Paying Dividends

What do you get when you throw characters from different settings together?
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Ashton Kimbre
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Paying Dividends

Post by Ashton Kimbre »

St. Mary's had an electronic school bell. It preceded things like lunch schedules and announcements, but during them most of the girls paid it little mind and kept about their cell phones, notebooks, and for a select few, their schoolwork. There weren't a lot of things on campus that the students showed a visible respect for, teachers included, but they did listen to the church bell. At the start of each day it stopped all the fights and bullying, ended all conversations, and ushered the students to their homerooms. There was something about it: its enormity atop its bell tower and its all-powerful toll. Its history, perhaps.

It was peculiar given St. Mary's reputation for harboring some of the more dangerous juveniles when compared to other private all-girls schools, yet the bell tolled, and the girls always listened.

“Who do you think has prettier eyes, Ashton or Clarice?” Leila Taylor asked from their third grade homeroom as a way to break the morning silence. The church bell was just finishing its set outside as she saw from her seat by the window, and all the older girls were filing from their congregation at the fountain to head to their respective rooms.

“I think Clarice does,” Jacelyn Williams answered, in a social mood and more awake than the other girls that had been within earshot. She looked out the window with Leila, sharing in her envy of the older girls, smarter, prettier... and stronger.

“Yeah, Clarice's eyes are really pretty,” Leila had to admit, sighing as the last of the upperclassmen had left her view of the fountain. She returned to the world inside her classroom and adjusted the bow of her uniform around her neck.

“I hear that's all makeup, mostly,” Dakota Ginley said, turning around in her chair from in-front of Leila. “Besides, Ashton's eyes are blue. Blue eyes are the prettiest.”

“Dakota Ginley,” the teacher said, not breaking stride as she came into the classroom. “In your seat, please.”

Leila shared in a chuckle with Jacelyn who was slouching herself back over to her desk area for another long, boring day. Leila popped Dakota on the back playfully with her spiral notebook for getting called down by the teacher. “Yeah, turn around, Blue Eyes.”

“I'm in my seat,” Dakota wiseassedly answered the teacher even though she was doing precisely what she was told. Jacelyn fought with her giggles, trying to get into a mindset to do work at some point, and Leila simply shook her head and turned her strong grin to the window again. Outisde she noticed a single upperclassman standing by the fountain, and before she got to think it odd, the teacher's books hit her podium and snapped her back to class. She opened her notebook.

Outside, the eighteen year old girl awkwardly stood by herself, gazing around that the buildings and wondering which one was which. A new kid never stuck out worse. Her shoes were together, her socks perfectly white, her skirt smooth and without a crease, and her shirt and tie was neat and orderly. Her brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, and her hoop earrings were cringe-worthy to any St. Mary's student. Nothing went against you in a fight worse than hoop earrings, and that was just one of the things she was setting herself up for painfully discovering. But while she was still stalwart, she clutched her overly-folded schedule in her hand and set off to find her homeroom.

It couldn't have been that hard.
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She lucked up going into the correct building first, and again being on the side that ran to her homeroom. She kept her distance nervously from all the other doors, only being near enough to them to read their numbers, but when she came to the one listed on her paper, she had to approach it, and hearing the other girls inside transformed her nervousness into fear. She hadn't even realized she froze outside the door, but she knew she would have to go in eventually, and the longer she waited the more of a scene she was likely to make for being late. She bit her lip and fought with her cowardice. You only make a first impression once.

“Hi, I'm Siri Paszke, is this twelfth grade homeroom?” she asked upon entering and pulling the door to a close behind her. She took a careful glance around the whole room, and when no one answered her, she submissively focused on the aisle closest to her along the wall. A front row desk was empty, and she saw it a godsend, moving to it and sliding into it fluidly, only afterward taking a relaxed breath that, so far, she seemed to be doing alright.

No one had replied to her, acknowledged her or even faltered slightly in their ongoing conversations, and they were none of them afraid to indulge in their outdoor voices with the teacher not yet in the class. Siri tried to look busy, getting her notebook out and a pencil, opening it and pretending to scribble something down despite the class having not even started yet. When she thought it safe, she looked around again, this time taking a longer glance to read some faces, determine some threats, and gauge where she stood. Not a one of the girls looked timid or shy. They all looked comfortable, confident, and unafraid, making her the least-predatory person in the room. She swallowed so hard her throat hurt.

“Who's in my chair?” a voice called from the middle of the room, and once the other students recognized whose it was, they surrendered some silence to her. The dark-haired, blue-eyed woman at the front of class slowly opened her eyes from resting while waiting on the teacher's arrival.

“Oh s**t, someone's in Lizzy's seat,” a girl quickly and carefully fired out, grinning behind another student's back before she could be spotted.

Siri had been keeping her nose in the blank pages of her notebook, sinking deeper and deeper between those college ruled lines the more apparent it became that she was the one being addressed. When she heard her questioner shoving off from her perch on another student's desk at the middle of the room, she turned and looked as dumbstruck as she convincingly could.

“Who, are you talking about me?? AAH!!” she screamed only for a moment in a shrill squeak when one of her hoop earrings were hooked by the other girl's finger and suddenly she was at her every command with just the slightest pull.

“You're new here, aren't ya,” Lizzy said, easily removing Siri's defensive hands each time they came up to try and take hold of her own to ease the tension on her ear. Lizzy was years ahead of Siri when it came to bullying, and she knew how to keep her right where she wanted and gloat her strength to the other girls at the same time. “The sooner you apologize for putting your a** in my chair, the sooner we can all get back about our business.” Her smile was met with the approval of a decent chunk of the classroom.

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry! I'm sorry, okay?” Siri held her arms out as foolishly as she could look, which seemed to be just the place Lizzy wanted them to reward her with as little pain as possible. “I didn't know it was your desk!”

“Do you know now?” A playful tug was given to that hoop earring, immediately rewarding her with a squeak that reminded her as vividly as the first time why she loved bullying. Siri couldn't wait for her to finish asking that question because she couldn't wait to give her her answer, but another woman spoke up: the dark-haired girl seated in the front row.

“She knows it's your desk. Now let her go,” she said, already stood up and still, facing her. Seated some desks behind Lizzy, a beauty by the name of Diana Holte smacked her forehead discouragingly.

“I shoulda known Ashton wouldn't put up with that long,” a girl said from the back. Lizzy dropped her good mood instantly, glaring at Ashton and on the verge of showing her clenched teeth, but she resisted and let Siri's earring go.

Relief came over Siri and she was no less paralyzed in accepting that relief than when she was still held hostage by her ear. While she stood there, eyes closed and mouth agape at the slowly diminishing pain, Lizzy shut her notebook for her and smacked it against her chest before patting her on the back and sending her to the back of the classroom.

“Keep on taking care of everybody, Ashton,” Lizzy said, sitting in her chair just as the teacher came in, prompting Ashton to sit back down as well. Lizzy bit down on the eraser of Siri's pencil: her newest trophy. She eyeballed Ashton wolfishly. “Just remember to take care of yourself.”

Ashton only looked fatigued by her words, taking in a deep breath and exhaling it with now-closed again eyes as she faced the front, sensing the forthcoming class agenda and dreading that more than Lizzy's threats.

“Everyone in your seats. I'm running a little late today so we're going to get right to it,” the teacher began, entering very suddenly and rushing Siri to try and find a seat just in time for another girl's voice to timely offer up that guidance.

“Ayo, babygirl, right here. You can sit next to me.”

The girl was dark in complexion with lightly-freckled cheeks; cropped, dark brown hair; and was lacking the venom that the other girls' eyes seemed to lunge out with. Siri obliged her automatically, slipping in behind the offered desk and trying to calm herself from the whole scene that happened just moments before. When her excited breathing was no longer noticeable, she opened her eyes again and looked around her at the girls on that side of the class. It felt no safer there than where she had just come from.

“You jus' get here today?” the girl asked.

“Yeah.” Siri sighed, looking to the girl finally who had showed her to a seat. “I would have rather finished school where I was at, being so close to graduation. But my dad's work moved us here.” She could have spoken about herself a little while longer, but the girl's hand coming down on her shoulder won her curiosity and attention.

“My name's Terry. Welcome to St. Mary's.”
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Siri was just beginning to not ease up when the electronic bell rang over the PA and signaled the start of the seniors' lunch block. Everyone got up except for four or five students and filed out of the class. Lizzy left, which was a load off Siri's mind, but so did Ashton and Terry some students behind her. At least their math teacher was still in the class, but she was so preoccupied with collecting her papers into her bag so she could leave as well that she didn't even notice two of the girls making a very obvious underhanded trade with a box of cigarettes and the money to pay for them. After a half-minute of innocent nothingness, the girl got up and headed out of the classroom with her hands in her hoody pockets to go and have a smoke.

The cell phones had come out when that bell rang. Chuckles were had at silent texts and at funny videos the girls weren't shy about turning up the volume on. Siri didn't want to go out, but she was hungry, and she also wasn't about to let her reputation get cemented in that she hides in the classroom during lunch because she's afraid of someone. She stuck her notebook down in the steel basket under her chair and picked up her handbag.

Before she got up, she took out her earrings and put them in her handbag next to her compact.

Fifteen minutes later, the only thing that Siri had managed to eat up was time in line at the cafeteria, and later trying to find somewhere to eat her lunch. She nearly considered going back to her homeroom to eat, but by the time she got there she wouldn't have any time left. Outside the cafeteria, Siri walked around with her little cardboard basket lunch looking for a place to sit; and just when she was about to sit up against the bricks, she saw the fountain and its modest crowd, and amongst them, the familiar face of her rescuer enjoying her lunch seated on its circular bench.

“Hey,” she said, making herself known as she came up to her. She wanted to thank her for standing up for her earlier, but first she wanted to see if her company was even wanted. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”

“New girl,” Ashton said with a mouthful, sounding excited only in tone as she poked around uninterestedly in her tupperware container with a plastic fork. “Nah, you can sit down.”

Siri sat down next to her but with the space of two between them. “My name's Siri,” she said, and she still had her gratitude to give her, but she'd wasted a lot of her lunch block already and chose to stuff some food in her mouth finally. “Thanks... you know, for earlier.”

She hesitated to look directly at Ashton. She only glanced at the edge of her, her shoes, her legs, and the contents of her lunch. It looked good. At first she thought Ashton hadn't heard her, then she thought she didn't have anything to say when she didn't. Silence pushed her back into her bubble and, maybe for the best, she went back to eating.

“Lizzy's nothing. Just a bully,” Ashton said belatedly, never opening her eyes wider than a very relaxed point. “If she ever messes with you, just tell a teacher. She's got more write-ups than most of us so if she's smart she'll back off. The other girls might call you a snitch, though.”

“Thanks, I'll remember that,” Siri said, grinning with sincerity. It was nice to know she seemed to be as helpful a person as she was back in the classsroom. “I don't wanna be a snitch, but I don't want to let her walk all over me, either. You know?”

Ashton had stopped looking like a willing listener; she stopped chewing her food even and a slightly more awake expression came over her. She saw Terry leaning against the back of the gym building with a heel up on the wall, and next to her and noticeably fawning over her was a middle schooler, presenting her with a Valentine's card. Ashton relaxed again, noting where she saw her. It often paid knowing where St. Mary's top dogs were.

“I'm sorry, what?” Ashton said, looking at Siri who just grinned and shook her head. A moment of silence returned, but just briefly.

“You bring your own lunch?” Siri asked, and Ashton nodded, returning to finishing it.

“I don't eat what they serve here,” she said, making it sound like there was something horribly wrong with the cafeteria food, but Siri couldn't place a finger on anything wrong with her lunch. It tasted fine.

“Well it looks really good,” Siri complimented, hunching forward as her lunch basket was nearly empty enough now for her to finish the remaining bites easily. Her day had started off rough, but now it looked better. St. Mary's was a beautiful school that looked rich in heritage, and it was kept up well. She could see herself surviving here one more year to graduation.

“I'll be right back. Gonna get a drink,” Diana said, walking her fingers out of reach from Ashton's shoulder while she headed across the court headed to the vending machines outside the cafeteria.

“Get me a water,” Ashton said a little louder to make up for the distance she let Diana put between them. She couldn't be certain Diana heard her, but she asked her to get her a water every day. She knew the routine by now.

Minutes passed and some students walked by the fountain, continuing on their way; some finishing their lunches and heading back to class early to beat the bell and the imminent hall traffic. An almost foreboding bird caw traveled on the wind once the girls outdoors had been spread more thinly. Ashton took notice to her surroundings and exhaled a relief-sounding breath when she was done. She had a little more chicken and rice left in her tupperware container, but she put the lid on it prematurely. Her plastic fork was bitten and snapped at the neck with the push of her thumb.

“Are you done eating?” Siri asked, watching her curiously.

“I'm going to have to be,” Ashton said, talking around the end of the plastic fork in her mouth before spitting it out. When she looked back up, she was glaring down Lizzy and her two soldiers she was bringing their way.
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Post by Ashton Kimbre »

“What are you doing? Protecting chumps full-time now, Ash?” Lizzy asked, throwing her arms out as she came to the fountain. Ashton had woken up for the second time today, the first time being when she first confronted Lizzy at the start of class. She looked a little miffed. She very much disliked being called Ash.

“Have you ever considered I just don't like you?” she counter-questioned, putting her plastic container on the side of the fountain before standing up. She made fists but held them down at her sides like two guns she didn't want to draw if she didn't have to.

“You're not s**t. Clarice proved that in the gym when she kicked your a**. And she's not the only one that's going to have put you in your place if you don't start remembering it,” Lizzy said, moving closer and causing Siri to step back in an almost magnetic opposition with her. Ashton, however, didn't budge.

Ashton remembered her fight with Clarice. She remembered it well, and she remembered it positively, and many of the girls at the school shared her outlook on it. It was unfortunate that they came to blows, but that was another time, and arguments are hard to step down from when you get going, and moreso when everyone's watching. But that fight wasn't their be-all, end-all fight. Quite the contrary, Ashton and Clarice were, and still are, two of St. Mary's most sculpted products out of the gym, and an unsureness on the student body's part had many of them wanting to see a round two, though none of them foresaw that happening anytime soon given the two girls' current state of mind. Ashton, and very publicly, saw things differently than she did at that time. She was older now, and much wiser than her younger self that she let get out of control that day.

She knew she was stronger than she was before, and above that, she didn't see any point in a rematch with Clarice, for revenge or otherwise. A hefty portion of this lent itself to some of Ashton's fame as a role model.

“Where's your friend Diana at?” Lizzy asked, up in her face now, and with this closeness, Terry across the court finally saw the red flags and excused herself from receiving a chocolatey Valentine's offering from another student.

“Hey. Gimmie a sec,” Terry said.

Ashton looked out the corner of her eye to the cafeteria. Diana was still probably at the vending machines. She gave Lizzy credit for her little ambush at the same time she marked her weak for resulting to it, and bringing up Clarice didn't stick the knife in her and twist it like Lizzy thought it would. What it did do was make her measure Lizzy up to Clarice, and to Ashton, there was no comparison. If she wanted to fight, she'd get her beating. The only thing she would have to worry about would be her two thugs, but even then, it wouldn't be anything Ashton hadn't walked away from before.

“I don't need Diana here to kick your a**, Lizzy. You're not that hype,” Ashton said, prompting the sidelines to 'oooooo' and try and provoke Lizzy into throwing a punch.

Terry arrived just in time for the gathering crowd to have manifested into an obstacle for her to fight through. When she came to the two girls, it was Ashton she pulled back from Lizzy's face. Terry knew Ashton, at least better than she knew Lizzy in that Ashton wouldn't start swinging if she touched her.

“Hey, what you doin'? What if one of the sisters saw ya fightin'?” Terry asked, sounding the diffuser but in actuality orchestrating herself into Ashton's corner. Ashton looked at her and said nothing, still waiting on Lizzy to throw the first punch so she could throw the last one.

“This doesn't have anything to do with you, dyke,” Lizzy said, trying not to fight Terry if she could help it while still sounding like she could take her. A few giggles came from the gathered students: Terry haters. There weren't many, but there were a few. Terry recognized their faces, just as she recognized there were more there who respected and had no problem with her. She could play that to her advantage.

“Why you actin' mad anyway? Your boy ain't getcha' nothin' for Valentine's Day? I'll be your boy if ya' want,” she said, and let it settle for the perfect amount of time before she winked at her. That unnerved Lizzy, but above that, she had now pieced together that Terry stood with Ashton for whatever reason, and even though they still had the numbers advantage, she was much less inclined to continue. Terry had a name, Ashton had a name; Lizzy wanted one, and her two girls were just unproved muscle. Diana was coming back soon which went against the plan, and their scene had gone on just long enough to start drawing faculty attention.

With the approach of a pair of sisters from the abbey, Lizzy took her girls and headed the opposite direction just in time, and looking more than a little annoyed. She could look more annoyed, Terry thought.

“See ya back in homeroom, babygirl!” she called after her, grinning knowing her words got to her. Lastly she looked to Ashton. “Well, that was fun.”

Ashton let out a deep breath as everyone began to go back to what they were doing, the show that never ended up happening being officially over now. Siri let out the breath she was holding as well, but she remained panting, shaky, and scared, slowly sliding down to the base of the fountain and putting her face in her hands. Terry and Ashton watched her.

“She's not going to leave me alone now, is she? It's just my first day, man,” she cried, but held in her tears, not wanting anyone to see her break down. “What am I going to do?”

“For starters?” Ashton answered, getting a look from her and Terry, both whom were curious. “Leave the hoop earrings at home tomorrow.”
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Receiving a new student was as exciting as Ashton's homeroom had been in a while. Everything was boring when everyone knew everyone and knew who was alpha and who was not, but a new girl always disrupted that flow very quickly. Since Siri had arrived, things hadn't been as bad as she feared, and predictably so. Lizzy didn't like her, but she didn't hunt her every waking moment or terrorize her in her dreams like she thought she would. Ashton figured this would happen, but it was always best to wait and see. Making assumptions led to a lot of bloody noses at St. Mary's, and sometimes worse.

“Check out this video,” Noel whispered over to her new friend, Siri, while keeping her phone hidden under her desk. The smile on her face was building up the joke that risked not delivering on the hilarity the longer it took her to send it.

Siri received it on her phone a few seconds later, watching it without the audio and still enjoying it as much as if it had been on. She responded back via text: lol.

Happening to look back at them while stretching her back, Ashton breathed easy seeing Siri was adjusting well. She'll be alright, she thought, returning back to the front and their math teacher's excruciatingly painful explanation of a formula. Now if only she could understand what she was talking about.

Ashton was making a real effort to do well in all her subjects, just managing to keep herself afloat with the more academic half of the class, but it was the after school programs where she really excelled. She was a figure in the gym, frequent MVP and captain in sports, and a renowned fighter both in and outside the athletic club. There was nothing she couldn't do when she put her mind to it. Some things she just put more of her mind to, like her physical training. If her mathematics and a few other academic subjects had to be her weakest links, then so be it.

The day moved on. Lunch was quiet at the fountain, and Diana made a joke about not getting into any fights while she went to get their drinks. Ashton wasn't worried. It was about time for another of St. Mary's famous hair-pulling, eye-clawing brawls, but not today. She just wasn't feeling it: the bloodlust in the air. But there was always tomorrow.

At the end of the day, after class... after basketball practice... after weight training... Ashton returned to her dorm room, and depending on the weekday, she wasn't done putting in hours working part-time at Partlowe's “authentic Italian” restaurant outside New Haven as a waitress. Every day that she had to put on that uniform, she felt a little more of her dignity chipping away, but she braved it, keeping her end-goal in sight that, come graduation, she'd be out on her own. Luckily, today was not a waitressing day.

“Hey Ashton,” Maisie said, turning in her computer chair to greet her.

Maisie Didier was Ashton's roommate and had been for over a year now. Her last roommate, Rebecca Biggs, nicknamed Reb Brown, was a burly girl and member of the wrestling team, and turned out to be a very loyal friend; but like Siri after her, she suffered the fate of transfer and left to finish her last year of school at a new and uncharted all-girls setting. Ashton wasn't worried about her surviving at another school for a second.

“Hey,” Ashton said, coming in and dropping her mesh bag at the door that had her gym clothes in it. She looked around the room, flipping her ponytail, never surprised by anything new she saw among Maisie's mostly frivolous belongings. “Is that a blender?” she asked, thumbing to the glass pitcher poking out of a box of packing peanuts.

“It is,” she answered, smiling delightedly in assuming Ashton might have been as interested in it as she was. “My mom sent me a new one I liked online after I told her ours was old and didn't work very well. It has more speed and pulse settings than the old one and comes with all these different blades, and get this: we can make homemade ice-cream now!”

“First off, stop calling my blender old. It's not old, it's just not brand name. Second, it's not our blender, it's my blender, and it works just fine, thank you.” Ashton sighed, looking at the sparkling, eye-catching glass: a telltale expensive bauble of a rich person flaunting their wealth. “More junk you really don't need.” She went to her bed and fell onto it tiredly. After a moment, she flipped onto her back, feeling out which muscles had been worked today.

“You won't say that after you've used it. I figure with all the fruit we eat, we could use a nicer blender. And you can still use your old one for all those nasty protein shakes you make,” Maisie said, turning back to the computer and picking up typing where she left off in that word document for her literature class.

“You are not seriously complaining about my muscle shakes. I wash the damn blender, Maisie. Whenever you use it, it's always clean. You are not seriously going to tell me that you taste my protein powder in your damn smoothies.” Ashton looked away from the ceiling to make eye-contact with her. Seeing Maisie's face would tell her how angry she should be, and when she saw her biting back a grin, she deduced what was really going on and laid back down. “You just can't stop spending your mom's money, can you?”

“Please. It's not like you can either.” Maisie almost laughed after she said that but gasped instead, realizing what she just said. Ashton closed her eyes. “Ashton, I'm sorry.”

“It's fine.” She kept her eyes closed.

“No, really Ashton. I forgot.” Maisie frowned, biting her lip again. She'd forgotten Ashton wasn't in the same financial boat as most of the girls at St. Mary's. She forgot her situation was... difficult. She kept watching her lying on the bed, waiting for her to give a more serious response. At least then she could know she wasn't just forgiving her to take it out on her later, but then again, Ashton wasn't really that type.

“It's fine, Maisie. Forget about it.” Ashton yawned, being truthful in her tiredness but not completely truthful about it being fine. Maisie didn't mean it. She knew that. But nevertheless it brought up a very unpleasant thought to an otherwise fine day: her mother.

Maisie reluctantly went back to work on her paper after Ashton had made it obvious the matter was over. Her frown lingered with her a while after she pushed her glasses back up.

Mom, Ashton thought, looking up at the ceiling as Maisie's typing slowly faded into a background much larger than their room's space. She didn't even notice a girl next door shouting at her roommate about rearranging her things without permission, and quite loudly at that. She only called her “mom” in her thoughts; when they spoke, it was always “Jillian.” As far as Ashton was concerned, her mother had long since lost her title of mother.

She opened her eyes slowly, saving herself from easily drowning further into that pool of depression. She had to deal with her mother whenever she was in town, but she wouldn't otherwise, not on the phone, not via mail. She turned away all her packages, and she refused her money except what was automatically funneling her tuition, thus explaining her part-time job for some pocket money. Most of the other girls at St. Mary's didn't work a public job; most didn't have to, but they were also on presumably better terms with their parents.

“Hey Ashton?” Maisie asked, further snapping her out of her trance. “How many Ls are in canceled?”

She faked snoring.
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It was the start of another school week and the day was creeping like Mondays always did. Word traveled the halls that Kiyomi busted up a girl real bad, but nobody had the specifics of it. They'd have more details at lunch when everyone pooled their information.

“She was actually dumb enough to say that to her about Jia?” Diana asked Mindy over by the fountain. Her continuous nod told it all. “Damn.”

“I won't say it wasn't dumb, but the bravery in that girl to even say it to her...” Mindy shook her head. “Not a lot of people would have even dared.” She looked to Diana, curious if she might see her perspective that maybe there was something to be taken away from the a**-beating.

“Yeah... 'cause they're not dumb, Mindy.” Diana stared at her, refusing to acknowledge Mindy wanted her to as anything other than foolishness. Mindy's shoulders slumped and she looked aside, scolded by Diana's piercing gaze. If she could make Mindy feel bad for thinking the way she did, she was going to.

Ashton was holding her half-emptied water bottle from her perch at the fountain bench, watching the other girls walk and talk before their lunch block was over. Most were probably talking about Kiyomi's fight, she figured. Fights were always a breaking bulletin with the student body. She watched Diana collect the last of the opinions she wanted on the story before returning back to her.

“The general consensus is Taylor mouthed off to her about Jia and got her a** kicked,” Diana said, standing in-front of Ashton and placing a hand on a cocked hip frustratedly.

“Brave girl,” Ashton said, crunching up her now empty water bottle. Diana frowned.

“You too? It's not brave, Ashton. It's idiotic. You don't pull a horse's tail and expect not to get kicked. Taylor thinks she's real or something, but she's not, just like the rest of them.”

When Ashton didn't give her a response, instead looking interested and neutral at the same time toward her, Diana looked over at the gym building, spotting some pertinent business with another girl that would have to take place over their ongoing discussion.

“I'll be right back. We're not done with this,” she said, crossing the way over to the gym building.

“Okay,” Ashton said, grinning at the sight of her frustration with the topic even as she walked off. And to think she quit debate, Ashton thought.

She took out her phone while she waited, swiping her finger with painted nail to open its lock. There were no new notifications; it would have hummed if there had been. But that didn't stop her from going to her inbox and looking at the messages there, all old and already read. She opened her most recent one... a message from Ryan.

Her eyes followed and followed again the lines of his text. It wasn't a short one; and when she got to the end of it, she looked back up, seemingly rejuvenated, and pressing down the top button on her phone to relock it. Diana was just finishing her meet, shaking hands with the other girl and pulling them apart to make each others' fingers snap. Ashton couldn't avoid the similarities of a well-oiled prison system. There were factions, or gangs, that ran together; and there was a code that all the ones that mattered abided by: respect. Give it, receive it; don't give it, and a hit squad of usually four times your own numbers would leave you bloodied and twitching around the emptiest part of campus you'd go all day.

They didn't have their own currency like some prisoners made for themselves. They weren't that bad, yet. They still had the real thing to swap hands with, even though they had more than they could spend coming in from their parents or rich relatives, and it was the most unstoppable thing at St. Mary's.

Plenty of girls just came to school to make money, and there were plenty of ways to make it. Snacks, drinks, cigarettes, drugs, stolen electronics... all the colors of the criminal rainbow were in at least one girl's messenger bag on any given day. The sisters had responded well enough to the downward spiral before it could really get going, or responded as well as they could with their extra security and closer-than-most-schools hospital coordinating with RhyDin Medical for all the unsightly incidents they encountered on a semi-regular basis.

If you asked Ashton what she thought of St. Mary's, she used to say it was like a dam with holes that needed plugging. It wasn't good. Now she saw it like the holes were plugged, but not in the right way; just a temporary patch, ready to leak again at any moment, and it would stay that way until something changed. Ashton didn't know what that answer was to making the school better, either, and if she was going to figure it out, it was a little late in her stint at St. Mary's to try and better the place. No, she thought, it was better to let next year's seniors carry that weight.

“What did you want with Roz?” Ashton asked to the returning Diana, seeing she'd spoken with her.

“Someone from her circle of friends busted into my locker yesterday. I was looking into it. It's all sorted out now,” she said, sitting next to her on the fountain and reaching her hands back to the back of the stone bench to stretch. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” Ashton replied somewhat quietly; preoccupied. “I was just thinking about what you said.”

“What'd I say?”

“We were talking about Taylor.”

“Oh yeah, that's right. I wanted to get back to you about that.” Diana rose a strict finger as an introduction to her forthcoming setting straight of the record, but the calm over Ashton's composure distracted her enough to want to hear what she'd come up with well before she just started arguing. “You still think it was brave what she did?”

Ashton shook her head. “I don't know about that. Can't take the word of the halls with what happened. It's probably close to one of the stories you were told, but we really don't know what went down with Kiyomi and Taylor. I was more thinking about that other thing you said... about her being real.”

“Oh yeah?” Diana asked curiously with a risen and very curled eyebrow.

“Whether it's Kiyomi, Lizzy, or even that new girl, Siri, we can't say what they're about, Diana. We've both heard stories. I've heard about more screwed up childhoods from some of these girls than I care to remember, and they're just screwed up enough that I can't forget about 'em, either.

“Take a s**t life and add 'enrolled at St. Mary's' to it, and you're gonna call that kid a poser? When one of these girls goes at another and loses hard, I mean hard, and everyone calls her on how fake she was... how she's nothing. But it ain't about that. Look at her face... look at it before she snaps, when, and after. All that's real. If you're here at St. Mary's, that's the one thing that we do know.”

“Which philosopher from the Renaissance were you texting before?”

Ashton sat in silence with her for a long few moments, listening to the chatter around them and the slightly louder splashing coming from the fountain. Diana would gasp suddenly and take hold of Ashton's arm when she tried to push her back into the water, and she would have wiped that grin off her face if she wasn't busy catching her breath.
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“You should go to the duels,” Diana said.

“Huh?” That got Ashton's nose out of her phone, just like Diana thought it would. “The duels? What?” She repeated Diana's suggestion, seeing if it sounded as ludicrous as it did the first time. It did.

Diana got up from the weight bench in the gym and went over to sit next to her on the larger one against the wall mirror. “You didn't answer me when I asked who you were texting so I had to pull you back to reality somehow. I look out for your well-being like that.” She grabbed Ashton's shoulders and leaned as far over with her as she could before they both risked falling off the side. “So who were you texting?”

“Nobody.”

Ashton answered too quickly. It made Diana smirk. She might as well have just told her. “It's Ryan, isn't it?”

No response from Ashton.

“Dammit Ashton,” Diana whispered, looking ahead now. “You need to open your eyes, girl. You've got a reputation to think about. You're one of the toughest of us, and a lot of things run smoothly around here because of that. But if people start seeing you getting teary-eyed over a boy–”

“Screw them, and screw you, Diana,” Ashton said, pushing her from her so she could get up and give the perched barbell the much more aggressive shove she had originally intended for her. Needless to say, it made quite a noise, and the few that were still in the gym despite the late afternoon hour did look their way, but just as quickly forgot they saw it seeing it was Ashton Kimbre.

Diana remained hunched over silently on the bench, pressing her fingertips together thoughtfully. She realized how insensitive she must have seemed, but she plotted how to go ahead, because the truth of the matter was insensitive was the last thing she was being. She stared at Ashton, seeing the effects of her private life. Ashton had been good at keeping it quiet when things were good, but they weren't good now.

“I'm just saying...” Diana began again, slowly. “If this gets any more obvious than it is now, and it's very obvious now, by the way, some of the other girls are going to start testing us, and we don't need that. A lot of kids look up to you, too, Ash.”

“I told you not to call me–”

“I know. You were wandering again.” Diana glared angrily. “This concerns me too, Ashton, because I run with you. And it doesn't matter how good you are at keeping your little secret now because it's written all over your face that... oh, I don't know... an Asian pretty boy you met last year who's on a wrestling team has you wrapped around his little finger.”

“Diana, I'll tell you this just once more, because you seem to have forgot. What I do in my private life is none of your business, so stay out of it. I think we're done today.” Ashton kept staring at her, pushing her out of the gym with her unpleasant gaze until Diana finally shrugged in her gray sports bra and got up from the bench. She pushed her arms into her hooded jacket to cover herself up for the walk back to her room. It was very hard for her to resist the urge to tell her how stupidly over the moon she was, but she managed to.

Snatching up her black drawstring gym pack, Diana headed for the door, but not before leaving her friend with some stern words. “We're not done talking about this.”

She left the gym and it got so quiet on Ashton's end that her ears were able to pick up the subtle movements of the disc weights being lifted by the girls on the other side of the building. Ashton let out a breath now that Diana was gone. She felt bad that things had to get that tense between them, but she didn't regret standing up for her private life. As for the accused details of her private life, she was unintentionally giving them some thought as well.

Ashton stood there between the weight bench and the dumbbell rack with her hands on her hips. Diana was wrong, she thought. She was never stronger, she was never in better shape. Her reflection in the mirrors around her reminded her of that. Anyone who dared to pick a fight with her would regret it, but maybe that wasn't the point. Diana thought she was showing weakness, and very apparently given the urgency she had just been confronted with.

Was it true?

She let out a breath shakily and seemed to be evaluating herself, mentally. She felt like an addict that didn't know she had a problem yet. Maybe Diana was right, and maybe she wasn't, but in either case, Ashton felt she should be able deal with it on her own. She was strong physically; she was strong mentally; and she thought she was strong emotionally... that was until her phone buzzed over on the bench.

A text message.

She went over to check it as if she answered to it, swiped the unlock, and sat down because she thought she might need to; just in case she were hit by something in that tiny device.

It was Ryan, messaging her back finally after her own text message that she had put her own “minimum reply time” stipulation on. Ryan had failed that stipulation, and his message told why.

“We're done.”

Ashton rarely, if ever, looked hurt, but she did now, and even then you still might have had to do a double-take of her. It was the kind of upset that gets asked 'are you crying?' and only then do you figure it out. She was fortunate to not be going through this during school hours, but she didn't think about that. She was busy thinking of the perfect reply that would make everything okay again, but her fingers never depressed any of the keys to start writing it. A 'message is too long' notification would likely follow any attempt she made, so luckily, she never started. The longer she went undecided, the longer she held off being dumped. It was only when she put the phone down that she felt the reality of her new relationship status, and despite being given tremendous clues and numerous hints of it coming for weeks, she never looked more dumbfounded.

Only now was she able to snap out of her stupefaction and consider what Diana had been talking about. Today wasn't the first time she had tried to warn her about Ryan, but she didn't think anything of it then because she had been so head over heels. He was into fitness, she was into fitness; he was into sports, so was she; he thought she was beautiful, and she thought he was. They were the perfect couple, she thought, and Ashton kept that world all her own, and now she realized how stupid she'd been.

When she thought of how distant Ryan had been, and how long he'd been acting that way, it made her sick to her stomach. He put off breaking up with her because she was so oblivious to him wanting to. He didn't want to hurt her feelings. He pitied her. That infuriated her. How weak she must have looked...

She shoved her phone in her gym bag, not wanting to look at it anymore. When she came back up, she closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the mirror, controlling quite amazingly any tearletting. Her next move was weighing heavily on her mind: mourn, or push forward.

The gym door opened then, disrupting the peace momentarily of the small after hours exercise crew. It was about time for everyone to leave, which told Ashton that the new entrant could only have been a new person unaffiliated with the gym and its hours, or it was someone with an emergency, but the silence that followed their entering the gym quickly ruled out the latter there.

“Excuse me,” she could be heard saying, difficult for Ashton to pick up on the other side of the building. “Does anyone know some good weights to start out on?”

Ashton opened her eyes, making immediate sense of the girl's intention.

“Uhh...” one of the girls replied, nearly done with their own workout and about to leave, but beyond that, disinterested in explaining the intricate ins and outs of the gym to someone who was more than likely just going to quit after the first day anyway. “No one's here right now, but if you came back tomorrow, the coach would be here and she would be able to help you.”

“Oh... ok,” the girl replied timidly, and seemingly picking up on her unwanted presence.

Ashton knew that would be the end of it. She might look around and might even take a few more steps inside, but she'd eventually turn in her tour, and she'd face that door again, and then out like she came, probably never to come back... that was if she didn't do anything.

Having been looking at the ceiling that whole time and listening intently, Ashton looked over at the girl when she had stopped speaking. She hadn't made eye-contact with her yet. She was shy, and she was tiny, both being things the gym could fix. Ashton had to decide what to do: stand by in her grieving state and let her walk out, or suck it up and go back to being herself.

“Alright, thank you guys for the help.” They hadn't really helped her, but those words would at least help her get out the door. The girl wasn't sure what she was going to do when she had come in the gym, and now it kind-of made sense to her that her lack of a plan when she entered was resulting in her leaving with a fruitless visit. She told herself she could check tomorrow and speak with the trainer, but further back in her mind she saw herself as probably not doing it.

Her less-than helpful assistance returned to her reps, a nod lazily sufficing for both 'no problem' and 'bye.'

Before the girl's hand touched the door, Ashton called out across the building.

“You looking to get started in the gym?”

The girl looked back at her, seeing her standing in her tank top and shorts that both showed her physique and thus qualification to help train someone; but perhaps more importantly than that, and certainly important to Ashton, she looked inviting.

“Yeah,” the girl replied after a moment. She was less sure now than when she came in, but still stood by ever entering the gym in the first place. “I've never worked out before, though. I don't know what to do. But I'd like to start.”

That was all Ashton needed to hear.

“Well come on over to the bench. Let's see where you're at,” Ashton said, waving her to come over. The girl nearly jumped at the command, and the girls behind her grinned; their reservations of Ashton aside, it was always fun when a new person started out.
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It was going on 11 PM, and Maisie was typing away on her laptop. She was instant messaging her friends, the boyfriend being the primary conversation, but she had other things pulled up in her browser tabs. She had homework and papers on down the road that needed writing, and all their research and sources were brought up with the intent of getting some work done, but it was highly unlikely Maisie would even open up her schoolwork documents tonight. She was much too busy exchanging smiley faces and flirtations with her boyfriend, Garrett Fraser.

Ashton was a disturbance, not that Maisie was getting anything productive done anyway. Her easy-to-install chin-up bar seemed to shake the foundation of their bathroom doorway with every lift she took, and her dropping noisily between reps and pacing around behind her, panting indecently, was distracting enough. She could tune out her uncomfortable gasping at least with her music and noise-canceling headphones, but not when she was doing her pull ups and chin ups. Ashton was at home on the battlefield with her workout equipment, and the more of a workout she was getting, the more naturally she let it out, and the more orgasmic Ashton's count became, the more Maisie decided she'd had enough.

16... 17... 18... 19...” Ashton exhaled triumphantly each time she let herself down. She loved the feeling. She loved the burn.

“Alright! ENOUGH!” Maisie shouted, squinting her eyes tightly and throwing her headphones down from her ears to around her neck.

Ashton dropped down and caught her breath while waiting to see what Maisie had to say. It was surprising to say the least, and even Maisie herself wasn't sure what she'd just blurted out. She had just kind-of screamed in her aggravation, which she figured was a fine enough place as any to start.

“I'm trying to get some work done, Ashton.”

“Calm down there, Emily Barker. You can do your work,” she said, swinging her ponytail around to unstick it from her sweaty and partly exposed back. “I'm not stopping you.”

“Yeah... you kinda are.”

“Well... I guess the good news here is you only have to put up with it for one more year. Then I'll be out of your hair. But until then, I'm going to do my exercises in my room,” Ashton smiled, going over to the chair at her desk to sit down. She leaned over the side of it and caught her breath, staring at her arms and clenching her muscles while she did so, admiring them. “We've got a good setup here, Maisie. There are worse roommates you could have.”

Maisie sighed, turning back to her laptop. “Do you at least have to sound like you're coming all the damn time?”

“Yes I do,” Ashton said, laughing a little and finding her complaint childish and cute. “That's what working out feels like. You should try it sometime.” She wiped her face and arms with a dirty shirt and then discarded it back to the floor. She looked around, but not for long. “I'm sticky. I'm going to take a shower.”

“I already took mine, so dry it down,” Maisie said, back to typing away but halting again when Ashton stopped to ruffle her hair on the way to the bathroom.

Inside the shower, Ashton had considerably lost the liveliness she had been showing Maisie. She rest her forehead against the wall under the showerhead and just let it rain the scalding water on her, almost punishing herself with its intensity as if she had done something wrong.

She stared at the drain beneath her feet. Her hair veiled her face with its length and she made no efforts to clear it. She was making little effort in that shower save for maintaining her hands up on the wall. She felt so alone. Her muscular arms showed just like the rest of her body, and she couldn't help but notice staring down at the fiberglass floor. She thought: what's so wrong with me that he would break up with me? Am I ugly?

She had been very proud of her body and how much she was able to achieve thus far with her discipline and determination, but one boy had succeeded in having her question it all.

When she got out of the shower, she didn't dry it down. She didn't turn the fan on to pull out the moisture. She didn't fully dry her hair, and she didn't brush her teeth. She just got into her pajamas and looked to get into bed as quickly as possible. When she came out of the bathroom, Maisie stopped what she was doing to look at her.

“Did you dry the shower down?” she asked, having noticed she hadn't turned the fan on the entire time.

“Yeah.” Ashton lied as effortlessly as she had in her, not even attempting to sound convincing. She crashed to her bed, and Maisie couldn't help but wonder why she was being such a high concentration of b*tch tonight. Then it dawned on her: Ashton hadn't dried her hair, something she always did; and she wasn't pulling her weight with the chores, which she was more about enforcing than anyone.

Ashton kept everyone locked out of her personal life, and she was damn good at it too. But there were some things that she couldn't keep secret, no matter how much she wanted to. Maisie being roommates with her just afforded her some of that knowledge, and she knew that she had been on shaky grounds, back and forth, with Ryan for quite some time. Now Maisie felt she had enough of a gut feeling from just seeing her like she was to make a good estimation: they had broken up.

How to approach this, Maisie wondered. She regretted her attitude she'd given Ashton tonight. On any other occasion, Ashton would have deserved it. But these were the rare circumstances. Ashton was in rare and uncommon form tonight. She always showed strength, and she showed it with great consistency; now she looked weak and inconsistent, and Maisie wondered if she was likely the only person that had seen her this way yet, and if she was, if that changed anything.

She decided it did.

“Ashton, you can't go to bed with your hair wet.”

She was ignored, and Maisie let out a deep breath. She'd need some strength of her own for what she was getting ready to do. She got up and went over to her bed. A nudge to her thigh with her knee shook her in accompaniment with her nagging voice.

“Come on, Ashton. If it were anyone else's hair I clearly wouldn't care, but you have to go to class tomorrow. At least let me brush it so it doesn't get knotted up.”

Maisie was indeed nagging, and it worked. Ashton sat up, still mute and not thinking anything of it. A break-up was always the rare exception to most rules when it came to the relationships between the girls at St. Mary's. Like the Sunday Truce when there's usually no griefing, there was also an unspoken code to be supportive of one another when it came to those oh-so destructive boys...

Maisie undid the elastic hair tie that Ashton was so used to keeping her hair in and she began brushing. It was quiet, but it was nice, at least to Maisie. At least this way Ashton wasn't alone. That was how she would have wanted it if she had just broken up with someone. After a time, she put her hand on her shoulder.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

Ashton looked toward her shoulder but not over it. Maisie got her thinking about it: just the thought of Ryan. That was all it took to release the floodgates, and then she was grateful Maisie couldn't see her face as she began weeping powerfully... silently.

Maisie pushed herself against her back and just held her.

Garrett's blinking IM could wait.
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In a mess of hair and flurrying punches, the girl beneath Ashton couldn't move. She had gotten herself into the worst position possible, and she had arrived there well before she got taken to the ground. She seemed to be winning the verbal war, spouting off at least two “bitches” for every punch of Ashton's to her head or unguarded face. Ashton wasn't saying anything. She was using her oxygen much more proficiently.

Diana just outside the observers and recording cell phones around the corner keeping an eye out for any of the sisters. A patrol was inbound around the cafeteria building through the brick arch shelter, and Diana was quick to send Siri to stall them before they heard any fight-cheering. Siri ran ahead to keep them frozen at their position, and Diana looked over her shoulder to check on the status of the fight. It could stand to go on just a little longer, she thought.

The audience for this particular beat down was a smaller one, and it was subsequently a quieter one. For one, it was Ashton fighting, and for another, no one really cared about the other girl, Drew Rateliff. Her current fame was only a fleeting product of stepping up to Ashton, and her challenge wasn't going so well. There was also a heartless factor in this incredibly one-sided scrap: the onlookers were holding off on stopping it when it was clearly over several painstakingly long minutes ago.

The girl, Drew, was risking more longer-lasting injury by continuing to fight so intensely, but it was that she wasn't backing down at all that the other girls were implementing their own brand of discipline by leaving Ashton on-top of her.

This had all started with an insult. Drew and Siri were exchanging unpleasant banter that heavily bordered on offensive. They upgraded to insulting one another with the bigger guns of St. Mary's finest smack-talkers – bigger guns that had unfortunately lost a lot of their punch from overuse. “Bitch” didn't ring like it used to say 10-20 years ago, and it fell out of power early on in St. Mary's time; that didn't stop it from falling out of use, however. What did do the damage, and always would, was the personal attacks. “You're fat,” and “fatty” were the hollowpoints of anything Drew had called Siri so far, and when she saw them working almost instantly, she switched to full-auto.

Tears were a sign of weakness more and more the more seniority you had at St. Mary's. Opinions varied, especially among the seniors, but the more on down the ladder you went, the more a story about a girl crying in the bathroom could squander her rep. Ashton understood there was a time for crying, like a lot of the higher seniors at St. Mary's, and she found herself on Siri's side yet again when her self-consciousness had showed about her weight.

Drew moved on to Ashton after Siri's silence had marked her defeat, and she wasted no time testing her balance on her fountain throne. That was more than enough for Ashton to trade in her lunch block to issue a beating. It was strange, though. She usually didn't get so into her fights. Her hair didn't get as messy as the other girl's, but it had this time. She was fighting like it was personal, and she didn't know why.

Finally they pulled her off of Drew, but it took three girls and a whole lot of talking right against her ear to pull her out of her bloodthirsty trance. Drew got up fast, her adrenaline still pumping, but none of her signals were clicking. Only the sharp eyes caught it, and it was mostly the fighters that noticed. Drew was still out to prove herself, and it took girls that weren't even her friends to do her the favor of just leading her away and checking her out. She had a lot of hair that needed combing away to investigate that bloody face.

“Ashton. Hey Ashton,” one of those voices said in her ear. It was Diana. Ashton looked to her, a little displaced, and Diana smirked, checking on Siri's status, no longer able to delay the sisters from their inevitable approach.

“Come on,” she said, taking Ashton's wrist and leading her into the school building. Lunch was indeed over.

She dragged her into the bathroom, navigating around the pair making out just around the privacy barricade and setting up her purse on the side of one of the sinks.

“What was that back there? That wasn't like you,” she asked, not looking at her, instead devoting her attention to the contents of her handbag.

“Did you see that, Diana? I think I hit her harder and more than almost any girl I've fought, and it didn't do anything,” Ashton said, sounding jaded. She didn't look at Diana either until she approached her, curious to see what it was in her hand. It was a hairbrush.

“I think you need to take another look at her, Ashton.”

“I don't need to. She won, Diana. Did you see Siri's face when she cut her down? I could have beat on that girl for the rest of the day and I wouldn't have hurt her as bad as she hurt Siri. Ow!” she reacted painfully toward Diana brushing her hair before calming again.

“Sorry,” she said, smirking and waiting for her hand to go back down before she continued brushing. “I think you're thinking about this too hard, or the wrong way. Trust me, Drew Rateliff will be feeling that fight the rest of April, and nobody's so dumb that they don't learn their place from a beating like that. As for Siri, she can toughen up. The rest of us had to.”

Ashton didn't say anything. Diana was right, and she was right, marking the impasse. She just leaned there with her hands back on the sink while Diana made her look pretty again. Looking good and being one of the school's top fighters went hand in hand at St. Mary's. You didn't have to glam it up, but if you could—and Ashton could—it was one more race to lead and one more example to set, and Ashton was all about setting examples.

“That wasn't like you. Why don't you tell me what really happened? Were you taking out your breakup with Ryan on that girl?”

Ashton just stared ahead right into that open stall. “Just hurry up and finish.”
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(this takes place approximately one week prior to the events of Hail to the King)

“Aw, babe. Why are you getting me all excited when you know you can't come over?” Maisie asked sweetly into her cell phone from the bed. It was likely that her night was going to heat up considerably during that one phone call, and under normal circumstances she wouldn't have risked it with Ashton being her roommate, but she had good reason to assume she'd have the room for a long time to come. She'd overheard from Roz that she went out to run after her workout. Ashton never ran at night. She always did her running in the morning, and if Maisie was just a little less swept up in her call with Garrett, she might have been concerned about her.

“Uh huh, and what would you do... if I was there right now?” she hushed softly, closed her eyes, and breathed loudly into the receiver. That was when a loud knock came to her door and made her jump almost a cat-like foot in surprise. She looked angrily at the door and slightly confused. If it was Ashton, why didn't she just let herself in?

“Ugh, hold on,” she said, laying her phone on the bed and going to the door, turning off her stereo's low sexy music on the way. She opened it in a hurry in little else than her boyshorts and pink tee, expecting to see her roommate on the other side. It wasn't.

Standing on the other side of the door was Roz and two of her girls on either side of her, and they didn't look ready to start something as much as they just looked... ready. Roz read the shock on her face and took the time she was paralyzed to look around inside her room for Ashton. She looked back at Maisie after she didn't see her.

“I don't guess Ashton's back yet, huh?” she asked.

“No, I still haven't seen her since school let out,” Maisie answered truthfully, and Roz looked out in the hall with an aggravated smirk on her face. She stuck her hands inside her jacket pockets.

“Alright. I've got other stops to make anyway. I trust you and Ashton are close, so when she gets back, tell her to call Roz. Everything's different now so tell her we've got some things to talk about. I just want to know where she stands and who she wants to stand with. She's got my number.” Roz took one last look in the bedroom—spying the LED screen of Maisie's cell phone—before turning to leave.

Maisie knew Roz was all talk. Ashton had told her that much about St. Mary's and her factions and smaller gangs. Ashton didn't have her number. She had no reason to. She kept her friends on her phone, and if she needed to speak with any of the girls at the school about anything, she met with them in person. Roz was just trying to build herself up in-front of her girls. She only had about five that ran with her and that was it, and none of them had ever been brave enough to start anything worth noticing by any of the real crews or badasses. But something Roz had said did worry Maisie. “Wait, why is everything different?” she asked, and it was Roz's turn to look confused.

“You mean you haven't heard?”

Maisie shrugged her shoulders and shook her head with a dumb look on her face, taunting Roz as if she shouldn't expect her to be in on something she clearly wasn't.

Roz didn't leave just yet.


The street lights had just come on when Ashton jogged past one. She jogged past another. She started counting them shortly after noticing her afternoon run had rolled over into the evening. She counted the street lights to busy her mind. She had her music in her earbuds turned up to max to keep her thoughts out. But she was bound to slow down sometime, and when she did, she would have to think, and that was the last thing in the world she wanted to do right now.

She had to stop to catch her breath in-front of a green steel bench at a bus stop with a sheltered seating area behind it with rather cheap-looking wind barriers boxing it. She held onto her knees next to the bench and caught her breath. She didn't want to stop. She wanted to keep running. But for whatever reason she took out her headphones and stopped her music.

Ashton gazed out to the RhyDin night and listened to its sounds as her heart and the world around it slowed down. Her thoughts wasted no time, invading and assaulting her all too suddenly, telling her how futile and hopeless her oppositions were in life. All her life, Ashton had been a proponent for the opposite way of thinking... that was until earlier in the day when she caught news of Clarice Queen's suicide.

Ashton sat down on the bench and took her shell suit jacket off with her phone still inside its pocket and tossed it to the bench space next to her. Her phone had been ringing nonstop since she left the gym after school, and even after turning everything to silent she could still feel them calling out to her. She just wanted to be left alone for a while. She didn't know how long, but it needed to be alone, and it needed to be as soon as she got out of school.

She wiped her hand from her forehead to the ponytail at the back of her head. Her body was finally beginning to calm down from that endurance run, and she was beginning to think clearly. She was far enough away from St. Mary's now where she felt its desperate cries for guidance—many of which would be aimed at her—couldn't bother her.

She leaned back against the bench with both her arms over the back. She looked up at the moon and stared into it for a long time, struggling to say something as soon as she saw it.

“You never got to let me give you your glasses back,” she said, shakily. “I don't care that you had a new pair the very next day. I know money was never an issue with you. It wasn't about that.”

Ashton wiped her nose with her thumb and wrist, attributing it to the cold air before hearing how it was her crying that was causing her voice to crack. “Maybe I thought it would be a nice showing of peace in-front of all the girls. They love to war so damn much... maybe seeing us making nice would have inspired them to not go at each other all the time. Maybe you thought I was holding a grudge. You probably didn't – no, I'm sure you didn't – but maybe I still wanted to say to you that I wasn't holding one. Maybe we could have been friends.”

Her face found her hands shortly after that. She let it all out in those hands, never relenting on the pressure to keep her eyes covered and keep in the tears she had built herself up to resist over her years at St. Mary's, but they came regardless. They strewed down her face and onto her lips, and it was some time until she even began to show signs of letting up.

“It's going to be harder to pick up the pieces back at St. Mary's than it ever has been. Everyone's going to think they can step up to fill some kind of vacancy you left. They're going to want to be the next Queen, and they're going to fight for it. I have to be so careful about how I deal with this.” Ashton cleared her face of hair, tears, and running makeup. She only made light fixes. She could do the rest when she got back.

Oh yeah, going back...

She unwadded the pile her jacket had been reduced to and found her phone. She had never had this many unopened envelopes in her inbox at one time. She wasn't worried about those right now, she just looked for Diana's, and found it:

“we need 2 talk as soon as u get this.”

You'd think it was Vito Corleone that died and all the families were scurrying to join different sides and find out where each other stood, all to overthrow the ones that were too slow to keep up with the changing times or found themselves on the wrong side. Ashton toughened up a great deal at that thought, dispelling any remaining tears or sniffles left within her. Plenty of girls were working behind the scenes right now, and they were a very real threat, and indeed, the more time she took to correlate with everyone, the larger her disadvantage became. She wouldn't let it get that far. Her memory of Clarice was one of the stronger forces pulling her up – out of her shadowy pit of grieving.

“I wonder if you remembered how many people wanted to see our rematch. I didn't even mind all the hype talk back then. If talking about us fighting kept them from fighting each other, then I can live with that.” She picked at a thread on the strap of her tank. “I try not to fight nowadays unless it's for a good reason, but I won't lie, even I wanted to see that rematch. I didn't think I was ready—I still don't, if you were still here—but in a school full of missed potential, a few really, really shined... and you were one of them. You were the strongest of us, Clarice... so if you couldn't take it anymore, what does that say for the rest of us?”

She leaned over on the bench for a time, her hands joined and her head down deep in thought. That was when her phone played the tone it only played when she was sent a message with an attachment.

She never received those, and she made a face appropriate for that surprise. It got her to look at her phone again and look at the message. It was from a number she didn't recognize, and that puzzled her further. She opened it and her eyes slowly widened before a horrific realization: Siri, the transfer student with the impressive GPA that Ashton had taken a liking to at the start of the year, was the focus of the photograph sent to her, and she was beaten up worse than any ambush she'd seen during her time at St. Mary's. The attachment note:

“keep ur distance ash. ;)

Her most despised nickname to top off an already hellish statement. Ashton slowly turned her gaze above the phone, brandishing a furious look. The things she was planning on doing almost immediately, and none of them were anywhere close to keeping her distance, but she reminded herself she couldn't go charging headfirst into anything – not at this sensitive, all-important time. She collected her bearings. She needed to return some of her messages, some of them from St. Mary's highest chairs, but before any of that, she needed to get back.

She looked up at the moon one final time, hoping she was looking in the right direction—given her two choices—for Clarice.

“I guess we'll find out.”

She was up from the bench and starting back on her run with a fully refreshed pace and leaving her jacket behind. It was an intimidating run back to campus, but Ashton thought nothing of it. It would be nothing compared to what St. Mary's was about to go through.
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The dorms felt like a wholly different place. They felt like a storage building that was filled to the brim with nefarious whispers and conspirators. Doors that normally remained cracked or open were uncharacteristically shut, and rooms that normally bled hip hop dance music through the walls were silent. It wasn't the dorm that Ashton had slowly moved up in floors from over the years, and not even her own room was free from this change that Clarice's death seemed to have brought to a little bit of everything.

Sitting on Maisie's bed across from Ashton wasn't Maisie, but Diana. Maisie had been given a polite dismissal to the hall while she and Diana discussed what to do in light of the fact that everyone was in a standoff for the nonexistent throne that Clarice left behind. Ashton kept her thumb pressed against her tightly closed lips while she deliberated on their course of action. As for Diana, her own thumbs couldn't work quickly enough.

“I don't think I've ever sent so many texts in my life,” she commented, depressing away at that little keyboard of buttons that revealed when she slid open her phone.

“You know we have to, though,” Ashton said. Diana's silence confirmed her agreement. She had nothing to argue with, nor did she want to. Keypad buttons continued firing away.

“What are we going to do about Roz and her girls?”

“Nothing. She's just flexing. We have bigger worries than that.”

“You're talking about Siri.”

“Yeah.”

It was common knowledge that Ashton had taken a strong shine to Siri since her transferring to St. Mary's earlier in the year. Siri was one of those uncommon girls that didn't get to finish their last year at the school with the friends she had gotten used to, but instead had to finish her high school education with a whole bunch of girls she didn't know and likely wouldn't get to before the year was done.

She was shy and reserved, but she had her defining interests and hobbies, a very bright personality, and she didn't back down from bullies as Ashton saw on her first day, and inadvertently painted a target on her back when she stood up for her against Lizzy. They had become friends after that, and though she never vocalized it, she intended to look out for Siri and protect her until they graduated. Maybe it was better that she hadn't promised Siri her protection, because she was unable to keep Riley from giving her the beating of her life; and what made Ashton feel so weak was that she was the reason they even touched her at all.

“Ashton?” Diana said, throwing her a line in an attempt to pull her out in the self-loathing she was currently drowning in. “You know if you go after Lizzy, the other girls are going to notice and act accordingly. You make a move, they make a move based on your move. That's how this works. It's all part of the sick game they play.”

“We play it too, Diana.”

“Of course we do. We live here. You can't live here and not play. Even if you lose a fight, you have a way better chance at surviving St. Mary's if people see you get put on your back rather than rolling onto it willingly.”

She closed her phone, done texting for now.

Diana was very smart, and Ashton regretted that her intelligence was being wasted on St. Mary's survival tactics despite their extreme usefulness at present. She had a bright career in business waiting for her, she just had to dodge all of St. Mary's many bullets first, and especially given what just happened to Siri, Ashton was more determined than ever to look after her closest friend.

“We just gotta get through the year, Dee.” She took a deep breath seated there indian-style on her bed in her t-shirt and underwear, all the horrors of their enrollment thus far sending a chill through her. “That's all we gotta do.”
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(this scene takes place before the events of this post)

“I'm so not looking forward to this,” she said.

Ashton had been in the bathroom collecting toiletries and whatnots while Diana laid on her bed, mostly ignoring her continuous string of complaints.

“I know you'll have things under control while I'm gone. I'm not worried about that. It's mostly spending time with my mother. We haven't been alone in a car since she dropped me off here, and we've got two campuses to look at. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do,” Ashton said, coming out of the bathroom with her hairbrush, hair dryer, toothbrush and soap compartment.

Diana inserted a cream cheese cracker into her mouth uninterestedly as Ashton passed her.

“Hopefully this is the last time, and hopefully that thought will keep me cool, but who knows for sure. All I know is the sooner we graduate, the sooner we can move past all this s**t.” Ashton placed her hands on her hips, her six-pack exposed in that half-tank top as she looked over the contents of her duffel bag to make sure it wasn't missing anything. “Is that everything?” she asked.

“Are you asking me? I don't know,” Diana answered sarcastically, knowing Ashton always forgot to pack a few important things whenever she voiced her routine checks before a big trip back home for a visit or otherwise. She placed another cracker into her mouth when Ashton rose an eyebrow at her. Diana finally pointed at her makeup bag on the computer desk. When Ashton found it, she remained silent as her way of saying thanks.

“You should have everything you need. Text me if you need anything, and text me even if you don't. You can help me not go insane this week. I should be back next Tuesday. Just be smart like you always are. Don't get baited into any confrontations,” she warned.

“Ashton,” Diana interrupted, laughing. “I got it.”

The two stared at each other for a borderline testing moment before Ashton eventually wavered and approached her best friend, sitting on the bedside next to her with her hands laced together between her freshly shaved legs.

“Is that low-fat cream cheese?” Ashton asked cautiously.

“No,” Diana answered, popping another in her mouth just as Ashton disregarded her diet in lieu of taking her criticisms and wrestled her over custody of the plate's remains, spilling more than could he saved. Giggling escaped from Diana's mouthful of snack food.
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Ashton was a day into her trip visiting campuses with her mother when news reached the school that Terry had been stabbed and the balance of power was shifting. Diana, now in charge of the Fitness Academy, had to convince its considerable member-base that that was not the case.

“Come on girls,” she began from the fountain. “What's the first rule of St. Mary's? Don't listen to to the gossip. Unless you hear it from Ashton, Kiyomi, or Terry, nothing's changed.”

“What about Jamie? She'll be back from juvie soon, I hear,” a girl retorted with a shoe and an exposed muscular leg up on the fountain.

“Until she's back, what I said holds, and do you roll with Emily Barker now? Get your foot down.” Diana no sooner looked a the girl's shoe and it was brought down to the ground. It could have been brought down faster, she thought.

She sighed when the girls went back to eating their lunch and resuming their conversations. Gossip was always going to exist, and it was very difficult to persuade the direction it went in despite her efforts to discourage conflict within St. Mary's factions.

Doing that was harder than ever this semester.

“Hey Diana,” Siri asked, approaching her a little more timid than she was known for acting at school. Diana looked surprised for just a moment, not recognizing the voice nor the submissive tone it reached her with. When she saw it was Siri—in all her bruised glory—her heart immediately went out to her.

“Siri,” she said, instantly ready to help the girl. “What's wrong?”

“I'm fine. I just wanted to tell you – I know Ashton's gone for a little while, so if you ever need help with anything – I just want you to know you... you don't even have to ask.”

Diana watched her return to her former strength almost in that very moment. It was a declaration of loyalty, Diana thought, but she also noticed that it carried a faint undertone of revenge. Siri wanted to get her attackers back, which meant things were still personal with her.

Diana nodded very business-like. “I think I have things under control, thank you.” An accompanying hand to Siri's shoulder to make her cold words sting a little less. A teaspoon of sugar.

Siri nodded and wandered off from the fountain playing with the pebbles beneath her sneakers. It was apparent she was brainstorming on alternatives to getting back at her attackers, and Diana made a very shorthand note in her spiral notebook to put a couple girls on her for surveillance duty. When that was done, she checked her very thin and effeminate numberless Disney wristwatch. She had less than half her lunchtime left and all of her 300-calorie pasta salad, concocted by Ashton, unopened from its baby blue tupperware container.

Better start sooner rather than later, she thought, but it would appear her lunch would have to wait. Jia was waiting to see her behind two of her guards. Jia never came to talk to the Fitness Academy.

“C'mere, Jia,” Diana said, beckoning her to the fountain where she sat to dismiss her girls from blocking her.

“About time,” Jia answered, moving past the juniors that were very brutish for their grade. “I thought we were tighter than that, Dee.”

“What do you want, Jia? I haven't eaten lunch yet.” A pleading face to Kiyomi's left hand of the Asian Culture Club, or at least that was how Diana always looked at her. Right hand sounded far too useful to fit Jia.

“Well shovel it down or do something, but I wouldn't take too long. Roz is in the alley right now with Kiyomi, and she wants to talk to the head of the fitness club; says one of her girls got beat up for using a weight bench she had no business using; says she got roughed up pretty bad. Somebody's gotta deal with this,” Jia said, pulling an errant thread from her skirt.

Diana didn't say anything, taking in all that she said and weighing it. The case Jia had laid out was a heavy one, and demanded perfect handling. This was right next to a worst-case scenario, but in the same breath, it was the most-expected of the scenarios that she'd be dealing with while Ashton was gone. She'd have to choose her words carefully and respect all involved parties, and, of course, there was the possibility that there wasn't even a meeting at all waiting for her in that alley.

Either way, her lunch was over.

“Yes, someone has to.” Diana stood up, shoving her notebook and her lunch in her bag and walking with it next to Jia. She shrugged with her phone out, texting one of her subordinates while addressing another one right across from her. “Stay here and watch the fountain for me while I'm gone. Don't give Lizzy or her people an inch closer to it than where they're at now. I mean that.” A hair toss from the Chinese-American scholar, her text complete and her phone put away.

“You're not going alone, are you?” the girl asked.

“Stop being so paranoid. The clubs are unified now. There's not going to be anymore warring, not from us. You just guard our turf until lunch is over.”
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"You just guard our turf until lunch is over.” Diana pointed at the girl, showing her very rarely seen assertive side despite it being a very prominent part of her character. She just seldom got to showcase it because Ashton was always the one who gave all the rallying commands. Jia was more amused than she was impressed, but both were definitely driving forces behind her sneaky little smile. When Diana started walking off from the fountain, Jia matched her pace very quickly.

“Wow, Dee. You might want to think about filling in for Ashton on a more permanent basis. You've got this down pat.” Teetering on busting out laughing, Jia held it in all along the walk to the alley. When they arrived, it was just as she said. Kiyomi and some of her girls were all striking leans while Roz stood in the center like the head of a house. Diana thought right away that she was acting far taller than she really was.

“Jeez, Diana. Did you get the big box at Grady's Chicken? What kept you?” Kiyomi asked, coming off the brick wall now.

“I haven't eaten yet, actually, so let's be as quick as we can about this,” she said.

It sent a good and a bad message right off. For the bad, she came off inconsiderate to the girls, and for the good, she came off business-like. Luckily, and playing into Diana's hand, she was doing business with Kiyomi today, and Kiyomi couldn't have cared less about how inconsiderate Diana might have sounded, and Kiyomi was also fond of settling bothersome things—like business—as quickly and painlessly as possible.

“Damn, girl. Alright, so Roz has a complaint she'd like to voice. She says one of her girls was at the gym and tried to use one of the machines and some of your girls jumped her.” Kiyomi nearly shrugged in her retelling but refrained so as not to look too aligned with Diana in this case, but she really didn't see the severity of the issue beyond a mild disciplinary ruling. Still, there were these channels that had to be gone through.

Diana looked at the girl who she very quickly put together would have been brought before them: she looked like the most loyal kind of servant for Roz, Diana thought. She'd taken a beating alright, but it didn't look like the kind any of the girls at the gym would have dished out. It reminded her of Siri, but it was hard not to think of her. They both had worn bandages on their faces to expedite the healing process, and neither girl's feminine features shone through despite their best efforts with their makeup. Roz was waiting in-front of Diana's eyes right after she was done looking at her girl.

“Blood for blood,” she said quietly.

“We don't do that here,” Kiyomi said after seeing Diana didn't have an immediate reply cocked and loaded. “We find out who did the punching and the kicking when they're not supposed to be punching and kicking, and we take away some of their privileges for a little while. You haven't been here as long as the rest of us, Roz. We don't start fires this close to graduation.” She made sure her point was gotten across before looking to Diana.

“Now, Diana, do you know which of your girls did this?”

“No, I was not aware there had been an incident at the gym,” she said coolly.

“It wasn't just one girl,” Roz said, turning to her bruised and beaten lackey and beckoning her from the wall to the center of the alley with her. “Jackie, tell 'em who it was.”

Nervously, the girl spoke out with her mousy voice. “It was... Tonya... Susan... and... Siri...”

“For the love of God,” Diana exhaled with frustration and turned, riling Roz instantly with her lack of belief and demanding Kiyomi step in-front of her to keep her from approaching Diana.

“Whoa, whoa,” Kiyomi said, making sure Diana wasn't going at her, and she wasn't. Diana was just walking to the wall to think while she dipped her head, hands on her hips, and blew out her piling frustrations that had waited until the day she'd carry all of the responsibility for the Fitness Academy. After seeing Diana had shown no signs of aggression, Kiyomi turned her back on her and addressed Roz fully, shoving her back.

“What did I just get done saying? What the f**k kind of leader are you trying to be, Roz? You don't solve your people's problems by fighting whoever fought your girl, and you definitely don't come after another head of a club – I don't care what they did – and you REALLY don't want to try doing it in-front of ME.” She shoved her again, this time right into her group.

“You b**ches are taking sides!” Roz accused, slinging her arms free of the aid from her girls.

Kiyomi had heard enough.

“Go finish your lunch, Diana.” She turned her head to her. “Go ahead and let Ashton know about this as well when you get a chance. We'll talk later. I got this.” Kiyomi had went from looking very bored to very annoyed, and it was never long after someone annoyed Kiyomi that they abruptly stopped suddenly. A wave of her hand and some Asian Culture Club muscle was moving Roz and her girls out of the alley, and not without some choice advice from Kiyomi along the way.

Diana stood there in disbelief that this pitiful excuse for a feud was trying to gain momentum so close to graduation. With any luck, she'd be able to resolve it this week with proper delegating between the clubs. Hopefully the other heads would agree with her that the Roz army didn't need to see any further recruitment. There was a lot on Diana's plate already, and she had a lot on her mind for it to just be lunchtime. Before heading back to the fountain, she made a note that she would have to thank Kiyomi later for freeing her up.

The day came to a close surprisingly faster than Diana expected. Keeping busy with text messages to all Ashton's usual information gatherers and point guards as well as Ashton herself. She met Maisie Didier and Siri Paszke at the track field where plenty of her girls were out stretching. With all their phones pointed at one another in their pseudo-huddle, Diana gave them their instructions.

“Both of you make sure you get the directions. It can be hard to find this place,” she said, popping a bubble with her two sticks' worth of gum.

“How much is dinner there? I don't have a whole lot of money right now,” Maisie said.

“I got you,” Diana was quick to reply, stuffing her phone back in her pocket after seeing both girls' phones chime confirming they'd received her message. “Siri, don't go anywhere alone, okay? Take one of my girls with you if you have to go somewhere. I have something to go do. I'll see you this evening.” She began walking from the field with her bag over her shoulder.

“Where are you going?” Siri asked.

“I'm going to see a friend,” she said before she got too far and had to say it too loudly. Turning back, a hair-toss, and she was on her way out from St. Mary's gates.
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Diana Holte walked the whole way to Old Market General Medical. It wasn't beyond her means being SIC of the Fitness Academy, and she had wanted the fresh air after a rather cumbersome school day. After recovering her phone from passing through the metal detector at the front entrance, she approached the front desk and placed her hands on its counter, her jingling bracelets on her left wrist chiming against the surface briefly.

“Terry King's room, please.”

Confirming Diana's worst fears, it was terribly easy to gain access to a stab victim's bedroom after merely identifying yourself as a close friend. Nevertheless, she followed the receptionist's instructions to the appropriate wing and to the appropriate room number. It was cracked, and Diana pushed it closed behind her after she'd slipped in.

“Who's that?” Terry asked, lowering her television remote to glance down her short hallway to the door. “Diana?”

“I texted you that I was coming,” she said.

Terry only then checked her phone lying on the counter next to her very unattractive and very unfinished dinner. Her look of surprise said it all.

“Oh.”

Diana shook her head, coming up next to her bed and asserting her condition. She didn't mince her words.

“You look terrible.”

“Tsk. Don't say that,” Terry said, frowning after a click of her tongue.

Diana picked up the piece of toast from her dinner tray and dropped it again. “Are you not eating?”

“You wouldn't wanna either if ya’ tasted what they're tryin’ to feed people here,” was her response. Terry felt justified in her claim, all she needed was for Diana to sample it and prove her right.

“You need to eat, Terry. I don't care how inferior it is to what you usually eat. It passes whatever health administrations it needs to to keep this hospital open, so that's good enough for me, and it should be good enough for you. Just know I'm not going to leave until I see you eat something.”

“Why you worryin’ about me, Diana?” Terry asked, attempting to take a bite out of her piece of bread in order to please the currently very intimidating Diana Holte, but pausing to await her response. “Don't you got enough to do already with Ashton out of town?”

Diana sighed. “I'll worry about that again when I get out of here. Right now I'm making sure you're keeping healthy by eating what they tell you to eat. Seriously, Terry.” She pushed the mobile counter-top back to Terry's lap where she assumed Terry had pushed it away from when the nurse had delivered it to her. Terry looked none too pleased to see it in-front of her again.

“Ugh... Fine. I'ma make a deal with you, Diana. Help me eat it an’... I'll do my best,” she said.

“You're impossible,” Diana said, tearing half the toast from the styrofoam plate and biting off its corner while she moved to the only guest chair in the darkened room lit only by the aging 21” television. She placed her bookbag and handbag at the floor against the chair leg.

Terry watched her move and appearing to stay a while, and though she had no idea why, a look of calm and gladness came over her. She took up the other half of that toast and began to eat with a sudden inspiration, though her lack of manners had no reason to improve as she spoke with her mouth full.

“Why did you come, Diana? You know I'll be out in a few days.”

“We're almost done with school, Terry. You don't need to be slipping now.” Diana noisily unzipped her backpack and held up several groupings of stapled documents at her—not to her—all of which had teacher markings in their upper corners where space allotted.

“Ugh,” Terry groaned again, recognizing the papers as homework. “I'm supposed to be restin’. What are you tryin’ to do to me?” She placed her hand over her eyes and wiped her face down.

“Relax,” Diana comforted, though grinning at the sight of her displeasure. “You focus on getting out of here – and eat – and I'll take care of the paperwork. How's that for a deal?”

There was a long pause from Terry with surprise at her kindness being mostly to blame. She half-wanted to confirm that she would actually do that for her, but she resisted, believing her like was the common sense thing to do.

“Thanks, Diana,” she spoke softly, leaning back onto her stacked pillows.

The late evening turned to night as both Terry and Diana settled in to their bed and chair, respectively. A nurse had given Diana a pillow to improve the uncomfortableness of her chair after she had been given the go-ahead to stay after visiting hours, and the television seemed to only worsen in program quality, appealing to Terry's changing mood from classic sitcoms to teen dramas. Diana's pen, meanwhile, never stopped filling in those college-ruled lines, and Terry's eyes wandered to her often whenever the show's story moved to characters or relationships she wasn't interested in. She wanted to express her gratitude to Diana for coming over, but just saying thanks didn’t seem to cut it given the amount of her homework she was taking on for her. She opted down another path for a conversation piece.

“Does Ashton know you're here?” Terry eventually asked quietly and during a commercial break no less.

“Nobody knows I'm here.”

“Nobody? Why’s that?”

“I wanted to make sure nobody came to visit you tonight that you wouldn't want visiting you. I thought you'd have someone watching your room anyway, so you can imagine my surprise when I got through the door as easily as I did and found you all alone. I thought you were more careful than that, Terry.”

“No one's comin’ to finish the job or anythin’, Diana. This ain’t the movies. It ain’t nothin’ we're not used to, either,” Terry said.

“Oh I know. How many times have we seen an ambulance flashing their lights in-front of the school? More times than I'd like to count, and math is my best subject,” Diana added, laying her pencil down for a second and peering over the rim of her glasses at her. Terry was smart when it came to gauging other people's emotions. She knew not to make light of the situation anymore, seeing Diana was looking quite bothered by the subject of their school's less than gleaming reputation.

“Still...” Terry began. “You don't have any obligation to me, even with the clubs united. An’ you should be lookin’ after your girls while Ashton's away.”

“Terry, please.” Diana groaned. “If I stuck by you in school for so long while we were both getting our a**es kicked, what kind of friend would I be now if I wasn't right here, especially when no one else is?”

Terry was at a loss for what to say in that moment, recalling those days long since past. Diana had always been fierce, and her pretty face didn't show the marks she'd once received for being defiant in the face of so many bullies who wanted to pick on Terry for being the gay girl.

On more than one occasion, they found themselves outnumbered, but Diana always stood with her after that first time Terry stood up for her, and they often traded roles of the rescuer after that through their enduring enemies, new and old. Diana got called a “d**e lover” or a “gay lover” and of course gay herself for being Terry's friend and sticking by her, and in the beginning, it did make Diana uncomfortable – until she saw that it hurt Terry, if ever so slightly. She didn't show it back then, not obviously, but it was noticeable enough, and it was the best kind of wake-up call for Diana to get past her selfish insecurity and not be like those who judged others simply for being different.

The bullies could call her what they wanted to, Diana figured. Terry was her friend, and she wasn't going to be like the ones who pointed and and punched and kicked and looked disgusted by her, not after the kindness that she had shown her.

Fast-forward to St. Mary's years, and though they ran with different clubs, they had always had that connection from their childhood years.

It was so odd to be revisiting them now.

“Damn, Diana,” Terry said, finally.

“It's not like your assignments are hard, Terry,” Diana said plain-faced, removing pen from paper only to bring it back down and lower her voice. “And it's not like you wouldn't be here for me if I was the one in that bed.”

“If you're goin’ to stay here a while, you might as well be in this bed. Real talk. The chairs in here look uncomfortable.” Terry scooted over, showing Diana the spacious zone she had created next to her, and the presentation of said space with her hand was almost laugh-worthy, but Diana restrained herself.

“Seriously?” Diana sought to confirm, mockingly, but Terry grinned through it unflinchingly. She was used to it.

“Seriously.”

And so Diana made her way over to the bed and struck a pose in-front of her with a very skeptical look across her features; a look as though Terry were way out of bounds with this gesture and unfairly using their history to attempt and legalize the move. And nevermind that she had moved despite her wound, which should afford her some leniency with her as well, she figured.

“Just remember your scripture, Terry: idle hands are the devil's tools,” Diana said, before warily climbing over the collapsible arm of the hospital bed with her schoolbook that was bookmarked with her notebook and pen. Terry just watched her silently, surprised, intrigued, and amused.

“What?” she finally asked her, annoyed after getting situated with her pillow and book and not liking to be stared at at so close a proximity.

“Nothin’,” Terry replied softly, conscious of Diana's soft-spoken rule of warning. She similarly got situated, and after all the shuffling of the noisy bedsheets and pillow covers died down, her head fell on Diana's shoulder in the silence with the dialog of teen drama on the overhead television.

Diana wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable by the contact as she thought she would have been. It didn't feel like she was coming on to her or getting frisky, both common traits attributed around school to Terry's ongoing legend. No, on the contrary, Diana thought it was a very sisterly embrace. More so, there was a loneliness she felt that was not common to Terry's usual behavior, and if the least she could do was give possession of her arm away while they watched a poor-production high school romance drama, then so be it. The triviality of it all also fell short to the importance of more pressing matters that seemed to have finally infected Diana, such as what season of the show they were watching.

“Is this before or after Kara started dating Jacob?” she asked.

Terry delayed in her response.

“Before,” she said, sounding totally at peace.
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