Ceasefire {girlxgirl}

Quatre

I sat up late that night planning my counterattack.

                'It was lights out two hours ago,' Lacey muttered grumpily, the top of her head just peeking out from under the covers. 'Go to bed.'

                'I am in bed,' I said distractedly, tapping away on my laptop. A Google search of "Tallulah Wendy Hitch" had produced hardly any results, not so much as a Facebook page, and it turns out that when you do an internet search of "Twitch", all you get are medical pages.

                'What are you doing, anyway?' Sidney mumbled from further across the room. 'Looking up pranks? You already know how to do pranks. I still check under the bed every night.'

                This did cause me to pause as I fondly remembered the jar of live spiders I'd left under Sidney's bed when I'd first arrived, mistakenly thinking it was Lacey's.

                'It would just help if I knew something about her,' I continued after a moment, resuming my rudimentary web search. 'I mean that prank wouldn't have been any good if you two weren't scared of spiders, would it?'

                'I don't know why you're taking this so personally,' Lacey finally emerged to throw her two cents into the conversation. 'It's not like anybody actually got hurt.'

                'It's the principle of the thing,' I said fiercely, refreshing the page of results in case I'd missed anything. 'The- The- The why of it. Why did she do it? What right did she have to do it? What sort of a game is she playing here and why did it have to be Molly and Mr Ross?'

                'Maybe it's a romantic gesture,' Sidney, who always reads far too deeply into things, said wistfully. She seemed startled when she noticed we were both staring at her like she was mad, which, obviously, she is. 'You know, a roundabout way of getting your attention. Maybe she likes you, so she went after the two people you give all your attention to. And it worked. Now she has all of your attention.'

                I squinted at Sidney. The thing about her particular brand of psychosis is that she always comes very close to making it sound rational. 'No,' I said definitively after a moment. 'When I confronted her she said she doesn't make out with the same person twice.'

                There was a beat of silence, then Lacey cleared her throat, and, trying to restrain a grin, asked, '... Twice?'

                I scowled as I realised I'd let the cat out of the bag. Damn Sidney. 'Yes,' I said stiffly, returning my attention to my laptop screen like I'd suddenly found something interesting there.

                'The caveat seems to imply that there was a first time,' Lacey went on. She was loving this.

                'And?' I demanded, as though her predilection for gossip were tiring.

                'More interesting than the fact that you messed around with her – within hours of her arriving, might I add – is the fact that you didn't want us to know. I wonder why that could be,' she mused, pretending to know me.

                'Probably because I knew you'd react like an infant,' I muttered grumpily. 'Just because I'm the only one who gets any action around here.'

                'We don't want the kind of action you get,' Sidney pointed out.

                Lacey swung her legs out of her bed and came over to mine, snapping my laptop shut so quickly I barely had time to get my fingers out of the way. She picked it up and slid it under her mattress before I could protest.