Juliette Also Tries To Take A Bath

[MurderWeasel]

((Juliette Sargent continued from Fly Back To School Now, Little Starling))

Since leaving the shoe tree, Juliette had found a lot of time to think, but nothing had precisely clarified itself. She passed another night in the woods, and mused at how strange it was to spend so much time alone in the wilderness, even given the context. She had by now learned that sounds of movement and shadows in the corner of her vision were more often than not animals—most of them small birds, though she had caught sight of monkeys on multiple occasions and was pretty sure she'd seen a donkey or goat at a distance at one point. Still, whenever the status quo was disrupted, she paused and checked, took shelter behind a tree trunk or sank into the foliage just in case.

After all, she was never truly alone. Each moment she was being watched—or, if she wasn't actively observed, it made little difference because eventually the records would be reviewed with great interest if things went to plan. She had to prove herself aware, reasonable, sane, and potentially valuable. It was a hard line to walk, especially as she had been left with an unsettling doubt about just how well she truly could get into the heads of the unhinged. Did she understand them well enough to cater to them?

She slept acceptably, at least, though awoke stiffer and stuffier than ever, to the revelation that Quinn had killed only once the day before. Meilin Zhou, Ace's friend-turned-romantic-partner. She'd been at the big party, which wasn't much of a surprise since she was at most parties, far more than Juliette. Meilin had played in the orchestra, which Juliette respected a lot, but they weren't close. News of her death meant basically nothing. Based on the timing, it had presumably occurred well before the discussion at the shoe tree. Perhaps that was behind Quinn's agreeable mood.

Erika had killed a whole lot more people too. Two people had stayed in Danger Zones. Drew got shot. Marco had another mark to his name. Bret Carter was dead.

So were Nathan Coleman and Lucas Brady. It was, Juliette thought, fitting that they depart on the same day. Her feelings around them were a twisting mess, difficult to grapple with or unpack and wholly irrelevant now, but she thought that, on balance, she was sadder that they were gone than she was about many of the others. Brady was the person so many of Juliette's classmates thought was lurking behind her smile. They were not alike, but they were viewed similarly, which gave her insight into him and the struggles he faced. Unlike her, he was unequipped to handle them, and again and again his ego tripped him up as he unfurled into one of the school's greatest pariahs. Nathan was Nathan. He was, in his own way, a fixture of their school and a symbol of their class. With his death, their school spirit really was gone, she supposed. They weren't a class anymore, weren't united by anything but circumstance. The knives were out, and there was no more chance they could be placed back in the drawers.

Nothing else made that big an impression.

It was, more than anything else, lonely. Juliette was surprised to feel a longing even for the menace-tinged tension of Quinn and the unconcealed scorn of Julien. Back in Chattanooga, she was never really truly alone. If she screamed loudly enough, even at home when there was nobody else in the house, the neighbors would come and see what was happening. To properly free herself from the possibility of somebody coming upon her, she'd had to find dirty, out of the way places, and even then it had been so unsure. Maybe if she'd fallen into the river someone would have run down from the other bank and dived in to save her. Maybe they'd been watching from a window the whole time, cell in hand, emergency number all queued up, just waiting to send if she made one wrong move. But here, while there could be an interloper at any moment, mostly there was not. Juliette was left to her own devices and company. She hated it.

---

The sound of the river was nostalgic, in a way.

Juliette had intended to make for the lake and take care of her hygienic needs there, but upon further reflection had realized that there was a better option: the lake was fed by a waterfall, which implied a flowing source up above. She took her time with the trek, hunkering down and conserving energy in the hottest hours, traveling in short bursts, always keeping an ear out. Once she did reach the rugged banks, it took time to find an appropriate location. She wanted a place where there was good circulation of current, but also enough shelter to keep her from being swept away or easily spotted. This search was complicated by her general ignorance of rivers. The fantasy of being carried off by the waters was still appealing in its strange manner, but she shook that thought free.

Finally, she found a shallow pool formed by flat rocks, some of them boulders jutting out from the banks, wide and high and catching the late afternoon sun. They looked clean enough for her purposes.

Juliette was not one of those girls who brought her entire wardrobe with her everywhere she went (and that wasn't to imply that it was a uniquely feminine trait either; some of the boys in her class were fashion fiends), but she did like to be prepared just in case. When things went wrong, when buses were delayed or washing machines unavailable, that was precisely when people got bored and started taking pictures to entertain themselves. She'd packed enough clothing to last her the whole week assuming no access to laundry facilities whatsoever, and then had done laundry when able and kept her clean clothes with her in her backpack. Just in case.

So she'd had enough to maintain a level of appearance that was probably uncommon among her peers, despite the humidity and the rain and the mud and the bugs. For almost a week, she'd rotated blouses and swapped her skirt every couple days and changed her underwear. She'd worn her improvised poncho (now folded safely away in her duffel bag in case its services were required again) to keep what she had as nice as she could. She had several pristine sets of socks even now, courtesy of that time spent in sandals when it was raining. But for all that, she'd been sweating, gotten drenched, crawled through bushes and slept in heaps of leaves and twigs. She did not look good, and none of her clothes would pass muster at the end of a particularly grueling gym class, let alone in mundane everyday circumstances.

It was time to change that.

She slipped out of her flats and set them on one of the boulders, undid her necklace and took out her earrings and set them in the right shoe, stripped her socks, and then began pulling her dirtied clothes from the plastic bread bags that had served to keep them dry, shaking out a few stray crumbs.

She couldn't smell anything. Normally, Juliette was fairly in tune with her own scent—made a point to be, because it was part of the impression she made on others and that had to be good—but while she knew intellectually that she reeked of sweat and deodorant and her clothes must have been the same, she just couldn't perceive any of it right now. It didn't matter. The stink would wash away. The wrinkles, well, there was nothing to be done for that.

After a few minutes, everything lay neatly in rows, arranged by garment type. She had three skirts (two grey—one a pencil skirt, the other something looser and more casual—and one black pencil, which she was wearing), four blouses (one white long-sleeved, one white short-sleeved [her current attire], one red short-sleeved, one black long-sleeved), four bras (two each black and white), and eight pairs each of panties and socks (again half and half black and white). She also had one black bath towel. Just in case.

Slowly, Juliette undid the buttons of her blouse. She had changed here before, obviously, but it still felt different as she slipped out of the top this time, because she wasn't immediately racing to scramble into something else. Her skirt was next, a pull of the zipper and a few tugs and it was pooled around her ankles.

Anyone could've come by. Quinn, or Erika, or Marco, or... or someone who would actually kill Juliette instead of just talking with her, someone like that could turn up and stab or shoot her and her legacy to the world would be getting killed in her underwear. Or, she thought as she unhooked her bra, even worse.

But the strange thing was, it didn't really feel like it mattered. Juliette was used to being horribly, awkwardly acquainted with what some of her classmates looked like naked, no matter how she tried to force herself to want to avert her gaze and how she actually did so whether she wanted to or not. She was used to them knowing her in that way too. If she was still going to make a run for the House, this would probably be political suicide, or at least an uncomfortable question hanging over every interview in perpetuity, but that was all gone now. Her prospective future coworkers were seeing her disrobe, but they had seen and would see her do far worse. Surely she would learn similar too-personal details about them. Besides, maybe there were some cute women working for them, hm? Maybe this would start a conversation someday?

Really, it was just about choice. Juliette had to change for gym class or she'd fail. She wanted to strip now so that she could look better tomorrow. It was an investment and a risk she took on because the rewards would potentially be worth it. That was why it felt just fine.

Still it was a shame she didn't have her swimsuit. She'd brought it on the trip (just in case, but fat chance of her willingly going swimming; she'd spurned the pool no matter how many of her classmates wandered off to enjoy it) and its modesty would've been a nice little mental boon (it was a one-piece, classy not frumpy; Juliette enjoyed bikinis but only from the spectator's side of the equation), but it was with her dirty clothes in some luggage piece in a holding room wherever their captors were, assuming it hadn't been destroyed or dumped.

That's life. Juliette, now completely undressed, stepped into the water. She braced herself to shiver like she always did at school, prepared to take the quick plunge to equalize her temperature as she was wont in gym, but found she didn't have to. The river was warm, comfortable. It was relatively clear, the stones beneath her feet smooth but slick with algae. She wouldn't be going too deep—even worse to be the girl swept naked over a waterfall than the one shot while bathing—but as she took a few more steps and sank to a crouch and let the water lap around her neck she was surprised by just how good she felt. She dipped her head, eyes held closed, came up, took a breath, and laughed.

But levity could come later. She had laundry to do.

The process was repetitive and meditative, leaving Juliette room to let her attention wander the banks and woods for signs of interlopers. At one point, she ducked out of view behind a rock when a rustling came, only to briefly meet eyes with a strange, long-legged bird. It stepped into the water, drank, and returned to the darkness beyond. The vines and branches were so thick she lost sight of it in moments. Otherwise, there was nothing but false alarms, twigs cracking or, in one case, a particularly loud and sudden splash from further downstream, which sent her to ground for five minutes, listening, waiting, but no follow-up manifested.

Juliette took each article of clothing, soaked it, rubbed it with soap (of course she had soap, her own bar; she didn't trust the hotel to use anything of decent quality), rinsed it, then wrung it dry and spread it out on one of the rocks, getting as much surface area exposed to the sun as possible. Before long, everything was arrayed just so, drying in the dying hours of the day. This was the sixth that she had passed here, and the rain in the early part of the ordeal had done a number on her reserves. She should be prepared, then, to last at least five more days in general comfort, and could probably stretch it to a week if she had to. By that point, this would all be over, or close to, though she would prefer to make another pit stop about halfway into that interval, when she still had reserves to draw upon rather than being forced to do everything at once.

Of course, clothes were only part of the equation. There were other matters to attend to as well. The constant splashing around had surely worked much of the grime and sweat free, but Juliette lathered herself up all the same, shampooed (of course she had her own shampoo), ate a mint. Soon enough, she felt almost human again.

Almost.

Fortuitous, then, that their captors had given her the last piece of the puzzle.

Now sitting on the banks of the river, Juliette shook the can of shaving cream she had been assigned, the paired straight razor resting on her bare thigh. The branding made it clear this was designed for men to shave their faces with, but that was just marketing, she was pretty sure. The gel seemed close enough to familiar as she sprayed it into her palm, rubbed it to a foam, and slathered it over her legs. Her armpits would come next. It was good it was still warm.

She almost convinced herself she was getting goosebumps anyways as the razor brushed over her skin.

---

The blood dripped more slowly now, faint pinpricks from Juliette's right shin, her left calf, a little spot under her right arm. Bloody gauze lay to the side, though not too much of it. Rationing was important, Juliette told herself, as she chewed on her lip and tried to ignore the stinging where the nicks had been wiped down with disinfectant. This was a question of tactics.

What was the tactical weight of cutting herself up shaving and then washing the foam off in a river full of who-knew-what exotic bacteria and parasites as she tried not to hyperventilate because she couldn't see beyond the soap how bad the damage was? That question could remain rhetorical.

What was done was done. Her legs were smooth to the touch, the cuts were minor—she'd had worse even with a safety razor when she first started shaving, she thought, but maybe it had just felt that way because it was new then—and when the bleeding eventually stopped she didn't think anything would be visible. For now, Band-Aids would suffice.

Only one thing remained. Once Juliette had dried her hands and applied the bandages, she pulled her handbag closer and rummaged around for her makeup. As she did, her hand brushed over her compact, and she paused.

It was strange. As she'd washed herself and her clothes, she'd caught her own reflection in the water almost constantly, and had been struck by how different she looked with the distortion of ripples and the backdrop of pebbles and twigs and algae and the occasional small fish. She took a backseat in a way, became part of the context of the world. But when she was looking into the mirror, it was just her again, center stage and the subject of all attention.

She wasn't entirely sure which she preferred.

((Juliette Sargent continued in Dress For Success))