Cass & Alex: the (bad) diner
She wasn't a bucket to fill and fill with other people's thoughts and feelings, but a sieve, one that rattled - or she wasn't a bucket presently. Cass hadn't offered her palm and she wouldn't, for the door would open and the glass would fill and she'd no idea presently whether it would fill and fill until she spilled or whether it was a vastness, an emptiness of other people that belonged to the mundane world, for people who lived ordinarily. There were drugs that straddled the ocean, glass between herself and who she was. They called it madness, and the drugs remedy. Cass wasn't sure the drugs weren't the madness, herself.
But she'd flickers. Shadows of shadows and Cass's smile was glinting, it hardly committed into being but she was stood near the rubbish of a night full of meals scraped into the trash and he'd shadows wreathing his heels like shades of what-might-have-been. There was an echo of a girl who was at his elbows and Cass refused to look directly. Her eyes were clear and steady and grayish blue, and they didn't look mad at all.
The people who were truly mad, sometimes didn't.
The boy was young. His hair was candy-floss and he wore headphones that she remembered being papery and thin, the insubstantial foam of sitting in the back of a car being driven by an excellently unfeeling nanny. He acquired the brickwork in a sprawl of insubstantial proportions, and Cass's smile crooked at the corner.
"Most people are," she said, truthfully, and blew smoke toward the streetlamp. "They needn't come for the food, or the conversation. Both are terrible, usually."