illestfated·:
It was probably insane to think how Mae Borowski was raised by such a saint like Candy and still managed to sit at the diner and gobble up pizza as if she were raised by wolves. The curly-haired girl doesn’t quite care what gets grease stains as she grabs the pizza, mumbling to herself for the thousandth time that This will never live up to Pastabilities but scarfing it down anyway. In between bites she’s shooting golden brown eyes Bea’s way, taking her Bic pen between greasy fingers and scribbling down whatever idea comes to mind, and then the golden one hits - a haunted house. But just as quickly as that idea comes, it gets shot down by Bea.
“What?” Mae slams the pen down onto her notebook’s pages and watches the taller girl try to explain everything, but she shakes her head. Then, the pen is immediately back between fingers, and Mae is scribbling little dudes and putting her friends names above them. Me, Bea, Gregg, Angus, Germ(?)… Maybe Selmers? She becomes too invested in drawing a little poetry book next to Selmers’ little stick-figure body to pay attention to whatever Bea was saying, but then her interest is piqued again when Bea mentions the Halloween store out of town.
“Okay, we can totally still do the haunted house. We’ll just use Party Barn. None of those fake paintings, they’re totally lame and we can just, like, make them ourselves. We could make a ton of these decorations ourselves. Only really need to buy a fog machine and like, make-up. I could probably get Lori Meyers to do the make-up for the haunted house, too.” Mae scribbles out everything she’s written on the page thus far, re-writing HAUNTED HOUSE and putting all of these ideas down, whether or not they get the Bea seal of approval.
bea continues to watch mae as the shorter girl scribbles and rewrites haunted house on the page, seeing how quickly the pen moves across the paper without so much as a second thought. it doesn’t bother her as much as it would have a year ago. she remembers the anger that was stacked against mae, when they sat in this very spot with angus and gregg and mae went on to say how pointless school was and how it just wasn’t her thing. bea blinks the memory away, they don’t matter now.
“okay, fine, we can make a bunch of the decorations ourselves. we can get some decent supplies from the ol’ pickaxe,” she tentatively agrees, already trying to figure out how much she would have to put aside to buy the proper construction items for whatever big scheme mae was already planning in her head. though, she didn’t have much faith that the group would be able to successfully put together anything of value.
“so, what are you thinking exactly,” bea continues cautiously, knowing that talking mae out of anything was a feat in itself but also not wanting to get the others hopes up if the party didn’t turn out exactly how she planned it. she picks up the slice again, taking another bite before wiping her hands on a napkin and pulling her cell phone out. it’s pretty old, an iphone that she got when she graduated high school but never had the chance to upgrade yet. it sucked, but at least it worked well enough to text and make phone calls (and maaaayyyybeeee get on the internet, which is what she’s trying to do now).
bea punches in the party barn’s website and begins to scroll through their online selection of halloween decorations. “are we gonna try to run the haunted house or is it a general theme? we have to think about costumes too.”
