Bad Karma

twenty

Leilani Elrod

Episode 4. Spy Games

"Just pull the drone up." John B hissed furiously. From what I could gather while shaking in JJ's arms, there was no gold on that boat.

"We- we can do another pass! Charge the battery, go back down!" Pope tried to argue. I don't care what we did. Actually, I very much do care. I want to go home and crawl into a hole.

"Guys, we've been through it three times! There's nothing here!" JJ called out them, "Let's go."

"Shut up!" Kie yelled back at him.

"What? It's true!"

"The gold could be buried, we don't know!"

"If it was there, it would've been found on the metal detector, okay?" John B steered the boat, "Somebody beat us to it."

"Or it was never there." JJ whispered to me, running his hand through my hair in an attempt to make me smile. I didn't.

"Kie, can I stay at yours tonight?" I asked her, sitting up in JJ's arms. Friends didn't do this kind of thing.

---

"So, why did you want to stay here?" Kie asked me after getting out of the shower.

I shrugged, "Can I not just want to stay the night with my best friend?" She was upside-down from my view point on the bed, my head hanging off the edge.

She grinned at me, grabbing a pillow and throwing it right at my face, "You can.. if you tell me what's going on with you and JJ."

"Friends, Kie!" I sat up quickly, crossing my arms, "He said we were friends!"

She looked at me like she was very, very confused.

She sat down next to me, "Is that, like, a bad thing? You guys are friends."

"Yeah, but he kisses the living frick out of me, and then when I ask him 'what do we do now?' he says, 'go back to being friends?' like, what?"

"Okay, do you.. not want to be friends?"

"I dunno, Kie! But how am I supposed to be friends with him when he does all that.. stuff?"

"What stuff?"

I groaned, falling back onto the bed and staring at the ceiling, "Sleeping on the hammock together, him constantly touching me, calming me down while I'm having a panic attack, cleaning my bloody nose, kissing me- basically, existing, Kie!"

"I'm just saying, bro is totally head over heels for you, babe. I'm surprised you never noticed with that thick noggin of yours."

I just blinked at her. What is she even talking about?

"Don't play dumb, Lani." She looked closer at me, furrowing her eyebrows when she realized I wasn't playing dumb, "Oh, my god. You really don't know, do you?"

"No?"

She jumped on the bed next to me, "Let me get you all done up for the movie tonight!"

"Movie?" What movie?

She flopped on her back, "Don't tell me you forgot about our monthly movie night! Come on!"

"That's tonight?"

Once a month there was a movie screening in-between the cut and Figure Eight. It was supposed to bring the two social classes together and it actually worked. Everyone just sat around, drinking Pepsie's and watching a movie. We went to every single one without fail.