The Girl(tm) finally catches up with Xavier under a highway overpass, down near one of the big interchanges where the electric cars zoom by overhead in all directions and the sunlight has the same diminished quality as the jungle floor in the Amazon rain forests. He's sitting with his back against one of the pillars, staring at the thermos in front of him with a solemn, serious expression on his pale features. His left hand is extended halfway toward it, frozen and almost forgotten, and he doesn't notice the Girl's approach. He has other, bigger things on his mind right now.
She approaches him slowly, leaving her eyes in night mode, trying hard not to make any sounds that his limited biological hearing could detect over the buzz of traffic. Even so, Xavier might have noticed her if she was colored in the outrageous electric blues and neon greens typical of her kind. But her body is a muted russet brown that blends in with the darkness and gives his distracted thoughts nothing concrete to react to. By the time he recognizes anything unusual about the lethargy that grips him and tries to muster up the will to move, he can do little more than twitch in languid stagnation. His muddy brown eyes go glassy and vague, the thermos seeming further away now than ever.
"Hello, young man," she says, stepping out of the deeper shadows and into the attenuated golden light of late afternoon. "Do you know who I am?" A flicker of irritation crosses Xavier's face, despite his exhaustion, and her eyes blaze into swirling, pulsing life as she turns her full attention on him. He wonders if they can all do that. He can't seem to bring himself to care, though. Even if he didn't feel the weight of hypnosis settling onto his blank and muzzy brain, he's more than happy to leave the Girls--and the world--to their own devices.
Even so, he feels a tugging compulsion to answer. "You're her," he says at last, his voice soft and sleepy. "Terri's Girl." He wonders if she knows he hasn't had any of the thermos's contents yet, or if she's confusing his drowsiness with drugged indifference. She probably does. There have to be sensors for that kind of thing. Just the fact that she found him speaks to a degree of acuity to both her mind and her senses that probably tells her exactly what he had for breakfast this morning, if she didn't already know just from watching him. He wonders if he should tell Terri that her Girl is spying on them, but it hardly seems to matter anymore.
"Yes," she says, coming closer to him and bringing her hypnotic gaze ever more fully to bear on his heavy-lidded eyes. "I'm Terri's Girl. She's been very worried about you lately. She thinks you need a friend." A familiar anger bubbles up inside him, but it can't gain purchase with the weight of sleep pressing down on his mind. He can see it, appreciate it, but a sheet of glass seems to separate him from actually feeling it. It's actually kind of nice, even though intellectually he knows that it's a violation of his emotional freedoms by its very nature.
"Everyone thinks I need a friend until I ask them to start acting like one," he says, bitterness seeping into his tone despite his exhaustion. "Then they're too busy or I'm too weird or, or...." He fumbles around, trying to find some way to convey the depths of his anguish, but his mind is too foggy and disjointed to properly explain it all. It's too many frustrations, too many petty cruelties, too long a history to go into with something that's not even properly human. He lets himself trail off into a soft, defeated sigh and slumps forward, acutely aware of the embarrassing bulge in his black jeans.
"I don't think Terri believes that," the Girl says, looking at him with infuriating compassion on her synthetic features. "Would you like me to tell you what she told me?" Xavier really would like anything but that, but his defiance is already fading into mellow disinterest and from there into bland, amiable acceptance. He nods, the thermos long forgotten as he stares into the Girl's swirling hypnotic eyes and lets himself open up to her story.
* * * * *
"Hi Xavi--" But it was already too late. Even before Terri had managed to fully set down her satchel, the lanky young man with the shock of floppy black hair had already slung his backpack over his back and was on his way out the same door she'd just come in through. "...er," she managed to finish, in the moments before the clunk that was just shy of a slam told her that her roommate had managed to avoid her again.
She tried to take it in stride. Of course she did. She felt certain that she couldn't have done anything to offend Xavier, or at least as certain as anyone with her particular set of neuroses could be--she did her chores promptly, she hadn't been so much as a day late with the rent in the three months since she'd answered his ad for a new roommate, and she tried as hard as she could to respect his personal space and leave him alone whenever he was in his bedroom instead of out in the living room they both shared. But, well, that amounted to perhaps a few minutes a day at best. And most of that he spent with his face buried in some manga comic or other, barely even acknowledging her presence.
Was it her appearance? Terri knew she probably looked a little bit less, well, gothy than the usual women he probably hung out with when he wasn't home; her tastes tended toward sparkly make-up and hot pink hair and clothing with rainbows decorating every conceivable surface. Not for the first time, she wondered if she should maybe try to find something a little more muted to blend in with Xavier's somber blacks and grays and browns... but changing her personal style to fit in with a guy she only just met a few months ago felt a little bit, well, stalkery. Terri wanted him to like her, not worry about her breaking into his room at night and leaving locks of her hair on his pillow.
Or maybe that was exactly the kind of thing he liked in a woman. Terri really didn't know. All her efforts to get him to open up had resulted not even in hostility so much as mute, uncomfortable silence that ended with one or both of them retreating to their respective bedrooms. It felt almost like the height of futility to try to talk to him again, but Terri had a feeling that something sensitive and sweet lay beneath that veneer of mute awkwardness. She'd caught sight of him drawing a few times, in the moments before he covered up his sketchbook quickly and stashed it in his backpack. She knew he had an artistic soul like she did if only she could get him to show it a little.
Or maybe she was just fucking lonely. Three months in Ithaca with no one to talk to but her teachers and nothing to do but study was driving her crazy. Terri knew she should be grateful that her parents were paying her way through college, right down to her living expenses, but it sometimes felt like a job might at least introduce her to some kind of social circle that wasn't already invested in the intense competition for academic praise and the daily grind, grind, grind of creative projects. Everyone at school felt so pretentious, so desperate to talk about themselves and so quick to cut others down. Maybe that was why she was so interested in Xavier.
