Chapter 4: Leyna

Short one, just a little blurb of Leyna getting home from work and an introduction to Shay, Leyna's little sister.

{Leyna}

When I finally finished reformatting and filing all the new music away, it was already 10:30. I chucked quietly and walked to the front of the library, where all the lights were still on in spite of the complete lack of people. A note was lying on the main desk, and I picked it up. Sure enough, it was addressed to me.

Leyna,

Everyone else went home already, but I didn’t want to disturb you. Lock up before you leave, and don’t forget to shut off the lights.

Deborah

I stuck the note in my pocket and reached under the desk for the key card. I shut down the wall screens and flicked off the lights before swiping the card on my way out. The card reader’s red light came on to indicate that it had locked, so I tucked the key card into my pocket with the note and headed toward my room.

When I entered, Shay was lying across the table, a bowl of half-eaten ramen noodles in her lap. Apparently she’d decided to wait up for me, only to fall asleep before I got home. I tiptoed over to her and removed the bowl, which I rinsed and set in the sink. Then I carefully lifted her off the table and carried her to her bed. She stirred in her sleep, and I froze, hoping not to wake her up.

No dice. “You’re late,” she accused me groggily, rubbing her eyes.

“Yeah, I know.” I set her down gently and pulled the blankets up to her chin.

“No,” she said, pushing back the covers and blinking away the sleep from her eyes. “I’m not tired anymore. Why are you so late? You get off at six!”

“Well, we got a whole lot of new music from the Scavenging, so"“

Shay sat upright and narrowed her eyes. “Deborah made you stay until you finished ALL of it? That’s so unfair!”

“Uh, no, actually…”

Shay’s shoulders slumped. “You stayed because you wanted to?”

I nodded sheepishly.

“You blew me off for a bunch of music that nobody has listened to for centuries!”

I looked at her blankly. “I blew you off?”

Shay glared at me, all the fury of a scorned twelve-year-old burning in her eyes. “You promised we’d have a ‘sister spa day.’ We were going to make our own mud masks, and do our nails… Seriously, you forgot? It was YOUR IDEA!”

I looked around. Sure enough, there were little jars of mud, plastic containers of nail polish, and little tins of sequins, which must have cost her at least a few day’s worth of her school points. The wall screen was paused on what I knew to be the opening credits to this really old movie called Dirty Dancing, which was our favorite. I stroked her hair, trying to calm her. Again, no dice. She shoved my hand away and threw her head back onto the pillow. “I can’t believe you. I spent all my points from this week on the supplies, waited up for you, and I even made us tea. But you not only blew me off, you forgot about me in favor of some stupid dead guys on your stupid files! I thought we were gonna have fun!”

“Well, we can do it tomorrow,” I said hopefully, knowing that would do almost nothing to quiet her.

“No, the tea will go to waste if we wait, and that alone was fourteen points!”

“We…we could just do it now,” I conceded reluctantly. “But you have to go to bed as soon as Dirty Dancing is done, all right?”

Shay looked at me doubtfully. I picked up the jar of mud and dipped my hand in. A quick smile twitched my lips and I smashed the mud against her cheek. Shay squealed and shoved her own hand into the jar to start smearing some on my face, too. We applied the mud masks and sat back for a little late-night relaxation.

�' �™ �'

“I just don’t understand what Baby’s dad was so upset about, you know? She didn’t lie�"all he asked about what the money was going for was whether or not it was illegal. Abortion’s never been illegal, right?” I sat on the edge of the pool with my elbows on my legs and my chin on my hands, leaning slightly to hear Farr from where he was scrubbing furiously at the tiles on the side. Farr did this (scrub the pool, I mean) once a week just to earn some extra spending points.

“I don’t think so. Maybe he was mad that instead of doing it right at a clinic, they got that hack job for cheaper than it should have been?”

“So why didn’t Baby just ask for more, then? Clearly her dad didn’t have a problem giving her huge amounts of money. Also, why did it cost so much back then?”

“Isn’t your job to know everything about history?” Farr swiped a hand across his forehead, wiping the beads of sweat away. I helpfully kicked a little splash at him to keep him cool.

“No, stupid, I just put stuff in order. Anyway, what do you think�"?”

“Less gabbing and more scrubbing!” Lukas called as he strode on to the deck of the pool with us. He planted a kiss on the top of my head before gracefully dropping down next to me. “What are we talking about?” he asked as he rolled up the bottoms of his pants so that he could drop his feet into the water.

“Once again, Leyna finds herself pondering the ins and outs of Dirty Dancing,” Farr said.

Lukas groaned. “Again? Haven’t you two dissected every aspect of that movie?” He pushed me lightly on the shoulder. “No offense, honey, but you need to get a new favorite. That one is old as dirt and not much better in quality.”

I frowned at him. “Okay, yeah, it’s several hundred years old, but that doesn’t make it bad. It just makes it old. What about you? You like music from the 1700s, and that’s older than my ‘old as dirt’ movie.”

“For your information, Beethoven made beautiful music, and anyway it was in the late 1700s.”

“Real strong argument, buddy,” Farr said sarcastically.

“Fine,” Lukas sighed. “Ask me a philosophical question regarding Dirty Dancing.”

“Why is that hotel-management kid such a prick?” Farr fired back immediately.

“His name is Neil,” I offered.

“Wait, I thought the waiter kid was the prick,” Lukas said.

“No, that’s Robbie,” I said.

“Fine,” Farr amended, “Robbie’s a prick too. But people call him out and Johnny almost beats the s**t out of at one point, right? Nobody notices when Neil’s a prick. He just gets to be prick-y and everybody just lets him. What’s the deal with that?”

Author's Note

Sorry for the short one, but I've got to get back to Knox, and I'm running a little low on ideas for this section. XP