[Chriseva] A Family We Chose For Ourselves

2. Penetrators

"So you and Chris, huh?"

The question comes as an eerie déjà vu, but instead of the guilt she felt when she heard it the first time, Eva has to physically supress the sheepish grin threatening to emerge. She remembers the same voice telling her not to long ago to break up with her boyfriend and hook up with Chris. She'd been taken aback and offended at the time, angry even. Like who did this person think she was, telling her to do something like that? But Sana had been straightforward and factual in her argument and despite feeling slightly insulted by the suggestion, Eva really could find no fault in Sana's reasoning.

"I don't know," she says truthfully, as she'd been with Jonas not ten minutes ago. "It's...complicated. He's complicated."

"Yeah but still," Vilde adds, looking at her in wide-eyed awe. "Landing the Penetrator Chris. The most infamous Penetrator after William. That's pretty awesome, Eva."

There's a cough that sounds suspiciously like Wilhelm from somewhere across the table.

"I mean, I wouldn't say I landed him, you know. Something would need to have actually taken off to land anywhere. I don't know if we're even in the vicinity of the plane, much less in it."

"So many plane puns," Chris muses to herself just as Sana says, "But he said yes to coming to the Kose party with you. That has to mean something. When have you ever heard of a Penetrator willingly coming to a party that didn't have sex, drugs or a bunch of girls lining up to hook up right off the top, especially when there was one such party happening at the exact same time?"

"The definition of coming to something is actually being here, you know. I don't know if you're seeing something I'm not cause unless I'm blind and stupid, he's not actually here. And he's not answering my text and all of a sudden I'm feeling pretty fucking dumb."

"That's Vilde's area of expertise tho, don't go stealing her job in the group she'll have nothing left to do." Sana says as-a-matter-of-factly, with the straightest poker face ever seen in all of Oslo. A beat passes as Vilde abruptly turns to glare at her before Chris guffaws out loud. Noora and Eva try hard to suppress their own laughter as Sana turns her frown into a dimpled smile directed at Vilde. "I'm just kidding, girl. You know I love you the most out of everyone here."

Vilde fights a losing battle to keep the cross look on her face and eventually returns Sana's smile with an adorable kitty-cat grin of her own.

Eva thinks that she really did luck out with this group of people in front of her. She can barely remember a time in her life when these four people didn't play such an important role in it; trailing after Jonas and Isak and Elias holding out for every scrap of attention. Not realizing at the time how much she wished to have what Jonas had with Isak and Elias and Magnus and Mahdi, how much she craved what they had: a comrade and companion, someone to watch her back, to tease her playfully and set her mind at ease over her own feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness. She had that with Ingrid once upon a time ago, and she threw it all away. She has only herself to blame for her loss.

But then Noora popped up out of the ground like some saviour fairy godmother right when Eva needed it the most. She was smart and kind and the most gorgeous person Eva had ever seen in her life. And then Vilde showed up with the wrong Chris, or was it Eva who showed up with the wrong Chris? Now Eva thinks that maybe both Chris' had actually been the right one. And they invited her into their little group. They wanted her, at the time Eva didn't realize how much she needed them more than they actually needed her. And then Sana pummelled through their reality with her straight forwardness and cynicism and wit but backed everything with irrefutable cold hard fact.