"Criminal tendencies run in the family, I guess," Mike says darkly.
"Mike, be nice," pouts Jessica. "It was for abuse!"
"Doesn't that run in families too," Lauren says; it's not really a question. "Bella, I dunno if you're sleeping with him yet, but don't have his kids, right?"
"Bella's not sleeping with Hammond!" exclaims Mike stridently. This exclamation is not less annoying for being true.
"You're not, right?" Eric asks Bella. She rolls her eyes and shakes her head.
"Grow manners," says Jessica. It's not clear to whom.
"Grow eyes," snorts Lauren. "Delaney wants to bang her worse than you do, Mike, and I read the paper too and now he's got millions of dollars."
"I do not - I haven't - you're -" sputters Mike.
Bella has no idea why these people still sit with her. All she did was plunk down next to Angela and Angela's new boyfriend Ben. She remains stoically silent.
Yeah, that seems like an adequate plan. Absent objections from Bella, he is going to descend on her table with his Tupperware of Mystery (he brought an empty one today, just to cover for tricks like this) and fill it with assorted cookies on the way.
But the ploy isn't as effective now that the conversation is about Alice.
"You sent your own dad to jail?" challenges Mike.
"What're you gonna do with three million dollars?" asks Lauren.
"Are you seeing a shrink? You should. My aunt's a shrink," Jessica says.
"Why did you wait until now to make a fuss about it?" Eric wants to know.
Nope.
He doesn't show it, though.
He ignores Jessica like she isn't even there, cocks his head at Mike, and says, "Okay, no, I'm curious. How is the fact that I sent my dad to jail a bad thing?"
"He's your dad," Mike says. "I can't believe he even put up with you, if I acted like you mine would send me to military school, and then you turned around and trumped something up for the cops."
Bella coughs. Mike doesn't even look at her.
"Is this you trying to get my shirt off? 'Cause you could've just asked," he says. "I didn't trump up shit and I've got the scars to prove it. Ever broken a bone? You hear it before you feel it, didja know that? Snap," he says, smacking the edge of the table lightly for emphasis. "Then it hurts."
"Mike, shut the hell up," snaps Bella. "Jesus."
"Don't tell me to shut up!" bristles Mike.
"You're telling an abuse victim he deserved it, you have officially thrown polite discourse out a fortieth-story window and watched it go splat -"
"Yeah, Mike," says Jessica unexpectedly. "Just - shush, okay? Go sit with Bill or somebody."
Bella splits her paper plate, dumps the cookies onto the clean bottom half to be devoured, picks up the Tupperware, and puts her hand on Alice's elbow and steers him away to another corner of the cafeteria. She bought lunch today; given that she's full enough, she can leave everything and Angela will probably get it for her if no one else does. "I do not know what is wrong with him," she murmurs. "Here." There's an empty couple of extra chairs, not associated with a table, in the corner. She sits him down.
And just like that, he still hurts but he is no longer angry about it. Mike is not his problem, even if Mike apparently wants to be.
He would kind of like to be petted, but he isn't going to ask; it seems like the kind of thing Bella might not want to be doing in the corner of the lunchroom.
She provides a thorough and concise explanation of the rules, punctuated with occasional humour of that dry sarcastic kind she seems to like so much.
"Will do," Bella agrees. She experimentally swings her racket a few times. She spends a pentagon on general athleticism so she won't be terribly exhausted by suddenly adding cardio to her day, and one on skill at racket-based sports in general after discovering that "all sports" is too general. She gets a birdie from the pile and starts tapping it up into the air, over and over. "Hee."
After class, Bella has no reason to stick around; she puts her equipment away and runs off to call her dad to come get her. (Her car should be fixed soon. If only she'd thought to magic it fixed when it first broke - sure, magic was scarcer then, but it might have taken only a square -)
[Maybe social consequences will have an effect where arguing for human decency didn't. Also it's less work. I think I've settled on soccer,] Bella continues. [The school has a team, the women's teams aren't as generally denigrated as, like, baseball ones, and we're doing it in like a week so I can "learn" it then.] She flies through the rock and down the spiral staircase. "Halloooo!"
"I'd say not," Bella says. "If you care about the process, why wouldn't you learn it the usual way? And if you care about the results, actually sewing is redundant - you can just wish clothes into existence." She gestures at her wish-jeans. She's worn no non-wish jeans since she learned she could do that.
"All the Ivies - I have preferences among them, but any I can get into this year is noticeably preferable to any that won't take me until next year if at all - and the public universities here and in Florida, since I could claim residency in either now that my mom and Phil moved to Jacksonville. And MIT, because that's good in its own right and right near Harvard. I might not send in applications for all of them; I'll have to take a second look at the requirements and the average test scores and stuff."
"It's not all about a critical mass of useful people - it's also bad to have any major useful-people gaps. If I go to Harvard and then someone from Stanford with whom I have no mutual friends makes more money than God, I'm in trouble; if I go to Yale and someone from - from the University of Tokyo invents a proprietary technology that interacts badly with magic and I have no way to get in touch with them and influence that nonmagically, then I'm also in trouble. But I can't be everywhere yet and the world is big."
"I'm starting to wonder if my car's a lost cause. They've hung onto it for a long time now; they should have had time to get whatever parts they needed. I'd fly everywhere too but eventually somebody would wonder why I didn't have a vehicle in the parking lot. If it didn't rain so much here I'd get a motorcycle. Maybe I'll do that if there's better weather where I go to college..."