Alec kissed Lenore's head again when she made that horrible attempt at a joke, but it was an attempt and she was sad, so he couldn't inform her how horrible that joke was. He listened to her explain how the day had gone. He had gone to her party. He'd given her her gift. He'd bought her an intricate wooden box that was big enough to hold a gun, but pretty enough to hold jewelry or some shit. A duck had been etched into the top of it, and little duck had been etched into the wood beneath the duck. Inside of it was a knife that toasted bread as you cut it, because it was dorky and cool as hell, along with a pack of Marbolo Smooths - a menthal brand that tasted like peppermint - and a zippo lighter that he'd already filled for her. Since she was now legally old enough to give herself cancer, he figured she might as well try.
But after she explained to him what had been the real problem - which was a lot more than he'd expected her to tell him - he didn't know where to start. "That's fucked up," was where he chose to begin. It was. It was some kind of high school drama shit. Not the issues, more so how all this drama had come together to crash and burn at the same time. "That's...fucked up," he elaborated.
Where does one even begin with that though? Was he supposed to ask her what she planned to do about Viola? Because if she had any kind of concrete plan, he doubted she would be so worried about it. Or did he focus in on the main part, the part he didn't know - which was Knox fucking Viola. It did explain why Lenore wanted to kill him, though. Was that a secret he was already privy to? Sometimes he forgot. It happened a lot when he didn't care. "Knox fucked Viola? Did I already know that?" He asked her, just to be sure, like she would know all of his Intel, but she kind of would. Lenore told him most of the gossip at school at this point. "Was it consensual?" Because Viola was seventeen. He wasn't going to pretend like she didn't have a choice if she did. He'd fucked many a grown man when he'd been her age. Just not a teacher.
"You failed your trigger test, fuck," he continued. He might as well just repeat everything she said sentence by sentence, except adding the word fuck at the end of it at this point.