Every time that Abby opened her mouth and started talking, it was like listening to nails on a chalkboard and Sora was about to the point where she was considering pulling her hair out. The only reason she hadn’t thrown a fit herself, was because she figured Alex was suffering enough and she wasn’t totally heartless. Still, when Abby decided not to go first, Sora had to physically bite back a groan. If there was one thing she absolutely did not want to do today, it was share sob stories and try to think of some bullshit way that she’d overcome it, or whatever.
And yet, despite all of that, she plastered on the brightest of smiles as she looked at the both of them. “It doesn’t matter if this is dumb, we’re still going to do it, so yeah, I’ll go first.” She shrugged, before trying to think of what she could possibly talk about.
“My mom left.” She finally blurted after what felt like an unnecessarily long time. “She abandoned me and my brother, and then my dad introduced us to a new woman and a half-brother that I never knew I had. And I was angry with pretty much everyone… Angry at my mom for leaving, my dad for cheating, and Caleb, my half-brother, for existing in the first place. But… I was looking at it the wrong way. I gained a younger brother out of it. I still had Ian and my dad, and it could have been worse.”
She was lying through her teeth, but leaving out a lot, like how Caleb and his mom didn’t even live with them but she still smiled throughout the story regardless. “So what do you get out of that, Abby?” Abby merely crossed her arms over her chest and let out a huff. Sora rolled her eyes before looking at Alex. “Alex?”
The amount of gratitude in the look he gave Sora was immeasurable. At this point, if Sora had decided to play up as well, Alex might have just put his head in his hands and given up. “That’s good,” he said through gritted teeth. The more Abby talked, or even existed, the more he wanted to throw her out of a window. Still, he had been assigned to deal with her, and he was not about to be beaten by a spoilt brat. “So you know there was a good part of it. Uh,” he paused, trying to think of something to say. “A bad thing which happened to me was I got rejected from ballet school. But it turned out good ‘cause I ended up at Luxor and made friends. Okay?”
“Why’d you get rejected?” Abby picked at her nails, looking uninterested and pretty clearly just looking for new opportunities to be venomous.
Alex sighed and plastered the fake smile right back on. “I guess I just wasn’t good enough. Alright?” He gave Sora a helpless look, biting his lip.
