Dinner

Who: Skye and Thom
Where: The Diner
When: Shortly after school

Skye, out of a sheer lack of anything better to do, had wandered to the diner after school and ordered a cheeseburger and a soda, and was going through one of the random newspapers laying around in the 'help wanted' section. Nothing was really springing out at her as something she wanted to do, though. It wasn't the time of year that people suddenly wanted a little extra help out on their farms, or even for yard work, and Skye had zero interest babysitting or sitting at a desk after school three days a week. She wanted to be able to get up and move. Pretty much everyone else wanted people full time during the day, and Skye wasn't able to do those because there was that whole school thing she had to deal with. Maybe she could find something to do with animals. She liked animals.

Though if the world ended that would put a rapid end to any job she'd have anyway. Maybe she'd wait to see if the whole ghost thing resolved itself. Pursing her lips, she finally pulled off her winter coat with the fur-lined hood and put it in the seat of the booth next to her and started doodling with a pen in the margin of the newspaper she'd previously been reading.

Thom had been home alone again, but that was normal for him. But at least his mom had left him the car today, which was great, since he'd not been in the mood to cook and he couldn't bear sitting at home watching yet more news reports of the ghost thing going on everywhere still and eating delivery pizza. The plan, he'd decided, was to go grab something to eat at the diner, and then maybe head out of town for a while, change of scenery - something.

The place was busy, but he didn't particularly want to wait for a table - especially since it would only be a table for one - and he cast his eye around, before he spotted that new girl who'd been a friend of Chrissy's - Skye. They'd never really properly met before everything happened, but he knew her and so he headed over, stopping at her table, but not sitting down - that'd just be plain rude. "Hi - I was wondering if this seat was taken," he said, politely.

Skye blinked up and smiled faintly at Thom. She didn't know him at all, but she recognized him because Chrissy had pointed him out. It was unfortunate that they'd never gotten an introduction. "Please do. I was just... creating recycled art." She gave the newspaper she was doodling on a puzzled look, only now realizing she'd been drawing spirals and stars and other things that didn't make any sense but she supposed were kind of pretty. And she folded the newspaper up and pushed it out of the way, just like her coat. "Thom, right? Chrissy pointed you out to me once."

Thom slid into place opposite the girl and looked at the newspaper doodle upside down. "Recycled art?" he asked her, slightly amused at that and interested in how she would define that, only then she'd pushed it out of the way, and he turned his attention back to her. "Yeah, Thom - and you're Skye, right?" he checked, though he knew full well who she was.

"That would be me." Skye nodded, with another slight smile and a bit of a shrug. "I'm pretty sure, anyway, what with the whole license telling me so. What's up?" She readjusted herself in her seat, tucking one leg under so that she didn't feel quite so short. It didn't help much. "How are you?"

"Just here to grab some dinner - guy's gotta eat, y'know," he told her, grabbing the menu, though he knew it by heart anyhow. Still, it didn't hurt not to advertise that fact - not to advertise that he was the sad fuck who ate alone more often than not and was on first name terms with every restaurant and take out owner in town. "And I'm not bad - you?" he asked her.

"I guess I'm alright. I was trying to decide on whether I should get a job or wait to see if the whole end-of-the-world thing works out, because I don't want to work and then not get the paycheck in the end due to the extinction of humanity." Skye grinned a little more. "That'd just be adding insult to injury there."

Thom laughed at that. "Yeah - that would truly suck," he agreed. "But I think you might be safe for the first week - all this shit going on with the religious nutballs... Honestly, I don't know if I buy the whole 'end of the world' line. They're just ghosts, right? And it's not like they're going all poltergeist or whatever - they're freaky, but they don't seem dangerous," he shrugged, though he knew he felt better for having read through some of the books he'd picked up with Alexis.

"I figure, if they were going to end it, it would've ended by now. It can't be that hard to end the world. Why even bother? The living seem to have a handle on it themselves, what with the whole killing the whales and polar bears equals global warming or whatever combination they come up with this week." Skye laughed quietly. "Though I'm told something like the dead rising is biblical. Or maybe that was a horror movie. I dunno."

"I think that the suggestion of the dead rising is biblical - though I'd think that the portrayal would normal be more along the line of literal. Of course, that would give us zombies..." Thom mused. "As for ending the world, I think that's actually pretty damn difficult to do. Now the end of humanity, that might be easier. But life itself? And the rock we sit on? Much harder..." And there were always people willing to fight for it. Like him, and his mother.

"So... zombies are in the bible. That's good to know, in case they ever rise. I mean, at least that way we can go 'see, we told you it wasn't ghosts, and now there are zombies' and we can be self-righteous until we're eaten or infected or whatever." Skye grinned, then looked up with a smile when the waitress came with her various foodstuffs; Skye offered the fries to Thom so he'd have something to nibble while he waited for his own food. "Or maybe somehow all the ghosts or zombies or whatever will weight the earth down and we'll fall down into the sun."

Thom frowned slightly, then cringed, realising that maybe he could have phrased things better. But, maybe he just was too serious at times. He took the opportunity to order himself a burger and coke from the waitress, snagging a couple of fries from Skye, since they were on offer. "Okay, so the zombie thing was my own input," he admitted. "But, the whole dead rising thing - I don't know, I'm not that religious, but I always figured the bible meant it literally dead rising from their graves. Think that's why some religious types don't like cremation too much. Me, I always figured literal rising would just be a bad case of zombies. And what about those that had been dead long enough to turn to dust? Or do bones last forever? I mean, some places have those weird bone houses, don't they?" He suggested, before thinking that maybe this wasn't the best conversation to be having whilst she was eating.

Skye was maybe weird, but the talk of dead rising didn't seem to phase her appetite. "I don't think bones last forever unless the conditions are right, or else we'd be up to our necks in all the bones of everything that's died. That had bones." She dipped one of her fries in ketchup a couple times, then shrugged and ate it. "I know there's this cathedral in Russia somewhere that's made entirely out of human bones."

"Well, that's the kind I'm talking about," Thom said, thinking things through further. "And, of course, there are fossils and they're sometimes imprints of where bones have been, but that's long before humankind." He wondered how long angels lived for. And how long they'd been around for. Had Leija's ancestors been around before his had? He didn't really want to consider that. He didn't really want to think about her at all, even though he did still on a regular basis.

"Since I don't think I've actually managed to read the bible through, does it specifically mention that the dead that are rising are human? Maybe we'll get dinosaurs in there just for the weirdness factor." Skye actually looked a little hopeful at that; she would've loved to seen a real... er... dead dinosaur. Then she realized exactly how odd that sounded. "Um... never mind, that's a bad idea."

"I'm with you there on never actually having read the bible, so I can't tell you - sorry," Thom admitted. "But, if I see a T-Rex in the park, I'll be sure to let you know," he added with a grin and a twinkle in his brown eyes.

"Ha! Awesome." Skye grinned at him. "I'll let you know if I see any zombies at all. That's probably one of those things I should let people know about anyway." And she pushed the fries towards him again. "Have as many as you like."

Thom held up his hands as she pushed the fries over. "No, no - I can't steal all your food, anyway, I have my own on the way," he averred, shaking his head - a movement which sent his floppy hair swaying. "But I think that a zombie and dinosaur early warning system would probably be appreciated. That way we'd know when things were really screwed." As opposed to, say, only slightly screwed as vampires tried to take the entire town out. Right, yeah.

"I suppose if zombies and dinosaurs or zombie dinosaurs started wandering around, I'd probably give up on this city altogether and go back to Canada. Nothing ever attacks Canada." She nodded. "It's true. There were no alien spaceships over Canada in Independence Day, you never hear about zombies in Canada, and there was a movie called Super Volcano where one went off in some big national park down here? And the lava stopped at the border."

"Wow, a movie where even lava needs a passport, eh? At least you're not too far from the border here if you need to make a run for it then," he said with a smile as his burger and coke arrived. "Then again, there are people who seem to think the whole of the UP's in Canada already, and we don't seem to be getting any slack for that lately. Clearly shit knows its geography."

"...but, it's not. This is clearly American soil, because there are American flags pretty much everywhere." Skye blinked, and decided to point out. "If it was Canada, then they would be Canadian flags. And also, this is south of the border."

Thom bit into his burger, chewed and swallowed before answering her, gesturing with his coke as he did so. "Yeah, you say that, like it should be obvious, but you know the UP was actually missed off some State maps in the past? Like - not even people who live in the same State realise that we're here half the time. It's one of those insane things. We're like the forgotten part of the country. Maybe that's why there are so many flags around - people have to remind everyone that they're still here," he shrugged, taking a sip of his coke.

Skye laughed. "That's insane! Even from where I'm from, there's no way anyone could mistake it for Not Being Canada, with capital letters. Of course, we're landlocked, and in the middle of nowhere. It's kind of hard to forget the region, if not the village itself."

"Honest to god, I'm telling you - ask anyone round here, there are maps that have been produced in the past where everything north of the bridge is missing, because whatever guy drew the map decided we were part of Canada," Thom laughed, amused by her reaction. "Not even our own country wants us. Maybe we should just declare independence and have done with it, make ourselves our own little country," he joked.

"But then America would definitely know you're American and completely freak out because you want to leave what's supposedly the best country on the planet. There would be protests and violence and things." She paused long enough to eat another french fry. "Might take everyone's minds off the ghosts, though. I can see the benefit there."

"That definitely sounds like politics," Thom said, considering that. "Everything's going horribly wrong, distract everyone with something different. It's the shiny butterfly effect, assumes that people can actually only really concentrate on one thing at a time and that they have the attention span of a demented goldfish," he added with a shrug, before taking another bite from his burger.

With another grin, Skye put some ketchup on her burger and put the top of the bun on it. "But shiny butterflies are ever so much fun...!"

"Well, yeah - I think that's the point, really. So, y'know, just gotta wait for whatever the distraction's gonna be. I'm sure there'll be something - cos people really don't seem to be settling down and just getting used to the ghosts. Not that I blame them," he added. It was quite an adjustment to make, suddenly knowing ghosts were real. Especially for people who'd had no knowledge of the supernatural before now."

"You could always try getting people around here to separate from the rest of the states." Skye pointed out. "Turn it into a song. People are into that sort of thing."

He cocked an eyebrow at her and quirked a smile. "All about revolution, eh? Nah, not really my kinda thing anyway. I just kinda go along with the flow of things, fighting against it's too much like hard work." And anyway, he already had his calling. "How about you - what brings you down here from Canada anyhow?" he asked, flipping the conversation over to her.

Skye licked off ketchup from her fingertip before answering. "I lived up on a dairy farm in the vast middle of nowhere. As in so nowhere that I couldn't even go to school because there wasn't one that was close enough for me to actually get to and back from in anything resembling a decent amount of time. So my cousin - my aunt's son - who lived here went off to some party college west of here, and my aunt got lonely. So she talked to my folks and asked if they wanted the chance to send me to a real school. They said yes, and ta-da! Here I am." She paused, and smirked a little. "Got the cowboy hat and everything, if you're curious."

Thom quirked an eyebrow and chuckled. "You got a cowboy hat? you know, somehow I didn't associate those with Canada, but I guess cattle's cattle all over, right? And, so - this place like a sprawling metropolis, compared to what you're used to them?"

Skye laughed. "Oh my gosh, are you kidding? Back home, you could pick a direction, almost any direction, and walk for days without seeing anyone. The closest village had barely any people in it at all; I think the girl that was about my age - I think I saw her maybe once every six months or so? If I was lucky. I've heard that Marquette was a smaller-sized city, but it seems absolutely gigantic to me!"

"Days? Really?" Thom asked, finishing off the last of his burger and following it with some coke That definitely filled a hole. "You must have been bored witless..." He couldn't imagine that. At times he'd felt like this place was just far too small to hold him, though he knew he was getting better at that as he got older and got used to who and what he was. Or maybe he was just resigning himself to the facts of life.

"Not really. There was always something to do. I mean, there were chores, and I was home schooled so I had to do that, too. And then there was the vegetable garden. And my dad or my brothers would take me out hunting or fishing sometimes in summer and autumn, or ice skating on the pond in winter. Or you could just stand out in a field and watch the sun come up or go down with the woods all silhouetted and the sky looking like it was on fire, or when it was cold watching the northern lights dance over the sky like green and pink neon dust and curtains while the songdogs wail." Skye blinked and smiled sheepishly. "But I'm kind of biased, so you probably shouldn't listen to me."

She'd drawn Thom in a little as she started to get all prosaic on him and he was smiling a little by the time she'd finished. "Now, it sounds beautiful when you put it like that..." he told her, almost able to picture it.

Skye sat back, looking up at the ceiling in a lazy, thoughtful sort of way. "It's beautiful. Really beautiful. Really lonely, but really beautiful. You need to be a special kind of person to live up there a long time, I think. I just didn't know anything else before I came down here. I don't know if I could go back and stay a long time anymore."

"'Nice place to visit, but...' yeah?" Thom asked. He could imagine being somewhere like that for a while. He was sure that he could probably get some damn good music out of it, actually, but eventually, yeah he could see how that would get to a person. "Do you ever wish you hadn't left? I mean, you said that you didn't know any better before - you ever wish that you still didn't?"

"I don't know." Skye got that thoughtful, almost far away look on her face again, and she pushed a few strands of escaping hair back behind her hair. "If I hadn't left, I wouldn't have known what I was missing. But I'm glad I came, too. I never knew how fun it was to have friends or to eat out whenever you felt like or to go to a party before. But at the same time I've also... never known what it was like to have a friend die, or how isolated you can feel just walking down a crowded hallway, either."

"Yeah," Thom agreed, his tone sounding heavy. "I - I'm sorry. I know that doesn't really mean much in the scheme of things, but..." But what else was there to say? They'd had one person in common and that person had been killed, and recently as well. No, there really wasn't anything to say that would help there.

Skye nodded. There really wasn't anything more to say about the entire thing, was there? She picked up the straw from her drink, and stirred her soda with it. "But at least you cared; I'm pretty sure the majority of the school couldn't decide whether to be sad or to have a parade."

"Yeah, but our school includes people who's reaction to the ghosts was to dress up in boiler suits and run down the corridors spraying everyone with foam..." Thom pointed out, expressing how he felt about the emotional maturity of the average MSHS student. He didn't rank them particularly highly.

Skye pursed her lips, and tried to look haughty. But she was a farm girl at heart, and any haughtiness on her part was a glaring and obvious lie. "Obviously they knew that foam would scare them away or something." And she broke down, grinned, and shook her head. Skye hadn't been particularly impressed either, but she also had two older brothers.

"Yeah, maybe," Thom agreed halfheartedly as he finished his coke and grabbed his wallet from his pocket. "Anyway, I should probably get going," he said, dropping enough cash on the table to cover both their meals - he'd enjoyed the company, after all. "I'll see you around hopefully?" he asked, as he picked up his bag.

Skye shrugged with a smile. "We go to the same school, I don't see why we shouldn't. And you're good to talk too, so I definitely won't try desperately avoid conversation with you like I do with the popular girls." She batted her eyes and managed to get a complete air-head look on her face, like the girls managed to wear all the bloody time. Luckily, she didn't have to wear that particular mask for long. "So, yeah. I'll see you around."

Thom raised an eyebrow and cuckled slightly. "The popular girls are avoiding me now, are they?" he asked, amused by that. Apparently the airheads had finally got the message. He wouldn't miss the days of them trying desperately to show him the error of his ways and convince him that he really wanted to be part of the popular crowd, honest. At least some things were looking up. "Take care of yourself, Skye," he said, before walking off.