Dating is stupid, flail on the carpet instead (Ash)

[Marnie Sullivan]

Marnie was in such a haze when she arrived back from classes that it took her several minutes of trying and failing to enter her room before she realized she was attempting to push open a pull door. When she noticed her mistake, she finally flung her door open, embarrassed but relieved that the dorm was empty of witnesses. It wasn't the first little mistake she'd made in her daydreaming state lately - attempting to write with the eraser side of a pencil, scooping ketchup on a salad at lunch - but it was the most obvious.

Most days Marnie stacked her textbooks properly on her desk and pretended she would start her homework immediately. Today she didn't even get that far, simply dumping her books on the wooden surface and throwing herself onto her bed to stare at the ceiling.

This was stupid. Completely, utterly stupid. There was no good reason to be getting this worked up over a boy she'd just met, especially one as ridiculous as this one. She wasn't in love, of course not. She wasn't even sure if she liked him. But he seemed to like her, like like her, and maybe that was the problem. Marnie's track record with romance wasn't bleak so much as empty. There was the two-week relationship in the seventh grade, when they barely managed to peck each other on the lips and then broke it off when he'd moved to Arkansas. Then there was the eighth grade, when an invitation to a dance made her powers boil over and she was pulled out of school. At Hammel, if anybody had ever flirted with her during the campus hours she'd limited to class, Marnie had been completely oblivious. But this boy, well, he was nothing if not heavy-handed.

He was also willing to strip for no reason. Another key difference between seventh grade and now.

Restlessly, Marnie rolled over and buried her face in a pillow to stifle a frustrated UUGGGHH. The girl had a full collection of trashy novels under her bed, it'd be a lie to say she hadn't made the connection between their contents and the boy's suggestions. But books were safe, contained. Having the opportunity right in front of her was a whole other animal.

Marnie tugged on the cover of her bedspread and tried to pull it over herself. Instead, she rolled a little too far, landing with a thump on the floor wrapped up like a yellow cotton burrito. She groaned and half-heartedly tried to wriggle out of the bedspread before giving up, still oblivious to the fact that she'd left her door open.

[Ashley Engel]

Friday classes were frustrating.
Students were eager to get out, teachers didn’t lay heavy on the homework as much. There wasn’t as much to do and sometimes if the wind blew just right classes would be finished early. Ash couldn’t stand it. She wanted to learn, not be babysat and released prematurely. It was a double edged sword at any rate, because as far as she could tell there wasn’t any education going on she wasn’t already on top of. She was wasting time no matter what her teachers did.

It felt like all she’d done thus far in the semester was get out and talk to a few people. Some good, most bad. It wasn’t a terrible fact, but it was bittersweet. If it wasn’t for the campus library she was scared she wouldn’t have learned anything useful at all at Hammel. Unless one counted how to appropriately start conversation. She’d learned that the hard way with time.

For better or worse, while she didn’t feel any smarter, her social skills were improving.
Enough so that it had become routine for her to get in after classes and linger in the open area to the dormitory. The only person she really had any kind of connection to was Marnie, but that was more than enough. Ash wasn’t confident she could handle knowing too many people in one enclosed space.

After getting in late thanks to a particularly crowded, noisy hallway she slumped straight into a couch and disengaged from her bag and books. The whole place was quiet, briefly, before the familiar sounds of chameleon girl tumbled out of her room. Marnie’s voice was lower than normal. Chaotic and chittering and almost guttural. Ash’s face contorted in brief confusion as she got up, seeking the other out to quickly find her in the floor of her room.

“Marnie?” The brunette muttered quietly, staring at the blanket lump in what looked like a mixture of bewilderment and concern.
“Are you.. er..” She’d almost said alive, but that much was obvious. Dead people didn’t make noise.

“Why?” Was what she clumsily settled on, because nothing else really seemed apt. The situation was weird. Weirder than usual. And none of what she heard out of the other girl made a lot of sense in the moment.

[Marnie Sullivan]

Oh, god, she'd been spotted. Marnie lifted her head a few inches to peer at the doorway, and discovered her neighbor watching her carefully. Should she explain herself? Marnie was at once desperate to blurt out her exasperation and keep it locked up and private. And Ash, well, Ash had admitted she wasn't great at relating to other people's problems. At the same time she hardly seemed the type to turn around and gossip.

"Why indeed, Ash, why indeed," she sighed as she let her head thud back to the ground. She sucked in a breath and released it with a long, low whistle. Yeah, Ash was probably safe.

In a series of short, uncoordinated scoots, Marnie managed to rotate herself around to the degree where her feet pointed towards her bed. Rolling onto her side allowed her to face her neighbor, even from this bizarre angle.

"I have a problem and he looks good with his shirt off."

[Ashley Engel]

“Uh..”
Ash blinked a few times. Watching Marnie was both amazing and worrisome. Ash didn’t understand the romantic troubles of her age group. Boys and girls and liking and like-liking.. It was over her head. Beyond the emotional difficulties she’d always had, there were a myriad of reasons to justify her anti-romantic stance in life. She didn’t understand it, and she didn’t want to. “Love” was weird. Often nonsensical. The only part of it Ash found reasonable was the human nature aspect. Good genes, internal instincts, lizard brain understandings.

Caveman Joe and Caveman Jane were the alphas of their tribe so naturally they would copulate to make alpha babies and continue the species. It made sense on that level. Marnie, unfortunately, was neither an alpha nor to an age where childbirth seemed worth considering. So her issue with a male and his physical nature puzzled Ash.

Not as much as the blanket did, though.
She watched the other scoot and squirm with her mouth open just slightly, gawking. She was getting the feeling she walked in on something wholly unpleasant and not worth getting into. Still, too late to really go back now it seemed.

“Is.. the problem that you want him to put his shirt on? Or was that note unrelated to the actual issue?”

[Marnie Sullivan]

"The problem is that I don't want him to put his shirt on!" Marnie groaned. Still lying precariously on her side, she lost her balance and flopped face down, hair spilling across the floor. In a fit of self-consciousness that morning, she'd actually taken the time to heat-style it into waves. Not that it did any good, really.

"I guess, I mean, I don't know," she mumbled, before turning her head to press her cheek against the carpet and emitting a small huff to blow hair out of her face. It barely helped, but Marnie didn't bother to try again. She probably looked quite a mess, but who cared? Ash was the only one there, and if she was going to judge, she was doing it already.

"It's just - this isn't what I expected, you know? You grow up thinking you want to be swept off your feet and then some complete dweeb shows up and calls you pretty and prances around like a circus animal and all of a sudden you're like, 'well is he going to text me or is my head going to pop from the force of my own stupidity first?'"

[Ashley Engel]

Ash opened her mouth. Shut it again.
She wasn’t entirely sure what to say about any of it.

Marnie looked.. nice. For a blanket burrito, at least.
Her hair was different. Shinier. Which was a sign of preening. So.. she liked a topless guy. But.. she didn’t like liking a topless boy? Ash tried to follow along, slowly nodding and taking it all in. It made sense in the way that it didn’t really make sense at all.

“I.. would not know that feeling.” She shrugged.
She’d never fantasized about a boy showing up and whisking her off her feet. She didn’t like the idea of pining for someone to come solve her problems. Ash preferred a knight role to a princess one. Marnie, on the other hand, seemed opposite. She was a princess wanting a knight and (apparently) getting a court jester.

The closest equivalent to Marnie’s trouble she has was Cain. Who, while not romantic, was an idiot. So she could at least sympathize with the idea of dealing with a moron you still sort of liked no matter what you did. Slowly Ash came to lean in the open doorway, arms crossing and eyes averting from Marnie. She stared at the girl’s chameleon and mulled the dilemma as she understood it over and over.

“If you’re interested in him, why not pursue him head-on? You want him to text, but aren’t you equally capable of contacting him as he is you? Or.. if you don’t really want to be involved with him after all, there are a myriad of ways to scare him off.” She looked back at Marnie as she said that, with the flattest expression humanly possible. When she deadpanned it was serious and outright killed any humorous edge the words might have had.

“I know several methods for that.”

[Marnie Sullivan]

At last Marnie decided to flop onto her back so that she could struggle into a sitting position. After a moment to extricate an arm from her blanket wrap, she lifted a hand to push her hair out of her eyes.

"I can't text him, I don't have his number." Or any other way to contact him, really. Knowing next to nothing about him meant not knowing where to find him, either. Marnie hadn't recognized him from any of his classes, she had no idea if he was in any clubs, she didn't even know if he lived on campus or in town. Which made the fact that she'd coughed up her own phone number seem like an even bigger lapse in judgment.

"And I don't want to scare him off either, I mean I kind of already tried to and he didn't buy it..." When Marnie had claimed to have both a dangerous ability and a dangerous boyfriend to convince the guy to keep his distance, he'd just laughed it off... hadn't he? "Oh goddammit, what if he did buy it? What if he thinks I have a boyfriend? Why did I say that?!" she moaned, flinging herself back onto the floor dramatically. By the time they'd parted ways she was sure he'd known she was lying, but if she was wrong -

"Wait!" She pointed at Ash, having remembered something else. "Instead of scaring him off, can you help me with something else? I kind of told him that you could read his mind and, you know, if you were to run into him somewhere..." God, the more she talked, the more Marnie just heard reason after reason she'd given the boy to avoid her. Which had been her original intention, and then the whole thing had gone to hell.

[Ashley Engel]

The more Marnie said the more confused Ash got.
If she didn’t have the boy’s number.. what kind of contact did they have? Where had she met him? Ash listened to more than just what Marnie said in an attempt to better grasp the situation. It.. made things better and worse. Marnie’s motivations and reasoning were about as clear as mud.

The longer it went on the more Ash was unsure if Marnie really wanted the boy to contact her or leave her alone. Teenage girls were confusing, terrible creatures. Slowly one hand came up, fingertips massaging the soft spot behind one ear. Trying to keep up with Marnie’s scattered thoughts was taxing, even with no one else around to distract Ash from her target.

In the end, her expression went from blank to slightly pained to flat again.
She looked at Marnie, void and quiet, and for a moment there was a trace of anger about her. She didn’t care about the girl telling people about her telepathy. Anyone could find that out. What she minded was being used.

“So you told him what? I’d fry his brain out or something if I met him?”
She didn’t fully understand what Marnie was getting at. Rubbing more at the spot behind her ear, she sighed heavily and shook her head just slightly. What a royal mess.

“Listen..” She knew she would regret it. She knew from the instant she opened her mouth. But Marnie was.. special. Important. So, of course she’d help.
“If you want help, and don’t demand to go off some idiotic idea, I’ll see what I can do.”

[Marnie Sullivan]

Once again Marnie rose to a sitting position, this time staring at the area of blanket that hid her knees. A sunken feeling developed in the pit of her stomach when she detected what must have been annoyance in the other girl - of course it had been out of line to bring Ash into it, she wasn't Marnie's personal lie detector.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly, eyes still trained on her knees. "I just, I didn't understand what was going on and I thought maybe he was lying to me, so I told him I knew someone who could find out of he was or not. That's all."

She glanced up to make eye contact, eyes wide and her lips turned down in a slight pout. "It's fine if you don't want to."

[Ashley Engel]

Ash made a small noise. A barely audible “Ahh”.
Understanding Marnie’s reasoning helped greatly. While she still didn’t like the idea of being used, having it done for protection was better than pointless scare-tactic. Just slightly, the brunette eased her shoulders.

She had half a mind to tell Marnie that making that face was unfair. Not that it did anything (or rather, anything Ash would admit to) but it was still blatantly a tactic. Conscious or no. Chameleon girl was lucky Ash was resigned to help almost out of the gate.

“I already offered. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Ash sighed, glancing away from Marnie and her blanket-wrapped pout.
“Besides, I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sound curious.”

[Marnie Sullivan]

"Thank you!" Marnie brightened immediately and attempted to clap with excitement - with one hand still under the blanket, all she succeeded in making was a series of paffpaffpaff noises. "I owe you one, I really mean it, this whole having to guess his intentions thing is really throwing me for a loop here."

It almost felt like cheating, really, but Marnie shrugged the thought off. She'd warned him fair and square, after all.

"One thing, though," she said, as she considered the scope of Ash's power a moment more. Beyond the physical limitations Ash had explained to her, there was still a lot Marnie didn't know about how far it could go. "If you find out about stuff he likes, like movies and books and stuff, that's fine, but if you see - or hear or whatever - anything super personal, can you just, you know, keep it a secret? Even if I say I really want to know." Setting that boundary would surely frustrate her later, Marnie knew, but if it was ever going to be set it had to be now.