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He could tell when Jace was miserable, and Jace was, in fact, obviously miserable. She had a hangdog, impatient look to her, and she looked slightly like she had when Harper had died -- wild around the eyes, a little furious, though in this case she looked more irritated than lost as she had before. It was maybe a fact of growing older. She stormed out the building without either her sister or Irelia in tow; and when she saw Antony, looked unsure as to whether he was there for her or not, scuffing her feet in the grass as she moved over to the bike rack.

"Having fun surrounded by chicks?" she said acidly, and: "Look after Wisp, she's like -- she's gone boy crazy, she hikes up her boobs in the mirror."

The scuffling paused. She undid her bike chain, but -- seeing it as the gift it was, eventually Jace said roughly, "I'll come with you. You're getting fat. Seriously, look at all your love handles and your pudge and your huge a**. Fatty McFatony."

She wheeled her bike beside him, still not quite looking him in the eye, trudging with heavy feet and obviously a heavy heart beside him. Jacoba was miserable.

Eventually, she said --

"Well."

She actually laughed at that. "Do you totally remember how I was all, 'Step off, man?'" she boasted. "You were just being way weird at me. It was gross. If I have to have you around, I want you as you, not some fancy-a** suck-up. I bet he just sat in the kitchen and made you eat butter all the time, right? And made you bad touch yourself."

She sobered again: when she'd met Rudolfo, she'd been with Irelia, who'd still been her own age.

Her hackles immediately flew up like an angry dog's. "Why don't you go to hell and piss on yourself," she immediately snapped, "I don't give a damn that Wisp grew. Wisp is stupid. Wisp just cares about training bras and being, being -- a retarded secret policeman. I like being this way. All you teens ever do is make kissy eyes at each other and pant and talk about your breasts. So shut up."

Jacoba crossed her arms in front of her (entirely flat) chest, sticking her nose up in the air. There was a small bandaid on her cheek. She'd obviously gone way too hard in gym class. She looked hot and bothered in general. "Chris is all over that stupid Polly kid," she said, "who should pretty much be in the nursery, not middle classes, she's like an ADD gremlin. Seriously, she wants a piece of me. I laid off her for his sake, but, man..."

Her response to this was to stare at him as though he were made out of buggers, obviously not at all understanding what he meant. Even the pirate thing, which she normally would have hotly replied to, fell by the wayside. "Well, yeah?" she eventually said. "So?"

Trying to parse this, she eventually said -- "You better not let my sister date Nacho. She has "Mrs Devon Garcia" and "Mrs Ignacio Garcia" on her diary. It is the grossest thing I have ever seen, she can't make up her mind. It. Is. Nasty."

"No," the redhead said again, obviously totally baffled at the way his conversation was turning. "Irelia likes investigating dead mummy asses -- even if she is one of the coolest people I know," she amended, out of defence of her best firend. "And did you see her chest? It's like, it's not a chest, it's an alien parasite sac. If I turn out like that I am just gonna kill myself and you are going to have to say at my funeral, 'Jace died rather than look like that.'"