Log: Abi and Blue WHO: Abi Blyg and Blue Sargent WHAT: Girl Hangout Time WHEN: Backdated to a few weeks ago WHERE: A playground near an elementary school WARNINGS: Reference to food policing by a parent toward the end.
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Abi was not a master at making friends. She actually tended to be shy, preferring to wait for an extrovert to come around and adopt her in any new situation. It had been working for her for years.
It was almost working in Vallo, even. She found some chatty types who were willing to let her latch on, and she probably could have just hung around the full house she lived in and let that be all the social interaction she ever got. Throw in college and teaching a dragon to draw and she’d be all set! It was just…
…well, they were all boys. Men, in some cases, and a dragon, but still. Boys as far as the eye could see. The need to speak in person with another lady-type was growing stronger by the day. Luckily, she knew of at least one person who was in as much danger of death by testosterone poisoning as she was.
“Hey Blue!”
Abi smiled brightly as she swung into Nino’s just as the lunch shift was finishing its changing of the guard. “Still up for invading the elementary school playground with me?” During the school day the space was verboten, of course, but after the kids all went home, the swings were fair game for all.
Nino's looked fine, and Blue looked fine. No one would be able to tell that only a few weeks ago, graviturgy had decimated the windows, the doors, and the creepy crawlies inside. Maybe that was for the best, not having to worry about reconstruction. Made moving past all the weird, destructive, near-death experiences easier. Also, having lunch dates with friends who were not the long line of boys that she was either dating, living with, or having knife fights with behind her place of employment helped.
The moment Abi came in, Blue was slamming down her apron on the counter. "I'm leaving!" Blue shouted to the back, not even waiting until someone confirmed they heard her or acknowledged that the front had no staff. Nino's operated on the good graces of its waiters, and Blue was not feeling generous the second she was supposed to be off the clock.
She scooped up two boxes—pizza, obviously; free, obviously— and led Abi right back out the door she came in from. "We are park bound, and we are not going to stop until we powerwalk the whole way there," Blue said, moving a quick clip. She was concerned they might try to pull her back in for one more hour and she was not about that overtime life.
"Is there a reason for the park in particular or are we people watching? I'm fine with both, by the way."
“I like swings?” Abi shrugged and flashed Blue a smile as she opened the door with a hip and held it for Blue and her armload of pizzas to proceed first. “Playgrounds didn’t stop being fun because I turned eighteen, and if I go with you then I don’t have to hear even one ‘lol you’re the same size as the fifth graders’ joke. Plus I’ve never gotten to eat pizza at the top of the jungle gym, and that suddenly became a bucket list item when I realized it was a possibility.”
"You'll just hear 'lol you're both the size of a fifth grader' instead. But jokes on them, I've heard them all. And that's why I wear steel toed boots, kicking them is easier. We're at the right height," Blue said, flashing a foot of her shoes—not only shiny with metal but painted by Ronan Lynch, an original. She had been told she couldn't wear them at Nino's while working (something about eat the rich next to a rainbow otter holding a knife seemed threatening to customers), but Blue didn't listen and continued to push the limits.
Blue shifted the pizzas from one hand to the other as they walked. "I'm not going to belittle your bucket list, but I hope there's something a little more adventurous on there because we're five minutes away from pizza-on-jungle-gym completion."
“Honestly, I’m having to rewrite the whole list since I landed here,” Abi laughed. “Like, I did have ‘climb to the top of Machu Picchu’ on it, but…”
She gestured broadly at Vallo and its obvious lack of Machu Picchus.
“Same for the Louvre and Monet’s garden. Skydiving is still up there, though, and of course there’s all kinds of new things I keep adding as I go. Like ‘eat pizza at the top of the jungle gym’ and ‘make friends with a dragon’ and ‘figure out magic watercolors’ and stuff.”
"And stuff," Blue echoed, with a grin. Her bucket list had consisted of similar exploratory, cultural things that helped her escape the continental US. No one could have expected this was in her future where those things didn't exist. Blue understood.
"The watercolors I could help you with, if you haven't checked it off yet. I have connections." There were implied quotations around the word 'connections'. Her contact was Ronan who was more of the traditional artsy with paints where hers was more of the fiber type. And, well, she lived with him. All it required was yelling for him when she was home.
"Alright, what else? What else? Skydiving we can make happen. And if anything, you wouldn't even need to do it jumping out of a plane. Probably some kind of hoverbike situation or robotic flying lion. You're not scared of heights, are you? This isn't, like, an exposure therapy thing to get over your fear?"
“No, just, like…the basic human fear of freefalling through space until you pull the cord.” Abi laughed again, because skydiving seemed like a terrible plan for exposure therapy, but she also had plenty of friends who would make plans exactly that terrible.
She was starting to feel inconsiderate, though, because the conversation was all about her. “But hold up, what about you? Do you have a list we need to check off? Or are you just out here living in the moment, taking life as it comes?”
If her hands weren't full, Blue would have immediately waved Abi off. "No, no, don't worry about me. I did all my adventuring right after high school. There was an epic road trip, I chained myself to a tree in protest, scared a man in a Waffle House, I'm set for now. But if I start having that itch to check off more of my bucket list, I'll make sure to text you."
Blue opened up the top box and offered the pizza to Abi. No reason to wait until they were sitting at the top of the jungle gym to indulge. "So, I guess yeah, taking life as it comes. You have to here. I live with too many planners, and I try not to say I told you so when it all goes terrible and their plans go up in flames, but I do like being right."
Abi laughed as she took the offered pizza slice. Now there was some serious living in the moment: eating pizza while walking, nevermind what might end up on your shirt.
“You guys are from Virginia, so you’ll actually know what I mean when I say I grew up in NoVA, in a very NoVA family, surrounded by very NoVA people,” she said. Most people in Vallo she’d have to explain Northern Virginia to; they didn’t come with the knowledge that the suburbs around DC were famously uptight, competitive, wealthy, and career-obsessed. It was kind of nice having someone she didn’t have to give all the background to. “I’m from the part of Fairfax that’s basically Arlington. Living in the moment is strongly discouraged, because that’s not how you get into an Ivy. So I pass for a free spirit there, but anyplace else I come off extremely risk-averse, as my dad would put it.”
"Gansey's parents are Republicans, but not just the average vote type. The Congress-running, donor-party-throwing, have 'no idea why everyone is up in arms about coffee needing to be fair trade' Republicans. They live near D.C., and I'm pretty sure they hate me," Blue said, not faltering at the thought that the parents of her boyfriend did not find her terrifyingly endearing. Just terrifying. "So I get it. Any little kerfuffle out of line and you're basically the black sheep. I've convinced them I've somehow corrupted Gansey but he always had that bit of adventurous spontaneity in him. I just told him it was fine to let his freak flag fly whenever he wanted to, because we're both a little weird."
Blue adjusted the pizza boxes in her hands. "But it's not an overnight thing. You work yourself up to it. You can still live in the moment while being risk averse. The two are not mutually exclusive." Now she nudged Abi in the side with her elbow, and since they were practically the same height it was actually her side and not a hip. "You're living it out here. I think your dad would be shocked at you befriending a dragon."
“My dad would be shocked at a dragon, period,” Abi laughed.
Her dad would also be shocked at werewolves, she thought, and her smile wilted. He wouldn’t have believed her if she’d told him, and neither would her mother, and to be honest she couldn’t really blame them. She almost didn’t believe it herself.
The last thing she wanted to do was dwell on all that and ruin the outing she’d been looking forward to all day, though. She shifted herself over instead to the immediate sympathetic response she had to Blue explaining Gansey’s parents. “That’s got to be hard, having your boyfriend’s parents be…like that. How long have you and Gansey been together?”
"I guess, maybe? I don't think about it that often, because I can push their buttons, no need to put on a front, and because Gansey's so good. He's the antithesis of his parents underneath all those brightly colored Vineyard Vines getups. It just takes some time to get to know him," Blue said. It had taken her some time, longer than she liked to admit. But the soft, charming, anxious nerd who backpacked in another country because he was searching for a legend was incredibly endearing. Boat shoes notwithstanding.
"But we've been together, oh—" Blue took a moment to tilt her head side-to-side, counting the months. "Three years now, just about. Although most of it has been here in Vallo, which is really weird to think about. Not knowing what happens back home, what those years look like when not surrounded by magical chaos."
“Oh wow, I didn’t realize most of your time had been here! That’s wild. I mean, three years…” They were young enough for three years to still seem like a long time.
They’d reached the playground, and Abi made straight for the dome-shaped jungle gym as she continued to pursue her curiosity. “Are you glad you’re here? Or do you wish you could go back home?”
Blue had to think about that question for a second. She scrunched up her nose, twisted her mouth up like she swallowed something sour, and thought. The perfect tableau of a short girl with pizza considering her life. It wasn't one she liked to dwell on, not when there were a ton of good things here.
"Yes, sort of?" Blue said after a full ten seconds of contemplating her answer. She handed over the pizza box to Abi, who was above her on the jungle gym, and then followed so that they could sit side by side at the top. "There are people I miss that aren't here anymore. My mom and my aunts. Sometimes I miss Orla, she's my cousin, but you can't say that to her if she shows. She can't know or it will make her ego inflate."
Blue let out a soft sigh. "I miss Henry too, but he'll find his way back. Until then I will just wait here." Blue took a slice from the box. "What about you? Better here than home?"
“Probably better here,” Abi admitted as she lifted a slice from the box. She took a bite and mentally declared the bucket list item checked off: pizza at the top of the jungle gym, done. “With what happened back home…I mean, if a bunch of camp counselors left alone for the night in the middle of the woods say ‘oh, no, we aren’t responsible for all the dead bodies, that was werewolves,’ no one’s going to believe them. I doubt if my own parents would believe me. I wouldn’t believe me, if I hadn’t seen it. So yeah, I think I’d rather be going to college and living with folks who race chocobos than, uh…heading for prison for murder? Probably heading for prison for murder.”
"Oh, adults not listening to teenagers when weird supernatural stuff happens? Must be Tuesday," Blue said, taking a bite out of her slice of pizza. "Not to say the stuff that happened to you wasn't bad, and jail is yikes, but there's someone out there that would have believed you. Maybe not the people you think. Take here for example—" Blue gestured toward the playground, but she really meant Vallo.
"I'm pretty sure no one would believe me if I said I spent years in a magical city with, I don't know, dinosaurs. But the people that matter, they will. Maybe not at first, but they always do. Sometimes it doesn't matter what the adults think." She paused, thought of her mom and her aunts again, then added. "Or, not all adults."
“I’ve had, like…three adults in my life who weren’t completely useless about anything real,” Abi said, and then burst into a laugh. “Sorry, I just imagined trying to tell my mother about Vallo and getting any response other than either ‘that’s nice, sweetie’ or ‘we’ll call your therapist.’ And that’s if she didn’t just skip straight to the lecture about the calories in pizza like it’s the most important thing in the universe.”
"Well now you need to eat another piece, and I should have brought ranch or something, to dip it in that. Next time," Blue said, intently, because she meant it. There would be a next time. Blue was not an Adult, in the strictest sense, but she was older than Abi a little, and that made her the responsible one. And Blue had always been sensible, her mother had said so. And sensibility told her right now that she could provide some alternative advice to whatever stuff Abi's mom would have been spewing out.
"Honestly, the most important thing in the universe right now is eating pizza at the top of this jungle gym, and then scaring off any asshole who tells us we're too old to be here. I don't like wasting food but I will throw the burnt crust bits at them for posterity."
“I knew there was a reason I liked you,” Abi replied with a smile. She picked up a second slice of pizza and raised it in a toast. “To eating whatever we want and being wherever we please.”
With a smile, Blue held her slice up, and cheers-ed with Abi. "I like the sound of that."