Their Hideout

And yet curiosity and desire were greater temptations sometimes than raw emotions, for they resided so deep within the soul that they were immutable…

But a rewind on the clock of my dubious fate was necessary.

***

I spent about a week holed up in my room except for the dreadful hours of school that dragged on and ate up excessive amounts of my time. The only thing that kept me going through those sleepy epochs was the banter of Cherry and Zixin, who reminisced about the previous Friday and all the chaos their excursion entailed when they crashed into my life on Monday.

"Ari, did you hear about what happened at the fair? It was fucking crazy!" Cherry yelled, quivering in anticipation in such a manner that I thought she was abandoned inside a tundra (without the hypothermia wearing off) since I last saw her.

Regardless, she wouldn't have gotten riled up if nothing happened, so I shook my head, awaiting Zixin's further judgment and comments.

He scratched the back of his neck and said with a sheepish grin, "Yeah, it was a huge mess."

With the bashful way he was acting, it almost made me think one of the two did something naughty with the other students in attendance, but the two of them were too dorky and awkward around anyone else for that to have been the case. So the only other possibility was…

"Nobody died, right?" I asked suspiciously while furrowing my brow.

This wasn't going to be a shitty remake of *The Outsiders* in which we had to take a train out of our town to escape prosecution. (It better not have gone that route!)

Chuckling—an awful sign—he averted his eyes and replied vaguely, "Not at my own hands!"

Cherry grabbed and examined them, dragging her thumbs over the palms. "No blood here. He's in the clear, Ari." She winked at me. "I kept watch."

Backing away and almost into a table beside the door, Zixin protested, "What did you think I was going to do? Bash someone over the head with a cotton candy stick?"

As the two of them had an imaginary bolt of lightning and rage connecting their foreheads, we all entered our classroom for study hall. I placed my heavy bags on a dark wooden desk, a loud thump resounding under all the commotion as people's movements painted the monotonous white walls in dark shadows.

"You wouldn't even have to do that with the kind of luck you have," I sneered, crossing my legs under the desk.

A glimmer of sadness—almost so subtle that I scarcely noticed it—colored his face, yet he forced himself to laugh as if that was the most logical reaction he could think of and not the one he wanted to display on the basis of his emotions.

There was no telling what that faint shine was, but I had a feeling that it was attributed to a separate matter on top of the one afflicting his sister.

"Maybe you're right, but I swear I didn't do anything!" He raised his hands as if he was cornered by the police.

"I was just walking by one of the stands, and a cable on the swing ride snapped and flew in the other direction! It launched someone,"—he waved his arms as if they were operated by a carousel, revolving on the tips of his toes—"which obviously was fatal. Someone running the ride said the cord broke from excessive strain as there wasn't any way a knife could have done it with all the restrictions at the entrance."

"I really feel bad for that person," Cherry began solemnly, rubbing her forearm while her excitement fizzled out, "and I hope their family is doing—"

"How was the ghost?" I asked more seriously than precedented despite the question being a joke meant to cut off Cherry's grim words before she sulked the rest of the afternoon.

It was hard to contain my strange cocktail of emotions.

For fuck's sake, what was Zixin's luck? But I was intrigued by the series of odd events that always trailed him, and it was difficult to resist getting what information I could out of him, the lover of the occult (or just one variety).

Although most people would have been offended (as the empathetic Cherry was), Zixin replied with enthusiasm, "She was super sweet, but she cried the whole time! All the barbecue flames were flickering like crazy. It sucked that I couldn't comfort her." He then frowned, staring listlessly at the side of the classroom.

Cherry's face scrunched up as she said, "You had to get out of the fire! They didn't need more people dead!"

"I was fine there!" Zixin yelled, but there was something subtly distant about him then; I only worried that his animosity towards people would exacerbate without a rapid antidote.

***

To jump back in time a little further, the weekend was far superior to the week that followed it. Sixteen hours of working a day in exchange for sweet words and caresses alongside plenty of lighthearted conversation—that was heaven on Earth if I knew anything and better than any monetary salary a student my age could have received.

Living in that pale bubble of ours for the weekend with little interruption, I soon forgot the fact I was getting little done and spewing bullshit in conversations to please Melina—something with which she passively agreed yet rarely acknowledged the absurdity of as our chats reached far into the jubilant night.

"You think they have some kind of superhero hideout? A treehouse? A *doghouse*?" I asked while halfway asleep, too giddy to control my incessant jokes.

Melina passively smiled as she sat atop a bookshelf, her dress today only barely covering her most private areas from the angle I was at. (The air conditioner puffed out air like it was asthmatic during the deepest parts of the night, even in the midst of fall.)

I blushed a little at the recurring thought and centered my vision on the computer that was just out of my reach. Nope.

"I think they'd go somewhere like the movies together when they want to avoid other people's stares," she responded softly, kicking her slightly tan feet as if they were buried in the ocean waves. "If they had somewhere concrete, then they'd be running the risk of getting caught there or having cameras installed. Theatres are quiet, dark, impermanent..."

Although I had been joking, that was perhaps the only time this weekend a cohesive thought sprouted in my head about her novel as her words trailed off to bask us in comfortable silence.

I nodded. "A theatre. That makes perfect sense. I think that it's also,"—without pausing, I stared directly at her aloof eyes, wondering if she'd catch the haughty yet sweet insinuation of my words—"pretty *romantic*, wouldn't you agree?"

It seemed she caught on as she smirked and chuckled, her fingers interlaced across her lap to hold down the fabric of her outfit. "Take him into his safe space, break his walls down, and then, Nico is Molly's for the taking. I've told you that many times before. Are you sure that's romantic? Would that mean romance a contest in which you win over what you believe is rightly yours against that person's will? Is it a game of charades and manipulation with a clear end but dubious means?"

"Depends on how you look at it." Resting my feet on the board under the desk and drumming my toes against the wall, I said, "You can twist it any way you want, but it's never innocuous."

"Neither are you." Her tone sharply snapped for a moment as her facade dropped, but she recovered her docile expression. "Do you think I don't know what you're doing?"

I raised my eyebrows and swallowed, taken aback by her sudden shift and even more so by her ability to read me. Her diversion was odd—to say the least. The confrontation was both exciting and nerve-wracking, but it was like a challenge to me to see how long I could proceed with my antics.

*I wonder: What's up Melina's sleeve? Shall I pry more into that brilliant mind of hers? Would I find out she isn't as innocent as she seems or brush it off?*

She gently continued, "You're trying to procrastinate on your work, right, Ari?"

Ah… My name that rolled off her tongue so sweetly like velvet, probably tasting a little like cake and frosting if it made her as happy to say as it did for me to hear. I was weak and on a sugar rush.

"Well…"

"Hm?" She placed her chin on her palm, gazing at me in an almost dominant way to which I was immediately submissive.

"Don't call me out like that!" I shouted at last due to her pressure, probably loud enough to disturb the cobwebs from three rooms away.

Using her foot, she pushed the laptop back in front of me, its shiny screen laughing in my face at the fact I couldn't get shit done.

"Come on. This story isn't going to write itself, dear."

***

After that intimate weekend, when I realized both the talks and my attention span dimmed, I knew it was time to shake things up. Against her warnings from a week ago, I devised a plan to get the ball rolling some more the next Friday.

Staring my two friends in the face with the fire of determination, I pulled three tickets to the latest rom-com from my pocket, missing the feel of soft chairs on my legs, popcorn kernels between my teeth, and the melody of laughter from the cheesy lines shared by the leads.

My friends were terrified by my sudden vivacity as I cheered, "Let's go to the movies tonight!"

*Melina, I hope you're not mad at me! I'll bring you back your favorite candy bar!*

To the chagrin of the teacher in the room, Cherry screeched, "What the fuck are you smoking, Ari?"