Night Lights and Dark Places

Chapter Sixteen - Graves

He was in the middle of a game of jacks when she suddenly pushed her books off the coffee table.

"I'm so fucking sick of studying," Tolly announced.

"Your classes only just resumed, didn't they?" He asked, bemused. She groaned loudly.

"Shut uuup! I'm so tired, Jamie! I quit!" Dramatically, she flopped back and laid on the floor with her arms spread wide. "I'm dropping out. We'll join the circus."

"What do you mean 'we'?" He grinned, abandoning his game and sliding over to the coffee gable, folding his arms atop its surface. Tolly sat up, hair mussed and face drawn in genuine exhaustion. "Why don't you stop for the night? You've been very diligent in your studies; I'm sure a little break is in order."

She sighed, a smile hinting at the corners of her lips. "I guess you're right." There was a brief pause as her face turned thoughtful. "I should show you the roof."

"The roof?"

"Of the building. They're real lax about roof access, and barely anybody goes up there since most'a my neighbors are retired old people or single moms." She straightened her back, stretching. "It's a nice view. I go up there to clear my head sometimes."

"Show me, then."

"Alright. Lemme get some actual pants on, first."

With the acquisition of pants, she lead him out and up a maintenance staircase at the end of the hall.

Once out on the roof, she pointed languidly towards the hazy horizon, a tired sort of smile on her face. "See all those towers over there in the distance? That's uptown. Lot more recent, and I used to live closer to it before, uh, you know. We're on the east side now, near the lake, so everything's a lot older and shittier and costs less." Her smile turned bitter as she spoke, and she looked away from him, shoved her hands into the front pockets of her oversized jeans. The confidence with which she always seemed to carry herself gradually left her, posture deflating as if hot air and ego were the only things that had ever kept her upright. He regarded the sudden shift with a sour mix of amusement and sympathy.

It took him a moment to decide on what to look at, and as she sank into a stiff squat at the stone lip of the roof, his eyes settled on the skyline. "That makes sense."

"Yeah, but since property is so cheap down here, we got violence comin' out the ass." Her eye-roll was almost audible. Tentatively, he joined her, accidentally bumping his knees painfully against the cement lip and losing his balance in the process. She never once looked at him, and as he glanced at her through his periphery to gauge what sort of expression she may have had, he noticed that she wasn't even looking out at the glowing horizon, but at the dismal street below them. "Most people I meet down here are hard workin' and just wanna live their lives, but then you got all these punks runnin' around tryna kill each other, or outdo each other, or whatever else. Gang shit, maybe. Ridiculous."

He'd only understood perhaps half of what she said. "Ah."

Relaxing a bit, she leaned back, palms pressed to the gritty rooftop, swaying slightly. A heavy sigh left her. "At least there's history here. The oldest districts are down south near the university, and that's neat. I get to see all that on my way to campus." She paused, her pixie features contorting into something of a grimace. "Man, this city was just doomed from the start, come to think of it."

"What do you mean?"

"Like, this place has never been safe, never. Since the beginning, people've been dying constantly. I mean, yeah, people die anyway, but here, you're just as likely to die of natural causes as you are foul play or a freak accident, for real, and it's always been that way." She gestured broadly outward with an unnecessarily dramatic flourish. "The settlers didn't get along with other settlers, and those settlers didn't get along with the natives whose land they stole. That's why it's called Grafstad. It's built on death."