VI: The Thief and the Gallery

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The Thief and the Gallery ✷  Chapter Six

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The Thief and the Gallery ✷  Chapter Six



     Kitty Lovelace is a fucking bitch; but that's never been news.

She has had everything handed to her on a silver platter since she was nothing but a clumsy child and yet, even with all that her family dynasty's ever given her, she choses to slum it with the lowlife kids. Maybe it's a habit; maybe it's a rebellion. Either way, it sure as hell stirs things up on in that small little town.

In truth, nothing about it is heavenly and Kitty has experienced that firsthand. At thirteen, she'd sit around the twelve-seat dining room table in the midst of the Lovelace manor, guzzling down freshly squeezed juice, then, as soon as her mother's phone rung and she rushed to the kitchen to answer, she'd sneak the leftovers out and offer them to her friends. It was a wretched thing; Teddy and Kenji had never seen such a variety on a single plate. By fifteen, she was barely even home anymore. She preferred half-burnt, salty grilled corn and cheap beer anyway.

Perhaps she only grew to like them because they were the only handful of people on the entirety of Connecticut that did not treat her like an animal on display in a glass cage. They were two in the beginning, three with her, and she had fallen quite in ease with them a little too fast to predict it.

Instead of staying in Hartford until most of them were too drunk to handle another bitter, cold glass, they spent their mornings vandalizing the town and running away from police and their nights in a construction site that was never finished with crumpled cans of cheap beer littering the concrete—they always picked them up right afterwards, that was a no brainer. Kitty hadn't felt true laughter until she sat with them, bodies folded in half, laughter bellowing across the brick walls and ricocheting like flat rocks.

Though they didn't live in lavish homes with three cars, and they could barely afford a full meal everyday, Kitty found in them a certain comfort. TDHC, they called it. She was officially initiated at thirteen.

The rainwater had washed away her very first public art piece, but she had done so many since then she could barely remember its outline. She signed them all, a set of initials at the bottom, a metaphorical middle finger for the police officers who viewed it at some type of public property defacing.

The sheriff enjoyed her work, however, so she kept them in town and allowed Kitty to spread her masterpieces even further down the town. They were everywhere now: Doose's Market; the Town Square; the Independence Inn; and the highway. Hell, she even had her own doodle on the "Stars Hollow" sign. And whenever the rain or other phenomenons—human or natural—would come and scrub it away, she'd recreate it somewhere else.

Foolish One  ✷  Jess MarianoWhere stories live. Discover now