faithfullymckay:
Usually if you wanted to avoid all of the rest of the student population…well Faith was still a safe bet to sit beside given how much of Broadripple wasn’t exactly keen on getting a sermon outside of compulsory Sunday morning mass, but today was a particularly good day to have her in company. It had been hard for her to be herself in the last few days, so trying to smile and pretend everything was a-okay was more difficult than usual. She was able to manage a smile at Eden, who she knew wasn’t there to bother her or ask too many questions. At least nothing to purposely make her uncomfortable.
“I just hope it clears soon,” Faith shrugged, pausing to highlight what she needed from the textbook in front of her - pretending that it still had her full attention and not the prospect of that retched smell sticking around for the rest of the school year, “But I’ve stocked up on air fresheners anyway. Spring Awakening, Fresh Vanilla, Clean Cotton. You name it.” And sometimes if you used a tenth of the can it even helped. The pink highlighter paused against the page, her bottom lip getting trapped between her teeth as she thought of exactly how she wanted to answer. “Everything’s fine,” She finally decided, shooting a reassuring nod Eden’s way. It was a lie of course, everything couldn’t be fine when you were avoiding your best friend, but she didn’t want the other girl to worry.
“You’re such a smart person. I knew it’s why we kept you around,” She grinned. For a moment, Eden felt genuine relief sweep over her, glad that if anyone was going to think of tools to deal with a situation at hand, it was going to be Faith. “If you have a spare, I’ll swap you for convenience points. I don’t know how much longer I can handle Kat’s scented candles,” Eden chuckled, easily more drawn to the idea of Clean Cotton or Vanilla over some strange Fig and Obscure Plant Root option. Also, Kat and candles were a fire hazard. Eden had already banned her from using them two days into The Big Stink and steered her towards scent sticks and aerosol cans. Until Kat had caught her in the face with one, now she was down to just incense sticks.
Watching Faith’s reaction, Eden figured that was a warning sign to drop the topic. Which was fine, Eden didn’t mind, she didn’t always need to know everyone’s business. But... then again, sometimes people really wanted to talk about things, even though they said they didn’t. So she had to be considerate. Just because she thought Damian was currently the indignant father of Kat’s unborn child, didn’t mean Faith did yet, but all would come out eventually. The truth always did. “Okay,” She responded with a small shrug, fingers floating over her keyboard for a second before the next part fought its way out of her mouth, “It’s just that I get it... Sometimes your best friend does something that makes you question everything and well, it sucks... and it doesn’t always feel like it makes sense either.” She admitted, specifically talking about her own grievances with Penny right now but assuming that it might be a ballpark for where Faith stood with Damian right now. Eden may not have been included in any real source of friendship groups at the academy but she saw a lot that went on, overheard all kinds of conversations and snippets of gossip. She knew more about what was going on than she let on, so a well-educated guess told her that Faith was lying too. Everybody was.








