Chapter Text
The girl in the doorway wasn’t one Lillian remembered. She was tall. With one hand lifting her hem, the girl walked to the balcony railing and scanned the horizon. Her fingers traced the railing and her eyes flicked from roof to roof.
Lillian peered down at the same spot and saw nothing of interest. She wiped her eyes quietly and waited politely for the intruder to leave, though neither were really supposed to be outside, so the second one of them left, the chaperones would catch the other. Lillian decided she didn't like this girl.
“You’re Lillian, right?” The girl asked.
“Do I know you?” Lillian asked.
“No, not yet at least.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lillian raised an eyebrow.
“A storm is brewing. I’m putting together a team,” She began. “For volleyball, I mean. There’s supposed to be a competition with prizes, I know people on student council.”
Lillian said nothing. A storm was brewing? Get out of here.
“Are you good at volleyball? You seem like you’d be good at volleyball.” The girl pried.
“The student council will never see me again at any event ever. That is a promise,” Lillian moved towards the door, bumping the girl’s shoulder. Her hand was on the doorknob.
“I’ve heard rumors. The prizes, they could change things-”
Lillian opened the door, determined to find somewhere else to sulk.
“-ll be important-”
The door shut. Of course she couldn’t even run off somewhere else without getting wrapped up in some other drama. Everyone here was half crazy except for Lillian, who was apparently full crazy. The rest of the night was a sequence of attempts at finding some place to be alone, none working, and a defeated return to the dorm too late at night. She had wanted to stay here all day. If they had just let her, it wouldn’t have had to be this way.
A number of days passed, some better than others, the only noteworthy occurrences were a large system of thunderstorms and a long stretch of absence from work. Eventually, the vacation ended, but the storm did not.
Outside, the sky was clotted with thick clouds and the puddles grew too wide to walk around. Grey rainwater pooled on the windowsill; Lillian stood watching the drops trace the pane as she rubbed cold hands together. The feeling returned slowly to her fingertips and once it did, she smudged the windowpane with her thumb. It was ugly and conspicuous and she hoped it annoyed Amaliel when she saw it. There was noise down the hall—with a sigh, she hung her jacket and scuffed her shoes past the closet and entryway around the corner.
She saw an open door in the hall, and people casting shadows into the hall. A chair scraped. Lillian spotted the other two sitting across a table.
“It’s not turning on!” Hiroki told Eden, who was unfolding a piece of paper half as tall as he was.
“Hold the button down longer!” Eden yelled back over the wall of paper.
“I am holding it down!” Hiroki shook the phone in his hand, evidently holding the button down.
“What’s going on…” Lillian asked from the doorway.
“Trying to set up Hiroki’s phone,” Eden answered. The instructions crinkled as Eden inspected them, and Lillian pulled up a chair.
“What do the instructions say?” Hiroki asked.
“They say hold the button down longer!!” Eden repeated, pulling the manual away from the table.
“Liar, you aren’t even reading that!” Hiroki grabbed the top of the instructions and pulled it towards him. Eden tried to hold on to the bottom. The two knocked over a chair with a loud clang.
“Don’t rip it!” Lillian scolded the two, prying Hiroki’s hand off the instructions. “Let me see.”
She skimmed through text boxes and icons, trying to find the English section. Too many words for anything, she thought.
“I think we need to plug it in first,” Lillian said. She spotted a charger on the table and peeled the plastic off. Hiroki was reluctant to let go of the phone, but once she plugged it in, a battery icon blinked onto the screen.
“Wow Lillian, you’re really smart!” Eden said.
“You’re just illiterate, actually…” Hiroki grumbled. Lillian started to fold the instructions away.
“When did you get a phone?” She asked Hiroki.
“I, uh…” Hiroki started.
“I bought it,” Eden shrugged. “Figured he’d be easier to call if he actually owned a phone.”
Hiroki looked down at his hands in his lap.
“Well, I don’t know,” Lillian said. “We could’ve gotten two cups and a really long string…”
“That’s not funny!” Hiroki crossed his arms and kicked Eden under the table. He glanced back at the phone. “Do you think it’s charged yet?”
“It’s been ten seconds??” Eden said. “Not at all!”
“You couldn’t even read the instructions-”
“Not yet,” Lillian confirmed. “Why don’t we just set it up after work? We can give you our phone numbers later.”
“I guess,” Hiroki huffed.
Lillian pushed in her chair first, which wasn’t her custom but no one commented on it. Even as she walked and filed towards the radar, the sound of shoes echoing against the empty halls. Eden turned on the lights as they entered.
“Have you heard anything from Amaliel? I saw she was running late but you two seem like you’ve been here for a while.” Lillian asked.
“Not since we got called in,” Eden said. “No reason we can’t get the containers ready, though.”
“No reason we can’t slack off either,” Lillian countered. She walked slowly but Hiroki kept ahead.
“I’m going to get the containers,” Hiroki said, boots echoing as he walked down the hall.
“Right behind you,” Eden sighed. Lillian followed behind reluctantly.
Hallways and doors gave way to shelves and more shelves of containers: the storage rooms were dusty and dark. Even though the three of them had filled bag after bag with containers this week, they never seemed to make a dent. Lillian shrugged her bag off her shoulder and filled it without a word.
“Lillian?” Eden asked.
“What is it?” She filled her bag without looking up.
“About the dance-”
“How about we go to work,” Lillian said. She closed her bag and slung it over her shoulder.
They left the storage room to a distant pinging on one of the computers. Eden sighed.
School had settled back into something familiar, at least. Neither girl looked at the other for a few days after the dance, but that too became tiring, and now Lillian and Michelle settled for pretending nothing had happened.
“Lily!” Michelle waved to her as she walked in. “You’re back early!”
“For once,” Lillian said, gracefully flopping face-first into her bed.
“Do you want to study together?” Michelle organized all the papers scattered around her desk into a neat pile. “Don’t forget about all our quizzes tomorrow.”
“All our quizzes?”
“Four, haha,” Michelle smiled. “On the same day. It’s really funny how that keeps happening.”
“Ugh, I’ll just fail. Too tired,” Lillian said to her pillow.
“And it definitely wouldn’t bother you at all to fail four quizzes. You’d be in a fantastic mood, even.”
Lillian considered this.
“Fineeee,” Lillian got out of her bed. She kicked her boots off with her feet.
At her desk, Michelle handed her a stack of notecards for vocab words. As far as she could tell, or hope, it was four classes worth of studying. Lillian shuffled through until she saw words she recognized. “Thanks.”
Eventually, Lillian found her notebooks collecting actual dust by the side of her desk. It wasn’t exactly her best week academically, but was she really so behind? She didn’t want to be asking Michelle for help if she needed to study too, but four separate quizzes was a lot to figure out alone.
“I um, I have no idea what any of this means,” Lillian told her roommate, gesturing to half the notecards Michelle made.
“I don’t either, that’s the issue,” Michelle flipped open her notebook and passed it to Lillian to copy the notes she missed. Theoretically, at least: Michelle’s notes didn’t exactly capture their math homework, rather her rapid descent into insanity over the last two lectures.
This did little to put Lillian at ease. She raised an eyebrow and leaned over towards Michelle’s desk.
“You missed the three worst classes of the year,” Michelle informed her.
“And it’ll all be tested tomorrow?” Lillian raised her eyebrows.
“Best of luck,” Michelle said. “I know I’ll need it.”
She returned to her own notes with a general aura of doom.
They settled into a tense silence, not looking at each other but still feeling the other’s stress every time a page was flipped or a notecard shuffled. Lillian was making slow progress on the math homework: switching between the worksheet, Michelle’s notes, and her textbook each time she encountered a hard problem, which was starting to look like every problem. She checked the answer key and realized the first five questions were wrong, which she was completely calm about. Her blood pressure was normal and she was totally cool.
“This is so illegal, I wish I had…” Michelle began. “I wish I had one of those half gallons of ice cream, then I could do all this math homework.”
“Or one of those bulk bags of chocolate chips,” Lillian suggested.
“Or brownies!!” Michelle faced her, the pen in her hand pointed to her temple. “I would actually spend my life savings for a sweet treat right now.”
“I would beat up an old lady for a sweet treat right now,” Lillian said.
“I would kill a man for a sweet treat right now!” Michelle exclaimed. “...maybe”
“I would kill a man recreationally,” Lillian raised. “Why can’t we do anything fun or eat any sweet treats…”
“Because this is what stands between us and graduation, Lily. We’re going to fail our tests and die…” Michelle lamented. Lillian had nothing to say but slumped in her chair. The moment stretched and the pile of homework sat unmoving. Michelle might’ve been thinking about her assignments; Lillian was considering the feasibility of canceling class herself. Maybe if the fire alarm went off, or some sort of flooding in the basement…
“Let’s get some work done,” Michelle sniffed, picking up her pencil disheartened.
When she woke the next day, Michelle was standing over her desk, shuffling a few papers into a stack quietly. There wasn’t a real urgency about it. The blinds were half open and scattering soft light over the back of the room.
Michelle jolts when Lillian’s alarm goes off, so Lillian apologizes and fumbles around her nightstand to turn off her phone.
“Lillian, check your phone!” Michelle says to her.
“Huh?” She mumbles.
“It’s a snow day!” Michelle points to the window. Lillian couldn’t see anything from her angle.
“I can sleep in?” She asks groggily.
“We can do anything we want!” Michelle beams. She throws her notes into the trash can.
Lillian rolls back over and snuggles under the covers. She thought she remembered being cold but finds an extra blanket layered on top of her. She doesn’t wake up again until half past noon.
And it’s nice, she thinks, to finally wake up without the pain in her shoulder from work, or her limbs feeling like lead. She stretched and got out of bed without protest. She saw Michelle at her desk again, with a set of flashcards. Lillian joined her after brushing her teeth.
“How’s it going?” She asked her roommate.
“Fine,” Michelle shrugged. “I’d rather be at the snowball fight but getting caught up isn’t half bad.”
“There’s a snowball fight?” Lillian asked. Michelle nodded.
“Hm,” She said. She opened her notebook to the homework problems she had left.
“I would win,” Lillian added. “If I was there.”
Michelle laughed. “I’m sure.”
“We should finish this,” Lillian told Michelle. “And then go destroy the snowball fight.”
“Are you sure you’ll finish your homework in time?” Michelle raised an eyebrow. “You just woke up.”
“That won't stop me,” She explained.
“Uh huh…” Michelle said, returning to her work. Lillian would show her.
She pushed through the textbook problems so quickly that the limiting factor was really just how fast she could move her hand. She skimmed formulas and textbook chapters like never before. Her hand was covered in graphite by the time she heard the next set of school bells.
When the first math worksheet was finished, she pushed it off to the side and picked up the anatomy flashcards Michelle lent her. Vocab is light work, she thought to herself. Once she was finished with math and anatomy, she decided that everything else wasn’t all that necessary.
Michelle was surprised to see her stand up from her desk.
“Are you really finished?” She asked Lillian.
“Yes, I am, thank you for asking,” Lillian answered.
“How’d you finish English that fast? I didn’t even see you writing-”
“That’s because I didn’t, Michelle. And I won’t,” Lillian presented this solution with the same confidence she would have given an actual essay.
“But-”
“But I decided I’m not doing it. And that’s the fastest study strategy of them all,” Lillian concluded.
Michelle pondered this for a moment.
“So is it snowball fight time?” Michelle asked finally.
“I mean, I have nothing else to do today,” Lillian said casually.
Michelle laughed. Out the window, she saw some girls shivering around the fringes of the warzone—she suggested to Lillian that maybe it was a two pairs of gloves sort of day. And the biggest, puffiest jackets they owned.
“I wonder how you join,” Michelle wondered once they were outside. “Do you think there’s teams?”
Lillian threw a snowball at her. It hit Michelle squarely on the shoulder. Michelle’s face twisted in betrayal.
Upon realizing she could not fight to her fullest in three layers of jacket, Lillian executed a tactical retreat. As she neared the rest of the group, Michelle was now the target of other snowballs and Lillian was able to escape her. One snowball hit Michelle so cleanly in the face Lillian winced. She turned around to see who threw it.
It was the girl from the balcony. She walked over and introduced herself to Michelle. Her name was Evangeline Starkiller and she had long ebony black hair with purple streaks and red tips and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people told her she looked like Amy Lee.
“I see the two of you are fighters. You have the spirit of battle in your hearts,” Evangeline said.
“I’m not joining volleyball,” Lillian said flatly.
“Volleyball? Are people playing?” Michelle inquired. Lillian should never have let the two of them meet.
“Not now, but soon. Great treasure awaits the winner,” Evangeline began.
“Lillian did you hear that?” Michelle asked. “Great treasure!”
“And what is this great treasure exactly?” Lillian raised an eyebrow.
“A half gallon of ice cream,” Evangeline revealed.
“Wha- that’s it?” Lillian asked. “One half-gallon, like singular?”
“They never have ice cream at the cafeteria,” Michelle thought it over.
"But Michelle that's a terrible deal!" Lillian waved her arms. "Do you have any idea how much work it'll take to win?"
"Do you know any other way to get ice cream into this godforsaken school?" Michelle asked irritably.
"Well, no," Lillian admitted.
"We're doing it, Lillian." Michelle insisted. "Evangeline, can you sign us up? We'd like to be a team."