picking teams

chapter 10: cady

helloooo everyone happy wednesday!! if you follow me on tumblr welcome to the doodlebops chapter! and if you don't then you get to find out what that means for yourself :)

tw for
mentioned drugging
sexuality crisis
mentioned outing
drug use (just weed)
alcohol
very very mild slut shaming
mentioned broken bones

enjoy!!

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Sleep doesn't come to Cady easily that night.

She lies awake for hours, tossing and turning so much her muscles start to ache, and staring at the tiny pumpkin on her nightstand.

Janis. Janis, Janis, Janis.

Cady knows herself well enough by now to know something weird happens inside her whenever Janis is around. She just doesn't know what it is.

Janis is unlike anyone Cady's met before. She seems so closed off when you first meet her, so cold, so timid. But even after just a few conversations, Cady has been allowed to peek into the most fantastic world that is Janis Sarkisian.

Janis is loud. Not externally, or vocally. But inside. There's a roaring passion behind everything Janis does that feels like magic to witness. Her football, her art, the way she talks to people. All of it is loud and beautiful.

And Janis is kind. The tutoring sessions are exclusively for her benefit, but she was so quick to drop one to rescue Cady from her little cave of sadness and turn her entire outlook upside down. Like it was nothing. She didn't mention buying Cady dinner and yummy snacks and her first ever pumpkin.

She didn't judge Cady's artistic skills, or more accurately, her lack of artistic skills. She listened when Cady told her about her brother. She doesn't ever tell Cady to stop talking about Regina, even after all their history together.

Cady's learning and starting to understand how Janis shows she cares about people. And by the sounds of things, she cares about Cady quite a bit.

Cady realizes after a few hours that trying to fall asleep is getting her nowhere. Her mind is just running circles around itself, making her dizzy but still not tiring itself out.

So Cady hauls herself out of bed and over to her desk to grab a notebook and a pen. Making lists always helps her fall asleep. It lets her get her thoughts out in an objective way, and she can process whatever's on her mind on paper instead of giving in to the roar of her thoughts.

She's not entirely sure what kind of list she's going to make this time, but she just lets her hand do what it will and her brain follow along behind it. She flips to a blank page in the notebook and divides it into four sections. She labels one column 'Janis' and the other 'Aaron'. One row 'pros' and one row 'cons'.

And before she knows it, her hand is flying across the page, listing everything she can possibly think of, every tiny thing that comes to mind. She watches the page slowly fill with ink as she writes and writes and writes until the tiny little muscles in her hand start to ache and the words start to bleed together both on the page and in her mind.

It's a mess, but so is she.

She clicks her pen closed so it doesn't leak into her sheets and blinks blearily at the page to see what she's done.

She reads through each box. Smiles as she reads over all the pros of Janis. Pros for what? What am I doing?

She pores over it for a long time, trying to make some sense of all of this. It doesn't work.