Baby Blue ✧ Rules (Euphoria)

4th Chapter

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4th Chapter
In which two drunk girls on a rooftop are all it takes.

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I'm high on Ritalin and Jules is drunk.

We are sitting on the roof of her house, sharing a cigarette and a bottle of rum and coke whilst the town spreads dark and dead all around us. The only sources of light is the full moon that's wandering slowly across the sky, and the dim orange glow of the lamp posts over on Maine street.

It's precisely seven minutes past midnight and somewhere, not too far away, at the edge of town an owl is screaming. Apart from that it's quiet.

"I sometimes feel like I'm dreaming when I'm up here." Jules says softly, exhaling a cloud of smoke into the cool air. "Especially when everything is silent and it's almost like there's not a soul in the world but me."

I understand her. I really do. It seems easy to imagine that there's nobody else out there when it's late and all the houses lay still and deserted. "It's kind of liberating."

She looks over at me, the hint of a smile playing around her lips. Her eyelids are painted in a bright yellow color.  "Exactly." She nods. "And empowering."

We sit together in silence for a few minutes and pass the bottle back and forth between us. With Jules it's never awkward, even if we don't talk for some time now and then. It feels nice enough to know she's there.

After a while she lays down on her back, gazing up at the starlit sky and sighs quietly. A fresh unlit smoke is dangling from the corner of her mouth.

"In New York I could never see the stars." She says, suddenly changing the topic maybe even to her own surprise. "It was too bright, even at night. There's a reason why they call it the City that never sleeps, you know."

Jules doesn't talk about New York all that much. She is very open about most of her past, at least with me, but I know that like every average Teenage girl, she, too, has her secrets.

And I guess that's fair, given that I have kept something significant about me from her, too. If you ask me, there's not a soul out there that hasn't got one or two skelentons in their closet.

It's human nature.

"Do you miss it?" I ask, carefully, reaching over to light up Jules cigarette for her.

She grins up at me and takes a long drag before breathing out again, slowly. She looks so aesthetic. Like an artwork come to life.

"I do. Sometimes." Her voice is soft and melancholy as she speaks. "It's so different here, you see. New York is loud and big and kind of fucked up and this town is just so innocent and quiet, like nothing ever happens. I don't think it fits me."

She hesitates for a few moments before she continues. "And I miss my friends. I mean, we text and facetime a lot but still. It's kind of weird to not have them around every day anymore."

I nod, taking a sip from the half empty bottle. Sometimes it confuses me that Jules has had a life elsewhere before she came here.

It's not like I believe she just materialized the second she set foot in this town, it's just that by now I'm so used to her that it feels like I've always known her. I can still remember how life was before she showed up, I just don't think I could go back to that.