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why would you even bother telling someone your secrets before killing them
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By the end of Bio, the halls are full of people eager to inform Bella and everyone else within earshot that her friend is a murderer. They have entirely the wrong attitude to have formed the impression because he just now murdered someone, and also her father hasn't come looking for her yet, so this is probably nonsense.

Bella goes to gym.
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Alice is chatting amicably with Ms. Finch. If the rumours have reached him, he's showing no sign of it. When he spots Bella, he waves and abandons his conversation to head for her corner.

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"So, you're a murderer, now," she says without preamble.

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"What, seriously?" He laughs. "Wow, some people do not know a joke when they hear one."

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"Well, perhaps the original people did, but it's gone a few links down the chain since," Bella sighs.

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"Fuck it, whatever. Think your friends'll still let me come on their beach trip?"

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"If I had to guess? Jessica will gather some people who don't care - which won't include Lauren or Mike - and you'll still be invited because she wants to use my car."

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He laughs. "Nice. What's Mike's problem, anyway? He ask you out or something?"

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"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."

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With a wry, crooked grin: "So, not gonna ditch the fuckup and get all your nice, normal friends back?"

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"I would not advise you to antagonize Angela," Bella says evenly. "But I've been here less than two weeks. I'm still the new kid and I still have time to meet more people."

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"Okay," he says cheerfully.

Which is... not exactly a promise not to antagonize Angela, but might be an acknowledgment of the consequences.
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"If we can factor out the consequences of apparently-you're-a-murderer-now, is there anybody in school who'd be particularly likely to tolerate you and might get along with me?" Bella asks.

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Alice considers this.

"Dunno," he says. "I don't pay that much attention. What kinda people do you get along with?"
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"Angela's great. Jessica's fine, Eric's fine - although it's possible he has a crush on me too, and it's starting to get kind of ridiculous; do I correspond astonishingly closely to some regionally popular fetish? Mike was okay when he was just showing me how to get to classes and not coming over all creepy-possessive." She shrugs. "And you're interesting."

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."
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"Yeah, all I can tell you about that is the reason I've got a crush on you is nnnot the same as the reason anybody else does," he says, grinning. "Maybe there's somebody in Art."

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"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."

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"So I'll look for some," he says.

It's something he's never done before, which is an automatic plus.
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"Not strictly necessary - Angela continues to exist and I haven't yet met everyone in my own classes - but it would be nice of you."

She tilts her head. "What has you convinced that the etiology of your crush is different from Mike's or maybe-Eric's?"
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"Because I like you for weird reasons," he says serenely. "And 'cause if Mike liked you for the same reasons I like you, he wouldn't act like he wishes he could pee on your leg to scare off all the other dogs."

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"Well, that's a grotesque mental image," Bella remarks.

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He laughs.

"Yeah, get used to those."
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Bella rolls her eyes. "Anyway. Weird reasons? You're a mind reader now? The inner workings of the median human are transparent unto you, and your own clockwork is wound backwards?"

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Cheerfully: "You called me a freak on purpose when you knew I hate it; you told me you don't care what I want and you looked like you meant it. Those sound like normal reasons to you?"

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.
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Bella smirks to herself and does her stretches and other relatively safe exercises safe on her mat.

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And at the end of class, there he is again.

"So where were we?"
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"You were explaining how your clockwork is wound backwards, and I could earn your admiration by provoking you to see if you were a physical threat to me, and also by insisting on tailoring my persona to my preferences and not yours," Bella prompts.

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"No, you already did those," he says. "Hell if I know what you're gonna do next; that's part of the fun."

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"Could is a past tense verb too," Bella says pedantically. "Like, 'I discovered when I was small that I could get more brownies if I helped myself while they were cooling, instead of waiting for Renée to cut me one.'"

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"Okay. The way you said it made it sound kinda like you were building a list for future reference, is all."

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She shakes her head. "I only needed to do the experiment once, and I think we're clear on who's driving this thing." She gestures at her head.

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"So that's what the experiment was for? You wanted to see if I'd hurt you?"

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"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?"

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"I was kind of too busy falling in love to think about your reasons at the time," he says, smiling. "Makes sense. Not sure it worked the way you meant it to, but it makes sense."

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"Why does it bother you so much?" Bella asks. "Is it only the one word?"

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"Yeah, just that one," he says. "It's like getting punched in the gut, except I like getting punched in the gut. I dunno why. I mean, I'm not exactly gonna argue that the definition applies, y'know?"

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"Huh. Do you know when it started? I assume you weren't born with special reactions to any English word."

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"Good question," he says, thinks about it, and shrugs. "Not a clue."

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"Weird. You realize that because it's obvious, anyone who feels like metaphorically punching you in the gut can do it any time they like. Self-restraint might be worthwhile."

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"On the other hand, if it wasn't obvious, you might not have said it," he points out, "and I like that you did."

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"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?"

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"I think there's exactly one of you," he says, laughing. "And you were a complete surprise, that's the point."

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"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."

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"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."

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"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."

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"I'm falling in love with you again," he informs her, smiling crookedly.
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"How many times can one do that, really? Surely it's redundant by now," yawns Bella, smiling slightly. "Unless you've been falling back out each time when I wasn't looking."

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"Well, maybe I need a more accurate phrase. I'm falling in love with you more?" he tries.

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"This must be one heck of a deep pit, with a lot of really convenient ledges," Bella muses.

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"Pretty sure it's bottomless, actually."

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She smiles. "You're very cute when you want to be."

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"Thanks, but—" he makes a buzzer noise, as of a game show highlighting an incorrect response: ennnh. "Wasn't trying to be cute."

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She shrugs. "Then you are occasionally very cute when you aren't deliberately undermining the impression of same."

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He laughs. "Okay."

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"What are you generally trying to do? Or are you bouncing around like a pinball, occasionally meeting sharp impacts but never rolling around towards something specific?"

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Alice blinks.

"...I think that's actually the most accurate description of my life I've ever heard."
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Bella bursts out laughing.

"Well, pinball wizard, bounce off anything interesting today apart from the rumor that you're a murderer?"
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"The incredibly weird realization that I'm friends with somebody who has other friends?" he says after a moment's thought.

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"Have you historically been friends even with people who didn't? Your mom left me with the impression that you've been altogether a loner, historically."

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"I've never been, like, hey-come-back-to-my-house friends," he says. "Well, not since I was a little kid. I've hung out with people. Sometimes even the same people for a while. But, y'know, even people who don't wanna avoid me sometimes wanna hang out with people who wanna avoid me."

Which is apparently also the pattern he expected their nascent friendship to follow.
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"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."

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"Are you sure you're a high school student?" he teases. "Because you make way too much sense."

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"Here I am, enrolled in high school," Bella says. "Taking classes. Actually showing up to them, in fact. Teenagers being idiots is optional, but most people will be idiots if you give them an excuse and wedge them into low-stakes environments."

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"Oh, uh, I'm not allowed to take you into the basement anymore," he adds. "So hanging out at my place might not be the greatest idea."

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"Okay," says Bella quietly.

And, "You're allowed to come to mine if I invite you, right?"
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"Yep!"

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"Let me guess. The basement is off-limits because we might fornicate in it, but it didn't occur to anyone that my dad works until late in the evening and I spend many of my waking hours at home completely unsupervised."

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"Pretty much. Well, actually I think Mom is hoping we'll fornicate at your place."

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"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."

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"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."

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"Am I even that respectable?" Bella asks. "Lower-middle-class background, divorced parents, willing to associate with you?" She sticks out her tongue at him.

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"Police chief's daughter," he counters. "Can't shun you without looking like he has something to hide."

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Bella laughs out loud.

"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."
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"Maybe they'd kick me out of the house and drop a trust fund on my head," he suggests with a shrug. "Or maybe Mom thinks he would. And I'm telling Hilary you called her a goddess."

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"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."

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"...Okay, back up," he says, laughing. "Are you suggesting I go screw some girl, knock her up, marry her, and then piss her off until she runs away, all so I can get out of Dodge on my dad's money? Man, you are cold."

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"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."

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"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?"

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Bella shrugs. "Fair enough."

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"But if you find anybody who might wanna have a big fake relationship to go fishing in my dad's wallet, hook me up," he adds.

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"I'll let you know," Bella laughs.

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"No guarantees he'll bite, but it's worth a shot."

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Bella decides to write this down. (She does it in a way that would not be obvious to a typical snooper; the note reads Pinball wizard may benefit financially/residentially from romantic subterfuge.)

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"So what's up with the notebooks?" he asks idly. "Is it a Harriet the Spy kind of deal?"

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"No." Pause. "Well, not really. In brief, they're a memory aid. Humans have pretty bad memories."

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"Yeah, I'll give you that," he says.

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"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."

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"My brain's never bothered trying to tell me I'm nice," Alice reports sunnily.

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"Well," says Bella. "Would you like it if you were nice?"

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He gives this some thought.

"Dunno. Probably not. But if I was, then I would. I like being me."
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"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."

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"Oh," he says. "Huh. Yeah, I get it."

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Bella smiles. "So that's why the notebooks. But I've been doing this for a while, and my brain mostly gets the picture that I'm not going to let it pull anything like that, so I don't need them that much recently. Except for more ordinary notetaking."

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Alice smiles.

"That's pretty cool."
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"I compile them into searchable typed-up files, periodically," she continues. "This one's almost full and ready to be converted."

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"Cool," he repeats.

And almost says something else.

And doesn't.
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"What?" Bella asks, tilting her head.

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"I was gonna say, can I read some, but I'm pretty sure the answer's no."

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"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."

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"Okay," he says, grinning, and starts flipping through this one from the most recent page backward. "So I'm a pinball wizard now, huh? Awesome."

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"It amuses me, and thus it is so," Bella says placidly. "Makes a decent code too, although frankly so would 'Alice'."

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"Probably, yeah. Is this felony assault one about me, too, or are there fights going on at this school that I'm not in?"

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"That's also you, yes. I didn't get around to looking up whether provocation's an extenuating circumstance - and have decided not to ask Charlie, for the time being."

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Flip, flip.

"Who'd you cut off in traffic?"
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"A Jeep," says Bella.

What? That's all she knows about the other vehicle. If it had been someone she knew she would probably not have cut him off.
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"Guess I won't ask why you did it," he says, indicating the I HAVE NO EXCUSE written next to the note.

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"No excuse doesn't mean no reason. I was in a hurry. That's just not actually a good cause for cutting somebody off. Probably saved me less than thirty seconds if anything, and I could have gotten into an accident."

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He snorts and looks back down at the book.

"If I had one'a these, would you wanna read it?" he asks, not quite as nonchalantly as he meant to.
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"Probably," Bella says.

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"Well, I don't. But who knows, maybe I'll start."

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"Heh. I've never gotten anyone to start serious notetaking before," chuckles Bella.

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"Have you tried?" he wonders.

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"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."

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"Well, I don't care about pinning my thoughts down where I can see 'em," says Alice. "But I might care about pinning them down where you can see 'em."

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Bella smiles at him. "Why?" she asks.

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He thinks about it for a moment.

And a moment more, tilting his head from side to side.

And then he laughs.

"I see what you mean about the stuff you think not wanting to stay the way you thought it," he says.
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Bella bursts out laughing.

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Alice grins at her.

Cheerfully: "Maybe I should borrow your notebook."
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"I have a box of them at home. They're pennies apiece in bulk. I can bring you one tomorrow."

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"You do that," he says. "In the meantime, you still want that why?"

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"Yes please." She hands him a pen; he's still holding her notebook. "You can write it down too, if you like."

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He flips back to the most recent page, and then to a blank one after it.

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."
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She reads it.

"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."
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"Okay," he says with a bright, easy grin, "time me."

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Bella's not wearing a watch, but she has a phone. She pulls it out and watches seconds blink past. "Go," she says.

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"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."

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"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."

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"...Run that by me again," he says, "because it made no sense the first time."

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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?"

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"Oh," he says, and smiles, and shakes his head, and touches the scar that runs under the corner of his jaw. "No wonder it made no sense. Yeah, there is one person in the world who can get me to do stuff by threatening to hurt me, and you're not him."

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"Example-me isn't threatening - isn't bothering to. Example-me will go over or through you if she has to, and doesn't care because there is a higher priority." She pauses. "I would make a terrifying religious fanatic. It's probably good I'm not one."

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"So, in this example, where I stand relative to your crusade depends on whether or not I want you to win," he says, "and I still don't get the original question."

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Bella shrugs and gives up. "Okay."

She picks a new question. "Why do you like getting hurt sometimes, I wonder?"
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"...Dunno," he says. "Pretty sure I just do."

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"The way some people just like strawberry ice cream?" she inquires skeptically.

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"Kinda, yeah. What, I can't be kinky?"

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"Getting beat up by Dave Farber in the middle of the hallway in front of a couple dozen people was a sex thing?" Bella asks, frowning.

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"...Kinda, yeah," he repeats, in a slightly different tone. "I mean, there's more to it than that, but I'm pretty sure you can guess the rest."

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"Several dozen people, such as me, did not agree to be involved in your sex thing," Bella says. "Dave Farber included. Does the more that there is mitigate this glaringly obvious problem at all?"

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"Well, it wasn't a sex thing for you," he points out. "Think for a sec about reasons why I might wanna get beat up a lot at school, and then don't tell me the answer when you've got it."

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Bella obligingly does not say the answer aloud.

"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."
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"...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."

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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."

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"I don't really give a shit how sketchy I am," he says. "But I get people to beat me up all the time, and I wouldn't climb a tree outside your window to watch you change, even if I somehow found out that what you're keeping under there is as hot as a kick in the balls."

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This is completely beside her point. "And?"

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"And that kind of means they're different things, don't it? To me, anyway, apparently not to you."

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"I'm not trying to claim they're identical, or that anyone who'd do one logically would do the other," Bella says. "I was countering your attempt at justifying the one by analogy to the other."

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"...Okay, different angle," he says. "Do you feel like me getting beat up is a sex thing you don't wanna be looking at?"

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"Well, I do now. Pretty sure some modestly clever version of Dave Farber whose response to all discomfort isn't 'hit it harder' would also."

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"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."

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"'Changes anything'? That's not how I'd think about it," Bella says. "I didn't actually say all things considered, you should stop. Other reasons exist. They might well add up to a compelling enough weight to overcome nonconsensual participation in and supervision of a pseudo-sex-act by ignorant bystanders. I said it was sketchy as all get out. It still is even if, all things considered, it would be laughably imprudent for you to quit. We could imagine a magical Peeping Tom who must collect memories of unclothed women in order to save his dying children, too, but that wouldn't make it not gross."

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."
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"Change anything as in change how creeped out you are. I guess not."

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Bella shrugs again. "My creep-outed-ness is but one of many factors you get to weigh here. Probably doesn't matter much next to the other factors, especially since I'd have other reactions to consequences thereof too."

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"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."

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"There doesn't have to be a perfect answer. The universe does not care if people think there ought to be."

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"...yeah, you don't have to tell me that," he says, giving her a bit of a look.

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"Sometimes I have to remind myself."

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Alice snorts. "I don't."

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"Yes, well. We're not identical twins."

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"I noticed."

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She laughs, a little. "Do you happen to know at what point Ms. Finch will be annoyed by us hanging around in her gym?"

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"Not unless we tell her to fuck off when she comes to kick us out," says the voice of experience.

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"How long does that usually take?"

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"My ride'll probably show up first, actually."

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"Huh, that hadn't occurred to me. Is there some official reason that it doesn't appear as soon as school lets out?"

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"Is 'nobody really gives a shit if I have to wait half an hour in the parking lot' official enough for ya?"

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"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?"

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"Making sure I go home right on time every day when I don't usually go to more than three of my classes is kind of locking the barn door after the cows fuck off," he points out.

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"Yes, but who is neglecting said door, is the question. Does the driver figure it doesn't matter, or did your parents tell him to not bother?"

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"Dunno. If I had to guess, I'd say it's Theo not bothering to get out here on time and them not bothering to get on his case for it."

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"Makes sense. Should we migrate to the parking lot so we spot him when he comes in?"

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"Sure, why not."

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Bella gets up, grabs her coat, and meanders out. She's careful on the sidewalks; there could still be ice, even though it hasn't snowed for a few days.

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Alice follows her out, looking thoughtful. And not paying any particular attention to the footing.

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There is one slightly damp bench at the edge of the parking lot. Bella looks at it, and then says, "We can sit in my car."

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"Deal," says Alice, looking at the bench.

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Bella hops into the driver's seat of her nice warm car. Well, nice dry car. She turns it on to cause warmth.

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Alice tucks himself quietly into the passenger seat.

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"You look pensive," observes Bella.

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"Yep," says Alice.

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"You know what's great? How you're so consistently informative and helpful and I spend almost no time in your company uncomfortably curious," says Bella.

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"...I genuinely cannot tell if you're being sarcastic or not," says Alice.

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"Yes," says Bella. "Yes, I am being sarcastic."

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"Oh." He glances at her and smiles. "Sorry. ...This one's kind of a long story, though."

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She shrugs. "If Theo appears and interrupts you, I won't blame you for not having finished your long story, I'll just expect you to pick it up the next time we talk."

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He drums his fingers on his knee.



"...Can I borrow your notebook again?"
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She hands it over, and a pen.

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Alice flips to the same page he used previously and starts...

...drawing.
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Bella peers over his shoulder, puzzled.

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A sketchy, scribbly view of an alley - brick walls, a Dumpster. A figure walking along it who might or might not be Alice; the scribbles of hair suggest that it is.

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.
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Bella watches the sequential art unfold in silence.

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Next: the hand grabs the front of his shirt.

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.
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Bella swallows. She doesn't say anything.

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Next: Alice's lower back, his shirt and jeans both visible, the latter half falling off and bearing a slash across his hip that goes right through into the flesh underneath. A few lines of background suggest he is pressed against a flat surface.

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.
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Bella "reads" through it again.

"Someone hurt you," she says. "And you didn't want him to."

She flips back a page, forward again. "When was this?" she murmurs.
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"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."

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Bella's holding the notebook kind of tightly. "You sure you want this drawn? I told you people've stolen my notebooks, before."

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He shrugs. "Rip it out and burn it if you want. Or do whatever with it."

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"I don't have a scanner. So I can't really put it in the computer." She's still looking at the drawings. "What got you thinking about this just now?"

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Alice takes a deep breath, slowly.

Looks out the window.

Says, very quietly: "I get off on getting hurt."
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The spiral binding on the notebook is starting to dig into Bella's hand.

"I didn't mean - this isn't what I was talking about. This isn't pushing Dave into a locker."
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"Yeah, well. Apparently up here," he taps the side of his forehead, "if pushing Dave into a locker was a sex thing, then so was—that. Which explains why I got all weird about it."

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"That's not what I meant," Bella repeats.

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He shrugs.

"Okay. So what'd you mean?"
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"This creep," she points at the faceless image, "attacked you on his own, right? Dave, you pushed and you knew what was going to happen or you wouldn't have bothered pushing him."

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"And that's the difference? Whether or not I started it?"

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"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."

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"...Thanks," he says, grinning wryly. "I guess."

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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."

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"Okay," says Alice.

He glances out the window again.

"...And there's my ride."
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"See you tomorrow," Bella says. "I'll bring you your own notebook."

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"Yep. Thanks," he says, and hops out of the car to go meet Theo.