Rites of Passage | Damian x OC

22. Little Things

Misty Roman liked to think she was a pretty understanding person.

Despite the shit she'd been through growing up in a household of people who were family by blood but acted nothing like it, she'd managed to figure out how to stay empathetic and remember that human beings did things for many reasons that were usually selfish. Their choices weren't always smart, but people rarely made decisions just for the hell of it. People got scared, fell in love, got angry, felt overjoyed, hated the world because of something tragic that'd happened. People tended to do stupid things based on emotions, desperation, or something like both.

But out of everyone she'd ever met in her life, she just couldn't figure out her new friend, Jess, the girl who she'd just started getting to know better and had suddenly fallen into the dangerous world that was drowning—almost literally—herself in underage parties and alcohol.

Granted, Misty hadn't really talked a whole lot about her own past, not in a whole lot of detail at least. It wasn't like she was secretive—in fact, she was pretty open about having emotionally unavailable parents and having reserved such bitter feelings toward them for so long, and she'd already explained to Jess that their in-process divorce was the reason she was at the facility. While those two idiots were too busy figuring out who'd get the six-figure house, the number of luxury cars and other materialistic things they cared about, her older sister Maya was trying to get custody of her and become her guardian. And because things like divorces cost a lot of money and sometimes took a long, long time, Misty had done everything she could do to get put into the facility since she wasn't allowed to stay with Maya in the meantime.

And it hadn't been all that bad so far, but now it was nearly August and she'd started her morning with the very good news: the long-overdue process was over, and Maya was pretty much her legal guardian now.

Maybe she'd been jumping to conclusions, but she had possessed a strong feeling that Jess also had a pretty troubled past, one that made her refrain from talking much about herself or her family. Misty had respected her boundaries and rarely asked questions that might've been too personal, and that could have been why her new friend almost randomly decided to open up to her the other week. I mean, I didn't even do anything special or out of the ordinary to deserve it. But something must have triggered Jess earlier this summer to make her turn to alcohol—Misty clearly remembered worrying about the girl the first time she hadn't been able to reach or find her the night she'd disappeared from another house party, not hearing from her until the next day.

She was no mind reader, but she wasn't quite sure she believed Jess's explanation that she'd asked Damian to pick her up from the party and had forgotten to tell Misty...

But who was she to judge? Obviously, she'd gone through some pretty hellish things in the last few years, and Misty liked to think she empathized with her. Losing your parents, trying to live with a stranger who was family only on paper, running away and struggling to survive? Yeah, no wonder Jess was the way she was.

The pink-and-black-haired teen stood outside the bakery shop, hands shoved inside the pockets of her over-sized windbreaker as she rocked back and forth on her heels. A pop song blasted through her headphones, blocking out the annoying sounds of Gotham in the daytime. One of the city's major intersections was just right in front of her since the bakery was on the corner; pedestrians flowed in both directions around her, Gothamites dressed in business-wear or casual attire.

The time on her phone read two minutes to three in the afternoon. She'd arrived a little early by about fifteen minutes but only because her work shift had ended sooner than expected. Part of her wanted to go into the bakery and sit down, but the teen had figured she'd better stand outside to make sure she flagged down Jess since she'd never been here before... And she wouldn't be surprised if the other girl got lost.