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 Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 7:38 am
Death, in general, did not phase Fallon. Her grandmother, for example, had been dying for several years now. She had two dogs as a child who were hit by a car right in front of her. She had witnessed a construction worker fall from a scaffolding to his death the year before she came to Barren Pines. One of her childhood friends died from cancer when she was still in primary school. No, death was natural, part of the flow of life. It fit into the rules of life, and therefore, it pleased Fallon.
But death was also supposed to be random.
And nothing about the onslaught of death at Barren Pines felt random to her.
It wasn't that Fallon enjoyed randomness in her life, but the pattern of death was imperceptible to the human eye, she reasoned. There had to be a complex pattern to it, one she would love to figure out. Yet, to have so many students die in a matter of weeks, all falling to the same disease... it did not fit the pattern in Fallon's mind. And this made her uneasy.
The kitchen was empty that afternoon, which was bizarre. Normally, students milled about, laughing and talking, but lately, there had been a lull in happiness. This too displeased Fallon. There were less people to eat her food, to blather on about silly things in her presence, to tell her how wonderful everything tasted. Though she liked her solitude, this was not what she wanted.
Fallon had arrived several hours before and began baking. She made every kind of cake, pie, and dessert that she had the ingredients for. The long table of the kitchen was covered in a rainbow of treats, ranging from a pumpkin cheesecake to her fruit tarts to a whipped mousse. And yet, she was there alone, staring at the sugary-sweet buffet and blinking slowly. A piece of fruit tart sat untouched on the plate in front of her.
Out of those who had died, none were close to her, but she knew them well enough to be concerned. Abeline, cold and frigid, was a frequent guest around the table, and she came most often to Fallon's mind in short waves. Disruption, that was what it was. There was no way to punish a dead person for disrupting her order either, which made everything even more unsatisfying.
Pursing her lips, Fallon lifted her polished fork in one hand, rolling it across her fingers. She cast a long glance down the table. It looked like it belonged on the set of Willy Wonka. She sighed quietly. This simply would not do. None of it. Fallon needed her life to return to normal -- and she needed it now.
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Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 7:21 am
The kitchen was overflowing with baked goods. It looked like Barren Pines had taken on the task of confronting a hunger crisis in Candyland.
Laney shuffled in in her slippers, though it was midafternoon, with the plant Seymour hugged to her chest. It was her newest accessory, and she talked to it like a pet, though all it ever did was sit there and wilt. Since Tara had died, it went everywhere with her. If Laney went to class, Seymour went to class. If Laney took a shower, Seymour took a shower (well, almost -- the point was you could see its ugly, yellow-brown leaves poking against the curtain of the changing area just outside the shower). If Laney went for a walk around the football field, Seymour went for a walk around the football field. And now, if Laney went to the kitchen, the plant did too.
She was quieter these days, in certain moods. The petite, snow-haired girl could sometimes be caught staring out at nothing with her big saucerplate eyes, like she wasn't quite tethered to the world -- and during those times she was tolerable, vacant but polite, as though in a haze of laudanum.
At other times she was an agony of activity, much like Fallon -- cleaning her room top to bottom, making up colored flyers -- she barreled through all the preparations for her Game Night almost entirely by herself. She paced, she knocked on people's doors just to ask them, "do you need anything?" She had apparently sat through five replays of the Twilight movie with Frankie over the course of one night -- though no one much cared what Laney did so long as it wasn't causing a problem for them. They had their own problems; life was heavy at Barren Pines. Life was precious, and it was fragile. When Laney wanted to do everyone's laundry for them, it was a little weird, but no one really cared if that was what she wanted to do.
The worst was the crying. When she got into a mood to cry -- which had happened late at night, a few times -- they all lost sleep over it. She wasn't just heartbroken, she was loud. Some students had earplugs, but this didn't help, and her shattered sobbing rang on sometimes for hours, till a few weary students would shuffle up from their beds and try, desperately, to calm her down so she would go to sleep and they could have sleep. It rarely helped: she was disconsolate.
Other students complained to the schoolboard.
And some others, listening in the dark to her far-off weeping that echoed through the air vents, turned their heads into their own pillows and very quietly cried along with her -- not for the anguish of little Laney Sutton but for themselves, and for the friends they had lost.
It had been a difficult week.
She was calm now, staring down at the countertop of treats with a queer sort of insight, as though she could understand the need to bake five pies with five different-colored fruits, two upside-down cakes, and one right-side-up, and everything else Fallon had laid out. "I just came for a glass of water," she explained herself away. "This looks lovely. How long does it take you to bake this much food without a room full of ovens?"
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Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 8:03 am
Of all the people Fallon might have wanted to walk through that door, Laney Sutton was not one of them. The excitable girl was a torrent of emotion more often than not, and Fallon found that very off-putting. She didn't want to be alone, but she was not sure that having Laney around was a more pleasant alternative. She straightened in her chair when the pale-haired girl entered, drawing herself in to a more refined position. The kitchen had been empty all day, at least ever since she had gotten there in the morning. Normally, Fallon would cook what she wanted, and people would trickle in little by little to eat her food and tell her how much they lvoed it, but today, no one had came. And so Fallon just kept cooking. She was a robot, unable to stop her fingers from kneading dough or sprinkling sugar. She baked everything that she had the ingredients for, and it had taken her the entire day. She even skipped two classes, which was not very like her at all. But didn't they understand? People always came to eat her food. But no one did. No one came. How was she expected to continue the pattern of the day when she was missing a very important link in the chain?
Fallon was not equipped to process this change in the delicate order of her life, and so she felt the only solution was to do as she always did and wait for the others to fulfill their roles. But no one came.
She cooked.
No one came.
She cooked.
No one came.
She cooked.
No one came.
She cooked.
No one came.
She cooked.
No one came.
And now Laney had arrived. Late, certainly, but she was there.
Fallon appeared despondent, face drawn in sagging lines. She was not saddened by individual deaths, but upset by the overall trend of disruption at Barren Pines. She wanted consistency, and they were bringing her suprises. The only comfort was in the knowledge that the cause of death was constant, but recently, even that had fallen in to speculation. There were whispers of the states of the discovered bodies. The most outlandish she had heard was of the green-haired girl -- Esen, was it? -- who woke up dismembered. Fallon did not believe that; bacterial menangitis did not do that. And yet -- people talked.
Dropping her eyes to the mismatched smattering of desserts, Fallon grimaced. Most of these had been sitting out for hours and had far passed the quality that she demanded of her food. She just couldn't bring herself to throw them away, not without someone to finish her pattern, a classmate to eat her cooking. Fallon raised her eyes to Laney. "It is no trouble to cook for my classmates," she said, the same practiced response she always gave to questions regarding the time and effort she put in to cooking for others. "Would you like a treat? The pumpkin cheesecake is fresh, and the fruit tarts too. The mousse still has a nice whip to it." There was a touch of desperation in her voice, a need for Laney to comply. She watched the girl, unblinking, eyes not even straying to the hideous plant Laney insisted on carrying around.
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