Might as well put another chapter up, since it looks like I'm dead otherwise. XD I still need to read your fanfic, Moyayuki.
gonk I have so little time lately! I can't wait for the summer. Come June 15th, I'm free until the middle of September. =P
MSWord spell check is rubbish, really. Excuse mistakes, obvious or otherwise. Unless they're huge and not likely to be picked up. Then, well, help is loved. (I haven't actually reread through this since I wrote it last summer. XD)
A bit of Ellette/Calina interaction. Enjoy.
.3.
It wasn’t until later that evening when Calina found herself finally alone with her sister. They had been forcefully shoved out of their room at around six o’clock, and told that it was time to eat. The Nurse had wheeled in, and repeated the same phrase ‘It’s dinner time’ until all four girls had gathered outside of the two doors leading into their rooms. Nurse had then taken them to dinner.
The rest of the evening had been spent with Azaliah, who seemed to refuse to be on her own for any length of time. Ellette certainly didn’t mind this, as she enjoyed having company other than her sister who was often insulting. Calina, however, couldn’t wait to get rid of the other girl, whose incessant chatter made her head spin. She was such a bouncy girl, Calina soon found herself ready to actually take a walk from the room with the Nurse over be in the same room as them.
Finally Azaliah had been convinced that it was time for her to sleep, by Medina, and the Nurse had wheeled through to make sure they were alright getting settled down, and the Roe sisters had been left to themselves. Calina reclined on her bed, stretching out on the soft white sheets and enjoying the quiet. Ellette was sat on the chaise, with her sketchbook in her hands, and a pencil between her lips. She was staring into the space above her head, waiting for the divine strike of inspiration she needed to get her going.
“You seem to get on quite well with that Miss Azaliah,” Calina commented after a while, hoping to bring up that afternoon’s dress fiasco without causing too much disturbance.
“Yes.” Ellette didn’t look away from the ceiling, her eyes fixed to the spot. She did take the pencil from her mouth, at least. Calina found it ridiculously hard to talk to her when she kept it there, like some sort of smoking pipe.
“Why?” Calina asked. “She’s not much like you. She’s not who I would have thought you’d have made friends with.”
“Is that a problem?” Now Ellette looked down, and stared at her sister.
“No, no,” Calina said lightly. “I just thought you would have wanted somebody more... intellectual?”
Ah. Wrong word.
Ellette’s features shifted almost instantly into a passionate frown.
“You don’t think she’s clever?” she asked quickly.
“No, I just don’t think she’s the right sort of person for you.” Calina sat up properly and brushed her hair from her face.
“She’s perfectly intelligent, I think you’ll find,” Ellette corrected her. “She’s lovely. I like her.”
There was a long pause as the two sisters glared at each other. Calina sat on her bed with her legs crossed underneath her dress, while Ellette sat mimicking her pose over on the chaise. They sat like this for some time, each seemingly lost in their own thoughts. Calina couldn’t help but let her mind wander, thinking about what tomorrow was going to bring the shape of their first lessons. She was enrolled in the Earth Science class, which wasn’t really too interesting from her point of view, but it was only for the first term, and she was also considering enrolling in the Literature program. Maybe that would widen her vocabulary. She could always use more words to produce for laughs at small parties.
“It’s not Azaliah you have a problem with, is it?” Ellette broke the silence. It was then painfully obvious that the conversation had ended, and she had only brought up something which Calina had lost interest in a good while ago. While she had been considering her educational options with society in mind, Ellette had spent the time considering why Calina was being so protective. “It’s not Az at all.”
Calina furrowed her brows.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“Yes you do,” Ellette insisted. “It’s not really Az, because she’s too mild for you to have a real problem with her.”
“Well if it wasn’t Miss Azaliah I was talking about, then who was it?” Calina was honestly rather confused by her sister’s assumptions. Ellette, though, was like a dog with a bone, and she wasn’t about to back down now. She had it all worked out. It all made sense now.
“It’s Miss Medina,” she said sharply. “You don’t like her.”
“It’s not that I don’t like her!” Calina protested. She knew deep down that this was a lie, though. Medina was strange, definitely strange, and she was definitely too argumentative and full of her own self worth.
“Yes it is.”
“No, I just don’t trust her. I don’t want you hanging around with her, Letty. Please. She’s not like us. She’s- well, she’s
weird. Didn’t you look at her?”
“Don’t be so discriminatory!” Ellette cried. “You’re so much like Papa, and you can’t even see it! Just because she’s a little different it doesn’t mean that she’s out to get me!”
“A little different?
A little different? She’s purple!” Calina screeched. She bit her lip and attempted to bring her voice down a notch, hoping that they couldn’t hear next door. How embarrassing a situation
that could prove to be. “I’m sorry Ellette, but I don’t trust her. And it’s not just because she’s purple, either.”
“Oh?” Ellette asked icily, raising her eyebrows to show that she thought that was
exactly the reason why her sister distrusted their new roomies.
“Yes. She’s apathetic, she’s disagreeable! Behaviour like that isn’t normal these days, Letty.” Calina tried to talk to her sister without sounding condescending, but it seemed that this was the impression Ellette was getting anyway: Calina was trying to force ideas down her throat again, what a bore. Calina shook her head, as if to dispel these myths about her ideals and intentions. “I’m only trying to look out for you,” she said softly, then. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Ellette repeated Calina’s motion and shook her head. Clearly this was an issue they weren’t going to agree on, like religion had been, and Calina considered that it actually might not be best to push her fears about the new girl, just in case that made Ellette even less willing to take her advice.
“You say that like it means something,” Ellette said after a minute. “’I don’t want you to get hurt’. What a load of old rubbish! You’re just thinking about yourself again, Calina, and you know it. You can be awfully selfish sometimes, and it’s definitely
not becoming.” She scowled and stood up.
“Just because you don’t like Miss Medina, it doesn’t mean that I have to dislike her. I’m not going to let you rule my life.” With that she crossed to her bed, which was positioned parallel to Calina’s but on the other side to the bedroom door, lay down on it and turned her back to her sister. It was a clear signal that the conversation was over.
Calina sighed. Well, at least it was better than having been blanked out of the conversation as soon as she started it. She had, this way, found that Ellette was a lot more stubborn than she thought, and this only served to make her feel as though she needed to protect her sister all the more. Ellette was definitely a weak-minded child. She had no experience with life, yet, and thus she couldn’t see what Calina could: Medina was a bad influence, it was blatantly apparent not only in the way she acted, or spoke, but the way she dressed (Calina did not mean to sound catty, but this statement should have been true to even the most uneducated people), and the way her sister acted. Azaliah was an ill girl, Calina could see this, but she couldn’t see
why the girl was ill. She seemed lively enough, she seemed as though she should have a full prosperous life, and although her mysterious illness could have absolutely nothing to do with her sister’s oddness, Calina thought that it had a lot to do with it. Medina was not normal, and maybe this was infectious. It would have been wise to ban Ellette from seeing her, but she felt that this wouldn’t go very far seeing her sister’s current infatuation with the new girls.
Maybe Calina just had to prove to her sister just how much of a bad influence Medina was. Yes, that was what she was going to do- and if the few words she had shared with Medina today were any signal to the purple girl’s oddness, then that would be a very easy task indeed. But, tonight, it was getting late. She pulled a nail file out of the bedside table on her left, lay back and stared at the ceiling, her mind all but focused on her nails.
Around twenty minutes later, Calina heard the quiet whirring of Nurse as it came in to check that Calina and Ellette were ready for bed. It seemed that Ellette had fallen to sleep in her clothes, for she was so quiet, but when she heard the Nurse approaching she sat up in her bed and stretched her arms over her head with a yawn. It had been a long day.
“Alright girlies,” Nurse said as it appeared through the bathroom from Medina and Azaliah’s room. Calina groaned internally, and sat up.
“Yes Nurse?” she asked it, feeling slightly awkward. She was still getting used to the thing, and the temptations she had to treat it as if it wasn’t a real thing that could understand her or act in a logical way. In actual fact, it was probably more logical than her since it had been tick-tocked that way in set-up, but that didn’t make Calina feel any more comfortable talking to it like it- or
she really- was a real human as Madame Delehan had instructed them to do.
“I believe it is time for you to go to sleep. It is late. You have your first lessons tomorrow.” Aside from her voice being automated, Calina thought that Nurse sounded an awful lot like a real nurse. Her eyes flashed a little, and her head moved from side to side as she looked around the room. Calina couldn’t quite comprehend how the images formed into ‘brain’ waves of any kind, but just the thought of it gave her a headache so she decided not to ask.
“We were just going to bed now.” Calina stretched her arms as her sister had done, and began to gather her night things together so she could use the bathroom. Nurse stood stock still, as if waiting, and then her eyes flashed a darker purple, making the warm brass colour of her face flickered in an almost ethereal way.
“Where is Miss Medina?” Nurse asked, head spinning a little as she looked around the room.
“She’s not in her room?” Ellette was puzzled. She shared a look with Calina, but Calina obviously wasn’t as worried as her, so she turned back to the Nurse.
“We thought she was in there,” Calina said, not in the slightest surprised that Medina was already causing trouble.
“Have you checked the parlour?” Ellette got off her bed and walked to the parlour door, which was slightly ajar. Calina followed, leaving her night things on the bed. She supposed it wouldn’t be good to lose a roomie on the first night at the university, after all, even if she wasn’t the nicest roomie in the world.
And then, with a jolt, it hit her: She was
awful. Medina was possibly missing- although it was unlikely, it was still possible- and all Calina could think about was how awful a person she thought Medina might be once she got to know her. She swallowed hard.
“Yes, have you checked the parlour?” she asked Nurse quickly, this time a little more worried. Ellette looked at her and gave a look of confusion, asking a silent ‘what was
wrong with her?’ through her blue eyes. Calina shrugged, as if to answer her sister’s thoughts. It had been a long day, she wasn’t even sure how she felt any more, only that she was tired and she wanted to go to bed as soon as possible.
“No,” Nurse answered. “Check please.”
Calina was the first to reach the parlour door, since it was so close to her bed, and she poked her head around it quickly. She breathed a sigh of relief. There, sat in the biggest armchair, curled up- if you could call it curling with all those limbs and joints at such odd angles- with a book in her hands was Medina. Her face was intent and screwed up with concentration, only succeeding in making her look even more weird; her nose from this angle seemed too long for her face, and her forehead too high, and in the shaded light from the hanging lamp her skin looked a deep shade of purple that was almost scarlet.
When Calina stepped through, Medina didn’t look up right away but obviously finished the page she had been reading. Calina cleared her throat, wondering if Medina knew she was there, but Medina still ignored her. She couldn’t decide whether this was Medina behaving rudely, or whether she was just engrossed to the point of deafness in the book. She waited a moment and then tried clearing her throat again.
Medina slammed her book shut angrily and looked up.
“I heard you the first time,” she said quite calmly, though she was obviously annoyed- or did she always look like that? Calina couldn’t think of a time when she didn’t look vaguely annoyed at some thing or other.
“Oh, okay.” Calina didn’t quite know what to say. She smiled politely, and then decided that a simple explanation might be alright, in case she hadn’t heard. “Nurse wondered where you were. It’s time for bed.”
“Yes, I heard.” Medina brushed her off again, and sat perfectly still, as if waiting to leave before she would get up. There was a frosty silence as Calina stood in the doorway for another moment, twisting her fingers in her dress awkwardly and feeling like she was five years old again. Eventually she turned on her heel and went back into her bedroom, intending to get her things together to use the bathroom as soon as possibly afterwards.
Almost as soon as she had walked out the door, Medina burst past her and Calina was hit by a gust of cold wind as she stormed past. She walked with her hands poker-straight by her side, as though she were marching, and she almost tripped over her sack-like black dress in her attempt to leave the room. Nurse followed her almost immediately, sensing the hostility.
“Go to bed,” she said to them before following Medina through the bathroom. “I’ll be back to check on you shortly."
Calina stood in the centre of the room, her arms wrapped around herself and she stayed still, unsure quite what to do. Ellette busied herself getting her things ready for bed, not looking her sister in the eye.
“Do you think she heard our conversation earlier?” Calina asked quietly, meekly, her voice barely even sounding against the sound of the tap running in the bathroom. “Do you think she heard those things I said about her? Those awful things?”
“I don’t know,” Ellette said truthfully, finally turning to her. “They weren’t very nice, were they? It didn’t look much like she heard anything in particular though; she looked flustered more than anything else. If she did hear, it didn’t look as though she was too upset.”
Calina shook her head. “I think she did. She was just trying not to show it.” Here Calina paused and ran one hand through her flyaway blonde curls, her face flushing angrily as she began to pace the room. “Oh, I may not like her, but I didn’t mean her to
hear me! I’m not
that mean.”
“That’s debatable.”
“
Thanks.”
“Look, it’s been a long day. We’re all a little high strung and tired. I’m sure tomorrow it will be as if it never happened.”
The tap in the bathroom stopped running, and the room was left empty. Calina gathered her things together and took them through. Sitting on the cool, hard seat of the toilet, behind locked doors with her back pressed hard against the wall, Calina sighed and couldn’t help but think that she’d messed things up. Why couldn’t she just keep her mouth shut? Tomorrow, she would start fresh, new, with a clean slate. Hopefully Medina would understand. Hopefully she hadn’t ruined everything.
She might not like the girl, but she could at least be civil... Couldn’t she?
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