A ruler on her knuckles holds a particularly appealing bite, light a tap as it is. She finds herself wishing it'd gone a bit harder. She's always had a fascination with sharp pain - the scraping of skin, the sting of hot tin on the edge of a lighter. She used to drag her knuckles hard along the rough brick of her school building's exterior - it lit her brain up in a way that was as pleasant as it was unpleasant, and it was a nice shorthand for her brain - pulled two different ways always and forever.

Julie nods, a quick and quiet shimmer of movement that shakes the hair out of her eyes before it falls back into them, and she reaches one of those scabbed up hands up to brush some of Susie's hair out of her face.

Then her face darkens when Frank and Joey come up. "Joey's layin' low with me. I don't know where the fuck Frank got off to..."

She doesn't wanna come out with her thoughts on Frank - how she's pretty sure he was gonna throw them all under the bus to get out of the whole situation. It pissed her off to think about and she didn't wanna bug Susie with it.

Flopping into Susie's bed, she kicks her sneakers off and swings the artfully torn legs of her jeans up onto the bed, resting her head back into her crossed hands, making herself at home and making eyes at Susie.

"Cushy little room. Surprised you ain't got a roomate."

She tries to change the subject.

Her shoulders loosen almost immediately as she takes in her best friend, who looks largely unscathed. Not being able to see her since she got sent to Barton has been utterly miserable. Surrounded by Stepford submissives who just want to have someone tell them what to do all the time, it makes her want to gag. But Julie is in her dorm room, looking at her with frenzied, concerned eyes and it warms her up from the inside out.

"If you keep misbehaving, I'll have to figure out a worse punishment," she teases back, lightly tapping the ruler on the back of Julie's hands as she takes a seat next to her.

"M'okay," she echoes with a similar shrug. "Cops couldn't try nothin', not with my parents right there." Quite possibly the only good thing to come out of that night and Susie doesn't want to waste time thinking about shit that never happened. "Have you talked with Frankie and Joey? Are they good?" She hasn't heard from any of her friends since her exile to the upper echelons of the city and it's been driving her stir crazy.

"Yeah, m'great." There's a mania about her, in her voice - like she can't speak fast enough for her own preferences. Julie pulls herself up by the sill of the window and the light behind her, from outside, casts her in a strange light. She pulls the mask the rest of the way off, pulling her hood down and letting the blonde shag of her hair bloom like some sort of scraggly sea-plant. She isn't great - her parents have all but told her to fuck off. She's more or less a fugitive, Joey's fucked off into the quiet somewhere and Frank... well. She sees the ruler in Susie's hand and her teeth glint in a smile from behind her lips and she puts her hands together as she moves to the side of her bed, showing her wrists and another pout. "Gonna slap me for my sins, Sister Mary Margaret?" She's riding high, Julie is. If her brain moves as fast as her anxiety, it might outrun it. She wants to breathe a sigh of relief but she can't, not yet. "You... you okay? Cops didn't... didn't try nothin' fucked did they?" She sits on the side of the bed.

There's no other word to describe Barton other than stuffy. There are so many rules and expectations that are pressed onto them that it makes Susie's skin crawl. The teachers have all been told some kind of story about her (the truth, most likely) and she sees the way they look at her like she's some feral beast.

Her mood has been worse in the last week since she still hasn't heard from Joey or Frank or Julie since that night that she was arrested. Her parents know who she had been spending time with, but she had refused to name them to the police. A small bit of loyalty to the first people in her life to accept her as is.

But it does mean laying flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling and feeling like she's about to go stir crazy. The scratching at the window makes her jump and Susie snatches a steel ruler off of her desk before she realizes who is crawling into her room.

"Julie?" she asks, her concern dissipating quickly and being replaced with a giddiness. "What are you doing here? Are you okay?"

Olivia O. of Lowertown via their instagram.//.

The mask is blank and that's why it works so good, her hair tucked up under the hood of her flannel jacket. It's nothing to climb up to her window either - second floor, yeah, sure, but as new as New Eden might be, these buildings are old and they're far from unscalable; Jules has been climbing her way into places she ought notta be for her whole life. She's sneaky too; confident in the idea she hasn't been seen. She shouldn't be doing this; it could get her in trouble, or worse, get Susie in trouble; Julie doesn't care about herself; she's already fucked - the target on her wrist makes sure of that.

But she has to know Susie is okay - if she's not, Julie's ready to make it right, not matter what making it right looks like. She taps on the window, quiet but audibly, and when the window opens she crawls in, trying to be quiet as a mouse, only partially succeeding. On her ass on the floor, she tips the mask up enough to show the pout of her mouth curling into a half-smile. "Hey." === @thedcmned

Julie isn’t in the mood of taking pictures :(

I drew them from memory hhhhhh

Olivia Osby of Lowertown on their most recent tour with Porches.//.