heffalumps and woozles [open]

[Isabelle Amherst]

"Together, we'll color the world! One bag of colored corn starch at a time. Dr. Seuss would be so proud." The playful girl who uttered those words, eyes gleaming with liveliness, with a bold smile that dared the world to even try to steal her joy, was a free spirit. That girl was an adventuress, a wild child, a rebel without a cause, a kind soul, a dare devil, and an innocent girl at heart, all in one.

How far Isabelle Amherst had fallen.

Eyes closed, head tilted back, Isabelle gently flicked her forearm, hoping it would miraculously speed up the flow of the blood that was carrying her substance of choice to her brain. Yanking off the rubber tie around her arm that was keeping her veins plump, she breathed a sigh of relief as she felt the combined rush and relaxation. With her signature colorful locks dyed black and her skin even more freakishly pale than usual from lack of sunlight, Isabelle was unrecognizable, but even her dramatically altered looks could not hold a candle to the transformation of her soul. If souls could be seen, then that of a sixteen-year-old Isabelle's would have been a medley of every color on the visible spectrum: bright, shiny, loud, and as bold as she was. Eighteen-year-old Isabelle's soul was black. Opening her eyes just enough to glance around the library to convince herself that no prefects had stumbled into the area for rounds, Isabelle pulled a cigarette and lighter out of her purse. A moment later, she chuckled aloud to herself. Of course there had been no prefects. She was one of the prefects on duty that hour as evidenced by the insignia on the uniform that she happily donned that night for the love of irony. There were others, but she knew exactly where their routes would lead them and had chosen her recluse spot accordingly.

Putting the lit cigarette to her lips and inhaling a lung full of the delicious poison, Isabelle smiled weakly. The smoke came out in an audible sigh. The nicotine gave her a way to avoid thinking about her best friend's second death. Drowning herself in controlled substances, she did not have to acknowledge that the death had come just after their falling-out; just after she told him she didn't care anymore, that he was dead to her. She didn't have to contemplate the thought that she would never get to say sorry or that he died believing she didn't love him and would never wake up to be told otherwise. She could forget that those wrongs would never be amended. For a few minutes, none of that mattered. At least, that was how it started. More recently, her life had become the inverse: a string of inebriation with few occasional minutes of sobriety.

If you were to ask Isabelle about any of this, she would lie to you and to herself. The substances were for fun: a way to add a rush to a meaningless existence. The syringe sitting next to her had nothing to do with anyone named Chandler Fernandez. That careless asshole man-child meant nothing to her anymore.

Sudden noises dragged Isabelle out of her thick haze, and she jumped a bit, realizing that she was not alone in the library after all. Both hastily and groggily, she grabbed the syringe and rubber tie that she had carelessly thrown aside and shoved them inside her purse. "Shit," she muttered, realizing the lit cigarette was still in her hand, and there was nothing in sight to put it out. Too panicked to think clearly, the lost girl held the cigarette behind her back before scanning the area to see if the noises had even been real or in her mind.

[Camila Reyes]

Aha. Maybe next time, beautiful… 

I think you two will be fine. But I’m not sure about you pissing people off, in all reality I think you’re gonna have to worry about me not starting anything... 

There they were again. The voices that seemed to haunt her, even after she had fled the beach, fighting the limp that plagued her since the battle. She had fought time and time again to get the nurses to leave her the hell alone. They had patched her up as much as they could, and yet, they tried to get her to sleep. How the hell could she sleep? The voices of her late friends were echoing in her head, preventing her from sleeping. Blood was spattered on every surface in her dreams and she thought she could hear screams from the courtyard, despite the fact that no one was out there. The girl who had held herself above others in her own eyes had plummeted so far down, that she was not even sure how far she had fallen. She was waiting to hit an actual surface, causing her skull to crack or to awaken from some horrid nightmare that had somehow hijacked her senses and caused her to hallucinate. Deep down, she knew that what had happened was real, but she hoped and prayed that it was not, so that she could live the way she had before.

She gratefully took the painkillers from the nurse and headed to to her room to get something to wash the pills down with. The skin around her eyes was bright red from crying and rubbing at her eyes with the sides of curled fists. There were still some grains of sand clinging to her hand, though she hardly noticed as she opened the door. She shuffled awkwardly into her room, placing the bottle of painkillers on her dresser before fishing a two liter bottle of Cocoa-Cola from under her bed. She grabbed a plastic cup and laughed bitterly to herself, pouring some of the oddly strong-smelling liquid into the cup. She went back over to her dresser, pouring pills out of the bottle. After the fourth white pill fell into her palm, she steeled herself and threw the medium-sized pills in her mouth, taking a large swig of the liquid in the cup. Immediately, she began to sputter, not because of the pills, but because of the burn of alcohol in her throat. She of all people should have known that mixing Vicotin and alcohol was a bad idea, but frankly, she did not care. She just wanted to live in a world, even if it was a temporary world, where everything was okay and where she could just exist without having to deal with reality.

She noticed it was late, but she had decided that she would ignore curfew that night. After all, who gave a rat’s a** anymore, right? The strict prefects were dead now, so there was no need to follow rules so closely. She stumbled out of her room, clearly drunk and barely able to lock the door. Honestly, she did not care if Carter noticed the pills or rum and Coke; she was in too much emotional anguish to worry about other people’s opinions. She nearly fell down the stairs while exiting the girls’ dorms, thanks to a combination of the pain in her leg, her emotional state, and her state of intoxication. She limped on, however, stopping every once in a while to let out a string of curses in both English and Spanish. She kept stumbling and, because she was drunk, she had no idea where she was going.

She finally came upon a pair of double doors after wandering around for a long time and shoved them open, nearly falling flat on her face after they creaked open. She looked around in a hazy stupor, confused at her location; it smelled like a mix of mold, coffee, and cigarettes. Her sapphire eyes drifted to the side, where she noticed spines of books protruding from what were obviously shelves, both metal and wood. Maybe moss is growing on the wood, she thought idly, stumbling over to a bookshelf and tracing the spines of a few hardcover books. She giggled quietly at the feeling, before looking saddened and withdrawing her hand as if a fire had burned her. She shuffled farther into the temple of books, not able to bring herself to look at the computers. They had met because of him smacking his face on a keyboard… She shook her head vigorously, becoming irritated when her chocolate brown bangs, which seemed to be thin and limp that particular day. In a sudden, emotional outburst, she yanked the ponytail holder out of her hair and pressed her back against a bookshelf, smacking her head against it and sliding down the back. Her small form trembled with sobs and she pulled her knees to her chest, pressing her face against her bony kneecaps. Beautiful my ass, Valdez. That goes for you too, Kay…

“You were both high…”

The irony of the statement made her chuckle humorlessly to herself as she rose from her position. She must have looked like a trainwreck, what with her crumpled red blouse and wrinkled black skirt. Her white blazer was probably covered with dark patches where her tears had fallen. Just to spite the school, she wished she would have worn her uniform in the battle. Of course, his crimson blood would have stained her shirt regardless, since he had taken the bullet to save her life, but that did not matter. All she could feel was the despair that consumed her. She had to admit, the funeral that Calista had arranged was wonderful. She had interrupted with her own touch; marigolds for grief in the coffins for all of those who had died. She wished that they could have been cleaned up before the funeral was arranged, since some bodies were badly bent or covered in blood. On an island that was made to be a prison, though, should she have not been surprised; after all, they were here to be contained, not treated with the respect they deserved.

She started stumble-limping toward what she thought were tables and chairs, though she could not be sure. What she was sure of was that the odor of cigarette smoke was closer and more pungent. She thought she heard someone else mutter a curse, so she followed where the sounds of rustling were coming from. She did not see a book laying on the ground before her and tripped over in, landing face-first on the floor. She refused to move from the spot, no matter how stupid she looked. There was no point in trying to pick herself back up again; she would just fall again. I think this is surface… Why didn’t I fall harder, though? She sighed, still not bothering to push herself up onto her knees. Instead, she lifted her head to greet the other person, who turned out to be a young woman with black hair that she could have sworn had been colorful a short time ago. She snorted humorlessly, her sapphire eyes still filled with tears that had not been shed and the dark, saggy circles under her eyes that made her statement ironic.

“H-hey Isabelle… Ya’ look look like *hic* hell…”

[Isabelle Amherst]

Cigarette still in hand and behind her back, Isabelle craned her neck and peered around the bookshelf in front of her, but she saw nothing, which was no surprise, considering that she couldn't really see more than five feet in front of her without the contact lenses that she hadn't bothered to wear to not do her rounds. The sounds continued, though, and Isabelle was about sixty percent convinced that she was not imagining them, which gave her enough reason to groggily place her hand on the bookshelf she was leaning against and forcefully heave her body onto its feet, even though the heroin streaming through her veins begged her not to move at all. Feeling heavier than ever before, Isabelle lethargically lugged all eighty pounds of herself further down the aisle, trailing her hand along the bookshelf the whole way for support, as if retreating from whoever may or may not have entered the library. In reality, her condition would barely have allowed her to outrun a turtle, but she trekked along anyway, hunched over and hardly breathing. 

The noises, which she half-discerned to be footsteps at that point, were getting nearer, but for the life of her, Isabelle could not figure the direction from which they were coming. The large library had somewhat of an echo, and in her state, the faint footsteps sounded more like an amphitheater's worth of noise, surrounding her and closing in on her. She looked back and forth, realized there was no where to go, nowhere at all, and suddenly buckled at her knees, landing back on the floor just as the noisy predator in the room landed right in front of her, proving not to be quite so threatening after all.

“H-hey Isabelle… Ya’ look look like *hic* hell…”


Isabelle tilted her head to the right as she leaned forward and observed the female who had fallen right in front of her who apparently knew her name. Thanks to the visual and mental fog created by astigmatism and drugs, it would take more than a few moments for Isabelle's brain to come up with an answer as to who was in front of her, time during which she chose to say nothing. Instead, she leaned forward and brazenly touched the person's long, soft hair, and after a moment, tears fell from her eyes and formed little droplets on the tile beneath them.

"Bridget..." Camilla, of course, looked nothing like Bridget, but for the moment, heroin, grief, sleep deprivation, and poor vision combined and permitted Isabelle to believe that the pink-haired thief was before her once again, miraculously back from the sunken coffin. Isabelle's tears grew into sobs, and she found herself clumsily dragging Camilla halfway off the floor by her underarms with a sudden strength that possessed her so that she could even further invade the girl's personal space by engulfing her in an uninvited hug. "I'm so sorry, Bridget. I should have thought of you first." 

There were a million things to be confused about from Isabelle's two short sentences, yet Isabelle herself was likely the most confused person in the room. Though they were the two most important people in Chandler's life, and they had never shown animosity towards each other, Bridget and Isabelle were not close by any stretch of the imagination, yet Isabelle, for some reason, clung to her hallucination of her dead acquaintance like she was holding on for dear life. Her violent sobs subsided into manageable cries, but the cries continued between muttered apologies, even though the little sober voice hiding in the back of her mind faintly whispered that this was not Bridget, that Bridget would never get to hear her vague, meaningless, and barely coherent sorries at all. In fact, as far as she knew, Bridget never found out about the main cause of Isabelle's guilty conscience at all, yet Isabelle murmured her apologies to the hallucination anyway, for all of it: for her death, for the kiss, and for everything before it.

 

[Camila Reyes]

As she drew nearer to the scent of cigarette smoke, she heard a shuffling noise. Of course, she dismissed it as some kind of odd hallucination, despite the fact that hallucinations were not one of the side effects of the white pills she had been given. She was surprised that she was not talking to the ghosts of her deceased friends. Regardless, she continued to hear the sounds and tried to follow them, just wondering who it was. Maybe Ashton would jump out from behind a bookcase and scare the ever-loving s*** out of her. Wouldn’t that be rich? she thought bitterly, continuing to limp-stumble along, gripping the side of a bookcase for support. This leg hurts like an Oedipus! she grumbled in her head, trying not to laugh at her own corny joke. She wished that Roman was still around so that she could try out the joke on him, but, sadly, he was unavailable at the moment. More like, unavailable forever… She shook her head and carried on, hoping to find someone else in that god-forsaken place at that god-forsaken hour. Every time that her leg made contact with the floor, she winced; the pain had dulled, but she could still feel the sting of the stitches despite the four pills and two cups of rum and Coke she had downed before stumbling down the stairs and into the library. She guessed that she still had a bullet in her leg and that was causing the pain. There was also another pain that she was feeling, but there was no time for letting her emotions consume her. After all, she had let her tears and grief flow freely most of the afternoon. She had even “freaked out” at a new student who looked like Deven. In a way, she felt sorry for the poor kid; being compared to the likes of Deven was just insulting.

Camila was hardly a predator in her inebriated state. She was more like wounded animal that was easy prey for a tiger to swoop up and eat with no problem. She lay on the floor, looking quite pathetic in her wrinkled uniform shirt, stained white blazer, and still-too-short black skirt that usually made her blush in embarrassment. Her brown hair was more frizzy than normal and seemed to be in tangles. In all honesty, she was too doped up to care about how she looked. Despite this, she still hoped that the other person in library was not Stephen. The white-haired young man was really starting to grow on her and she did not want him to see her like this: grief-stricken, depressed, and ensnared by drugs and alcohol. At that point, she doubted that anything would surprise her, simply because of the slowness of her mind and reaction times when under the influence. Her personal space was invaded for the first time that night when Isabelle came close to see who the hell was talking to her. The blue eyed young woman could hardly blame the prefect; if she were in such a state, she would want to make sure a random voice was not just all in her head. What did catch her off guard was the young woman stroking her frizzy hair. Her muscles locked and she looked up at Isabelle in alarm as she was wrapped into a rather tight hug without her permission. Her nervous system was slowed down, so she could not react the way she normally would have. She tried to pry herself from Isabelle’s strong grip, mumbling for her to let go. The name ‘Bridget’ coming from Isabelle’s mouth made Camila freeze in her frantic attempts to get free. Bridget… She felt tears in her own eyes again and she swallowed thickly to hide her sorrow. Bridget, Chandler; they were her comrades, her fellow Battle Front members, her superiors. Or at least, they had been.

“Isabelle… I hate to break your hallucination, but, I’m not Bridget. Chandler wasn’t really my type anyway; more of an overgrown child, than anything. I-I don’t know how Bridget was able to take it all and still smile… A-anyway, I-I’m Camila. I-I’m sorry for your losses…”

The apology seemed tacked on, as if she had decided to say it last minute. Of course, there was no way to rehearse speaking when one was as inebriated as she was. She felt like a horrible person having to tell Isabelle that she was not Bridget, because it seemed the two had some kind of conflict they did not resolve before Miss Shine’s untimely demise. She curled a fist at her side, feeling tears sting her eyes. I won’t make the same mistake. I just need to find him and tell him… Later, though. This seems important. She listened to everything Isabelle said, confused at what she was saying. Thinking about Bridget “first”? What kiss was she talking about? The poor Latina had no blessed idea of what the other young woman was prattling on about, so she just nodded and looked sympathetic. It was all she could do; what could she say to someone who had lost everyone in her life? From what she knew for sure, Chandler was her only friend, and he was dead, so she had no one. She took a deep breath and grimaced at Isabelle, taking one of the young woman’s hands gently in her own. In doing so, she saw the needle marks dotted across the girl’s fair skin and sucked in her breath. She needed to do something now. Not for Chandler or Bridget’s sake, but for Isabelle’s. It was clear that the young woman was hurting, and she needed some kind of relief before she overdosed and possibly died.

“Isabelle, I’m sure you have a lot of things to say, so just say them to me, okay? I promise, I won’t ever bring them up again, but clearly, you have something to get off your chest. Letting things build up will only cause a downward spiral. I-I can’t promise that I’ll be your best friend or anything, but I can listen to you when you need to talk, okay?”

[Isabelle Amherst]

Isabelle was so wrapped up in finally getting her senseless apologies off of her chest and out of her system that while she noticed "Bridget" struggling against her tight hug, attempting to wiggle free and mumbling a request to be "let go," Isabelle certainly did not let that bother her. Isabelle was not ready to let Bridget go. She had not been ready when that bastard ran his sword through her, and she was not ready now, so rather than releasing the poor girl like a polite human being, Isabelle only hugged tighter like the strung-out rebel she was. Not even the hallucination's attempt to inform her that it was not Bridget could break her trance-like state as she tried to bury its head into her shoulder, which might have been a comforting gesture as it was intended... if the recipient were indeed a long-lost friend and not a very unlucky stranger. It wasn't until Camila began to speak in a tone that resembled nurturing, offering condolences, that Isabelle started to realize that "Bridget" hadn't yet uttered even one sarcastic word, which planted the first seeds of doubt, forcing Isabelle to tentatively pull away and give the girl some space so that she could see her. When the maybe-not-Bridget female took her hand, Isabelle knew for sure that she was hallucinating. Bridget did not voluntarily hold hands, and she definitely did not offer to talk about feelings. Even in her twisted up condition, Isabelle was still not an unkind person at heart, so while she did not want her hand held by not-Bridget, she did make a half-hearted attempt to be somewhat nice about it as she gently tugged it away. With her hand free, she quickly rubbed at her eyes, careful not to smear the eye-liner too much , a futile attempt to keep the "hot mess" factor of her looks under control. This person might have watched her pathetically bawling while rambling incoherent apologies to a hallucination of her ex-boyfriend's soulmate, but that didn't mean Isabelle needed to actively prolong the pity party by looking like she really needed the pity. Any sign of her heart sinking as she admitted to herself, once again, that Bridget was gone needed to be masked, so Isabelle distracted herself with other thoughts to steer clear of another breakdown. The question of who this person had been the whole time still remained, so Isabelle attempted to rewind the past couple of minutes in her mind to get a name. The "hallucination" had said it. It started with a C. Cameron? Camille? Camila! Then, in the process of trying to remember all those words that she had readily ignored, Isabelle remembered something else.

"I look like hell? Said the girl who must've lost her hairbrush this morning," Isabelle slurred through her tears with a delirious chuckle, clearly a bit late, as she smoothed out a bit of hair hanging over the girl's forehead. Hardly anything actually sounded malicious coming from Isabelle, so the retort seemed more like teasing than anything. Having decided that she was definitely, one-hundred percent, not talking to Bridget Shine, Isabelle had no desire to talk about her feelings, so she completely ignored Camila's offer to talk and attempted to make her expression detached and disinterested, but that did not last long, since she caught the smell of rum. She shuffled forward a bit on her knees to get a closer look of Camila's face. The frizzy hair, the red eyes.. if Isabelle was an expert on one thing, it was booze, and there was no denying that Camila had downed a few. Isabelle's lips curled in concerned ire. The world did not have many genuinely nice people, and from what little she had heard about this Camila girl, she was one of them. The fact that the hell-prison they were all stuck in was threatening to break down even the good ones was upsetting to drugged-up Isabelle. "Have you been drinking? You should be careful. You could hurt yourself, and the last thing Ashford needs is another person getting hurt or worse," she warned, clumsily placing her hands on Camila's shoulders, only vaguely aware, in the midst of her concern, that her words qualified for most hypocritical statement of the year.

[Camila Reyes]

Camila was grateful her arms and chest were pretty much left alone in the battle, save for the burn on her left arm. She continued to struggle against Isabelle, weakly throwing punches and insisting louder to ‘let her go’. She was not fond of people invading her personal space, even if it was a friend of one of her comrades. Or, at least, he used to be, she thought sourly, dropping her fists. There was no point in struggling as Isabelle tightened her arms around the small, brown-haired young woman. She let out a yelp as the confused prefect nuzzled into her shoulder and let out a loud sigh. She awkwardly patted the young woman’s head, looking uncomfortable and feeling rather odd. She never really thought of herself as the sweet and gentle type of person, even with her attitude change. And yet, here she was in the library, letting, in all effects, a stranger, nuzzle into her and hug her. She knew that, before a certain period of time, she would have shoved Isabelle away and cursed at her before storming off. Grated, Camila could do neither of those things in her condition, seeing as one arm was injured, her leg had stitches in it, and she was smashed after downing over two cups of rum and coke. Yeah, just flee and be useless, like you always are, she chided herself, feeling grief well in her throat again. She could have saved him, but she was too weak…

Camila breathed a sigh of relief the moment that Isabelle let her go. She felt bad for doing so; the young woman seemed to be convinced that she was talking to the former Battle Front second-in-command, who was probably connected to her somehow via the Dark Knight. Tch, some Batman alright, she thought sourly, crossing her arms over her chest carefully. She knew if she moved her left arm too much, it would sting. Looking at Isabelle made Camila wonder what she looked like herself. Despite this, she reached out her right hand to try and comfort the grieving prefect. Someone else had reached out to her, even if he was quite confused, and tried to make her feel better. It was the least she could do for someone else, though the needle marks scared her a little. She did not know Isabelle like her comrades did. She thought that Isabelle was being corrupted, just like she was. She only made the offer because she did not want to see anyone else fall victim to what she was feeling, even if they had been at the school longer than she had. The instant she felt Isabelle’s hand wiggle, Camila removed her hand, muttering a soft ‘lo siento’ to the prefect before placing her folded right arm over her carefully-folded left one. Her shoulders hunched in a little, as if she was all of a sudden shy. The mix of emotions inside her just made her want to disappear from view.

“Heh, please. I lost my ability to sleep after the battle and my wits at the funeral. A hairbrush is nothing.”

Her tone was joking as well, though her s’es were slurred and a hiccup followed a few words. She noticed Isabelle shifting closer and stepped back a little bit, wondering why. She was not Bridget, and it seemed that Isabelle had ignored her offer, so why was she suddenly getting close again. She sighed, getting herself ready to convince Isabelle that she was not Bridget once more. Instead of touching Camila, though, Isabelle seemed content to observe. She let out a humorless chuckle; she probably looked like hell too. Her hair was messed up, that was for certain. She did not really smell the rum coming off her breath, since she was not on the receiving end of any statements. Isabelle was more concerned about Camila than Camila was about herself, in all honesty. The blue-eyed young woman was really starting to believe her parents; maybe she was just a pathetic loser who would never amount to anything. Of course, she would not really know if she tried, but what was the point? She tried to change and be a better person, and people died. She tried to not be as angry and emotionally volatile, and someone else was instead. Maybe… I’m just no good for anything. Of course, that was probably the mix of grief, depression, booze, and pills talking, but even when she was sober, Camila had thought along similar lines. She had snapped herself out of it by acknowledging she still had friends who were probably in all kinds of pain as well, so she needed to man up so she could help them. Isabelle’s words made her snicker and she rolled her sapphire eyes. People had died; getting injured was nothing compared to mass death. She stumbled backward, trying to get Isabelle to stop touching her.

“Yesh, I have been; thanks for noticing. Trust me, I’m already hurt. I have two close friends and several comrades at the bottom of the ocean, a burnt arm, a bullet in my calf and two Vicodin did jack for it!”

She shouted the last part of her sentence before sitting down on the floor and hugging her knees to her chest. She was not going to let another stranger see her cry. Maybe she would talk to Carter or Stephen and let tears flow, but she was not interested in giving Isabelle any blackmail material. After breathing heavily for a few moments, she looked up again, tears glinting in her eyes. She let out a large puff of air before itching her nose with her left hand. She looked directly at Isabelle before opening her mouth and closing it again. She wanted to point out the hypocrisy in the situation, but she did not have the heart to be so mean. She did, however, bring up the marks on Isabelle’s arm.

“I can see why you might have confused me for Bridget… You must be pretty high right now. If you want me to lay off the rum *hic* and pills, I suggest you lay off the drugs. All of them are poison, really.”

[Isabelle Amherst]

To say that Isabelle Amherst had been in a dark place would have been an understatement. 

Yeah, they talk about her.
She smiles like she's so tough.
She says "Hey, can you talk a little louder? 
I don't think my heart is broken enough."

The free spirit who was so immune to being brought down by all of life's ammunition, at least on the surface, had been reduced to a pathetic drug addict, wasting away the majority of her hours trapped in the prison that was her inebriated state of mind while life went on around her. The dark-haired damsel with heroin in her veins was no doubt a far cry from the invincible wild child of days past. But there was something about Camilla that seemed to call out to the old Isabelle, slowly drawing her ghost out from the strung-out shell of a body resembling Isabelle Amherst that was half-splayed out on the library floor. Perhaps it was that the girl seemed almost equally damaged and vulnerable, heart-broken from the recent tragedies and seeking refuge with a controlled substance, yet still shyly tense, shoulders hunched and refusing to be held. Isabelle couldn't be as rude to her as she had been to others who attempted to drag her out of her never-ending, self-induced haze. It may have also been Camilla's subtle motherly vibe. As out of tune with her surroundings and aversive to touch she was those days, having her hand held by someone for even a second brought a delayed sense of comfort, and though she had no idea what "lo siento" meant, the softly uttered words felt warm. Having had parents who could compete with the worst of them for the prize of "most neglectful," any form of nurturing, no matter how mild, had the tendency to call out the Isabelle who was kind, who was not spiteful and not nearly as rebellious as she portrayed, who really just wanted to be hugged. 

As Camilla made the crack about losing sleep and wits, Isabelle let out a half-hearted, throaty, close-mouthed chuckle. It would have been funnier if it wasn't so true. Feeling more sober and more somber by the moment, she finally acknowledged that Camilla obviously did not want to be touched and pulled away, letting Camilla stumble back and curl up into the bookshelf and settling in herself across from the girl in a similar, condensed position, knees pulled to her chest. She listened as Camilla continued on about a bullet, Vicodin, and what seemed like a bargain to lay off her substances of choice if Isabelle agreed to do the same. Isy let out a whole-hearted laugh at the thought of that.

"Yeah, not going to happen, but I have a better idea. Can't help you with dead friends, but if Vicodin's not doing it for ya leg, I've got some Oxycontin. Then we can both be this high." A delirious giggle escaped from Isabelle's lips at her own joke, interrupted by a hiccup, making her wonder if the vodka she'd downed earlier was more recent than she thought. Time was such a blur. But she was serious about her offer of a stronger pain-killer. Life had been so unfair to them. She was certain they had earned the right to at least numb the physical pain. 

[Camila Reyes]

Camila had decided to become a rebellious sort after years of trying to be the perfect child. After her eighth grade year, she had realized that she would never compare to her brother and decided that she would be her own person. She was tired of trying to get her parents’ attention, tired of being ignored, tired of being teased and demeaned. She had decided to show them all that she was better than all of them combined. Even her choice to join the Battle Front was slightly motivated by saying “screw you” to society and the government. Now, though, she was beginning to question her quest for rebellion. After all, was it not rebellion that lead to this pathetic situation, where she drowned herself in alcohol and pain pills to relieve the physical and emotional pain? She was normally in control of as much as possible: her emotions, the friends she made, and, to some degree, the environment she was in. Now, all of the control she normally felt was slowly disappearing, just like the heroin being absorbed into Isabelle’s bloodstream. The thought made her curl into herself further, relieved that Isabelle had finally released her from the hold that invaded her personal space. She did not really think of her gesture of invasive at first, since she could clearly see the unexpressed emotions written in Isabelle’s eyes. She was trapped in a state of inebriation to flee from reality, and maybe from her grief. Losing a friend was not easy; she had learned that the hard way. Maybe, they were more alike than she had first thought, despite the difference in alliances. She saw the confusion on Isabelle’s face at her apology and sighed a little, tucking a frizzy stand of brown hair behind her ear.

“Ah, I meant, I’m sorry. Heh, I forget that not everyone knows what that means sometimes.”

Camila had nearly forgotten that Isabelle probably did not understand her because she was quite “doped up”, so to speak. Or it could be that not everyone knows Spanish, dummy, she chided herself. She was almost sure that the young woman would have probably learned some other language, if she had at all. She was quite fuzzy about the school’s requirements for official graduation. Of course, it did not really matter, because they would all become weapons anyway. The ability to puzzle over the reason for educating weapons was a sign that the alcohol was beginning to wear off and, soon enough, the pain pills would too. She let out a soft sigh; maybe she should start mentally preparing herself. Of course, this was quickly interrupted by Isabelle giving a half-hearted laugh to her comment about losing things more important than her hairbrush. A ghost of a smile danced across her lips; the laugh was forced, she could tell, but she was comforted that she could at least make someone feel better in the face of the awful reality that they all were faced with. Her good mood was erased when she let out her frustration and she placed her face between her kneecaps briefly, panting slightly until the anger passed. God bless anyone else who has to deal with this, she thought bitterly, lifting her head to look at Isabelle once more as she spoke. The offer was quite tempting, she had to admit; however, the want to be nurse in her head told her to lay off more painkillers for another hour or so. She let out a half-hearted chuckle at the joke.

“The nurse in my head tells me I should wait a little *hic* longer. B-but I’ll take one or two if you’re willin’ to *hic* give ‘em to me.”

Camila was not one to reject other people’s kindness. Well, except for earlier, at the the beach, but she had chosen to ignore that. After all, she had been well within her rights to express her emotions. It had been right after the funeral, so her emotions had still been running high. She suddenly felt bad and wanted to find Cain and apologize; however, she was more interested in making sure nothing bad happened to Isabelle. She was sure the upperclassman did not need a babysitter, but she felt that the other young woman could use the company, since she would probably come down from her high and feel utterly alone if she was by herself. Instead of staring at a bookshelf and staying silent, Camila decided to try and make small talk.

“I would ask you why the library of all places, but then, I would just be a hypocrite. I kinda just stumbled here in a stupor. I guess it just feels safe… Books have always made me feel safe, honestly.”