Stir Crazy [Open]

[sam]

Only a few days after Sam had arrived at the Institute here in New York, and already he was itching to be away from there. He'd spent the last few days confined there, mostly cooped up in his room and venturing out only to eat or when boredom got the best of him. He was starting to go a little bit stir crazy. So he'd left. He hadn't exactly snuck out...just walked out the front door while no one was paying him much attention. New York was supposed to be one of the greatest cities in North America, right? So if he was going to be living here for an indefinite period of time, he figured he ought to get to know the place a little better.

He wandered the streets aimlessly for a while, mapping the city out in his mind, until he found large groups of people about his age congregating in one area, and found himself following them into a mall. He'd heard of them, but he'd never actually been to one; Alicante wasn't huge on the conglomerate shopping. He figured he might as well check it out, since he had nothing better to do, and so now he was still wandering aimlessly, but he was indoors, glancing at shop windows occasionally, but more interested in watching the people he passed by as he strolled through the mall, hands in his pockets, interested in their habits. No one seemed to pay much attention to people outside their own groups, so Sam wasn't worried about being discovered snooping. There were so many people here; no wonder demons could move around so easily.

[bris]

FOR SOME REASON THAT BRIS couldn't understand, her mother had urged her off to the mall with the final rule of "Have fun!" She'd barely even given enough warning for the teen to change out of her pajamas and into something decently acceptable. As clothes had been her priority, her hair had been neglected and her makeup not even thought about. With smudged eyeliner marring her skin and streaks of blue threaded through her hair from a party at Pandemonium the night before, she felt like a raccoon that’d fallen into an opened can of paint.

But there was one benefit to being a girl at the mall: unlimited amounts of reflective surfaces in which to fix makeup and hair. So after running her fingers carefully through her hair to take care of the snarls and fixing her makeup as much as possible without remover, she deemed her appearance much better. A quick nod to the mannequin she'd been facing, a turn on her heel, and she was off to blow the money generously given to her on overpriced clothes. Or food. The way her stomach growled in response to the second thought, she turned instinctively toward the well worn path to the upstairs food court.

&&&

Half an hour and nearly two hundred dollars later, the girl sat back on one of many benches with one leg twisted underneath her bum and shopping bags littered around her feet. Normally, the fact that she was wearing a skirt would have deterred her from sitting any way other than cross-legged. But leggings were one hell of an invention. Despite the cell held loosely between her fingers, her attention focused itself wholly and discreetly on people watching.

Over by the navy sign aglow in the name Aeropostale, several girls a little older than herself chatted animatedly in voices that sounded distinctly valley girl to Bris. In some sports store, a couple of boys-- probably only around ten or twelve-- threw a football back and forth over a clerk's head. One of her coworkers from F.Y.E. tossed a quarter into the fountain as he probably did daily.

She didn't know what caught her eye, but maybe it was the way he seemed to care less about being in the crowd. Most people wandering the mall by themselves were looking for their friends. Well, any still below the rank of college senior. Or maybe it was because he looked vaguely like Charlie McDonnell of charlieissocoollike on YouTube.

Grey eyes averted quickly back to the display on her phone when the brunette realized she was staring.

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TAGGED!? Sam!
WEARING WHAT NOW!? One Messed Up Day
LISTENING TO!? “The Saltwater Room” by Owl City?
WORD COUNT!? 431-ish
BABBLE AND NOTES!? Okay, so you’ve PMed me and I’ve updated this to make it look pretty. Yay!

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[sam]

Content to be ignored by the waves of people surrounding him, it took Sam a minute or two to notice that the watcher had, in a crazy turn of events that wasn't so much crazy as it was terribly mundane, become the watched. He was passing by the food court, as the large sign hanging above the scattered tables indicated, when he felt an itch behind his left ear, and turned his head as he reached up to scratch it. It was then that he noticed his viewer, a girl approximately his own age, seated in a contorted position that Sam didn't imagine could be terribly comfortable.

Even though she turned away as soon as his eyes grazed her, Sam felt quite certain that she had been staring at him with some determination, and he had to admit, he was curious as to why. He was dressed much like the other teenagers around, in a pair of destroyed jeans and an ordinary t-shirt, some label or another that he couldn't be bothered to pay attention to emblazoned on his chest. His clothes were neither too baggy or too tight; he preferred to be comfortable to fashionable, and stuck to trends only so far as necessary to pass as a Mundane. He didn't think there was really anything too noticeable about himself, he wasn't that cute, after all, ego aside.

Boredom won out, in the end. He had nothing better to do, and if the truth was to be known, he was starting to get lonely in this city of too many people. So, adopting an air of confidence that wasn't so much of a stretch for the young troublemaker, he strolled towards her table but halted at the table directly adjacent to hers, and instead of sitting in a chair, he hopped up onto the table's surface, sitting with his long legs dangling. "How come you were watching me?" Subtlety just wasn't the boy's strong suit.

[bris]

HIS EYES WERE EGYPTIAN BLUE.

Surely it wasn’t the weirdest thing about him. Given time, Bris was quite positive that she could find something particularly odd hiding just beneath the normal looking surface: a tendency towards stalking, an obsessive liking of the color orange, an unhealthy craving for sushi. The insignificant fact that his eyes were very startlingly blue shouldn’t have caught her attention as much as it did. The fact that said very startlingly blue eyes were fixed upon her and full of curiosity, now that encouraged paying attention.

The fact that he’d hopped up on the table adjacent to hers rather than taking a seat didn’t dispel the need to pay attention, though.

Sliding down in her chair, she turned over the thought of just how little he’d been in society to not realize that sitting on a table in a public mall read as a gigantic no-no in the books of security guards. If she had to guess, very little. He just gave off this vibe of someone who hadn’t yet acquired the proper behavior required of someone in the public eye. And New York, quite frankly, had a very judgmental set of eyes.

Since he disclosed no qualms with watching her as he patiently waited for the answer as to why she’d been watching him, she took the time to inspect him a little closer. He was probably taller than her-- it was hard to tell when they were seated at different elevations-- yet he looked just a tad bit younger. She mentally hit herself in the forehead, reminding herself that this wasn’t pick apart every detail about the guy who’s looking for an answer time. That only came on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sadly it was a Friday.

Now that she couldn’t rightly delay her answer any further, a plausible excuse slipped her mind’s grasp. She could say there was something front with his hair, but that wouldn’t hold up as something would have actually had to be wrong with his hair. Considering that hers probably didn’t look all that good, she skipped over that excuse only to cross off everything that came to mind. Finally, with her bottom lip caught between teeth, her gaze slid down to the phone in her hands simply because it was something to look at. “I guess because you looked… different?” She supplied the first word that came to mind. Well, the second-- lonely had been the first.

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TAGGED!? mr. blue eyes =O
WEARING WHAT NOW!? One Messed Up Day
LISTENING TO!? “if you could only see” tonic
WORD COUNT!? not nearly as many as deserved
BABBLE AND NOTES!? this is so late

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[sam]

Finally having found something to fix his attention upon, Sam didn't really have any issue with giving his undivided attention to the girl in front of him. It was the unfortunate side effect of always wandering aimlessly; you got bored of the aimlessness. She seemed to be taking her time with getting to an answer, so Sam occupied himself with looking her over while he waited. She appeared to be pretty much the average of the mundane teenagers he'd encountered so far, although her hair did appear more disheveled than was strictly the norm, but he figured that wasn't much of a concern to her, given the smudgy makeup, he assumed it was part of her 'look'.

One thing that he did take particular note of was her body language; she shied away from him and slunk down, almost as thought she were ashamed and surprised. He wondered what he'd done to warrant that, and glancing around, noticed more than a few others casting disapproving looks his way. He frowned, trying to think of what he'd done to gain so much ire in the last thirty seconds, and then he looked down and things became clear. Right. Sitting on tables wasn't appreciated in most cultures, and apparently New York wasn't an exception. Normally this wouldn't bother Sam, but he was trying to be good. The operative word being 'trying'.

Feeling somewhat embarrassed by his own social faux pas, Sam slid off the top of the table, and instead dropped down into the unoccupied seat opposite the object of his attention, doing his best to look casual instead of ashamed like a puppy being scolded for peeing on the carpet. He put his attention back on the silent girl, trying not to draw any more notice to himself than he already had. He was started to get worried that she was hard of hearing or just plain stupid, when she seemed to find the words to answer his question.

'...different.'

Sam wasn't altogether very surprised by that observation, and answered only with a slightly perplexed, "huh." More of a resigned sigh than anything else, he tried to figure out what he'd done wrong. He was trying to blend in, not be a glaring beacon of oddness. Puzzlement overcame his features; maybe it was because he was alone? There didn't seem to be many other lone teenagers, with the notable exception of the girl in front of him, so maybe that had been his tell. "Well that blows." He added, somewhat petulantly. "What I do wrong?" He asked it as casually as one might ask a classmate what they had done wrong on a test, like it was that simple.

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