Bella goes to gym.
"No, never. Didn't even propose marriage," says Bella with a withering but amused look. "But perhaps he imagines he would have worked up to it eventually." She shrugs. "It's a small school, but not so small that I need to latch onto the first people who talked to me. Angela's great, Jessica's fine, I can live without Mike and definitely without Lauren. No idea where Eric stands but I wouldn't miss him much."
She gauges how long she has before gym starts before continuing to chat, and decides she's got leeway. "In Phoenix I hung out with the book club and sometimes a cluster of girls from my geography class, but I didn't like anyone enough to have second thoughts about moving when that was expedient."
"I couldn't get into art class; this school has different requirements from my old one, Art's pure elective, and I have to spend this semester catching up. May have room for it next year though." She shrugs. "I can get along without a vast collection of friends. It'd just be kind of depressing if I somehow wound up without any."
From across the room, Ms. Finch calls, "While we're still young, Hammond!"
Alice grins. "Hold that thought," he says, and turns to join the rest of the class.
"Before going home with someone whose primary form of recreation seems to be getting into fights? Yes, that seemed like relevant information - information that I wanted to collect under controlled circumstances. And I had a trigger I'd seen work - so to speak - one and a half times." Pause. "What, did you think I did it just to annoy you? Why would I go out of my way just to annoy someone?"
"How many of me do you think there are?" Bella asks, amused. "Enough to be worth it even now that my historical behavior is a fait accompli? For that matter, did you expect me? Would it have been productive to make any plans contingent on my future arrival?"
"If I lived in a fairy tale universe, giving my lunch to a random hobo could grant me a wish," Bella says. "I won't know if I live in a fairy tale universe until I feed all the hobos in the world, in fact, because perhaps only one is magical. That doesn't mean I should plan for it, because I would wind up being very hungry and having no time for anything else, and even if the hypothesized magic hobo is powerful enough to make all the work worth it if I find them, there might also be zero magic hobos." She makes a vague, expansive gesture. "Here I am, how surprising. That doesn't mean it makes sense to repeat otherwise-a-bad-idea behaviors that happened to pay off. Especially since I'm already here, and as you concede there are not several of me, lurking in the corners and waiting to call you names if only those names are sufficiently obvious."
"Mm, okay, lemme put it another way," he says, tilting his head back to look thoughtfully up at the ceiling. "I don't really do stuff that makes it easier or harder for people to hurt me, because sometimes I like it when people hurt me and sometimes I don't, and I don't know which one it's going to be until it happens."
"Mmm... hm." Bella closes her eyes and tilts her head back. "That doesn't mean there's no useful tweaking to be done. I might want to buy something a telemarketer is selling. I don't know whether I do or not until I listen to the sales pitch. But on average, listening to telemarketers is a waste of time, so our house number is on the do-not-call list. Meanwhile, I haven't asked my mom to stop sending me email forwards that she gets from her floaty silly friends, because while plenty of those are also wastes of time, a fair number of them are cute or interesting, enough that it's usually an okay bet to spend the time opening the message. I bet there are ways you could make it harder - or easier, for that matter - to hurt you in particular ways, that would make things better overall. There's no reason to think that the exact amount currently happening is exactly right."
Which is apparently also the pattern he expected their nascent friendship to follow.
"I don't understand the idea that one's friends all have to get along with each other," Bella says. "I can go to Angela's to paint our toenails and yours to invent - we never actually named that sport. Hm. Anyway, even if Angela wanted to avoid you that wouldn't mean I'd have to interact with only one of the pair of you."
"That did seem to be on her wishlist. She was very wistful about the whole thing. What exactly does she imagine you having a girlfriend would do that having a mere friend could not? Even a fraudulent green-card marriage with someone from the Philippines or something could occur with a mere friend. Not me, since I was born here, but you know what I mean."
"Get me the fuck out of her life?" he suggests. "Without pissing Dad off too bad? He'd flip his lid if I started seeing somebody he didn't think was 'respectable' enough. But I kinda see Mom's point, actually, I bet he'd be just fine with a shotgun wedding to a girl I met at school."
"If you knocked someone up and hastily married her, what would you do then - what do your parents imagine you'd do? You still don't have a job, most high school girls you could inseminate don't either. Where would you live? What would you live on? How would that solve the basic problem, which is that you live in that house with those people? Plus Hilary, goddess of cake, who I apologize for tarring by association."
"Please do," Bella invites. It's the sort of thing that might invite cake. "Do you think you'd get a trust fund? Because getting kicked out and funded thusly sounds like a pretty okay solution to several of your problems, although not the living-alone one unless you promptly alienate your shotgun wife and then she aborts. Or you like her and wish to spawn. I bet there's someone you could seduce in this school if you wanted to do that."
"Well, I don't think you should do this to anyone I like. I'm not particularly suggesting it at all. I'm just wondering why you don't do it. 'Without screwing up anyone else's life' wasn't a qualifier on your three wishes. Your first idea for how to go to jail was to kill somebody."
"Well, one, getting this mythical chick pregnant wouldn't help anything," he says. "Except the odds that she'll marry me, I guess, but that kinda depends on her. Two, I know I'm kind of a slut, but the people I want to fuck and the people I want to fuck over are not the same people, y'know?"
"So I write down things, more than most people do, but a lot of them are things ordinary people would write down if they got in the habit. Grocery lists and appointments and notes-to-self. But I also write down things I think. Because we can misremember our own thoughts, too, and then we don't know who we are. Brains are self-serving critters. Mine tries to tell me that I'm nicer and smarter than I really am. My notebooks tell me otherwise."
"I'd like to be nice. But I care about other things more, so I don't go very far out of my way to get that particular wish. But then, my brain tries to tell me that whatever I did instead of being nice was really nice after all - I had better motives than I did, whatever mean thing I said was an accident and I meant to say something else, it wouldn't really have been nicer to do the 'nice' thing for some reason even if I couldn't have known that ahead of time. And that's bullshit, and I do not wish to be full of bullshit - and that is something I care about more than most other things."
"I don't put anything sensitive in the ones I bring to school. They've been swiped before," Bella says, handing over her current notebook. "Plenty of it's written in a weak makeshift code of sorts anyway. You can ask if you don't understand something that sounds interesting - in general it's not specifically aimed to keep you out."
"Probably, yeah. Is this felony assault one about me, too, or are there fights going on at this school that I'm not in?"
"No, not really. I don't think most people care about the same things I care about anyway. Renée doesn't even write down grocery lists when she does the shopping. She wanders through the store and grabs what looks good and wonders why she doesn't have a red onion when she wants one the following Thursday. Charlie's pretty diligent about getting stuff he learns in investigations written down, for documentation if there's some kind of dispute later, but he doesn't extend it to any other sphere of life."
A short interval of scribbling later, with much crossing-out and gazing thoughtfully at the page and one instance of nearly nibbling on her pen but stopping himself in time, he passes the notebook back.
His handwriting is pretty terrible, but more or less readable nevertheless. All in all, it only took half the page.
At the very top are the words Because I like you, with 'like' crossed out and 'love' written in next to it. From that sentence, two arrows wiggle down the page.
One points to a scribbled-out 'because', followed by So I want you to hurt me, which is also crossed out; the final version, So I want you to have the chance to hurt me, is written below that.
The other arrow points to So I want you to know what I think, with a (/how) added next to the 'what' as an obvious afterthought.
"Because I like you's what I ended up wanting to say," he explains. "The other stuff's what it actually meant."
"What do you want me to do with the chance to hurt you?" she asks. "And don't say 'whatever you want' unless you think about it for a full sixty seconds and still mean it - that's what I'll actually do, because everyone does what they want one way or another, but that doesn't mean you have no opinion."
"But I don't really know what you're timing me doing," he says, "because I know damn well what I want. If hurting me is what you want to do, you'll do it, and if it isn't, you won't. And there's only one way to find that out. I don't think you will, but maybe I'm wrong. It makes a difference if you do or not, but not the kind of difference that changes how much I want one or the other. So if I have to sit here knowing that for a full minute before you'll buy it, then sure, I'll do that."
"It's not quite that simple," Bella says, abandoning the timer as useless for this purpose, or at least this person. "Lots of things I might want interact. As long as anything I want is more important to me than not hurting you, you might be faced with - for example - the choice of whether to be in my way or not."
Bella hums to herself, thinking of examples. Finally she says, "Imagine your dad made some asshole move that had nothing to do with you, and also really pissed me off, and also there is no evidence of it sufficient to convict or it is not technically a crime or he buys off the judge on that one. And imagine I go on an overblown crusade to bring him to justice, however oblique, however slim my chance of success, and whatever the collateral damage. I'm making this example up; it's not at all likely that I'd chase messy goals on this scale without good odds of getting what I'm after, not when there are other things to do. But suppose I did. You might be in my way or you might be helpful. And since we're imagining that my crusade is my top priority, you know what will happen if you stand in various places relative to said crusade. What would you want me to do with the power to hurt you?"
"It doesn't work very well," she says. "I demonstrated that the other day." And: "If I change clothes and don't bother to draw the curtains because there's a tree right outside my window anyway, changing clothes isn't a sex thing for me. That doesn't make it okay for some occupant of said tree to turn it into one for him."
"...Well, that's a mental image I didn't know I wanted," he says, blinking. "Anyway. It's different, though, ain't it? I mean, the guy in the tree, you're... part of that. And you don't wanna be, I mean, I'm assuming. The only person who's really part of me liking getting beat up is me. Everybody else just sees the part where I'm getting beat up."
Bella scrunches her eyes shut. "In what sense am I more part of an interaction with a Peeping Tom whose presence I might never be aware of, than Farber or someone like him is part of an interaction that involves plenty of physical contact that he's fully cognizant of? You're making up justifications. I think your brain wants to tell you that what you're doing is purely okay instead of maybe-on-balance okay. This is the part where, if you're like me, you make it admit that it's actually sketchy as all get out - and you care about something else more than about not being sketchy."
"Sorry," he says, to all appearances sincerely. "Does it change anything if the sex thing isn't why I do it? I do it because of the other thing. And because getting in fights is, y'know, fun, in a strawberry-ice-cream way. Getting off on it is just... it's not even a bonus, it's not an extra, it's just an also."
She shrugs. "Hell, the fact that I'm now pretty skeeved out by the whole thing doesn't necessarily mean I'll flee the area next time you push someone. I'm still afraid you'll get yourself killed, and I'd feel like shit if I left and then you did die or even had to go to the hospital, and my priorities are such that I'll stand there feeling like the entire situation is creepy to avoid that risk."
"I don't want you to be creeped out, though," he says. "And I can't stop getting off on getting beat up, and at this point I probably couldn't stop getting beat up even if I stopped trying, but maybe if I can explain why I don't creep myself out then I won't creep you out either. Except I guess not."
"It still seems weird. Do your parents value the driver getting to procrastinate for half an hour? Do they unaccountably believe that you will get up to nothing untoward in this context, while they're perfectly prepared to ban you from being in your own basement with me? Does the driver have a lot of other places to go and things to do in the early afternoon that cause delay? Is he spending this time doing something your parents don't know about and you haven't said anything because you don't care if you wait half an hour in the parking lot?"
Next: a hand landing on his shoulder. Just the hand, and a bit of arm, and the shoulder and a bit of neck.
Next: he pushes the hand away. No one's face is visible, only his shoulders and the two hands.
Next: he shoves the other person away, both hands on their chest; it's a man wearing an open jacket that might be denim or leather.
Next: Alice's shoulder/neck area again, this time with the other man's arm wrapped around him from behind, holding a knife to his throat. (No one in this sequential art seems to have a face. The image ends at the line of Alice's jaw.)
The placement of the knife aligns precisely with the scar under Alice's jaw, which does not exist in the picture.
Last: Alice's hands, flattened against asphalt, decorated with drips of what is presumably blood.
This sequence has taken him to the bottom of the original page, all the way down the other side, and halfway down the next one. He draws a sharp slashing line across this page, under the final image, and hands Bella her book back.
"Back in New York," he says. "Remember when I said 'got caught hooking' was making a really long story really short? Yeah." He gestures to the notebook. "There's the rest."
"Yeah. Pretty much." She pauses. "Also, since I seem to be getting misinterpreted today - I'm not defending Dave, let alone this asshole. Dave took a push and turned it into a beatdown. That's not okay either - it's worse, it's unapologetic violent escalation, not just needling somebody in a vaguely sketchy manner, and there is a definite hierarchy between those things and the first one is worse. I'm just not friends with Dave and since he doesn't care what I think there wouldn't be a point in talking to him about it."
Bella looks at the drawings again, and closes the notebook. "I'll type up this notebook's stuff worth saving today and start a new one tomorrow," she says. "Charlie doesn't pry. It's pretty secure to leave it at home without actually shredding the pages or setting them on fire. You're a decent artist."