Who: Rose and Emily What: Arrival. And a pillow. A very special and ugly pillow. Where: Bathos Lobby When: Tuesday night Warnings: Er. Rose is inherently prone to offensive content most of the time? Also: I'm verbose as hell.
At this point all that mattered to Rose was her pillow: her only true champion since age ten. It was a hag by now, and before she left a large rip had made itself intimately known. The feathers had erupted around her head when she clunked against the stuffing after last night’s revelries, but she was too far gone and hazy (and filled to her collarbones, it felt specifically, in acids) at that point to do anything but strangle its thin casing and let its fluffy innards bleed around her while she tossed and turned in her sleeping bag. She remembered (very vaguely) that the night had been a hard one partly because she felt like upchucking on the guy and girl next to her, and partly because dry skin on her ankles scratched and snagged on the fuzzy inside of the sleeping bag. And then, to make matters worse, when she woke up: there was her pillow all dead and mangled on the floor with its feathers in her hair.
She had meticulously packed what she could back into the split fabric while the rest of her group loaded their things into the pickup truck. Her “group” was, she decided, just general jackasses with one thing in common at least: totally ditching the smelly whatever they currently lived in for a shiny new stench. They also claimed they went to high school with her but every slob looked ugly and unfamiliar to Rose, so she scrunched her face up at all of them and tried to fix her pillow instead. They stopped at a CVS on the way where she bought cotton balls and transfused about half of those into the pillow. She also bought some white felt, and glue. Lacking the skills and supplies to sew the pillow nicely, she glued the patch of felt over the rip and fell asleep against the pillow, against the window, on the rest of their drive to the portal.
Rose trailed into the lobby of Bathos with that yellowing, bulging, patched up pillow now and a half a bag of cotton balls with a small tube of glue also inside the bag. The bag was tucked under her arm, the pillow hugged to her chest, and she had a suitcase in the other hand. She had a pair of mysterious keys in her pocket. She was so exhausted at this point that she didn’t really give a damn about bringing anything else in. She leaned against the wall and trailed it towards the elevator with a “shhhhh” noise and the inability to realize that she was dumb-looking sight.
Frizzy-haired, with cotton balls, a raggedy keepsake, and one suitcase until she remembered the rest of her worldly needs; looking haggard and crazy, dragging her feet, her side and head and ear “shhhhhhhhhh”ing against the lobby wall as if she was trying to listen for secrets through it. Clutching a fuck ugly pillow for dear life. She clung to it lovingly, and needfully, helplessly sober, and kind of beginning to drool in a most unattractive manner, we might add.
She looked around for an elevator. Together, she and her rag-tag pillow (it had been through a lot and god damnit they would go through the rest together) would ascend to a middle-class heaven. That was her plan. Just had to slide over there—wherever there was gonna be—first.