“Well, I would, but all my shirts are in my suitcase, getting molested by Brandon and his funboys.” I flipped a finger at the window, in case they were watching.
“Get something out of my closet,” he said. I thought he was playing something from Coldplay’s catalog now, something soft and contemplative. “Sorry about staring. I know you’ve had a tough night.”
There was something so damn sweet about that, it made me want to cry. Again. I swallowed the impulse. “You don’t know the half of it,” I said.
This time, when he looked up, his gaze actually made it to my face. And stayed there. “I’m guessing bad.”
“Real bad.”
“You’d tell me if I was a friend, right? And not just some guy whose door you randomly knocked on in the middle of the night?”
I thought about Jane, poor sweet Jane, my best and only real friend. Trent and Guy, who probably had been destined for nothing but still had been, for tonight at least, my friends. “I’m not so good for my friends,” I said. “Maybe we ought to just call you a really nice stranger.” I took a deep breath. “I lost three friends tonight, and it was my fault.”
He kept looking at me. Really looking. It was a little bit hot, and a little bit disconcerting. “Then would you talk to a really nice stranger about it? For”—he checked his watch—“forty minutes? I need to leave before sunrise, but I want you to be okay before I do.”
It took only thirty minutes to tell him about the Life and Times of Me, actually. Michael didn’t say very much, and I felt so tired afterward that I hardly knew it when he got up and went into the kitchen. I must have dozed off a little, because when I woke up, he was kneeling next to my chair, and he had a chocolate brownie on a plate. With a semi-melted pink candle sputtering away on top.
“It’s a leftover,” he warned me. “Two weeks at least. So I don’t know how good it is. But happy birthday, anyway. I promise you, things will get better.”
They just had.
AMELIE’S STORY
A brief vignette, and one that I wrote mainly to understand Amelie and Oliver’s relationship. This was written very early on, between Glass Houses and The Dead Girls’ Dance. It was also before I’d thought about Bishop, or even much about Myrnin, although I already had the broad strokes of his character in mind. This little scene was written to help me understand how these very long-lived, somewhat disinterested characters would see these teenagers who’d defied them . . . and it also gives us a bit more about Shane’s father, since I was beginning to write that book and had a feeling for what was coming.
The characters changed over time, developed more depth and richness and personality, but I think the outlines are there in this story, and the sense of their long view of things.
This was originally posted as part of the Captain Obvious “hidden content” on the Morganville Web site.
Outside, nightfall had truly come, and it was a glorious darkness.
Amelie stood, one hand holding back the heavy velvet of the draperies, and watched the streetlights of her town blink on one after another. A faint circle of safety for the humans to cling to, an important illusion without which they could not long survive. She had learned a great deal about living with humans, over the past few hundred years.
More than about living with her own kind, she supposed.
“Yes?” She had heard the tiny whisper of movement behind her, and knew one of her servants had appeared in the doorway. They never spoke unless spoken to. A benefit to having servants so long-lived: one could reasonably expect them to understand manners. Not like the children of today, sparking as bright as fireflies, and gone as quickly. No manners. No sense of place and time.
“Oliver,” the servant said. It was Vallery; she knew all their voices, of course. “He’s at the gates. He requests a conversation.”
Did he? How interesting. She’d thought he’d slink off into the dark and lick his wounds for a year or two, until he was ready to play games with her again. He’d come very near to succeeding this time, thanks to her own carelessness. She could ill afford another occurrence.
“Show him in,” she said. It was not the safest course, but she found herself growing tired of the safe road. There were so rarely any surprises, or strangers to meet.
Like the surprise of the children living in her house on Lot Street. The angelic blond boy, with his passion and bitterness, woven into the fabric of the house and trapped there. Or the strange girl, with her odd makeup and odder clothing. Or the other boy, the strong one, quick and intelligent and wishing not to seem so.
And the youngest, oh, the youngest girl, with her diamond-sharp mind. Fierce and small and courageous, although she would not know the depths of her abilities for years yet.