She was, entirely against her will and heavy-handedly so, a solemn, stateless wreck, stoic at the edge of the bonfire (nothing bon about it) as rusted out ruins at the bottom of the Atlantic. Gia had found a heady mix of loathing and isolation and memory at the bottom of her water bottle (there was no vodka in it, she insisted truthfully to anyone drunk enough to ask and not quite notice who they were asking, but perhaps there should have been) and when it was empty she had stared into the hot centre of the haphazardly constructed Guy-Fawkesian-nightmare and willed herself to do something. 

She hadn’t intended to come. Just like she hadn’t intended to come to the cellar bacchanal.  Tradition was too strong a word for her to resist still.

It was all too much. A blur at the party’s edge, Gia didn’t have to fight her way through the crowd to reach the bonfire’s (and again: she could not see anything good anywhere) outskirts, where the stray stupid couples stealing kisses and warming their hands and unloved alcoholic first years brought to their knees in their stupors were more alike than different. 

It was someone who should have been in the centre of the world, as she usually would have been, that made her pause a few steps from freedom. She kept her tone measured and even as she stepped closer to Sylvianne, one wild animal caging another. “I don’t have anything to drink. Water or liquor. If that’s what you’re looking for.” 

The sheer unholiness of waiting for Sylvianne Liu in the library on a Sunday was almost laughable (laughing, though, especially in the library, was a sin, and she had accumulated far too many of those just by existing, at this point). Gia had nearly swallowed her tongue when their pairing was announced, her jaw clenching so tight it might have shattered if not for the release when she opened her mouth to say — ‘Thank you.’ Cunt. In fact, she had failed, at first, to register Sylvianne’s name being announced alongside hers, it turned over and over in her head as one word, over and over, until it was the only name for the girl she would recognise.

Gia’s gaze fixed steady on the clock hanging a few feet overhead. Half past one. That’s when she had told Sylvianne’s student email she would be in Study Room 4. She pulled at one sleeve, then the other, suddenly cold and daydreaming on the idea of telling Sylvianne’s student email that she should have been on time and Gia would be turning in their project with a note attached: ‘Unfortunately, I could not reach Sylvianne Liu, so all the work you see below is my own.’ Which was childish, she knew, but. if her partner was going to be a child and arrive late, she had no choice but to retaliate.

Just a girl and her emotional support cat

Something is On the Horizon.

Unfathomable Priorities.