Coffee & cigarettes are best when shared (open)

[CADY GRANDT]

Surprising for one with an appearance such as hers, Cady could never comprehend the appeal of smoking. Of course she had tried it before, but only to sputter; gain the mental image of her lungs turning to soot and crumbling away, falling with a deflated squeal against her ribs. But right now, she wished she had one clutched between her two fingers. She would blow smoke rings around the campus, possibly attracting dirty looks or even better, admonishment, from a teacher. Then, making no attempt to stifle her amusement, she would laugh:

“Whatever you say,” and pitch the cigarette to the ground, give it a halfhearted stomp with her boot-clad foot. She would walk a few steps, only to visibly produce another from her back pocket, as well as a lighter, and light up again.

That would be pretty badass. Well, at least to all the rich snots that infested the place.

The teacher’s mouth would fall slightly ajar. Perhaps they would schedule her a meeting with the administration.

Cady sighed and walked toward a picnic table, throwing her army green satchel to the ground. In one motion, she jumped onto the bench and then climbed onto the table’s surface and lay down, her limbs sprawling off the ends. Inhaling and then releasing air slowly, Cady watched her breath appear over her; closed her eyes, and she pretended it was smoke.

Her ears were aware of the muffled noise of other students around her, some in fervent conversation. Head lolling to the right, she opened her eyes only slightly; they must have resembled half-crescent-abysses of sorts because her heavy winged eyeliner. Heh, she liked to look scary.

Was someone staring at her? Affirmative.

“Hey!” she shattered the silence she had built around her. “What are you looking at?”

She said this not maliciously, but playfully. Maybe this fellow student would be fun to mess with.

Outfit here

[WILBUR HICKS]

Wilbur glared at the annoyingly high rooftop that surrounded the courtyard. If only it wasn't just so darn TALL! He couldn't think up much of a plan for how to get himself up there to reclaim his lost paper airplane. Wilbur had never known just how hard it was thinking up plans and such. That was much more Katrina's duty. Wilbur was just expected to follow orders and follow the plans. Now that he was stuck without his plan-making mistress he'd have to figure it out all for himself.

He hated this.

Well first things first. He'd have to find a partner in crime. That was Katrina's number one rule: you always had to have a partner in crime. ALL the famous criminals and heroes and adventurers did, apparently. Besides, he'd never be able to git himself up there without a little help from somebody else.

Looking around the mostly deserted courtyard, Wilbur tried to find himself an appropriate buddy to help climb up the immensely tall wall and scamper up and over the roof to find the paper airplane. There were SEVERAL qualities this partner in crime had to exhibit. They had to be athletic and hopefully a gymnast. They had to be fun and adventurous, not gross and stodgy. And finally, they had to be tall. Yeah, tall would be the most important, especially if they wanted ANY hope of scaling the wall.

Wilbur found his perfect target lying on a picnic table, doing some weird, ceremonious smoke type thing while lying on her back. Wilbur vaguely wondered if she was one of those modern day witch type people, what with all the eye makeup and the creepy smoke thing. If so, all the better! Hopefully she'd just be able to hop on her broom and nab his plane for him.

Oh! Shoot! He'd been caught in the act of ogling his future accomplice! Dagnabbit! He had to work on his reconnaissance skills. This was just plumb embarrassing, being caught by some witch with floozy female sensibilities. Good God, he was a disgrace if there ever was one.

"Well, uh, howdy, miss." Wilbur saluted her, loud and brash. He figured it was best to just assert his intentions at this point in the game. No point in beating around the bush anymore. He marched right over, extending his hand for a good shaking. "I was just wondering, well, I was wondering - have you ever had a paper airplane?" He broke off into the question quite suddenly. "I'm not talking any paper airplane either. I'm talking about a really FANTASTIC paper airplane. One that's just perfect and could fly for miles if the wind was just right. You know what I'm talking about?"

[CADY GRANDT]

Strangled and guttural, a sound escaped Cady’s throat. She bolted upright to a sitting position as the boy extended his hand. Lines and slight muscle movements crept their way onto and around her mouth; an expression that was a mix of confusion, disbelief, and amusement.

Had she heard correctly what had just been said?

Paper airplanes. She hadn’t given a thought about airplanes, or any form of paper-folding craft, since, well since—she couldn’t remember. She assumed she had fashioned a few as a child, as many children often did-- but no prevalent memory of the sort surfaced in her mind at that moment.

She stared down at his outstretched hand, noticing what looked like traces of dirt underneath his fingernails. Fighting off a grimace, she finally spoke, matching if not exceeding the volume of her counterpart.

“Um. No. I don’t know what you mean. Because, well, I don’t think I’ve made one, or even seen one, since I was little,”

Eyes darting back and forth across the courtyard, she swallowed several times as if she could digest the lingering discomfort. Now, she’d had a fair amount of conversations with those her age, and eavesdropped on maybe ten times more. But never before had she heard, much less been asked, a question this outrageous. Maybe she was being double crossed; she had hoped to mess with him but he was one step ahead and now messing with her?

An inkling of this suspicion and she finally decided not to shake his hand. Who knew where it had been? Judging by the boy’s overall air of unkemptness, she didn’t want that question answered. Not that she was the most cleanly person herself; she didn't mind if she hair got a little greasy, a little knotted. She really had no problem with people rocking the grunge look, as it was along the lines of her own style. But she preferred to keep to herself and avoid any type of physical contact on her less... hygienic days. Plus, he wasn't a rocker or rebel type of grungy. He appeared to be more of a I-just-got-done-raising-a-barn type of grungy.

She made it clear she wasn’t going to return the gesture, glancing at his hand once again, and then up to meet his eyes. His expression looked honest enough.

And that accent. That hokey accent. It was too much.

It was a sort of thing that was so ridiculous it just had to be authentic. Peering back up to meet his gaze with a charmed grin, she decided to trust her own discernment. He seemed like a nice enough, sincere enough guy.

And he didn’t emulate the arrogant attitude she had observed much too often among most groups around Baum, around the whole entire city-- whether they’d been stoners, rich, athletic, the list went on. It was amazing how much you noticed from the outside when you weren't trapped within the circle of your own friends and their concerns and expectations. But this guy, he seemed—pleasantly strange. Like he didn't care who knew his unusual affinity for childish crafts. A little off-putting maybe, but a breath of fresh air none the less.

Cady cleared her throat, which was growing progressively drier from the cold air, and added, “You’re kind of a goofy kid, aren’t you? But I guess I can deal with goofy, because now you got me hooked. Where does a question like that come from?”

Sweeping her legs from beneath her, she jumped down from the table, landing awfully close and almost stumbling into her classmate. Eyes widening from her display of clumsiness, she shuffled back a few steps, forcing a somewhat choked laughter.

[WILBUR HICKS]

Wilbur was more than delighted to find that this girl was so far meeting two of his three requirements. She was tall as all get out and she wasn't giving him the stink eye. That last part was what was most surprising and important. Most of the girls at the darned school thought so much of themselves. They thought they were all important little queens in training cuz' they'd gotten into some prestigious school in the city, and on account of that they couldn't even spare a second o' their time trying to get a paper plane or climb a tree. It was disgusting, that's what it was. Girls and some guys even thinking they were too good for a little fun every once in a while. It was one of the things that Wilbur positively HATED about the school. It was just too hard to find anyone nowadays who he could hang out in a tree with.

When his handshake was clearly forsaken, Wilbur swished it upward, running it through his greasy hair like that had been his plan all along. If she didn't want to be polite then that was no skin off his back. In fact, that had the potential to make him like her even a bit more! Maybe she was the kind of girl that didn't believe in being formal or nothin'! Gee, that'd be just swell. Wilbur hadn't come across too many lady folks in the city that didn't care for rules or formalities. He'd been starting to think that they were an endangered species, but here one was, in the flesh!

Today was turning out to be a rather swell day after all!

Wilbur positively beamed at the fact that he was referred to as a 'slightly goofy kid'. He couldn't think of a better compliment in the world! It was the worst when people said they considered him 'nice' or 'cool'. He didn't care about none a those things. He figured that made him too much like the boring crowd. Goofy was just about the best word ever. It separated him from anything the beautiful freaks could ever aspire to be.

Hands firmly planted on his hips, Wilbur hardy cared whether his new found wall-scaling accomplice was two yards or two inches from his face. He happily rambled on about his paper airplane regardless of her shuffling back and forth.

"Well, ma'am, you don't mind if I call you ma'am, do ya'? Anyway, the reason I ask is because I've made JUST such a perfect plane quite recently. Gosh, ya shoulda' seen her. She was a beauty. Anyway, by some cruel twist of fate, I was tossin' her back and forth, just as one ought' ta' with such a work a' art, cuz' ya' gotta' properly utilize 'em ya know, 'else they just go to waste, and outta' NOWHERE comes this beast of a gust, and it blew ma beauty up onto the roof." Wilbur nodded seriously as he turned and pointed up onto the slick slanted rooftop just to where he was SURE his airplane rested, just out of sight. "I was wonderin', well, would ya mind lendin' a hand to get her back? I'd be eternally grateful, I swear. I just, well, obviously I can't get it on my own, but I figured that if someone else were to help out we'd be able to send one of us up on the other's shoulders and retrieve it!" Wilbur broke off into a huge grin, smiling at her, POSITIVE that she'd agree.

[CADY GRANDT]

Cady hadn’t even steadied herself and the boy was already jabbering away at 100 words per minute. He had grown a triumphant and altogether silly smirk as soon as she had called him goofy, which was a curious thing; she had almost hoped to insult him. But it was becoming more and more clear this boy was his own, special breed. He was either oblivious or indifferent, most likely a combination of both. Naturally, she had to help him out because he clearly had a proper motivation—

Wait. There was a problem here. Cady didn’t exactly do “favors”.

Favors had actually been the blight of her childhood, the reason she found that she could never do anything quite right, or helpful. Most of the time, when she tried to show compassion or gave a helping hand, it backfired. She messed up, she broke something. She didn’t know what she was doing, and angered the person she had tried to help. Several memories of living back at home in Minnesota stung her gut; when she was 8 she had broken some china plates while attempting to put them away, after noticing they were sitting clean in the dishwasher. Her mother, a native house wife and sentimentalist, had gone berserk. She remembered being 10 years old, and proudly presenting a home cooked meal to a cantankerous and paranoid veteran in her neighborhood, only to be accused of poisoning it, called a “sneaky, devious, little bitch” and having it splattered across the front of her shirt. On second thought, that probably wasn’t the best idea, but she’d only wanted to try and cheer him up. Her intentions had always been benevolent. At 13 she had been accused of stealing when she was simply trying to rearrange items that hadn’t been properly displayed in a grocery store. By age 15, she had been taken down to the police station, accused of kidnapping, because she had been trying to help a sobbing toddler find his mother. Turns out, she had misheard the child and accidentally taken him from his front yard. But she definitely hadn't been trying to kidnap him. It was absurd.That memory was particularly painful to remember; to relive the faces of her parents and what her mother had said to her after she’d been cleared and picked up from the station.

“Are you okay, Cady?” her mother had said, uneasily. “Are you sure you weren’t really trying to keep that child? I know you don’t have many friends or companions around here, and loneliness can do pretty scary things to the brain—”

The more she recalled, the more ironic it became. Upon entering her teenager years, her mother had repeatedly called her “troubled”, but it was exactly the opposite, at least in Cady’s opinion. Often the root of the trouble stemmed from a charitable drive. Ugh. She had to stop thinking about all of that. Besides, this was just a paper airplane. And she was new Cady here, Cady who only looked out for herself, Cady who didn’t care if she got in trouble.

That cute little hick accent snapped her back to the present. He’d just offered to call her ma’am. Maybe that’s how they talked in Cornflower Town or whenever he came from, but she definitely couldn’t help him out if she was doubled over in laughter every time he referred to her.

“I’m not an old woman,” she snorted, however good- naturedly, “So you can just call me Cady.”

Hoping she wouldn’t regret this, she sighed softly and crossed her arms.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. Sounds pretty important to you. I’ll help you get it back. It’s not like I haven’t scaled some walls and shit in my day, anyway,” she offered circumspectly but with a glint in her eye.
This could be fun, after all. She just wouldn't think of it as a favor, but more so as a little stunt to turn some heads. Like chain smoking around campus, except without the whole blackening lung deal. Yeah.

“Okay, so, what do you need me to do?”