Devolve 2.0 The Reboot

( Clinging to what's left. )

Down in the basement, past the darkened weight room full of shadowy machines, and past the well-worn doors to the gym, the door to the indoor pool stood open. Inside, Jubilee and Molly were hard at work perfecting their cannonballs and underwater tea parties, oblivious to the late hour.

The night hadn't started so nicely. Jubilee took one look at Gert and Chase failing to see what was right in front of their faces and hightailed it to Molly's room, pajama-clad and armed with a movie, a plushie, and plans to colonize Molly's room until they both felt better. She hadn't expected to find Molly crying any more than she expected to burst into tears herself.

Somehow with all the crying and hugging and honesty, Jubilee spit out the short story of her crush on Jono. And with that, out came her anger at herself for getting so attached and for never saying anything. And how relieved she was she'd never said anything. And again her anger at Jono for not bothering to tell her, even though she was the one who had masochistically told him to go after Paige in the first place. She'd heard it from rumors, and personal feelings aside, that sucked.

Molly's situation twisted her up inside and made her want to confront Chase, so she could tell him to his face that if he thought Molly was being hurtful then he should just take a look at what an insensitive asshole he'd been. But it seemed like Molly wanted to confront Chase too and she said it with such a purple-ish gleam in her eyes that Jubilee quickly figured disarming the situation would go a little better.

Night swimming, she prescribed. Putting on a bathing suit when it's dark out always cheered her up, at the very least, even on the occasions she'd then scampered out to the lake to discover it was too glacial to jump in. But this time she led the way downstairs, to the pool in the basement.

Cool water washed away the sticky feeling of tears and soon they were laughing. They stayed underwater as long as they could and came up in bursts of bubbles. They jumped off the diving board until Jubilee's arms were sore from pulling herself out of the water. They were both wrung out from everything--Jubilee kept alternating between happy thoughts of the fact that she finally felt like she'd made sense of the world and unhappy thoughts of the sense-making Molly still had to do--so they headed upstairs. They fell asleep watching cartoons, spooned together under the covers, convinced that tomorrow would be better.