WHO: Bea & Rae WHAT: Dropping off a pair of boots. WHERE: Sing Sing. Kitchen. WHEN: September 4, 2019; sometime in the morning(?) RATING: Medium-low
There was a hair stylist that Bea used to work with, way back before the world decided to implode, that used to talk about things like paying it forward, being a better person, and everthing that she had never really considered doing when life wasn’t just chaos and survival. Maybe it had been her upbringing, or maybe it was her own selfishness, but she just hadn’t been the type of person to always take others into account before she considered what was best for herself. With the exception of Vienna, but Vienna had always been the exception.
Now though, with the infection and the aftermath she’d noticed that things she wouldn’t have done before were things she considered doing now. Like offering her old boots to someone else. It used to be they would have just lived in the back of her closet gathering dust and becoming a good home for spiders or other creepy-crawleys that chose to live in them, but because nothing was easy to come by any longer she had actually stopped to think that someone else might be able to use her discarded pair. Jake (she thought his name had been Jake anyway) would definitely have considered that paying it forward. Maybe he would have even told her she’d grown as a person… but she didn’t think she had and he wasn’t here to say it, so there wasn’t a lot of use in putting too much thought and energy into the what-ifs.
If she was honest with herself, she wasn’t necessarily looking forward to the exchange with Rae. Part of her hoped that the cook had decided to skip helping with breakfast, or that maybe she didn’t help with breakfast at all. It wasn’t like Bea kept track of who was where in Sing Sing. Especially not the people she wasn’t closely associated with. But she had said she'd drop them by, so she needed to keep her word; even if it meant a conversation with someone she didn't know, who could very possibly be someone she wouldn't like.
The cafeteria was already mostly populated when Bea walked through, headed for the kitchen; boots tucked under one arm with a note stashed in the laces, just in case she had to leave them without talking with Rae. She would be pissed if someone else walked off with them because it would make her look like she hadn’t kept her word.
When she reached the kitchen doorway she tapped quickly on the doorframe and asked, “Is Rae around?”