Re: Ruby and Clint
"Is there such a thing as good country?" Ruby laughed. She didn't want to ruin Jules's party, so that was off the table, but it would've been funny to see the response. Based on Clint's question, she was guessing he hadn't been witness to the homecoming fight in Jules's kitchen, so she nodded anyways. "I've been here a few times, but a tour couldn't hurt. You and Jules friends?" She kind of wondered who he was close to, or even who he'd dated. She'd always been bad at keeping up with his crowd and now she wondered who's toes she might be stepping on by keeping his company. But she was getting ahead of herself. And, really, she wasn't going to let some bitch stop her from getting what she wanted.
“Uh, yeah,” Clint said with some mock-offense about the jab at country music. He liked all kinds of music, pretty much, and lived by the theory that there was good to be found in all genres. “Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, just to name a few.” He flashed Ruby a grin. That probably made him look like a dork, but whatever. “But yeah, me and Jules are friendly enough, I guess. We’ve kinda had the same friends since grade school, so.” Clint shrugged, leading the way out of the kitchen and toward some of the quieter parts of the house. Everybody could find where the booze was and the living room, but he’d been through almost all the rest of it before. “We’ve never been like, besties or gone out or anything,” he added, just to clarify. “But she’s all right.”
"I don't even know who Merle Haggard is," Ruby grinned, "But I'll give you Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. And if it gets everyone singing, it doesn't matter what genre it is." She wasn't old enough to go to a bar, but she knew she liked bar songs-- the sort where everyone drunkenly joined in when the song came on. "Just curious," she smiled, wondering if he remembered her from back then, when her hair had been dark and straight, when she hadn't known better than to keep her mouth shut about the weird things she believed. When she'd been friends with Jules. Ruby didn't remember him very well, but she'd started to break away from that group around the same time that she'd started noticing boys. She'd pretty solidly identified Clint as 'not her type', but there she was, wandering the back halls of Jules' house with him. "We were close once. But it was a long time ago."
“What?” Clint teased, drawing the word out like he just couldn’t believe she didn’t know who Haggard was. Then he grinned. “Blame my dad, he loves that shit, so I grew up listening to it.” Clint led them down a short hall that had a few doors in it. Two were locked, but the third opened up into a small library with a desk in it. Boring, but secluded. And with furniture, his teenage-boy-brain couldn’t help but notice. “So this is, uh ... the library, I guess,” he told Ruby, glancing around. There were bookshelves along the walls and a desk and everything, so that was his assumption, at least. Clint’s eyes came back to her and he smiled crookedly. “Though I guess if like, you two were close, you don’t actually need a tour?” He was mildly curious why they weren’t friends anymore, but that kind of thing seemed to happen regularly in high school.
Ruby’s eyes roamed around the room as they stepped in, quietly amazed by the number of books in the room. Was it even possible that one of Jules’s parents had read them all? Or did they just collect books to put on display? It seemed so wasteful, even if books were relatively cheap. Why buy something you didn’t intend to use? Her attention turned back to Clint and she gave him a little smirk. “To be fair, I don’t recall ever seeing the library before,” she said, leaning against the arm of a sofa. “But it’s true that I might’ve been more interested in the tour guide than the tour itself.” He looked so cute standing there with his crooked little smile and Ruby knew he’d already guessed as much. Even if she’d never been there before, she’d have been more into Clint that Jules’s house. It was an easy choice to make.