The Henhouse

June 9th, 2019 - 8:19 PM

It took Ella the better part of an hour to coax Artie out of his room. His painting was getting all the dedication of a magnum opus.

"I still can't tell what it is," she confessed, "but it seems really important to him. It's like it's... connected to him. You know?"

"Sure," Justin answered. He gasped as his left arm stretched across the table to grab at a few cards that had slipped out of the pack. Both forearms felt sore, but his left was much more sensitive now. It just had been sucked dry of another half-cup or so in the past hour.

"You know, I've gotten a lot taken, too." Ella offered her arm, which had developed similar callouses to his own. The sight of them made Justin's skin crawl.

And his hand clench into a fist.

"I figure it's more than a pint by now," she estimated.

"A pint?" Ivy hissed, surprised. She was sitting, legs crossed, on the couch beside them, scribbling in her black-bound notebook. But now her head shot up at the pair of them.

"What? You had more?"

Ivy frowned. "They must have taken a quart from me so far." She rubbed her right forearm, then showed both arms to the pair of them, boasting purple bruises and calluses up and down, a step up from Justin's or Ella's. She returned to journaling, less at ease than before. "And I have no idea what kind of medical assay requires more than a quarter-cup at a time," she added spitefully.

Her eyes flicked up and she frowned pointedly at Justin. He grimaced back. If the researchers suspected drugs in her system... that might be a reason for them to take more samples from her. And if she got caught, it might be grounds for them to expel her from the study altogether.

Not to mention the notifications to her parents, her school....

Justin darted his eyes away after a sudden pang of guilt hit him square in the gut. It couldn't go on... but what could he do? Say? Half his high school back home was on the stuff, after all, and he wasn't about to go all SADD on them, either.

Peter could do better, Justin figured.

But where was he?

"He's not coming," Ivy answered when asked. She didn't elaborate.

"He's been... working out," Ella supplemented. "Painstakingly. He told me he's worried that he's not doing his tests 'well enough' - because of his brace and all, I suppose. Apparently a lot of his tests have been more physical - exercises, basically... so...."

"So, what? He's doing pushups for some kind of... extra credit?"

Ella shrugged. "I guess that's the general idea. But it's getting obsessive. He's been in his room all day."

"Well, maybe that's also just how he deals with stress, or something. I mean, he is a boxer. Probably a good one-"

"One of the best," Ivy said into her notebook. Her pen slowed to a crawl.

"He won silver at the Junior World Boxing Championships last year," she elaborated.

Ella's head tilted.

"I'm guessing that's... really good?"

"If you call beating out the majority of top junior athletes from over 40 countries around the world 'good,' then... yes. It is."

"You're kidding," Justin breathed. His stature had lended well to boxing, but Peter's psyche hardly showed the inflated ego Justin would have expected from a world champion.

"And he didn't think it was relevant to bring up to us any time over the past week that he's a- a what, a world-famous athlete?"

"Well, clearly not 'famous,'" Ivy refuted. "None of us knew him before we got here. ...And no, he didn't think it was relevant."