Gracie Abrams is eking out a solitary existence, fighting day-in, day-out against the drain of working customer service and nursing two newborn kittens in her off time. Out on her own ever since her sister moved in with her boyfriend, the burden of...
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"Is it alright to just give up, then?" Bella asked, and I turned to look at her once more.
She had one eye open, watching me. I'd never seen her so relaxed. Who knew some people looked so harmless when their head hit a fluffy sheet?
I laughed gratingly. "As opposed to what? Making everything worse again? Losing Kirishima this time?"
Bella stayed silent for a moment, then she sighed. She flopped onto her back, looking up at the cracks in the ceiling. "So it's over."
I swallowed. I wanted to laugh, but I feared I might just start screaming. What's over? What had we even accomplished? Nothing.
"If you want to do something, then you can do something," I countered, voice as caustic as hydrochloric acid. "This has nothing to do with me."
Bella repeated my last sentence, fitting the words around in her mouth like she was tasting a food she'd never tried. Then, apparently unsatisfied with the sour notes, she spit it out, raising a brow at me. "And I suppose keeping Kirishima hidden in your apartment has nothing to do with you, either."
I wasn't going to sit here and be called a hypocrite.
I was going to lay here instead.
I flopped to the bed, too, staring up at those same cracks. At this point, they were so well-loved by my eyes, they were practically a map to a newly-discovered island. My island. Over there, around the craggy bend that almost formed a perfect, jagged circle, was the place where penguins lived. Really. They did. And if you followed that line to the three branching lines that looked the exact same, like a real river had come coursing in, eroding away the ceiling for centuries, you'd reach the place where the tigers and snow leopards lived. They totally lived together, too. And they got along.
"Everybody likes to say that I'm doing well," I said, voice hitching. "Even—Kakashi—said I was good at handling everything in my life. I allowed myself to feel, stayed true to—to who I was. Am. I—people tell me I'm responsible. When something bad happens, and I'm a part of it, they say, oh, you couldn't help that. You did all that you could."
Bella stayed silent, and I wondered what the map of my ceiling looked like to her. I hardly knew the woman. She'd been "the biker witch" in my head for so long, but none of those words applied to her. She drove a giant SUV thing. She wasn't a witch.
What did she like? She was a confidant to at least two displaced witches, but she also spent her days working at the Wolf Den, unflinching at whatever the hell happened up on that second, drug-addled floor. Obviously, she was used to people coming after her, too, if her reaction when Kakashi and I had first met her gleaned any truth. She expected people looking for her father to come straight to her. That couldn't be easy, no matter what the situation was.
