Borrowed Time

Chapter Twenty One

If it had been disclosed by Carly beforehand that hanging out with her after school was going to just be cleaning up the old theater shop, Juliette might have turned her down... She was lucky she'd worn shitty clothes to practice, otherwise she'd probably kill herself for ruining something nice with paint.  Carly didn't seem to mind it, honestly she seemed to enjoy it... God, what a freak.

"So... What do you think the last director's mental breakdown was over?  I'm just curious, because no one seems to be talking about the fact that she's even gone. It's eerie, if my theater director at my old school had gone anywhere it would've been on everyone's minds... but this place is already so different from there."  She shrugged.  Honestly, Carly's guess was as good as hers, she'd hardly interacted with the old director, only enough to know that she smoked like a chimney and was fucking insane.

"Well, knowing her, it could've been a number of things.  Maybe her cat died, maybe her lease was up, maybe her husband left her... Any of those.  Or maybe this town destroys people and it finally claimed her." Juliette mumbled, grimacing as she scraped the paint scraper across more of the table, trying to remove the big chunks that would get in the way of properly cutting wood.  Carly let out a little chuckle and glanced over at her from her spot.

"Aren't you just in a peachy mood?"  She looked over at her, rolling her eyes.  Yeah, she'd be in a better one if she knew that hanging out with Carly involved manual fucking labor.  She hadn't signed up for this.

"When I agreed to hang out with you, I didn't think it meant deep cleaning the fucking crew room, this place is disgusting." She shot back, and Carly smirked at her, turning away from her work for a moment to speak to her.  That wasn't needed, they were making good headway and Juliette wanted to get the fuck out of here.

"I'm sorry, beauty queen, what were you expecting?"  She asked, and Juliette shrugged.  To not be elbows deep in paint chips and paint gallons that probably had exactly one more use in them... Why not just throw them away and start fresh, that sounded easier.

"To maybe sit on a couch and have a conversation not surrounded by decade old paint." Carly snapped her fingers together, like that had triggered some sort of memory for her, which Juliette doubted was even possible.

"Oh, my mom said that if they smell sweet, like chocolatey, to throw them away because they've spoiled." She said, and Juliette furrowed her brows.  Wait, that was possible?  How the fuck could something inedible spoil?  What happened to make it spoil?

"Paint spoils?" She asked, and Carly nodded, not looking away from what she was doing to dignify Juliette with a look as she spoke.  Rude, but she would allow it just this once.

"Mhm."  Okay, now that she was thinking about it, maybe it wasn't that weird that paint would spoil... Medicine spoils... But that's ingestible... She'd get to the reasoning later, she was sure.

"No shit... I guess it makes sense, but I've never actually thought about it, you know." She said, and Carly nodded, glancing over to give her a kind of smirk before she went back to organizing the screws, getting them into different baskets... Shit, that looked tedious as fuck... And some of those screws looked old as shit, were they reusing screws?  The football team got new uniforms every year and they to reuse screws?  Ridiculous.

"That's fair, why would it be on the forefront of your mind?  You've got too many other things rattling around up there."  What the fuck?  She wasn't wrong, but how the hell could she possibly know about Juliette's loud as fuck brain?  That wasn't supposed to be something that people noticed.