* AFTER ME COMES THE FLOOD ,, sam

Nell was sure that the two girls would have erupted into fistpumping and trash talk if the professor wasn’t busy droning on about the assignment, so she just stifled her laughter as she busied herself with the pencil. At least she never put her head down in class, but still it wasn’t like she could ever sit still, even when the professor was talking about the project as if it was the most boring thing ever. Howver, Nell was actually looking forward to it, because Samantha Blackhill and Nell Shepherd were a boss duo. And the rest of the class had better respect.

She waited while Sam seemed to consider the words, Nell herself going over everything they’d read that year. It was strange, considering the fact that the year was almost over. It was the beginning of September, so they had four months until graduation. Three months until the trial. She forced that thought away, as dangerous and concerning as it was. That’s what winter meant to her, it meant possible incarceration. It meant something that Sam did not know about. But for how long? Apparently it had been Jane that told Josh’s father about the trial and lied about the murder, and soon enough it would be televised. Even in Canada, because as Jane once told her, the media loved stories like hers, something that seemed so unimagineable, something so grim.

Snapped out of her musings by her best friend, Nell said, ”Alice in Wonderland sounds awesome. Who should we do?” Like Sam, she thought for a moment before an idea lit up her eyes. ”We should do a really underappreciated character that no one cares about. Like…Alice’s sister or the Knave.” That would probably be the most interesting, since it seemed that everyone always loved to talk about Alice or the Mad Hatter or the Cheshire Cat. There were a lot of other characters in that book it would be interesting to think about. Whoa, getting a little too excited. But it was a part of her nature, and Sam seemed excited about this project as well, so she didn’t feel too bad.

This time, Nell actually did fistpump and said, ”We’re running this.” When a few students looked over because hse had gotten a little too loud, she winced, apologized, and returned her attention to Sam. ”Oh definitely, we can do most of it at my place.” Even though it was small considering it was a crappy downtown apartment, she loved having friends over, especially if they were working on a projet. ”We can even go the extra mile and make a poster or power point. I wonder if he’ll give extra credit for that.” Nell did like to overachieve sometimes, but it wasn’t beause she was a teacher’s pet. She just wanted to do good, and prove that she could excel in the Academy. ”So, anything cool going on this month for you?” she wondered. Of course, Sam didn’t need to reveal anything too personal with Nell, but she considered the short-haired Earth girl a good friend of hers. She liked to know these things.

She leaned back in her chair, something she never really thought that she’d get in trouble for by a teacher. Nell didn’t have the previous grade school years to know about things that younger kids had been admonished for, like eating glue and running around with scissors. And since she wasn’t aware of it, it was something that she couldn’t really miss not having experience. ”The Knave would be pretty cool, since we don’t find out much about him in the story.” About any of the characters, actually—they really don’t have too much backstory to them, which is probably why the book would be one of the harder ones to do. But Nell actually liked that, putting thought and effort into things. She was a hardworker in everything she did, from school and her element to her job and life in general.

Nell snapped her fingers, brigning down the front legs of her chair with a metallic slam, and pointed at her friend. ”You are a genius, Sam. We can even use our element to make it look like a real tree.” Really, she seemed like a creative thinker, which was perfect. Nell was much the same way—her talents lay mostly in english and history, right-brained subjects. Math and sciences…well, she’d rather not think about those since she was doing mostly average with those subjects. And of course, there were her elemental classes, which she was getting much better at. After all, it was a part of her nature, being an Earth student. It wasn’t liked academics—it was more about feeling and focus and, okay, there was academics involved to better understand, but she could handle those things. She felt confident enough in those areas that she tried her best. Nell really wanted her powers, to get better.

Eyes glinting at her friends words, she couldn’t disguise the devilishness. ”Ooh,” Nell said in the immature, eighth-grade way, winking at Sam. ”You plan on hanging out with Marcus, huh? Whatcha gonna do with him?” She rested her chin in her hands as she leaned on her desk, looking at her friend with barely-veiled mischeviousness. If the girl didn’t want to tell Nell about her personal life or what she was going to do, Nell was completely fine with that. She wasn’t teasing to weasel her way into Sam’s life, she just liked to know more about her friends and see that they were happy. Inwardly, she was hoping that Marcus made the girl happy. They’d met before and Nell remembered that he was a graduate. But they weren’t terribly good friends. ”Gonna have some fun?” she asked before giggling deviously. Innocent, friendly trolling she was doing.

As for herself? ”You know, just doing my thang,” she said, playing up her New York accent a little more. Somehow, she was glad she wasn’t assimilating so much in Canada—it must have been what her grandparents felt like moving to America and why they mostly spoke Spanish. They had a lot of pride. Nell just liked having something that set her apart, as cheesy as it sounded. More than that, people were interested in it, and that meant Nell could meet new friends. Which was even cheesier. ”I don’t really know, actually. I’ll be keeping busy, that’s for sure.” Nell wasn’t one to talk about herself, and not just because she was a private person—she liked talking to other people about their lives more. But pricy definitely played a part. Nell didn’t really like talking about her illegal job and the stress that was constantly eating at her thanks to the trial in the back of her mind. Shifting her gaze to the clock as if also shifting the subject away from herself, Nell said, ”Class is almost over. Want to head to the craft store and pick up some stuff? Maybe get something to eat?”

Sam suggested that they save that for last, which was a reasonable thing for them to do. There she goes, being all awesome and reasonable, Nell thought humorously. ”Sounds good.” Nell nodded as if to back this up. Her apartment was more or less a jungle. Well, less now that autumn had come and it was harder to care for certain plants she had been growing during the summer. But she always made sure to replace them and grow more. It may have made the place more crowded with all the vegetation, but for some reason it also felt lonelier without her element around her. It was much easier than New York, however. Even though Maple Hollow was a large city, they were still in the mountains and there was plenty of nature around to observe. That’s where her hometown and Canada differed—the closest that the city came to wildlife was Central Park, a place she’d never been.

Nell was proud in the fact that she’d gotten Sam to blush. It was adorable, to say the least, and it only encourage her in her ball-busting. ”He wanted to meet up with you?” she said as if considering. Well, well, that was interesting. ”You know, it may not just be the usual.” She winked at her friend, feeling like an asshole. But the girl would certainly understand that she was just playing around. To emphasize this, she held up her hands and said, ”But I shall say nothing more on the subject.” Her crafty grin was still planted on her face, however, just to show where her thoughts were at that moment.

With Sam’s question, Nell grinned. ”Ooh, I’ll drive!” she said enthusiastically. Then, to explain why she was just so excited to do so, she told Sam, ”I’ve got something that may entertain you.” Now she waited through the rest of the class with barely-veiled excitement as she made more conversation with Sam. When the bell finally rung from its place in the tower, she was quite like a bat outta hell. It was difficult for the girl to stay in one place for too long, anyway, and besides, she wanted to get out to her parking lot and show Sam her car. Usually, she wouldn’t have been so proud of her PT Cruiser, but now it had a rather impressive hood decoration. Out in the parking lot, Nell spread her arms wide with her keys dangling from her fingers. ”Tada!” On the hood was a jumbo magnet mustache, and she explained, ”Poor Gwen is going through menopause. Not enough estrogen.”

So Sam loved Gwen? Nell patted the hood, and said, ”Hear that, baby, you got a compliment.” She looked back at her friend and laughed a bit, something not uncommon for her to do. She was always either smiling or laughing. ”Thanks.” Her eyes twinkled with gratitude, and as she droved, she contemplated Sam’s words. Her ire toward the car was mostly joking. After all, she didn’t even have one growing up. After her father left, the only things that had occupied the curb in front of her house were weeds poking up through the cracks in the asphalt and old used needles. The fact that she never had a lot growing up made her less inclined to complain, especially about petty things. Coupled with the belief that anything that happened now was not as bad as what she’d had before, and she got by very well in life. She was happy with what she got.

Now focused on cars, Nell turned her head when Sam spoke up, and flicked her eyes back to the road as she chewed on her lip to think about it. ”Well, we have to evaluate the situation,” she said as if speaking at a very important lecture. ”Now, he asked to hang out, right? Did he give a reason?” It was all circumstance, after all. Nell wasn’t going to pretend she understood boys and their intentions, she barely had enough experience with people in general to fully comprehend them. But she understood circumstance and situations and was empathetic enough to know about certain things. ”Because depending on the reason…you know, there may be some ulterior motive.” She was hoping to do some sleuthing and figure this out so that she could be assured that Marcus liked Sam. It wasn’t too hard, after all. Sam was freaking cool and easygoing, she wondered how she didn’t have more people chasing after her. Well, from what Nell heard. She liked to ignore any rumors, though, so things like that would have gone right over her head.

Nell chewed on her bottom lip as she thought, and her face broke out into a smile when Sam said that he didn’t really say. Tapping the steering wheel for emphasis, Nell said, ”He’s being vague, that’s good! That means there may be something that he wants to talk about that he doesn’t want to tell you.” She bobbed her head, as she continued to form ideas in her head. Then, she held up her hand, keeping the other on the wheel. With a stern look to Sam, she said, ”However, don’t be disappointed if he doesn’t ask you out or something. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you.” It was almost comical that a girl with little to no real world experience—especially when it came to crushes and other school scenarios—was giving one of her closest friends advice on it. But she liked to believe she had the capacity to give such advice. She knew people well enough, right? Even though she didn’t really know Marcus, she thought she had a good enough grip on the world by now that she could help out her friends like this.

When they reached her apartment, she bent over to scratch behind Pablo’s ears when he greeted her by rubbing against her legs, and the cat went over to sniff inquiringly at Sam. Pablo knew her, though, as Sam had been over a few times before. The girl was probably used to the plants crowding up the space of the studio apartment. Pablo meowed, and Nell could recognize that as his ‘I want food’ meow. Picking him up, she said, ”It’s not chow time yet, Pablo.” Nell went to sit on the couch, placing Pablo on the floor and flicking on the TV. The cat busied himself with using the trunk of her ficus as a scratching post, and she figured that she would get to watering her plants in a bit, after figuring out some more stuff. ”Well, we can do an interview-style thing,” she suggested, putting the remote on her coffee table and digging through her bag to pull out her binders and notebooks. ”If we do an interview, it wouldn’t have to be some full-length detailed paper, but we could still get a lot out of the history and focus more on the tree.” It sounded like a good idea, since the tree would be the more eye-catching part of it and they should spend a bit more time on that. Clicking the cap of her pen, she started scrawling down their ideas. ”Doing an interview should only take…well, not too long actually. If we get a bit of a head-start today, we’ll be sailing right through this project.”

Nell was glad to be there for people in terms of support, even if she didn’t think she was the smartest person in the world. She really felt like a terrible friend sometimes, but that was mostly when she thought about herself, something she tried to prevent. Still, she was glad that Sam seemed really happy. ”Sure!” Nell said with a light chuckle. She wasn’t the kind of friend to poke and prod for answers. If she did ask, she’d do it with some eyebrow waggling, and if the other person wanted the subject to drop, she’d immediately do so unless it was otherwise important. But she liked to be there, to stand by her friends as a constant support. She was loyal and dependable, even though she never put a finger on these qualities herself—she didn’t think about herself a lot, and when she did there were things she didn’t like there. So she tried to be there for others and not focus her attention on herself.

Kicking off her shoes, Nell leaned back and slapped her hands on her knees to keep herself moving at all times. ”How would we do a live interview?” she asked. ”Have someone dress up as the Knave and give him a script or something?” That sounded pretty funny, actually, and she was giggling at the mere idea of it. But as she was laughing, she noticed that her stomach hurt and decided that it was time for her to eat. ”It’s gonna make Pablo jealous, but you want anything to eat? I haven’t had anything since twelve o’ clock.” Nell going over four hours without food was very distressing. She didn’t constantly have her hand in a bag, but she always made sure that she ate whenever she was hungry, and that was a lot. Luckily, she had an iron stomach that could handle anything—except okra, though that was an allergy. She headed into her kitchenette where Pablo sat patiently in front of her bowl, as if trying to make her feel guilty about not feeding him.


[tis okay. <333]