Ceasefire {girlxgirl}

Six

I caught up with Molly in one of the first places I checked – the library. She was sitting at one of the tables at the back with a pile of books open in front of her, staring at them but not actually studying. She was still so pale her face was practically translucent and she jumped a foot when I slipped into the chair next to her.

                ‘Jesus!’ she hissed, when she saw it was me.

                ‘Do you still have them?’ I asked quietly, knowing they would have been burning a hole through her skin since she took them from my pocket.

                ‘Yes,’ she muttered anxiously, reaching into her own pocket with shaking hands. ‘Please take them.’

                I slipped one hand under the table and took them from her easily, casually stuffing them in my bag under the guise of searching absently for some book or other.

                ‘I feel like I’ve been living some perverted version of The Tell-Tale Heart since I hugged you,’ she mumbled. ‘Like everyone I saw could sense that I was carrying, or whatever you call it.’

                ‘Holding,’ I corrected absently, as I pulled a book from my bag at random to make my presence look at least slightly legitimate. ‘Thank you,’ I added, trying not to sound awkward, to let her know I was genuine. ‘You saved my ass.’

                ‘Mrs Hastings asked you about the drugs?’

                ‘Are you kidding? She practically accused me of being a drug baron. She searched my bag and my locker.’

                ‘Wow,’ Molly breathed, and I looked at her worriedly. She sounded like she was about to start hyperventilating. ‘Imagine if you’d still had them in your pocket... And they fell out or something... God, Twitch is completely evil.’

                ‘I’ll say,’ I muttered angrily. ‘I have a proposition.’

                Molly blinked her big cornflower blues at me perplexedly. ‘What sort of proposition?’

                I sighed, frustrated that I’d been driven to this by some chick who’d been in school less than a week, but determined to persevere. ‘Well, it’s like this. Twitch set her sights on you early and thought you’d be an easy target. I intervened, making me a target too and, well, making her even more determined to destroy you. The way I see it, for our sins, we’re in this together.’

                ‘Together doing what? Getting our asses handed to us by that cow over and over again? I don’t think I can take much more humiliation, Ivy. Staring at Mr Ross used to be one of my favourite pastimes, now I can’t even look at him.’ The fact that she was being so candid made me realise she was still nervous, which meant she would be much more pliable to what I had in mind.

                ‘Look,’ I said, after taking a moment to disregard everything she’d just said, ‘obviously, we need to get rid of her. Somehow. We either need to get her in enough trouble to get her expelled, make her life miserable enough to drive her out, or make sure she gets herself in enough trouble to be sent away. Either way, she’s already bested us twice. I think we need to join forces here. Team up, or whatever.’

                Molly squinted at me suspiciously. She didn’t trust me any farther than she could pick me up and throw me. ‘You mean stop making each other miserable and focus our joint energy on her instead?’

                ‘Exactly. A truce.’

                ‘A ceasefire.’