Phone call. [For the writing prompt ;)]
Judy… had never really had a friend before.
In third grade she had Suzie Bumper, but Suzie had stolen her crayons and that had ended that.
In fourth and fifth grade she’d had Elijah Lucks but he’d called her a teachers pet and she’d kicked him in the knee and that had ended that.
In seventh grade she’d met a nice girl, Daria; but Daria had moved away and hadn’t called her back.
In tenth grade, a rabbit with brown fur had stopped in front of Judy’s lunch table, where she sat (eating. alone. a common occurrence.) and told her plainly that no one wanted to be friends with a rule following clingy weirdo.
So Judy stopped clinging.
By the end of school, Judy had no friends. And those who weren’t didn’t seem to mind much, anyway.
They were right. She did cling. She did find things she loved and held fast, held strong. Her laughs were too loud and her grip was too tight. She’d send twenty texts before there was a chance to respond and her thirst for Justice was a vibrant topic of constant conversation.
Judy was born to be friendless.
So when she wakes from a dream about claws and teeth (i want you to remember this…) she tosses her phone back and forth in her hands and ignores the salt dripping down her chin.
She shouldn’t call. No one liked a clinger. No one liked the animals that held too tightly, and really, she should just forget about it and talk to him in the morning. No one liked the annoying loud mouth or the chatty know-it-all. All her friends had been lost like that.
She gets up and picks up the phone and thinks that if she’s going to lose a friend tonight, she might as well get it over with, and it rings, and rings, and each ring is just another rung up this awful ladder to the ending that has to happen, because she’s Judy, and she loses friends, and that’s just who she-
“Carrots?” She swallows. Her mind goes blank. She can hear him yawn. “Judes… it’s two in the morning.”
“Sorry…” she breathes. “Sorry, I didn’t mean-”
A beat. Then: “I had a nightmare. It’s not a big deal. You go back to-”
“No, no, just…” he yawns again, and she imagines his teeth in the slatted moonlight from between the grating of the fire escape out his window. “Let me get coffee. Then tell me all about it.”
Judy Hopps thought she was born to be friendless.
Now she holds tighter. Tighter still. And when she sniffles out, “Thanks,” she means a hundred different things all at once, and all of them are the same. “Thanks, Nick.”
”No big deal.” His coffee pot gives a chortle. “Tell me all about it.”
