor.
Like most women in the little house nestled between two edges — the town’s and forest’s — Blue’s anger runs hot and close to the surface. Her ire is easy to wake. But it runs hot and bright and quick. Without further fuel, it dwindles quickly.
“Everyone goes to the library,” she tells him, needing to clarify that one misconception. It’s not a special invitation or anything. “The whole class. Every Tuesday. Right after lunch.”
Carefully, she plucks her bookmark — the same one from Saturday, though the book is new — from the back of the book and settles it between the pages to keep her place. She sets it aside on the same root as last time and climbs to her feet. She bends down near Jack, picking his book up from the ground and carefully brushing leaves and fresh dirt and little sticks from its pages.
Instead of handing it to him — he’s clearly out of hands — she tucks it against her body and considers the cupcake.
The frosting has gone flat where the plastic wrap presses against it. Little wrinkles in the plastic reflected in strange wavy patterns in the frosting. It looks almost store bought — the highest, almost unachievable luxury — and Blue’s eyes flicker between the extended plate and Jack’s face.
As far as apology offering goes, it’s a good one. Sweet treats are rare in Blue’s life. It’s not that Maura Sargent is leading the charge in a war on sugar or anything. But sweet things are for special occasions and frosting is a hassle. Banana nut muffins are Not, whatever Maura might think, a reasonable alternative to cupcakes just because she doesn’t want to deal with mixing or piping or cleaning up after frosting. (And Maura’ll be damned if she pays for ready-made frosting when it’s cheaper — and tastier — to make her own. Blue doubts both of those asserments. The tastier most of all. She’s had storebought cupcakes, every time a child that isn’t her has a birthday during the school year, and Maura’s lumpy frosting doesn’t even come close.)
”Did you bring a knife so we can split it?” A glance down at the cupcake to clarify it.
no subject
Well. That's good. Another reason to feel like an idiot. He was beginning to think he'd run out of them. It leaves him in a weird kind of limbo, stuck in purgatory holding a cupcake there until she slowly stands to set him free one way or another.
Not... exactly in the way he'd been expecting. Which is now sort of... what he's expecting.
"No, it's for you," sounding appropriately bewildered. He hasn't had a lot of interpersonal relationships, he hasn't owned a lot of material things. He doesn't really take himself into consideration when it comes to... well, anything, really but definitely not the distribution of goods, food, or money. It strikes him suddenly why she's asking and he's quick to try and set that to rest, "You don't have to feel... guilty, or anything. I already had one. I just brought this one for you."
Since when do people split apology cupcakes?
Well, since when do people give apology cupcakes, might be the better question.
On a sigh, he breaks down and admits, "I'm not really good at friends and talking and stuff."
no subject
"Okay," she says, perhaps a little uncertain, and takes the paper plate from his hand. As far as cupcakes go it's a nice one. Made nicer by the unexpectedness of its existence.
"Thank you," she adds in a mumble that's directed mostly at the cupcake and mostly out of obligation. She frowns at it, like it's a conundrum that needs solving. Like it's a symbol of their fraught relationship so far.
"I'm not either," she confesses. "Well. The friends stuff."
It's important to her that he doesn't think that she thinks of herself as a poor conversationalist. She's excellent at it. Far superior to her peers. Though, admittedly, she spends very little time engaging with said peers in friendly conversation. It tends to start semi-adversarial and escalate from there.
An elephant of silence sits between them, the pause lasting longer than is comfortable as Blue chews on the inside of her cheek and frowns at the cupcake and tries to figure out where they go from here. It's probably visible, when she makes a decision, determination sharpening her features before she holds his book out for him to take. It's a good one, she can tell. Both from the cover and the thickness.
"You can sit down, if you want," she offers magnanimously with a wide gesture towards her side of the tree. Between the roots, there is ample space for two eight-year-olds. (This summer, Maura and Blue fit side by side easy.) Given, of course, that one of them (Blue) is willing to share and the other (Jack) isn't too shy to take her up on it.
Cupcake plate in hand Blue makes a lap around the tree, eyes on the ground. Occasionally she leans forward and picks up a stick, considers it only to throw it away again. She's almost made a full lap around the tree when one of the sticks meets her approval. It's both thin and sturdy.
Next, she rounds on the giant tree stump (legend has it, the tree was diseased and about to fall and a local lumber jack took it down, but that was long before Blue's time, and she's only ever known it as a stump) a few steps away from the beech tree. She sets the plate down, tongue trapped between her teeth while she works to gently lift the plastic from the cupcake. Once free, she wraps it tightly around the stick and uses it to divide the cupcake into two roughly even parts. The crumbs held together by the frosting.
It's slow going and she ends up with a lot of frosting on her fingers. Carefully licking them clean, she returns to her side of the tree.
"The left one is a little bit bigger, so that one should be mine," she tells him, "But you should have the other half."
Like an apology accepted cupcake. Or the start of the kind of friendship she has only ever read about.
If he's sitting down at the base of the tree, she will sit down next to him -- only jostling him with her elbow once, and only by accident -- and offer out the slightly massacred cupcake for him to take one sticky half.
no subject
He doesn't eat it until she's in place, until after elbows have been jostled and limbs have been appropriately arranged. When they finally settle, it's with her left arm up against his right, his cast-arm tucked into his lap atop his book, and his cupcake hovering patiently somewhere around chest-height.
He'll take a bite after she does. It seems like the right thing to do.
After he swallows, he figures maybe... talking might be okay. Probably a good idea. Only one topic really comes to mind —
"What are you reading?"
no subject
Next to him, Blue peels the cupcake wrapper from the slightly-larger remnants of her cupcake and takes a bite. It's really good. Probably has real sugar in it and everything. In theory, you can sweeten cupcakes with honey, but in practice, Blue really, really doesn't recommend it. She transfers the cupcake to the hand closest to him, and licks the frosting off the fingers of her other hand carefully.
"It's called Hexwood." Blue grabs the book with her mostly-clean hand and turns it so he can see the cover with its twisted branches and the figures seemingly growing out of the wood.
"It's got knights and space travel and a forest that isn't really a forest in it." Blue takes another crumbly bite and chews it thoughtfully. "I've read it before. It's good. You can borrow it after you've finished yours."
A quick glance over in his direction. Maura would tell her that big gestures (like sharing library time or the spot below her tree or lending him her favorite book) don't always seem the same size to other people.
"If you want," Blue adds for good measure. It'd be a shame if they had a breakdown in communication this quickly. She sets the book down and twists around so she's half facing him.
"How about you?" She pauses to push the last of the cupcake into her mouth. "What are you reading?"
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)