✅ The Last New Start [NaNoWriMo2021]

20. Ffrances Has Skills

Tess felt nothing but relief when she got home, later than she expected. She'd estimated that the bus home would take about as long as the one that had brought her to greater Ashfields, bringing her back just in time for dinner if she jogged from the bus stop to Gabby's front door. Unfortunately, it didn't seem so simple. As the bus reached the little village of Bullocksfeel, where she would have jumped off to walk the rest of this way if she'd been going to Kim's house on the edge of Raybridge, she was focusing most of her attention on her phone, chatting with her friends. And then the screen went dark, and she realised that she had dismissed a battery alert without thinking when she had been responding to a question on Clatter ten minutes earlier.

From that point she just stared out of the window, trying to make out a familiar landmark as the first street lights illuminated every scratch on the window. She saw a sign as they approached Palmerston, and the architecture was unmistakeable. Palmerston was what happened when an opportunist developer unexpectedly acquired a large plot of land zoned for residential use, and filled it with a few thousand almost-identical slums, separated by occasional mock-suburban neighbourhoods. That meant that it was easy to recognise when you were there, but walking down one street looked almost like any other. And that was a problem when you'd only walked three different routes since moving in, and didn't even know the name of any street except the one you lived on. Tess found herself waiting for the shop window she'd been admiring her reflection in that morning, which meant sitting on the bus and waiting for what felt like half an hour. For all Tess knew, they could have been driving in circles.

When she got back to the house at last, Tess was promising herself that she would never let her phone battery die again. Just being able to see her position on an electronic map would have been all she needed to know when the bus was passing close to home in some other direction, but she'd been using her phone so much that day and robbed herself of the opportunity.

Gabby wasn't angry. She seemed more scared than anything. Tess felt a little offended at that, like she was still a child. But she didn't say anything, because disappointment was surely better than yelling. All the worries went away quickly, but she felt that she needed to prove that she was still a responsible adult. Thankfully, Gabby and her girlfriend were already preparing for dinner, giving Tess an opportunity to cook something simple for herself, with just a little assistance.

Most of the evening was spent getting to know the newest member of the household. She called Gabby the love of her life, and spun some fantastic tale about being the teacher who had managed to seduce her student under the guise of demonstration some sociological research technique. It sounded to Tess like the kind of thing you'd get in a lame romance novel, never in reality, and as they related the story the two older people contradicted each other (and themselves) more than once. Before long Tess realised that they were just like Kim and Liz when those two ended up in the same conversation; you couldn't take anything they said seriously as they riffed off each other, and the tale would grow with every telling.

Still, before the evening was over, Tess found it was easy to think of both of them as friends. She didn't know how much of what they were saying was true, but she quickly realised that it didn't matter. That attitude was helped along a lot after she gave Gabby her gift, and Ffrances's failure to recognise the character led to a desperate attempt to find a decade-old Canadian-Japanese anime series on any modern streaming service, followed by a screening of random episodes accompanied by several bottles of wine, and the promise of opening a bottle of sake after one more episode. It took Tess quite some time to realise that this must have been a running joke she wasn't privy to, and that the sake probably didn't exist. She hadn't been drinking anyway, having looked at the numbers on the wine bottle and concluded that it was significantly more than double the alcohol content of the 'light' stuff she'd previously been drinking. After what had happened the first time she got carried away, she decided that it wouldn't be worth the risk.

One glass of sake couldn't be that bad, could it? The people in the cartoon drank it like it was water. But when it seemed that sake wasn't going to be forthcoming, Tess decided that it would be okay to have a single glass of wine instead. This time, she made certain to pour it herself, just so she would be sure how much she had drunk. And if she felt ill in the morning, she would have less next time. If she was fine, then she might perhaps consider a larger glass in future. It seemed logical. Responsible. Organised, even. A way to ensure that a morning like her first night in this house never happened again.

While they watched, there was a lot of conversation on the side. Getting to know each other, and becoming part of a new group. But Tess found that as Gabby and Ffrances drank more, she was spending more time watching them. Trying to understand them, and to know just where the limits were. They were the adults she was living with now, and even if they sometimes acted like she expected college girls would, she knew that they were in a position of responsibility. She couldn't afford to lose their respect.

Ffrances, it turned out, was a very fun person with an infectious sense of humour. She was also unexpectedly small. Which was to say, she towered over Tess, and it had been intimidating to almost walk into her on their first meeting. But once Tess had time to look carefully, she realised that Ffrances was somewhere halfway between the two cousins in height, and was almost as slim as Tess herself. She would have been below average height for a woman, and well below the average weight, but she had a kind of confidence that seemed to make her the centre of attention. Even Gabby deferred to her like she was the boss. She was also stunning. They were both slim, but where Tess had almost no figure, Ffrances had all the curves a guy could ask for, and her whole body seemed naturally in proportion.

"I figured it would be easier to bring it through, we can pour our own," Ffrances's voice cut into Tess's thoughts, and she realised there was another bottle of wine on the table, a different kind this time. But she had promised herself that she was only going to have one drink tonight, and she intended to stick to that. She made her apologies and left, while Gabby was queueing up another episode of 'Captain Kairo'. She wasn't quite sure how much those two had ended up drinking, but she knew that it would have been more than enough to ruin the following morning for her.

Tess picked up her bedtime drink, which Spike had said would greatly reduce the chance of feeling ill in the morning. By now it was becoming a habit, even if she hadn't drunk enough to need it. Tess turned her laptop on briefly, checked FriendSpace in case of messages from her performance group. She closed it promptly when she was faced with an advertisement for diapers "to help growing girls sleep with confidence". She didn't need anyone else trying to remind her she was a baby. She signed in to Clatter, and thanked her friends for a great day. She even sent Spike some pictures of the flower he'd given her in different parts of the room, always being careful to ensure that the more embarrassing parts of the decor weren't obvious. By the time she'd done that, she was already starting to fall asleep. It was still relatively early, but she was sure now that she would sleep well; and that she definitely wouldn't have a hangover in the morning.

Author's Note: I've now written up to chapter 30 on both this story and My Cousin's Keeper, which is enough of a gap that my script has started advising me to post more than one chapter per day again. I hope  you're all happy with that! If you'd like to see the next 10 chapters even sooner, my Patreon supporters can see the whole story so far for as little as $2. If you're enjoying Tess's adventures, please consider helping me keep writing!