why would you even bother telling someone your secrets before killing them

[self_composed]

By the end of Bio, the halls are full of people eager to inform Bella and everyone else within earshot that her friend is a murderer. They have entirely the wrong attitude to have formed the impression because he just now murdered someone, and also her father hasn't come looking for her yet, so this is probably nonsense.

Bella goes to gym.

Comments

[self_composed]

Bella laughs out loud.

"If you knocked someone up and hastily married her, what would you do then - what do your parents imagine you'd do? You still don't have a job, most high school girls you could inseminate don't either. Where would you live? What would you live on? How would that solve the basic problem, which is that you live in that house with those people? Plus Hilary, goddess of cake, who I apologize for tarring by association."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Maybe they'd kick me out of the house and drop a trust fund on my head," he suggests with a shrug. "Or maybe Mom thinks he would. And I'm telling Hilary you called her a goddess."

[self_composed]

"Please do," Bella invites. It's the sort of thing that might invite cake. "Do you think you'd get a trust fund? Because getting kicked out and funded thusly sounds like a pretty okay solution to several of your problems, although not the living-alone one unless you promptly alienate your shotgun wife and then she aborts. Or you like her and wish to spawn. I bet there's someone you could seduce in this school if you wanted to do that."

[edgeofyourseat]

"...Okay, back up," he says, laughing. "Are you suggesting I go screw some girl, knock her up, marry her, and then piss her off until she runs away, all so I can get out of Dodge on my dad's money? Man, you are cold."

[self_composed]

"Well, I don't think you should do this to anyone I like. I'm not particularly suggesting it at all. I'm just wondering why you don't do it. 'Without screwing up anyone else's life' wasn't a qualifier on your three wishes. Your first idea for how to go to jail was to kill somebody."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Well, one, getting this mythical chick pregnant wouldn't help anything," he says. "Except the odds that she'll marry me, I guess, but that kinda depends on her. Two, I know I'm kind of a slut, but the people I want to fuck and the people I want to fuck over are not the same people, y'know?"

[self_composed]

Bella shrugs. "Fair enough."

[edgeofyourseat]

"But if you find anybody who might wanna have a big fake relationship to go fishing in my dad's wallet, hook me up," he adds.

[self_composed]

"I'll let you know," Bella laughs.

[edgeofyourseat]

"No guarantees he'll bite, but it's worth a shot."

[self_composed]

Bella decides to write this down. (She does it in a way that would not be obvious to a typical snooper; the note reads Pinball wizard may benefit financially/residentially from romantic subterfuge.)

[edgeofyourseat]

"So what's up with the notebooks?" he asks idly. "Is it a Harriet the Spy kind of deal?"

[self_composed]

"No." Pause. "Well, not really. In brief, they're a memory aid. Humans have pretty bad memories."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Yeah, I'll give you that," he says.

[self_composed]

"So I write down things, more than most people do, but a lot of them are things ordinary people would write down if they got in the habit. Grocery lists and appointments and notes-to-self. But I also write down things I think. Because we can misremember our own thoughts, too, and then we don't know who we are. Brains are self-serving critters. Mine tries to tell me that I'm nicer and smarter than I really am. My notebooks tell me otherwise."

[edgeofyourseat]

"My brain's never bothered trying to tell me I'm nice," Alice reports sunnily.

[self_composed]

"Well," says Bella. "Would you like it if you were nice?"

[edgeofyourseat]

He gives this some thought.

"Dunno. Probably not. But if I was, then I would. I like being me."

[self_composed]

"I'd like to be nice. But I care about other things more, so I don't go very far out of my way to get that particular wish. But then, my brain tries to tell me that whatever I did instead of being nice was really nice after all - I had better motives than I did, whatever mean thing I said was an accident and I meant to say something else, it wouldn't really have been nicer to do the 'nice' thing for some reason even if I couldn't have known that ahead of time. And that's bullshit, and I do not wish to be full of bullshit - and that is something I care about more than most other things."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Oh," he says. "Huh. Yeah, I get it."

[self_composed]

Bella smiles. "So that's why the notebooks. But I've been doing this for a while, and my brain mostly gets the picture that I'm not going to let it pull anything like that, so I don't need them that much recently. Except for more ordinary notetaking."

[edgeofyourseat]

Alice smiles.

"That's pretty cool."

[self_composed]

"I compile them into searchable typed-up files, periodically," she continues. "This one's almost full and ready to be converted."

[edgeofyourseat]

"Cool," he repeats.

And almost says something else.

And doesn't.

[self_composed]

"What?" Bella asks, tilting her head.