Library Talk

Who: Thom and Chrissy
When: Fourth Period
Where: Library

Spanish? Yeah, not today. Chrissy just wasn't in the mood to sit around pretending like she was paying attention to the pronunciation of those stupid nouns the class was learning. So she weaseled herself out of the class, telling the teacher she wasn't feeling well and wanted to go see the nurse. Of course she never made it to the nurse. Instead she took a detour and headed into the library. A little quiet would be nice. With Aaron back in town, every time Kimber found her, it was to complain about the boy. And whenever she was around Aaron, well, he was just a talker anyway. Quiet, yeah, that'd be nice.

So the library it was, heading towards the back of the room. Turning past a shelf, she saw Thom. She hadn't spent much time with the boy the last couple days. Aaron taking up a lot of her time, so she headed over, coming up behind him and running her fingers along his shoulder to get his attention. "Hi there, pretty boy." she said with a smile.

It would have been wrong to say that Thom had been avoiding Chrissy the last couple of days. He would have termed it that he was giving her some space, not seeking her out. There was a difference, to him at least. If she wanted to see him, she knew where to find him, she had his number and he was at her beck and call anyhow, wasn't he? When he felt the touch of her hand on his shoulder, he'd been ostensibly doing some homework - though mostly it'd been abandoned for the scrawl of lyrics that ran, half formed and irritatingly not quite scanning right down the margin of his notebook. He turned as she spoke and looked up at her, setting his pen down. "Chrissy," he said, giving her a small smile.

Her eyes ran across the paper, not really reading it, just noting the marginal scribblings. "Distracted?" she questioned, moving the free hand not at his shoulder to the page and tracing it down the edge of the paper. "Somehow I don't think teachers appreciate commentary in the margins." she teased, giving him a smile of her own. "I would have called you yesterday, but Aaron spent the night with me and Sammy was over and between those two arguing and playing dress-up... well, there wasn't much time." She was pretty sure the boy hadn't minded the few days reprieve from her. Getting to do his own thing and not having any Chrissy-duty as it were. "How're you?"

"Aaron?" Thom asked, raising and eyebrow. He didn't recognise that name - Sammy he knew, of course, but Aaron was new and the way she phrased it made him wonder if this was something that he was meant to be picking up on. No matter how many times it turned out not to be a test, he still couldn't shake the paranoid feeling that the next time would be.

She nodded, pulling out the chair beside him and sitting down, bag being placed on the floor as she did so. "Aaron. He used to live here before, but his parents separated and he moved away. He just got back into town. Came to live with his mom again." she told him. "Jealous?" she teased, cracking a little grin.

"Am I meant to be?" Thom asked, turning to her as she sat down, picking up his pen again in one hand and tapping it absently and lightly against the page without thinking.

She shrugged. "I dunno. I don't decide your emotions." she told him. "How does a boyfriend feel when his girlfriend tells him that she had another boy, whom he doesn't know, spending the night with her?" She raised a brow at him, but moved to the next topic. "And you never answered how you are either." she pointed out.

"I figured I should work out if I was being jealous or not before I asked that question," Thom told her, easily. "And I was wondering whether you phrased it like that on purpose - that he 'spent the night with you'."

"I simply told you what happened. He came over, stayed over, left this morning. Spent the night. I am correct in that terminology, right?" she questioned. She was partly toying with him, just to see if she could get some sort of rise out of him, even if it was a fake one.

"It depends on your use of the word 'with', as I'm sure you very well know, Chrissy," Thom told her, slightly annoyed at having to play this game. "Look, I tell you what - whatever, okay? You'll do whatever you want to do anyhow."

Chrissy frowned. He really was no fun. "Ya know, I can just go if you'd rather." she told him, reaching for her bag. "No need to stick around. Gotta get busy doing whatever I want."

"You're the one that sat down here in the first place," Thom pointed out to her, making no move to either stop her nor to encourage her to go. "Were you after anything else except to see what kind of a reaction you could get out of me about Aaron?" he asked.

"I wanted to see you. I haven't seen you in a while and I just wanted to okay? Aaron is about as gay as Elton John. I was just teasing. So yeah, maybe I wanted some type of reaction from you about him, but apparently that didn't work, now did it?" she questioned, clearly annoyed. She let her eyes pan around the room, glad it was empty around them and no one could hear their conversation.

"You got a reaction, Chrissy - this one," Thom pointed out, just as annoyed. "Don't go fishing if you don't like the results." See, this was what he'd always hated about girls like Chrissy, he knew - the kind of girl that would try and yank a guy's chain by suggesting that something could be one way just to see what they'd do. No lies involved, just - it was manipulative, was what it was and Thom had always hated that.

Chrissy sighed, let go of her bag and just sat there for a moment in the silence. "Maybe I just wanted you to be a little jealous." she muttered. "I don't know. I didn't want you pissed off. I'm sorry, okay?" Not that she really was, but she made a pretty good show of looking like she actually had something to feel bad about. Still playing him, just not noticeably.

"You wanted me to be jealous? Do you know how you're coming across? One weekend it's Gabe, the next week it's Aaron - and even if it's bullshit, do you get how you're presenting yourself? 'Jealous' isn't really the result you're getting," he added, though it wasn't said unkindly.

She could almost feel the fire in her cheeks. She wanted to slap him, call off the deal and just walk the fuck out of the library. But then part of her knew that what he was saying had a bit of merit, even if she felt it was a small bit. "I should go." she said, though she made no attempts to remove herself from the chair beside him. Her brain going back and forth between staying and going.

"If you don't want me pissed off, Chrissy, don't play me. I don't react well to it - I never have and just because... Just because of what there is between you and me doesn't mean that's going to change. You told me the other day that I should be reacting however's natural. This is natural for me. I don't do games and I know when you're playing them - you're not that good and I'm not that stupid. Have you thought anymore about what we talked about at the weekend?" he asked her.

"I just wanted for five seconds for it to matter to you what I do, that's all." she told him. And that was true. She wanted him to be jealous, because if he was jealous, well, maybe he cared just a little bit. "And which parts?" she questioned. "I've done a lot of thinking about a lot of things."

"You just don't get it, do you?" Thom said, wrinkling his brow and staring slightly. "You want what you do to matter to me? And so you put something to me that you know I can take the wrong way hoping that I'll be jealous. You have any clue how selfish that is? Not to mention that it's never going to get you what you want. Because it I had been jealous, you still would have had to tell me that Aaron was gay and no issue and then the end result would be that I would be pissed at you for playing me anyway, lowering you in my opinion. The end result would be the same, except, if it mattered to me. If this was really real? I'd be gone by now. So you want what you do to matter to me? Don't play those games - because if there comes a day when that does matter to me? You'll lose." Not that he thought that would make the damn slightest bit of difference to her. The more he knew about Chrissy, the more time he spent with her, the more he was becoming convinced she was entirely incapable of actually even attempting to see anything at all from anyone else's perspective but her own. "And which parts? What do you think - the parts where we talked about how you were unhappy. Where I offered to help you change if that's what you wanted. Those parts."

"It'd be really nice if you didn't talk about real and unreal at school. The walls have ears ya know." she said softly, but she didn't press that part any further, she'd probably bitch at him later about it when she had more opportunity to cuss the boy out for being so blatant about this being a charade. "And fine. No games. I haven't cheated on you, real or not. Just in case you were wondering, course, you don't care either way so I guess that doesn't matter." Chrissy twirled a curl around her finger and let out a sigh. "And yeah, I've done thinking about it. I just don't see how you're going to help me."

"I figured that part out on my own, Chrissy - and there's nobody else here," he pointed out, looking around the empty library. "As for how I can help you - that all depends on what you want to do, Chrissy. You want to change at all, that's got to come from you. It's not anything that anyone can give to you. It's up to you."

"Well I don't even know where to start." she told him. Changing was a hard thing to let happen. Especially when faced with the simple fact that Chrissy had always been a certain way. Doing a complete 180 from that was going to be difficult.

"Okay - start with why you're doing it," Thom suggested. "You're going to need to be really sure about that. Because it's going to be hard at times, there'll be days when reverting to type is the easy option - so, you say you want to change. Why? And where do you want to be?" he asked her, giving her his full attention and letting go of the remains of his annoyance. He was better at focusing on positive subjects - he'd always been better at that.

"I'm tired of being what the masses expect." she said simply. "They know me, how I operate. Every little thing about me. Half of them are afraid of me, the rest just hang out with me to be popular by association. I'm tired of that. I want to surprise them. Throw them off guard. Make them realize that it's possible for Chrissy Chapman to be more than they think she is." And maybe that wasn't a good enough reason for him, but that's what mattered to her. "Being a bitch is too exhausting."

"And what's 'more'?" Thom pressed. "What do you want to be? Where do you want to be? You say being a bitch is exhausting, you want to throw them off guard - so, what...? What's your goal? And is it long term, or just 'surprise' and then that's it, once that initial reaction is over." Because that's what it sounded like to him. A gimmick.

"I want to be normal." Chrissy said. "And yeah, long term. What's the point of working so damn hard to change if I'm just going to revert back? That's stupid. And you might think I'm stupid, but I'm not dumb enough to bust my ass for a change only to waste all that work. If I didn't want to change, why would I change just to go back? It'd be a lot easier just to stay a bitch, don't you think?"

"To show people that you can. To prove that you 'can' be more than they think, that it's 'possible'. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to," he pointed out. "But, okay, good - I'm glad it's long term. So, tell me what 'normal' means to you."

"Normal. Being able to come into school without having to know what everyone else has going on in their life. Being able to date someone without them assuming I'm going to sleep with them. Not having to sleep with whoever I date to keep them around. Not having to deal with the mindless chatter of people who seriously are just... stupid. I just want a different life." She sighed and let go of the curl, turning her attention towards Thom again. "When you get up in the morning, all you have to do is roll out of bed, shower, put some clothes on and show up. You don't have to worry about what everyone else will think of the way you look or if your ass looks too fat in your jeans or who you slept with the night before. I want that."

"Why do you worry about what people think of you?" Thom asked her, tilting his head to one side slightly and looking at her. It was a question that seemed important to have an answer to right now.

She shrugged. "I don't know. Just do. Always have." She didn't really know how to answer that questioned. She'd just always thought it mattered to be the pretty girl or the popular girl.

Thom frowned a little. "Give me a better answer than that. Think about it - take your time if you have to," he recommended. "But give me an actual answer. Something more than 'I don't know'. If you want, write it down. Email it to me or something. But give it some thought."

"But I don't know." she told him. "I just always felt like I had to have their approval. Like if I was going to be worth anything, everyone else had to think so. That I had to be the pretty one or the popular one to mean anything." She sighed and shrugged. "I don't know."

"And if you're suddenly not the popular one?" Thom pressed. "What then? How would that make you feel? And why?"

"I always thought it'd make me feel like I didn't matter and that was like the worst thing ever. I mean... I might be a bitch, but I matter. People pay attention to me. They think about me, good or bad, they do. But now, I just kinda want to not matter to anyone ya know. I don't even matter to myself half the time, why should I worry so much about mattering to a bunch of people that after graduation I'll probably never see again?"

"That's going to be the question you'll have to answer. And you'll have to figure out whose opinion matters to you," he told her.

"Not that many." she told him. "None maybe." she shrugged. "Not like I have many real friends anyway. They all just want a slice of the popularity pie. I could almost guarantee if I was suddenly unpopular, they'd drop me like yesterday's news."

Thom had to laugh slightly at that as he leaned back and looked at her. "You realise that what you just said makes no sense, right? I mean, I get what you mean, but... Popular is having friends. You'd have to lose the friends in the first place to not be popular, therefore if you were unpopular you would have already lost the friends you were talking about losing if you became unpopular," he pointed out.

"It does make sense. I want friends, just not the ones I have. I want real friends. And you just said I had to figure out whose opinion matters to me." she told him. "I mean that right now, no one's opinion really matters. And being popular doesn't mean having friends, it means having the right friends." she pointed out. "Not even having the right friends, just being accepted by the right people. I could hang around with a ton of chess club members, all of them being my friend, doesn't make me popular."

"We clearly have differing definitions of the word 'friends'," Thom allowed. But then again, he didn't have that many real friends either. A couple of friends and the rest were probably better defined as 'acquaintances' - Thom spent a lot of his time alone, but he liked it that way. "And different definitions of popular. If you were friends with the whole of the chess club, you'd still in popular - just not popular with the in crowd."

She nodded. "I guess you have a point." she allowed. "So where do I start? How exactly am I supposed to get from where I am now to anywhere near where I want to be?" she asked. Chrissy wanted things to be different, in some ways at least, but at the same time it was unnerving to even imagine life being something other than what it'd always been.

"I guess the place to start is by you figuring out what it is you do that you want to stop doing," Thom told her. "What makes you the bitch you don't want to be anymore, why you act like that. And why what you do is so disliked by other people. That's not something that I can tell you - that's something that I can talk through with you, but the answers need to come from you, or they won't be worth anything."

She nodded. "Guess I just have a lot of thinking to do about the whole thing then." she said with a little shrug. "Maybe later you can come over and we can talk about it some more? After I've had some time to think about it all again."

"Sure, any time," Thom agreed, easily. This part he had no trouble with - this part he wanted to encourage. If he could get her to change, to stop being the bitch, this pretense wouldn't be needed any more and yet he'd still have achieved his goals.

"I should probably go to class or something. Pretend like I pay attention. And let you get back to your lyrics... that is what you're writing down in all your margins, right?" she questioned, motioning towards the paper.

Thom's eyes dropped to the paper then back to her. "Right, since that makes such a change for me..." he joked. "And yeah, you should get to class - school and everything," he added.

"I'll see you later, then." she said, getting up and collecting her things. She brushed her fingers through his hair as she passed behind him. "Bye."