Ravi
Well? What do you guys think?

Lanzo
I think for the rest of the year you're gonna be known as the kid who wasted a whole night with a story about dog farts.

Amira
Sorry, that was awful. A baby got hurt, man.

Yuna
Super gross.

Thor
I didn't understand half of what you were saying.

Garland
Who cares? As long as you get all the attention, right? You can just browbeat us all into submission, all night, with your stupid vegan rhetoric and your half-assed science! Treat us all like we're fuckin' stupid, right?

Garland chucks the empty wine bottle, and it bounces on the yellow grass. He stands up and walks away.

Garland
I'm gonna take a piss.

Thor
Same.

Thor follows. Ravi looks to Aurion, afraid he'll remember the kiss. He hums to himself in thought.

Aurion
Here's the thing: you're leading the audience around on a leash. Telling them what to think, how to feel. There's a 'bad guy' and a 'good guy', but that's not realistic. I would have stuck to Perry's perspective throughout, so he becomes the central focus, instead of just gravitating to whoever you think is most sympathetic.

It's up to us if we want to relate to him or condemn him... and throughout your story, you straight damn him. Is it not understandable to you to seek joy and want to bury the consequences in your mind? To preserve comfort over reality?

Ravi
I... guess I never thought about it like that. I tried to see from his point of view, but I couldn't see myself making the same mistakes.

Aurion
You see yourself as a sort of neutral party, but you always pick a side. You should stop coloring events with your biases and tell the story more factually, without picking which facts are more important, and which side is more righteous. Truth is a web, not a thread.

Amira
Whoah.

Yuna
You got that from me, dude.

Aurion
When I grow up, I'm gonna be a famous writer. So I study, and I listen to others. Like Yuna, of course.

Ravi
Wow. I, uh, study writing too-

Aurion
And yet, you're a terrible writer. It's like guerrilla warfare, how you fixate on your 'villain' and swarm them with their own weaknesses and compromising flaws. A true writer knows that there is no 'right way', only different walks of life.

Ravi
I know, I learned a lot of this from my mother. I just thought-

Aurion
That your uncle was irredeemable? Because I actually saw a lot of myself in him. Am I irredeemable?

Ravi
...I guess not, no. You seem cool-

Aurion
Enough excuses! "You are entitled to your opinion, but you must learn to recognize it as such." That was Sir Brenfeld, in my favourite book series, King's Ruin. By a true master, Pommel Grimshaw.

Ravi waits silently for him to finish. Yuna and Amira get up and collect their things. Aurion picks up a bag of cheesy nachos, and starts chomping away at them.

Aurion
(Munching loudly.) I'll say this: you're an illustrator, who can paint a picture with words. But you're not a writer. Lucky for you, I am. Now, YOU owe me a kiss-

Ravi's eyes squint and she grits her teeth. She watches the little orange clumps in Aurion's mouth, stuck to his gold tooth and all the others, and she smells his breath. It's like bitterness and rot rolled into one.

Ravi
No offense, dude, but we have vastly different lifestyles. I'm not sure I can actually tolerate physical contact with you.

Aurion
(Hurt.) Oh, you're guarded, huh? Or is it because I'm fat, or because I'm black? You tryna make me feel BAD about myself?

Ravi
(Wincing.)
No, I just-

Amira
You agreed to play the game, Ravi! You gotta follow the rules!

Lanzo
You just moved here, and already you're gonna turn into a bully?

Ravi
I'm not-

Aurion looks like he's going to cry, but he takes a deep breath, slaps his knee, and looks down. Then he looks up again.

Aurion
How about this: every lunch period, you tell me a story until I can say for certain that you understand what I'm saying. If you don't, you have to kiss me... with tongue. Do you swear it?

Yuna, Lanzo and Amira watch. Ravi cautiously takes Aurion's hand, and shakes it.

Ravi
Deal.

The Next Day... at the Romanov Apartment.

Ravi wakes up, and gets out of bed. Or to be more precise, her folding futon. She'd always preferred it to a real bed, for some reason – the softness of a queen-sized mattress always made her feel like she was about to die. She creeps out of her room and to the bathroom, which stands next to Alice's room. As she sits on the toilet to piss, she thinks of how narrowly she'd managed to avoid living with Perry and Polina. Alice had to move away from New York, and in the process, break up with Lisa. Her girlfriend of a few months wanted someone "accessible", and living in another country wasn't what she had in mind.

Ravi washes her hands and comes out, only to find Alice standing in the kitchen. The two look incredibly similar, both somewhat thin with broad shoulders, long legs, and hips wide enough to discern a curve. Alice, however, is taller with dark red hair and brown eyes. Ravi's hair is dark at the roots, but reddish at the ends – dyed in just such a way that it almost looks natural. As for her eyes, she's seen them in the mirror: green from a distance, but actually, rings upon rings from blue to green to gold to brown in the middle. Almost like a rainbow. Thor had been the first one to point this out to her, right after he gave her the sage piece of advice: "Anyone you stare at will fall in love with you." She decided he was probably just being funny.

Alice
Hey, snap out of it.

Ravi
What?

Alice
You were in orbit, space cadet.

Alice sips her coffee and shuffles her slippers to the fridge. She opens it.

Alice
I'd wring a chicken's neck for some eggs right now.

Ravi
That seems unnecessary.

Alice
Why, you telling me there's something better in here?

Ravi
I've been making smoothies. A banana, some almond milk, frozen fruit...

Alice
How? Our twenty-dollar blender can't chop ice.

Ravi
Yeah, they're uh. Chunky.

Alice sits down at the table and flips a newspaper to the Classifieds. Ravi rummages through the fridge and finds the last mandarin orange.

Ravi
Any leads?

Alice
Not yet. We're still pissing away my dad's severance. Twenty-thousand dollars sounds like a lot, until it isn't. But it'll give us almost a year.

Ravi
What the company did was-

Alice
In the past. I had my shot. Some people make money by doing real work, and some people just pull strings.

Ravi
I guess. Do you miss your girlfriend?

Alice coughs up coffee mid-sip.

Alice
That's tough to explain. In some ways, no. In others, hell yes.

Ravi
Like...?

Alice
She's a lot of... fun. But she didn't really like me for who I am. So I spent a lot of time trying to make her like me.

Ravi
How do you know when someone likes you?

Alice
Unless you and them can communicate, you don't. There's 'signs', but they're easy to confuse. And if they lie to your face about it, there's nothing you can do except let it go and move on. Assuming you like them back.

Ravi
Why would you lie to someone who likes you?

Alice
That's kind of a complicated question for eight in the morning!

Ravi
Sorry.

Alice
We just... had more fun together than apart. Especially in-

Ravi
(Embarrassed.) Yeah, I've been your unfortunate witness.

Alice
(Laughing.) Take notes. Even if you don't meet your perfect match, it's better to have some mediocre relationships than live alone forever. And nothing brings people together like-

Ravi
Okay, stop! I have to catch the bus.

Alice
In six minutes?

Ravi
(Blushing.) I wanna be early, at the bus stop.

Alice
It's ten meters away!

Ravi
See you after school!

Alice
I was gonna say "a good story", if you care at all.

Ravi hurriedly downs a glass of orange juice, grabs her backpack, and leaves.