Jaida remembers being new to New York City. Not fondly, but she remembers it nonetheless. So, when she found out the woman she was renting out her spare room to was fresh off the plane from France, she suspected she’d have to go into full tour guide mode.

They had made it down to the subway station. She couldn’t convince Nicky to hop the turnstile because “these are louboutins, Jaida,” but they got there nonetheless.

“Why is that rat the size of a toddler?” Nicky asked, hiding behind Jaida as she watched the rodent scurry along the tracks.

“‘Cause he’s eating better than we are, quantity wise anyway.” She couldn’t help but shake her head in fond amusement at her roommate’s reaction. “These guys ain’t gonna hurt you. You mind your business and they mind theirs. It’s the ecosystem.”

“I don’t believe you’ve ever taken an earth science course.”

Jaida shrugged. “They don’t teach this in school. Unless you take an urban studies course, I guess,” she told her as they got onto the subway.

There wasn’t a single surface that Nicky felt comfortable touching, so when the train jerked them forward, she held onto Jaida for dear life. It wasn’t until they came to their stop that she realized she latched onto her like a koala. “Don’t say it.”

“I recognize that face,” Nicky observed with a smirk.

“Face? What face?” Jackie sputtered, doing little to seem even remotely innocuous. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

She just laughed at her friend’s poor attempt at denial. “Please. I know an ‘oh’ face when I see one.”

“Ew, Nicky.”

The blonde rolled her eyes. “Not like that. You just realized I was right and you do have a crush on Gigi,” she surmised triumphantly.

In turn, Jackie groaned in defeat. “And what difference does it make? What model works in a high end agency and goes ‘oh yeah, I wanna bang the office secretary’?”

“More than you may think.”

The two turned around to see Gigi leaning against the door frame with a smirk. “Nicky, darling, could you give us a moment?”

Lemon had just entered the apartment and nearly turned right back out. But her curiosity got the best of her, at least enough to keep that inside. “Put that thing back where it came from or so help me.”

“What do you want me to do? Run a DNA test and see whose vagina I can shove it back up?” Priyanka asked, bouncing a surprisingly calm infant in her arms.

“Or something!” The blonde huffed. “Okay, let’s go back to the beginning and tell me what happened.”

“Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much–”

Lemon pinched the bridge of her nose. “Skip to the part where the baby ended up in your possession.”

Priyanka didn’t miss a beat. “Someone asked me to hold her at the grocery store and after like, ten minutes, I started looking around for the mom and when I made eye contact, she ran out the door and drove away. Which would explain why she gave me a diaper bag too.”

She looked at her girlfriend in utter disbelief. “It’s a miracle you didn’t get abducted as a child,” she remarked, then added, “we’re taking the baby to the hospital.”

“I don’t think she’s sick.”

alexa play as if we never said goodbye (this is set in that universe and i took some liberties bcs i missed the summer camp au)

-

“How do you spell ‘enamored’?” Jackie asked without looking up from her notebook.

Crystal furrowed her brows. “How do you define it?” She tried to lean over to glimpse at what her cabin-mate was writing, but was promptly blocked.

“Nevermind. I don’t want Jan to think I’m showing off anyway… or that I was showing off when she reads this in the future,” she mumbled, scribbling out some lines before ripping out the page and crumpling it up in frustration.

She tilted her head. “If she’s not gonna see this until we open the time capsule, why are you so worried about what it says? We’re gonna be like, basically grown-ups.”

Jackie flopped back on the bed with a dramatic sigh. “You don’t get it, this has to sum up everything I feel while making sense. Don’t you want the last thing you say to Gigi to be meaningful?”

“We already slept in the same bed, we’re basically pre-married.”

“Engaged,” she corrected.

“Engaged in what?”

She laughed, finally taking a moment to calm down. “I just want this to be perfect, I can’t just stuff a bunch of failed love letters into the time capsule. This is supposed to be romantic.”

Crystal furrowed her brows. “What about what happened at the Halloween party?”

Jackie blushed, pulling the hoodie of her sweatshirt over her head. “That’s different. I think.”

“I’m climbing uphill, Jamie, climbing uphill…” Jan sang to herself as she rounded the corridor towards the auditorium. Sure enough, an hour before the auditions were set to begin, there were already a full group of girls doing vocal warmups.

She sighed and leaned against the wall, continuing to sing to herself. “I’m up every morning at six. I’m standing in line with two hundred girls who are younger and thinner than me, who have already been–”

“A little on the nose, don’t you think?” Another girl’s voice startled her out of singing. “Though I guess auditioning with that would be pretty meta. I’m Marcia, by the way.”

Jan chuckled softly once she’d shaken off the momentary embarrassment. “Jan. That’s not my audition song, by the way. Just sort of what plays in my head while I wait. We gotta amuse ourselves somehow.”

“Either that or go insane,” Marcia agreed. “How often do you audition? I’ve scaled back to twice a week so I can hold down a job that at least covers rent and subway fare.”

“About the same, with the added reasoning of my roommate not murdering me with constant rehearsal. You know, law students.”

Marcia nodded, letting out a quiet laugh at the imagery of Jan belting showtunes while a roommate desperately tried to focus on an obscure legal case. “Well, you wanna get something to eat after this? Give your roommate a little more peace and quiet?”