“Good point, and anyway, both clearly are enough to drive anyone mad. If we aren’t careful, we’re all going to start feeling like Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole.” It was a lame joke, but she was attempting to bring humor to the current situation. If she didn’t try to distract herself from the very real possibility of everyone– including Kai, who she hated lying to– learning the truth she’d tried so hard to bury for the past couple of years, she knew she’d make the mistake of turning to the very things she always turned to when she felt like this. And she didn’t want to… She was trying, struggling but trying, to turn away from those vices, break the hold that they had on her. And yet, just when she felt that she might be succeeding, The Circle blew up her whole world.
“You know, you’re right, and obviously we can pull off anything because we’re so cool, it doesn’t matter how ridiculous we look anyway,” she joked, her lips twitching with the threat of a smile. “I wasn’t thinking of it that way, but that’s so true. I hate those kinds of people, though… Mostly because I hate myself when I’m stupid enough to believe that they know what they’re talking about.” She laughed, before quieting instantly when he asked what had happened. Of course, she’d known that he hadn’t been at the dance, because she liked to think she would have known if he was because it was Kai and she’d known him for so long, but she’d been certain that the news would have been buzzing throughout the dark school. “Well… The Circle happened,” she started simply, voice lacking any real emotion. “That promise they made at Homecoming? Turns out, it wasn’t a prank after all…”
She trailed off briefly, swallowing thickly afterward. “There was a pinata and… it burst suddenly. No one questioned it at first, until we saw what was written on the wrappers. Secrets… Not everyone’s, but more than a few of them. That thing they said on Homecoming? It wasn’t a prank, after all. To make a long story short, there was a banner in the pinata, with a long, dramatic message written on it that clearly stated that the lights wouldn’t come back on until someone stepped into the light and took off their mask. Figuratively speaking, since we all wear masks every day, according to them.” She paused, wondering if Kai could hear that fear in her voice, the fear that she couldn’t swallow no matter how hard she tried. She didn’t want to say that her secret had been one of them… that she wasn’t brave enough to be the one to “step into the light”. “Anyway, that was when the power went out. All of it. So we’re all doomed until someone spills their deepest, darkest secret to the whole school.”
Kai laughed along at her Alice in Wonderland reference. That story in general always brought a strong feeling in him. Sometimes positive, sometimes negative... Thankfully that time it, at the very least, wasn’t a negative one. He wasn’t sure how convincingly he could fake laughter with all of the tension in the air. Though even though the reference to the story itself didn’t spark any unwanted feelings, Lia’s tone did. There was something in it. A tiredness perhaps... he wasn’t sure. All that he knew was that whatever was making everyone around him so tense, Lia was feeling it too.
Though he was able to put that aside, somewhat and listen to her go on about what he had said. He was about to comment further... say how yeah of course they’ll look cool in anything because they’re the two coolest people on the planet! Maybe even spring up into a fun super hero pose while he said it... but he was silenced before he even opened his mouth when he heard Lia immediately quiet down. The circle happened... Just those words hit him harder than he expected, and he tried to brace himself for what was to come.
“Oh...” He finally said after hearing her recall what happened. He sat there for a couple of moments, and all he came up with to say was ‘oh’. A couple more seconds went by, and Kai didn’t even know what he was thinking. Usually he had at last a hundred thoughts buzzing around in his head... but in that moment, his mind was blank. He wasn’t thinking anything, he wasn’t feeling anything... he knew he should have been, right? Lia just told him something... insane, and he literally had no reaction. He wasn’t even trying to suppress any negative thoughts or feelings. He wasn’t hiding behind a mask of acting like everything was okay. It was like his brain was filling his head up with fog and restricting anything from going in or out.
Finally however, he realized something crucial about Lia’s words... Just two words that she spoke changed everything ‘not everyone’s’.... which meant there was a chance Kai wasn’t in danger. How fucked up was that? After hearing something horrible... something terrifying, and he thought or felt nothing... and the first though when his brain finally let him receive any was about himself. Even though he hated himself for being so self-centered... even though he knew he shouldn’t have been thinking about himself in that moment... Even with clear guilt in his voice, he asked the question “What were the secrets?”
