.
"So it would seem. Have fun with clearing out all of this mess." Haley said. At the mention of hiking, she wrinkled her nose. Hiking, she was convinced, existed solely for the sporty fitness influencers on InstantGram to look down on everyone else. Literally. No, thank you. She would stay in her lane and do beauty content. "My shoes are good enough for getting to the beach and that works just fine for me." God, she wished the beach had anything else going for it. It just had the smelly pier with the fish shop and that weird poet's cabin.
"I'd give anything to be back in Zuzu City." Haley said wistfully. Starbucks coffee shops and malls and actual salons where she could get her hair done. As soon as her parents got home, Haley would be on a one way track back to the city.
Haley looked at Jay with a skeptical expression. "I doubt that." None of the people here even had Facebook. Not that she used it either, but still. She doubted if any of them had even heard of Tweeter, much less used it. They were all just boring... small town people who seemed to be happy doing boring small town stuff.
"You really ought to." She agreed with a pointed gesture to the moss covered stones and fallen branches that littered the ground. Even if it did have a kind of... quiet, overgrown ambience to it, that shouldn't exist on a walk way. Paths were for walking, not for people to stumble over logs every five feet. Glancing at the yellow flower Jay held out, Haley snorted. "Also, that's a weed. Even I know that."
.
"Thanks," Jay said, putting as much false cheer as possible into her voice. "I just know it's gonna be a hoot and a half." It was going to be a bitch. It was going to be such a bitch, and she wasn't looking forward to it at all. She snorted. "I mean, sure, I bet they're great if you're just going that far. That's nowhere, though. You're not seeing anything."
Raising an eyebrow, Jay looked at Haley and asked, "You were in Zuzu, too?" That made sense. Haley looked like she'd fit in the city. More than Jay had, at the very least. Not that Jay was super sure she fit in the valley, either, if her current failures at farming were anything to go by.
"What's the expression?" She glanced over at Haley as if she was considering before she stepped forward to push some brush out of the way. "Oh, yeah: don't just a book by their cover. There are actually a lot of interesting people around here." And weird. The people around here were weird in ways that city people just couldn't be.
Jay gave a soft laugh. "I really ought to," she agreed. "At least with a walk way." Maybe she could turn some of those stones into a little stone path. It might be nice. It's certainly be more traversable. It could make getting back and forth to town a whole lot easier than it was now. Okay, yeah, sure. She should probably get started on that pretty soon. "But it's a pretty weed," she said, her tone wheedling. She also... hadn't known it was a weed. She was gonna have to read up more on plants. She'd studied fauna, not flora.














