track #6: Mirror Side #1: Constant Bullshit — Summer Walker
Mirror Side #2: Heart Cold — Toosii
"It may not have seemed like it, but moving on from Jaivon was tough for her."
"Conversations about Deidra weren't all that uncomfortable for him to have anymore."
TROUBLE.
An isolated hand left to smolder in an unexpected outbreak of fire tends to notice when the pain from the scorching and high flames becomes unbearable to manage. Most would assume that to put an end to the suffering, one must completely draw their hand away from the heat that is eating away at their crisp flesh. However, in addition: to eradicate the pain, to truly eradicate the pain, one must also put out the flames before they can continue to cause anymore damage. Before it continues feasting away at the layers of skin that are left behind. Before it spirals into what most know as trouble. Trouble. Good trouble. Bad trouble. The two, though very different, interlock in very different ways, and in those different ways they tend to spiral out of control.
"You really not with Jaivon anymore?"
Chanala's younger brother Miziah was spending the day with her and he had a million questions to ask about her precipitous split from Jaivon. Ever since moving most of her belongings out of Jaivon's home she'd been waiting to find herself a new space to settle into. When she got approved for a space in a beautiful luxury apartment building, she wasted no time making the place feel like home. She lived with Jaivon for two years. Living on her own was different. She didn't have to dress up an extra plate of food for anyone, have to hurry back to another soul at the end of a long work day, or have to wrestle for extra leg space in the bed. Living alone took on another meaning of peace and quiet. No fuss. No fight. No trouble.
"I haven't been with him for almost a month now." Chanala informed her brother. She was laid out on the cold hardwood floor, in an early stage sit-up position with her camera close to one of her eyes. Bright flashes of light passed through the lens as she snapped a series of photos of Miziah unannounced. She pulled the camera away from her eye to get a look at the digital screen projecting one of the off guard photos she captured of him, then she stood up from the floor. "Whose apartment do you think we're standin' in the middle of?" Her question was asked with loads of sarcasm and a face so twisted up, that it resembled a pair of shoelaces attempted to be tied by a kindergartner.
Chanala's mother and father didn't take the news of her split from Jaivon too well. The second Chanala introduced him to them three years ago they fell in love with him. No one in the Knights household expected the couple to end things without warning, especially after they had previously shared their plans of marriage and starting a small family together. To hear that the relationship was over was concerning. Chanala didn't give them any reasoning either. During their common Sunday night family dinner, Chanala told them in a low monotonous tone of voice that 'things didn't work out as planned.' before stuffing her mouth with thick beef and broccoli, so that it'd be hard to answer any questions. Her embarrassment wouldn't let her say much else.
It may not have seemed like it, but moving on from Jaivon was tough for her. She thought about him far too often, but she was glad that she walked out of the relationship with the rest of her poise, negative STD results, and no children that would link her to him forever. All that was left to do to get over him was bury herself in her work and alleviate her pain by filling her schedule with back to back client photo shoots, responding to emails, and gluing her eyes to her laptop and computer screen all day. From now on, she was focusing on the two M's of importance: Making her money and Minding her fucking business. She was becoming a little more selfish with her time—on occasion, of course. She was making exceptions for certain people.
"It would've been nice to know about the situation the second shit went down." Miziah continued, scratching the bridge of his nose and looking around the luxurious apartment with his eyes baring fascination. He glanced up at the perfectly painted white ceilings as Chanala glared down at her camera's display screen. Though she was painfully silent, she was obviously irritated that she was stuck in yet another conversation about someone that was supposed to be irrelevant to her. She thought she was done talking about him."Mama and pa ain't around us this time, so you can be honest now." Miziah urged. "What happen between y'all?"
"Like I told you and our parents a few weeks ago," Chanala was ready to repeat her words back to Miziah without so much as a stutter. The sentence had become rehearsed. "things didn't work out. I was never not honest about anything. That's the truth."
"So, in other words, what you really tellin' me is that I need to pull up on this nigga?" Miziah jerked his neck forward, growing aggravated by her vagueness.
"No. That's not what I'm tellin' you at all. You don't need to do anything. That situation has been dead and buried for weeks. I don't feel like talkin' about him anymore either, so next topic." Chanala reasoned. She tugged Miziah towards the setup she'd created with nothing but a navy blue sheet she found in one of her drawers from the second bedroom down the hall. She had him stand in front of it as he had been and she jerked his head up by grasping his chin. Her medium length acrylics pierced into his skin and he rolled his eyes slowly. She straightened out the collar of his jean jacket. "Bare with me for about..." she looked down at the watch hugging her wrist. "twenty more minutes and then you're free to go."
Miziah stared down at her stiffly. A dewy glaze laminated her normally tough-walled eyes. He had evidently upset her with recurrent talk of Jaivon, but he felt that it was his job to get to the bottom of what she wasn't telling him. Miziah was twenty-one years old. Three years younger than Chanala. Yet, he took on the role of 'big-brother' based on what he would call instinct. They were close growing up, and due to that, they knew each other's deepest and darkest secrets. Miziah could almost throw up from the thought of her hiding her sadness from him. She did everything that she could to make sure that he was secure and Miziah went ten times harder at doing the same for her. There was never any in between.
Miziah exhaled low enough, so she couldn't hear him."I can handle him for you if you want." he mumbled after a bit of time. "Just say the word and—"
"We're done talking about this, Miz." she paused in the midst of brushing her hand against his jacket to say. Her eyebrows were drawn in tight and her lips were pouted out sternly. "Don't talk like that around me either. You like to search and sniff your way into trouble that you don't got no kind of business being in. It's not worth it. I don't need him handled. I don't need you handlin' anything. You stay away from him. You got that?" Chanala waited for him to respond with confirmation that he understood what she was saying, but Miziah was a stubborn one. The collar that she spent her time fixing was jerked up into her hand and she yanked him down to her five feet and five inches of height with far more aggression than she intended to. "You hear what the fuck I just said? Don't go near him."
Miziah blew some air through his lips. All of that, yet he still ended up nodding his head. "Yeah, I heard you," he told her. Chanala's hard mug thawed away and her fingers defrosted from his collar. She straightened out the material around his neck once more before she sighed apologetically when he said, "I won't go near him."
"Thank you." Chanala said. One of the things Miziah disliked about his sister the most was the fact that she was good with masking all of her sadness with an instant smile, so when she pulled her lips up to grin at him, the creases in his forehead deepened. Her eyes were still slightly wet, but her smile was bright enough to distract him from the tears that almost fell from her eyes. She sniffled quickly and walked backwards until they were at a safe distance. "Twenty minutes. Move your right arm to the front of you and tilt your head to the side for me." She lifted her camera and waited for him to get into position. "Relax your face. Your shoulders." Miziah did as he was told and Chanala beamed with light. "Great, now don't move."
It was Saturday. Chanala had dedicated plans to take the entire day off, drink a half-full glass of red wine, and snuggle up on her cozy three-seater couch, rewatching old Bad Girls Club episodes all while stuffing her face with thick crust, four cheese pizza. But, photography was always and would always be at the front of her brain. Shortly after she placed her head onto the cold side of the pillow last night a creative vision hit her like a heavy-weight train. She nestled the overflow of her ideas in the black journal she kept in the drawer beside her bed and when morning time came, she called Miziah over to be her model for the day, since Trinity was busy running errands with her daughter Amore.
Chanala was passionate about a lot of things, but photography was, without a doubt, her greatest passion. She graduated from college a couple of years ago, and when she had the opportunity to open her own photography studio out in the city, she took it. Time felt like it'd gotten up on its legs and escaped her. She had been snapping pictures since she was a freshman in high school with a small refurbished camera that her father bought her for her fourteenth birthday. The unmistakable nickname, Shutterbug, that people penned for her years ago stuck with her, no matter how much progress she'd made. It didn't bother her one bit. It reminded her of how far she came.
The process to get to where she was today was a shaky one. She didn't think that she would be able to make a living as a full time photographer, but her passion overhauled her doubts and before she knew it, a buzz zapped her overnight. Her talent with a camera wheeled in clients from far and wide. The high quality pictures that she devoted all of her time to directing, capturing, and editing were accompanied by a high quality price, and it was proven that people were willing to pay that price to get behind her camera. People that fueled the same passion were eager to learn how she got to where she was. Therefore, Chanala wasn't just a mentor for herself. She served as a mentor to those who gave her the opportunity to tell her story. She was almost living the life that she mapped out for herself when she was younger. Almost.
As promised, twenty minutes passed and Chanala gave Miziah a break from the camera lights. She slumped onto the couch for the shortest second before teleporting over to her white desk housing her desktop computer. Miziah gave himself a mini tour of her apartment, checking out the size of some of the empty rooms and asking Chanala simple questions from wherever he ended up. She was about to be trapped in her explicit zone of strict concentration, and Miziah could tell when he walked back into the main room and saw her chin in the palm of her hand with her eyes glued to the computer screen.
"Champion Ortez," Miziah said. Chanala pulled her eyes from her computer screen with a supernatural quickness. She sat up tall in her seat and lifted one leg before she placed it over the other. Slow, inquisitive, she had no choice but to take a break from her work and watch Miziah study the painting that Champion gifted to her last week at Prisms. It was the only piece of art that was hanging on the wall. All of the picture frames she took from her old living space were collecting dust in some big brown boxes in the next room over. She didn't have the chance to unpack them yet—and old pictures of her and Jaivon, which she should have left behind, still needed to be obliterated and tossed. "That's the name of the man who owns that art gallery we go to. The one on Cedar." Miziah continued.
Chanala hadn't the slightest knowledge that Champion was the owner of the art gallery that she spent most of her time in. The thought was a bit embarrassing. "What else do you know about him?" she asked Miziah. The question may have come across as a stupid one to ask. Miziah was also interested in all things art and he was studying art design and education in college. Their artist minds followed down the similar road of their mother, who was a high school art teacher. Their father, a doctor, advised them to go where their hearts desired, and from young, nothing else had truly interested Chanala but finger-painting and Kodak cameras. The same went for Miziah, but he spent much more time going to art shows and gatherings than Chanala did.
"You live under a rock, or something?" Miziah insulted her just to be annoying—as his personality allowed. Chanala gasped out a sarcastic laugh. "The question is what do you know about him? What's the date on this painting? I ain't even know he was still selling art, let alone making it. Crazy. I been tryin' to cop me one of these clean mu'fuckas to hang up in my place for the longest." Miziah's savage attempt to touch the frame resulted in Chanala serving him a large bowl of critical sideye. Miziah shook his head and folded his arms, strictly observing the painting with his eyes instead. "Let me guess," he said, just as Chanala's lips parted to speak. "You're gonna' tell me that luck found you, right?"
Chanala's personal phone buzzed from her sweater pocket. She blocked out the sound of Miziah's voice for the time being and reached into her pocket. Miziah was still asking her questions of his interest, yet Chanala was concentrated on the text that she received. Suddenly feeling a jolt of warmth throughout her body, she got up from her desk seat and settled herself on the couch, sinking deep within the plush throw pillows. Miziah spent more time being hypnotized and consumed by the clean brush strokes and use of colors on the canvas. The winding sound of Chanala's nails hitting the screen came to a permanent stop only after she sent two text messages to the person on the other end of the phone.
"Is that what you think this is?" Chanala's soft-spoken voice only ever graced the space around them after an extensive period of her destined silence. Miziah didn't even notice that she had been distracted for over seven minutes, texting back and forth with a person who seemed to have a strong enough power to haul her away from her computer. "You think that this is..."
"Luck," Miziah finished her sentence with his firm belief. "If I'm rememberin' shit correctly, the closest anyone could get to his work was when we could view it in the gallery, but everything got removed a while back." Miziah had been going to the gallery far longer than her, for sure. Chanala couldn't remember seeing any of Champion's work there since she began frequenting the place with Miziah two months ago. An unprompted amount of Chanala's time was spent staring up at the painting. Her fingers hovered over her phone screen. "He ain't been hosting them art studio workshops he used to do either. Nigga must've dropped off the face of the Earth." Miziah said with a frown. "Moved to Mars, or some shit."
Chanala took a stand from the couch and stood beside Miziah. They both stared at the painting with observant eyes. Chanala fixed the small tilt of the frame with delicate hands before she spent a minute or so staring up at the painting, thinking back to the past few weeks where she had the privilege of sitting down and sharing a table at Prisms with Champion. Then, she focused on Miziah's use of the word luck. Fucking luck. It was a desolate one to her. If luck was something that Miziah claimed she had, it had a funny way of showing itself. The realization almost made her laugh, but in turn she had to bite down on her lip to keep from smiling uncomfortably.
"You wanna' know the funny thing about luck?" Chanala teased Miziah, leaning close to him and nudging his arm. "It seems that when it's already attached itself to a host, it has trouble findin' the location of other people that might need the same sprinkle of green dust at that exact moment in time." Miziah redirected most of his focus to the side of her face. Her hands were living deep in the pockets of her sweater, so she could feel the rough vibration of her phone against her fingers when the time came. "I want to believe that luck is more prevalent than I think, but I can't help but wonder if there's enough of it out there to cover more than just one person. It hasn't covered me in entirety yet," She felt a vibration travel through her fingers and grasped onto her phone to savor the feeling. "I'll let you know when it does."
"So, it's true? You really not with Deidra anymore?"
Champion was seated in his at-home art studio with his younger sister Elan, who had just gotten a cloudy update on the unfortunate split of him and Deidra. She was far too interested in the small details, and the questions that she asked were ones that she could answer for herself. On most, if not all Saturday's, Elan came over to spend the day with him so they could catch up on the good and bad things that life presented them with. It seemed like Elan wasn't as nosy as Champion thought because she failed to notice that Deidra was no longer tramping across the floorboards of his large home. Normally, Elan was skilled in finding out things on her own. This big reveal coming up in their conversation had her in a confused uproar.
"I ain't been with her for a good month now." Champion said. Though Elan was supposed to be sitting still so that Champion could draw a realistic portrait of her as she requested, she was the kind of person that had trouble keeping her movements to a minimum for more than seven minutes. She reached her hand out towards the bag of Goldfish crackers she brought with her and pulled a few out to toss into her mouth. Champion was so used to her eternal motion that he found personalized ways to work around it with the help of his memory, but as soon as she reached a hand out for her cellphone, he sent her an irritated look that had her sitting up straight and staring ahead of her as she should've been. "You ain't seen her around lately, so what you mean is it true?" he continued.
"Don't get all mean with me. You always tellin' me to stay out your business, and the one time I decide to find some business of my own, some real crazy shit go down on your side of town. You can't blame me for needing some verification 'cause I sure wasn't expectin' things between you two to end anytime soon." Elan remained still for the most part, but she wouldn't be Elan if her mouth didn't have the opportunity to chat people's ears off. "If we being real, I expected you to text me about this shit the moment things went down. What happened?"
Champion's parents were just as shocked as Elan to hear about Deidra being scribbled out the picture that was once what they thought to be a happy and stable relationship. They came to be fans of Deidra over the course of the years. Big fans. It was real disappointing that they wouldn't be seeing her around anymore, but they trusted that Champion let her go for good reasons. It didn't help much that he left them without an explanation. In a tone that exhibited distance, he said, 'Y'all won't be seeing Deidra come 'round here anymore' at a family event and everyone got to squawking like birds about someone who was supposed to be irrelevant to him. He didn't answer any of their questions. The embarrassment he felt had finally reached its final destination.
Conversations about Deidra weren't all that uncomfortable for him to have anymore. He used to find himself harboring on the thought of her far too often, but now, whenever her name was mentioned, he didn't feel anything but rampant irritation. With knowing that he left the relationship with no kids that could've linked him to her forever, negative STD results, and all that was left of the trust that he had in strong relationships, he could no longer feel sadness talking about her. All of the time he used to lavish Deidra with was redirected. The business offers he would have normally shied away from due to heavy time consumption were at the front of his to-do list. There wasn't much to do but drown himself in his work and money. He hated to say it, but he was starting to reconsider who he spent his time on. That was on occasion, of course. He was making exceptions for certain people.
"Things ain't work out." was Champion's dry response that had Elan sucking her teeth and tilting her head out of aggravation.
"See, now you know I know you, Champ. I know you real well. That's the lame ass answer you been handin' out to everyone else, but you can't do that with me. You tryna' tell me that I need to pull up on this bitch?" Elan asked.
"No. I ain't sayin' that at all. You don't need to be goin' out of your way to do anything. That's old news that don't need to be revisited. I'm not tryna' talk about her right now either. I done enough talkin' about her." Champion admitted while he tossed down the 2B pencil he was drawing with to swap it out for a 4B pencil. He stared down at the paper he was drawing on with his eyebrows touching. Elan could sense a calm storm rolling in. His face was always easy to read, so to put a hold on Elan's nagging he pulled his expression back to one of composure. "Sit still for about..." he took a quick glance down at the watch on his wrist while he spoke. "twenty more minutes and then you can do all the movin' you want."
Elan's beautiful cat-shaped eyes deteriorated in size with each ticking second. Instead of crowding another handful of goldfish into her mouth and halting all of her movement as Champion commanded, she snatched up her bottle of Snapple Peach Tea. She hadn't gotten all of her answers yet. She rocked the bottle back and forth with her lips shriveled inwards. After she tapped her hand on the bottom of the bottle to break its seal, she let out a scoff. She finally twisted the cap off and didn't stop to take a drink until she announced, "You managed to tell me everything I need to know without sayin' anything. I can beat her ass. I will. I'll handle her for you. Don't worry about it."
"We done talkin' about her, Elan." Champion paused mid-sketch to voice. His eyebrows remained pulled together angrily and the violent expression covering his face was death-dealing. "What I need you to do is stay your hype ass outta' trouble. You been in enough already. She not even worth it. Let her be the last thing you think 'bout." He reached for the large container of colored pencils sitting to the left of him, surprisingly in the mood to go the extra mile for Elan and add some color to the portrait. He found the colored pencil that replicated the color of the same deep brown skin they shared and set it to the side. "Don't let me catch ear of you goin' near her either, startin' shit you won't be able to pull yourself out of. Level the fuck out. For me, at least."
Elan ended up raising her hands in defeat and she said, "Alright. Fair. I got it. I won't go near her."
Elan was wickedly stubborn. Even though she was a few years younger than Champion, she never hesitated to travel the extra mile if that meant that she would be able to shield him from any round of pain heading his way. He always rolled through with his fists blazing and ready to swing the heads off of the people that crossed her, so twenty year old Elan had been reciprocating the same energy for as long as she could remember. However, years had gone by. While Elan noticed that her brother turned over a new leaf and became the kind of man that handled most of the good and bad situations he went through with equanimity, she knew that if and when the time came he wouldn't have second thoughts about punching someone dead in the throat over her. It was all about respect. That was something they both agreed on.
Champion took a break from drawing for the first time since they sat down and lifted up his phone. As he began tapping away at the screen, Elan fiddled with the Snapple bottle in her hands. She was ready to use his moment of minimal inattention to ask him for a very large favor. She took heed of how focused he was and could only assume that he was setting aside a bit of time to read and navigate through a couple of business emails, but Elan's heart-shaped head swiveled warily and curiosity gnawed at her fingertips when she saw that he wasn't perusing a usual lengthy email, but rather a text message. The person on the other end of the cellphone had him in an evident digital headlock.
Elan sat forward and, still, she was unsuccessful in grabbing his attention. "You know how my birthday is comin' up?" she asked him despite his silence. She wasn't too surprised that he granted her a delayed, yet attentive head nod. "I was wondering if you..." she fiddled with the silver painted cap preserving her bottle of juice before she set the bottle onto the small table beside her. "could maybe lend me an extra four hundred dollars." Elan had no idea if he would provide her with a rapid response, but she should've known that his phone had him fairly occupied. Far too occupied to even speak in a timely manner. "If you can't..." Elan continued.
"No. I got it," Champion started to provide an answer to her question before his deep voice was trailing off instinctively. His eyes held a permanent lock on his cellphone screen. He didn't have to wait more than thirty seconds for three small dots to come into view of the screen with methodical indication that the individual on the other end of the phone was presenting a response. For what seemed like two seconds, Elan finally got a glimpse of his eyes, then the mysterious individual had all of his attention whisked up once more. Elan knew what question was coming next. Throughout the reading of the text on the screen, he said, "I need a small hint at what you plan on doin' with the money though. No crazy shit, right?"
Champion and Elan grew up with money, therefore luxury was always at their fingertips. Most of the reasonable things that he, or Elan, ever wanted, their stern, hardworking parents provided it for them. They were both always grateful that they never had to struggle for anything, and Champion never put on the facade as if he did. Large homes, cars to drive to school, help paying for their college tuition, Champion and Elan had all of it. Still and all, as soon as he was able to, Champion worked hard to make sure he wouldn't have to live off of his parents' money. Since he was able to provide for himself, Elan stopped asking them for extra spending money and turned to her older brother instead. He never truly cared what she did with the funds she received. Their parents did.
"I need some professional pictures taken," Elan updated him honestly. Champion was interested. He had to look away from his cellphone for more than three seconds. "I've been wanting to book me a lil' photoshoot with this photographer I've been following on social media for years, but her appointments fill up at the refresh of a web page. It's almost like winning the lottery. If I'm lucky, she'll open up some slots before my birthday, but of course, as you know, I gotta' have the funds ready for when she do." Elan already had her hands clasped together, in the begging stage of the conversation because her brother didn't look too convinced yet. "I know four hundred probably sound like a lot, but trust me when I say this ain't some mediocre shit, Champ. It's the real deal. She's getting booked by the hottest influencers. The best photography you've probably ever seen."
Elan always had her selling pitch ready before Champion could give her a straightforward answer. All of her 'presentations' on the need for money were given within the heart of harsh jokes, but she was very serious this time. Champion said, "Best I ever seen?" accompanied by inward eyebrows, and Elan nodded her head real fast.
"The best. Her name's Chanala Knights. Please tell me that you've heard of her." Champion immediately paused mid-text and lifted his eyes away from his phone screen with a slight feverish haste at the sound of Chanala's name looping through his ears. "She's well known in the area for her photography work, so if you say you haven't heard of her before, you can consider yourself living under a fucking rock." Elan insulted him. Champion glanced back at his phone and nodded his head. "Don't artists normally know other artists?" Elan continued, sitting forward, begging for more of his attention again. "That ain't a code y'all got over in art land, or whatever? You've had to have heard of her before."
"The world don't always work that way, Elan." Champion uttered. "I'd be lucky if it did."
Elan didn't know if he was as persuaded as she needed him to be, so her hands were on her phone in seconds and her screen was displaying Chanala's main social media page, where some of the pictures she had taken over the years, lived and interacted. Elan pushed the phone at him, hoping that she hadn't lost all of his interest yet. Between her impatience and waiting for him to finish tending to whoever had enough power to pull him away from his work, she looked over at the windows that provided her with a beautiful view of the backyard. A minute passed, and Elan was startled by Champion snatching her phone from her hand. She cut her eyes at him and sat back slowly, waiting for his reaction.
While he scrolled through the pictures lighting up the screen, he picked out a few of them that he recognized from the first night Chanala presented them to him at Prisms. His attention, however, couldn't help but linger far too long on the pictures that were of her, artistically taken with her own camera. She never showed them to him. Now, he was left wondering why. Elan noticed that he stopped scrolling. She assumed that he'd reached a decent ending to her catalog, yet his gaze was a little different. More attentive, focused, stuck. Elan sat forward again, arching an eyebrow and studying his expression. "Well..." she drawled in a questioning tone. "what do you think?"
Champion handed her phone back over to her without saying a word. Elan's shoulders grew limp like cooked noodles. She had no idea what he was thinking yet. She had a feeling he purposely rendered his face clean of a readable expression, so she couldn't create her own hypothesis. After what seemed like an arbitrary space in time, Champion lifted up the brown colored pencil he'd been working with previously. Elan had been prompted so many times today and in the past to sit up straight that it was a force of habit to pull her shoulders up without having to be told.
He was back to his work, back to his thinking. Elan stared down at the portrait that he had been working on, and of course, she expected nothing less than perfection. The quick drawing looked just like her, down to the small mole above her lip and the new nose piercing that she got at a random piercing shop last week. He might've drawn her a hundred times, and each time he did, he picked up on the differences in her appearance. A change in her hair color, a new tattoo or piercing, her emotion. She never had much success in hiding anything from him. Attention. Detail. Too much attention to detail. He often stared at people too hard, drawing them up in his mind. Elan had all the portraits he drew or painted of her lining the walls of her bedroom—almost like he was drawing her at different stages of life.
She moved her eyes away from the portrait and looked up at him, glaring straight at his forehead with cautious eyes, hoping that her presentation had done enough justice. For most of the time that skipped by, it was soundless between them. The sound of Champion's colored pencil laying out color onto the drawing paper soothed Elan's nerves. It always did. It was real similar to settling a few drops of eucalyptus oil into a diffuser and waiting for the sweet, calming effect. She remained stock-still for as long as she could. Champion's phone vibrated, and he abandoned the colored pencil in his hand to glue his eyes to the screen. Luckily, he didn't abandon his ongoing conversation with Elan. Her lips extended into a large smile when he finally asked, "How much you said you needed?"