Hiding Among Books ((Nell))

Nell scanned the shelves and they felt like home. Some spines she recognized, others she'd like to get to know. Her childhood had been spent surrounded by shelves, and now it was one of the few places she could find some peace. Her life had gotten out of control, spun too far for her to even try and get it back in line. Not even her home was safe anymore, but she certainly spent more time there than usual. She wanted to keep an eye on Bryce, even though it was all she could do not to snap at him when he was nearby. He was one of the few people who earned that sort of reaction from her, one of the few that came the closest anyone had to what she might consider hate. Rafael was his competition, so it was only expected that they had gotten together and became the most unholy of friends.

Her finger on Dickens, she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. She checked to make sure it wasn't a text message, having put it all on vibrate while in class, so she looked to see who was trying to get in touch. If it hadn't been her father calling, she wouldn't have picked up. She answered, keeping her voice low out of respect for the environment. "Something wrong?" was her greeting, and she imagined he was rolling his eyes, tired of her always answering the phone like that. With how little he called her, though, suspicion was natural. "You don't have to come over today," he informed her and that only made her worry more, even though it was spoken--in Spanish, of course--as something she shouldn't even have a second thought about.

She continued to walk, through the shelving and the books. The Earth graduate had come for a paper she had to write in a literature class. This professor like to assign the paper and the book at the same time. And this was one book she had yet to read, One Hundred Years Of Solitude. She looked forward to these projects, having once majored in English. Sometimes she wondered if she was too fickle for college, and that worried her. What if she had to drop out? What if she didn't become anything? She was sure she'd disappoint Josh. And her father too, but she didn't care as much about his opinion as she did her fiance's. This was why she never thought about her future, it was scary.

"Why not?" she asked him, and wondered if he would question her as to why she was speaking so quietly. He did not, just went on to explain, "I'm going out to dinner with someone." She stopped walking, blinked. Dinner? "With who?" It was turning into a game of twenty questions, a game she knew he did not enjoy. "A friend."

Upon seeing the girl's reaction to the question, Nell wondered if she should hastily take it back, wave her hands around. She was not nervous around people, but she did not like to make others uncomfortable, and she did not take her lip-biting as a good sign. Or she might have been reading too far into things, which also happened. She let her eyes find the other girls, too, but not so obvious because then they'd both be staring and that would attract unwelcome attention. As the girl spoke, a slow smile crept across her face. It was not something she'd do, passive as she was, but she had to admire the brunette's candor. "I'm guessing you're Water, then," she said, and not just because it was a Water type thing to do. "Because if you were a Wind, that mess would have knocked over a few shelves." She grinned then, flashing her teeth and clearly in a good humor. But that was not unusual for Nell. The unusual thing was to find her in a bad humor.

Nell lifted her eyebrows when the girl--Emma, as she introduced herself--held out her hand. People rarely did that anymore! It was only in meetings and interviews that she'd ever done so. And so she took it with a light chuckle, as if amused by some secret joke. "My name's Nell," she introduced herself. "And you can call me Nelly, or Nellers, or N-dubbs." Hopefully, the girl wouldn't recognize the name from the news. It had been last year, but the memories of the trial still haunted her. She'd lost a lot of friends through it, when people find out that she'd lied about everything she was. Who she was. Especially what she did. Killing her mother did not go over well with her friends, and those who stuck around probably thought about it still, wondered about it in the back of their minds. They might even tiptoe around her with their words, fearing that she might snap and kill them. She couldn't get rid of the stigma, no matter how hard she tried.

It may have seemed strange to others, but it was only natural for her to ask the next question with her over exuberant friendliness. "So how's your day been going?" It was as if Emma had been her old friend, that was how quickly Nell attached herself to others, folded them into her realm. She was the type of person to trust too easily at first, to give everyone the benefit of the doubt without a second thought. Remembering manners, she ducked her head a bit. "I'm sorry if you have any work to do," she said, realizing she might have been holding her up. Nell had work, but she was confident she could hold a conversation and then get to it. She was an expedient worker, so she did not believe it would take long at all.

outfit.