Five Crooked Lines

[Endellion]

"Really? Well, I appreciate it. If things go well I might just hold you to that too," Julien said, honestly grateful for the offer.

As much of a double-edged sword as it could be, he tried to see ahead of things a little even if it could drive him to opt for inaction. No way he would have seen this headed his way though, however long he mulled on it. Was it welcome? Absolutely. He was far less likely to get stuck on the wall, looking for a way up that he couldn't reach, if he could get some help along.

"I'd say that I've never danced before so I wouldn't know, but I figure that goes without saying." Barring the times he let his hair down a little when nobody was around, that was, though Julien had no plans to make mention of that. Still, he was more than co-ordinated enough not to trip over his own feet or step on someone else's and that was surely a good enough place to start from.

Morgan bringing up classes did serve to remind him that he'd need to be getting to his own soon as well. He was curious about why they mentioned the caverns since neither of them overly seemed the type, but being above ground was more his specialty and besides, that was something between the two of them so he wasn't about to try and wedge that one open. "See you around, man. Expect to see me at the table with you when prom rolls around."

A look at his phone showed the friend request waiting for him to do something with, and of course Julien accepted it. Dragosavich, huh? Not a plain name by any stretch of the imagination; seemed about right, going by what little he now knew of him. He looked Alton up to send one his way as well.

With that over and done with, he got out of his seat as well and looked at Alton. "Since he mentioned it, I need to be heading off myself as well. It's certainly been quite an experience talking to you though. Stay frosty." Someone like him firing off finger-guns would just feel weird, so he was happy with that.

As Julien slipped his headphones back in and made his way out of the library, a passing nod to the library attendant as he went by, he couldn't really shake the feeling that saying it that way risked coming across as insincere a little too much for his liking, but it seemed most appropriate to sum it all up. Neither of them evidently cared much for letting the tide pull them into setting their paths in stone, and that was something he could get behind. Definitely good people to be on good terms with.

Either way, he was happy that the gamble paid off.

((Julien Leblanc continued in Chrysalism))

[MurderWeasel]

"Ta ta," Alton said, giving the other boys a two-finger wave and a smile as each departed in turn. "See you at Prom, and likely before."

Then they were gone, and he was more or less alone, still at the table and now free to lean back as far as he liked, draping himself over the back of the chair, stretching his neck, looking up at the ceiling. In fact, the library comprised two floors, and the layout was such that he could get a decent view up the stairs and into the boring zone beyond. He'd been up there once or twice, certainly, but only to hunt down non-fiction books when required for projects. He'd always bring them back down to this level as soon as he could. Then again, maybe there was something to be said for the comparative privacy of a quiet study area; if he was going to sneak off to make out with someone, it'd bring greater secrecy and an extra bit of thrill of the forbidden, and he bet the stacks weren't patrolled as carefully.

"Um," came a voice, "Alton? Can I, uh, do you have a moment?"

He blinked, slowly, and turned himself back upright, unwinding casually and on the way checking the time on his watch.

"Five or so," he said. "Seven if I rush to math."

Only then did he see who had spoken to him. The voice had been familiar, but in that same hazy way it went with so many underclassmen. It was female, but that didn't do much to narrow it down given Alton's usual acquaintances. The face, though, he knew in an instant: it was Kylie Marin, apparently having noticed him at last and for some reason or another having made her way over to his table. She was thin except for her wide face, blonde, generally cheerful and a little bit unrestrained in this way that provided an interesting contrast. She would be cute in a year or two, he thought. Physically she was getting there, but her attitude was still so young, even compared to some of her own classmates. Alton did not think she was infatuated with him, unlike some of the other girls her age, and that was one of the things that made her intriguing, though not the primary one. She was also developing a good nose for worthwhile information, and slowly but surely was cultivating a subtlety around at least those few topics where such things did matter.

"Oh," she said, and then she said it again: "Oh." She laughed, lagging a second behind his joke.

"Have a seat," Alton said, smiling and gesturing to the chair recently vacated by Julien. This was, he mused, becoming quite the social lunchtime. He enjoyed the mix, the different crowd he found here. You didn't get this sort of thing in the lunchroom. It was too loud there, too public.

Kylie was nervous. This was clear as she sat, glancing this way and that; her eyes lingered longer on table she had vacated where her friends still huddled and on the library assistant. Alton's lips quirked up a bit. Kylie still had a lot to learn about playing it cool.

"I don't, uh, I don't want to distract you," she said. "If you're busy, I can go. I can talk to you later. Maybe I should talk to you later, I'm sorry to bother you."

She started to stand back up, but Alton gestured at her, two fingers again, waggled up and down, message clear: sit. She sat.

"I'm not doing anything, and I'm not busy," Alton said, checking his watch again to punctuate the statement. There was still plenty of time to make his next class. "We can talk now."

His voice was calm and quiet, his curiosity channeled into a slight inquisitive lilt, but that was the fruit of practice of his own. In truth, his interest was piqued for real now. The girl had tried to chicken out, had made his excuses for him surely not out of genuine concern (because if it was genuine concern, why had she even bothered to come over in the first place? She had him on Facebook, and she knew the period was almost done) but as a last second reconsideration. He knew that attitude, and briefly he entertained the possibility that he'd been wrong in his assessment of the nature and level of interest she had in him. Accordingly, he also reconsidered her cuteness. Her hair would fall below her shoulders if she let it down from the high ponytail she wore it in. Her clothing was nice, a touch more formal than the norm, an olive green button-down blouse over black slacks, probably advice from the usual suspect. Her smile was wide and nervous, and she had braces with bright red bands, which clashed horribly with her top; that was a little coaching failure there. No, she wasn't quite there yet, which was good, because there were other very compelling reasons to tread lightly around her.

They regarded each other for a few seconds, Alton's gaze sweeping over her and then coming to rest on her face, while Kylie's darted around again, checking the woman at the desk. That sent a ripple of irritation through Alton, made him want to reach out and gently take her by the chin and hold her head steady, maybe puller her towards him, but of course that wasn't something he would ever actually do. Instead, he claimed her attention with his words.

"What can I do for you?"

"Oh," she said, "it's not, I mean, you don't have to do anything if you don't want to."

"I might want to," Alton said. He checked his watch. "It depends on what it is."

She swallowed and started to glance towards the desk again, but Alton rolled his fingernails along the desk with a rattle, a mirror of the gesture he'd used right when Julien arrived but this time one-handed and noisier, and that made Kylie look about ready to tumble backwards out of her seat and scramble for the door. She winced and raised a hand like she was actually going to shush him, but Alton raised an eyebrow and she didn't complete the gesture. Nobody was paying attention to them anyways, the library now being swept by the bustle of an approaching passing period, groups arriving and leaving and the attendant gesturing at a boy as he held a book towards her. The group Kylie had been with was packing up but showed no signs of departing; they were, Alton thought, ignoring him and Kylie quite pointedly, in that way that meant they were trying not to be caught paying attention.

"Go on," Alton said, kindly so the pressure wouldn't sting or be quite so obvious. She swallowed again, and he thought she was going to just call it off and flee, but then she spoke.

"When you, uh, when you said you owed me. Were you, were you serious?"

There it was. Alton smiled for real, nodded.

"Of course."

It had been a while ago, now, and he'd actually more or less forgotten about it. After the class elections, a rather vicious series of threads and arguments and implications and insults had swept across Facebook, and while it had been interesting it had also unfortunately overlapped with a promising and ultimately successful date Alton had set up with this cute leggy black-haired junior whose name he couldn't recall just now. Kylie had, of course, been following it all very closely for her own reasons, so Alton had asked if she wouldn't terribly mind logging it for him, and she'd performed admirably in that capacity, sending him a collection of screenshots taken throughout the night. Most of it was just the same stuff that he could find on his own, but there were a few little tidbits here and there that he couldn't find other evidence of when he went back to check. That was to be expected; one of the beauties of social media was how easily you could make something disappear, and another was how hard it was to ever truly purge anything.

"Beautiful," he'd written to her. "I owe you a six pack. Or are you more of a whiskey girl?" Paired, of course, with a winking emoji, to introduce ambiguity and deniability. It was a casual, offhand offer he hadn't expected her to take him up on, the sort of thing he threw out like his offer to help Julien and Morgan find dates, but just as with that other one he'd always been prepared to stand by it. Really, the only concern he had was that Kylie would mess up and get caught and rat him out, but that such a concern existed meant he could take countermeasures proactively and hang her out to dry if she screwed up.

"Oh," she said. "Okay. Um, so I was wondering if you could get—"

This time, Alton's command was a single finger held up.

"Something special going on?" he asked.

"Y-yeah," she said. "I have, my friend is having this party this weekend, and I—"

"Sounds like fun," Alton said. "Why don't you hang out after school and fill me in? I'll drop you off at home, mm? Meet me out front."

She swallowed, looked lost at first, but a normal expression spread over her face in less than a second. She definitely had promise, Alton thought.

"Alright," she said.

Alton gave her a smile, a nod, and then swept himself off the chair, a movement that flowed into his steps as he walked out of the library. As he made his way to the next class, he was figuring out logistics, and he would be good to his word, giving Kylie a ride to her dad's house and taking down her request to fulfill a couple days later, casting himself as the fairy godfather of underage drinking, hooking her up with a handle of Smirnoff and two six packs of PBR. What she did with them afterwards, how and if she evaded getting found out by her family, whether it led to further trouble for her or her friends, well, that was somebody else's problem.

((Alton Gerow continued in We're Milling Through The Grinder, Grinding Through The Mill))