Author: pandion | When Robin arrives on Sunday, Andi is in the front yard on a lawn chair, knotting a friendship bracelet safety-pinned to the knee of her jeans in robin's-egg blue and two shades of pink. |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin waves. |
Author: pandion | "Hi, Robin!" says Andi. She detaches the bracelet-in-progress and stashes it in a little bag, then hops up out of her chair. |
Author: hold_infinity | "How's it going?" she asks, hauling her guitar in its case toward the front door. |
Author: pandion | "Going pretty good." Andi holds the door for her. "Got all my homework done early, I love having all my homework already done on Sunday. You?" |
Author: hold_infinity | "Homework?" she says innocently. "What homework?" |
Author: pandion | "Not a schooly person?" |
Author: hold_infinity | "Not so much. Ethan's helping me cheat," she says cheerfully. |
Author: pandion | "Whatever, I'm not judgy," shrugs Andi. "...But I spend so much time around Bella that I kinda have a Shoulder Bella like cartoon characters have a Shoulder Angel and my Shoulder Bella wants to make sure you don't do it in a way that gets anybody else in trouble." |
Author: hold_infinity | "Nah." |
Author: pandion | "Shoulder Bella is satisfied." Andi pats where a three-inch Shoulder Bella's head might be, gently, and says, "Is the living room a good guitar habitat? Bella's having an Introverted Day. Or at least an Introverted Morning, sometimes she perks up around lunch." |
Author: hold_infinity | "I don't see why not," says Robin. |
Author: pandion | Flop! The sofa now contains and Andi. She waves a hand with mock imperiousness. "Music!" she says. |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin laughs. She puts down her guitar case and extracts a somewhat battered-looking acoustic guitar.
"All right, what're you in the mood for?" |
Author: pandion | "I dunno what my choices are! What's your favorite?" |
Author: hold_infinity | She laughs. "Depends what mood I'm in! Here, I'll play you something fun."
She grabs a chair, sits down, and plays.
It turns out that Robin is a really good singer. Not bad at writing music, either. And her lyrics are adorable - it's a song about sweet things, and you can almost taste the chocolate. |
Author: pandion | "Now I'm hungry," laughs Andi. "I like that song!" |
Author: hold_infinity | "Me too," says Robin, grinning. |
Author: pandion | "Has it got a title?" |
Author: hold_infinity | "Nah, I'm shit at those," she says. "I just have it written down as 'Sweets'." |
Author: pandion | "Speaking of which wow I really want chocolate like right now, how do you feel about muffins, we could make muffins. I have this recipe with yogurt in it, it's good." |
Author: hold_infinity | "I feel great about muffins!" |
Author: pandion | "Awesome!" Off goes Andi to the kitchen. "Mom would make us wait till after lunch to eat them but she's off at - I forget what it is this week. Bella!" she hollers at the ceiling. "Remind me where Mom is!" |
Author: instar | "Book club, then ceramics class," Bella's voice replies faintly, "we might wind up meeting her at the Mexican place for dinner with her ceramics friends." |
Author: hold_infinity | "Your mum does ceramics?" |
Author: pandion | "Apparently," shrugs Andi. "She signs up for all kinds of things. If Bella says she has ceramics friends she's probably been doing it for a while, I don't really keep close track, it could just as easily have been origami or some nature hike group or an exciting new religion." |
Author: hold_infinity | "Well, that sounds fun and exciting." |
Author: pandion | "Occasionally one or the other of us will go with her to something," shrugs Andi. "Probably we got invited to ceramics a month ago and I just forgot." |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin giggles. "Did you go? You remember that much, right?" |
Author: pandion | "No, I didn't go," chuckles Andi, finding the muffin recipe card and starting to collect ingredients. "I went to her class on hand-bookbinding, in, um, May, I think that was the last thing I tagged along to." |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin puts her guitar away and hovers nearby.
"Did you bind any books?" |
Author: pandion | "Yeah. Little blank ones. Not enough pages in them for Bella to even want them for notebooks. We put them in the 'random arts and crafts to give away at Christmas' box." |
Author: hold_infinity | "There's a box for that?" |
Author: pandion | "Yeah. I guess it'll be full of little clay pots, soon. D'you wanna melt the butter?" Andi asks, gesturing at the freezer where butter may be found while she measures sugar into the mixer. |
Author: hold_infinity | "All right," says Robin. "What do I do?"
She manages to get the butter out of the freezer all by herself, at least. |
Author: pandion | "Just microwave it - there's bowls." There are bowls, a mismatched assortment of them, where she gestures. "Don't let it explode, stir it around every once in a while - you don't cook at all, huh?" |
Author: hold_infinity | "I don't cook a lot," says Robin. She picks a bowl, and checks the requisite amount of butter, and puts it in the bowl, and puts the bowl in the microwave. |
Author: pandion | "I cook more than Bella but Mom does most of it. At Dad's we take over, he's terrible, he lives on canned soup and sandwiches when we're not there." |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin snorts. "Sounds terrifying." |
Author: pandion | "He can, actually, cook fish, otherwise his house would just be this giant pile of fish with some beams and plaster in it, he goes fishing a lot. But you can't have fish all the time." She takes the butter out of the microwave, observes it to be mostly melted, calls it good, and starts mixing it with the sugar. She measures salt. |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin laughs. "Can't you?" |
Author: pandion | "Well, you'd probably, I don't know, get - scurvy? Or something?" |
Author: hold_infinity | "Lemon," says Robin. |
Author: pandion | "Okay, he does put lemon on the fish some of the time, but still, I bet you can get something if you just eat fish." |
Author: hold_infinity | "Probably," she concedes. |
Author: pandion | Andi cracks eggs, and spoons yogurt - "You wanna stir up the dry ingredients?" |
Author: hold_infinity | "I can do that!"
She does that. |
Author: pandion | Presently the two sorts of ingredients, plus a hefty scoop of chocolate chips, are combined. Andi remembers to turn the oven on. She tucks muffin papers into a muffin tin. "Soon we will have delicious muffins." |
Author: hold_infinity | "Best kind," Robin asserts. |
Author: pandion | "All other kinds of muffins are inferior. Delicious ones are the Muffin Master Race." |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin scrunches up her face and splutters. "I feel like I shouldn't be laughing," she giggles. |
Author: pandion | "Yeah, that was kind of tasteless. Just like Inferior Muffins." |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin sporfles. |
Author: pandion | "Into the - nah, I shouldn't," says Andi, smirking slightly as she puts the muffin batter, now divided into its cups, into the oven. |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin covers her face and groans. "Enough, no more, no joking about muffin genocide," she says. |
Author: pandion | "I wasn't gonna finish the joke!" |
Author: hold_infinity | "You started the joke. The joke was made," says Robin. |
Author: pandion | "Sorry." |
Author: hold_infinity | "It's all right." |
Author: pandion | "I don't wake up in the morning and say 'I think I will make offensive jokes today', I just keep riffing on anything I do start with." She sets the oven timer and puts the recipe card away. |
Author: hold_infinity | "Yeah," says Robin. "I'm not blaming you or anything, it's just not something I want to be laughing at, you know?" |
Author: pandion | "Yeah, I get it." She flops back onto the couch. "What other songs have you written?" |
Author: hold_infinity | "Tons, want to hear some more?"
She gets out her guitar again. |
Author: pandion | "Yeah!" |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin plays some more.
Her songs are all over the map. Some fun and cheerful, some melancholy, some angry, some just beautiful. |
Author: pandion | Andi listens happily, clapping at each song, singing along in places when she can learn the chorus well enough to do so - she has an untrained, serviceable voice - and then she goes and gets the muffins out. She wipes the counter clean, then upends the muffin tin onto it; twelve muffins bounce out, and she sets them upright and plates two and offers one to Robin. |
Author: hold_infinity | The rain of muffins makes Robin giggle. She's still giggling as she takes the offered muffin. |
Author: pandion | "If you take them out by hand you have to wait for them to cool," explains Andi, unwrapping her own muffin with careful little pinches too brief to leave burns. |
Author: hold_infinity | "And if you take them out by hand you don't get to see them bounce along like that," she says, continuing to giggle. |
Author: pandion | "Muffins are surprisingly bouncy!" |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin cracks up all over again. |
Author: pandion | The muffins are delicious and moist. Andi is smug. |
Author: hold_infinity | "These are awesome," says Robin. |
Author: pandion | "Thanks!" |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin beams. And eats her muffin. Om nom. |
Author: instar | "I smell chocolate," says Bella, coming down the stairs. "I am collecting my share of chocolate." |
Author: hold_infinity | "Hi, Bella," says Robin. "Andi made muffins! I helped!" |
Author: instar | "Hi, Robin. Thanks, Andi." Bella picks up and peels a muffin. |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin grabs another one. Because they are delicious. |
Author: instar | Bella brings a second with her upstairs, but apparently she is still being introverted. |
Author: pandion | "How many songs have you even written? Do you just have them all memorized?" |
Author: hold_infinity | "I dunno, a bunch," she says. "I have most of them written down somewhere." |
Author: pandion | "Yeah, but do you also have them all memorized?" |
Author: hold_infinity | "Mostly." |
Author: pandion | "Wow, I can barely keep the words to 'Jingle Bells' straight sometimes. If I'm in your band can I have sheet music when we perform?" |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin laughs. "Sure." |
Author: pandion | "Awesome, I thought that was, like, frowned upon." |
Author: hold_infinity | "Hey, I currently have zero band members. I can't be too picky." |
Author: pandion | "Well, I dunno, maybe you had a foolproof plan to find more and they weren't going to have objectionable habits." |
Author: hold_infinity | She laughs. "Nah. Anyway, maybe you'll figure it out with practice. If you actually join my band." |
Author: pandion | "What do you wanna call it? Oh man, I've been saying things would be good names for bands for years and I can't think of a single one, if I were Bella I would've written them down but I'm not." |
Author: hold_infinity | Robin laughs. "I dunno yet. I told you, I'm terrible at naming things." |
Author: pandion | "Next time I think of a good name for a band I'll pay attention." |
Author: hold_infinity | "Perfect," says Robin. |