Calpurnia drowsily lifted her head, blinking away sleep. Her phone had dinged. She didn’t like the default notification sound, it was like one of those annoying pop-up ads for scandinavian goat cheese if it sounded like a dying robotic cat’s last dying wish. What wish, you ask? Simple! To continue its reign of terror and annoyance every time Calpurnia got a text. Not that she couldn’t change it, but she found that unless she made it a major inconvenience she’d completely forget to reply. Stupid idiot goldfish brain.. Making her suffer through this every time someone contacted her. She sighed, and picked up her phone. It was the middle of the night, and her lockscreen proudly informed her that she’d been rudely awakened at the lovely hour of 11:28. She’d put it on Do Not Disturb for pretty much the only time ever, so one of the contacts she’d listed as an ‘exception’ must have tried to get through to her. So that would be… her dad, who she knew good and well had no intention of contacting her anymore, whose number she might as well delete, Felicity, Milo, or that one magazine that she’d entered sweepstakes for at least FIFTY BAJILLION GAZILLION GOOGOLPLEX PLUS INFINITY TIMES ALREADY and still hadn’t even gotten that cool horse sticker for her notebook cover that came free with your next issue after entering a raffle, which was the entire reason she wanted to enter! The horse sticker! It looked like one of her favorite characters from this one show she'd liked as a kid but that she was definitely about a decade too old for, it was called silly lily fillies or somethi- wait. the text. Who had texted her? She snapped back to attention. It wasn’t from the magazine, nor was it from Felicity or her criminally insane deadbeat of a father. Oh, crap. “Hey, I'm going to the Fairgrounds. You might not see me for a while. Don’t follow me. Don’t look for me.” The message was… alarming, to say the least. Milo had never been one for ominous warnings, and Calpurnia had never been one to follow any warnings. Something was clearly going on. Especially considering that he hadn’t been feeling up to going anywhere recently, least of all anywhere dangerous. Milo didn’t do dangerous. He was more of a by the book kind of guy, especially if the book in question was a manual about how to be really boring and never have any fun ever. Ominous crap like this counted as fun for tax purposes, like how bees were technically fish. No, wait, that was for some sort of weird conservation law. The tax thing was about baby rabbits being fish. No, no, that was for lent. Um… whatever. Calpurnia decided right then and there to do the exact opposite of what she was told, as she had done for most of her life up to this point. Although, despite the persona she usually put up for display, she wasn’t just doing this to be stubborn. She knew what was going on. Accepting the gravity of the situation was hard for her, but Milo wasn’t doing well. She knew all too well what was happening. All too well. When your best friend’s been sick with something that the doctors gave up on diagnosing, when it stopped being about hope and started being about taking advantage of the time that was left… you don’t just ignore a message like that. Milo wasn’t exactly prone to running from his problems, but Calpurnia wouldn’t put it past him to take matters into his own hands after tests showed that his own blood was poisoning him. If he was going on the run, he wouldn’t last long at all. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to worry about him. Whatever the case, Calpurnia didn’t leave her friends to die of their own stupid decisions unless she was in a much worse mood than this. Which is to say, she didn’t do that at all. Calpurnia sat up, trying not to rustle the covers too terribly much. Considering the sheer volume of said covers, it was like attempting to outrun inevitability itself. Shame. She debated texting him back, but she doubted that would do much good. Instead, she navigated to Felicity's contact before ever-so-carefully getting out of bed. This was the sort of situation that needed action. Unfortunately, it was the middle of the night. She already wasn’t allowed to leave the house on her own. If her mom woke up, the whole plan would be done for. What plan? Well, she needed a minute to figure that out. Maybe more than a minute.
I was gonna add more writing, buttttttttt this drawing has been in my unshared projects for a few days now, and what I have written is sorta the point of no return for Calpurnia here. This is what essentially ends life as she knows it.
